He's Wasted and He Can't Find His Way Home

Beware of Mr. Baker: Ginger Baker Does Doc

If you took away his cane, drummer Ginger Baker would be any documentarian’s dream subject. Everyone who owns an old Blind Faith or Cream record has heard him tear it up. Mad as a hatter and feisty as hell, Baker has spent the last five decades embodying the cliché of e-z living as a rock star. (And the girls do indeed come easy, and the drugs do indeed come cheap.) Thing is, Baker did it long before it became cliched, in a style that yielded high drama and plenty of breakage. 

The bellicose beat-keeper became famous for scrapping with bandmates and pretty much anyone who crossed him, to the point that few would work with him, despite his prodigious talent. As archrival former bandmate Jack Bruce once put it, “It's a knife-edge thing between me and Ginger. Nowadays, we're happily co-existing in different continents... Although I was thinking of asking him to move. He's still a bit too close."

Daring novice filmmaker Jay Bulger not only braved interviewing the wild man for a month at Baker’s South African ranch, but also chatted with family and friends, most of whom confirm the dual-diagnosis of insanely talented and demonically mental. In phoenix-like fashion, he lost and regained fortunes—and wives, homes, and even countries—multiple times throughout his life.

Beware of Mr. Baker employs a perfect balance of music, talking heads, history, archival footage, and animated re-enactments that are deftly rendered and fun to watch. Bulger interviews a small army of rock and heavy metal musicians, including Clapton, Stewart Copeland, Mickey Hart, and John Lydon. It’s amusing to see and hear this parade of pancake-makeup-ed zombies, if only to confirm that livin' the life really does accelerate the aging process. The entire film compels watching, as Baker’s life story takes a number of unexpected twists and turns, some of which involve African stepchildren and a string of polo ponies.

photo: Miller & Maclean

Through the mayhem, Baker’s lived a life driven by bile and gusto. And lots of pharmaceuticals. Having kicked smack about 29 times may explain why he’s perennially in a bit of a mood. But despite his compromised liver, many dub Baker the consummate musician. Though he considers himself a jazz drummer, he's also laid down a whole lotta rock and Afro beats, most notably with Fela Kuti. 

Bulger has managed to uncover plenty of dirt from and about the madcap redhead, who’s now 73, half-deaf, propped up on pills, and living in South Africa with wife #4, a 28-year-old Zimbabwean hooker-turned-Internet bride. 

As a former rock critic, I’ve seen just about all the rock docs out there. This one stands as one of the best of 2012.

I’d also suggest Netflixing Benjamin Smoke, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and Tom Dowd and the Language of Music.

Annie Leibovitz, Pilgrimage, at Santa Fe’s O’Keeffe Museum

photo: Heidi Utz

On Wednesday I received an amazing Valentine: the opportunity to attend a private reception with Annie Leibovitz on the eve of her new exhibition, Pilgrimage, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Leibovitz describes the show's subjects as those that have shaped her view of her cultural inheritance. These are, essentially, 64 portraits of objects that signify her influences and idols, from O’Keeffe to Marian Anderson to Virginia Woolf. Many of these historical relics, such as Thoreau’s Chinese soft bedframe from Walden Pond, currently reside in museums. 

Unlike her best-known works, frequently commercial celebrity portraits, Leibovitz took these photos during 2009-2011 simply because she was moved to. She calls it “an exercise in renewal [that] taught me to see again.” And adds, “Looking at history provided a way of going forward.” Organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, this traveling exhibit includes images from two separate trips to NM to photograph O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu home, Ghost Ranch, O’Keeffe’s “Black Place,” and the museum’s vault.

photo: Annie Leibovitz

In this mostly American cluster of subjects, Leibovitz opts for individuals residing squarely in the traditional canon—Pete Seeger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elvis, Emerson, Lincoln—as well as several iconic geographies—Old Faithful, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, and Monticello. All feel familiar and safe. Though perhaps disappointing for those of us who admire her bolder work, in shaky, turmoil-filled times, artists sometimes retreat to more reassuring traditional subjects rather than embrace an edge that feels everpresent in the environment.

photo: Annie Leibovitz

Some of the photos are straight-up documentation: Lewis & Clark’s compass, Emerson’s bookcases, a glass negative of Lincoln. Though predictably well-rendered, their flat, purely documentary quality offers little opportunity for transcendence and doesn't establish new contexts or ideas about their subjects. The near-fetishization of objects (which she dubs “talismans”) seems out of character, given Leibovitz’s four-decade career creating some of the world’s most imaginative personal portraits. Many prove emotionally sterile, especially when one recalls some of her groundbreaking shots (a very pregnant, very naked Demi Moore; a very Yoko-ed John Lennon). Part of what's missing is the point of view her portraits carry. Sure, there's the obvious care she took in photographing these objects, but is fondness for a subject enough? Leibovitz once stated, "Sometimes I enjoy just photographing the surface because I think it can be as revealing as going to the heart of the matter.” In this show, I wish the revelations had been deeper.

