Wessel's World

Talk to me.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Actually, any picture is worth five thousand words, at least. Photographs may seem more specific, and less flamboyant than paint, which is difficult to apply, hard to control, and may take years to master to any serious degree. But what makes a photograph powerful is at least as hard to explain as what makes an effective painting. We want to take so much for granted with photography, perhaps not realizing that the phenomenal qualities of different kinds of photographic processes determines to a very large extent how we think about images made from light sensitive materials, and what they may tell us about our conception of the process of exposure--not simply in the technical (scientific) sense, but in the sense of what we think we see in those images--what they may tell us.

Henry Wessel has been able to build a body of work which lives on the edge of discomfort--visual discomfort. But it's a subtle kind of edginess, not the head-on, over-emphatic, sentimental exaggerations of most candid photo-journalism, or the heroic, hieratic imagery of monumental objectification inherited from the Wagnerian thrust of early Modernism. Wesssl's work starts out cool, something is happening, and you think you know what it is. There is an immediate, abiding emptiness and slackness of condition in his relaxed, California landscapes along the shoreline, or in the older suburban neighborhoods, which is initially open, but which on closer examination begins to seem less accidental, more specific, maybe even a little eerie.

I always think this man looks a little like Gerald Ford, for some reason--something about the squareness of the back of his head. In any case, the photograph seems peculiar, not just because the man is standing in a full business suit on a sandy beach, but because his specific posture seems more studied, and directed, than appropriate. The "nothing" which we know about the picture's narrative isn't clarified by anything within it, so we're left holding the metaphorical bag, as it were, of the photographer's intent. The relation between his right hand, and the fall of his seamed trousers creates a tension, but this tension is not related to anything within our frame of reference.

The reason things seem to fit in the world is that they exist within a context which has a history, or a future, and a presence which links them to that continuity in time. In Wessel's work, this linkage is removed, leaving things floating in a limbo of purposelessness which is both liberating and disquieting. And we like this unsettled quality. It seems to allow us to stare at objects with an abstracted calm and sensual ease which is vacated. There's a studied aspect to his images, which invites our participation, but which carries no message or overbearing weight. All of the care and tedious attention that go into making these hedges the perfect shapes they are, is made irrelevant by their removal from anything ulterior. They belong to what they represent, but they're not going anywhere. They don't do anything. It's a balanced static, perfectly at rest, organized and held in place.

When people appear in a Wessel picture, they're not related to our presence. They go about their business without any self-consciousness or shyness. In the work of Robert Adams, or Louis Baltz, the emptied-out architecture of tracts or bulldozed land or industrial detritus, carries a hard purpose: It's repulsive, summoning your indignation and sense of creepy autonomy--and technically razor-sharp (no blurriness, no failed vision); but in Wessel, we know there's no heavy moral purpose at work. There's a settled-ness, a moment divorced from implication and desire. As much as we may try to place the picture into a context with inertia or propulsion, they don't animate. They're stuck in time.

The accidental quality of reality, of the way things don't fit, is ironically evoked by the improbability of congruence. Three juniper bushes leaning in almost perfect symmetry doesn't heighten our sense of the inevitable. They're not this way to any purpose, to please us or delight us or confound us. They're just that way because of the way the wind blows. They're accidents that yield no other meaning.

The way things look from certain places in the city always suggests a randomness brought about by other intentions--so what we see, say, through a window on a certain floor, was never planned by anyone, except in a general sense. Architects like views, but most views are the residue of necessary choices, rather than the product of deliberate preference. And skylines are perpetually changing. The beauty, here, the layered perspective and counterpoint of massing and texture, is perfectly fitted into our gestalt of the moment. Yet we have no place to go with it. It's a toy of the mind. A giant interlocking puzzle of hopes and dreams and mistakes and confused material enjambments. And it's absolutely gorgeous.

