RICH ASSHOLES PAYING NO TAXES IS UNPATRIOTIC

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Sean Murphy
dt
Did you catch this? (Trigger warning: you’ll need to Windex your screen and take a shower after watching to disinfect and rinse the slime off.)

This embarrassing exchange merely confirms what anyone with a semblance of political, business or psychological acumen has known for decades: Trump is, in addition to being an irretrievably wretched human being, also an appallingly bad (albeit opportunistic) “businessman”, serial liar and hypocrite. Bonus reminder: Rudy Giuliani remains an execrable, race-baiting, sexist troll who has made a career off the suffering of others.

But what should not be lost in the melodrama that will unfold this week is a very revealing and, if the Democrats manage to handle yet another gift correctly (for once?), useful opportunity. For entirely too long, Dems have been on the defense against the easily disprovable claims that if not for the richest of the rich, there’d be no job creation or tax revenue since, of course, the government doesn’t create jobs (ha) and the wealthiest pay the lion’s share of taxes (ha!). In addition, the working poor (keywords: working and poor) have been consistently and successfully marginalized for not paying their “fair” share, even and especially the ones who are below the poverty line. (A primer on the playbook that has worked, pretty much without fail, since the early ‘80s is HERE.)

And of course we blame out-of-control welfare (which, among other reasons, was created to ensure we don’t have children starving, and, in many instances, an opportunity to help pull willing would-be workers out of privation…unless, of course, you want to believe the racist and classist malarkey that there are thousands (millions?) of Americans who don’t want to get ahead; who are perfectly content to cash those checks and—not having the remarkable good fortune of inheriting wealth from their parents—perpetuate the cycle of hopelessness for their families).

The GOP has been able to have it both ways, with minimal pushback from the “liberal” media, lionizing the wealthy 1%; those “job creators” who, when the rocks are lifted from their shady but—courtesy of 21st Century Capitalism on steroids—not only perfectly legal, but encouraged dealings, are very happy to ship jobs overseas, fight against regulation (which directly enriches them while causing all sorts of health issues that cost working folks more money…if it doesn’t kill them), and—wait for it—pay no taxes. We’re not talking about taking advantage of available loopholes (themselves an indication that the system is, of course, rigged so that the richest of the rich get away with the most while stiffing the rest of us); we’re talking about ensuring that they pay close to nothing. And, at long last backed into this corner, we get brazen sycophants like Giuliani calling Trump a “genius” for paying no taxes.

Herein we have, at best, a conflict of interests.

Because, if enjoying every available loophole was unassailable proof of his savvy business instincts, why wouldn’t Trump have happily released his tax info months or years ago? After all, he could make the case that his successful avoidance of paying taxes underscores his brilliance. But…that’s complicated because Trump has played the poor/race card, calling out the tens of millions of Americans who pay no federal income taxes—you know, the “takers”.

(Sidenote: any person who laments out-of-control entitlements or social programs, but is unperturbed by –or applauds– the psychopathic swindling by the Masters of the Universe is not ignorant so much as an unwitting victim of very purposeful and politically motivated propaganda. That this is based, at least in part, on a far-from extinct culture of prejudice, alive and unwell, and so disgustingly exposed at any Trump rally, scarcely requires elaboration.)

Is this revelation going to sway any hardcore Trump supporters? Of course not. (Anyone capable of rational thought when it comes to Trump would have rightly been pushed past endurable limits with the knowledge that he’s unashamedly stiffed workers who have built or provided things for him, a venal sort of bullying that makes the aforementioned psychopathy seem almost quaint.) This “revelation” is simply overdue acknowledgment of the hatred so much of our entitled class (and the political party that serves them) feels for the rest of us peasants. They have largely held—and acted on—these beliefs with impunity, on occasion even marketing themselves as the real populists. That farce can, and should, reach its tardy expiration date, effective immediately.

Back in 2014, as the Dems, running away from Obama’s accomplishments (obviously) and downplaying the demonstrable good Obamacare had already done (naturally), I wrote the following:

During the Tea Party shenanigans in ’09, I kept asking myself: when is Obama going to start reminding everyone that this big bad government has historically been the bulwark between the people and an Industrial Revolution lifestyle? Does it need to actually get to the point where the Republican Party literally says “let them eat cake” before people start to realize wages are stagnating, prices are rising and the only people getting fat are the wealthiest one percent? Apparently it does.

(This is an opportune time to remind any recalcitrant Gary Johnson supporters that, in addition to your candidate being a vapid loon, his libertarian policies—you know, the ones you claim more closely align with yours than either Trump’s or Clinton’s—double down on all the pro-business, anti-regulation Republican nonsense and ignore or oppose what most of us would consider sensible things like climate change, engagement with foreign allies (or enemies!) and government services. Never mind the Ayn Rand jokes that write themselves: just ask yourselves about things like maternity leave, minimum wage and 40 hour work weeks. Then try to square these, or virtually any single progressive advancement (the ones Bernie Sanders rightly, and heroically, has spent his life articulating and endorsing) with anything Libertarian. Please gang, resist your sexist tendencies and slack-jawed gullibility. Or and, if you insist on not being remotely conversant with the issues, at least stop deluding yourself that Johnson has anything whatsoever in common with either Sanders or progressive politics. Also, being nihilists without a clue is never a good look. Finally, vote for Clinton if for no other reason your dream of legal marijuana has approximately 100% better chance of happening with a Democratic administration.).

Speaking of, just as every politician was once (still?) asked if they ever smoked pot, going forward every single aspiring president should be asked—ceaselessly—what, if any, taxes they paid. (Oh wait, that did happen with every candidate until the supine media rolled over for Trump? My bad.)

The takeaway here is the same as it ever was: actions speak more eloquently and loudly than time-tested boilerplate does. In addition to exposing, without any gray area or subtlety, what these entitled and wealthy elites truly believe, the attack line going forward must be as direct as it is devastating: failure to pay any taxes might make you a more successful—and wealthy—businessman; it also makes you unpatriotic. If you’re unwilling to pay your fair share for the services that often make America exceptional, you’re not merely putting your money where your heart isn’t, you’re letting the country know no rules can, or should, apply to you.

That, sadly, will never be enough for the Fox News watchers, bigots and our angry old guard (Hey millennials: vote for Clinton if for no other reason than to savor what the next 4-8 years will be like for bitter racists for whom “making America great again” would be outlawing abortion, not letting women vote, no separation of church and state and—yikes!—reinstating the draft.). But it just might open some eyes of inexplicably “undecided” voters, and certainly should resonate with the younger demographic—the one with school debt and uncertain job security, whose taxes helped bail out the 1% when they systematically and deliberately tanked the economy less than a decade ago. The one that gets younger and less white every day.

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The Portrait-Sitter: Poverty, Intimacy, Paint, & Naples

Posted on September 29, 2016 by John Domini

Panoramic view of Naples

 

In midlife and more, with a long marriage gone bust and a career going nowhere, I began taking my father’s family up on their many invitations to visit Naples. I’d been over to the ancient city before, I knew the language, and I could always find a cheap flight. As for food and drink, that was cheaper yet, often free, like the lodging. I mean, to spend three weeks or a month walking my father’s old Gulf-side blocks, his centro storico — especially since the old man was dying, during those same difficult years — well, it made as much sense as holing up and hammering away at my so-called “career:” some sort of writer, some sort of teacher. I mean, might not Naples offer a solution? For the dwindling remainder of my own life? To suss out answers, yea or nay, took me a good decade of over-and-back. I found help in this country too, naturally, some of it coming from my father himself. Once, I’m convinced, I heard from him after he passed. Just now, however, while there’s no ghost to interrupt, I ought to admit that there remains plenty I haven’t solved. Plenty of mystery yet, no question. Even towards the end of my Neapolitan changes, a few years into the present millennium, I still knew so little that, when I took my shirt off in a good-looking young painter’s apartment workspace, all I could do was wonder.

The woman had asked me to strip down, I knew that much. The undershirt as well, she’d specified, though I was to keep my pants on. I was to pose topless, all part of a session for which she’d freed up an entire summer afternoon.

