Grade Z

[gurdonark]

A close friend of mine in law school elected early on to use the legal education we acquired for things other than jury trials about auto accidents and conveyancing deeds. We went to law school just at the time that video technology first meant that every home could rent old movies. My friend, an avid fan of Grade Z horror films, realized that in the early days of this new VCR medium, people would rent anything. He therefore used his new found knowledge on property rights to begin tracing the rights to forgotten bad horror and children's movies into the defunct corporations and decedent's estates where those rights reposed. Then he'd buy the rights, for a thousand or two, and license the rights world-wide. I found great amusement that, say, the Polish rights were worth x amount, while the Czech rights were worth y amount. The rules of the licensing game were simple--you got an advance and a promise of plush royalties. The promise of royalty would never be honored. This led me to learn one of my favorite aphorisms about the entertainment business--"what you get up front is what you get".

My friend had a perfectly workable deal going as a rights buyer and seller, but he wanted more. He wanted to be a film-maker in his own right. Unlike some, who want to direct art films or write a moving screen play, though, my old friend Jeff wanted to do the business side of genre films. He wanted to produce Grade Z movies.

His first film bore the initial title "Angel of Vengeance", but later bore the monicker "Warcat". The film comprises roughly 76 minutes of sheer, unadulterated "hunt down the girl" violence. Indeed, in the reviews for such genre films, critics always note that the film is a "cut above" because it makes no real pretense at plot or characterization. Bad guys want to catch girl in desert terrain; girl turns tables on them; girl disposes of bad guys, one by one. It's a different sort of "guy meets girl, guy loses girl, guy gets girl" story. As I recall, my friend cast an unknown Vegas cocktail waitress as his heroine. The original director was Ray Dennis Steckler, known for low budget horror classics such as "The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies". For one reason or another, though, in mid-film, Mr. Steckler was replaced as director by the more staid Ted V. Mikels, whose more Merchant/Ivoryesque oeuvre includes movies such as "Mark of the Astro Zombies". The whole thing was financed with friends/family money, and, in the way of these things, turned a profit through tons of tiny dollar licenses to countries all over the world. My friend Jeff later went on to script and produce "Soldier's Fortune", with Gil Gerard, and to produce "Alienator", with Jan Michael Vincent. I actually invested in "Alienator", against my better judgment, and made a very slight profit. I watched one day's rushes for that movie, and realized that I am not destined in life to sit in little screening rooms watching the same scene of an alien being run over by an RV over and over again. I didn't even get to meet P.J. Soles, but I did get to meet a horror film director from the 50s my friend assured me I should be impressed to meet, whose work included something about a "sun devil", if I recall.

Jeff went on to do a little legit TV movie of the week field direction in a few films, where he acquired the nickname "Doc", because he kept saying he wanted to go to Grenada and study medicine. Then he got an LLM in intelletual property in Chicago, bought the Charles Atlas Company, and settled into being a vendor of exercise programs and licensor of the famous ad "how Mac became a man", including the fellow kicking sand in the scrawny weakling's face. I saw him on the A & E biography of Charles Atlas, in his three piece business suit, speaking in hushed tones of passed greatness. He could have been Charlie Rose. This was a contrast to the article on him in "Fangoria Magazine", which focused on his fondness for schlock horror movies. Jeff's achieved a kind of success that, when he was 15, would have seemed really cool to him. I think that's one way to look at worldly success--how would one's 15 year old self feel about one now?

I am an avid non-fan of bad genre horror movies (i.e., I take pains to avoid them), and my choices in life, both professional and personal, are different than Jeff's in many respects. But I find in Jeff a few inspirations. Jeff grew up with a little money in rural Arkansas, but no connections at all. He didn't go to the "right" colleges, and he didn't "know" the right people. He met Vincent Price when Mr. Price came to his hometown for a film festival, but he didn't "make use" of this contact for anything. His projects usually involved raising funds from friends, done on shoe string budgets, with an eye to independent business. Yet Jeff managed to produce movies, direct movies, script movies and act in movies, and even become something of a cult "name" in his field. How did he do it? He focused on what he wanted and he believed in himself when everyone else thought him an eccentric joke. He found a niche, and carved in it.

