Tardiness, Familial Dysfunction, (Maybe) a New Direction

Relishing the morning sunlight, Tacoma, 2011. Fujicolor 800 in Leica M4 w/135mm f/4 Elmarit, no exposure data.  Desaturating the image -- rendering it in black-and-white --   enhances its timelessness.  Photo by Loren Bliss copyright 2015. (Click on picture to view it full size.) 

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PERHAPS THE BITTEREST lesson of old age is that – contrary to the mercenary lies of the USian psychology business (which revealed its true moral imbecility by its anything-for-profit service to the empire's torture-masters)  – the toxins of familial dysfunction never die.

Though I had assumed for nearly a decade I had finally resolved my conflicting emotions about my father – on the one hand his often contemptuous, sometimes hateful and occasionally downright sadistic behavior toward his children; on the other hand his admirable political courage, socioeconomic insight and Mensa-caliber erudition – the newly disclosed terminal illness of my oldest male half-sibling summoned all that presumably buried angst from its grave and sent it rampaging like some vengeful zombie through the (again) suddenly vulnerable structures of my selfhood and identity.

The immediate result was the intellectual paralysis that delayed this blog, for which – particularly since I see how many people checked in Monday looking for new work – my apology. But it is impossible for me to write the sort of material I normally post here when I am suddenly confronted with the realization that, as I said on the comment thread of Rebecca Solnit's superb essay on post-Katrina New Orleans,  Ms. Solnit is what I think of as a “real writer,” in comparison to which I am scarcely more than a presumptuous hack, and it would be dishonest of me not to admit I envy her talent. (Emphasis added.)

What I was actually thinking was infinitely more self-damning. As I admitted to a relative in a letter discussing the long-ago origins of the animosity between the half-sibling and me, whenever (economic or professional) circumstances compel me to define myself as a writer or an editor, it's always accompanied by an inner voice...shouting “Phony. You can't be a writer; you're a dyslexic.” That voice – obvious to the recipient of the letter but needful of clarification here – was the echo of a familial chorus of belittlement in which the half-sibling was one of the lead singers. But its choirmaster was my father, whose favorite pejorative for me until I was 11 or 12 years old was “goon boy.”

It was that same voice that prompted my desperate effort to escape the curse of dyslexia  by trying, from my mid-20s through my mid-30s, to abandon newspaper reporting for a seemingly dyslexia-proof career in photojournalism. But the barriers – despite photo credits that included Newsweek and Paris Match – eventually proved insurmountable. The first of these was Moron Nation's visual illiteracy, which almost invariably prompts employers and patrons to chose photographers on the basis of personality rather than talent or vision, and which – because I never learned how to be “a fun guy” – usually excluded me from serious consideration. At the same time there was the USian Empire's post-World War II taboo against social-documentary photography – the resultant censorship of any images that focus on the savagery of capitalism or on the deeper aspects of the resistance thereto. Then there was the cosmic finale of the 1983 fire, which destroyed not only my life's work – all my photographic prints (save the few in my working portfolio) and probably 98 percent of my 31 years' production of negatives and transparencies. Because of the post-traumatic clinical depression that followed – or more specifically because of Moron Nation's thoroughly documented loathing  of anyone who is even temporarily disabled – the fire ended forever any possibility I would ever again work as anything other than a (mostly unemployed) freelancer.

A further complication, which had actually become apparent seven years before the fire, was my inability to work outside specific environments, as for example my truly abject failure as a suburban newspaper photographer c. 1976-1977. I failed because, in the USian suburbs, which are to me the personification of Moron Nation, I could almost never find anything with which I could empathize. This meant I seldom found, apart from dogs and children, subjects I could photograph effectively. My one memorable image from that entire dismal period was a published but long-lost picture of workers in a ramshackle (and therefore visually intriguing) machine shop. 

The real problem, of course, was that I was congenitally unable to come up with the Disneyland-type imagery my employers preferred. I had lived a big part of my teens in a suburb and knew its malevolent conformity and its enabling hypocrisies entirely too well. Hence I recognized the suburbs not just as a cultural, intellectual and emotional wasteland but as a behavioral sink – its superficial serenity yet another of capitalism's Big Lies – which means I knew the suburbanites themselves to be debt-slaves feigning happiness merely to alleviate the bottomless desperation of their hopelessly empty lives.