Nature, they say, abhors a vacuum. But it also resists formal symmetry, at least of certain kinds. The chances, we say, of three palms lining up into a sensible arrangement is as unlikely as the chances of being dealt a royal flush. What we may call an aesthetically pleasing substitute for the deliberate symmetry of advance planning is the delight in finding one in nature, like finding a four-leaf clover. Four leaf clovers are an odds-makers delight: 1/10,000 !!

But post-Modernism has never been about symmetry. What most catches the jaded eye now is the unbalanced, the truncated, the lean, the distorted scaffold of expectation. The way things pull to their own stasis is often more compelling than what they were supposed to be, or do. Buildings and trees and animals escape from the barriers and pathways laid down to contain them. We will demarcate one precinct of the world as under the control of our resolve--a small one-bedroom bungalow, for instance--and spend the next 30 years watching it be transformed. But along the way, we live in it, we live on the ground--a founded-ness which is both reassuring, and an entrapment.

In the post-War years, the building boom caused an explosion in the construction of tidy, optimistic little places like this one. Its evident hygienic, peppermint, vanilla, trimmed simplicity is like a little space-ship to nowhere. This little house is unashamed, modest, careful, decent, but small-minded. It knows its place. It's not going anywhere, and it doesn't dream of leaving. It's happy just as it is, and that's usually how a Wessel photograph feels.

Monkeys have always been a favorite subject of photographers. In fact, animals in the zoo--no matter what kind--are as delightful to photograph as the people who come to look at them. The animals are looking at us, too, unless they've become so inured to their immediate surroundings that they've ceased to understand it the way they do when not captive. Wildness includes the ability to relate to one's changing environment: When it is fixed and hemmed-in, a certain irrelevance drops down like a curtain. I don't know what kind of animal lives in this cage, but that's rather beside the point. It's a house--not unlike some of the houses which Wessel has spent so much effort photographing elsewhere--but with the cyclone fencing surrounding it on all sides, it takes on new meaning. Metaphorically, Wessel may be telling us that the little house we live in, like the white one just above, is as locked and enclosing as a cage. And the slanted cyclone fencing may serve the same function as the curb of a sidewalk, separating the stepped layers of the public from the private. Wessel isn't an invasive artist--he's not looking to pull away exteriors, uniforms of the personal. But there's a vacancy, an emptiness which inhabits all his pictures. People wander in and out of them, but they're not important, except to themselves. And our curiosity in them is ephemeral--we don't really care what happens to them--that's not what it's about.

If there's a loneliness in Wessel's work, it's the isolation of the photographer, who's happy just to have the opportunity, the chance, to move through this quiet, unruffled, but slightly empty landscape of structures, forms, perspectives. There's an extinction of human sentiment in a picture like this one (below), in which the mated, identical queen beds in an empty bedroom, occupy a temporary place in the lives of . . . whom? They're like a scene from a Whitman Sampler.

The dance of human movement, of the flow of forms across the surface of the temporal, from one body to another, in a coordinated, choreographed ballet of variability and contingent impulse, is perfectly rendered, perfectly staged. As we move through Wessel's world, we stop and go, think, or stare idly out to sea, or across the street, or we cut diagonally across the mall parking-lot, mapping our errand, strategizing the quotidian. Wessel's world is one part of our world, and the two intersect. We can see ourselves here, but it's not our best moment. Most of our lives are composed of such segments, just going about our business, getting along, making do. Wessel owns this part; he's made it his domain.

Jones Very Early & Late

LeRoi Jones's (Amiri Baraka's) career has been a lightning-rod for the plight of the marginalized Black African American Writer in America, for the last six decades. His biography reads like an improbable fictionalized cartoon of a man beset by a series of florid delusions, no one of which seems to fully account for his resentment, suspicion and violent hatred for American behavior and government policy, and he has repudiated or repented many of his radical positions over the years.