Earlier this week I was going to post about William Jewel McGonagle, the Scot bad poet. McGonagle wrote rhymed stuff in Dundee, and actually earned a living of sorts at it. But the living he earned was not because of his immense talent, but because people would hire him to make fun of his work. He would give recitals in rented auditoriums to catcalls and jeers. He was unperturbed until late in life, certain that he was a great poet. Eventually, he did retire to Perth to try to find a more congenial set of hearers. I like that this man's life's work has been rewarded with universal fame as a bad poet. Of course, now "bad poetry itself spawns not only an LJ community, but contests world-wide. I prefer to make my poetry bad by inadvertence than by intention, personally. I am bad only because I am not good.

Production of inferior creative product is not a strange thing for me. I mailed off my third compact disk to a purchaser of "Vibrating Electric Fields", which I sold on eBay. "Chess Poems for the Tournament Player" has sold something in the range of 100 copies. I get kind notes from time to time from appreciative chess players who see it for what it is--a light-hearted bit of bad poetry intended to capture the moment of being a bad chess player. Sometimes I wish I were a truly "artistic" person, but I really like the little niche successes I achieve, tiny though they be. I am a microbe noticed only, really, by myself.

I'm probably one of the half-dozen people who really likes Woody Allen's movie, "Interiors". In particular, I like "Joey", the would-be artist who simply isn't talented. She's got the "soul" of an artist, but she's not got the chops. I think I like her character because I'm intrigued by the pull which being "artistic" has upon people.

As with many things, my thoughts and feelings on this are contradictory. I find on the one hand that some people really do have almost innate gifts for art, for poetry, for music and for novels. I find a much larger set of folks have sufficient talent that with hard work, they can achieve beautiful things. But it's undeniable that some folks have the longings to "be" artistic, but not really the chops to do so. When the longing is a writing or painting prompt, great. But pain because one is not what one is not seems to me to be rarified air indeed--so rarified that one cannot breathe.

I remember taking an acting class at a Unity church while I was in law school. I even co-wrote the class play, though I remember my co-authorship as more about typing than writing (indeed, most of my literary effort is like the Vidal quote about Jacqueline Susann, author of "Valley of the Dolls", that "she doesn't write, she types"). During the class, one instructor called upon each student to just walk, just make an entrance naturally, without acting. I'll never forget that one woman, an amiable "I love to act" type. When her time to "enter" came, you could see her lift herself up and change her carriage in an effort to act naturally. I still remember her hurt expression when the instructor asked her to go back and try again before she had even gotten going good. It's so hard to just be--one wishes to be someone else. She wished she could act--but it was hard to just act as herself.

I think that people love to express themselves, regardless of their talent. I see nothing wrong with this, and in most ways I see something very right in this. I think that the need for connection is a laudable thing, and the need for recognition is a perfectly understandable thing. But the reality is that only a tiny set of folks will get recognition or an income or the Heaven of remembrance by posterity. Artistic or musical or literary success is a very thin reed upon which to hang one's sense of self-worth. It's so elusive. In addition, it's so hard to know when one has achieved it what one has achieved. I like to read, sometimes, obscure little university scholar poets, but, like the book of poetry in the Millay poem, their work ends up in the second-hand store, largely neglected, unless someone by chance buys a book for a dollar and opens the pages.

In an earlier time, people posited that art could substitute for religion, religion having shown through scientific error and needless regulation its unsuitability to govern souls. But art itself proved a difficult goddess. The lack of common aesthetics, the competition between "experimental writing" and "quality writing" and "genre writing" and goodness knows what else, the constant sniping and over-analysis and sport by people who write but don't read--it's a curious time in the arts.

