Against The Din
His Cultural Relativist friends would roll their eyes when he discoursed on Substance, bringing up his favorite comparative dichotomy of filet mignon to White Castle. They relished the opportunity to non sequiter him with the fact that his own writing for newsstand magazines, which some called baroque, hardly satisfied that snobby criteria. More than a few gained pleasure when his having to pay the rent required further lowering of his editorial benchmarks.
The grander journalistic positions were always out of his reach anyway; he was certainly lacking the courage or adrenalin-lust necessary for substantive challenges such as War Correspondent. And, as for something other civic-minded, alas, as time went by, he had grown disgusted dealing with what he referred to as the "Droppings of the Political Ostrich - unable to fly, yet flapping its left and right wings madly, mostly for mating displays."
He eventually accepted a position interviewing visual artists, but rather quickly discovered that most of those with what he recognized as Substance felt that their work alone had pretty much said all there was to say.
The next rung down was movie/music celebrity interviews and short bios. Pop icons, each one of course labeled a genius, needed marketing. The content became irrelevant; the bottom-line significance was Who he interviewed, not What they said - unless a scandal lurked. Except for the photo from The Godfather that ran with the interview, he remembered little of Brando's digressions. Eventually even the identities of the famous persons sitting across from him became translucent. Distracted by contemplating the inner structure of the opera singer's mouth, his reverie cost him the tenor's descriptions of his performances at Teatro alla Scala.
His hands gripped the bars, trying to make eye contact with the audience he imagined.
An intense period of defeat followed.
He left his job at Fourth Estate Magazine, which had succumbed to bottom feeding in shallow entertainment, and decided to forego any further forays into substantial writing, For the next year he reshaped himself as a visual artist, his work drawing comparisons to Hieronymus Bosch, Jerry Uelsmann, Hannah Höch and others.
This excerpt from a recent published interview* suggests a change in course and perhaps to some degree a utilization of his somewhat abandoned craft of writing:
During the interview he noticed an image hanging on our office wall, a photograph of a work by Robert Montgomery – an outdoor, solar-powered sign**, that reads THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE BECOME GHOSTS INSIDE OF YOU AND LIKE THIS YOU KEEP THEM ALIVE (view photo here). This led us to a lengthy discussion of the relationship of text with visual art, and him sharing his love of literature. "I love fiction. I think it rewires our brains. I often think of the writer Oakley Hall’s quote: 'The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction’. I’d love to find a way to add some truth to my visual work.”
A first collection of his photo-montage works will be published next year, entitled "Outside The Din Of Tribal Choirs." Some samples here.
* Fifth Estate Magazine, Volume 12 No.35, Tempest-tossed Publishing LLC Sept 2016
** ”It’s made from recycled sunlight – the sculpture recycles sunlight to illuminate itself, as a metaphor for what we do when we remember someone we love.” – Robert Montgomery
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