Monthly Archive for November, 2009

She had moved to Topeka, Kansas from California’s Orange County when in her early 20s. But that was not her home, either. The DeMent family roots were embedded in the loamy ground of a small island in the St. Francis River, Indian Hill, just outside the town of Paragould in northeastern Arkansas.

Iris DeMent was working as a waitress in a Kansas City pizza parlor, after having left Topeka, when her future husband, Elmer McCall, walked into her life. She had been trying to write songs for a few years and had been singing after hours at local coffee houses. Her life was about to take a very big turn. She had driven around through small towns of the Midwest, marveling at how different it looked from where she had grown up in Long Beach and Cypress, California, where her dad had found employment at the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park.

Talking about Kansas she says, ”Something about those old brick buildings. You have a sense of the past in the Midwest… . I like the people there… . They’ve been there for years. People from California all come from somewhere else.”

She took a trip down to Oklahoma to see a brother (she was the youngest of her dad’s 14 children, the 8^th by her mother). She had one of those moments that can only be called an epiphany. In the liner notes to her first CD, “Infamous Angel,” she writes, “At about six o’clock at night or a little later, I was driving along and I just saw this town where it seemed like there were no people there… . I started wondering what happened to all those people. That idea stuck with me and when I got back I started imagining this lady who might have lived there.” That lady is the narrator of DeMent’s song “Our Town.” The harmony vocal on this video from the “Transatlantic Sessions” is by the “Red Dirt Girl” herself, EmmyLou Harris:

DeMent decided to move to Nashville, not to become a performer (she had yet too little confidence for that) but to write and sell songs. Once there it became clear to her that the songs she was trying to write for the commercial market were not ones that came out of her roots and experience. “Well, I’m just going to take a break,” she says in the liner notes, “so I was just fooling with the guitar and ‘Let the Mystery Be’ popped into my head and I never went back to the other one.” Eventually, she had enough songs that came from her life and her heart to record an album, “Infamous Angel.” Nine of its eleven songs are hers. Here is “Let the Mystery Be,” the first song on the CD:

This was her witty anthem of independence. In a musical culture attuned to the platitudes of fundamentalist Christianity, as well as the evangelical roots of her own family, DeMent sweetly, but insistently, affirms her agnosticism.

After almost two years in Nashville, she returned to Kansas City, married her beau, Elmer, and continued to write and perform after the debut of her album. She was writing songs for her second album when her sickly father died. This new album “My Life” was dedicated to him. Her liner notes begin:

Sometime before I was born my dad had been a fiddler. I don’t know who told me. I just know that I have known it as far back as I can remember. Later in my life I learned that the reason I had never seen my dad’s fiddle, or heard him play, was because when he got saved, he “put the fiddle away.”

She then tells an emotional story about the conflicting emotions her dad and mom had regarding the power of music in their lives, about its distraction from religious piety, and even about the still alive belief that the fiddle was somehow Satan’s instrument.

One of the ongoing internal dialogues in DeMent’s music is between the secular life with its everyday messy challenges and trials, and the quiet, clean resignation of surrendering your fate to the Lord. Although Patric DeMent had kept his fiddle for many years in a weather-beaten box high in a closet, Iris felt its power and threat when she first discovered it:

I don’t remember the connection between “getting saved” and “putting the fiddle away”… [but] I must have concluded there was something sinful about the fiddle…. I suddenly became very nervous, shoved it back upon the shelf and got out of there as quickly as I could.

She ends the liner notes of “My Life” with an epitaph to her dad: “Patric Shaw DeMent, March 17, 1910–June 7, 1992.” Of the ten songs on this CD eight are written by her—and several feature that demonic fiddle.

Her mother’s family embraced country music with no such qualms. Her mom, Flora Mae, loved to sing: “As an adult she would sometimes do so for hours as she washed and hung out the laundry, cleaned her house and cooked dinner. She had a clear, resonant voice.” She had even dreamed of singing on the Grand Ole Opry. Though it was a dream never realized, Iris persuaded her then 74 year-old mom to sing lead vocal on Iris’ paean to her mom’s life, “Mama’s Opry.” Here are the lyrics:

She grew up plain and simple in a farming town.

Her daddy played the fiddle and used to do the calling when they had hoedowns.

She says the neighbors would come and they’d move all my grandma’s furniture ’round.

And there’d be twenty or more there on the old wooden floor dancin’ to a country sound.

The Carters and Jimmy Rodgers played her favorite songs.

And on Saturday nights there was a radio show and she would sing along.

And I’ll never forget her face when she revealed to me,

That she’d dreamed about singing at The Grand Ol’ Opry.

Her eyes, oh, how they sparkled when she sang those songs.

While she was hanging the clothes on the line, I was a kid just a hummin’ along.

Well, I’d be playing in the grass, to her, what might’ve seemed, obliviously,

But there ain’t no doubt about it: she sure made her mark on me.

An’ she played old gospel records on the phonograph.

She turned them up loud and we’d sing along, but those days have passed.

Just now that I am older it occurs to me,

That I was singing in the grandest opry.

