ESSAY: Levi's New Ad Campaign

Screen shot from Levi's ad, "Go Forth", featuring Walt Whitman in scratchy authentic sounding old 78 vinyl voiceover - unbelievable, really. It's meant to be powerful, poetic, a ode to the endurance and dignity of mankind. Fireworks go off, sounding like gunshots. It's a gritty place of trial and try-again, this America. Then, the ad slaps a close-up of the little red Levi's tab onto the last frame. Is that a subtle butt shot? Well, that's where that little tab is, n'est-ce-pas?

When I found out it was shot mostly in Louisiana, I thought of Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North) - didn't they make you see that in film class - whose last documentary was a commission from Standard Oil (1948), called Louisiana Story. It's the story of the construction of an oil rig amidst a pristine wetlands, and how well it all turned out. It did, didn't it? Didn't it?

"The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people."

Walt Whitman

I want to praise activists through the years.

I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
Studs Terkel, author of Working

Studs, are you turning over in your grave yet? Just keep reading.

Next Ad "We are all workers":

[wind blows soft and sad as soft slow-spoken African-American young girl reads her school essay in voiceover]

"We were taught how the pioneers went into the West.

They...made up what things could be...

People got sad and left.

Maybe the world breaks on purpose...so we can have work to do.

...people can't see...how frontiers are all around us." [ glorious orchestral music up]

from To Work, directed by John Hillcoat, shot in

Braddock, PA

Screen shot from We Are All Workers, directed by

Aaron Rose, a five-minute mini-documentary about the attempt

of Braddock PA, a decaying milltown, to rebuild as a commercial center

and artists' community. It's a story of urban reclamation, going green,

and Levi's Jeans. Weiden & Kennedy, a Portland ad agency (Nike, Old Spice,

Target, Converse) did these incredibly artsy beautiful ads.

Well, you've got to have something to wear while you're saving the earth. Gosh, it's nice to hear someone talkin' credit about what we're tryin' to do. Maybe it's not so bad to have to work hard.

It still takes bodysweatmuscle work, work with your hands and back, to keep things clean, to get fixin' up done, doesn't it. Kinda makes you think how you oughta help out, join in. They were like that in the '60's. They had new explanations, new motions and notions. You see them around today, in post offices, Apple stores, with their backpacks, faded blue denim workshirts,

hiking boots, folk dance skirts swirling. Back East, lots of them, still. I think they got them in

Idaho and Oklahoma, too. Don't they?

What they've got is people who wear jeans but really don't want to be had. Do you really think that rugged individualists are going to buy jeans because a corporation has branded itself as socially responsibile? Has endowed itself with certain American rights? Where are these jeans made, anyway? Did Levi's open a factory in Braddock?

I was going to get a plane and go wash birds in Louisiana. Then my biologist brother told me that it's really hard on them to be washed with detergent and most of them die, unable to function in the new locations they are released to.

So I just cleaned the garage instead. I hired two Levi-clad day laborers from the city's hiring site who worked very hard in 95 degree temperatures for $12 a hour, a burrito lunch, and all the water they could drink. See, I got the idea, right? Then I had a garage sale and people paid me to carry away my junk.

I think I'll just let everyone else reclaim, resist, and buy the jeans instead and hang out looking retro-cool.

If hard work were really a virtue, then mules would be saints.

James Dee Richardson

Maybe they really are, and we just don't know it.

Seriously, the commercials are exquisite in tone, frame by frame marvels of polished balance, and have a most lyric and elegiac mood, deeply cinematic. I love the color, the scratchy chalky typeface, the music. Reverentially, I return to Walker Evans, the WPA murals, Dorothea Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher, The Grapes of Wrath...You just want them to go on and on...video photo essays of deep and satisfying summation.

Are these ads going to sell jeans? I do want to see the nursing home of the baby boomers in a few years, check out what they're wearing while they listen to the Stones. Hope they can still hear them.