What are the implications of acting-out a sequence of intense criticisms, over a long life, spitting out vituperation and provocative sneers in an agon of impotent rage? For a man of his impressive intelligence and intuitive creativity, such behavior may seem like the romantic indulgence of wounded genius, and in much of his early poetry, this is precisely the stance that predominates. The persona of his early poems gives a very clear picture of a man committed to an honest expression of his dilemmas and preoccupations, in the years before his personal life had undergone the contorted dislocations which he himself would largely orchestrate.

Jones's first book, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note . . . . [with four dots, please, the ellipsis implying, in this case, that its author was going metaphorically to take his own life, or to exorcise some part of his own nature in the course of the writing] [New York: Totem Press/Corinth Books, 1961], was self-published (Totem Press was his concern). Jones's next collection, The Dead Lecturer [New York: Grove Press, 1964] is omitted from his Wikipedia entry, which would suggest that he's disowned it completely. But Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note . . . . probably still continues to count in his personal sense of literary identity, since it clearly enunciates many of the frustrations and indignations which would animate him for the rest of his life.

Reading Preface, now, fifty years after it was published, one is impressed not only by Jones's rhetorical flourishes and directness of address, but by his ability to convey the ambiguity of his plight as a Black Man making his way in the literary world of the dark post-War years when prejudice and marginalization of difference were at their height. Hypocrisy reigned everywhere in those days, particularly where it wasn't even acknowledged. Jones could see how the official accommodations open to him would neutralize the shame and guilt and rage he felt towards himself. This conflicted persona is the sub-text and subject of nearly all his early poems.

One Night Stand

(For Allen)*

We entered the city at noon! High bells. The radio on.

Some kind of Prokofieff; snaring the violent remains of the day

in sharp webs of dissonance.

We roared through the old gates. Iron doors hanging

all grey, with bricks mossed over and gone into chips

dogs walked through.

The river also roared. And what sun we had

disappeared into the water, or buried itself

in the badly pitched tents of the wounded soldiers.

There, also, at the river, blue steel hats glinted

on the sparse grass, and brown showed through

where the grass was trampled.

We came in, with our incredulousness, from the north.

On steely highways from the marble entrails of noon.

We had olives, and the green buds locked on our lutes.

Twisted albion-horns, rusted in warm rain, peasant carts,

loud black bond-servants dazed and out of their wool heads,

wild shrubs impecuniously sheltered along the concrete,

Rumble of the wheels over cobblestones. The green knocked out.

The old houses dusty seeming & old men watching us slyly

as we come in; all of us laughing too loud.

We are foreign seeming persons. Hats flopped so the sun

can't scald our beards; odd shoes, bags of books & chicken.

We have come a long way, & are uncertain which of the masks

is cool.

_______________

*Allen Ginsberg.

In seeking to sort out the options and opportunities for himself in the world of the American 1950's, Jones sounds a confused jumble of tendencies. At this point in his life, language is both a means to the liberation of his lyrical gift, and a perceived compromise. In a style that seems to owe much to Ginsberg and Duncan (and behind them, Whitman and Crane, perhaps even Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen), he sings with a seeming confident note of his own good-natured, but occasionally guarded, enthusiasm of his camaraderie with fellow (white) poets.

"We have come a long way, & are uncertain which of the masks/is cool." Were truer words ever spoken? The poems in Preface are like a cry of despair, of unresolved aspiration--to discover in himself, or his milieu, an adequate adjunct to the muse's diadem. Jones was still putting together the pieces of the mosaic of that record of Black Culture in America which had been bequeathed to him. For starters, he had Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, both conflicted de-facto Uncle Toms who had made their peace with White America, as exemplars. The Jazzmen were better heroes. They hadn't had to define themselves in terms borrowed from the slave-owners' archive. Jazz belonged to Negroes, to African American descendants; it was their music, appropriated by the White media culture, but still surviving intact, in an under-current of deep blue mystery, Louis & the Duke, Parker & Coltrane, Miles & Dizzy, Monk & Mingus.

The Bridge

(# for wieners & mcclure)

I have forgotten the head

of where I am. Here at the bridge. 2

bars, down the street, seeming

to wrap themselves around my fingers, the day,

screams in me; pitiful like a little girl

you sense will be dead before the winter

is over.

