Georgia O'Keeffe: 'The Flag' (1918)

Last year in October, while checking out a First World War art exhibition at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, I was fascinated to learn that Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) had opposed intervention, that she had a brother who died as a result of the war, and that she painted The Flag early in 1918 to indicate her revulsion. 

Since then, I've come across additional details about The Flag and Georgia's brother. Alexius (Alexis) Wyckoff "Tex" O'Keeffe (1892-1930) was an officer in the 32nd Division of the US Army, stationed, along with thousands of other soldiers from his home state of Wisconsin, as well as thousands from Michigan, at Camp MacArthur, in the vicinity of Waco, Texas, starting in 1917. 

Fred A. Gildersleeve, Officers, 32nd Division, Camp MacArthur, Waco, Tex., Dec. 23, 1917. Library of Congress. 

The 32nd Division saw heavy combat on the Western Front in 1918, and Tex was badly wounded by poison gas, not enough to kill him outright (as some accounts erroneously suggest), but enough to cause him to die in his thirties, more than a decade after the war's end, finally taken out by Influenza.

When "Tex" was sent to Waco in 1917, Georgia was teaching at the West Texas State Normal School in Canyon, about twenty miles south of Amarillo in the Panhandle; she was the head of the one-person art department. By October of 1917, she "seethed with impatience over the conformity and pettiness of the Canyon community." (Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O'Keeffe, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, p. 144).

Georgia came down with a case of the Spanish Influenza early in 1918, and took refuge with a friend at Waring, Texas (about forty-four miles north northwest of San Antonio); she painted The Flag in San Antonio.

Not surprisingly, Georgia's teaching career at the West Texas State Normal School ended in 1918.

The Flag was not shown in public until 1968, during the American War in Vietnam, the year of the Prague Spring and the Paris uprising -- in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its permanent home is at the Milwaukee Art Museum. For more information, here is a link.

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Mary Karr: 'The Art of Memoir' (2015, 2016)

Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016; originally published by HarperCollins Publishers in 2015. 

Karr is primarily known as a poet and memoirist; she also teaches, which is how this tome originated, through years of teaching experience. One of the book's "takeaways" (in the shady parlance of our day) is her list of "Required Reading - Mostly Memoirs and Some Hybrids" (pages 221-227). The core text is more pick-and-choose -- whatever may help.

Mary Karr's advice on how to get going with the writing process: "The idea is to unclench your mind's claws . . . don't judge how your thoughts might jet around at first. Eventually you'll start identifying . . . with that detached, watcher self and less with your prattling head." (page 31).

On voice: "The voice should permit a range of emotional tones -- too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it's shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader -- from cool and diffident to high-strung and close." (page 36).

Keep it real: "You'll need both sides of yourself -- the beautiful and the beastly -- to hold a reader's attention. . . Sadly, without a writer's dark side on view -- the pettiness and vanity and schemes -- pages give off the whiff of bullshit." (page 38).

On revision: "the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality." (page 211).

"For me, the last 20 percent of a book's improvement takes 95 percent of the effort -- all in the editing. . . In the long run, the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity . . . Writing . . . means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world . . . you do that by fighting for elegance and beauty, redoing or cutting the flabby, disordered parts." (page 215). Amen to that. 

Today's Rune: Initiation.

'Waco' (2018)

Waco (Paramount Network), a six-part mini-series, covers events culminating in the fiery destruction of the Branch Davidians' New Mount Carmel Center -- and the deaths on that day of seventy-six people, mostly women and children -- near Waco, Texas, in 1993. 

Waco begins with Ruby Ridge and ends by noting the deadly use of tear gas (and CS gas) that resulted in catastrophic fires from the 1970s onward (including the bomb dropped on MOVE in West Philadelphia in 1985).  

Like Wild Wild Country (Netflix), Waco fills in a lot of details about a dramatic historical happening, though unlike the former, Waco is not a documentary film. Both deliver worthwhile and fascinating versions of people and events. 

In Waco, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) plays David Koresh to the hilt, while Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, The Shape of Water) takes on the role of FBI negotiator Gary Noesner. Shea Wigham (Boardwalk Empire) plays Mr. Macho, G-man Mitch Decker, who pushes escalation tactics at every turn. 