Also she’d freed a corner of her two-room walkup, uncluttering. She put me on a stool, and from that end of the place, I couldn’t miss anything. Not the bed, a futon of course, right here beside the stool. Handy, yes, but in need of some pick-up and put-away. It wasn’t cleared for action, or not yet. Then there was the woman’s own top, a tank top, sweat-stuck to a bra of that beige called “nude” and a stair-climber’s midsection. Just reaching her place, five worn flights between narrowing walls, had taken the wind out of me. But then the painter suffered maybe fifteen years less wear and tear, overall; I couldn’t miss that either. As for “the angel in the marble,” well, the metaphor comes from Michelangelo, right? So maybe Michelangelo could’ve found the angel, amid my kudzu body hair and sagging avoirdupois. Not that my friend — I’ll call her Anna — was some sort of dilettante. For years now, I’d been seeing her work around the city. Today’s piece, she’d told me, was part of a series: all men, all artists, in paired panels. In one they appear them fully dressed, in the other topless.

And what workspace did she have except her home? Her bedroom?

No place for a dilettante. That breed prefers a divan to a futon. Out on the street, they prefer a Gucci outlet and top-of-the-line pastry. Anna’s vicolo, though only four or five blocks uphill from Spaccanapoli, the UNESCO-honored Greco-Roman thoroughfare that splits the center of town, had nothing but a hole in the wall, pizza at a Euro a slice. Indeed, as I watched her swivel and dip before me, I began to think that, some days, a slice might be my host’s whole diet. This when the rent couldn’t be much. In New York the building might’ve been called a tenement, but here the bottom three floors went back a lot further than on the Lower East Side. Anna’s palazzo at least had a courtyard of packed dirt. Formerly a goat- and chicken-run, maybe a stables, now it combined space for engine repair and outdoor washing with a scrap of playground. The scruffy kids included a couple barefoot, when I arrived, and an oil-smeared “mechanic” sat grunting in one doorway. The scene comes to mind every time I revisit the sorry creatures of Elena Ferrante and her Naples quartet. Those novels’ mob-sickened blocks actually lie elsewhere, past the sunrise end of Spacccanapoli, in the neighborhood known as the Vasto. Nonetheless Ferrante’s battered strivers would’ve felt at home around any number of local intersections. Among them, too, would always have been those few with some gift, some reason to believe they might not tumble into the city’s long-festering ruts, like “Elena” in the novels — or like Anna, here.

Her reason to believe stood stacked all around us: more paintings than she had cups and saucers, and knives and forks too, in the kitchenette. The largest canvases, if they ever sold, would have to be cut off their mounting before they went out the door. Today’s were smaller; here on the top floor, where the main room had a double-window, each fit neatly within the sun’s parallelogram. Still, the paintings would mean two more sardines for the tin, by the end of my sitting — that is, if a sitting was all Anna had in mind, when she’d assured me we would have “hours alone together.”

She went hard, her top bunching as she prepped the first canvas. Nearby I spotted another set of shirt-&-skin, a pretty boy I’d say. Sleekly semi-bearded, he was an actor, Anna told me. She explained the lack of finish as well, the way the semi-nude turned to a stick figure below the nipples. The sitting was for the details, she said, the face and musculature. After that she took it “into a personal thing.”

Personal, amica? Plenty of mystery remained, and I tried to think it through as I sat for the take with my shirt on (nothing formal, Hawaiian rather, splashy). My portraitist had a fidanzato, I knew. The word no longer meant “fiancé,” exactly, but it carried a similar weight. I couldn’t use it myself, for instance, though back in the States I was seeing someone and I nursed hopes of taking it further. I’d gotten through some changes, as I say, by this time. Or pretty much: the woman in my life wasn’t yet a fidanzat-a. She couldn’t be, not so long as — in a reminiscence such as this, I can’t be coy — she was still married to someone else. Here in Naples, shifting on my stool, alone with a consenting adult and her mixed signals, I could only wonder.

As for Anna’s man, he was older, perhaps as old as I, and he’d achieved the Southern Italian nirvana of a lasting job. Un posto fisso, yes, though nothing you’d think, nothing executive level. He was only a kind of shop clerk, but then what he could do for her wasn’t what you’d think, either. Anna had something other than a sugar daddy. Her lover instead factored into a complex calculation such as you’d expect from one of Ferrante’s women, in which another all-important variable was the fact that the artist came from out of town. She wasn’t Napoli D.O.C., the expression locals use to establish their bona-fides; rather, she worked without the net of parish and neighborhood. Over a lifetime, that net might suffocate a woman, but it might also save her — it might well do both, over a lifetime — and so to ally herself with a homeboy, especially one long in place, provided Anna a lot more than, let’s say, a full pizza rather than a slice, and a full litro of good wine besides.

Yet though the most significant of the boyfriend’s contributions were intangible (here he put in a word, there he made an introduction), he also picked up some of the rent. Not that I asked, I don’t think. I perched there owlish, quiet, watching her swivel and dip. But she declared it was only right that the fidanzato help with rent, since there were nights he slept over. And could it really be as many as four nights a week? Could they work out the logistics? Getting the futon to cooperate would be difficult enough, and then come morning you had to organize breakfast.

My inner Q-&-A grew more serious between the first painting and the second. The artist allowed a coffee break, firing up the macchinetta although by then the heat had me down to my undershirt (another portrait: Stanley Kowalski Goes to Pot). But a couple of single shots didn’t take long, and then as she stirred in the sugar, my friend began to speak of an earlier lover.

This, I know I never asked. She brought him up out of the blue: her first lover, a Napoletano. They’d gotten together during her first months in town. At this work too, Anna went hard, swiftly sketching an entire dead dream. A life with another artist, that was the dream, because the boy played marvelous guitar and when he sang, davvero, truly, he was an angel. I put in a murmur or two, sympathetic I hoped, and meantime did the math. Figuring from our first encounters a dozen years previous, and from what I knew about art school in Italy, my friend hadn’t been that young at the time of this primo amore. She’d been into her twenties, late for this day and age. Then wouldn’t that put her past puppy love? Virgin or no, wouldn’t she have toughened up, some? Just listening to her story, freshly espresso’d, I could see the dream’s collapse all the way from here to the harbor. Anna’s Renaissance Man turned out to have more than one woman. He’d lied and lied again, and then another time and another, and finally — despite twenty years and more of toughening up — the woman had taken a knife to her wrist.

“Right here,” she told me, hoisting her hands into the sun’s parallelogram.

The way she put fingers to arm suggested something else, actually, a junkie shooting up. I didn’t see scars, either, though today’s stains may’ve covered those up. What I noticed was how she gripped her cup, all knuckles, and how she perched on the edge of her one clear patch of futon. She’d done it wrong, my friend went on. She’d slashed the wrong vein or something, and she hadn’t expected so much blood or pain or something, so she’d fainted and been discovered.

Discovered? She’d done this where she’d have company? Even as Anna confessed, she was raising more questions.

For her, though, there was nothing but certainty, locked in like her grip on the cup: if she’d stayed awake she’d have finished the job.

I had to ask: davvero?

“My first love,” she repeated. “There is nothing else to say.”

True that, Anna. I offered what I could, condolences, plus I think some feeble attempt to lighten things up. When I caught myself looming too close — the stool left my legs spread before her face — I scuttled back and straightened. Her posture too was changing, regathering, and then she gave her head a shake, firm. Break was over. My friend returned to her easel, checking sightlines and palette with such concentration that it was all I could do to catch her eye, as wordlessly I did my own checking. Was she through? Was that it, whatever she’d wanted? But she wasn’t talking, and so I too clammed up, pulling my drenched scoop-neck over my head.

We continued in silence until her fidanzato called. From the first ring-tone, that descending Nokia ring-tone, out of date by then, it was obvious that Anna didn’t care for the interruption. The way she got her back up, her chest straining against its soaked layers of cloth, you’d have thought she was calling attention to her nipples. But she set her man straight. She’d told him about this session. She’d known he’d be at the shop. Again I did the math, figuring from the midday riposo. After that, once businesses reopened, they didn’t close again till 8 at least, and meanwhile here at Anna’s the sun’s parallelogram stretched out almost wall to wall. After lunch, in summertime anyway, she could finish a first draft and more.

“I told you,” she repeated.

Before she closed the phone she had to wipe the sweat from its face. She swabbed her ear too, with the ham of that hand, frowning, in fact muttering. With that I could no longer keep my mouth shut. Even now, maybe ten years further along, I can’t sort out my nobler motives, like compassion, from the nastier promptings: Baby, ain’t your man makin’ you happy? Sorting all that out could take another ten years. At the time, there on the stool, at least I maintained my posture. I wasn’t a rookie, as an artist’s model; I knew I could talk, and she could answer. So too she continued working, frowning more neutrally, as she revealed that her boyfriend had another apartment he wanted to show her. He was hoping they could see the place before nightfall.

Then she added: “We’re going to marry. This next place, it’ll be our place.”