And we sang Sweet Rose of Sharon, Abide With Me,

‘Til I ride The Gospel Ship to Heaven’s Jubilee.

And In That Great Triumphant Morning my soul will be free,

And My Burdens Will Be Lifted when my Saviour’s face I see.

So I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World below,

But I know He’ll Pilot Me ’til it comes time to go.

Oh, nothing on this earth is half as dear to me,

As the sound of my Mama’s Opry

Merle Haggard first heard DeMent sing while on tour in his bus. He was listening to a multi-artist tribute album of his songs called “Tulare Dust.” His song “Big City” was the one chosen by Iris. Listening, he became fascinated by the unusual timbre and the clear sincerity of her voice.  At the first possible stop, he and Abe Manuel left the bus, went into a record store, and bought “Infamous Angels” and “My Life.” One of the songs on the latter album was Lefty Frizzell’s song to his own parents, “Mom and Dad’s Waltz.” Iris had made it her own, close as it was to her feelings for her own parents.  Haggard loved Frizzell, Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers. He sensed a kindred spirit in DeMent, phoned her, and invited her to Shade Tree Manor, his estate outside Redding, California. DeMent jumped at this; Haggard, more than any contemporary country artist, she deemed to be her mentor. They recorded several songs together and then toured. Though DeMent had grown up in California, she, like Haggard, felt rooted to another time and place. Haggard loved the way Iris would lose herself in a song; it reminded him of Jimmie Rodgers or Sara Carter of the bluegrass Carter Family.

Iris DeMent’s voice is unlike anything then being heard in country or folk music. It is not mellifluous, nor does it jump out in front of slick Nashville sidemen—it starts from deep inside her soul, but only comes to a sounding at the top of her throat. At first, it seems as if it is struggling, strained, as it slides like a Royal Crown Cola guitar bottleneck, not on but toward the note. Once it lands, it seems to split into its own harmonic in a kind of choked country version of Tuva throat singing. Seen close, her face registers not only the deep emotion called out by the lyric, but of the effort to hold that emotion in check. Here she is in that voice singing, “There’s a Whole Lot of Heaven”:

The book “In the Country of Country” is a history of country and western music, from the “Singing Brakeman,” Jimmie Rodgers, to Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Nicholas Dawidoff spent years criss-crossing the United States tracing musical roots and talking to the men and women who devote their lives to playing and singing it. Much of the early, hard-to-find information about Iris DeMent is from this lively book:

Amazon.com link for In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music

In May 1996 DeMent caught even her most ardent fans flat-footed with the release of an eagerly awaited third CD, the lower-case titled “the way i should.” The modesty of the chosen font belied the tornado of passion that blew its way through the first few cuts. This was no longer the gingham Ozark-bred lass of the first two albums: “There’s a Wall in Washington” took on the senseless tragedy of life lost in the Vietnam War. More impassioned, even strident, is “Wasteland of the Free.” Here are its partial lyrics:

We got politicians running races on corporate cash

Now don’t tell me they don’t turn around and kiss them peoples’ ass

You may call me old-fashioned

but that don’t fit my picture of a true democracy

and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

We got CEO’s making two hundred times the workers’ pay

but they’ll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage

and If you don’t like it, mister, they’ll ship your job

to some third-world country ‘cross the sea

and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

Living in the wasteland of the free

where the poor have now become the enemy

Let’s blame our troubles on the weak ones

Sounds like some kind of Hitler remedy

Living in the wasteland of the free

The prophet of jeremiads will eventually be smote by the faithful followers—and thus was Iris. Many of her heartland fans turned on her; they felt she had abused her country and its leaders, and she had done it using drums and electric guitars- a latter day Dylan at Newport, 1965. I’m not certain how her mentor, Merle Haggard, reacted, but the self-styled “Okie from Muskogee”, né Bakersfield, California, could not have been pleased with the firestorm greeting her. For the first time, all of the album’s 11 songs were written by her. There is no soothing balm of gospel’s sweet resignation here, nor the homilies of family kinship shining through adversity. The vision of “the way I should” is bitter and bleak.

Hank Williams, one of DeMent’s heroes, said of his own composing facility, “I pick up the pen and God moves it” – a kind of divine Ouija. One of Merle Haggard’s four wives, Bonnie Owens, (also an ex-wife of Buck Owens) says of Merle’s writing, “It’s amazing to me the things that come out of Merle’s mouth when he’s writing… . He’d say later, ‘Bonnie, I don’t ever remember saying these words. It’s like God put them through me.’ ”

DeMent has never had an easy time composing her own songs. Sometimes they just sit there and stew for a long time. And though she hangs on to the religious roots in her music, her agnostic/pantheistic view, stretching all the way back to “Let the Mystery Be,” may have caused the god of musical inspiration to turn a deaf ear on her. In 1999, she teamed with John Prine for four songs on his album, “In Spite of Ourselves.”