LAST AD: Verizon

An unshaven, balding young man turns his chiseled profile to the heavens. His head is circled by halos, blue, undulating to reddish near his shirt. His shirt and tie are open, his chest is swelled with grace. He is trusting, open; a seeker who has listened and looked for answers, and is being filled with them as we gaze.

Yes, the heavens are filled with messages these days, just like they've always been. There's scholarly agreement about just what St. Teresa found out in her moments of rapture. I wonder about our St. John of the Electronic Desert, though. What twittering shades have informed his vision?

Signal is strength - just what does that mean? Is that like the medium is the message? That means that content is irrelevant, doesn't it? Or maybe, it's like E.M. Forster, "only connect". That will be enough to keep the airwaves open.

The ad is proto/neo-Shepard Fairey, of recent Obama-vision notoriety. What makes me connect the two advertisements? There's a kind of fascist agit-prop message underlying this style, and also in the Levi's ads, I think. It serves as a kind of advertiser's warning and confession: Don't be fooled; this really is an ad after all, and I really am trying to sell you something. They just do it so very very well.

ART REVIEW & ESSAY: Textiles: The Value of the Decorative Essay&Photos

author photo

Textiles have a powerful continuing fascination for me - as an object class, they serve the most daily, intimate, bodily and domestic needs, but cultures almost immediately begin to embellish them with images that retain undeniable authenticity. It's impossible to escape communicating status, aesthetic values, and personal identity when donning a garment of any kind. They function as brand, prison, transparency, and mirror. To wrap the body is the first, continuing, and last act of human life, the most poignant care the family and society performs for each other.

Since textiles are impossible to redact, their power has relegated them to a separate class of art object - domesticana - as the Chicano art movement terms art products made by women with traditional female-gendered material and messages.

Dean MacCannell in The Tourist, describes tourism as a compensatory perceptual stance and relational form, an attempt at "moral involvement" (p. 40) because "everyday people...[are]...condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for...authenticity, to catch...a...glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity, or purity of others' "[cultures] (p.41). Global capitalism and materialism has destroyed human unity with the natural world and only simulated realities are available.

 "I hate traveling and explorers". Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, quoted in Artforum, April, 2010, p. 174

I would go further, suggest that the collector/aesthetician-stance may serve a similar purpose. MacCannell, whose critique, chilling and undeniable as it is, seems to me to leave us in an all too familiar unidimensional wasteland. Might as well become a freegan. Then I look at Claude Levi-Strauss describing a transformational energy in culture that reverses negative meanings, rendering them positive. An example is cannibalism. Christianity has created a symbolic sacrament of the body and blood that functions to incorporate power from the god, as cannibals believed they could when they consumed their enemies. (Thomas Crow, Artforum, April, 2010, p. 171).

Psychologists like Erick Erickson also describe behaviors that while neurotic in some, may be mature ego function in others. (Childhood and Society). Always, dependent upon the context. So, I aim for a post-modern informed, contextual integration. It is the task of individual to create a purposeful stance, which though subjective, will be convincing.

I realize that I want an aesthetic that is both journey to enjoyment and transcendence. It must not deny irrationality, hypocrisy, and grief. No scolding or preaching either. Don't bleach me dry traveling to distant conceptual plateaus. Tricky navigation is challenging and welcome. Oh, and please, an occasional humorous side trip. The experience of life on this wasted industrial plain still is our life to live. Reductionism is a reverse disposal of perspective, cramping open-ended possibility and creative action.