Leibovitz’s real talent is bringing people to life in interesting contexts. While documenting relics of the famous is necessary, such denotation seems well beneath her creative imagination. Yes, some of these objects do hold a certain cultural and historical resonance. But the question is, what do we gain by looking at them now? Her response: "These are pictures of people to me. It’s all we have left to represent them. I’m dealing with things that are going away, disappearing, crumbling. How do we hold on to stuff?” As the Digital Age increasingly overtakes us, and tangible objects seem threatened with extinction, I've sometimes asked the same question. I think back to the very analog life of my schoolbooks and marvel at how far away it can seem. But is the answer embracing the tight confines of the traditional Western canon, a trip among whose much-vaunted artifacts may feel like a return to an airless classroom?

photo: Annie Leibovitz

That said, several images do stand out. One is a close-up of Emily Dickinson’s embroidered white dress. Though simply two buttons, a hint of collar, and a swatch of fabric, the shot has a great immediacy and resonance. When combined with the image of pressed flowers from the poet's herbarium, the Belle of Amherst instantly enters the room. Another more complex image portrays Elvis’ elaborate burial site at Graceland, processed in saturated colors, with its cemetery stones glowing blue. Its playfulness feels so very authentic to Presley's projected identity and campy residence. A third fine shot is the considerably more humble abode of Jacob Lott—its striking, yellow-leaved tree and laundry line powerfully conveying place and season.

Maria Chabot, O'Keeffe breaking the fast

After viewing most of Pilgrimage, I wandered into the next room, where the ongoing Georgia O’Keeffe and the Faraway: Nature and Image exhibit still hangs (thru 5/5/13). I found myself more drawn to some of the marvelous shots of O’Keeffe and partner Maria Chabot hiking and camping in the northern NM wilderness. This proved a great contrast to Leibovitz’s photos, in which state-of-the-art lenses and colored filters tended to violate the historicity of the objects. Whereas the O’Keeffe exhibit’s original b&w Polaroids, shot in 1961 by Chabot, Todd Webb and Tony Vaccaro, seemed more genuine in the moment. Much of their charm derives not only from the novelty of seeing O’Keeffe unposed in these settings, but also from the age of the photos themselves. There's a harmony and internal verisimilitude among photographic medium, subject, and place that’s lacking in many of Leibovitz’s shots.

It’s hard to know how much of a role the Smithsonian played in Leibovitz’s choice of subjects and method of photographing. Obviously when an entity that large is involved, subject matter will be directed and edited. This factor also seemed to come into play with the photographer’s recent series of Disney-fied portraits, which hurt me to look at. I'm not sure why a photographer of her caliber would want to perpetuate such an insipid part of our culture. Annie Leibovitz may well be tired of doing the portraits she’s best known for. But I hope in the future she returns to getting inside and underneath, rather than dwelling on the surface. 

Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage opens at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, on Friday, February 15, 2013, and runs through May 5, 2013. The exhibition, which first opened at the Smithsonian in January 2012, is touring 8 museums nationally. For dates and places, check

here.

Walking Through

photo: Heidi Utz

Portland, OR

Detropia: Detroit's Postindustrial Decline

Detropia

As I watched Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s new documentary, Detropia, last night on the small screen, I wished I’d seen its lush cinematography in the theater. Tony Hardmon and Craig Atkinson have created a film awash in arresting, apocalyptic images—eerie reminders of Detroit’s rise and fall as America’s premier manufacturing city.

These days, the city has come to symbolize the collapse of the American Dream, the country’s decline and how bad it could potentially get, as job loss has forced 1/4 of the city’s population to leave in the last decade. Some say that nearly 1/3 of the city’s land is now vacant, due to home foreclosures and resultant demolition. This represents an area the size of San Francisco. Detroit is a graphic illustration of what happens when corporate greed takes over, as Michael Moore forewarned 24 years ago in Roger and Me. And despite lots of ideas being floated, so far there’s no real workable plan for how to revitalize what once was a vital and fascinating city.

Unfortunately, as many reviewers have already noted, what could have been a great film is marred by too many fragmented plotlines that are never resolved. Some of the local characters are compelling, but the star is really the built environment, as lovingly shot as a Garbo close-up.