I sat on the plane to El Paso a week or two ago, reading Millay's "Lyric Poems". The 60ish orthopedic surgeon next to me, seeing my book, talked to me about poetry, and then launched into a diatribe about MFA over-abundance, and the problem of academic fiction and poetry. He was so over the top as to seem almost smug and negative, but I heard echoes in him of things I might say (and made a mental note to avoid this form of curmudgeonry as I age). This diatribe featured the story of his friend, a poet, who would smuggle his work into the shelves of the fabled City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. The doctor reported pointing it out to owner (and great poet) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who would complain that this author was the only "reverse shoplifter" he had, who would try to smuggle books in rather than out. I can sympathize with that poet--wouldn't it be great to be someone that people wanted to sell at "City Lights"? Part of me thinks with amusement of the difference between one's aspirations as a writer and one's achievement as a writer. I can well imagine that on the one hand, one sees oneself as living a bohemian life, with a magnetic personal attractiveness, thinking great thoughts, doing great things, when, in fact, one gets one's MFA, tries to write short stories for little literary mags nobody reads, drives an old Honda, and prays for a Pushcart Prize. It's hard to be a member of the lost generation when berets are at Wal Mart and all your literary atmosphere comes from having a brownie at Barnes & Noble. But surely the literature of this time is not that of Paris 1923 anyway. The poets of this time must write of SUVs and curious men named Ashcroft and the way that flowers look on smoggy days.

I think, though, that the cinematic cachet of "being a writer" or "being an artist" and even the "compulsion" to be one all distract from the reality. One works at what one can find to do that one feels will do what one is trying to do--earn money, find a vocation, fulfill oneself. When one is not working, one spends time with family, with hobbies, with oneself in a further attempt to make life enjoyable or at least bearable. If one is caught up in the "I am an artist or I am nothing" mode of thinking, that's very limiting indeed. I want a broader path to walk than that.

At the same time, I think that creative expression by a non-artist has a value. I know that my own work sometimes shows that I am trite or sentimental, not because I lack craft, but because I am sometimes trite and always sentimental. I think that the inauthentic writer can sometimes show the sheer authentic experience of inauthenticity. This is not always a bad thing.

I like to think that in life, adding to the overall contentment, adding to the overall compassion, and adding to the overall understanding are very important things. The arts can do any of these things. But imagining that only success in a literary endeavor "qualifies" as a good life seems to me to be limited indeed. It would be easier to be the strictest fundamentalist than to live in a world in which only good artists matter.

I like the Isak Dinesen story "Babette's Feast" (whose first US publication, by the way, was in "Ladies' Home Journal"), in which a French chef is forced to flee to Norway. After years of cooking flavorless fish dishes at the request of the sisters who are her employers, strict protestant religionists, she uses lottery winnings to make them a fine French meal. The sensual food is her gift to them for their kindness, and a window to a new set of experiences for her employers. To me, Babette is an artist, but she has no patrons, no followers, and her work is forgotten, after the moment which is a life. But her gift matters.

But, really, I don't have some grand conclusion which ties all this together. I just think that music and art and fiction and poetry all matter a good bit. But they are not the only reason to live.

I think there's more to life than thinking that one is an artist, if one only had the talent. Ultimately, life is more about kindness than great art to me, anyway. Artistic expression, after all, is omnipresent. But kindness and contentment---so elusive.

Comments

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

Thoughtful musings on a Saturday morning. There are so many shades of gray, or rather, so infinitely many colors of the spectrum as there are kinds and degrees of being an artist. As many as there are individually different snowflakes. Which is to say, each individual is unique. And how and why they come to art, and what it does for them, and what they do for it, is as variable as anything found in nature. *Success* is a man-made term, and it varies from age to age, and from culture to culture, and from person to person. There is art in pop culture, art from museums, art with a capital A, low-brow art, kitsch, camp, new age, and all the *ists* of every movement that came down the pike. But all of those things are cultural judgements--sometimes based on a thorough education of art through the ages and sometimes just pronounced by someone with the power to pronounce. None of it, in my mind, has much to do with the heart and soul of art that lives inside an artist. (ahh which *kind* of artist am I talking about?) -- the kind that does so because it's how they think, live, grow, ARE.
I know a lot of people who marvel over artists and wish they could be artists too---but I think that envy comes from marveling over the work, and wondering what on earth it must be like to think up such a thing, to conceive it, then execute it and bring it to life. That envy is more a commentary on the work. If what they saw was abhorrant, I doubt many would envy being that artist. (or at least an artist that produces THAT kind of work)--
But still, the work is all one can really see of the artist. It's impossible for one person to get inside another person and see what it's like to be them. So all the artist-envy, and the artist-wannabes, and the poseurs--in my mind, just muddy up the place and confuse the whole works. They come and go through phases...early 20's is prime. And those with daddy's bank book and sent to expensive art schools may even get as far as having the sheepskin MFA that confirms their authenticity. But if they don't really have it on the inside, they're nothing more than passers through.

