Seeking Fame? Have You Got the Right Stuff?

The Mercury spacecraft Friendship 7
launching John Glenn, the first America
to orbit the earth.

While sifting through notes from an old journal (circa 1984) I came across a few observations that I extrapolated from Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. The book is a compilation of stories about the test pilots who put their lives on the line during those early experiments with rocket-powered, high-speed aircraft.

In The Right Stuff, Wolfe chronicles the grueling process those pilots (and later astronauts) went through. Testing comes first: pushing planes past Mach 1, Mach 2, 2.5, flirting with the sound barrier and beyond, risking death to prove they’ve got the guts and skill. Selection follows—only a few, like Chuck Yeager or the Mercury Seven, make the cut. For the astronauts, assignment comes next: strapped into a capsule, blasted into orbit, riding a controlled explosion into the unknown. The order’s rigid—Testing --> Selection --> Orbit. Each step is necessary to prove you’re worthy of the next.

The other night I watched a documentary about Eric Clapton, focused specifically on the Sixties, the first ten years of his career. While watching, the thought entered my mind that those early years before Clapton became famous were all part of a process that determines who is capable of handling success and fame, and who is not. 

Testing could be the grind—years of work, auditions, failures, bad decisions, or whatever crucible someone endures to stand out. Not all pass; most wash out. Selection is the moment of recognition—picked by the crowd, the industry, or sheer luck. Then orbit: the launch into stardom, confined in a pod, hurtling through a surreal space where normal rules don’t apply. Like test pilots, those chasing fame push barriers—convention, obscurity, self-doubt—hoping to break through. [EdNote: I think here of the "27 Club" that sadly includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.]

Wolfe’s pilots didn’t just chase speed; they chased mastery over fear and physics. Fame’s seekers do the same with ambition and exposure. Mach 1, Mach 2, Mach 2.5—each milestone ups the stakes, and the “barrier” shifts. But here’s the kicker: in both, you don’t know if you’ve got the right stuff until the test’s over, and even then, the ride’s never fully in your control.

We've often heard it said, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it." My observation has been that when we get what we want, we usually get more than we bargained for. 

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A Century of Rebellion: Exploring 20th-Century Art Movements

Henri Matisse. Woman with a Hat.
Public domain.

The 20th century was a crucible of chaos—wars, tech booms, cultural upheavals—and its art mirrored that turbulence, violating norms and redefining creativity. From Fauvism’s wild colors to Conceptual Art’s brain-bending ideas, artists didn’t just paint or sculpt; they revolted, experimented, and dreamed. Here’s a romp through 10 art movements that left their mark, each being an influence in various ways, upon impressionable fine arts students like myself. 

The century kicked off with Fauvism around 1904, when Henri Matisse unleashed bold, screaming colors and fierce brushstrokes. Forget realism—these “wild beasts” (fauves) shocked Paris salons, paving the way for Expressionism’s emotional roar. Growing up in JerseyI had the privilege of having access to so much art it was mind-blowing. On one occasion saw a Matisse retrospective beginning with his very first painting all the way through to the end of his life.

Then came Cubism in 1907, where Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is regarded by many to be the birth of modern art.  It wasn’t just painting; it rewrote how we see space—sculpture, even architecture, felt the ripple. It was a break from tradition that incorporated primitism and scandal, though provocative subject matter wasn't really all that new in the art world. Nevertheless, the piece made an impact n art hisory.

By 1909, Italy’s Futurism roared in, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of The Futurist Manifesto. The movement was obsessed with speed, machines, and modernity. I recently watched Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times and it's easy to see the energetic dynamism of a world in motion. Loud and aggressive, the movement briefly flirted with fascism before fading. 

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp
Photo by Alfred Stieglitz
Public domain

In Zurich during the second decade of the century World War I gave birth to Dadaism, a middle finger to logic and tradition. When Marcel Duchamp plopped a urinal on a pedestal (“Fountain”) and called it art, critics debated whether there was profound seriousness here or a profound joke. The Dadaists generated pure chaos. (If you're in the neighborhood, there is a room at the Phildelphia Museum of Art with a collection of some of Duchamp's most famous works including Nude Descending a Staircase, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors and Chocolate Grinder No. 2.