I can't see the bridge now, I've past

it, its shadow, we drove through, headed out

along the cold insensitive roads to what

we wanted to call "ourselves."

"How does the bridge go?" Even tho

you find yourself in its length

strung out along its breadth, waiting

for the cold sun to tear out your eyes. Enamoured

of its blues, spread out in the silk clubs of

this autumn tune. The changes are difficult, when

you hear them, & know they are all in you, the chords

of your disorder meddle with your would be disguises.

Sifting in, down, upon your head, with the sun & the insects.

(Late feeling) Way down till it barely, after that rush of

wind & odor reflected from hills you have forgotten the color

when you touch the water, & it closes, slowly, around your head.

The bridge will be behind you, that music you know, that place,

you feel when you look up to say, it is me, & I have forgotten,

all the things, you told me to love, to try to understand, the

bridge will stand, high up in the clouds & the light, & you,

(when you have let the song run out) will be sliding through

unmentionable black.

"The changes are difficult, when you hear them, & know they are all in you, the chords of your disorder meddle with your would be disguises. . .it is me, & I have forgotten, all the things, you told me to love, to try to understand, the bridge will stand, high up in the clouds & the light, & you, (when you have let the song run out) will be sliding through unmentionable black." The bridge here is a symbol in the way it had been for Crane, though for Jones/Baraka, it signifies a bridge to nowhere, or at least an unclear destination, fraught with uncertainty, and risk. Jones seems completely vulnerable in these lines, these poems, and that honesty and raw sensation is what makes them good. Rather than cauterizing his pain and presenting a hardened mask to the world at large, he throws out his cry of despair with unabashed candidness. "I've forgotten the head of where I am."

from Vice

. . .

Asked to be special, & alive in the mornings, if they are green

& I am still alive, (& green) hovering above all the things I

seem to want to be apart of (curious smells, the high-noon idea

of life . . . a crowded train station where they broadcast a slice,

just one green slice, of some glamourous person's life).

& I cant even isolate my pleasures. All the things I can talk about

mean nothing to me.

This is not rage. (I am not that beautiful!) Only immobile coughs

& gestures towards somethings I don't understand. If I were lucky

enough to still be an adolescent, I'd just attribute these weird

singings in my intestine to sex, & slink off merrily to mastur

bate. Mosaic of disorder I own but cannot recognize. A glass stare.

Resolution, for the quick thrust of epee, to force your opponent

cringing against the wall, not in anger, but unfettered happiness

while your lady is watching from the vined balcony, your triumph,

& years after, you stand in subways watching your invisible hand

bring the metal to bear again & again, when you are old & the lady,

(o, fond memories we hide in our money belts, & will not spend)

the lady, you young bandits who have not yet stolen your first purse

the lady will be dead.

And if you are along (if there is something in you so cruel)

You will wonder at the extravagance

of youth.

This is dramatic writing, with flexible elaborations and taut expedient poses. Jones teeters on the edge of a resolution, conceived in the terms of a (for him) pointless antinomy. How to achieve a meaningful and manly détente with the prevailing power-structure, while subsisting in the daily stay of mortal execution. There are words for what he thinks to say, but will not say them. There are ways out, but the words are only placekeepers for his energy.

In Jones's work--especially the early poetry in Preface and The Dead Lecturer--you have the feeling of a man out of time, late to the party, too young, too old, too predictable, too strung out, too careful, too impulsive, too extreme. But it was precisely that degree of excess that he longed for, and in the ensuing decades would lead to the radical gestures of presumed commitment that would define him. He had to vanquish the tendencies in himself that felt wrong, but what he should put in their place was a question. He would be unable to resolve the contradictions between his art and his place in the world--to discover how one could serve the other, to enable him to make himself into a whole man. That has been Jones's tragic destiny.