Waco is more sympathetic to the Branch Davidians than the ATF and FBI, who, despite their stated goal of avoiding another Jonestown, by their overly aggressive actions caused something more akin to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. 

Koresh (1959-1993) comes off as charismatic and eccentric, possibly a bit crazy, but he doesn't seem anymore so than say, Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844), the founder of Mormonism, who was murdered in Carthage, Illinois, by an American mob at age thirty-eight. 

By the 21st century, G-men seem to have learned some lessons about escalation and de-escalation. The Bundy Bunch in Nevada (2014) and Oregon (2016) were handled with a minimum of casualties, despite high tensions and lethal weaponry carried by both sides. 

More de-escalation training is needed at all levels of government and society, and around the world, certainly.

Off the Double EE Ranch, I've seen the New Mount Carmel grounds in person: eerie and haunted. 

Today's Rune: Joy.     

'Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary' (2016)

Made a pilgrimage to the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff to see John Scheinfeld's Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (2016). I wanted to see and hear Coltrane on the big screen. Well worth the extra effort.

The film is partly about the man and the musician, whose 1965 album A Love Supreme usually makes it into the top five jazz recordings of all time (that is, since electronic recordings began in earnest around the time of World War I). The film is also about Coltrane's impact on various people and their evolving ways of perceiving the world, plus more specifically his influence on musicians of various genres.

From the first time I listened to a John Coltrane recording, in my mid-teens, I've been hooked. Even now, I've got a framed album cover of Giant Steps in my work office and a framed cover of Blue Train at home. I've got three copies of A Love Supreme. I also dig Alice Coltrane, who continued down his mystical path after John's death in 1967 at the age of forty.

The most interesting surprise to me about Chasing Trane is a side trip to Japan, during Coltrane's last extended tour, and his visit to the Nagasaki atomic bombing memorial, and the enthusiastic Japanese response. 

The Texas Theatre is where Lee Harvey Oswald was nabbed on November 22, 1963, shortly after 1:40 p.m. A strange feeling to be seeing a John Coltrane documentary in this place on John Fitzgerald Kennedy's 100th birthday. But fitting, because Trane's music provides a portal to places far beyond our typical experience of space and time. 

Today's Music: Flow.  

Journey to The Presidio of San Sabá (November 2016)

Presidio outer walls

On the weekend before the presidential election in November, I journeyed into the shadowy heart of Texas to see with my own eyes the site of the The Presidio of San Sabá, which was abandoned by its Spanish and Lipán Apache occupants in or around the year 1772. 

It was worth it! The presidio grounds were the most interesting surprise, but along the way I noted pithy place names and tidbits, herewith presented for your consideration and possible amazement.

Menard

Silverado Cowboy Church --  Wall clouds -- Shatterbelt hills -- Palo Pinto -- Natty Flat --  Blue Flat -- Panama Road -- Gordon -- Twin Mountain Ranch -- Erath County --  W. K. Gordon Museum -- Thurber ghost town -- Mingus -- New York Hill -- Strawn -- De Leon -- Puddles from rain -- Ranger College -- Foggy -- Cisco -- Cattle -- Assembly of Yaweh -- Gerhardt Farms -- Lutheran cemetery -- Rising Star -- Old downtown and post office -- Men in camo and big cowboy hats -- May, Texas -- Blanket, Texas -- Trees with “grape” clusters -- Large carrion birds -- Early, Texas -- Mall, urban strip -- Brownwood next door --strip mall fiasco -- Hastings Books (shuttered) -- Red Wagon Restaurant -- Large railroad junction -- Payne Union University -- Octoberfest -- 3M Company plant --Kohler plant -- 377-South -- The Slough of Despond --

Looks plundered, blackened stumpy wreckage of trees -- Colorado River -- County line old rusty bridge to side -- Auction white pickup truck hoedown -- Curtis Airfield -- Salon de Reino -- Turtle & Tuttle -- East Sweden cemetery -- Little Onion Creek -- Onion Creek -- Shorn sheep in many fields – all the sheep are shorn -- Rochelle --Brady -- Mr. China -- Hext, Texas --Menard County line -- Monarch butterflies floating over road -- Chapman Draw -- Scalp Creek -- Volkmann Draw -- Celery Creek -- arrival Presidio San Sabá, 1757-1772 (two versions)

The Return -- Celery Creek -- Concho County -- Fuzzy Creek -- Valera -- wrecked train cars (mixers) – half a dozen -- A butte on the road to Santa Ana -- Bangs, Texas.