Out of the chaos of dada came  Surrealism, André Breton’s lovechild with Freud’s psychoanalysis. Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks and Max Ernst’s eerie landscapes, unearthing images from the unconscious and captured in paint.

Post-WWII, New York stole the spotlight with Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s. (For context, keep in mind the German occupation of Paris, which drove droves of artists, writers and thinkers to America and elsewhere.) Jackson Pollock became a sensation by dripping his soul onto canvas; Mark Rothko’s vast color fields swallowed viewers whole. America was now the art world’s heavyweight.

The 1950s brought Pop Art, where Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein raided comic books and ads. Campbell’s Soup Cans became icons—high art meets low culture--and the line blurred. (I myself never "got" Lichtenstein. It seemed boring to me.)

Then Minimalism stripped it all back in the ‘60s—Donald Judd and Agnes Martin went for clean lines, simple forms, industrial cool. No emotional mess, just detachment. 

It was during this same period that I myself was in the fine arts program at Ohio U. Happenings, Foreign Film Festivals and all manner of experimentation was taking place. Op Art tricked eyes with Bridget Riley’s dizzying patterns and Victor Vasarely’s pulsing grids, a scientific twist on perception. Through I never aspired to do Vasarely-like work, it did impress me.

The turning point here was Conceptual Art, which flipped the script. Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth said the idea outranked the object—art could be instructions or a dictionary definition. Art became a mind game. It wasn’t about beauty; it was about thought. Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word was a scathing dissection of this game.

As one who loved the act of laying paint on a surface, of creating visual imagery in whatever medium, Conceptual Art was a throwback to where I'd started my college studies: in philosophy. (You can read my take on this in my story Terrorists Preying.)

These movements weren’t just styles—they were the 20th century’s pulse, reacting to its madness. Take Dada, for instance. As a young art student, I fell hard for Salvador Dalí’s incredible precision (inspired by the classical mastery of Vermeer). His surreal clocks led me to De Chirico’s empty plazas, Max Ernst’s haunting woods and strange birds, Yves Tanguy’s strange landscapes, and Magritte’s sly riddles. Somewhere along the way, I learned Surrealism drank deep from Surrealism's well. 

At the time, my mind latched onto this story of Dada's roots: European artists in 1916 Zurich, sick of war, picked “Dada” randomly from a dictionary—eyes closed, finger pointed. Anti-art, I thought. While digging deeper recently, I found that tale to be a little murkier. Some say a knife stabbed the page for drama; others tie it to Romanian artists Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco muttering “da, da”—a sarcastic “yeah, yeah” in English, “yes, yes” in Romanian. And Dada wasn’t anti-art—it was anti-war, born in WWI’s heart. Their work mirrored the senselessness of a world gone mad, and artists held up the mirror.  

So what’s art reflecting now? War’s echoes, AI’s hum, NFTs, the dehumanizing effect of technology? Cultural fragmentation? These 10 movements of the last century show that artists don’t just follow; they provoke, question, redefine. Who are the most influential artists today? Where is the center of the art world today? Is influence the measure of great art, though? Perhaps the truly great work is being done by people who are beyond the need for recognition, fame or fortune. Or who will not achieve the recognition they deserve until another lifetime comes along. 

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The Prose and Cons of a Kerouac Classic -- On the Road

I finally got around to reading On the Road, the Kerouac classic considered by some to be the most significant book about the Beat generation. Twenty or forty years ago I started Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s follow-up, but couldn’t get into it.

Since I myself have now been a publishing writer more than four decades, I can confess that I’ve always had a beef with this book. Why? Because I’d heard how he wrote the manuscript on a continuous reel of paper and a publisher actually accepted it. Kudos to Kerouac, I suppose. He did it his way and he slid by the gatekeepers of convention.