Then, to return to my interest in textiles and tourism. These are my mother's old handkerchiefs. Born in 1910, surely she used them for decades until kleenex convenience replaced them. I found them in an unironed, but clean, wadded-up ball when I went through her possessions. I kept them for a long time, until, unable to bear it no longer, one summer day with little to do I carefully ironed and folded them all, and put them away in a special box. At least I still had room for them.Then I saw photos of Rachel Whiteread's studio, a few objects on display. How wondrous strange - that this minimalist sculptor of newly-filled volumes that moved me to mourn and face death would display objects, no matter their formal properties.

author photo  

Barbara Kruger

Martha Stewart's Living Magazine articles on collectible textiles (June, July 2010) showed me I could display the handkerchiefs, but it wasn't until writing this today that I find this choice purposeful, battling myself as I do over sentimentality and kitsch. I do not claim art status for them, but to use them to trace the domesticana chain from function to craft to modern textile/fiber art.

 Barbara Kruger - all small photo /text images

Orly Cogan, textile images

Searching for My Prince

OBIT: My Aunt Ro's Life Celebration

On my recent trip to Iowa, I called my cousin Debbie, my Aunt Rosalie's daughter, and Betty and Elmer Stearns, the sister and brother-in-law of Leo Lindberg, my mother's second husband. Although I didn't go to see them, and it's been a long time since we spoke, they greeted me so warmly and fondly, as if we'd chatted every day for years. Those family ties I held so loose and slack now seem mixed skeins of relation that hold me closely wrapped - I am grateful to find them in place after all, one of later life's small gifts of recompense for past sins of omission.

Deb told me that Aunt Ro had been placed in hospice, and I do know what that means, but I was still taken aback when she called a few days after I had gotten home to tell me that my dear, funny aunt had passed at 98. She was the artistic one. Uncle Roger, too. I saw their paintings as a child when I went to their homes, one of my clearest bell-tone memories. Though I felt very alone as I defined myself as artist and art teacher, I think Ro and Roger were there, offering me that path when my mother, bless her soul, wished for me a secure and functional life of homemaking, teaching, maybe nursing. (A vocational test I took in high school suggested I might be a drill-press operator.)

That day on the phone I asked Deb to tell Aunt Ro how much I felt her spirit in my life, and how glad I was that I had and have this work. She told me later that she had told Ro this, and I was comforted to know that one small last connection had been given to me.

I also remember when my Aunt Bruna renounced me for a teen-age incident. I had "shot my mouth off" over her endless grieving, not realizing how troubled a person she really was.

Even 35 years later, Bruna would never speak to me or see me, and before she died, I wrote her a letter telling her that I was sorry and asked her to speak to me once again. She refused. But Aunt Ro had read the letter (shared with her by my mother) and she told me that it was a good letter and I felt her tough brand of regard directed to me for what this had cost me.

I knew in some way, I'd made it right anyway.

Now, my parents are gone, my beloved uncles are gone, and all my dear aunts but one, my Uncle Roger's wife, Berniece, who lives in Cedar Rapids, alone, doing very well, living a quiet, blessed, and kindly life. I don't think about it so much, that the generations have switched places and I'm now the one moving close to the horizon's end. The perspective shifts; acceptance and a sense of privilege grows. My own children and grandchildren fill my heart and days with immediate joy and rejoicing gratitude. That's me, in full being, so fully part of life's ongoing stream.

Aunt Rosalie was frequently published in the local papers.

My Paintings: Small Watercolor Landscapes

California Poppies

Anza Boreggo Mountains

Carrizo Plain, California

VACATION: Going Home to Iowa

THE 'MIDDLE BORDER'

is a geographical term for the Midwestern prairie lands settled in the 1800's, made newly possible by the Homestead Act and improved river transport. It's also a literary concept; Hamlin Garland wrote two novels, Son of the Middle Border (1918), and Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), which contain the paradoxical phrase. Dreams of prosperity, romantic idealism, social justice and populist energy entwine with the harsh realism of physical toil, boom-bust poverty, and agrarian revolt. The tone is elegiac in these novels, but Social Realism is the bass that remains sounding even today. (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/Parrington/vol3/bk02_01_ch03.html)

"Rugged depictions of independent life with wide open space provided distractions for those in financial crisis...regionalism obscured the crucial forces of history...