In fact, her personal life took a few hairpin turns in the late 90s and especially after the election of George W. Bush. She and longtime amanuensis-hubby, Elmer McCall, divorced. DeMent battled depression. She kinda went below the radar and somewhere along the way, she crashed. It is not easy to find details about this period of her life but I did read that after “Dubya’s” election she appeared on stage at a venue, apologized to the audience and said she could no longer perform, given the current political landscape. I don’t know how long this lasted, but the eight-year recording drought came to an end with the release of “Lifeline,” her fourth CD in 2005. It contains a baker’s dozen of mainly traditional gospel songs done with her most ever restrained instrumentation: acoustic guitar, dobro, and upright bass. She plays piano on several cuts and has electric guitar on one other; otherwise it is all within the scope of traditional Bluegrass instrumentation.

All 13 of the songs evoke the consolations of gospel music, praising a God who looks over us and consoles us. There is only one song that she wrote, “He Reached Down.” It invokes a God who is truly immanent. Here are a few of its lyrics:

a certain man one day did go

down to jericho

falling among thieves along the way

well they stripped him and they fled

leaving him for dead

he reached down, he reached down

and touched my pain

well he reached down, he reached down

got right there on the ground

well he reached down, he reached down

and he touched my pain

There is a fascinating ambivalence in DeMent’s view of God. Perhaps the balm and solace she finds in this old gospel music harkens back to a time with her mom and dad and their singing these songs of suffering. But she also knows we have to be in the real world and fight for what is right.

In this video version of “He Reached Down”, done a few years after the “Lifeline” CD, she features a larger ensemble and includes those demonic fiddles—two of them:

“Lifeline” was an attempt to re-connect with the spirit of the music that had been in her first two albums. It began to lead her back into a performing life. There was a new beau, singer-songwriter Greg Brown, whom she married in 2002 and slowly, but steadily, she started to write new songs.  Two years after their marriage DeMent and Brown adopted a 5 year-old Serbian girl.

DeMent stated performing again in 2007, but sporadically; she sang at Cal State Long Beach this past September, and will appear in Providence, Rhode Island in early December. She says she has nearly enough new songs for a fifth album and hopes to be in a recording studio in early 2010.

The photo above and the other two group ones are from Vanity Fair’s November, 2006 Country and Western Music Portfolio. Here is a 22 photo slideshow of current C/W stars. The fact that Iris DeMent is not included, while her music soulmates are, is a comment on the insistent buzz-cult of celebrity as well as, perhaps, DeMent’s independent spirit, going her own way:

Vanity Fair slideshow link

I heard Iris DeMent in performance at the Troubadour in West Hollywood shortly after the release of “My Life.” Her plane had been delayed and the audience waited patiently for almost two hours. She arrived, unpacked her guitar onstage, tuned quickly and sang the songs from the CDs. But as indulgence for our long wait, she continued for another hour, off the playlist, with those old-timey songs—just Iris, her acoustic guitar, and an audience of rapt Hollywood sophisticates, pulled deep into the “roots music” that swirled around the room, enveloping all of us in its soothing embrace.

Here she is, alone with her acoustic guitar, on Scottish TV, singing the first song from “My Life,” “Sweet is the Melody.”

Here is a photo of Pilobolus:

Oops, sorry. That Pilobolus is a spore-spewing fungus, studied by mycologists, that thrives in cow manure. Here is a photo of our Pilobolus. They dance. Well, not all their critics exactly describe it as dance:

Their first gig was as opening act for a Frank Zappa concert; they named themselves after a relative of bread mold. They started to work together in a student dance class, but they were non-dancers. After almost 40 years of performances, they still have no choreographer; the dancers make it up among themselves.

Pilobolus is such an anomaly in the world of contemporary dance that the esteemed dance critic of the New Yorker, Arleen Croce, doesn’t even call them a dance company but an “acrobatic mime troupe.” Jean Morrison Brown in the book Vision of Modern Dance quotes one of the four founding members, Moses Pendleton: “We felt that maybe we couldn’t dance, so why try to? When we began we didn’t really feel free, moving in space individually. We literally had to hang on to each other…. It wasn’t so difficult if you did create this shape, a thing that moved…. We began to play around by combining bodies.”

This combining of bodies is unlike what any dance company had ever done or what the rarefied world of modern dance had ever seen. And since the four guys who started it had little sense of the airy space of classical dance history or of ballet, they followed their sense of locker room physicality and mixed it up like a rugby scrum or a football pile-up in the end zone. Here are two images of this “combining.”

Four guys: Robby Barnett, Jonathan Wolken, Michael Tracy, and the above-quoted Moses Pendelton enrolled in 1970 in a Dartmouth student dance class taught by Alison Chase, herself only 24. She says they thought it would be an easy “A.”  Journalist Rebecca Leung in conversation with Chase in 2006 for a 60 Minutes profile asks her about the beginning:

What was it like to try to teach these guys how to dance? “That was a relative disaster. So I struck out in another direction, and I taught them how to make dances,” says Chase. “It was a little bit like just giving us finger paints,” says Barnett. “We were given some materials, like us. And we fooled around and figured out what we could do.”

What they found they could do was glom onto one another.” You know the idea of standing alone in front of people was impossible,” says Barnett. “So we kind of clung to each other for moral as well as physical support.”