R E F L E C T I O N S

If a poem is a function of the way we respond to a given set of phenomena, then mathematics is the precision of the formula for describing the linkages and forces which govern them. Mathematics is a language, whose terms are narrowly defined, and denote very exact factors of something.

Consider, for a moment, the function of the light and the angles which could describe the distortions created by the undulating surface of this image of water. What, exactly, are the dimensions and shapes of the object/or objects being reflected towards the viewer?

The image is only static for a fraction of a second. As the water continues to undulate, there may "never" be--at least in reasonable time--another moment in which this exact template of light is reflected in exactly this pattern, again. But change is another aspect of the problem.

There should be a way of "untangling" the distorted imagery so that we could "construct" a reasonable facsimile, or recognizable version, of the object which exists above the water at the angle of reflection across from our view. I have no idea what such an equation or set of equations might look like. But I believe there must be such an equation, which would express the distortion in such a way that would enable one to trace it back to its source.

Words don't give us that kind of exactitude. When we use ordinary conversational speech, or poetic speech, or the jargon of disciplines, etc., we're using a crude tool to handle a very slippery, or complex object. How difficult would it be to convey the peculiarly beautiful and dazzling quality this color image projects? Part of the pleasure, I'd argue, is our sense of the accuracy with which our eyes perceive the changing patterns of the light. That accuracy is another way of expressing the precision and complexity of the process we can deduce from just this momentary glimpse.

We've all seen water glittering in the sun, and it's a familiar sight. We know that geometry and calculus and trigonometry can offer a language with which to make a mathematical diagram, a recipe for a phenomenon. Is such a formula or equation any more "real" than a poem might be to describe the "feeling" we can have about an experience such as this? Mathematics describes experience, after all, in the same way language does, but with considerably greater finesse.

In religion, words fail us. In art, they do too, though we may sometimes have the feeling that words aspire to, and attain, high levels of formulaic complexity. As humankind progresses in its ascent to higher plateaus of description and empirical confirmation, we may feel that we grow closer to grasping the inherent riddles of matter, time, origin, purpose. But no matter how sophisticated our languages become, they are all still languages, with greater or lesser degrees of power to describe, convey, solve, or evoke.

Language is what we have. There is this image of undulating water, and the light reflected off of tangent objects dancing in our eyes. We, and it, remain locked in a perfect quandary of mediation. Words bridge the gap between what is happening, and how we respond to that.

Street Art

The picture below was taken this afternoon across the street from my office on 4th Street in Berkeley. Can you copyright a building facade? Probably. Before this lettering pattern appeared, I would have ventured to observe that the building itself was vacant. Behind the ranks of uniform glass panes is a lot of two- or three-story high permanent heavy hydraulic equipment--thick gauge pipe, valves etc. God knows what went on in there in its heyday. Buildings like these in the last couple of dozen years in the Bay Area have been appropriated for low-tech small businesses or converted/subdivided office-spaces. Lots of artists have studios or work-spaces in them. I have no idea who's occupying this place now, but there's no evidence of human activity from the outside. Perhaps someone simply got permission to perform this appliqué as a project. . . ?

Clicking on the picture will render a much larger image, enabling you to read the words formed by the letters in the panes. The "message" is as follows:

HEAVENS

EARTH

ENERGY

PROPHET

MEANING

MISSION

DESTINY

CRUDE

ORE

FARM

FACTORY

WIFE

SKILLET

LABOR

CLASSES

MADE

MAN

HOUR

BASEBALL

ROBOT

LOOM

ROOSEVELT

JUST

WAR

AMERICA

AUTO

EXURBIA

JAZZ

UNION

PEACE

OWN

POOR

GUERILLA

JOBS

PAID

INHERITS

TECHNO

GAIN

CHANGE

I haven't tried very hard to decipher this, but it's possible there are some acrostic messages here. Maybe it's a coded transmission lurking behind the quotidian word-list? Or maybe it's just a light-hearted art project to make passers-by ponder for a moment. If so, there isn't much that I'm able to make out of it that would cause me to spend much effort meditating it.