The canvas includes myriad abandoned buildings, graffiti, walls, crumbling facades, homes being demolished, and skylines that bear the scars of postindustrial decline. Here is the graphic evidence of exactly what does happen to cities and people’s lives when corporations send jobs to Mexico. Detropia cinematically illustrates the premise of Chris Hedges’ and Joe Sacco’s fascinating book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (see my review on 9/3/12). 

Invocation

photo: Heidi Utz

Santa Fe, N. Mex
2005

Churchyard Tango

photo by Heidi Utz

Jacksonville, Oregon
2008

The watercourse, a speeding bullet

I. August 2011

Today I sit in an air-conditioned, boxlike structure, near the edge of a continent, waiting. On the opposite edge of the same continent, a wall of water unleashes its fury on the city on whose contour I was raised. Well-fed, a bit tipsy, lonely, I wait out the gale, wait wondering how the storm will vent its spleen and where and when. This is the second time this summer those I know and love have been evacuated due to natural disaster. The Earth twitches as the dead rattle before succumbing, while two female politicos talk drill, baby, drill and dismantling the EPA, and pretend they’re not women who sustain life.

photo: Heidi Utz

Last night I walked in Lithia Park and watched the Ashland Creek shoot across the rocks in its twisty, curvy trajectory through the woods. Stood on a bridge and looked out with a question on my lips…What will it be like if I stay here? And what will it be if I go back to the desert? Divination came in two eddies, side by side. The first, for staying, was black and flat, with nearly no movement the eye could see. The second, for going, was a gentle circular swim—not a whirlpool or anything close to dramatic, just a foamy, leaf-flecked swirl in the same direction, over and over again. Both seemed like little circles of bathwater, set aside from the main current which seemed to fly. This, something told me, is the current of much of the world. In living here, in this isolated valley, you are set aside, a protected observer.

I walked further through the woods still unsettled, as I could feel a pressure in my body, the foreboding of a wall of water about to upend mile after mile of concrete barriers mortals had placed against her. Waves of a planet that had withstood so much for so long, finally exploding in fury… And soon I heard water splashing loudly, as if dammed and released, dammed and released. Charging through a pipe into the creek.

Thirty-one summers ago, my mom and I sat on the shore of a barrier island, where the waves landed gently inches from our beach chairs, and we read long novels and allowed the water to hypnotize us day after day. The small stores that sold plastic rafts and pails and colorful long towels and suntan lotion felt like innocence. And sometimes I did not know if this was her last summer walking barefoot in the wet sand. But I knew that whatever happened, the land beneath us would not waver. That the shore in Jersey would always remain, year after year, a place of unique identity, escape, a reliable spot to see fishing boats and dirty seagulls and blue sea glass with soft rounded edges.

II.

The storm ducks and weaves through territory I know, the place of my birth, the province of my ancestors, my father’s home now, the dwelling place of friends and former lovers, the streets I’ve walked, the skyscrapers my great-cousin the architect once built. It’s a hot clear day in Oregon, nearly 100, hardly a cloud in the blue sky, a light breeze. I stand in a graveyard ready to harvest blackberries in a spot my love once showed me. I feel more than 3,000 miles from the East as I walk past a pristine duck pond and the residents honk and squawk. The berries are still not quite ripe, sitting red and green and grey in tiny clumps on the vine. Last year this time they were plumper, blacker, and more ready. But spring came late and the whole cycle of nature is thrown off. I walk back up the steep hill to where the graves are. See a stone marked “NOBODY,” with a birthdate in March 1981. Another, more sculpted white stone has no name, but a curved sliver removed: “Passing through.”  

When I left my mother in her human form, she was in a small, medicine-green room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Waiting for a wall of water to carry her war-torn body to higher ground. I stood vigil and could feel her readiness and fear of leaving, the stillness of a life ratcheted down to just its essential operations: breathing, moving blood through small channels, the barely perceptible throbs within organ tissues. A storm that had come to her nine years prior, with black-shrouded visions of apocalypse she gave no quarter. Came as a notice to evacuate, leave her earth-body as a shell, give in to the inevitable. She waved it on as one refusing when all the sheriffs and mayors and official mandates told her she could not stay. And for nine years she sat in her attic ducking waters that kept rising and holding her ground, even when the house was marked “occupants dead.”