Today's Rune: Movement. 

Amy J. Berg's 'Janis: Little Girl Blue' (2015)

Amy J. Berg's Janis: Little Girl Blue (2015), a state of the art documentary biography of Janis Joplin (1943-1970), presents her life in a most compelling, sensitive and soulful manner. My first serious foray into this field was Howard Alk's Janis (1974), which I saw at the Melkweg in Amsterdam when I was twenty-two -- and I loved it, not to mention the audience's raucous response. Now I'd consider Alk's documentary as a complement or supplement to Berg's. There have been other films, and there have been excellent books on Janis, too. As anyone who knows her music can testify, Janis Joplin was intense. Amy J. Berg has done her justice here. 

Today's Rune: Signals. 

Molière's 'Tartuffe, or The Imposter' and the Texas Constitution

Banned Books and religious tests. The First Amendment. Molière's Tartuffe and the Texas Constitution. What the hell is all that about?

In 1664 in France, Molière wrote the play Tartuffe, ou l'Imposteur / Tartuffe, or The Imposter; it was staged once, then banned from the public eye for fear of disturbing the peace (that is to say, for questioning certain widely accepted practices among the ruling classes). In other words, it's a perfect topic of discussion during Banned Books Week.

Here's what one of Molière's powerful critics wrote about the playwright in 1664 (via this handy English translation extracted from the original French by Virginia Scott). 

According to this critic, Molière was: "A man, or rather a Demon clothed in flesh and dressed like a man . . . the most notable and impious freethinker who has ever lived, has had the wickedness and abomination to bring from his diabolical mind a play ready to be shown on the public stage to the derision of the Church . . . with the intention of rendering it ridiculous, contemptible, and odious. He would deserve, as a result of this sacrilegious and impious attack, to be tortured publicly as an example, and to be burned at the stake, in advance of the fires of Hell . . ."

~Pierre Roullé, curé de la paroisse Saint-Barthélémy, quoted in "The Quarrel of Tartuffe," Molière, Tartuffe (W. W. Norton Criticial Edition, 2009), page 66. 

(For an American context, the Salem Witch Trials began in 1692 -- 28 years later).

Tartuffe centers around the title character, a flim-flam man who exploits religious sentiments for his own gain as he plots to swindle his supporters out of their homes. In the 21st century, he's a cross between a megachurch televangelist and Big Donnie Trump. 

Thanks to Molière's satire (which by today's standards is very mild) and works like it -- right through Voltaire and the philosophes and the Constitution of the United States of America -- freedom of expression and the right to dissent are considered essential rights, not luxuries, let alone something to be tortured publicly and burned at the stake for.

Which brings me to something in the Texas Constitution that needs to be revised in this 21st century. The way it now stands both the wording and meaning is self-contradictory and completely illogical. The way it stands now, any lyin' Tartuffe can be elected to state office in Texas, but not so a single freethinking adult who admits that she or he does not necessarily believe in a Supreme Being.

Article I, Section 4 of the Texas Constitution (in place from 1876 to 2016+):

RELIGIOUS TESTS. No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.  

Did you catch the contradiction?  "No religious test shall be required . . . provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being." Having to "acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being" IS a religious test, and a very restrictive one.

To prove that Texas does perpetuate a restrictive religious test, all we have to do is find one non-religious belief or one religious belief system that does not acknowledge or require a Supreme Being in order to function.

Let's suggest some:

Secular humanism
Agnosticism
Atheism
Animism
Taoism
Unitarianism
Universalism
Society of Friends/Quakers (specifically the Humanistic Society of Friends)
"Ground of being" (Paul Tillich)
Hinduism
Buddhism
Shintoism
Freethinking
Pantheism
Skepticism
Confucianism

Several of the above may believe in being, but not in "a [single] Supreme Being."

