I prefer to define myself, and live against your rules and expectations.
I was chaste. My dresses protected me, and I waited for sleep in an artistic pose. I detached myself from the ground even more. I flew over it. I was sure of being able to cross it with the same ease, and my thefts in the church made me lighter still. The return of Michaelis made me slightly heavier, for though he helped me steal, he was almost always smiling, with a familiar smile.
I’m not sure whether it is the whole world
or just my own skin
but sometimes I want to be free of it all.
I try to teach art as an act of free thought, as an act of open rebellion. (And art is always about problem solving.)
The neo-conservatives want you to think that might makes right, that to solve problems is only question of physical strength, economic strength.
In humility there is strength.
In the fall of 1991, my junior year in college, I started looking into study abroad programs. I was an English major, with a minor in Music. I was well ahead of schedule in regards to completing the course work for my major, so I’d made the commitment to myself to study another form of music (percussion, specifically) overseas before graduation.
For the most part, I’d resolved to go to Africa. I was a drummer, and quite interested in many of the traditions I’d learned about already in both Eastern and Western Africa. Somehow – and I’m not sure how – Indonesia was also on my list. At the time, I knew next to nothing about Indonesia. That fall, however, I picked up a recording that changed my life. The record was Javanese Court Gamelan, Vol. II, published by Nonesuch Records. On this record is a lovely recording of a piece called Gendhing Bonang Babar Layar. This recording has touched me as much as another piece of art, and as a result of which, I abandoned the idea of going to Africa, and instead went to study gamelan in Indonesia. I had to know something more about this music
It has look been an aspiration of mine to play Babar Layar. I make note of this today because finally I have the opportunity. The Cornell Gamelan is adding this piece to our repetoire. This is a lovely time for me. Since first hearing this recording, I’ve learned a great deal more about both Balinese and Javanese gamelan. Gendhing Bonang is perhaps my favorite form of Javanese music, and Babar Layar still means a great deal to me.
I drifted aimlessly my first months out of college. In the first six months, I had as many jobs, each worse than the one before. I finally settled into a job at the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, CO. It was a good place to be at the time, I love books, and like the books themselves might suggest, the store attracted a lot of curious, free-thinking people. I was able to work out a schedule where I worked 40 hours in 3-4 days, and used the remaining week to work on my photography.
About a year into the job, I developed a routine that enabled me to seriously pursue my photography. I didn’t have much money – minimum wage, really – but was able to outfit myself with a nice working studio. I bought a stainless steel sink at a junkyard, and built counter tops with scrape materials from my dad’s construction business. I bought a 5×7 Russian view camera, a World War II make, quite inexpensively, and printed all my negatives in platinum/palladium, doing all my printing under the sun. I photographed early in the morning, at sunrise, before going to work, and then used my days off to print the negatives.
I was pursuing a series of photographs in Commerce City, CO, a small industrial town just north of Denver. Commerce City is known for its petroleum refineries, and it’s also home to a Purina Dog Chow manufacturing plant.
Strangely, the city is rather beautiful. On the western edge of the plains, and just east of the mountains, Commerce City has expansive views of the mountains and downtown Denver. The light at sunrise was always amazing, and the air full of smoke plumes from the refineries and factories.
Early one February morning, I was out photographing. It was about 6:30 in the morning, and the air was bitter cold. The light was amazing, the long shadows of morning and winter light tried to warm the air. I made a picture, and quickly moved to capture another. I picked up the tripod with the camera still mounted, and as I turned to make my move the camera fell to the ground. It shattered, the old wood splintered easily. I picked up as many of the pieces as I could, loaded my equipment into my car and headed for work.
At the next opportunity, I pieced the camera back together. I collected a dozen or more fragments of wood, and assembled them like a puzzle. Knowing full well that it would be quite a while before I could afford another camera (as cheap as this was, I broke the bank to get it), I did my best to salvage the camera. I was able to rebuild it enough that I continued to use the camera for several more years. It was a sorry sight, two different colors of grey from my painting over the glued pieces, never quite matching the original grey color. It never functioned the same, but I needed it to make my pictures.
There is something worth learning here: all you need to make pictures is the need itself.
Struggling with myself, and trying to find the energy to connect with my photographs, I found myself instead procrastinating by googling some of my classmates from art school. I wanted to see what they were all up to, and to see how my life, work, and accomplishments stacked up.
Doing these kinds of things, it is always easy to feel poorly about oneself. I got to thinking, however, about an email I sent to a friend just the other day. My friend contacted me, feeling in the dumps for not receiving a grant. I reponded by saying:
Speaking from experience, you can’t let this kind of shit get to you. There are a couple of nice pictures in this selection of grant recipients, but for the most part it is just wallowing in its own trendiness. One of the reasons I don’t apply for things like this very often is that I don’t really want to feel like one among many, but would rather feel one with myself (and thus true to my ideals).
Being true to yourself; that’s harder than it sounds.
So, as I mentioned before, my meeting Frank Gohlke was a huge influence. That early influence was so great, I followed Frank to the Massachusetts College of Art, in hopes to work with him again as I pursued my MFA (though I think I talked with him no more than 3-4 times during those two years). Today, as I continue my daily struggle of defining myself as a photographer, it feels great to reconnect with Frank’s thoughts and work, it’s like rediscovering something essential.