The fidanzato had made a formal proposal. It wasn’t a secret, among the people we had in common, though apparently I hadn’t been talking to the right people. As for the ring, Anna left it off when she was planning to paint. But then, I’m not sure I’d have noticed a ring, or made anything of it if I spotted one. The woman was never one for convention. Yet here she stood, still sizing up my half-nakedness, telling me she and the man had agreed on a date for the wedding. They’d marked it on the calendar, along with the day by which they had to be in a new home. And Madonn’, it was so much to organize! They had family coming out of the woodwork!

“You have no idea,” Anna told me, “how difficult it is in Naples.”

Again she was shaking her head. Then suddenly, last thing I expected, she broke off working with a big, excited smile.

“But look what came to me,” she said, gesturing around. “Just look!”

Somehow the wallop of preparation had given her an idea. Diptychs, all men…

My eye fell on the other one, the pretty one, the lower part of his portrait still sketchy. Again I had to wonder, differently this time. I found myself imagining a string of paintings never finished, all the boys she’d never have, all these samplings of intimacy before she settled into one intended to hold her for a lifetime.

naples two

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Rumble at Hofstra: Trump V. Clinton Round One

Posted on September 27, 2016 by Sean Beaudoin

I watched the entire debate last night and spent most of the time wondering if you were somehow able to strip away all preconceptions from the audience, so that we could simply listen to two people speak, how difficult would it be for even the most bitterly partisan among us to decide who would make a preferable leader? One candidate was incoherent eighty percent of the time. Not as a matter of conservative or liberal advocacy, but in terms of possessing the ability to articulate a position, finish a thought, use rudimentary sentence structure, or focus on a single concept long enough to imply that they’d given it prior consideration. The other candidate was at times stiff and over-rehearsed, but was easily able to vocalize their positions, and had a clear grasp of detail and policy. One person repeatedly masked their ignorance and confusion about the most basic issues with free-form bombast, tautology, and opaque references to renegotiating trade deals. The other no doubt used evasions and calculated attacks to camouflage their own weaknesses, but was otherwise calm, rational, intelligent, and, most importantly, avoided making claims that could be instantly disproven by anyone with a phone and a search engine. Finally, one candidate’s vision of the country consisted of nothing but fearful denunciations; every other politician was a hack, every decision a disaster, every deal the worst deal ever negotiated, all businesses failing, all public utterances a disgrace, all mistakes conspiracies. They insisted that the rest of the world was getting the better of America, and would continue to, because no other leader possessed the ability to fix every problem–instantaneously but without a single articulated solution–that they did. On the other hand, Hillary offered a series of hopeful policy prescriptions that might even stand the chance of one day being enacted. Hey, even Huey Long, courting the most backward segment of 30’s Louisiana with pure demagoguery, could finish a sentence without sniffing, interrupting, or proving from tangent to tangent to be thoroughly disoriented. A vote for Trump is like taking an advance on your future culpability. Six months into Administration Trainwreck, no one who actually thought America could be made great again by wearing a red hat, or that “shaking up the system” could be achieved by flogging it with rank vanity will ever be able to wash their hands clean.

 

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, right, shakes hands with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the start of the presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., Monday, Sept. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, right, shakes hands with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at the start of the presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., Monday, Sept. 26, 2016. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

 

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Beware the Ides of Trump

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Kurt Baumeister

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I.

 

As we close in on tonight’s first forensic cage match between “Imaginary She-Devil” Hillary Clinton and Donald “the Human Dumpster Fire” Trump, I’ve been (completely coincidentally) brushing up on my Roman history, reading Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. And let me tell you, Plutarch has me worried.

The trouble is the more I learn about Julius Caesar and the rest of that era’s brave little gang of generals, plutocrats, and dictators-in-waiting, the more I see America’s present, the more I fear that much as we want or even pretend to learn something from history, we never, ever (or “ever, ever, ever, ever, ever” to wax Trumpian) do.

I know it’s a cliché, a terrible cliché, but the phrase, “Those who fail to learn history’s lessons are doomed to repeat them,” has been rattling around in my head, costing me sleep. The other thing that’s been knocking around up there—the necessary, unwelcome corollary—is that you can never completely discount clichés. You can never discount them because clichés are born of truth.

 

II.

 

Across the slate-blue Atlantic, thousands of miles and a score of centuries in history’s hazy distance, there was a republic, the greatest the world had ever known, the Republic of Rome. Founded on a contradictory mix of freedom and slavery, myth and memory, the Roman Republic was the precursor to the Roman Empire, a historical force for progress and order, oppression and conquest, that shapes our world to this very day.

In the epoch of Roman history that centers on the transition from republic to empire, there were plenty of outsize historical figures. Not just Caesar and his heir, Octavian (the first, true, titular “Caesar,” known later as Augustus); but Mark Antony and Pompey Magnus; Cato and Cicero; Cassius, Crassus, Brutus, and last but in no way least, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the dictator who first gained control of the Republic through force of arms, the man who, in many ways, made Julius Caesar’s ascension not just possible, but perhaps inevitable.

To liken Donald Trump to Caesar or George W. Bush to Sulla may seem simplistic, even unfair. The temporal depth and factual shallows of history mean that we see the figures who presided over the death of the Roman Republic as epic, larger than life, at this point more fictional characters than anything else. Trump and Bush, on the other hand, may seem all too human. They may seem like buffoons. The trouble is that buffoons can be just as dangerous as legends, if not more so; that the buffoon and the legend may be more alike than we realize when their common denominator is power, their common catalyst an ambition for war.

 

III.

 

A president barely elected by a nation apathetic at the extent of its own good fortune—interest rates and unemployment historically low, the stock market soaring; budget deficits seemingly a thing of the past—George W. Bush did much to dismantle America’s power and prestige even as he purported to enhance them. A real war of choice, a phony war on terror, reckless deregulation, vast damage to the American and world economies, a blind eye to the withering environment–by the end of his second term, not even Bush’s own party wanted him on the campaign trail or at the party convention.

There can be little doubt Dubya’s was a failed presidency, perhaps our worst ever. Still, there is one consequence of the Bush years that remains in doubt. Perhaps, all things considered, we will look back and see it as the very worst outgrowth of our 43rd President’s disastrous tenure—the fact that he made the idea of a know-nothing president somehow acceptable.

I remember the run-up to the 2000 election, how the contest centered on various canards about Republicans and Democrats, more specifically Bush and Gore, being the same. There was a third party candidate running from the left, Ralph Nader. Though Nader wasn’t a threat to win, he pulled 3 percent of the national vote—this time, in 2016, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have anywhere from 5 to 15 percent—a margin that in two states (Florida and New Hampshire) vastly outstripped the additional votes Gore would have needed to win. So, even though Gore did, in fact, win the national popular vote in 2000, he lost in the Electoral College, Dubya inaugurated as our 43rd President.

Perhaps more than anything else about that election, I remember Dubya’s appearance on a local TV station in Boston, where I lived at the time, an interview with a reporter named Andy Hiller. The interview consisted of Hiller asking Dubya various questions about foreign affairs. A sample:

Hiller: “Can you name the general who is in charge of Pakistan?” (Referring to Pervez Musharraf who had seized power by military coup in 1999 and would in the not-too-distant future become central to Bush’s War on Terror)

Dubya: “Wait, wait, is this 50 questions?”

Hiller: “No, it’s four questions of four leaders of four hot spots.”

Dubya: “The new Pakistani general, he’s just been elected ­ he’s, he’s, not elected, this guy took over office. He appears he’s gonna bring stability to the country and I think that’s good news for the subcontinent.”

Hiller: “And you can name him?”

Dubya: “General. I can name the general.”

Hiller: “And it’s…”

Dubya: “General.”

Hiller: “Prime minister of India?”

Dubya: “Uh, the new prime minister of India is, uh … no.”

Bush continued, speaking in vagaries about Taiwan, Chechnya, and foreign affairs in general. He neither had the requisite knowledge, nor even seemed to care that he didn’t.

(Does that remind you of a certain orange-hued, complexly-coiffured advocate for nuclear proliferation in Southeast Asia, nuking Europe, and attacking Iran over rude gestures?)

Bush seemed, at least in my eyes, to disqualify himself, completely and utterly. The man was so clearly out of his depth; so obviously a lesser figure than his opponent, Vice President Al Gore. There was no way America could possibly elect George W. Bush. And, yet, we did.

 

IV.

