Apparently i haven’t exhausted the meat from 1976, for i woke up this morning thinking about what i’d written; the litany i created for that year - just to keep track of the moving parts was: 5 jobs, 5 residences, broke both hands, 60 stitches in one arm, an industrial size vat of simmering spaghetti sauce poured over the other and rear-ended into the middle of 17th St and Broadway by a truckload of drunken Mexicans. I was driving an Ice-Cube Blue Turquoise Toyota Corona that was the only car i’d ever been given. I’d like to say it was only driven by a little old lady from Pasadena, but my step-mother was close enough - we never bonded, though i may have finally forgiven her for taking a powder when Pop wouldn’t join the Mormon Church; her excuse was that she didn’t want to spend eternity alone - my take is she was fake all along, and just took the ride as far as she could get. I know that my lack of generosity toward her is a lesson i am still puzzling. Back to 1976; at this turn after experimenting with having roommates i realized i needed a locked door, or more fluency with what i thought was passable Spanish but in fact was execrable, and remains so to this day even after recently living in Mexico for close to 2 years.
I had found a 2nd floor room in an old school rooming house on East Broadway in Santa Ana; there may have been as many as 14 rooms with a common kitchen. By this time i was working in an industrial soup kitchen in Irvine, CA - “Todd’s Enterprises”, an irony only to myself because my cheques all read “Joseph T. Stevens.” I had narrowly avoided voluntary induction to the U.S. Army, the thinking being how to finance a college education, and 1976 being a lull in the emerging “war for profit” using an all volunteer army; i tested off the charts - i always do, but the Recruiting Sargent kept looking at my eyes · people always do. When he didn’t return to the office from some necessary cosultation, i chose to Carpe Diem and booked it with my complementary P-38 can opener as a souvenir of the occasion. I couldn’t say exactly where in the sequence of events i was pushed into the middle of 17th and Broadway, but i remember that i couldn’t chase the mother fuckers because their truck had left tire tracks on my trunk and crushed the wheel well to the point of shredding valuable tire tread were i to give chase.
What i remember is staying with boyhood chum down the street from where i had grown up, and sitting in the bathtub trying to figure out how to soap myself with one hand in a cast and the other covered in gauze where the simmering spaghetti had lifted the skin off of my arm like a skin off a boiled potato. Scott was kool, in a wannabe Trump kind of way if there was such a creature in those days. He was a mechanic poet, who had endured a compound fracture of his thigh bone recently enough to have compassion for my predicament, and very handy with industrial tools of all sorts. The Toyota was a unitized frame so the rear right quarter panel could simply be cut out with an oxy acetylene torch, and with view deft swings of a large size ball peen hammer and a 3 inch diameter marine red lamp mounted in the gaping cavity wired just so, i was street legal again, laughable at stop lights, but street legal. 12 months earlier during anytime in 1976 i was in my element - confident and happy, but terribly alone in city whose only real attraction was museums within walking distance of many subways stops and many, many interesting people.
To give you an idea of how arrogant i was, after two years of intensive studio drawing, before i left NYC for the last time, i burned a stack of drawings 3 inches high in the courtyard of where i was staying in the Lower Eastside. They represented 2 years of work with some of the finest instructors i have known, nor was it simple hubris. The elan of artists at that time and the passion for competent and authentic work was fierce and honorable - product was contemptible · but process was lauded; if you were one with your work there was nothing Art could not accomplish. It was in that spirit, that and a loneliness and longing for family and home that i could not reconcile that drove me back to California and my comeuppance for my lordly thinking and reckoning with just how little the world really believed in the power of creative determination, or more accurately how little i understood about the egos of Pop’s two wive’s - both artists - factored into equation of a precocious, however crazy offspring and his own concepts of what art is, could be, or could have been.
I was not welcome, or more accurately, i was welcomed as long as i adhered to the conventions of a family torn asunder by greed, ego and agism. For the longest time i tried to behave with decorum and respect only to find it was not reciprocal as part of what was to become the “fame game” between these to ex’s. Following on the heels of the desultory 70’s was the roaring 80’s and the two maternal dames beat me to the patron trough. I was on my own; nothing was much different, ma had changed the locks in the house i grew up in when i was 15 - justifiably · i was an “unruly child”. But these were different circumstances than simple differences about upbringing, i was fighting for a passion that had effectively rescued me from a dissipated youth. Rather than fame, what has turned out is my faith in my abilities was mostly denial in the process of becoming human. Art had been a crutch which distracted me from dealing with the wounds of growing up in a family that well-reflected the upending of a civilization born of deceit and based on profit. The superheated art markets of the last 100 years has demonstrated; there is no taking reality away from Paul Cezanne: his conviction, discipline and execution of fine art need no interpreters; but to try and equate value for the works of Kinkade, Neiman, Dali, etc as accomplishment, is like discussing the statesmanship of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the same breath as d_rump; comparing a vision of our future between Arundhati Roy and jeffery bezos; or the importance of candor between Walter Winchell and mark zuckerberg - get up on your hind legs humanity and carry yourselves into the future · ain’t nobody else gonna, and ya’ damn sure can’t buy it, or steal it from Target.
jts 01/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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