Perhaps it helps me to better understand, or perhaps by copying them down myself I feel I can take a certain ownership over them, but again I simply would like to share a few passages from his recent book Thoughts on Landscape:
If I had to define an ideal viewer, it would simply be someone who had enough trust in their own responses to things and enough ability to be quiet. If they were able to articulate that response that would be wonderful, too, because we would learn something. You never know what’s it for, but I keep doing it.
I mean only in the last five years or so have a number of very young ambitious artists chosen photography as their primary medium. If they were painters, they would be doing the same thing. They’re doing it now in photography because that seems to be the medium, or at least a medium, in which a lot of very important things are happening. It look as if, you know, we’re in this horrible period where there’s an enormous amount of insincere, inauthentic, strategic and unloving work, but I don’t think it’s really very much different than it’s been most of this century in terms of the number of artists who are primarily interested in making a career and the number of artists who are interested in living a life.
The only really important thing to do is to work. Where you do it is not inconsequential and has a lot to do with your own state of self-confidence, your own sense of how ignorant you can afford to be of certain things…there are crucial decisions. But whether you to graduate school or don’t go, or live in isolation or seek community, whatever, if you don’t do the work, you’re not going to do anything….Well, you know what Freud said. Two important things in life, something he said toward the end of his life. “What are the most important things in life, Dr. Freud?” “Lieben und arbeiten” “To love and to work.” Everything important can fit in those two. Love and work.
In August 1992, I traveled to Bali, Indonesia to study Balinese gamelan, religion, and art. I was there for about 5 months, returning just before New Years.
Just after I returned, I took a week long workshop on photography taught by Frank Gohlke. This workshop was great, and is part of how I became to be a photographer today.
Recently, I picked up a copy of Thoughts on Landscape, a selection of essays and interviews by Frank. His first book, Measure of Emptiness, was close to completion when we first met in 1992. I loved this work, and responded to so many things he had to say about making pictures. I can’t tell a lie though, it’s been a quite while since I’ve considered Frank’s work; his was an early influence.
Thoughts on Landscape, however, has been a delight to read. I want to share one passage in particular, from a statement he wrote in 1979:
Making pictures is a way of creating worlds within the frame that provide almost the same richness and pleasure as direct experience of the world – yet the world itself is never quite so clear as in a good photograph. There is something peculiar about the way we attribute the clarity of some photographs to the world itself. I try to reinforce that paradox by making photographs that convince the viewer that those revelations, that order, that potential for meaning, are coming from the world and not the photograph.
I think this is the kind of thoughtfulness that inspired me to become a photographer myself.
Nick woke me at about 9am. He was smoking a cigarette and listening to dance music from Thailand. He has a loft in Green Point, Brooklyn. We chatted for a few minutes, and then walked up the street to get breakfast. Over breakfast, we talked. We spoke of music, parenting, and how we grew up (you know, who did what with who and what did it taste like kind of talk). This also felt great. There was a nice trust built between us with such a minimal context with which to know one another. Conversation came easily.
We finished breakfast and went back to the library for a rehearsal. We rehearsed from 11-1, and then broke for a meal. Today, I joined the chorus, and sang for the first time since college.
The good folks at the Indonesian Consulte in New York provided lunch, traditional Indonesian food served out of styrofoam boxes. Terima kasih banyak.
The performance started around 3pm. The auditorium was filled to capacity, with more waiting to get in. My mom and dad came from Colorado to see the show. Here is a document of the performance (the recording doesn’t do the music full justice).
It’s amazing how intimate an experience 43 people can share, and with so little of it spoken. After the performance, there was lots of mingling around the stage, friends and family showing both support and curiosity about the insturments. Much more than the performance, the rehearsal Friday night was the meaningful act for me, the performance was just gravy.
I met up with an old friend, a former student, and we went for a beer and talked about things back in the day. I later met mom and dad for dinner. I was exhausted when I returned to Nick’s place in Green Point that night.
I slept later than I meant to the next morning. I awoke to learn I’d lost my voice, from several hours of singing a coming cold.
I scrambled to Port Authority and caught a 10:15 bus from New York to Ithaca. It started to rain hard as we left the city, and by the time we got to Sullivan County it was snowing hard, a white-out. Cars were spinning off the road, the hills long and steep. I was glad not to be driving.
We drove to White Plains, and then caught a train into Manhattan. We went straight to the Indonesian consulate, via Grand Central Station – it’s been year’s since I’ve been here and taken in this well articulated and fantastic space – where we meet with members of Gamelan Kusuma Laras, and got started loading the instruments into a truck for transportation over to Lincoln Center.
When we arrived at the consulate, we met in the basement. It was an odd mix of people. Conversation was minimal, strained at best. It didn’t take long to load the instruments. After seeing off the driver, we decided to walk through Central Park to get to Lincoln Center, it seemed to make more sense than taking a subway. It was brutally cold, but this was a necessary step in getting members from the two groups to mix. It felt good to walk briskly in the bitter air. I walked with a young man who had just returned from Southern Kalimantan. He was there as a Fulbright Scholar teaching English. He started playing gamelan just a few months ago after returning back to the States, and had ambitions as a writer.