 

Regardless of whether we want to argue about the Florida recount, the Supreme Court’s partisan decision in Bush v. Gore, Gore’s poor campaign, President Clinton’s lies and dalliances, or the impact of Ralph Nader’s third party candidacy, the fact is that Bush became president. As the years went by, we’d realize just how unready George W. Bush had been for the presidency, and how much that lack of readiness mattered, so much it seemed obvious we’d never do something like that again. All that said, eight years after throwing that bum out, we’ve got a new bum we’re courting. We’re listening to the same tired lines of logic once again, too.

“The Democrats and the Republicans are all the same.”

“We need to shake up Washington.”

“What have we got to lose?”

“Safe states and swing states.”

“Votes of protest and conscience.”

“The lesser of two evils is still evil.”

“Deeply flawed candidates.”

“Broken politics.”

“We need a strong leader.”

To paraphrase: We need Donald Trump even if he has no idea what the realities of NATO are, speaks blithely of using nuclear weapons on our allies, and refers warmly to America’s chief geopolitical antagonist, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond,” Trump said in a statement in December of 2015. “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”

Ironically (or not), this is how Dubya described Former KGB Chief Putin in 2001, “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

Since Dubya’s statement, and prior to Trump’s, Putin’s Russia has pursued aggressive military activity against its neighbors Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine, invaded Syria, and continues to conduct a vast cyberwarfare campaign against America and its western allies, going so far as to harbor fugitive data-thief Edward Snowden and to work with Julian Assange (of WikiLeaks fame) in an attempt to influence the outcome of our election.

 

V.

 

There’s a debate tonight. Did I mention that?

In one corner: Lifetime public servant and noted policy wonk, former First Lady, former Senator, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. In the other corner: sexist, racist, religious bigot, xenophobe, bellicose nationalist offend-a-tron, and Vladimir Putin-adoring policy neophyte Donald Trump.

If Dubya made it acceptable to become President without much conception of the greater world, Trump has raised that to an art form, made crudeness and ignorance into virtues. (“I love the poorly educated.” “I love the deplorable.”) More than this, Trump has made being a jerk cool. That’s his contribution to what comes next. Whereas Dubya seemed like a nice enough guy, willing to speak up in defense of other faiths and races, Trump clearly is not. At worst he’s a white supremacist thug, at best someone willing to traffic in such beliefs in order to gain political power.

The question I come to, in the end, as I consider this all in light of Plutarch, isn’t whether Trump is dangerous. That question has been answered again and again by the candidate himself, and proven in spades by the tenure of George W. Bush. No, the question is just how dangerous Donald Trump can become. Whether his arrogance, ignorance, and militarism have the potential to do to America what Julius Caesar did to Rome. More than that, the question is whether we’re going to sit by and watch as history repeats itself once again.

AS #2 AS

Posted in Current Events, Politics, The American Scream, The Weeklings | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Week in Bad Poems: Election Epigrams

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Billy The Poet

Her campaigning’s kind of sucked,
But if she loses, we’re all fucked.

~

Trump is famous, Trump is rich,
Trump is Putin’s little bitch.

~

Has anybody lately seen
The plagiaristical Slovene?

~

“Basket of deplorables” was no gaffe.
The numbers add to more than half.

~

Skittles are not people, though
Donald Trump, Jr. thinks it so.
Next he will compare the Dems
To bags of melted M&M’s.

~

What will Trump’s taxes reveal?
That there is no art to his deal.
More — and that’s the saddest joke:
That Donald Trump is flat-out broke.

~

What, you ask, would Jesus do?
He’d vote for Clinton. So should you.

~

“I’m yuuuge,” said he.
“You’re a stooge,” said she.
“It’s sad,” said he.
“You’re mad,” said she.
“You’re fired,” said he.
“You’re tired,” said she.

~

She’s a liar and crook, she’s Wall Street’s slave.
She has MS and AIDS and one foot in the grave.
She fucked up Benghazi, carelessly lost her
Classified emails, murdered Vince Foster,
Left the brave men at Benghazi for dead.
Bill cheated because she would not give him head.
Instead she munched carpet because she’s a dyke.
On taxes, she’ll impose a big middle-class hike.
She’s for the XL pipeline and the TPP,
She screwed Bernie with her toadies at the DNC,
She wants troops in Aleppo, troops in Iraq,
She’ll send soldiers to fight there, and some won’t come back.
She’s slippery, she’s slimy, she’s really stuck up,
She’s shrill when she talks — please, girl, shut the fuck up!
…but…
Even if this all were true, and not just Hill defamed,
She still would be a better choice than He Who Can’t Be Named.

basketofdeplorables

Posted in The Week in Bad Poems | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Eric Buchanan Is A Man With A Heart, Like Anybody. Maybe Even More So.

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Lawrence Benner

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“I didn’t know much about the history of art. The development of art. Where things came from. At school, I did this kind of wild, crazy painting. Outside the studio they had these ceramic heads that the pottery department was making—these surrealist, ugly-looking heads on the wall—so I did a painting of all these trees, and each tree was a different color, and the sky was red. To me it was a kind of painting that didn’t look like anything else I had ever made. I wasn’t that experienced with the art world. So when I went into class that day they said, ‘Oh, you’re a fauvist now,’ and I was like, ‘What’s that?’ and they said, ‘a wild beast,’ and I said, ‘I kind of like that’ (laughs), and they said, ‘Yeah. You would.’”

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Buchanan: I guess my first love of any art form was music. I listened to the little forty-fives that my mom and dad had, and my sister had. My sister had the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and all that stuff, and it was profoundly different from the music I heard on the radio at the time. It was like there was something extra, something important, more interesting to listen to, in certain groups from that time period. I grew up thinking, “Wow, this is different.” I knew it was different. That all music wasn’t the same. I knew which groups I liked. I had very distinct tastes as a kid. I liked Johnny Cash, but I didn’t like all country music. I had some kind of discernment from an early age. It was really weird. I don’t know where it came from. My parents are not very artistic, you know. They’re not anti-art, but they weren’t proponents of it in any way. So it wasn’t in my background, per se.

Benner: But you wanted to be a musician?

Buchanan: I knew that I wanted to find a way to do the things those people were doing. But I’m not a musician. I didn’t have that talent. I tried to play the trumpet, the trombone, the tuba—but I was terrible at it. I knew that playing music wasn’t going to be my ax. But I had this natural talent for drawing. I could draw. At an early age I drew pictures of myself. I drew pictures of my teachers in art class.

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And they actually looked like the people they were supposed to be. Which was kind of unusual for a seventh grade kid. And I think those teachers told my parents, “Your kid’s got something going on here.” So my mom took me to the Asheville Art Museum and I took drawing classes. And I learned how to do contour drawing and other things, and I became obsessed with being an artist. I was a strange kid.

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As a teenager, I was kind of a big strong guy, and I got corralled by the school and my parents, “You’ve got to play football!” I was good at it, but I hated it. And I didn’t care who won the game, as long as I did well. That’s all I gave a damn about (laughs)—me doing well! I was happy as can be, even if we lost. The coaches hated me, because I wanted to laugh and sing after the games like we had won. I was always getting into trouble. They were like, “We lost! You shouldn’t be celebrating!” and I was like, “I played well. I made lots of tackles,” and they were like, “This is a team sport!” and I was like, (sigh) “OK.” I remember telling the coach, “I did a lot. I was one of the best players in the game,” and he told me to shut the hell up.

Benner: Beautiful.

Buchanan: Bad attitude.

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Benner: Did you already know by high school that you were going to study art?

Buchanan: No. It was always presented to me by the adults in my life as a pipe-dream, and if I was ever going to make art for a living, I was going to have to go into advertising. I actually made plans to become a commercial artist (sigh). I went to Charlotte to look at some schools and that kind of crap, and . . . nah, I didn’t want to do that. And my parents didn’t even want to pay for that.

I didn’t really know what I was going to do with my life. So, I went to Mars Hill College and got a degree in history.

Benner: But you didn’t give up entirely.

Buchanan: Well, no. I have a minor in art from Mars Hill College. I took as many art classes as Mars Hill would let me take. But at the time they didn’t have a very strong art department, and I thought I’d be throwing my money away if I went for a degree in art there.

Benner: That’s where you started painting. How did you get from doing realistic drawings as a kid to becoming a painter? How does that progression go?

Buchanan: OK. Well, I was an awesome drawer, and I just got better and better, but I was not a very good painter at first. I was terrible. Drawing was natural, but painting was very awkward.

Benner: Why? Because you had to use a brush instead of a pencil?