The United States Constitution dealt with this issue nearly one hundred years before the Lone Star's adoption of the 1876 Texas Constitution.

Article 6, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution: "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

Hence, even a casual reading of Tartuffe will help one realize that the Texas Constitution does require one's passing through a religious test in order to operate in any official capacity and that any hypocrite who pretends to believe in a Supreme Being simply by saying he/she does will be eligible for such offices, while a single reading of the US Constitution shows that the Texas Constitution is unsustainable as it now stands.

The core of Article I, Section 4 of the Texas Constitution should and must be changed to: "No religious test shall be required." Period. 

End of story.  Happy Banned Books Week. Viva Freedom of Expression and the right to dissent!

Today's Rune: Harvest.

The Eyes of Texas: T Bone Burnett at the Lone Star Film Festival (2010)

In remembering that T Bone Burnett had brought up Marshall McLuhan during the 2010 Lone Star Film Festival in November, 2010, I dug up my notes from his talks. Saw him at three different venues on or around November 13, 2010. These scribbles were made during T Bone's interview with Bobbie Wygant. 

T Bone has worked on many projects, ranging from his own albums to the music for Coen Brothers' films (The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Inside Llewyn Davis) to Walk the Line and Crazy Heart.

Bobbie Wygant asked T-Bone about his inspirations while living in Fort Worth, Texas.

There was a place called the Capri Theatre and they showed [Luis] Buñuel films and [Jean-Luc] Godard films and [Federico] Fellini films and [Sergei] Eisenstein and [Akiro] Kurosawa . . . these incredible foreign films in Fort Worth, Texas, & it was like a portal into another universe . . . I appreciated it so much. I learned. I would say it was through these two places, the Capri Theatre and Record Town, that I sort of learned everything I've lived my whole life on.

[My 2015 update]: The Capri (which also went by other names) was torn down I think in the 1980s. Nothing has replaced it. Fort Worth needs independent "art house" theatres -- at least one, for God's sake. Fort Worth's three major art museums are wonderful resources, and "Magnolia at the Modern" screens independent and international movies on weekends. However, new art does better in less controlled, contained or restricted environments; that is, via more free-wheeling & Bohemian focal points.

At another venue in 2010, T Bone Burnett spoke of his agreement with Marshall McLuhan, that a new medium envelopes an old medium and lifts elements of the old medium into higher art forms.

Examples: TV becomes more engaging when eclipsed by the internet (The Sopranos, etc.); analog music (vinyl record technology) becomes more absorbing when made obsolescent by digital music. 

Let's be mindful that we are surrounded by an electronic envelope of many layers. 

There's more, but that's a taste of it.

Today's Rune: The Self. 

The Eyes of Texas: Where the South Begins

Glen Sample Ely's Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity (Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 2011) -- as its full title suggests -- debates Texas identity. 

Which to emphasize?

Where the South Begins / Where the South Ends
Where the West Begins / Where the West Ends ?

Is Texas part of the American South, the American West, unto itself, or some other realm entirely?  All of the above. It is/was also First Nation country (Caddo, etc.) or passageway (Comanche, Kiowa, etc.), New Spain with a touch of New France, Mexico, Lone Star Republic, Annexed State, Slave State, Seceded State, Embattled State, Occupied State, cotton state, Wild West, cattle state, oil and gas state, drought, fire and Dustbowl state, and in some areas emerging -- eco-preserve state. 

To a large extent, Ely shows, determining where the West/South identity split ends or begins depends on how much rainfall arrives: less than twenty inches per year west of the 100th meridan: the West. Transitional zone between the 100th and 98th meridian: Shatterbelt Region. Then transitioning to East Texas = Old South. Let's not forget South Texas, either, which has its own characteristics.   

Upon closer inspection of Texas in its entirety, anyone and everyone would find a more complex milieu than that typically presented by either Texas promoters or detractors. It's a diverse place, with pockets not so diverse and other pockets more so. But why is it a Tea Party led "Red State" in 2014? Will it become a "Blue State" by 2020? How about "Purple" in between?  