They named this dance Pilobolus—and it was videotaped at a showcase for student dances. They had been at it only two semesters. “We managed to combine our bodies, climb over each other, flip, swing, fly, lift, flop each other around in different ways,” says Wolken. The student showcase led to a full-fledged show in New York, which got a great review in The New York Times, and the attention of Charles Reinhart, the director of the prestigious American Dance Festival.

Lesley Stahl begins a June 2006, 60 Minutes profile by asking Reinhart about Pilobolus’ appearance at American Dance Festival. What ensues is a capsule history of the group, with brief archived shots from their earliest work, and Stahl getting a hands-on demonstration from the group:

I first saw Pilobolus in the winter of 1984 in Santa Fe where I was photographing the western Silverado, and then subsequently during their annual two-week summer residences at the Joyce Theater in Chelsea, NYC. Their work is in constant morphosis year to year, their pieces ever-expanding in scale and complexity. As they do so, they leave behind whatever vestigial sense of most modern dance they might once have had.

In 2004, they created a dance called Megawatt. Large parts of it are performed on or very near the stage floor, almost as if they are the eponymous fungi struggling upward through earth to air. Here is a video of excerpts. The music is by Primus and Radiohead:

It’s easy to understand that any traditional way of talking about “dance” does not apply to the six artists who make up the core company. The fact that they, from the beginning, have lived in a community, much like Japanese Butoh dancers and the drumming group, Kodo, helps explain the intricate movement symbiosis required. When fully upright, wrapped and wound around each other like a vine with aerial roots, their term “weight-sharing” becomes clear. In order to discuss with each other whatever ideas they have as the piece is evolving in their studio, they had to invent their own vocabulary such as: “galloping sofas,” “fat gnomes,” “flogs,” “dolphin,” “body floss.” That vocabulary must be in constant expansion as newer moves are developed. As the company grew in ambition the core body of dancers sometimes expanded. But in February of 2005 at the TED conference in Monterey, California, a two-person piece was performed that distilled all their athleticism, organic evolution of body and near-metaphysical religiosity into a single 15-minute piece called Symbiosis. Its elemental, reductive qualities, along with the severe purity of the music of George Crumb and Arvo Part, demonstrates why this group had become a staple of the high-end artistic patrons of modern dance. It is a long way from the antics and acrobatic hi-jinks of their early years on the Dartmouth campus, to here:

Almost every style/technique in dance, from the 19th century Russian ballet of Petipa and Fokine, to Balanchine and Graham, Tharp and Fosse, depends on some codified set of moves and gestures that act as transitions from one section of a piece to the next. This is most apparent in classical ballet and its 20th and 21st century traditional siblings. But a piece like Symbiosis defies the history of what we think of as classical pas de deux.  These two superbly trained bodies merge at times into one. The high point of most ballet, even much contemporary dance, is the elevation or lift of the female partner with the male as supporting ground. This is not the style of Pilobolus.

Even as Pilobolus’ reputation reached its seeming apogee a few years ago, it took an unexpected turn that surprised and even dismayed some of its most fervent supporters. It may have even been the real reason why Alison Chase left Pilobolus, after almost 35 years. What happened, what that turn indicated, is that in the eyes of some Pilobolus followers—they went HOLLYWOOD; the company was featured on the 79th Oscar presentation doing shadow renderings behind a screen of that year’s films. The least said about that, the better.

However, after the Oscar telecast, Pilobolus, in an all too predictable twist, was inundated with over 3000 job offers, most of them of a commercial nature. This new direction filled their coffers, allowed the company to expand its teaching programs and expand its touring company. And as often can be the case, some of the commercial work did allow for a new creative platform.

Here is a behind-the-scenes video of the making of the “human car” commercial for Ford Canada. Matt Kent and Jonathan Wolken of Pilobolus are present to work with director Jorn Threlfall and cinematographer Ian Foster on the intricate choreography of dancers, props (car parts) and camera:

Here is the completed commercial:

Somewhere around this time, Pilobolus’ inchoate and experimental ideas for doing pieces behind a screen as “shadowplays” were embraced by commercial clients, some of whom may have seen the close, organic and even erotic intertwinings of these near nude bodies as too explicit for television marketing. But shadows and light play had been a visual element in some earlier pieces; I remember one that I saw in Santa Fe that had involved flashlights with light beams casting racing shadows against a stage scrim.

The idea of using the company for car commercials seems to have caught fire. Here is one they did for Hyundai:

It was only a matter of time before Pilobolus ended up on late night television. Here they are on Conan O’Brien’s show, taped during their July 2008 residence at the Joyce Theater. There are obvious elements inserted just for the program that show a pandering to mainstream Broadway style and taste:

This never-ending debate about art vs. commerce, integrity versus selling-out, is a bit passé at a time when no one even agrees that an avant-garde continues to exist, or when the move from off-off Broadway to Tony Awards can happen in a single season.