Buchanan: You have to learn it, you have to—it’s probably like dance, probably no one’s really good—I mean you can dance around in your own life, but once you get a teacher and they say, “This is the right way to do things,” then it probably isn’t as easy as being a free spirit, and just freestyle or whatever. So it was a lot tougher. It was an adaptation. I think for the first two years my paintings weren’t that great. They were pretty good. But even when I was stinking I never stopped. I made another one, and another one. I wasn’t just making them to make them; I was making them the best I could.

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Eventually I got to where I made my first powerful painting. It was a still-life. Somebody stole that painting, so I never got the pleasure of taking a picture of the thing, but it had an almost trompe l’oiel feeling to it. It was a cow skull and like . . . bone fragments, and it had a real depth and dimension that I had never put into my work before. I made that little milestone, and all of a sudden I knew how to do it. I had made my first good painting.

After making about thirty bad paintings.

Benner: But you got a degree in history.

Buchanan: I got a degree in history. I tried student teaching, but I was a really horrible student teacher. I was a good history student, but I had no business trying to teach history to kids. Because I didn’t care about teaching the kids, I just liked history. I didn’t like kids. And I was way too immature at twenty-five to want to be doing that stuff. I still wanted to play . . . and learn, and grow.

Benner: Not to be a grownup all of a sudden.

Buchanan: I knew that if I chose that as my life, I’d be having a heart attack in about five years. I felt so stressed out all the time. I hated it. And it wasn’t so much the kids that were hell, it was the other teachers that were hell. I hated them. I felt like I was being stared at. I was teaching at this horrible redneck high school called North Buncombe. When the principal showed me around, he said, “I designed this school like a prison.” Each hall went out like arms from the center, and you could stand in the middle of the rotunda and see straight down all the halls at the same time. All the lockers had been built into the walls so nobody could hide behind them or anything. He was very proud that he had designed this prison high school (laughs).

I knew I had to get out of that.

So I became a dishwasher and an art student, and I went to UNCA after I graduated from Mars Hill. But UNCA didn’t want to accept any of Mars Hill’s credits, and I didn’t want to take all the math, all the science—everything all over again. So I didn’t take an art major.

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At UNCA I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t have any money. I had lots of friends, and lots of party time, but I knew I wanted to get serious about something. And I knew that it was possible. I didn’t believe anymore that it was impossible to make a living being an artist. I knew that if I believed in it hard enough, I could make it happen. I don’t know why I had this faith, but I did. So I put it out there and kept hammering away at it, and I actually got better and better.

But I didn’t know much about the history of art. The development of art. Where things came from. At school, I did this kind of wild, crazy painting. Outside the studio they had these ceramic heads that the pottery department was making, these surrealist, ugly-looking heads on this wall . . . so I did a painting of all these trees, and each tree was a different color, and the sky was red. To me it was a kind of painting that didn’t look like anything else I had ever made. I wasn’t that experienced with the art world. So when I went into class that day they said, “Oh, you’re fauvist now,” and I was like, “What’s that?” and they said, “a wild beast,” and I said, “I kind of like that,” (laughter) and they said, “Yeah. You would.”

They said it was a put-down to the early expressionists—you know—pre-expressionists. Some critic called them wild beasts because they had no control. They were just working from their intuition, which was a smack against the academy, so . . .

Benner: But it resonated with you somehow.

Buchanan: Well, I went out and found out what a fauvist looks like after that . . .

and I think . . .

but . . .

but I . . .

OK.

Because I had a learning disability . . .

I was not a great reader. When I went to college they tested me. I had maybe a tenth-grade reading level, but I had a grad school vocabulary. I mean I was a smart guy, I listened to people talk, listened for the content . . . but I was very bad with language, and awkward with that sort of thing. I guess I got kind of good at writing papers in school, but after the history degree fiasco was over I never wrote anything. Until recently . . . um . . . on Facebook. I’m actually getting a little better at writing now. But I forgot how to write. I forgot how to spell words. I had to look up simple stupid words when I started trying to correspond with people. But I really didn’t have a reason to write anybody. I had no desire to be a published person. But I don’t want to be an ignoramus either, and I want to communicate well. I want to be understood, because . . .

. . . it’s important (laughs).

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Then I moved to Athens, Georgia. I was having a life crisis, so I moved down there.

I stayed for a year. I lived with this poet guy in a trailer. I was a landscaper in hundred-degree weather, and every day I came home caked in red dirt, and the poet . . . the poet would just be sitting there. There was a McDonald’s in front of our trailer court, and I’m like, “Dude, they’re hiring. You’re making me pay for everything, even your food,” and he’s like, “I can’t bring myself to work at McDonald’s. I’m a poet,” and I said, “What do you think I am? Do you think I love sweating to death? Having so much sweat in my eyes they’re bloodshot and I can hardly see? You think I like what the fuck I’m doing? You need to hustle.”

Wintertime came, and I turned all the electricity off. And we both froze. And I was very happy. It was so cold in that trailer. I went to Boston and it wasn’t cold like that. We had no heat at all.

Benner: You were sitting around bundled in blankets?

Buchanan: I looked like a guy who weighed three times as much as I did, because I had so many clothes on. The poet didn’t have anything, and he was freezing to death. But I didn’t feel sorry for him because he had seen me suffering and didn’t give a shit. So I’m like, “Now it’s your turn.”

Benner: Did he get a job?

Buchanan: No. He got a girlfriend.

Benner: Ah.

Buchanan: He got to stay warm. Eventually.

Benner: Then you went back to Asheville.

Buchanan: Yeah. In the spring. I studied art for another year and a half at UNCA, and that’s where I met Suzanne (my ex-wife, artist Suzanne Saunders), and after she graduated, we tried to move to New York.

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Benner: Your original choice was New York, not New Orleans.

Buchanan: We researched the various art scenes in America, and decided to try New York. We started by going to Boston, because we knew people there, and it was close enough to New York that we could do our research on moving there. But I couldn’t get a job in Boston, and we couldn’t get a house, so we ended up staying at a friend’s house, or a bunch of friends’ house. Me and Suzanne would move from room to room in that house, until finally we said, “This stinks. We’re getting out of here.”

At one point we threw a dart at the American map, and it landed between Atlanta and New Orleans, and we were like, “Screw Atlanta. We don’t want to move there. It’s horrible (laughs).” We hadn’t even been to New Orleans, but we knew it was better than Atlanta. So we said, “We’re moving to New Orleans,” and we bought our plane tickets.

Then, a week before we left Boston, all these people wanted us. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts wanted to hire me as a guard, and a few other opportunities appeared—but we’d already made our plans. We knew we didn’t want to pay $2500 a month for a little cracker box place in New York, and Boston didn’t have a good art scene at all—we could have accepted Boston—but neither one of them welcomed us in.

So I never got to see what New York was like.

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Benner: In 1991 you moved to New Orleans. What was it like for you in the early days?

Buchanan: I was a Beignet waiter for the first year and I wore a stupid little paper hat every day.

Benner: Café du Monde?

Buchanan: No, no. Café Beignet, which is an extinct café. At least for the French Quarter it’s an extinct café. It was across the street from Jackson Square. I worked there for maybe a year, and I kept seeing all these people that sold art across the street. I kept seeing all these people that sold not so great art, and they were out there every day, and I knew they made a lot more money than I did as a crappy Café Beignet waiter wearing a stupid little paper hat. So I quit. Right before Mardi Gras. Didn’t have a backup plan. I went to Royal Street and stood out there for a month. Every day I was out there painting, and trying to sell, and there was this great uncertainty.

At that point I had done all these wood carving things. They took an exorbitant amount of time to make, but people didn’t even want to give me twenty or thirty dollars for them.

Benner: Wood carvings?

Buchanan: Yeah, they were things that I had carved and then hand-painted. I did a lot of those in the early days. I thought I might make prints, but I liked the wood plate better than the finished print. So I made many many plates. I would paint inside the grooves. It took forever to make one of those things.

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But the carving thing was not significant to my progression. It was something I tried. I ended up painting all the time, and people responded much better to the paintings.

Anyway, after that first month—on the same day my rent was due—this would-be rock star woman named Poe (who had a momentary pop song called Angry Johnny, if you want to look it up . . .)

Benner: I think I’ve heard of her. (Daughter of Polish filmmaker, sister of House of Leaves.)

Buchanan: Yeah. Well, she bought two thousand dollars’ worth of art from me in one day. That was the most money I’d ever made in my life, and I said, “This is the job for me. This is what I want to do. This is what I came here to do. And now I’ve proved that I can do it.”

Benner: Did you have a studio then, or did you work out of your apartment?