It took about 30-40 minutes to walk through the park to Amsterdam, where we finally relocated at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The moving truck loaded with the instruments pulled up just after we arrived.
We quickly moved the instruments onto the main stage, and then discussed the best way to arrange them for the performance. It didn’t take long. We arrived at the consulate around 2:00 in the afternoon, and once we completed arranging the stage it was about 4:45. By this point, more members of the New York gamelan were beginning to arrive. Originally our numbers were about 10-12, now we were closer to 20. We split into two groups, and left to get dinner before rehearsal at 6:30.
We went to a Greek restaurant just 4-5 blocks south down Amsterdam. There were probably 12 of us, including Pak Harjito and his family. I ordered a grilled chicken dish seasoned with lemon and olive oil, served with roasted potatoes, and I had a hot coffee.
Our stay at the restaurant wasn’t long. We all reconvened at the library again a little before 6:30. By this time the group was much larger, about 40 in all. We gathered to rehearse the four pieces prepared for the performance. Only one of these had a I played before, Ladrang Pucung.
I played and performed with my first gamelan in August of 1992, Tunas Mekar. This performance was the first orchestrated works by Made Lasmawan in Colorado (prior to that, he directed a gamelan in San Diego). Just a week or two after this first performance, I left to study in Bali, Indonesia. Since returning from Bali, I’ve played with 5-6 different gamelans, though until recently these were all Balinese. I started studying Javanese music just about a year and an half ago; it’s still new to me.
This first night of rehearsal caught me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting much, or at least I went into the experience with an open mind and a thirst for the experience itself, though despite that I wasn’t as ready to be moved as I really came to be. Indeed, something was awakened.
The rehearsal ended a little before 10pm. The music, it transformed me. It was unlike anything I had heard before. It was a full orchestra of bronze instruments – gender, saron, bonang, gong, kumpul, demung, slentem – and also included gambang, rebab, and great range of kendang. Additionally, there was a full chorus, perhaps 20 singers or more, including two female solos (Pak Harjito’s wife, and Jessica Kenney from Seattle).
The overtones, the harmonics of bronze, are incredible, as you can well imagine. It is material of profound resonance, best exemplified by the gong (one of two words from Javanese that carried over to English, amok being the other). Together with the shimmering soloists and a haunting, graceful, and supple rebab, the warm wood of gambang, and the delicate, sophisticated subtlety of gender, the orchestra was thickly layered with sound, orchestrated with great patience, discipline, love, and sensitivity. The passages with the full chorus filled the space with sound and beauty. I inhaled it. I sat completely silent, and listened with reverence, with the same patience at the heart of the music.
People gathered in small pools and groups around the stage after the rehearsal. Conversation was short, but there was a lovely and clear sense that we shared something meaningful. Some might call it a of devotional, or maybe a call to mystical experience.
In pursuit of fullness, a full gamelan experience in New York, I opted not to stay with a friend or someone familiar in The City, but rather chose to stay with a member of the group.
His name was Nick. Together with his girlfriend, Gabriella (aspirations as a choreographer, but now teaches yoga), Nick and I went to a burlesque bar in the Lower East Side called The Slipper Room. We met up with a friend of his named Viking (old pals from an Apple Retail Outlet in the City), who was there to celebrate his 40th.
The Slipper Room features an all-night stage show. The MC for the night modeled himself after Pan: he wore buck teeth, a white beard, shirtless, and goat legs from the waist down. He performed “stand up comedy” between the dancers. There was also one acrobat. He was short, well-groomed and handsome. He could balance head first down on a basketball, and could swallow whole ballons. The women, about 5 of them aging between 22-30, danced 3-5 minute numbers, erotic dances, but the dances were also skits in a way like Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, though much more funny and a great deal sexier. Think maybe, Ann Magnuson.
On arrival, Nick and I both ordered martinis, and Gabriella a whiskey. Gabriella didn’t stay long, in maybe just 15 minutes she left. Just after she was gone, Nick invited me out to smoke pot with Viking. The three of us huddled in an empty doorway, passing a one-hitter with a wooden dug-out. Across the street, a young black man sold drugs from under the canopy of a dark store front. Four young women approached us during a hit and asked directions.
I’d only had two hits, but had finished the martini before smoking. By the time I went back into The Slipper Room, I was hallucinating, or at least something like it. As I walked to the front by the stage with Nick, the people jammed into this space seemed both more animate and foreign. My senses were heightened and challenged. I felt like I had reached a limit, and could suddenly see more clearly.
It felt as though number of pieces of my psychic self were coming to the forefront, in order to offer more clarity or resolve. All that I’d experienced that led me to that point seemed clear, how this moment seemed like a distillate of all my life, and I knew immediately that somehow after my life would change thereafter. It all seemed like a moment for definition, a decisive moment.
I sat down in the front row with Nick and a woman who introduced herself as Sheridan. I was mesmerized by the energy around me. We left for Nick’s apartment around 1am.