I know many talented writers who can’t get a publisher to look at their work without an agent and even then, if you sent in a manuscript rolled up like a toilet paper roll, I honestly doubt you’d be taken seriously.

Keep in mind, though, that this was the era of Jackson Pollock, so bad behavior was overlooked if you’d been tapped as a genius.

* * * *
My expectations were low for On the Road, despite Time magazine's declaration that this was one of the most important books of the 20th century. Others raved about it and endorsed it, including Dylan, so when I saw it at the library two weeks ago I checked it out.

Photo by Donald Giannatti via Unsplash

Reading On the Road brought two other road trip books to mind--Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Trip. Both of these were written in the 1960s, with On the Road preceding them. On the Road (1957) is about the travels of Sal Paradise (the narrator) and friends, chiefly Dean Moriarty, from 1947-50. Steinbeck's story was a true account of a road trip in 1960 around the country with his poodle. Tom Wolfe's book is an example of what was labeled the New Journalism, a novel-like account of an LSD-infused magic bus trip with Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. All three go cross-country and back, with Sal and Dean ultimately zagging South into Mexico.

Sidewalk nameplate outside City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco.

The three stories have this in common. They're well-written. On the other hand, I would not go as far as the New York Times went when they described Kerouac's novella, "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."

The central character--almost a fixation for Kerouac--is Dean Moriarty. Wikipedia describes him as "much admired for his carefree attitude and sense of adventure, a free-spirited maverick eager to explore all kicks and an inspiration and catalyst for Sal's travels."

As I read the book--and what makes all this praise feel appalling to me--this hero is essentially a juvenile delinquent who never grew up, who lies, is perpetually looking to get laid, abusive to every female character he has a relationship with, wrecks vehicles, vandalizes, steals, betrays his friends and does whatever he pleases without consideration for the others in his life. Great hero he is not.

The big surprise for me was that Kerouac did produce some good sentences. I enjoyed the skill with which he produced some of the descriptive passages, and everywhere there is a vividness in the writing that makes the action come alive in the reader's mind. Throughout the story I was struck here and there by a turn of phrase, by some of the interesting ways he stated things.

When all is said and done, Kerouac's writing was prose. Dean Moriarty is a con. 

Three Thoughts In Response to Mary Roach's Packing For Mars

The full title of this book is Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. I listened to the audio version of the book while commuting this past eight or ten days. I picked up the book because the topic of a manned mission to Mars has gained a lot of interest in recent years, inspired in part by Buzz Aldrin's passion along these lines and Elon Musk's enthusiasm for this project. Films like The Martian have not diminished the dream either.

But having read more than a few books about the astronaut program over the years, I've repeatedly wondered who in their right mind would want to undertake such a trip? Mary Roach's painstakingly researched collage of details regarding all that is involved with regard to eating, peeing, pooping, bathing and sleeping only serve to affirm what I've intuited all along. It just feels like a most horrid adventure from the outset.

The aim of today's blog post is to share three conclusions I've deduced from reading this book.

First, is Mary Roach's aim in writing Packing For Mars to inform us of the challenges or to dissuade us from actually imagining this is a worthwhile undertaking?

Second, did David Foster Wallace create a new mania for footnotes?
This past month I read Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech and I couldn't help but notice the preponderance of footnotes in the text. I had never noticed this in Wolfe's work before, having read The Painted Word, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff as well as Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine.  Ms. Roach has an absolute ball with her footnotes, and it makes me wonder if David Foster Wallace really did pull a Hemingway on modern lit. That is, he's certainly appeared to have left some fingerprints. Check out his essay on cruise ships, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. More than 130 footnotes in a single essay. It's a stylistic coup.

Third, I couldn't help but wonder, is our discomfort in talking or joking about body functions a particularly American thing. I've read and heard that more primitive cultures have no qualms about making jokes about passing gas and other topics that tend to make us squeamish. Mary Roach holds nothing back. When you look at the subject matter of her other books, you might conclude she's building a reputation on this "insolence."

The Amazon.com book description reads as follows:
Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk?

