Flashback Friday: Samuel Barber's Heartbreaking Adagio for Strings

‘I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!” ~ John Merrick

Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings (1936) is one remarkable piece of music. In the 1980 David Lynch film The Elephant Man, starring John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, Adagio becomes the perfect score for the film’s tragically soft climax. More theater goers probably remember it as the theme music weaving together Oliver Stone’s 1986 Viet Nam epic Platoon.

Having just viewed The Elephant Man again this weekend, my heart breaks for these social outcasts. This film tugs at your heart on many levels, detailing an exceptionally deformed man's struggle to gain a sense of dignity after years as a side show carnival attraction. The commercial exploitation of this “freak,” John Merrick, is a major undercurrent throughout.

A long forgotten memory came to mind while watching the film. I had been in Washington D.C. for the May Day protests of 1971. When the streets were safe as the first day’s rioting wound down I attempted to hitchhike out of D.C. in order to reach Athens, Ohio for my ten o’clock philosophy class at Ohio University Tuesday morning. I could tell many stories from that trip, but will only share one here. When it became apparent that the two students from Antioch, who had picked me up in Maryland, were not going to go several hours out of their way to bring me back to school, they were kind enough to drop me off at the Pittsburgh bus station where my ten dollars was just sufficient to catch a midnight bus that would transport me to Athens. With a transfer and two stops along the way I would arrive at 8:00 a.m., just in time to shower and ready myself for class. (Anecdotal: Impractical 19-year-old hippie that I was, I actually left Athens the Thursday before, thumb extended, with no money whatsoever for this five day adventure. My aunt in Falls Church outside D.C. gave me the tenspot in case I got arrested.)

There were four of us on the bus: a young black woman who pretty much kept to herself, a middle aged West Virginia woman who insisted that every boy friend she ever had was named Eddie and that I should get off with her at Parkersburg (an offer which I declined), and a man who worked for the Coney Island Freak Show who was traveling the country to purchase freaky attractions for the famed New York amusement park. He showed me photos which people sent, which he would then go examine in person and occasionally purchase. Some were Polaroids, others regular pictures.

As we riffled through the stack of photos I saw a two-headed sheep, two-headed dog, a six-legged sheep, Siamese twin pigs with eight legs and two heads, and other horrors, some fascinating, others grotesque. It was not a pretty assignment, yet he seemed to relish it.

I think it fortunate that the carny sideshows with humans as monsters to be gawked at are a thing of the past… or I hope so. But the reality is, we still see this attitude in the world where some people are made to feel themselves outcasts. Every society has its untouchables. It could be race, social standing, education level, special needs, the way we look, piercings... What we forget is that these are fellow human beings, with beating hearts, who like John Merrick have had human aspirations, who long to be treated with dignity.

How indescribably painful it can feel to be outcast, untouchable and dehumanized. Oscar Wilde, in his poem Ballad of Reading Gaol said it aptly:
"We did not dare to breathe a prayer or give our anguish scope,
Something was dead in each of us and what was dead was hope."

Perhaps there is someone in your life who feels isolated. Perhaps by befriending this person you will give birth to hope in his or her heart. Or if you are feeling inward pain from a heart wound that seems to go on an on, perhaps you can take comfort in knowing you are not alone. My prayer is that you will be comforted.

There are a number of versions of Barber’s wonderful and heart-rending composition. I selected this one to remove its film associations so you can just lose yourself in the streams of sound. If you get a chance, take it in. Inhale its evocative mesmerizing power.

This blog post was originally published in March 2009. 

Throwback Thursday: The Future of Art

The following article is a re-purposed 2009 blog post.

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 drawings 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.

Almost Wordless Wednesday: Forging Ahead with Dan Neff's Art of Glass

Lake Superior Art Glass expanded to a second location this week. 

Saturday's Open House included media coverage.

(Owner/creator Dan Neff in the spotlight.)

The Blacksmiths are still active here as well.

Britta Lynn Kauppila also maintains a studio here.