But all this commercial work does seem to have enriched the company’s ideas of shadow theater in a way that evokes an almost proto-cinema tone. There is a full narrative developed in this next video, told simply and in real time, the figures moving across the screen as they could have done against the cave walls of early man, shadows cast by flickering fire light:

This work also reminds me of cinema’s oldest surviving feature animated film, one I saw in my very first month at USC as a film student: The Adventures of Prince Achmed, completed in 1926 by Lotte Reiniger, whose use of multi-plane technique anticipated Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks by a full decade:

The story of Reiniger’s uncompromising odyssey in the creation of silhouette cinema can be found here:

Wikipedia.org article link

Here is the first act of The Adventures of Prince Achmed. After an introduction of characters and some prologue, the Prince is introduced six minutes in:

An old but absolutely fascinating documentary traces the development of Reiniger’s films—from sketches and cutouts to camera animation. There is a wonderful moment early on when Reiniger suggests that if you don’t happen to have an animation table in your home you can easily cut a hole in the dining room table and cover it with a white sheet:

www.dailymotion.com video link

It will be of real interest to see how Pilobolus develops from here. I wish them the best in whatever cutting edge endeavors they yet undertake. In American culture, the arc from creative genesis to pop culture fame is not always a good one. Like the stock market, as we too well know, the high point can just precede the crash—and that can land us back in the dung pile.

ONE

In May 1921, aesthete, agoraphobe, and author Marcel Proust in a rare sojourn into the world outside his famous cork-lined study, went to the galleries of the Jeu de Paume to see an exhibition of Dutch master paintings. Included were two by Johannes Vermeer: “The Girl with the Pearl Earring,” and the “View of Delft.”

Proust’s encounter with this townscape found its way into a key scene in the Captive section of his novel, In Search of Lost Time. Here, the aging writer, Bergotte, becomes fixated on a detail in the painting, a small patch of yellow paint on a distant wall, le petit pan de mur jaune.

Already ill, Bergotte sits on a circular settee, has an attack, and falls to the floor, dead. (Some testimony to the redemptive power of art). A study of “View of Delft,” the scholarly debate about just which patch of yellow may have caused Bergotte’s demise, and an excerpt from this scene of the novel can be found here:

www.essentialvermeer.com link

It is part of a compendium site called Essential Vermeer. The extremely close reading of Vermeer illustrated on this site– of the life and work of a painter whose output is meager by the standards of his contemporaries, as well as the little information we have about his painting style and background — is what caused mid 19^th century French critic Théophile Thoré Bürger to label him, “The Sphinx of Delft.”

What we know of Vermeer is mostly through church, town, and court documents. Though registered in the painter’s Guild of St. Luke as of December 29, 1653 (and having served on its board and as its dean several times), he seems to have painted as a solitary artist in his own home studio. He had no registered students; he had no confirmed teachers; he had no assistants; he left behind no “school.”

Here are a few of the things we do know: he was baptized on October 31, 1632; he died about December 15, 1675; he wed Catherina Bolnes in 1653 and had up to 14 children by her, 11 surviving at his death; his work was done on commission, mainly for patron Pieter van Ruijven who collected and hoarded most of his work; he lived with his family in a house owned by his mother-in law, Maria Thins, who was sometimes a model for, and commissioner of, his work; when he died he owed the local baker, Hendrik van Buyten, 617 guilders, which was paid by Catarina’s giving him two of her husband’s paintings; his estate, which had incurred huge debts, was dispersed through auctions and sales, which included many paintings by Vermeer’s contemporaries (he had been a sometimes art dealer). And in 1654, an enormous cache of gunpowder exploded in the heart of the city; known as the Delft Thunderclap, it destroyed nearly half of the structures and killed the painter Carel Fabritius who may have been Vermeer’s teacher—but we have no record of that or of how the explosion affected Vermeer, his family or neighbors.

None of this tells us anything about his work. There are no contemporary critiques or evaluations, no revelation of stylistic approaches or intentions. What we have learned has been due to close examination of the work itself. Opinions about his artistry have evolved alongside the evolution of technical, forensic investigation techniques. It is this very paucity of knowledge that has fostered both revelatory insights and wild theories. Confusion about the work was also spawned by a near two centuries’ neglect of the paintings. From the time of his death, until his mid 19^th century artistic exhumation, Vermeer’s painting corpus lay a-moldering. Late 20^th century chemical analysis of the canvasses, abetted by radiographic and chromo-spectographic scrutiny, has unearthed many secrets— but has also fueled newer and highly speculative theories.

TWO

There are videos from the National Gallery that give you a sense of what this analysis can reveal. The first video looks at “The Music Lesson” and demonstrates how composition, light, and adroit placement of set pieces, arranged in a meticulous and highly ordered manner, builds the painting.  Then, the discovery of a pinhole in the canvas identifies the “vanishing point.” This is an important observation when discussion about viewing devices emerges:

National Gallery of Art—Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” video link

Another video, “Girl with a Red Hat,” examines how under-painting gives depth and structure, and how highlights and complementary colors create complex pleasures for the eye:

National Gallery of Art—Vermeer’s “Girl with a Red Hat” video link

“Woman Holding a Balance” is a delicate work that uses light from a window to suffuse the scene, creating shadows that lead into the vanishing point perspective, much of this revealed only by a recent cleaning. Its construction is discussed by the Vermeer scholar Arthur Wheelock:

National Gallery of Art—Vermeer’s “Woman Holding a Balance” video link

What we see in these three videos is compelling testimony why these small, seemingly, innocent genre paintings have so captured the attention of generations of viewers, especially as they have come together within the past century in several of the world’s pre-eminent institutions.