Many of the reviews are five stars, but this one by Rex Xala seemed to more accurately coincide with my personal feelings about this exploration:

Combine equal parts of Sylvia Branzei's 'Grossology' and the Bathroom Readers' Institute's 'Uncle John's Bathroom Reader' series, make mention of something coming out of (or going into) the anus in nearly every chapter, add a thin pretext of future Mars expeditions, then glaze it over with stories of Astro-chimp masturbation and prehensile dolphin penises - Voila! - You now have an idea of what to expect from Mary Roach's 'Packing for Mars.' (Be sure to wash it all down with a nice chilled glass of charcoal filtered urine - Ms. Roach describes this beverage as "sweet...restorative and surprisingly drinkable" - Yum).

Xala does soften his edge with this follow up statement:

Do you believe we will one day be colonizing Mars?

Okay...perhaps the aforementioned description of 'Packing for Mars' is hyperbolic and a little bit unfair. To her credit, Ms. Roach seems to have put forth painstaking efforts in her research (she also includes long, ancillary foot notes on almost every page of her book). Moreover, through her emails and interviews with cosmonauts, astronauts, NASA personnel, etc., she manages to coax some rather candid information about seldom discussed issues/problems associated with space travel (e.g., personal hygiene, lavatory practices, sexual activity, etc.) Parts of this book were truly insightful, and from that perspective, I say "kudos" to Ms. Roach for her efforts.

This latter paragraph does a good job of indicating how anal Ms. Roach can be about her devotion to detail. If you are a writer, you will readily grasp that she has done an immense amount of research here. She clearly found ways to gain access to things most people would never have attempted to find, such as logs of all the astronauts conversations. She didn't stop there. Her sleuthing through cosmonaut history proved equally enlightening. Why did NASA first send monkeys into space whereas the Russians sent dogs? Ms. Roach answers this question and many others that you may have never thought to ask.

At the end of the day I appreciated the information packed into this well-researched volume. In the event that my friends or children of friends become mesmerized with the notion of planting their feet on Mars one day, I will feed them this dose of reality. At least they will know what they're getting into. It won't be pretty, though it will undoubtedly be historic.

Meantime, life goes on.... 

The Future of Art

On Sunday, I wrote some harsh things about the direction the modern art scene had gone in my article The Painted Absurd, in which I pointed readers to Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word. Wolfe's real adversary is not the artists, however. He was attacking the art critics who decided for others which works should have value and which were tripe for garage sales.

In truth, I still like to frequent the galleries, and I certainly understand where some of the modern movements came from. I like to see what is going on in the art scene as well as its manifold expressions along the periphery. It's a great source for ideas if you make art yourself. And if you imagine yourself making enough money to be a patron of the arts, it is a good way to see what's out there.

For the same reasons I peruse the art mags.

The March 2009 edition of ARTnews caught my attention because it had a cover story titled, "Where Is Art Going?" The feature collected an range of perspectives from museum curators and the like, thus it deals more with high art than just art in general. "A New Creativity" by Ann Landi postulates that because the economy has been trashed, the art market has been altered as well.

“Difficult times bring out the best in the best artists,” says David Ross, who was director of the Whitney Museum during that biennial and is now director of Albion New York, a SoHo affiliate of the London gallery. “When the economy falters, there can be a remarkable growth of seriousness in art.” But others see the notion of an art-market meltdown leading to new forms of creativity as specious hogwash. “I’d say the bohemian fantasy is sweet and sentimental, but rather insulting to artists,” says Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times. “In my experience, artists do what they do, market or no market. During the ‘80s boom, terrific work was being made by artists who barely got the time of day, and some of them were artists we simply started to look at in the ‘90s as the dust settled from the crash. That will happen again.”

Further along Landi writes:

The very nature of the way artists are perceived changes when the price tags cease to be that important. “In a downturn, artists are no longer validated according to their market value,” says Mary Sabbatino, vice president of Galerie Lelong in New York. “You’ll have an end to the quote-unquote critical description of Marlene Dumas, for example, as the most expensive living female artist.”