While that failure was meaningless in Manhattan, where my primary employer looked upon me as a latter-day Jacob Riis, potential employers  outside the City regarded it as definitively terminal. Hence in the job market west of the Hudson River, it nullified my three major photographic successes: the three years I was the social documentary photographer for Beth Israel Hospital's free-clinic program (photographing the peoples and neighborhoods served thereby); my on-the-spot coverage of the 1967 Tompkins Park (Police) Riot (which got my work into Newsweek, Paris Match and The New York Times); and my brief but productive tenure (1974-1976) as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly organized and staffed by seasoned pros that as a consequence was second only to the old pre-Murdoch Village Voice in quality. 

Visually The Sun was far superior to The Voice – Fred McDarrah was not that great a lensman – but my strip-away-the-camouflage imagery was lost on xenophobic Seattleites, who regarded Ansel Adams as the photographic equivalent of Jesus Christ and disdained human-condition photography  as an unconscionable waste of film. In a sense my career was therefore dead even before the fire.

Which – albeit indirectly – is precisely what made the fire so emotionally ruinous.

The photographic project on which I had worked the longest, 24 years in 1983, had evolved into a book, its working title “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer.” Though the work began as a 1959 journal entry describing an idea for a sociology paper, by the mid-1960s it had become an extended photo-essay, with the accompanying text birthed by the scholarship mandated by my need to understand what I was seeing and recording on film. Backboned by approximately 5,000 pictures – among them at least 50 of my iconographic “sandwiches”  (photographic collages made by printing two or three negatives simultaneously) – the carefully footnoted text argued that the untold (and perhaps deliberately suppressed) story of the Counterculture was its rebellion against patriarchy. Its main disclosures are summarized in a post-fire memoir here (for which I apologize because it so desperately needs editing by a real editor, someone whose competence far exceeds my own).

Thirty-one years earlier, when former Grove Press Editor-in-Chief Cicely Nichols confirmed the original “Dancer” was publishable and said she believed it would be one of the most influential books of the 20th Century, I immediately recognized it as the salvation of my career. And when Cicely offered to edit the text and mother it to publication, I not only accepted her offer, I did so with an intensity of job-related ecstasy I have never felt before or since. It was definitely what the comics would describe as a “WHEW!” moment. But its skyrocketing emotional uplift was the cruelest, most injurious prelude possible to the psychological nosedive inflicted by the fire.

The plan was that Cicely, a longtime friend, would unscramble the dyslexic dysfunction that had grounded my 50,000-word rough draft of “Dancer” on a reef of organizational problems, and I would edit the photography to eliminate all but the very best images, probably 100 at the most. Then as soon as I got my next paycheck from the trade journal for which I was working, I'd arrange to have the pictures, the manuscript, its accompanying research notes and all the rest of my files shipped to Manhattan from where I had stored them in Washington state. In my mind I was dancing with joy – something I was entirely too grotesquely clumsy to have ever done in real life. But on 1 September 1983, literally at the same moment Cicely and I were meeting to finalize our working agreement – 7:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 4:30 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time – came the fire. “Dancer” was dead. So was my career, not just in photography, but in the low-level, minimum-talent-required jobs in word journalism by which I had so often financed my photographic efforts.

Now, 32 years later,  I still sometimes photograph, though – as I must now confess – I am able to do so effectively only when the post-fire terror of another such loss abates to the point I can pick up a camera and view the world through it without being visually hamstrung by the associated fears. Sometimes the result is actually a halfway decent piece of work, like the image above and some of the other pictures I have made  and continue making of my neighbors here in this senior housing complex.

One of the corporate names by which this dwelling-place is known includes the word “Commencement,” to which my infinitely cynical mind invariably adds the never-to-be-spoken-aloud tagline, “your first step toward the grave.”

But none of that really matters simply because at my age – 75 years old last March – there are no second chances. Yet I see now, in the bitter clarity of these reanimated familial hostilities, how so much of OAN's textual content was indeed nothing more than a desperate grasping at an imaginary second chance that would never materialize simply because, as I already said, there is no such thing, not the least because at my age and with my personal and political history, any notion of a second chance was never more than grandiosity, presumption and denial. More than anything else I was (obviously) still seeking to win the approval of my long-dead father – and perhaps the half-sibling as well.

Maybe now, in the renewed hope of having at last settled this matter, I will find some art-for-art's-sake way of rediscovering the pleasure and passion and usefulness I found in photography before the fire took it all away from me,. Perhaps my new digital single-lens-reflex, which came to me in affordable form only through one of those startling combinations of coincidences we know as synchronicity, is a genuinely positive omen. Perhaps fate is not setting me up for yet another encounter with the agony of loss.