Kauppila is both a metalsmith and jewelry designer 

working on expanding her second location as well: Online.

It's been fun watching the evolution of the Armory Annex,

located at 1325 London Road across the street from Valentini's.

It's latest iteration now includes Lake Superior Art Glass.

* * * 

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Get into it.

Tech Tuesday: AJA R.I.P.

A great man passed away this weekend. This is a brief nod to note the importance of his contribution both to the industry he influenced and the multitude of people whose lives he touched.

It would be no stretch to compare Albert J. Amatuzio's achievements in the oil industry to Steve Jobs in the computer industry. Before Jobs there was no such thing as a personal home computer, and yet today few homes are without one. Before Al, synthetic motor oil for cars did not exist, no company producing it other than for the jet engines of aircraft he flew as a Lt. Colonel in the Air National Guard.

Al told me once that when he was a boy he used to sit on the Oliver bridge and while watching the cars cross between Duluth and Superior wonder, "If I could make a nickel off every car I'd be the richest man in America." He was five years old at the time and his first idea was to put long straws on the lug nuts so that drivers would know they were getting too close to the curb.

These early entrepreneurial yearnings eventually became more grounded. Decades later his ten-year quest to produce a synthetic motor oil for cars came to fruition in 1972 with the introduction of AMZOIL, the first synthetic motor oil in the world to meet American Petroleum Institute service requirements. Its performance benefits included a 25,000-miles or one year service life. And here in the Northland the most readily noticeable benefit was that you did not have to worry about getting your car started when it was 30-below zero in the winter. AMZOIL was a fluid that remained fluid no matter how cold it got here. (The name changed after Pennzoil sued Al for using their "Z"... even though he thought he was using his own Z. The name AMSOIL has been the official title ever since.)

My brother-in-law, a mechanic, introduced me to this high-tech oil in the early 1980s and I became a Dealer so I could purchase it at a discount. Little did I know that I would one day live in Duluth and snag a job at AMSOIL as one of several writers in the communications team. This 1986 career move had two significant consequences. Through Al's encouragement* I began a career in advertising. And through the influence of a fellow writer there I was introduced to the personal computer and bought my first Mac. (Which still runs, by the way.)

The success of those early ad campaigns led to my being hired away from the company for 8 years where I served as in-house ad agency for another firm in the screen printing industry. During this time I remained in close contact with friends at AMSOIL and eventually conceived an idea for a book about Mr. Amatuzio.  I envisioned a coffee table book with lots of photos and him talking to readers about each decade of his life, each chapter culminating in a key lesson about success. The book would highlight virtues like hard work, commitment, vision, determination, and one of his chief attributes: charisma. He grew up tough and knew how to fight, but he could also disarm you with his charm.

The book project was set aside as I instead returned to the company to serve two decades heading the advertising program I'd initiated several years earlier. It's been a privilege.

Over the course of a lifetime Al Amatuzio won many awards, both as a fighter pilot and an oil man. Though inducted into the Lubricant's World Hall of Fame in 1995, the honor he found most gratifying was the Nachtman Award, the highest honor in ILMA (the Independent Lubricant Manufacturers Association.) The award is given to individuals "who typify the vision, dedicated spirit and selflessness of the late Elliot Nachtman, who worked tirelessly for the benefit of ILMA and the industry."

Much more can be said about the man and his achievements. Read his story here.

You can also read my article on the history of synthetic lubricants (which was used as the basis for a segment on The History Channel) and see how Al's achievements fit into the larger picture of lubrication history.

Mr. Amatuzio... you will be missed.

* * * *

* I had been asked to produce an ad, to which I replied, "Does Al want an ad or does he want results? If he wants results we should do a campaign." To which Al replied in a memo, "How would you spend $10,000 a month." I did my homework, presented a proposal and received his sign off: "AJA"

Local Art Scene: Elizabeth Kuth Artist Talk and a Homegrown Call for Art

A couple weeks back I had the opportunity to catch Elizabeth Kuth give an artist talk in the Morrison Gallery at the DAI. Catherine Meier opened by introducing the artist  and her exhibition, Rooted Expression. I'd heard her speak about her work in January at Studio 3 West and anticipated an interesting digression and was not disappointed.

