My Father's Wallet

Life is full of surprises. As a consequence of inheriting the family farmland, I am about to be the recipient of a settlement in a class action lawsuit. In the 1980s, various telecommunications companies started laying fiber-optic cable along railroad rights of way. Apparently, some clever lawyers figured out that the companies laying the cable should have gotten permission from landowners along the railroads. As luck would have it, CSX (formerly B&O) tracks run along the north border of our farm. Now that the case has been settled, I'm eligible to get a few hundred bucks. The catch is I have to provide documentation of ownership of the land, which I inherited from Mom in 1995, as well my parents' ownership of the land before that.

Digging through records in the basement, I was able to locate a copy of the deed recorded when my parents bought the property in 1953.

I also found the contents of my father's wallet, which were in an envelope with his estate papers. The wallet itself, and any cash that may have been in there when he died on October 5, 1989, were not in the envelope. What I found were the plastic inserts containing cards, photos, and so forth.

He carried school pictures of his grandchildren, and my mom, taken when she was a cook at the school.

He was a long-time State Farm customer, as am I, and he carried insurance cards for the cars he kept running against all odds--a '69 VW Fastback and a '78 VW Rabbit.

On a small slip of paper, he wrote reminders, some of which are obvious, like the church tax number (I think he was treasurer of the men's group at some point) and our zip code. I'm guessing the slip of paper dates back to the sixties, when zip codes were introduced. Other numbers are more cryptic:

E 28 38 24
W 17 27 5
N 10 16 26
S 22 8 2
HOME 22-36-18

His Medicare Card was activated on 4-1-84.

His blood donor card showed he was Type O, and recorded only two donations, on 12-4-53 and 8-31-60.

He graduated high school in 1937, the same year Social Security taxes began, but the card in his wallet was printed sometime in 1961 or later, so it was probably a replacement.

He carried a discount card for Perry Drug Stores, which have since been acquired by Rite Aid.

Neither of my parents carried credit or debit cards. The only plastic card Dad carried was his driver's license. It reminds me of a poignant moment when I was riding with him at night and it became obvious that he couldn't see the road. He had become diabetic in middle age, and the disease was taking a toll on his vision in his sixties. I had to ask him to pull over and let me drive, and it wasn't an easy thing to do.

Hiroshi Watanabe

"Pipe-cleaner Flower Arrangement in Gallon Jug, Tule Lake, California 1" by Hiroshi Watanabe

Gentle readers, after an absence of lo these many months, I feel it necessary to delve once again into the subject of fine art photography. As usual, I have no right to pontificate on this subject, save for the fact that I have spent some minutes Googling the California-based photographer Hiroshi Watanabe. Do not be deceived. The urge to inform you about this talented photographer does not derive solely from the fact that I know how to spell Hiroshi, a skill I acquired when I became fascinated by the work of another genius of the photographic medium, Hiroshi Sugimoto.

I believe I first heard about Mr. Watanabe from a podcast by Martin Bailey. After Mr. Watanabe's name rattled around the dank recesses of what remains of my mind for several months, the time for further research had arrived.

When the name of Hiroshi Watanabe bubbled up from my subconscious, I went to his very impressive web site. Among the many galleries of his brilliant work on display there, I was particularly taken with the portfolio titled "Artifacts - Things from Japanese Internment Camps." The photos are of items Mr. Watanabe found at the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, California, and at a dump site from a California internment camp where Japanese Americans were detained during WW II.

I believe the photo above, of a flower arrangement inside a gallon jug, made from pipe cleaners by a resident of the camp, and subsequently left in the dump when the detainees were released, is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful images I have ever seen.

The Return of Elektro

A replica of the mighty Westinghouse robot, Elektro, is going on a national tour soon according to this NPR story about Elektro.

Street Photography

A couple of years ago, I attended a photography workshop in Chicago. The instructor was really big on photographing strangers. He felt it was important for photographers, who tend to be introverts, to overcome their shyness and photograph strangers. Inspired, I set off for the local farmers' market the following weekend to photograph people. The first vendor I asked was very nice and cooperated willingly. The second one was a very interesting looking character who may have had a police record. In any case, he flatly refused to let me take his photo. This took considerable wind out of my sails, and I packed up my camera and went home.

As I look through my Flickr photostream of some 2600 pictures, I can find six photos where I had some level of consent from a stranger before clicking the shutter. It may have just been holding up the camera and getting a nod, or actually asking to take a picture. Two of these photos were of the same guy feeding pigeons in Daley Plaza in Chicago. I have taken a few other street photos without the subjects' knowledge. I hope in the future to include more people in my photography, as I think it adds an element of interest beyond that provided by inanimate objects or flora and fauna.