And perhaps too my eldest half-sibling, a three-times Pulitzer nominee whom I fear was driven from journalism by our father's absurd but maliciously intended and therefore profoundly hurtful criticism of his work, will accept my turning away from OAN's previous format as a final conciliatory gesture. For it indeed marks my painful (but not begrudging) acceptance of my half-sibling's judgment of my own reportorial and writing skills: that they are – just as I so vividly saw when I compared my work to Rebecca Solnit's – mediocre at best. (Why not begrudging? Because, as I should have found the strength to say to him decades ago, any notion the writhing-spaghetti intellect of a dyslexic can produce “real writing” is patently absurd, our father's one slyly malignant claim to the contrary not withstanding – a truth I know perhaps better than anything else in this life.)

Until now my primary response to the self-hatred that is the inevitable and inevitably self-perpetuating consequence of dyslexia has been identical to my response to the horrors of my childhood: most of the time I lock them all away in a mental strong-box which I then hide in the most inaccessible corner of my alleged consciousness. The problem is that whenever I do this, I eventually lapse into self-deception, imagining myself to be normal rather than genetically defective and therefore capable of all sorts of impossible feats including being a “real writer” – a compensatory lie all the more easy to fabricate when (as had often been the case since the fire), there was not enough money for film and film-processing. No doubt the surprise entry of the digital SLR into my life, with its liberation from film and processing costs, is helping pull this pattern of self-deception into sharp focus.

Meanwhile I am left with the concurrent and no doubt final realization there is absolutely no escaping or even ameliorating the legacy of my childhood – a mother who so despised me she tried to murder me; a father whose early return from work saved my life but who nevertheless regarded my mother's toxic genes with such repugnance he soon afterward sought to abandon me in a state orphanage; maternal relatives who with but one exception thereafter regarded me as an unwelcome but legally unavoidable reminder of a socially embarrassing, potentially status-damaging and therefore wealth-jeopardizing incident that was never to be spoken of again; paternal relatives who were at best frigidly polite; a stepmother whose good intentions toward me were finally undermined by my father's relentless disparagement; four younger half-sisters who were subject to the same paternal conditioning (one of whom despises me, one of whom is indifferent and two with whom I am genuinely close); and the three older half-siblings, two male, one female, I did not meet or even know of until 1952, the children of my father's first wife.

The eldest of these was born a decade earlier than I and would become the primary role model of my adolescence, the man I so worshiped during my teenage years I sought to follow in his professional footsteps, the only male kindred for whom, even in adulthood, I ever truly dared feel love. I will mourn his passing, just as I have mourned the festering familial abscesses that so long ago drove us forever apart – conflicts neither my brother's fault nor mine and therefore eternally immune to such commonplace remedies as apology or forgiveness, unhealable wounds of enmity inflicted even beyond the grave by our father's everlasting malice.

LB/28-30 July 2015.

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Can Sawant and Socialism End the Seattle Freeze?

Photojournalist W. Eugene Smith in Seattle, 1976. When I asked Gene whether skyrocketing costs of equipment and supplies might gentrify photography into a medium only the rich could afford, thereby purging it of its humanitarian vision, a few of Seattle's vindictively intolerant Ansel Adams disciples shouted both of us down, denouncing us for our mutual recognition that art and politics are inseparable. (The negatives from which this hitherto unpublished image is made miraculously survived the 1983 fire and were dug out of the rubble the following year.) M2 Leica, 35mm f/2 Summicron, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure unrecorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

SOCIALIST KSHAMA SAWANT'S stunning victory in a Seattle city council election is forcing me to reconsider my longstanding hatred of what was undoubtedly the most xenophobic and politically hypocritical town in the United States.

Seattle's xenophobia, specifically its legendary hostility to people not born locally, was so venomous it has given birth to at least three web sites, I Hate Seattle,  Seattle Shmeng and the original, Seattle Sucks, which is seemingly no longer available on-line. The townspeople's hypocrisy, even more glaring, was measured by the huge gap between their haughty claims to progressive politics and environmental enlightenment versus the ugly reality of their malice toward lower-income people – particularly as demonstrated by their (carefully closeted) bigotry and their relentless opposition to tax reform and adequate mass transit.

The results of Seattle's bogus progressiveness, which because of the way the town dominates the state legislature actually afflict the entire state, include the most regressive state tax structure in the nation and a regional transit system that, as I noted in a comment on the aforelinked article's discussion thread, is nearly a half-century behind those of comparable areas.