Along with this, there have emerged conflicting theories about Vermeer’s use of a viewing device, most likely the camera obscura; it was known and used by his contemporaries, but has never been established as having been in his possession.

Here is short video that shows such a portable device:

National Gallery of Art—Vermeer Camera Obscura video link

In fact, most of the viewing devices of Vermeer’s times were unwieldy large boxes which you sat inside of and which could have actually contained a small canvas for image tracing. The one illustrated in the video can be employed only as a viewing guide. But the question of whether, and to what degree, Vermeer may have used such a device is still hotly contested. One of the most complete and compelling investigations I have read is from Philip Steadman on this BBC site:

www.bbc.co.uk — Empire and sea Power “Vermeer and the Camera Obscura” article link

Steadman is the author of Vermeer’s Camera, a small tome that is the result of his 20-year examination of Vermeer’s paintings:

Amazon.com Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth behind the Masterpieces link

Steadman went so far as to build a re-creation of Vermeer’s studio, dressing it with equivalent furnishings, in order to prove his theories. There are reviews and a CGI tour of his reconstructed studio at these sites:

www.vermeerscamera.co.uk reviews link

www.vermeerscamera.co.uk studio reconstruction images link

English painter David Hockney, in a parallel book, but one with a wider ken on optical aids in painting, explored the many possible techniques Vermeer and his contemporaries employed. This controversial book is titled Secret Knowledge:

Amazon.com Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters link

I read the Hockney book when it was first published and found the ideas especially compelling because Hockey is an artist, not a critic or scientist; his perspective comes from the vision of a fellow worker, a true spiritual brother of Vermeer. Hockney is also a great draftsman; he has never been dependent on any projection device for his drawing, in the way Warhol or many of the contemporary photo-realist painters were; but Hockney utilized several of these devices in his research.

THREE

About a year after the publication of the book, Hockney, who lived in Los Angeles at the time, made a documentary for British TV. He had set up a small studio on a stage at Panavision, Woodland Hills. I met him there, toured the set, and observed the filming as he worked inside a large camera obscura. He pointed out that he deployed only simple lenses that were readily available to Vermeer.  The rather primitive lens elements of that time account for the exaggerated specular highlights and soft focus you see in parts of Vermeer’s paintings, especially where a dark planar object such as a finial meets a hard sunlight reflection. Likewise, the shifting depth of field, with parts of foreground objects appearing in varying degrees as out of focus, is faithfully rendered by the artist. It is clear that Vermeer is painting what he actually sees projected onto the screen of these new scientific devices. He is not hiding anything nor is it likely that he traces anything. The camera obscura is for him simply a new kind of viewing tool.

This is the basis for ideas explored in yet another scientific study of Vermeer’s vision, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing by Bryan Jay Wolf:

Amazon.com Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing link

Wolf theorizes that Vermeer used optical devices as an aid toward an incipient abstraction, to create a different way to look at the world, one rendered through the tools of new science, one which embraced (he feels) the very concept of the ambiguities of the emerging modern world. Perhaps it is the strictly visual irresolution of elements within the paintings that has made Vermeer seem so attractive to modern scholars, academics intent on parsing reality through a prism of moral relativity. I suppose that this quasi-metaphysics seems remote from the paintings themselves—but it is indicative of how Vermeer has become the locus for a myriad of critical conjectures.

What has become evident to me in this examination by so many writers is that Vermeer’s paintings are, in fact, a point of departure for intersecting and conflicting ideas about how painters perceived the world in an era before photography. It becomes even more self-evident that the invention of photography in 1839 began to free the painter from the burden of creating a simulacrum of the real world; it set him off, in the path toward abstraction. This Promethean effort became the heroic journey of early 20^th century art. In another piece, I will look at this journey through the lens of the great Kandinsky exhibition currently at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.

There does seem to be a Vermeer for Every Man. So, it will come as no surprise that a very recent book titled, Vermeer’s Family Secrets, embraces an idea far afield from that of any of the recognized scholars, such as Wheelock, Gowing, Steadman or Liedtke. Writer Benjamin Binstock is convinced that on the basis of what he sees as internal technical anomalies in Vermeer’s paintings, especially some of the late ones, that Vermeer indeed did have a student. Riffing on the lacunae of what occurred in the privacy of his studio, and using speculation loosely taken from Tracy Chevalier’s novel, made to movie, Girl with the Pearl Earring, Binstock sets out to prove that as many as seven of Vermeer’s paintings were made in part or in total by an apprentice—his older daughter and frequent model, Maria.  He argues that Maria was Vermeer’s sole student: that she observed and studied him closely while she posed; that she learned to mix pigments, even including the precious lapis lazuli; that she cut, prepped and eventually painted on the same canvas rolls as her father; that she worked with him as a secret doppelgänger; that he trained her as a painter in his own style at a time when it was not easy for a woman to become a recognized painter.