Bern Porter

Bern Porter, 1933, Brown University graduate student
As recently as a couple weeks ago, I had never heard of Bern Porter. Now, I find myself, as I often have in the past, pontificating upon a subject based upon scanty and hastily-acquired knowledge.

I have a weekend subscription to the New York Times. I do my best to read as much as I can on Sunday, but I save the book review section to read during the week. After accumulating a few weeks' worth, I was preparing to dispose of the pile, when a brief review from January 25, 2012 caught my eye:

FOUND POEMS
By Bern Porter. Nightboat Books. Paper, $24.95.
Inspired in part by Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, Porter (1911-2004) created poetry from the mass-media images and "verbiage that one might call a kind of alternative literature - package labels, banal instructions, lists," David Byrne writes in his foreword. Above, "Glump."

If you are so lacking in self-respect that you have read this blog in the past, you may be aware of my interest in the art of Marcel Duchamp, including his famous urinal-as-art called "Fountain." Well, in my opinion, anyone influenced by Duchamp deserves further investigation.

As usual, I began, and pretty much ended, my research by typing "Bern Porter" into Google, which led me to bernporter.com. I would encourage the interested reader to peruse the wealth of information at that site, as I do not have the time or energy to plagiarize it here.

Just a few highlights I would like to include here:

Porter was a scientist who worked on the development of the cathode ray tube but never owned a television, or for that matter, a telephone.

He worked on the Saturn V rocket.

He worked on the Manhattan Project, but later renounced the atomic bomb.

His FBI files, which can be accessed via bernporter.com, reveal that he was considered a "screwball" by many people who knew him. If you doubt this characterization, I would encourage you to check out videos of his poetry readings on the web site. He really was weird. He also had a habit of abruptly walking away from conversations he found boring. Ah, wouldn't we all like to be able to do that?

One particularly interesting section of the Bern Porter web site includes pdf files of several of his books. One of these is called Aphasia (1961). Porter called it a "psycho-visual satire on printed communication." It consists of fragments cut from newspapers and magazines, reflecting the culture of the late fifties and early sixties. Most of the pages are ads, with some Sunday comics, stock tables, and other ephemera throw in. I must say, crazy as the concept is, I found it appealing. In the spirit of Porter, I've electronically cut some fragments from the book, which I present here. These things stirred memories of my own childhood.

Trumbo on Jeopardy

Dalton and Cleo Trumbo at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1947

Last night, I had the satisfaction of coming up with the correct question in Final Jeopardy. Even better, all three contestants on the show were stumped.

The category was "1930s Novels."

The clue was:

AN AUDIO VERSION OF THIS ANTI-WAR NOVEL BY A ONCE BLACKLISTED AUTHOR HAS INTRODUCTIONS FROM CINDY SHEEHAN & RON KOVIC

The contestants all incorrectly guessed All Quiet on the Western Front. The correct response was "What is Johnny Got His Gun?"

I had read Johnny Got His Gun way back in 1971, when I was in college and should have been doing course work. During those tumultuous times, reading an antiwar novel seemed more important to me.

I didn't know much about the book's author, Dalton Trumbo, until 2008, when I heard a reading of his hilarious letter to the manager of the Franklin Hotel in Rochester, Minnesota. Subsequently, I did some reading about Trumbo and how he was affected by McCarthyism. I wrote about this in the previous post "Argus," which is a much better piece than the current entry. I highly recommend clicking on the link to read it.

Borderlands

Today I delivered twelve prints to Artpost Gallery in South Bend for my part of their January/February 2012 show. Many thanks to Kay and Jake for giving me this opportunity.

Duchamp's Fountain Appropriated

My favorite surrealist/dadaist nut-boy, Marcel Duchamp, deceased since 1968, once again resurfaces, this time in the New York Times.

In "Flattery (Sincere?) Lightly Dusted With Irony," Roberta Smith reviews an exhibit of Sherrie Levine's art at The Whitney Museum of American Art.

In keeping with the long-standing editorial policy of this blog, we borrow heavily from people who put forth the effort to come up with original thoughts, sparing us the effort. We also liberally refer to ourselves as the editorial we, even though only one person can be blamed for the content of this blog. Anyway, here is what Ms. Smith had to say:

For more than 30 years Ms. Levine has been slyly lifting images and forms from works by well-known Modernist artists and photographers, using them, her admirers maintain, in ways that undermine conventional notions of originality, artistic mastery and authorship. Her goal has apparently been to expose evils like the commodification or fetishization of the unique art object and to chip away at the myths of individual creativity that have historically served male artists and their markets.