One of these areas is metropolitan Portland, Oregon, which has a transit system that is considered a national model of forward-looking effectiveness.

But the fact newly elected Seattle City Councilwoman Sawant is not only a declared Marxian socialist who makes no secret of her radicalism but is an immigrant as well suggests a sociological change in Seattle that may be of unprecedented magnitude. Indeed it suggests Seattle is at last on the brink of evolving into a genuine city, with all the cosmopolitan open-mindedness that gives urban living its great potential.

That said, my loathing of Seattle is too justified by ugly facts, too long-standing and too intense for me to set it aside without a lot of further reflection.

I first wrote of my animosity toward Seattle in a 1984 Village Voice piece, a brief but bitterly truthful summation of the four bottomlessly miserable years I dwelt there, 1972-1976. In terms of unabated loneliness, these were by far the worst years of my life.

The Voice account provoked Seattleites to an unsurprising frenzy of censorship, angry headlines and venomous letters to local editors. In predictable submission to the malignant Scandinavian/Lutheran puritanism that lurked beneath Seattle's seemingly benign surface, the local reprints suppressed my best turns of phrase – especially those describing Seattle from the perspective of a shunned and ostracized outlander. Some of the better passages are thus restored here:

(Seattle is) no place for dedicated urbanites. Indeed, anyone tempted to move there should first read Raymond Gastil's Cultural Regions of the United States, a University of Washington press book which accurately equates the xenophobic quagmires of Puget Sound with the intellectual barrens of Ohio.

There are the wonderfully enlightened, culture-loving middle-class professionals who will call you to your face a “fucking East Coast intellectual” and invite you to “go back where you belong,” with even stronger language, occasionally accompanied by threats of physical violence. And then there's the prevalent ethos of “mellow,”  which means any conversation beyond a rudimentary cataloging of new possessions and recent conquests – his new wife, her new man, his new skis, her new boat – is “too heavy, man.”

New York males should be especially wary. Seattle women – they're still called “girls”  out in the Evergreen state – won't look at you twice unless you're blond, tall and built like a lumberjack. But that only gets you in the door. You've also got to wow the ladies with body language, man, which means dancing like John Travolta and never forgetting the taboo on conversation. Otherwise you'll spend the night (which ends promptly at 1:45 a.m.) getting sloshed on 3.2 salmon piss while you watch some plad-shirted executive cowboy try to seduce his prom-queen secretary out of her lip-reader jeans.

Like so many others who have encountered the infamous Seattle Freeze, at first I blamed myself. Then I met other outlanders and began to realize we were all despised merely because we had moved there from somewhere else. That I was born in the Borough of Brooklyn and came to Washington state from Manhattan made the locals' hatefulness that much worse. In Seattle, someone whose birth certificate was issued by the City of “Jew York” – a term I first heard during an unpleasant exchange of insults with a self-proclaimed Seattle “poet” in 1972 – is even more reviled than someone from California.

***

My initial encounter with the region's carefully closeted but nevertheless intense bigotry – in this instance, the same anti-Semitism revealed by the damning of my birthplace as “Jew York,”  was in Bellingham rather than Seattle. It was November of 1970 and I had just learned to my horror I was homeless – that an unreliable sub-lessor had abandoned my wonderful Chelsea apartment five months earlier, that it had thus reverted to the landlord and left me without a place to live. Now with only a little money remaining after a summer and fall of chasing the Back-to-the-Land-Movement/agricultural-commune/resurrection-of-the-Goddess story through the rural Pacific Northwest, I had rented a room in a Bellingham boarding house and was desperately looking for work.

Obviously my first choice was the local daily, The Bellingham Herald. Because this was not the South, where my Civil Rights Movement activities had made me persona non grata at every mainstream paper but The Oak Ridger, I assumed that even if I did not find immediate employment, I'd be welcomed as a fellow professional, just as I had been on every Northeastern paper to which I had ever applied. Hence I typed up a resume, then phoned the lover who had managed to save my files and books from the Manhattan apartment debacle and asked her to please send me the recent clippings of my work. 

When they arrived a few days later, I phoned The Herald's managing editor, a guy named Fowler, and asked if he had any openings for reporters, as in those pre-Watergate days most newspapers did. He said yes, we made an appointment for an interview, and I assumed I would soon be on my way toward earning the exit money that would get me back to the City.

But as soon as Fowler saw where I had worked, he bristled with rejection. “We don't like your kind out here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor and catch the next flight back to New York.”