The history of Texas has oft been violent and cruel and even downright stupid, but there is also a countercurrent of resilience, imagination, and adaptation to change. Plus good food and music, among other things. Some of Texas is Western, some is Southern, some is a mix or becoming very made over indeed, with a dramatically heterogenous inflow of new people.

Fort Worth, the place (or at least a place) "where the West begins" according to public relations efforts since the 1920s, is as good a place to point to the current diversity of Texas as any. According to the latest federal census reports (2010-2013), Fort Worth is (as of mid-2013) the 17th largest and most populated city in the USA -- one notch below Charlotte, North Carolina, and one above Detroit, Michigan. 

Demographics of Fort Worth as of 2010-2013 (rounded):

19% African American/Black
 3%  Multiracial
 1% American Indian/First Nation
34% Hispanic/Latino
41% Anglo/Non-Hispanic White
 4% Asian 

That's diverse by any standard. 

Today's Rune: Partnership      

Domingo Martinez: The Boy Kings of Texas (Part 3)

From The Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir by Domingo Martinez  (Lyons Press, 2012):

"Texas . . . is a semiotic thunderbolt, can answer any cocktail party question about the superconscious power of symbols and signifiers across the widest cultural divides."

It has an "easily identifiable image."

"The word Texas itself draws infinite responses from people the world around . . . I won't pretend to defend it in the least -- most everything reported about it that is negative is terribly accurate, but . . . if you haven't lived there, then you couldn't have met the Molly Ivinses, the Ann Richardses, the Old 97s . . . and Buddy Hollys."

(Boy Kings, pages 321-322).

Who am I to disagree with this assessment? Putting aside the more chilling aspects of this vast place, I've been lucky enough to meet a lot of cool people here, or from here.

Today's Rune: Movement.

Domingo Martinez: The Boy Kings of Texas (Part 2)

 























I finished The Boys Kings of Texas: A Memoir by Domingo Martinez (Lyons Press, 2012), in which the narrator eventually makes his way from Brownsville, Texas, to Seattle, Washington. 

Just how important is place, anyway? Where am I? Where are you?  It all depends on circumstance, I suppose.

Martinez gets at all of this quite nicely, or if not nicely, then with a pithy sense of humor.

Seattle was subdued, a retreat for overeducated, liberal-minded people . . . with exceptional and fascinating dropouts. It was a wet . . . rain-soaked city full of promise and civility, where people judged you not by what you did or your race, but by your hobbies. It was the opposite of Texas. (page 303).

On geography:  it took me a week to find [Seattle] on a map. Or rather, it took me a week just to find a map . . .  Seattle was up and to the left, the very far left. Near Canada.

"Hunh," I said to no one at all, in a library in Brownsville, looking at Seattle. "So that's where Canada is. Maybe I can go to Canada." (page 303).

Indeed, how does anyone navigate through life?  Do you dig maps? If not, how do you know where anything is, or appears to be? 

Finally, what surprises you in terms of geographical location or assumptions gone wrong, notions that turn out to be way off base?  

Today's Rune: Journey.  

Domingo Martinez: The Boy Kings of Texas

I'm about halfway through The Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir by Domingo Martinez (Lyons Press, 2012). So far, it covers the author's family milieu near Brownsville, Texas, through his own teen years. There's a lot to take in.

With this kind of memoir, the reader (this reader, specifically) bounces off the narrator's stories and observations with memories from personal experience, family experiences, upbringing, geography and culture. What is not at first recognizable becomes a learning experience, paralleling the arc of the narrator as his own conciousness expands, as he comes to know more about the wider world.

There are plenty of vibrant (and sometimes grotesque) real-life characters in The Boy Kings of Texas. The grandmother is a real pisser, tough as nails, in some ways a connection to the rural past, in others, going with the flow of new ways and means of living. For the narrator and his siblings, there's a lot about identity -- American? Mexican American? Part of a group, individual agent, or how much partly both? Stay or go far away? Deal with various family crises or flee out of self-preservation?

To some extent, I'm reminded of several of Luis Buñuel's Mexican films of the late 1940s through early 1960s. Like Buñuel's work and no matter how else you cut it, The Boy Kings of Texas is interesting, and revealing. I'm digging it.

Today's Rune: Journey.