Anyway, pay attention when you walk the streets. There are always surprises. Especially in a place like Berkeley. An open mind, and an open eye can get you into trouble, but also might open up doors. Who knows what awaits you around the corner?

_________________

Addendum [12/2/11]. Clarification of last four words of the window display. INHERITS/TECHNOGA/INCHANGE, or INHERITS TECH/NO GAIN CHANGE. I inquired with a tenant in the building who told me the landlord had authorized someone to make this installation, but knew no more about it. -CF

Capone

This is a photograph of Al Capone's prison cell at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he was held for eight months in 1929-30. Eastern State was closed in 1970, and is now run as a public attraction by a non-profit, with tours and exhibits, including the Capone cell above. You can see some paint or plaster accummulating on the red fabric--is that a bed, or a blanketed storage box? There's something very surreal about this space.

Ken Burns's expose on the Prohibition Era has just been aired on PBS. There was a lot about the Chicago Gang wars, and Capone's crime empire there during the 1920's. Capone, as everyone knows, was eventually imprisoned on income-tax evasion, though the real motivation behind his incarceration was the violent activities he had engaged in to preserve and promote his various elicit business-activities, including illegal alcohol distribution, gambling and prostitution. His gang's annual income at its height has been estimated at 100 million dollars a year. Even today, money on that scale would be impressive, but that amount today would be worth between 10 and 100 times that amount, depending upon what indexing formula one uses.

Capone was not a very attractive man--in several senses. He had a very unpleasant Sicilian face, with dark-ringed eyes, and fat lips.

Capone was transferred to Alcatraz Island prison in August 1934. Here he was denied the privileges which had been accorded him at Eastern State. He lived only eight years after being released from prison in 1939, and they were not good ones.

His health had begun to decline, partly from a case of syphilis. By 1946, his doctors estimated his brain capacity to be that of a 12 year old. He died the year I was born [1947]. He was only 48.

The Cul-de-Sac - New Champagne Cocktail

I grew up on a dead-end street. Also known as a cul-de-sac. The neighborhood had been developed during the 1920's or 1930's, so there was no cutesy grid pattern as became common during the 1950's and 1960's. The street simply abutted an empty field, which had been at some point--probably as late as the decade before WWI--agricultural land. There was an old chicken shed at one end of the field, and there was a real barn at the back of the property where we lived, though a cement floor had been poured, and the stalls covered over. Eventually, the county declared it open space, and made a park out of it, but that was decades after I left home. As kids, we played sandlot baseball there, or (earlier) games of cowboys and indians, or, inspired by the WWII movies we'd seen, lobbed dirt-clods (tufts of turf grass) at each other like mortar shells. More than once, arriving home late in the evening after a dirt-clod fight, I was made to take all my clothes off and head straight for the shower, by-passing the kitchen and dining-room, until I had become "civilized" once more. I doubt anyone plays much in this "park" now--maybe someone stretches for a morning run, if that.

Dead-end streets are recognized as being less well-traveled, and consequently more peaceful, and safe. Hence their popularity in planned development street designs. In memory of the "dead-end" street where I grew up, here's a new champagne cocktail to whet your palate. Champagne cocktails tend not to be too popular, largely because they require the opening of a bottle of champagne. Once a bottle of bubbly is opened, it quickly becomes flat, so ordering a champagne cocktail in an establishment that doesn't routinely serve it usually doesn't work.

Nevertheless, if you happen to have enough glasses to fill, or are attending a dinner at a restaurant where the fare is high-class, give this one a try.

The proportions (as usual):

2 parts prosecco, or cava, or French dry

1 part neutral vodka

1 tea-spoon orange spirits (triple sec or equivalent)

lemon twist (with zest, if desired)

Swirled gently in an ice-filled shaker and poured into a chilled cocktail glass. You could use a champagne glass, but it's really unnecessary.

This one has a very "clarified" quality that you don't get in ordinary citrus mixes with vodka, gin or tequila. They go down very easily, and two are better than one.