Binstock believes that after the artist’s death his widow conspired to sell Maria’s paintings as Vermeer’s work in order to lighten the oppressive financial burden on the household; then Maria abruptly abandoned painting when she married and left Delft:

Amazon.com Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice link

I have not seen any scholarly refutation of Binstock, but I am certain they are coming. Some of these paintings are sacred cows of the Vermeer canon, especially the “Girl with the Red Hat,” the painterly subtlety of which we already have seen in a video. Still, Binstock’s askew theory makes a compelling read, and he serves notice that the “Vermeer Paradox” is alive and well. Short of finding a diary by the master himself, there will likely be no definitive answers to many of the mysteries surrounding his work.

There is a slideshow of over 100 images of Vermeer’s work—the full-scale paintings and numerous with multiple details—at this site:

Vermeer Foundation slideshow link

You can pause, then proceed at your own pace and dig into any of the paintings to explore your own musings: Vermeer theory is a wide open field.

Because there is so much that is disputed or unknown about Vermeer’s life and work, as well as an intense level of scholarly debate and conjecture, I can’t help but be reminded of that parallel question that even today roils through the English-speaking literary world: Who was Shakespeare? Who wrote those masterful plays? Does genius coming from an unlikely quarter always inspire such a spectrum of opinion when accreditation or attribution may be murky?   I think it’s way too easy to get lost inside this conundrum.

I’d like to return to the discussion of Vermeer’s involvement in emerging optical science in a future blog—with a look at the so-called Hockney-Falco thesis. In the meantime, let’s just consider Salvador’s Dali’s profound ruminations on Vermeer’s “Lacemaker.”

ONE

This is the bar “The Brass Rail” as it appears in October of 2009. It is two doors down on Connell Avenue from Hoppy’s “Pastime Museum.” Now abandoned, it was one of the active drinking hot spots during Picher, Oklahoma’s freewheeling heyday.

As the mines began to close down through the 50s and 60s, and as the reality began to emerge that Picher was not just another small Midwest town losing population to high tech centers, residents hunkered town and tried to console themselves in the pride they had for their history and for their homes.  They were starting to realize that the huge chat piles of mine tailings all around them were, in fact, deadly. The last mine closed in 1970, leaving behind a sordid legacy of pollution, degraded land, and unemployment. It was once beautiful and fertile land, home to several relocated Native American tribes, mainly the Quapaw, who now knew that their sacred land, once leased to the mining companies, was forever ruined.

My first encounter with this northeast corner of Oklahoma bordering Kansas and Missouri was in 1963. I was a senior at Loyola University, Los Angeles, hoping to begin graduate studies the next year at USC Cinema School. I had hitchhiked to Norman, Oklahoma to meet up with Carol Littleton, then a student at OU. We planned to spend Christmas with her family in her hometown of Miami, a ten-minute drive south of Picher. I had heard much local talk about the towns of Picher, Cardin, Commerce and Treece and thought their closed down mines would make interesting photo essays. We drove up there, my 35mm still camera in tow, on a blustery post-Christmas morning. I was not prepared for the oversize scale of the chat piles, nor their proximity to family homes, nor for the pervasive feel of a community really down on its luck.

Carol eventually moved to Los Angeles. A few years later we married and began careers in film. The fate of these troubled mining towns went pretty much out of my memory until a recent return trip when I read about Picher’s long, slow decline. Here is a timeline chart of the town’s downward spiral:  just click “1914” to track the decades.

www.cnn.com article link

Several years after my 1963 visit to Picher, more sinkholes opened up, a mine collapsed, and nine homes were lost. Traffic was diverted around town; there was fear that Highway 69, the main artery from the Kansas border to the Miami entrance of the Will Rogers Turnpike, would be closed, the ground unable to sustain the weight of a stream of 18-wheelers. And in 1979, a local rancher found orange water bubbling up on his land from underground. It flowed into nearby Tar Creek. The water was found to be highly acidic and contaminated with lead and a cocktail of other heavy metals; it had streamed up from the flooded mines.

In 1981, the decade old EPA declares Picher an environmental hazard.  Most of the area is named the “Tar Creek Superfund Site” and it assumes the highest priority. Cleanup begins but the scale of the devastation is awesome: 47 square miles, over 25,000 acres of highly toxic land, 80% of Picher directly over mines and slowly disappearing into sinkholes.

The once close-knit town begins to unravel as many parents worry about their children’s exposure to the toxins (43% of the population are found to have diabetes; strange tumors erupt in children; high levels of lead are found in blood samples; school test scores drop and mental impairment is feared.) Other families, many with four or five generations invested in the community, want to remain and help clean up the mess. Patience wanes, tempers flare all during the 90s  as evidence of the cleanup seems scarce. Contaminated topsoil and land around homes is scraped and carted off, leaving front yards and basements vulnerable to flooding with the next rain. Mold blooms. The chat piles seem as high as ever.