providing entertainment for those realities facing oppressed peoples, said Meyer

Schapiro. (Wickipedia article on John Steuart Curry)

I think of the Middle Border as a tag for the fundament of a real place, a singular heartland, and a synthesis of the American Midwest perspective. Its point-of-view is decent, conservative, grounded, pragmatic, hard-working. It feels distant; all that flat prairie to the west of the Mississippi to be overflown before one even arrives. It's a Great Wall, the space muting and buffering the impact of coastal racket and rictus. One faces inland and inward, holding the myth that values and truths will prevail against the latest east and west coasts trendlines.

The Cedar River, approaching Waterloo Airport

Grant Wood, Stone City, Iowa

I was born in Iowa, a vanguard baby-boom child of two soldiers (Mom was a WAC). The first twelve years we lived in a small Wisconsin town that served the farm belt around it. As a child of the Depression, Mom had seen those orange crate illustrations of California, and never forgot them. They moved to Long Beach, California, called 'Little Iowa', following many others already settled there. As marvelous as is California, the change isolated them and left them increasingly homesick as the years went by.

My brother, Lanny, lives in Iowa this very day. After earning his doctorate, he returned to teach at the same Iowa university from which my mother graduated. He is an environmental scientist, the fruit of our childhood upbringing in a fecund, bountiful land of deciduous forests, plentifully filled lakes and rivers, and farms planted to fill American bellies. How we used to laugh over being "corn-fed"; a kind of embarrassed acknowledgment of the inherent blue-collar hick-ness of our world.

My Italian aunt and uncle were gene-bestowed with the ability to draw and paint, a most extraneous gift in the Midwest, but that's what I got; Lanny's bequest was a more evaluative, objective scientific nature. I stayed on the West Coast, in love with the weather and big city opportunities, but I do get to "go back home", and it feels like it's all still mine, deeply possessed in my identity. A very good place to be from, a good place to go back to.

When we go back, we explore the grids of roads, taking in wide sky, the magnitude of agri-business and factory. I never lived in Iowa, but in Wisconsin, and so for me it's new and familiar at the same time. I love vessels of regional character: lighthouses, restaurants, hotels, churches, main street, streetlights, old brick factories, and barns. It's all a lively connection, a certain vibrancy in body and heart, and now in reflection, too.

How I love this particular Charles DeMuth painting - the title referencing the granaries of ancient Egypt, of course. The moderne aloof structures seem more like giant breast sanctuaries, the succor of safely-stored grain assured. Diagonal rays of light envelop and highlight them; they are protected from on high.

Charles Demuth, My Egypt

GRUNDY CENTER, IOWA - Central Counties Co-Operative

A cloudy, brooding day on a Sunday drive brought us to Grundy County, where cost per acre of rich Iowa earth is the highest in the state. I dreamed of finding silos and barns but the silos are replaced by grain elevators, and the old red barns are mostly falling down, replaced by new metal structures that require less upkeep. The grain elevators still have the power of volume and containment, and so these photos are my visual accompaniment to The Middle Border's lyrics about the prairie world.

I guess everyone's heartland is a private state of mind. Of course, the problem is that all runs to kitsch, especially it seems, in the Midwest. There are more crocheted toilet paper roll covers per capita than anywhere else in the world, I'm told by reliable statisticians. Decorative objects are fashioned from the old, the found, an unwillingness to discard the past, a parallel of "rasquache", a distinctly Chicano style that was defined by a unique sensibility of repurpose, re-use, and ingenuity. A woman's output is "domesticana", a term I would use lovingly for much of the work I saw in Iowa.

THE BARN QUILT PROJECT is a lovely extension of all the best of American crafting, I think. It's appealing, colorful, and there's a natural extension of beloved memory and forward vision that is so comforting. No kitsch-twinges were recorded, anyway. The barn quilt movement began in Adams County, Ohio in 2005, a project created by Donna Sue Groves to honor her mother, a master quilter. Grundy County was the first Iowa county to begin the project, and many other counties have enthusiastically begun barn quilting projects.