At the time I dismissed his reaction as that of a small-minded managing editor of a small newspaper in a small town that – despite its reputation as a “hippie Mecca” (a description famously applied by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1970) – obviously remained as small-minded as any Southern Klanville.

Now of course I recognize the Seattle Freeze is misnamed – that with the notable exception of Tacoma, it should include the entire Puget Sound area.

To encounter that same hostility from the newsroom boss of the state's largest-circulation newspaper, as I did in 1973, was particularly shocking; I had repeatedly found the better newspapers – note again my experience at The Oak Ridger – to be sanctuaries of reason even in realms of unabashed prejudice. But the managing editor of The Seattle Times, Henry MacLeod, rejected me with essentially the same message that had been snarled at me by Fowler. MacLeod was perfectly polite, as Seattleites usually are when they're deliberately inflicting psychological injury, but the sentiments were identical. “All your experience is East Coast experience,” MacLeod said, “and that doesn't count out here. We do things differently. You'll be a lot happier if you go back where you came from.”

***

The we-don't-want-you-here vandalism to which I was subjected so many times in Seattle began in Bellingham too, though there was only one major incident in the two years I resided there. While I never learned the identity of the perpetrator(s), it was already clear to me there were people in the local Counterculture community who vindictively envied my photographic and verbal skills, fervently hated me for my New York origin and were probably infuriated by my classroom performance as an unapologetic intellectual at Western Washington State College as well. Whatever my alleged offense,  it prompted some unknown person(s) to break into my rental house, disconnect the oil-burning heater's chimney-pipe, turn the stove up to high, leave my dog Dingo locked inside and nearly murder him with the stove's sooty outpouring of carbon monoxide.

It was New Years Eve, the last day of 1971, a night I remember as improbably clear and invigoratingly cold. I was attending a big party at a local tavern, was photographing the festivities, had connected with a young woman there and under normal circumstances would not have been home until late the next morning. But – fortunately for Dingo – I ran out of film. So about 12:30 a.m., I went back to the house for more. Thus an exigency of photography saved his life. But the house itself, everything in it blackened by soot and reeking of partially combusted petroleum, was rendered unlivable for the entire month of January. Happy 1972.

Dingo was a very protective half Malemute/half German shepherd, about 85 pounds of no-nonsense canine, and obviously the perpetrator(s) knew him well enough to fool him with phony friendship – a dishonest skill Seattlites seem to possess in abundance. Just as obviously, the intent of the crime was to kill Dingo and frighten me into leaving town. But as the Ku Klux Klan learned in East Tennessee, I'm not easily scared into retreat. Instead I contacted my real friends – a locally born Jewish businessman named Les and his Chicago-born fiancée Gabrielle, also a single mother named Billie who shortly afterward moved to California for graduate school and whom I regret to say I later lost track of (as I remember she too was from someplace in the Middle West) – and they willingly granted dog and man the necessary accommodations until I made the house habitable again.

In subsequent years, while I worked, resided and attended school in Seattle, all four of the tires on my automobile were slashed twice, once in 1974 and once in 1976, and the two right-side tires of a Volkswagen belonging to my then-lover, a woman from California, were cut beyond repair in 1975. Scribbled notes stuck under my windshield-wipers in the '74 and '76 incidents made the vandals' intent unmistakable: one said “go back where you came from,” the other said “we don't want you here.”

***

In 1975 I was assaulted during a post-opening party at which I was one of the honored guests. I was one of three participants in a show at King and King, a Seattle gallery that flourished during the mid-'70s but closed years ago. My presence in the exhibition was a courageous act on the part of the proprietors given that all my photography in those days was social-documentary work – an utterly taboo medium in a town where Ansel Adams is a cult messiah, his Zone System is the cult's biblical or qur'anic equivalent and any use of film to depict the human condition is considered a sacrilegious mixing of politics and art.

However it was not my photos that triggered the assailant's rage. Those he merely scorned, his “why don't you go back where you belong” routine a typical expression of Seattle xenophobia. Now, eavesdropping on my conversation with other guests, he somehow got the utterly mistaken notion I was badmouthing the hostess and tried to ambush me with a wild right hook aimed at the side of my face. He was at least a foot taller than I, built like a runner or a bicycle racer who also lifted weights, a blond, handsome, obviously athletic specimen of Homo Sapiens Seattlus, equally suitable for a Nazi recruiting poster or an advertisement for a trendy health club. If his wrecking-ball fist had landed with its intended force, I have no doubt he would have knocked me down if not out cold.