The one statement I liked in the article was that artists are going to make art no matter what the economy is doing. And it doesn't need to be validated by being in a gallery. Yes, even Dr. Seuss's drawing are now gallery pieces, but he began by making children's books. Much of what I'm doing right now, for example, is for illustrative purposes. Occasionally I like framing my work and plan on some larger, more serious endeavors again this summer now that my garage is converted into the three season studio. I don't need Federal funding to paint, draw, make music.

The thing is, when some people talk about art, they're talking about the art industry. The art industry may be hurting, but from where I sit the creative urge is alive and well in this country. It may be hard for poets to get published because no one reads poetry magazines much, but this does not stop poetry or music or other forms of creation from happening.

My time is up for now, so this is a theme I will have to return to yet another day. What's your take?

NOTE: The picture of a bear that you see here is a painting that we saw at a gallery in Sedona. The seated boy was produced this past week here.

The Painted Absurd

I originally saw excerpts from Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word in Harper’s magazine where the book had been excerpted. (I may still have a copy of that issue in my garage.) His cannon blasts against the absurdities which have presented themselves as “art” in the past half century were deafening. My guess is that some people celebrated and many were appalled, but for sure it became a stimulating read for at least one former art student, myself.

Wolfe essentially relates and dissects the process by which the art world evolved from visual artists creating paintings and sculptures to conceptual artists who had no product whatsoever except the theories surrounding what they were “saying.”

The argument culminates thus: "…there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes.… Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until…it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture…and came out the other side as Art Theory!…Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.”

Many young art students loved it because it did not require any skills to make “art” any more. You just had to have a cool idea that was communicated in a manner in which other people “got it.” Or twist your head around the zeitgeist of wonderfully new ideas like “ugly is beautiful” and “talentlessness is talent.”

The opening lines of my 1980’s short story Terrorists Preying, which in 2008 was translated into French, summarize some of my feeling about my personal struggle with these issues:

Although I'd been an art major in college -- mostly painting and drawing -- I became discouraged with it shortly after graduation and gave it up. I was living with my family on Long Island at the time and for some while afterwards still visited the New York art galleries, making regular tours of the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Modern.

What finally got me out of art was the whole directionlessness of it all. No one seemed to know what art was about any more. DuChamp started it, of course, with his Readymades. It took the rest of the world a half century to catch on. Everything was art, the critics were saying. For myself, their steel-firm logic stubbornly taunted everything I'd built my life around, leaving me creatively disabled, impotent, and broken down. In the end, I became the essence of minimalism, and ceased to exist.

Eventually every creative artist wrestles with how much to play the game. Each alone must decide for him/herself who they are and what they are about. For me, my fine arts background has blended into the foundations that support my advertising career, but on the side I still make “art” for various purposes, both illustrative and therapeutic. And I also continue to follow the arts scene by visiting galleries and reading magazines like Art News, ArtForum and Art in America among others.

Which leads me to this article that I stumbled on about conceptual artist James Lee Byars. (Nov. 2008 Art in America) Frankly, I never heard of him, but he was someone influential who did some big work which evidently seemed important to someone (most assuredly the critics whom Wolfe lambasted.) The article asks an interesting question: when your art career produces no product, what have you left for posterity?

Thomas McEvilley, author of the piece "James Lee Byars, A Study of Posterity", wrote, "Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial." In short, Byars perfectly exemplifies what Wolfe in 1979 was talking about.

To be honest, my college art career began with philosophy classes. After three or four, I felt that since philosophy leaves no product, I should make art, which was also philosophical but left you with something to look at afterwards. Besides I'd been drawing all my life since my classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art when I was five. The irony is that artists likewise went the way of the philosophers… at least, those who bought into the notions of Happenings and Conceptual Art as the next evolution.

If you’re interested in a good short read that answers the important question, How did we get from Rembrandt to a guy painting seal skins white and nailing them to his apartment wall in Boston? Pick up a copy of Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word.