Am I making any sense? I have no grand conclusion to tie this together either.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

You make a lot of good points here. I don't know the answer to the issues on these topics, but they interest me, and I appreciate you sharing your perspectives, which I value.

Art

[seraphimsigrist.livejournal.com]

Very nice bit of writing and this mostly
(so far, until I think further ,which am doing
at typing pace as usual, entirely) to say that
I read it--which it is pleasing maybe to know
people read and enjoyed something. I like
bad films pretty well but not really the grade Z
and not ones which are built solely around some
nasty moment(s)...old pirate type brother of
a friend(Dana Talley opera singer have mentioned)
with piratic name of Roger used to make soldier of
fortune type films of girls shooting automatic
weapons in las vegas desert, now he has some sort
of modeling agency, nice fellow... has drawn certain
limits to his life but...
(but someone might say I have too)
On art I do not think, and am sure you would agree,
that we need to reduce things to a level in order
to recognize acheivment...I would not say Ferlinghetti
is absolutely great, though great as you rightly say in City
Lights context, when put beside Pound for example, there
in a sense it is margerine beside butter, and yet
as you say he is butter compared to many...
well ..the image strains and boggles even or especially
my mind because I do not like the taste of either
butter or margerine as such. do like pound very well
ferlinghetti modestly well...and I think as St Paul
says in some other context, there is something to the
evaluation even if it is mine.
I think of a family friend, gone now,my mother's friend
named Eric Cox who was a British sea man and then a
missionary in jungles of Thailand(on application to
board on drinking he said "teetotler in theory but
not always in practice") He left a lot of writing of
an imaginative sort. It is not very good writing. Here is
where we would insist we retain the right to know that
it is not very good.
But he was a great man, really. He died of stomach cancer
retired in Pennsylvania. Gardening, radiant in a time
of difficult dying, full of awareness of God and of love
for his family and of the world too...
I expect it is the presence of God as source and as
evaluator if you will which makes it unnecessary to be
concerned if one doesnt get out into form what was in intention
--that is doesnt through limit of ability. Tolkien's Leaf
by Niggle on this. Even the Sphinx eroded by time. all
presumeably swept from here by heat death of universe, but
all intention joined to act, completing the act...
now I have written rather too much but it is airconditioned
here and outside puts one in mind of heat death. yours
indeed warmly
+Seraphim.

Re: Art

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

You make some really good points, here, and I don't have as much insight in reply. I go back and forth on art, but I recognize that I am merely a tourist in a country without maps when I explore it, achieving mixed results.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Interesting ponderings, about which I might say something if it weren't 90+ degrees in here without air-conditioning. As it is, I'll just copy a Dorothy Sayers quote which is vaguely relevant:

But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: "God is a spirit," "without body, parts or passions"; He is pure being. "I am that I am."

Man, very obviously, is not a being of this kind: this body, parts, and passions are only too conspicuous in his makeup. How then can he be said to resemble God? Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? A case may be argued for all these elements in the complex nature of man. But had the author of Genesis anything particular in his mind when he wrote? It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the "image" of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, "God created." The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things.

[blue-by-you.livejournal.com]

Egad. You did spark the long comments, didn't you. I'm going to be different this time and keep it short. Three things: I agreed with you; I disagreed with you; and, once again, you said brilliant things.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I like the comments, both short and long. As I read the post, I, too, find much to agree with and disagree with in what I said, but I'm not sure what I'd affirm and what I'd revise. Thanks for the kind words.