Buchanan: I did it out of a tiny little apartment on Royal Street. In an attic. It was like going up this endless spiral staircase, and you could see behind the walls of the French Quarter. It was like an M.C. Escher painting, stairways going into walls, and just weird stuff—defunct architecture and still-functioning architecture, a real hodgepodge of time periods—the different owners of the building had built separations and stuff that you could see through . . .

Benner: That’s in the tiny Royal Street apartment?

Buchanan: That’s in the building the apartment was in. Anyway, I became endlessly fascinated with every aspect of New Orleans culture, and buildings, and people, and I studied everything, just trying to memorize the buildings and the wrought iron railing patterns, so I could draw and paint that stuff out of my head. I have this obsession with realistic detail, and I also have this kind of crazy abstract expressionist thing. I’m not a true abstract artist. I’m not a pure abstract artist. But I am an abstract artist. Some people want to say, “Abstract art has no picture of anything!” But before there was non-figurative abstract art, figurative artists were considered abstract artists. Cubist artists were considered abstract artists. Then, when non-figurative abstract art came along, they started calling Picasso an expressionist, not an abstract artist anymore. They changed the definition.

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Benner: Could you talk a little bit about your technique?

Buchanan: OK. I have this sort of natural thing in my style, to make elongated people, and it may have something to do with my, sort of, oh—how shall we say—dyslexia. It may have something to do with dyslexia and some . . . mild autism. I think a lot of artists have touches of that. And if you’re not tetched too hard by it, it actually makes you a good artist. And I think that explains a lot of my own natural weirdness. That I see and think a little bit differently about space and how to arrange things. It comes out in the art.

Benner: So your style is informed by this distortion in your perception.

Buchanan: Right.

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Benner: You sell paintings regularly on Jackson Square, but you’ve done several larger commissions, like the Audubon Hotel façade. Could you talk a little about that?

Buchanan: The Audubon Hotel was this legendary bohemian hotel, which was—Oh God—the best mixture of people. It was the closest New Orleans will ever get to Studio 54. It was wild—sex, drugs, everything. Even people that weren’t on drugs were welcome. It was homeless people, it was transvestites, it was strippers . . . yats from out in suburban New Orleans . . . it was anybody. Anybody that was a misfit went there. They found it some weird way.

I had painted a hotel room in there—several artists were commissioned to paint rooms—I had one, Suzanne had a room too, and people paid more to stay in the crazy rooms. Mine was this kind of weird, expressionistic . . . cubist . . . a happy nightmare I guess you could call it. People didn’t know if it was a happy thing or a nightmare (laughs). It was a little bit of both. Suzanne had this surrealistic room; kind of Bosch-esque is how I would describe it. It was really cool. And there was this other dude named Bubby who had a room, and he had taken a nail gun and nailed thousands of teddy bears and stuffed critters all over the walls. It was 360 degrees of stuffed plushiness. And he even put these insane Velcro bedspreads on the bed. I couldn’t believe it . . . it’s hard to describe (laughs). I mean I didn’t want to stay in that room very long.

So, the owners were happy with our rooms, mine and Suzanne’s, and we were a couple. They liked us both. They didn’t want to offend either one of us, and they thought we could collaborate, so they commissioned us to do the façade.

But we had tried to collaborate several times painting canvases in our studios, and we just ended up bumping egos and not getting along, and not making good art either. But we were very proud to get the commission. So I said, “We’ll flip a coin, and whoever wins the coin toss gets to choose their side, and we’ll meet in the middle, and when both sides are happy with their side, then we get to go over into the other person’s side and put our flourishes on, and unify the whole piece of art.” The ground rule was we had to have the same horizon line, so the picture made sense.

The idea of the painting was you were looking at the outside of the hotel, but you were looking through the building—it was transparent—and you were seeing the people who inhabited the weird hotel bar. So it was a weird mixture of monstrosity and interesting characters.

It ended up being a successful thing and people loved it.

We got a lot of attention.

Then they sold the hotel.

Benner: Oh no.

Buchanan: I met the new owner of it, and his name was Joe the Suit.

Benner: Joe the Soup?

Buchanan: No, Joe the Suit. I was taking pictures of the front of the hotel, and he didn’t know I was one of the artists, and he says, “I like that painting,” and I said, “Yeah? You do? Why don’t you just keep it?” and he says, “Nah. Nah. We’re starting from scratch. We’re gonna gut this whole thing.” Then he says, “You want to stay and watch me sandblast it? Ha ha ha!” I was like, “No, I don’t. It’s your property. You do whatever you want. But I’m not going to stick around for that. That’s going to be a sad moment for me.”

Benner: By this time he knew who you were.

Buchanan: He knew. I told him who I was, I said, “I’m one of the artists,” so he was like, “You want to watch me sandblast it?” He thought that was hilarious. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I can imagine why they call him Joe the Suit . . . a little dodgy (laughs).

Benner: What’s the Audubon like now?

Buchanan: Oh God, it’s a shell. It’s been sitting empty since 1999.

Benner: It’s not a hotel?

Buchanan: Not anymore. It’s nothing. It’s probably in litigation, you know, a lot of times the former owner has liens on the property . . . it’s an open-faced thing. They’ve started and stopped and started and stopped. And they’ve done that with a whole lot of other bohemian paradises. They’re like, “Oh, people want to hang out there, let’s buy it out,” and then nobody wants to hang out there anymore because it’s not cool like it used to be. Their version of cool is not how cool naturally assimilates.

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Benner: Could you talk about some of the other commissions?

Buchanan: I painted a mural in Chicago for this nightclub called Bourbon Street. It took me three and a half months to paint it, during the winter. I was in there all by myself, in this cold building that didn’t have bathrooms or anything, painting this mural. During the day there would be about a hundred and fifty people cutting wood all day, so I had to paint at night. I painted this massive ninety-foot-wide, maybe thirty-foot-high mural. It was the stage. I painted all that by myself. I was there for three months. When I first went in there I was freezing to death. I was so cold. They flew me up there, and I didn’t have very many winter clothes, because I live in New Orleans. I didn’t even have a big winter coat. In New Orleans it gets cold for three days, but that’s about it.

Benner: And you painted one in Colorado.

Buchanan: I painted one in Boulder, at a place called Red Fish. Red Fish is a microbrewery, and a restaurant, and a billiard room . . . they had these monster steel brewing vats . . . multi-million dollar deals to construct that shit . . . and the Chicago thing was a multi-million dollar thing . . . although I didn’t get paid well, in either case . . . but it was all very educational for me, because I never worked with a contract.

Now, if I do something, I want to know exactly what I’m going to get paid, and I want them legally responsible to pay me after I do my work. Not what they think I deserve, but what I charge them. People will exploit artists, and if you’re an artist and you get a commission, get a contract.

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And if you have an exhibition in a cigar shop or a restaurant, make sure those people are not going to steal your artwork. Because that happened to me. The La Habana Cuban cigar shop tried to steal my art, and I had to threaten to sue them.

Benner: What happened?

Buchanan: They said they wanted some art for their shop, to decorate the place. So I gave them two pieces. But I put really exorbitant prices on them so no one would want to buy them. I didn’t want to sell them, and they knew that.

Benner: The paintings disappeared?

Buchanan: I went to the place and I said, “Where are my two paintings?” and they said, “Well, we want to buy them,” and I said, “I put those crazy prices on them because I didn’t want to sell them. They’re important to me. This is what we agreed to from the beginning. Now you’re changing everything?”

They had taken the paintings off the premises. They weren’t even in the building anymore. And I was like, “Well, I’m going to cost you every time we go to court, because my lawyer loves to kick thieving greedy people’s asses. He works for the ACLU. He will kick your ass. And I don’t even need a lawyer, all I have to do is go to the police and file a charge. So you can never ever sell that art ever again, because it will be hot. So, you do whatever you want, but we’re going to resolve this today, or we’re going to start going to court soon.” (Sigh) It was the most crazy . . . anyway, they gave me the money. They paid me for the art.

So now I know that you’ve got to have a contract, and be professional, or people will exploit you. Now that I’m getting better as an artist, and my prices are going up a little bit, you know, people will steal from you. People may sound goodhearted and like they’re your real fan, but it doesn’t mean they won’t steal from you. They may be your real fan, but they’ll still steal anything they can. They will get over any way they can.

It’s called business.

Benner: You’ve had to develop your own practices through trial and error.

Buchanan: There are some things I won’t do. I won’t paint a portrait of anybody’s child. I only paint portraits of people I know, or like. There has to be some sort of relationship if I paint your portrait. Or I particularly like you.