But in those days my peripheral vision was still good and I saw the punch coming and stepped inside his reach and all he did was knock my glasses off my face and send them flying across the room. I poked a couple of intentionally distracting left jabs upward toward his chin and launched a full-power karate kick at his balls. Yes I intended to hurt him – badly. The viciousness of his sneak attack warranted no less. I assumed the kick would drop him to the floor, where I would kick him again as he screamed and writhed and clutched his ruptured nuts: welcome to the jungle, motherfucker.

Alas the kick foundered in the tsunami of onlookers who washed over both of us and pulled us apart.

One of these onlookers was a pretty woman whose eloquent reaction to my photographic collages – see “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit” – had aroused my interest both intellectually and physically. But now she turned on me, exactly the sort of treachery I had come to expect from Seattleites of whatever gender. She shrilly denounced me for my attempt at self-defense, yelling something like “you bastard you tried to kick him you fucking New Yorkers always fight dirty,” at which point I sensed I was in danger of becoming the object of a lynching and quickly departed.

As in this incident, Seattle-born women often seemed breathtakingly cruel to me. This was a profound shock because women elsewhere, particularly in the Northeast but even in the South, had generally regarded me as good company. Many Northeastern women – I can say it now at age 73 without seeming boastful – forthrightly acknowledged they were sexually aroused by my intellect and my ability to share its content. There's also the fact I genuinely like women, that I regard women as intrinsically better human beings than men and usually more interesting as well. 

But in Seattle, even if the women managed to be somewhat intellectually accomplished, they viewed intellectuality as an exclusively female domain. They dismissed male intellectuals – especially those of us who genuinely relish female companionship – as repulsively effeminate. Thus they retained the mating habits of high-school prom queens, insisting on men with the bodies of professional athletes and jock-strapped minds to match. Most of these women also made no secret of their contempt for what they considered “East-Coast-type” males – smallish, slight of build, with dark eyes, curly dark brown hair, coal-black beard and Manhattan's signature intensity – in other words, men much like myself.

Because Seattleites so often assumed I was Jewish, I soon recognized this almost fanatical aversion to physical features like mine as implicitly anti-Semitic – yet another of the fascist instincts that lurked beneath the allegedly “progressive” facade of Pugetopolis politics.

***

By the spring of 1974 I was beginning to sing to myself that Bob Dylan line that goes, “I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough,” but then by a strange quirk of fate I was offered the opportunity to became the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, which would enable me to showcase my camera work as never before. It also put me more or less at the town's (pseudo) bohemian center, which I assumed would open doors both professionally and socially.

But the hatred actually intensified.

One of the unsuccessful contenders for my job was a smugly handsome local boy of about age 20, a typical Ansel Adams disciple named Nick who had no discernible photojournalistic talent and even less verbal skill but had the physique, carriage and blond cowlick of a male model. The local women on the staff didn't give a damn he was professionally incompetent; they merely wanted him around as a boy-toy to pretty up the office. Eventually – over vehement protests of two of The Sun's three outlander women (one of whom was my source inside the struggle) – the local women prevailed. They didn't care it flushed the paper's photographic quality down the toilet. For them, alternative journalism was more about having fun than producing great work. In any case, being from Seattle – or Texas – they wouldn't have recognized or understood quality social documentary photography even if it were handed them as the visual epic entitled The Family of Man. Just like Barbie wants Ken, and just as mindlessly, they wanted Nick no matter what. And when they finally got him – when his mediocre pictures began replacing my work on the cover – I knew The Sun had started to set.

So it was back to singing that Bob Dylan line. It took me another 18 months to get out of Seattle – I still had five quarters of school to complete before I got my bachelor of arts degree from Fairhaven College, and along the way I had acquired some private photography students to whom I felt strongly obligated – but by the fall of 1976 I was gone from Emeraldville. I was never there again save for occasional visits with friends, never more than an overnight stay.

***

The South, where I spent about two thirds of my boyhood, was despite its xenophobic history infinitely more accepting of me than Seattle ever was. In 1957, obviously a Yankee, I immediately found part-time work on The Knoxville Journal with samples of writing I had done in Michigan for The Grand Rapids Herald and later for The Grand Rapids Press. Though I was the carpet-bagger son of a carpet-bagger mortgage-banker, though I bore the odium of a child of divorce, I was nevertheless during my senior year at Knox County's Holston High School voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.”