I--er, I mean we--have learned from Ms. Smith that what Sherrie Levine produces is called appropriation art. The examples we found particularly interesting were (again we quote Ms. Smith) "two polished-bronze versions of Duchamp’s best-known readymade — the humble urinal that he placed on its back and renamed 'Fountain.'"

Duchamp's Fountain

One of Sherrie Levine's Versions
For more on Duchamp and his famous plumbing fixture, see earlier post, "Flushing Away Convention."

40 Year High School Reunion

The following is the essay I read at the reunion of the Wawasee High School Class of 1971 on August 6, 2011.

At graduation, some of us could have accurately said to each other, “See you in the next century.” Hard to believe, but here we are, 40 years later, dripping with nostalgia, and at our age, we’re lucky if that’s all that’s dripping. But here we are, still standing…or sitting down…or possibly lying down as the evening progresses.

We’ve seen a lot of changes in the world during our lifetimes. We came into a world shaped by a World War—the second and last World War, though there have been plenty of wars since then—Korea, the Cold War, Viet Nam, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the First Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth.

But WWII was the big one, and it changed our parents forever, though they might not have talked about it much. It gave them the satisfaction of fighting the good fight, of pulling together as a nation. Having lived through the worst of times, they saw the best of times ahead for them, and for us, their children. They liked Ike. They loved Lucy.

We were children of the 50s. You didn’t carry a phone with you then. You rented a phone—a single sturdy black phone—a phone with a dial—from Ma Bell, and it sat on its own piece of furniture in the living room. Even though dial phones have been extinct for decades, you still push the redial button to call someone back.

We grew up with television, with Miss Francis and Ding Dong School, with Captain Kangaroo, and Howdy Doody. With Disney in black and white and later the Wonderful World of Color, with Davy Crocket and coonskin caps, with Ed Sullivan and Elvis, but only from the waist up.

And we listened to the radio—AM stations, because that’s where the good music was. WOWO in Ft. Wayne, WLS and WCFL in Chicago. The only time we listened to FM was to hear Milo Clase broadcast the county basketball tourney on WRSW out of Warsaw.

We lived through the turbulent 60s, bombarded by ads for everything. Coke—the pause that refreshes, the real thing. I’d like to teach the world to sing. The Flintstones told us that Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. You don’t believe me? You can see the commercials with Fred and Barney puffing away on YouTube. By the way, it wasn’t until our graduation year of 1971 that cigarette ads were banned from TV.

And still we listened to music—on transistor radios, on 45s and LPs, and eventually on those awesome 8 track tapes, and the even more amazing cassettes.

24/7 news was unknown when we were kids. We got our TV news once a day from Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Local news came from real reporters like Harry Kevokian on channel 22, who was more concerned about current events than how his hair looked.

In our youth, computers filled rooms and cost millions of dollars. To have computers in your home, your car, or on your lap was unthinkable. We suffered through chemistry class with slide rules. Then in 1971 the microprocessor was invented and pocket calculators could be had for a few hundred dollars. There were no ebooks or iphones or email when we were in school. Only birds tweeted and Amazon was a river or a really big woman. Back then, text was a noun, something you produced with a typewriter, and the only thing you used your thumbs for was the space bar. You didn't delete your mistakes, you erased them, or covered them up with white fluid. Now text is also a verb, something we do with our thumbs, on devices that fit in our purses and pockets.

We remember where we were when JFK was shot, and how our little world seemed less secure after it happened. The summer of love came and went in 1967. We might have read about hippies in LIFE magazine and dreamed of wearing flowers in our hair, but we had to bale hay or work at other summer jobs. A guy needed money to buy V-neck sweaters he could tuck into his pants when fall came. Like many of our fashion statements, tucking one’s sweater into his pants seems laughable now. The girls, of course, could not wear pants to school. But we all have fond memories of mini skirts.

Change accelerated during our high school years. The assassinations continued in 1968 with Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. In 1969, we watched men walk on the moon. In 1970, students died at Kent State. Protests and riots became commonplace. We felt the rumblings of change from afar on our farms, in our small towns, on our lake shores and creek banks, but there were crops to be harvested, football two-a-days to suffer through, and homecoming floats to be made, and life went on.

And here we are, four decades later—children of the fifties, geezers of the twenty-first century. It's been quite a ride. Thank you and enjoy the evening.

Iris