All my mother's quilts are worn out, because we used them hard and carelessly, as my family was wont to do. Today quilts are tended carefully for their labor-infused value. I am moved by them because they have lost function and joined the world of "craft/art product". Murky gains. The meticulous stitchery, fabrics saved for thrifty reuse, such an infusion of symbol, comfort, and memory.

quilt on sale at The Happy Barn

Mexico, in theory, seems remote to Iowa, but not so; in a Mexican restaurant friends give Spanish greetings and they are returned by our server. Iowa's big cities fight drugs and gangs, and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans work in factories and food processing plants, actively recruited in the Southwest. And not surprisingly,they like it too - small town rural life in Iowa is safe, affordable, beautiful, slow-paced; discovered similarities to their own left-behind heartlands.

A family acquaintance teaching in Des Moines counted 37 languages at her elementary school. At first, I was surprised to find an exhibit of Mexican crafts (and Haitian sculpture) at the Waterloo Art Museum. I shouldn't have been.  Then I thought about the daily reality of living in Southern California. Our experience of the border is fraught with danger, conflict, ambiguity, and benefit, as labor flows through the permeable membrane of its nature.

 The only borders left are mental. 

contemporary Mexican weaving

WHAT'S FOR LUNCH?

at The Happy Barn, quiche with tomato and spinach, slaw, and cream soda.

WHAT'S FOR DINNER? SURPRISE!

Gasp and puzzle - dinner at Galleria de Paco with it's SoCal graffiti-style

sign and tag - what is this doing in Waterloo? It's spray can art (Mexican), produced by a refugee (Serb), of the Sistine Chapel (Italian), in Blackhawk

County (Native American), Iowa.

We laughed a bit over Adam's languid pose - the yearning trust in Adam's eyes, and the body waiting to live in God's likeness I remembered so vividly from the Sistine Chapel had become flaccid, somehow empty of promise. I think I know though, that this work was made with great sincerity as a celebration of possibility in America, and I am easy, marveling at the experience what's waiting 'round the bend any given day.

WHAT'S FOR DINNER? POT-LUCK!

Dessert table

This is what you hope to find - only in community relation can one find a dinner experience like a church supper, American Legion bar-be-que, or family party. My brother's retirement party was a warm, happy evening, meeting Lanny and Jane's (my sister-in-law) friends made over 30 years in Cedar Falls. Lots ofsalads, roast meats, two Mexican casseroles, and rich, 50's desserts - brownies, pinepple-upside down cake, pound cake, chocolate chip cookies, and most fun, a rhubarb crisp, made with fresh rhubarb from Jane's garden.

red rhubarb - better color for desserts than the green

Even Martha Stewart had articles this month featuring rhubarb, and Jane, always the kitchen enthusiast, tossed one up in her Mexican-style kitchen. My bright idea was to make creme fraiche, so out came Julia's tome, and it was so special on the crisp, the sweet, tart, and crunch (chopped pecans) flavors playing together. We added blueberries, too, for color.

My dear sister-in-law, Jane. We were all so happy to see Lanny and Jane marry, and I've had a most fortunate benefit - I got the sister I never had! How fun! Since Jane already has 5 other sisters, it was very generous of her to add me.

She is an accomplished crafter, cook, gardener, nurse, and her strength buoys all who know her. And she laughs a lot, humor at the ready.

Lanny's retirement is official, so I am back to California - back to crisp balmy June sunshine, our little house, my rose garden, grandchildren, the Hublet John. How really good it was to see my family. I will go more often, I resolve. Not so different now, Iowa and California - globalization has penetrated deep through the Middle Border, drilling entrances and eroding its breadth. More will be different next time, that's a certainty.