Ms. Kuth began by noting that this was her first exhibition in 10 years. Having German roots, she noted that German Expressionism has been one of her influences, that it resonated with her. She works on canvas, working and re-working her large abstract forms so as to produce complex scratchings, collage-juxtapositions that depict and develop "the essence of human motion." Over time she took all this complex interactions of form and line and began to simplify it, to distill it to its essence.

Her talk had parallels to her work in that she produced word pictures at times that were nebulous and conceptual rather than concrete. "The idea of line on line began to speak to me," she said. She pointed at another piece and commented on how it depicted vessels, a womb, something about caves.

In many pieces there is a sense of play in her work, with something figurative happening. Because she lives alone in the woods, her children grown, her creative explorations conveyed her process of finding, as in a quest.

What's interesting when working in abstract forms is that things emerge which you didn't plan. Kuth, for example said at one point bones began to appear in her work. The interesting thing is that her father was a bone surgeon. She also saw rocks in her work, which made her ask how she was connected to primal times.

She went through a long period of questions with no answers and she searched for connections.

Carl Jung's writings speak of the myths and symbols of early peoples. While painting Kuth said liines and elements would begin to line up. The unconscious does the biggest part.

Hans Hoffman, she said, was another influence. He talked about "the search for the real."

Kuth noted that while painting she thinks in terms of relationships and movement, not objects. She builds layers, she said, "until something speaks to me. My process is to create with immediacy, a whimsical play of forms."

During a Q&A period afterwards she was asked, "How hard is it to work large?" To this she replied, "I'm having a hard time going back to small."

She was then asked to discuss her drawing. In response she discussed her daily ritual of doing 10 automatic drawings every morning to start the day. "I feel closer to my sketches.... very intimate." She shared that drawing was also therapeutic. "Let yourself be reckless. Drawing is immediate."

In response to a third question she stated that "abstraction produces a more interior feel" as we are detached from the world of objects. Drawing provides sanity by placing her in the present.

Her show, Rooted Expression, will remain on display at the Duluth Art Institute in the Depot till next weekend.


PRØVE Gallery Sends Out Call

Do you remember their first opening in 2011?

PRØVE Gallery is calling for painters, graphic designers, illustrators, writers and all types of artists to create or recreate their ideal Homegrown Music Festival concert poster or show setlist. The imagery can be from your favorite Homegrown Music Festival moment, venue, band(s), Twin Cities Invasion, Iron Range Invasion, Superior Night or a complete fictional show that you always wished was part of Homegrown Music Festival.

Tell your friends, your mom and any other person who likes to design their dream-team poster.

Attached to this email are all the details concerning:

Deadline, how to submit, day of the show and more details concerning the concept of the show.

For any other questions, feel free to inquire to: info@provegallery.com

Check out this PRØVE Flashback, The gallery has made good on its promise to bring something new and different to the Twin Ports arts scene.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Open your eyes.

Marketing the Dylan Machine and Leveraging His Latest Achievement

Yesterday Bob Dylan received his Nobel Prize and diploma. The speculation was that he might not, but that didn't make sense to me. He accepted the honor in a private ceremony that included champagne. The only ones present: the 12 members of the Swedish Academy. And Bob. The concert he gave later that evening was reportedly most excellent.

Another Dylan-related event occurred yesterday as well. I received an email touting the release of three new Dylan albums, which brought to the foreground my ongoing admiration for the Dylan marketing machine.

THE MARKETING/SALES FUNNEL
Example from StevenDennnis.com

After half a lifetime in marketing, one is easily tempted to see everything through a marketing lens. The success of the Beatles was, in part, a marketing achievement. Pop 40 radio stations play the songs, building awareness for the product. Repeated airings lead to familiarity. Record stores were located everywhere making it easy to consider a purchase. Posters and T-shirts give fans the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty. Naturally it helped that they produced good "products."