In 2000, a relocation plan is discussed in the Oklahoma State Legislature. It is still on the table three years later, but at last is formally introduced in January of 2004. Five months later, Governor Brad Henry approves a buyout and relocation of all families with children under six years old.  In 2006, there are more sinkholes and collapses. Finally, the Federal and State governments agree to a buyout of all residents. There is no choice, even for diehard residents like Hoppy. No one will buy their homes or land; the already abandoned or torn down homes fester on the landscape as blight worse than the chat piles and sinkholes.

And on May 10, 2008, almost as an act of Mother Nature’s euthanasia, a tornado rips through Picher, missing the north part of town and Hoppy’s museum, but flattening block after block of the old clapboard homes. Below is a news video link.

What I find so moving about this clip is that it does not so much feature the physical devastation as the portraits of people who having had so little, have now lost everything.

Joplin resident, John Schehrer, who has compiled a comprehensive photo history of Ottowa Country from the mining days until now, documented the destruction done to Picher by the tornado:

schehrer2.homestead.com link

The end came fast. Those who had not yet accepted the government buyout, finally did so. In April of 2009, by a vote of 55-6, the remaining residents voted to dissolve the Picher-Cardin School District. That June, fewer than 50 students were left; only seven made up the last graduating class. By this past September, Picher, at least officially, ceased to be a town.

About eight years ago a group of documentary filmmakers, led by Bradley Beesley decided to make a film about the decline of Picher. Its focus is on the people, not the property, nor on the dry statistics of Picher as a Superfund site. That frustrating saga is merely the frame for a deeply emotional narrative of vulnerable American families in crisis. Here is a trailer for the film, The Creek Runs Red. Hoppy is narrating:

The other two producer-directors of The Creek Runs Red are Julianna Brannum and James Payne. They all showed the finished film to Picher residents in September of 2007. Here are the directors’ thoughts on the making of the film- the whys and hows of their very engaged work:

www.pbs.org/independentlens link

What is only suggested in the trailer is the depth of lasting emotion about Picher among its remaining residents. There are parents who are in fear for the developmental status of their kids despite their ties to the town; the students, who have real community bonding and peer relationships centered around the activities of Picher-Cardin High School, whose mascot is the “Gorillas,” and, finally, the residents like Hoppy whose very identity is invested in the legacy of his town, come what may.

The high school campus, now a school only by virtue of the signage, shows none of the decay so evident elsewhere. The school was clearly a source of community pride until the very end. The Picher-Cardin football team had won the state championship in 1984 and “Gorillas” spirit still ran high, as if in defiance of the label of “lead heads” and “chat rats” hurled at them by competing schools. Here are photos of the school track and field house that I made recently.

And here are two contrasting photos, the first an abandoned home that somehow escaped tornado destruction and a single home a few blocks from Hoppy’s Museum that still shows pride of ownership.

“D and D” is a local drive in burger joint a short distance from the high school. Despite its claim to being the last food joint in town still open—it is also now closed.

There is only one way to take measure of the grit of people who live in towns like this, whose sense of identity is so intertwined with the history of their communities. For those of us who live in the anonymity of large cities, it is impossible to gage the complex web of family, friends, church, school that so tightly binds some Americans, so tightly that even as they become ever more aware of the world beyond, and even as their kids leave for the temptations of the cities, they stay rooted to where they were born and raised.

This is the theme of The Creek Runs Red. It was shown last March on the PBS documentary series The Independent Lens. You can get a DVD of it online or in your Netflix chain:

datapanicdistro.com link

But PBS has placed the whole film online as well. Watching it, even here, is an hour of your time that will be richly rewarded. Here is the link:

The film was finished before the worst came; it tracks the recent history of Picher, but not the end game. You will meet some of Picher’s residents—Walter and Wilba Jones have lived in Picher for 40 years and refuse to move. Maude Smith, a Quapaw, and her grandson, JR Mathew, want out. They own 80 acres of now worthless land. Their family, the Crawfish, sees no future in the land that their ancestors were forcibly re-located to, from their native home in Arkansas. They will have been doubly re-located; they say that now people will understand how their people felt. John Sparkmann is a member of the Steering Committee for the relocation plan and an advocate of re-locating the children.  Bill Lake is a slightly wacky diehard resident and proud homeowner who wants to make a new Picher like the one he has constructed with his model railroad set. Betty Cole is the owner of “Betty’s Dairy In”; she discovers that she has a tumor and reflects on all the sick children, one of whom is young Jason Dixon, who had a very rare tumor removed from his spinal cord and who now walks with a limp. Sam Freeman is the three term Mayor of Picher who earns one dollar a year for all the aggravation he gets. Kim Pace is principal of the elementary school; she understands the conflicting emotions of her young students. Pastor Jim McFarland is a fiery evangelical who exhorts his congregation to “don’t give up.” Hoppy Ray plays and sings with his musicians at the Pastime, confident there will be a better tomorrow.

The film humanizes all these intersecting fears and hopes. It seems as if all is going to work out. In the final scene the Oklahoma governor has approved a re-location of some families and Picher’s folks celebrate a kind of victory at a local fair.

They don’t know that the worst is yet to come.