photo: caphotosnewyork, Carlos Ayala

III. Bloomberg has ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands, and the city that never sleeps has no mass transit, no flights coming or going, no exit routes for thousands sitting waiting in its five boroughs. The streets are empty, subways stopped. Nine are dead. Two million have no power. The rest have no agency. Irene brings tide like no New Yorker has ever seen to its jaded doorstep, commanding respect from even the most cynical. The island is surrounded on every side with water, a fact so easily ignored when you are walking beside a thousand others on their ways to work and play at 8 or 10 or midnight. In a place so given over to the human-made, nature is the animals in the Bronx zoo on a class trip or a skinny sapling tied to a stake with a length of rubber hose every six blocks. Taxi tires may swoosh in a rainstorm, lightning may crackle in a summer sky. Other than that, it’s entirely the man-created world, reminding you of your sinew, your strength, your engineering prowess…at least for a couple hundred years of history. You drive a mile through a tunnel barely remembering that on the other side of that concrete wall is the entire force of the Atlantic Ocean. You travel through it, dry and unscathed, forgetting you are surrounded by sea. Without reminders of your guest status in nature, leaving your primacy in the land human made feels silly and even annoying. How could anything so ridiculous as “nature” threaten these massive 100-story monoliths? How could the splashes of water even touch what all-powerful beings have so carefully constructed? A hurricane? Just another show. We’ll stay home and watch it on our flatscreen TVs, drink beer, light candles. Have a little party. Hey, Irene, show us whatcha got. And get the fuck outta here by tomorrow because this nature shit is a real pain in the ass.

IV.

My favorite photo of my grandmother shows her standing on the beach, Avon-by-the-Sea, wearing ballet shoes, one pointed toward the water. She is in her sixties, sporting cat-eye glasses, smiling wistfully toward the ocean. Even when she was a girl, growing up in Paterson in the early part of the last century, nature and NJ did not often intersect. They sat in different corners of the boxing ring, and usually man came out swinging, while nature cowered and ducked blows. The century was being industrialized and we were winning, triumphing OVER and ABOVE. It was a match, and we were so frequently (albeit ostensibly) victors. Harnessing power of rushing waters. My grandmother and her father and sisters and brothers worked in a mill on the Great Falls using the seas of the Atlantic to make fine silk for the world. My grandmother, a soft, sensible, sweet, and very smart woman, did not see the harm in the illusion of control over—if it crossed her mind at all.

As churchgoing and God-loving as she was, nothing told her that the natural world was not ours to use. Her way was the way of all early-20^th-century city dwellers. When you don’t live in a forest, it’s hard to feel the heartbeat of a tree pulsing through its rings. When there are modernity and Machine Age notions of progress to cater to, those that live and breathe become merely resources.

V. January 2013

I sit behind a wall in a sad, loutish city. It’s winter; the five strands of green in the yard are dead. Drought makes the desert even drier than I’d remembered it, the spirit much more gristly and insular. If you want water here, you need to walk where the earth opens up. In Santa Fe it’s deemed acequia; here it’s just “the ditch.” Under the ugly brown mountain, there are few poets, and the remnants of indigenous identity are discarded somewhere near the confluence of routes 25 and 40. I leave my house seldom because there’s little I’m connected to outside and no one wants to talk, really. They text my avatar and I hit Ignore. People live in condos and shop at Walmart and work for the military-industrial complex or Taco Bell. They get lost in their adobe and concrete microcosms, in their screens and phones, and forget to glance up at the edges of sky and points of stars. When you walk the streets, no one will risk eye contact because you are nondigital and therefore suspect. They mostly look at themselves, and more importantly, themselves.

Last fall, the hurricane of the year before was superseded by an even greater behemoth, one whose wreckage still litters the Jersey shoreline. The patch of coast from which my mom and I surveyed the horizon has washed away. The beach houses we rented each summer, the restaurants we frequented, the pier we played on, all of it, gone. Thousands have been homeless all winter, freezing in tents while Congress equivocates. Twelve-foot waves subsumed everything, pressing southern coastal NJ into memory and memory alone. We are told that this is the way it’s going to be from now on, that the storms will get bigger, the waves mightier and more arrogant, the damage more incalculable—as if incalculability had degrees.

Here in the middle, we die a different death, death of desiccation, of poverty, of people who lack nature and nature that lacks respect. And into this standoff America brings anger and guns, decides that kids are acceptable victims, and vents the collective spleen through bullets and displays of madness and hubris we’ve been told is “our right.” Our children sit in lockdown as our oceans take our homes. And the politicians tell us nothing’s wrong. It’s all as it should be. And in a sense, they’re right. As every reaction demands an equal and opposite reaction, we stand in the path of a balance coming due. As it should be. And despite making baboon-like shows of macho bluster, the AK-47s and overamped testosterone, there is nothing left for us to do but wait in absolute vulnerability for that which will inevitably carry us back into the stream.