To some extent the only thing that's changed today is the purchase step, as Amazon.com and iTunes have eliminated the need to visit a bricks-and-mortar outpost.

(See more variations of Marketing Funnels here.)

* * * *

The Stockholm Waterfront concert hall seated 3,000 last night and as has been the custom these past four years, Dylan and the band opened with Things Have Changed. The current set list is packed with classics including Don't Think Twice, Highway 61 Revisited, Desolation Row and Tangled Up In Blue. But there are faves from his later years also worked in, including Beyond Here Lies Nothing and several tracks from Tempest. And he's also pulling from the latest reconfiguration of his catalog, crooner covers like Melancholy Mood.

Yesterday's email was about three recent releases that just "happened to" fall on the same day as this private medal ceremony. Under the Covers is a 20-song compilation of recordings of other peoples' material. Dylan has purportedly recorded as many as 500 songs by others, so I can imagine this is potentially the beginning of a new series of products for avid fans. When I was in college Dylan took some heat for releasing an album of covers, but to be honest I really liked that album, which began with Lily of the West and included Mr. Bojangles and Big Yellow Taxi, among others.

Under the Covers opens with Pancho and Lefty, and filters through a host of songs on various themes, many of them familiar to the long-time follower, songs like Cocaine and Hard Times. It's available for purchase here on Amazon.

The second album being ballyhooed in yesterday's email was yet another I'd not expected called Acoustic Recordings. There's almost no information about the album at Amazon.com other than the price ($16.99 if you're a member of Amazon Prime) and that it's a 3-CD set of acoustic recordings of "Legendary Radio Broadcasts."

And finally there's Triplicate, his most recent studio album, which has been billed as Dylan's first 3-disc album, once again featuring classic American tunes. Produced by Jack Frost, this is his 38th studio album, a sequel to last year's Fallen Angels.

The release of Triplicate was preceded by a lengthy interview with Dylan himself, prominently displayed at BobDylan.com. The interview itself created a stir, covering a full range of themes from a lifetime as well as certain features of the new 3-disc set. Yesterday's email included endorsements from reviews, designed to assist fans in making that important purchase decision at the tail end of the funnel.

"A sensitive and exquisite 30-song extravaganza." - The Guardian

"As he sings these mountain-scaling melodies and conjures the ghosts of vanished lovers hovering over the verses, he doesn't just bring these songs back to life. He makes a pretty good case for why they should live forever." - NPR

"Strong performances, great repertoire, some of his best singing in years." - Mojo

* * * *
One thing the Nobel Prize has done is bring a new audience to the top of the funnel. Listening to radio shows like John Bushey's Highway 61 Revisited on KUMD then increases familiarity, if you're new, and reinforces loyalty if you're an old-timey fan like the rest of us.

Speaking of long-time fans, we're less than two months away from Duluth Dylan Fest. Ring them bells. Here in Duluth we will be celebrating the weeks of May 20-28. Check out the schedule here. Or follow updates on Facebook.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Open your eyes.

P.S.: If you're an artist who has created Dylan-themed or Dylan-inspired paintings, check out our Call for Art. 

Revisiting the Myth of Those Idyllic 50s. What Really Happened?

Leave It To Beaver publicity still.

This past week I was listening to an audio book called The Next 100 Years, which begins with an insightful re-cap of the past 100 years. There is one given, if you take a forward look from any of the 20 year vantage points (1900, 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980 and 2000.) You will readily see how wrong your expectations would repeatedly have been. In 1900 did anyone expect a world war in less than 15 years? In 1920, after Germany had been totally crushed, did anyone worry about that such a resurgence of that nation could so quickly threaten the world? In 1940 Hitler and Stalin formed a pact and it appeared that democracy was doomed, yet only five years later the Axis powers -- and much of Europe -- lay in ruins. In 1960  how many Americans anticipated that we would be mired in a lengthy conflict in Southeast Asia for obscure reasons that were never quite clear. And furthermore, how could America lose a war? We'd "saved the world" only 15 years earlier.