Seattle was therefore hands down the most viciously hostile place I have ever been. Considering those places include several locales in the the Ku Klux South –  one of which is this same Jacksonville that still honors slave-trader, Confederate general and KKK-Founder Nathan Bedford Forest – Seattle's hatefulness was surely without peer anywhere in the United States.

Since then I have continued to criticize Seattle relentlessly, focusing on its political deficiencies as revealed by its opposition to adequate transit and tax reform.

In fairness, I should note that Tacoma and its suburbs, formerly staunchly pro-transit, have now become more anti-transit than Seattle, actually damning public transport as a form of welfare, denouncing transit users as parasites and voting two years in a row to kill the local transit authority by ruinously downsizing its bus service.  But I still regard Tacoma as infinitely more cosmopolitan than Seattle. I have lived in Tacoma twice, 1978-1982 and again from late 2004 onward, and never once have Tacomans made me feel unwelcome.

Indeed three of my closest longtime friends are Tacomans, Mary whom I met at Western in 1971; Jim whom I met immediately after I moved to Tacoma in 1978; and another woman, Gretchen, a working artist, whom I met here in 1979. (After I sort of nudged Jim and Mary toward one another, they were wed in 1983. Not only do they remain happily married; they are also, for me, de facto family.) Thus Tacoma has become my home – that is, the closest approximation to home I will ever know in this lifetime after gentrification permanently exiled me from New York City.

But the point here is that now after the election of City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, whose open affiliation with the revolutionary Socialist Alternative Party proves her to be what I consider a real socialist, I have to reconsider my attitude toward Seattle. No matter how repugnant I have found it in the past, Seattle now seems to be transcending its xenopobic bigotry and reaching out to the peoples of the nation and the world by offering a true alternative to capitalism. Perhaps Emeraldville is at last approaching the sociological maturity that will make it a genuine Emerald City. Let us hope – especially for Councilwoman Sawant's sake – this turn of events is not merely another Seattle deception.

*****

My Contributions to Last Week's Dialogues on Other Websites

“Does Hillary's Silence on Iran Show Neocon Pull on Her Presidential Run?”  Truthout's Robert Naiman challenges Hillary to declare her true self. Applauding Naiman's astute analysis, I cite the facts revealed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family, which prove Hillary to be not just a closet Republican but a secret collaborator in the JesuNazi effort to make the United States a Christian theocracy.

“We Need More Than Words” Thom Hartmann discusses how a recent speech by President Obama “cut right to the core of some of the biggest issues in our nation, but we need more than words to fix this broken system.” I reply the only sure lesson of the past six years is that any promise uttered or implied by Obama the Orator is sure to be a Big Lie – that to imagine he will not again always serve the One Percent by shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer is to prove one's self a fool. The result is a notably civilized discussion on one of the Internet's  best news blogs.

LB/8 December 2013 

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Unyielding Reflections of Purposeful Defiance: a Locked-Out Blog, a Fire-Damaged Photograph

W. EUGENE SMITH in Seattle, 1976. Details in text; click on image to view full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1976, 2011.

*****

What, exactly, am I trying to do here? What is the real purpose of Outside Agitator's Notebook?

The short answer is OAN serves the two Muses to whom I am wed – photography and journalism – and thereby (or so I hope) serves you the reader with reflective pictures and thought-provoking commentary on the week's news.

In a major sense OAN is thus a continuation of the award-winning op-ed column I wrote c. 1978-1981 for a mainstream newspaper that served a big suburb of Seattle. The paper, which died in the late '80s, was an almost-daily, published every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. But our editorial pages never included photos, which were generally taboo in the era's op-ed sections, and while it was ok to imply socialist leanings, I had to keep my Marxist tendencies carefully closeted.   

The main inspiration for the OAN mix – an eclectic blend of pictures and text whether political or personal – probably came from Jill Johnston of The Village Voice, who during the 1960s and through most of the '70s wrote a regular feature entitled “Dance Journal.” Ms. Johnston (1929-2010) was originally the paper's dance critic but defied the capitalist taboo against mixing art and politics, often (correctly) approaching one as the symbiosis of the other. Though her favorite medium was unquestionably text alone, I see in retrospect it was especially her influence that shaped my view of photography – indeed of visual art in general – as tragically weakened (if not reduced to meaninglessness) when divorced from its socioeconomic and political contexts.