Benner: So most of the people in your paintings come out of your imagination?

Buchanan: Yeah. Or they’re people I know. Actually, I’ve been out there on Jackson Square for so long I know so many street musicians, and I go to bars where jazz bands are, and I know who I like. And they become familiar recycled characters in lots of paintings.

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Benner: Washboard Brad?

Buchanan: Washboard Brad. Guitar Paul. Tuba Fats. There’s all these people in New Orleans, and they don’t need to know my last name, either. I’m just Eric the Artist. And they’re Tuba Fats. Everybody’s got their handle. These are my peers, you know. Work peers.

Benner: You see them regularly.

Buchanan: Every weekend. Every festival. And I see them walking around town, at the coffee shop, or the bar. Wherever I be, they’re there too. Some of them, I run into them at the snowball stand . . . whatever (laughs).

Benner: What’s your method? How do you approach making a painting?

Buchanan: There are several different ways, and there are different types of paintings I make. I have many styles, actually. That can be a strength or a weakness, depending on how you perceive it. Because I can make one painting that’s pretty darn realistic, like a cat out in a field, and it’s straightforward. I try to capture the mystery of this cat out in the field, with the moonlight in the background, and the high grass as tall as he is. And all the detail makes it come to life. It’s always a story, and I punch it up where it needs to be, and more reserved in other areas.

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There are those kinds of paintings, and then there’s the more abstract subject matters that I do which are sort of a fusion of abstract expressionism, surrealism, and cubism. Primarily cubism. I take these elements of expressionism and surrealism and I cubify them, so I can tell a story using elements of my thoughts and experiences in life. I kind of feel like I’m a filmmaker, except I only have one frame to tell the story in.

I like doing both kinds of work, and I see the value in them both, and there’s no conflict of interest in me to paint something realistic, or half realistic, or totally like a cartoon. I don’t put limits on myself, and I feel like I can—and I will—paint anything I want to, anything I can think of, and try any experiment I want. I don’t feel like I’m owned by pressure from a gallery to make this certain type of thing that sells, and stick with that because anything else will confuse people. I don’t care. I like being an independent because I don’t care if it confuses my audience. This is what I like.

And I want people to see each piece as an entity unto itself. Occasionally I’ll do a show that has a thematic thing, and all the paintings relate to each other in the style, but then there are other shows where there will be seven realistic paintings and ten crazy chaotic abstract paintings that are borrowing styles from a whole bunch of things. I think this gumbo of fashion came out of being in New Orleans for twenty years, and hearing every kind of music that you can imagine, and seeing every kind of human being that you can imagine. If you stand out there on Jackson Square, you’ll see the highest and the lowest of everything walk by you at some point. So I’m inspired by my people-watching, I’m inspired by the buildings, I’m inspired by the sky and the giant clouds they have down there, and all the water.

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But there’s more to life than just New Orleans, too. I don’t want to be pigeonholed as just a New Orleans artist. I’m a bigger artist than that. I don’t want to be called a Southern artist, or a folk artist. I don’t mind being called an expressionist, or an abstract artist—those are more like what I am. But I’m not a folk artist. I know too much about art. I’m too self-aware. That’s for people who are truly naïve. I get kind of irritated by the label folk, because I’m not a folk artist. Not in any sense.

Benner: Implies a primitive sort of thing . . .

Buchanan: It’s like an old farmer in rural Alabama who sees Johnny Cash on TV and paints a very crude picture of Johnny Cash. Now, that’s beautiful art. I’m not taking away from it. But that’s not me. If I painted Johnny Cash crudely it’s because I chose to paint him crudely. If I wanted to paint Johnny more realistically and dimensionally, I could do that too. It depends on what suits my fancy.

Benner: So long as it’s a painting of Johnny Cash.

Buchanan: It could be Bob Marley (laughs).

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Benner: How do you balance the need to make money—I mean, I remember you once said, “Cats sell. If you need to make some money quick, paint a cat. Somebody will buy it.” I know you do what you want. But you also have to sell. How do you balance between being a commercial artist and being an uncompromised visionary?

Buchanan: I’m a terrible businessman and I don’t have a plan for success. I actually stopped making the things that sold the best—the stick figures on the long planks.

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People were begging for them, but I stopped making them, because I didn’t want to make them anymore. I started making my big paintings, and I stood out there until I sold them. There were so many weekends in a row that I didn’t sell anything.

But eventually the dam bursts, and I sell three or four paintings in one day, and it changes. My survival strategy is that when I have that day—and it may take a whole month of standing out there to get to that day—I’ll pay my rent ahead, months at a time. I’ll figure out how I’ll eat (laughs), but I’m not going to be put out of my home. I’m well paid ahead. I guess that comes from the gnawing insecurity of not having the guarantee that at the end of your time, you’re going to get a payment. It’s a little uncertain, but I think it’s made me a happier person. I have no expectations. I don’t get disappointed if I don’t get what I want. I know if I keep sticking around and trying, I will get what I want, because it’s good, and I know it’s good, and I believe in it, and it will work.

And it does. Eventually the right person shows up.

One time I painted this crazy abstract painting and the character was made up of geometric shapes and sort of . . . slashes or whatever, and I saw this man’s face in it, and I brought it out, and separated things from one another, and I made this really nice painting. It was this man with a bowler hat, and he had a big cigar . . . and he was real to me somehow. I felt great about that picture. Then when I was out there selling, I was like, “This is a hot painting, but nobody wants to buy it.” Everybody was going, “that one, that one, that, one,” pointing to other pieces. I didn’t understand it. And I was charging a very fair price for the work.

Then this man showed up, and it was him. It was his face. It was exactly him. He says, “Do I look familiar?” and I said, “Yeah, you’re the dude in my painting,” and I wasn’t even looking at my painting at the time. And he goes, “Yeah, that’s right. I want to buy that from you.”

I took a picture of him, with his cigar—he actually had a cigar in his mouth—pointing at the painting. He had a fedora on; he didn’t have a bowler on. That was the only difference. I painted the character with a bowler, not a fedora.

But this dude shows up and he’s a dead ringer for the guy I painted.

So it sort of let me know that . . . the universe has a proper place for my paintings to go. I mean, I have this bizarre faith—or superstition—that each painting I care about is supposed to go to a specific place. I don’t have a clue who it’s supposed to go to. But it’s my destiny to make these things, and to have them go to the right people out in the world.

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~

Born in Asheville, NC, in 1964, Eric Lee Buchanan has lived and worked in New Orleans since 1991. The text is from an interview with Lawrence Benner conducted on September 12th, 2016.

The images and photographs in this interview are the property of Eric Lee Buchanan except where otherwise noted. Additional photographs and photo editing by Jennifer Coates.

 

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Taxi Driver: 40 Thoughts for 40 Years

Posted on September 19, 2016 by Sean Murphy

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Not many critics would name it as the best American movie, and it probably would rank as few fans’ favorite films. Is Taxi Driver, nevertheless, the most important American film? It is, in the sense that we need our best art to endure; to speak past trends and time, to tell us about ourselves while asking more questions than are answered (otherwise it’s philosophy or worse, literary theory).

Shakespeare’s oft-quoted notion of stories holding a mirror up to Nature has become a crutch if not cliché for describing what art does. As history continues to confirm that we’ve evolved less than we might hope or imagine in the intervening centuries since Hamlet soliloquized, the more relevant issue might be why art matters. As such, it’s probably Oscar Wilde who got it right when he declared “It’s the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

Taxi Driver might not even be Scorsese’s best movie, but it’s definitely in the Top One. Okay, Raging Bull could fairly be considered his ultimate achievement (although substantial credit must be given to the ready-made script and tag-team for the ages from De Niro and Pesci). Mean Streets may, for aficionados, be his most consistently watchable (aside from The Departed, but in terms of aesthetic heft, that comparison would be like an all-star game vs. what the Miracle Mets pulled off in ’69—de rigueur brilliance vs. once-in-a-lifetime lightning caught in a bottle of straw-covered Chianti). Goodfellas, of course, is Goodfellas.

Aside from Taxi Driver, is there a film that continues to address—both directly and indirectly—so much of what makes America simmer and sometimes explode? Network turned out to be so prescient it’s practically a documentary (and would this make Paddy Chayefsky cackle or cry?). Taxi Driver seems to provide both a macro and micro analysis of our combustible American experiment: violence, sex, repression, isolation, exploitation, poverty (for starters) and the ways these phenomenon push and pull on practically everyone, occasionally proving toxic for the least-equipped amongst us.