In 1980 the U.S. economy was staggering and joblessness on the rise, yet over the next 20 years we became the most powerful nation in the world. Communism collapsed and as the new millennium dawned the future looked... Well, on 9/11 that picture flipped and we've been in a series of military conflicts near continuously since.

In short, who can really predict what tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrows will bring?

In this short recap it seems fairly safe to say that many of us look back on the Fifties as a special time in our history. Families went to church, Billy Graham Crusades were filling stadiums, well-paying jobs were abundant. Life was good.

In truth, how idyllic were the 1950s really? If a picture is worth a thousand words, the image of Ward and June Cleaver is one of the best expressions of our image of the time. In contrast, one can parade a whole slew of pictures from the Sixties that would suggest that these are two different Americas. Kids burning draft cards, riots in the streets, burning cities, anti-war protests.

As I mulled over my memories of the Fifties this week, it wasn't all baseball and apple pie. We were in the midst of the Cold War. We practiced air raid drills in school. My aunt and uncle built and stocked a bomb shelter in their basement. McCarthyism disrupted many lives of people in the media, and Jim Crow laws kept people of color powerless in a large swath of our country. Sputnik terrified many who were suddenly made aware of the power of Soviet rocketry. And women were kept in their place in the job market.

The article Two Great Myths About the 1950s. by Alan Petigny, affirms my gut-check on the nostalgic interpretations of that period. Here's an excerpt.

This perceived divide between the nominally conservative, placid 1950s and the socially liberal 1960s has shaped our understanding of the early postwar years. Some see this divide as the product simply of a generation gap while others credit the civil rights and anti-war movements and the rise of second-wave feminism. Still others focus on the formation of a counterculture. But despite their disagreements over how and why, the "when" is considered settled: the decade of the 1960s was when everything changed. This understanding is profoundly wrong and obscures the most significant feature of postwar American culture: a dramatic liberalization of values during the Truman and Eisenhower years that has persisted to this day.

Here's the beginning of another article about the Fifties, The Good Old Days: a 1950s Issues Portfolio, by Renee C. Tolliver:

The number of social issues facing Americans today seems overwhelming. “Whatever happened to the good old days?” is an observation that has become cliche. What do people mean when they say, “the good old days?” When were they? Why were they good? Can we get them back? Do we really want them back? Were those days really so good?

A little further on she writes...

A look at the historical facts and issues of the fifties serves to debunk the myth that the fifties was a golden age for all. This is the decade that saw Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas in 1954 and the brutal murder of 14 year old Emmett Till in 1955 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Even the arrival of television did not produce the focus for warm family gatherings that we seem to associate with the fifties. The impact of television was multifaceted. According to Lynn Spigel’s book, Make Room for TV, “Television was supposed to bring the family together but still allow for social and sexual divisions in the home.” However, what television delivered was not that cut and dry. It became a new conduit of truth, stereotypes and lies. Very few ethnic shows such as The Goldbergs appeared along with the traditional sitcoms like Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver.

Whereas it's true that that for many the times were to some extent idyllic, this was an experience only for some. The poor lived an invisible life outside the scope of our experience.

Here's one more take on the Fifties from Uncle Mike's Musings, another blogger who uses this platform. It's a long read, but has some interesting angles. Top Ten Myths About the 1950s was posted in 2014, but no less relevant today.

Frankly, I do have primarily idyllic memories from my Fifties childhood. We had a stable home, a safe neighborhood. We had books and music in our home and the fridge was always full. We took vacations, did things with our parents, went to the amusement park and the races from time to time. It wasn't till later that I came to understand that we were but one family experience and not representative of all.

Maybe this is the way all histories get written. The early writings glamorize our heroes. It's only later that we learn of their weaknesses, faults and feet of clay. Maybe that is what we miss. Having everything simple, cut and dried, black and white. But isn't that what childhood is in nearly every era? Growing up requires us to notice that things rarely fit into such tidy little packages.

Meantime, life goes on... What do you think?