[blue-by-you.livejournal.com]

Okay, one more thing: I really like your webpage. Especially the first "10 things" because you could have written them for me. I don't think #3 misses the mark at all.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Someday I will have to go back and line up the margins right on that page, so that I can call it "Gurdonark's Well-formatted Webpage".

I think this page is a succinct introduction to who I am. Thanks for reading it! I'm never sure that any declarations about the "big things" are on the mark :).

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

You may be right about craft. I do meet an awful lot of folks who try to do amateur law :)

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

nice comments
once again, you 'damn yourself with faint praise' Robert.
your life, and your expression of it in LJ is what seems to me
to be VERY important. you have a way of writing that not
only is very descriptive, but makes me glad i 'know' you.
can't wait to show you Hole-In-The-Rock and the Desert
Botanical Garden(which is just a stone's throw from there.
home your late July trip allows for this. i'm looking
forward to seeing you, if only for a coffee and chat.
you also give me faith that there are decent kind and honest
lawyers out there, which is something that i never had
before! in that spirit, i will e-mail you a lawyer-farmer
joke which i'm sure you can appreciate.
~paul

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Very kind of you. When I am in Phoenix for more than a brief hop, I'll give you a call!

Re:

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

do you have my phone #? btw, i stopped
in the remaindered bookstore today. i hadn't
had any luck there before, but today i got BOOK
OF THE HOPI(Frank Waters)SAM(Tom Hallman,
Jr.)JACK KEROUAC(Barry Miles)MILES(Miles
Davis with Quincy Troupe)& SILENT CHILDREN
(Ramsey Campbell). my wife wanted to go to
the Jockey Outlet, so i got to drive her there
for a 'carrying charge' of five books, lol! oh
yes, if you had followed the Lynx Lake Road
until you thought you were lost, and it turned
into a little lane, you'd have gotten to Lynx
Lake. you'd probably think it was more of a
large pond. i haven't been there in years.
originally it was stocked with crappie, but
i understand that is has attracted many
birds and other animals to drink, etc. the chances
of seeing a lynx in AZ are pretty small, unless
you're a REALLY silent bow hunter or a persistent
searcher. e-mail in two minutes.
~paul

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

Wheeling and dealing in the "intellectual property" of others seems somehow abhorrent to me.

I think I probably don't have anything else to say on the topic of art. I can only say that where others seem to find these kinds of musings so uplifting, I find them utterly depressing. Maybe I just see too much of myself in the above and I hate it.

Please know I don't say this to be confrontational or rude.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I am grateful that you tell me what you think, on any topic.
I don't see it as confrontational or rude. I do not intend to depress you, but I know that intentions and results do not align.

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you feel that way. As soon as I posted my comment I regretted it. You needn't have any intentions behind your posts. Anyway, I know you would never have any ill-intentions. It's no news that I'm one frustrated lass, and I loathe to have a mirror held up to my inadequacies. And sometimes your thoughtful posts have that effect. But that's my problem, not yours.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

You don't have to regret posting a comment to me, or worry about these things. I take on faith your friendship and good will, and real friends can be negative with one another. I think that LJ would border on trite if it were only about positive feedback.

I think that being frustrated must be ameliorated somewhat by being able to use a choice phrase like "one frustrated lass". So many things about you that you count as inadequacies I might count as virtues, but that's in the nature of things, isn't it?
Sometimes things feel much worse ot the person experiencing the frustration than they actually, on objective review, prove to be. I did take as part of my notion for the underlying post the frustration of being a non-artist you and I have touched upon. My treatment of the topic actually went in a different direction than anything that would relate to you, except for the part about how I think it's more important to live kindly than to be an artist, which I suppose might have general applicability. The remainder of the post was inspired by a pointed but useful criticism of my silly gurdonpoems project in another journal. So if there was any mirror holding here, it was only to an image of myself. Sometimes I think that your mirror which shows yourself to you is flawed, as you seem to see the most unsettling images there, but I think that you're quite a fascinating person, really.

People who wheel and deal in intellectual property, by the way, are no better nor worse than people who wheel and deal in cheesecake. :)