Two words: Bernard Herrman. Three words: Best Soundtrack Ever.

In the crowded field of contenders, a handful of geniuses easily distance themselves from the competition: Piero Umiliani is Bach, Nino Rota is Mozart, John Barry is Wagner, (John Williams is Stephen King), and Bernard Herrmann is Beethoven. (Ennio Morricone is God.)

There’s also Beethoven-level pathos in the fact that not only was this Herrmann’s final score, but he died literally hours after completing it. Added bonus: as Scorsese was largely unknown during pre-production, the notoriously cantankerous Herrmann was unmoved by the director’s desire to have him score the film. “I don’t write music for car movies,” he allegedly said. Only when he saw the scene where Travis pours peach brandy over his breakfast was he convinced.

Fact: during the immortal “You talkin’ to me?” scene, the screenplay simply read “Travis looks in the mirror.” (A reminder that not only was De Niro once an actor, during his prime there were few better.)

Apparently Scorsese first approached Dustin Hoffman to play Travis Bickle. It’s best to not even imagine how different this movie would have been.

Many other actors were considered for (even offered) the part, ranging from the intriguing (Jeff Bridges) to the preposterous (Burt Reynolds?!).

The fact that Paul Schrader spent some time sleeping in a car before writing the screenplay helps offer insight into the myriad ways everything about Taxi Driver feels so real.

In an interview, Albert Brooks relates the conversation (equal parts amusing and disturbing) where, after filming, Schrader thanked him for helping him “understand” Tom, the one character he didn’t understand.

The stories of method actors being method actors can be hilarious and embarrassing, but at times, instructive. It may seem obvious or facile, but the time De Niro took actually driving a cab around NYC enriches his performance. Just the way he stretches his sore neck after another endless evening is a deft, if subtle touch. It’s also a natural reaction from someone who has pulled some 15 hour shifts.

We rightly mock the onanism of thespians who believe staying in character throughout a shoot confers authenticity. How many actors, today, fresh off an Academy Award—as De Niro was in ’74—would actually spend any (much less substantial) time physically driving a cab?

Also noteworthy is the way De Niro, the ultimate New Yorker, is able to convincingly seem out of his element (on all levels) in The Big Apple. He supposedly studied the speech patterns of some soldiers from the Midwest (while on the set of Bertolucci’s 1900).

The issue of Bickle’s “complicated” views on racial relations is a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) theme that recurs. In the original screenplay, the pimp (Harvey Keitel) and both the Mafioso and bodyguard/bouncer were all black. Consider that, and appreciate the credit Scorsese deserves for his better judgment—creative and cultural—in spite of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s objections.

No matter how controversial his treatment of race, in this or any movie, it’s impossible to pretend Scorsese is not rendering real people, however backward or repellant. Contrast this with another director who courts derisive scandal, Quentin Tarantino, whose characters’ bigotry always seems too gleeful by half. Where Scorsese, at his most incendiary, can credibly claim he’s interrogating certain experiences and observations of an adult with the filth of a city under his fingernails, Tarantino repeatedly comes off like a developmentally arrested video clerk who has lived his life watching movies.

According to legend, the actor intended to play the role of Bickle’s psychotic passenger (George Memmoli, memorable as Joey from Mean Streets) was injured and couldn’t make the shoot. Scorsese gamely stepped in and gave it a shot. Suffice it to say, the results are terrifying, and astonishing. The entire film holds a camera up to NYC’s shadiest back-alleys, and this scene depicts the rotten core inside these hearts of darkness as much as any of the more celebrated ones.

It’s fascinating to hear Scorsese (in interviews and the making-of feature) describing the way De Niro directed him during their scene together.

While so many other scenes continue to be discussed and celebrated, with good reason, De Niro nevertheless gives a clinic even as the camera mostly focuses on Scorsese. His economy of words and movement in this scene are extraordinary: for almost four whole minutes, the only thing Bickle says is “Yeah,” twice.

The best soundtrack scores contain music that can exist entirely outside the films they appear in (or were written for), yet are—for all the right reasons—inseparable from the movies themselves.

Perhaps more than any film, Taxi Driver portrays New York City as it used to be (for better and worse). Adding to an already claustrophobic script, the shoot occurred during a garbage strike over the course of an unusually sweltering summer. One can certainly see, and practically smell the mid-decade grime.

For visual evidence of how much the city has actually changed, this site does some wonderful work.

No matter how many times you’ve seen it—and you know it’s coming—the slow pan-up revealing Bickle’s Mohawk remains one of the more arresting, and disturbing visuals in all cinema.

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The aforementioned improvisation before the mirror is venerated as one of De Niro’s finest moments. For this writer, the unbearable moments that occur as Travis follows Betsy out of the porn movie might best illuminate De Niro’s mastery of craft. Even as his date (and we) cringe that he’s naïve enough to even consider a “dirty movie” (in Betsy’s words) appropriate, the fact that in this scene—and for large chunks of the movie—we feel empathy for Travis, a character we might understandably feel nothing but disgust for, is one of the primary reasons the movie resonates after repeated viewings.

A great many things occur throughout the course of the film, but few of them happen quickly. The languid pace of the action, obviously, reflects the tensions simmering below the surface. It’s possible that Scorsese’s directorial instincts were never quite as impeccable as they are in Taxi Driver. For instance, this: a scene so pitiful even the camera looks away.

Or this. The implication that Travis is rehearsing his own soliloquy (Hamlet meets the narrator from Dosteyevsky’s Notes from Underground), editing and perfecting it, in his mind.

Okay, one more. If I were forced to submit the single scene (in any movie) that best illustrates both loneliness and alienation, and the ironic disparity between what gets sold on TV (as normal, as achievable, as happiness) and what so many people actually experience, it would be difficult not to choose this one.

A lot of actresses auditioned for the role of Iris. Like dozens. Jodie Foster allegedly was not the first choice, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone else doing the role similar justice.

Some serious heavyweights auditioned for the role of Betsy. Cybill Shepherd was far from the most talented of the lot, but she did exude the combination of beauty and banality the part required.

It’s a minor role, but it can’t be overstated how crucial Albert Brooks is for providing humor and fleeting relief from the near-suffocating intensity of the screenplay.

Even when it’s well-intended, we have an inclination to mythologize artists, particularly actors. There’s nothing wrong with this, especially if the work warrants our adoration. That said, shrewd preparation is seldom sexy as improvised magic, but it’s often crucial for a convincing performance. Case in point, Harvey Keitel spending time with an actual pimp (and play-acting as a prostitute to really get a sense of the power dynamics at play) unquestionably provided heft and credibility to his uncanny turn as Sport.

Paul Schrader, naturally—and with Scorsese’s full blessing—scoured the streets to find a prostitute he could talk to. The young lady he eventually met not only informed the final script, she appears (as Jodie Foster’s friend) in the film.

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In terms of bang for buck, is there a character actor from this era who ended up in more epic films than Joe Spinell? In addition to a brief role in Taxi Driver, he also found his way into both Godfather movies, the first two Rocky movies, as well as Cruising, Nighthawks and Night Shift. He should be buried, with a plaque, beneath the Empire State Building.

How many movies have been as flawlessly cast, from the leads to the most minor characters (think Melio in the convenience store, or even the man attempting to rob him, or the Secret Service agent Travis attempts to impress, and not least, Peter Boyle (!) as Wizard).

As reliable and perceptive as Roger Ebert usually was, his speculation that the post-shootout epilogue is a dream sequence has always seemed remarkably undiscerning. Never mind that Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro all are on record as stating the opposite. Never mind that if Travis, from whose point of view we’ve seen all the action unfold, is dead but still “seeing” it undermines the narrative logic. The carnage, horrific as it is, is still only the second most grotesque aspect of the film. The most appalling incongruity is that Bickle’s viewed as a hero. The movie would already be an unqualified success, but with Travis (who, no sentient viewer should forget, was seconds away from attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate) being lionized by the media, Schrader et al. offer some of the darkest irony in cinema history. More, they anticipated an American media that’s only become more culpable for sanitizing or altogether misreading sensational acts because, naturally, sensationalism sells.

Even the ending isn’t really the end. Courtesy of the extremely ambivalent final shot of Travis seeing (or hearing, or sensing) something, and only catching his own eyes in the rear view mirror, the last image the viewer is left with is that Travis remains tightly wound. As the credits roll, one is left wondering if he might be in the news again, inevitably.

Eternal props to Tom Scott.

Apparently De Niro was on board for a sequel. Thank God for the rain that helped wash that garbage from our screens before it ever got made.

Forty years. Wow.

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