Even now in the radically diminished never-again-a-Leica circumstances of inescapable geriatric poverty, photography remains my passion, and that so intense it surely deserves summation of its pedigree. Ergo: as I have noted before, I'm told the first word I ever spoke was “light.” But the real mother of my interest in visual art was my dear Aunt Alecia – Alecia DuRand (1909-1993), a Columbia University MFA and the first woman to chair a U.S. collegiate art department. My first cameras were gifts from my father:  a Kodak Brownie Reflex on my 12th birthday, an Agfa Press Miniature on my 14th and a Polaroid a year later when I turned 15.

Writing is a skill I learned on my own, though the process was much more haphazard, profoundly discouraged by mediocre grades in the exercises-in-tedium that characterize high-school English.

Nevertheless, probably by the time I was 16 (when I began keeping a journal), certainly by the time I was 19, writing had become a consuming intellectual exercise, though it never offered the always-seductive visually orgasmic Zen of photography. In fact my discovery of the difficult pleasures of text probably started as a quest for psychological compensation, a response to the trauma inflicted when my burgeoning interest in science – biology (specifically forestry) – was torpedoed by the dyslexia that so often reduced me to apparent idiocy. “Science is mathematics,” my father always said, “and you can't be a scientist because you can't do math.” My haughty peers in the youth group of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church painfully echoed his judgement: “Some people say ignorance is bliss; I say Bliss is ignorant.” (The religious schizophrenia of my boyhood years in Knoxville – Monday thru Friday the academically superb Roman Catholic Holy Ghost School, on Sundays the implacably hostile Unitarian youth group – is another story for another time.)

In any case, midway in my 15th year (and probably for all the wrong reasons), I decided I would be a journalist – a “newspaperman” as we said then. The very few occasions I wavered from that path were moments of overwhelming hopelessness, invariably relieved by circumstance at the last possible moment – or so it seemed until clinical depression drove me onto welfare. At that point the ruinous notifications mercilessly sent out by the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services c. 1987 (in essence “Bliss has applied for nut money and we need confirmation he used to be employable”) destroyed my reputation (and therefore my career) beyond any possibility of repair.

Which – an oblique explanation of why I'm on Blogger and excluded from major media – brings me back to OAN and what obtains here.

Normally I spend the week collecting and evaluating what goes into this blog, then write the text and choose the featured photograph on Saturday for posting early Sunday morning. But the huge technical problems imposed by my ouster from TypePad – the necessity to learn the radically different software employed by Blogger (and to do so without any technical support) – literally stole the last seven days from my life.

Obviously, much of the OAN material is based on news reports. These news items always exceed the space available – this week for example I bookmarked 27 separate stories for consideration. But the struggles of the past seven days denied me the time to do the requisite reading, and after spending all day yesterday trying to catch up, I realized the task was hopeless. There was too much to absorb and not nearly enough time for the absorption. Maybe later this week I'll manage to post what should have been uploaded last night; maybe not, as the forthcoming days will undoubtedly produce more that demands comment.

Meanwhile – and surely to the detriment of my always troublesome blood pressure – I can't seem to stop boiling with rage over the obstructions themselves. Despite the tremendous help given me by a Blogger discussion-board veteran whose screen-name is Katley – to whom again my most profound gratitude – I cannot remember ever in my life having endured a week of such relentlessly bitter frustration.

Part of the problem is I genuinely despise computers: I recognize them as perhaps the ultimate expression of the capitalist Big Lie, and I therefore regard them with undiluted repugnance. Beyond the disinformation and denial that facilitates their imposition into all our lives, computers are not labor-saving devices – not at all – but are instead the ultimate Ruling Class power-source, alien machines perfected for job-theft and subjugation, the core vehicles of outsourcing, downsizing and the most brazenly cruel profiteering in human history.

Utterly appalled by this – appalled too by how computers originated as the essence of cruelty itself (that is, as war machines born to solve the riddles of making atomic explosives in furtherance of capitalist imperialism) – I'm also blocked by my dyslexic inability at the rote learning essential to computer operation. But whether we are dyslexic or not, computers convert our lives to a uniquely vicious game of Simon Says – a contest that in childhood I always lost and therefore hated. And now – through a twist of karma or the malice of some divine sadist – I am damned to endure it again, this time for the highest stakes of all. My struggles during the past seven days are final proof that no matter how long I am around computers, I will always regard them as expressions of malevolence, invasive technology that compels us to learn a mode of thinking so radically anti-intuitive it cannot but threaten our survival as a species.

It is a game that is always an ordeal, a game I cannot ever view as “play” because any sense of playfulness – or any vestige of the delight and the good humor with which I normally approach learning – is forcibly excluded by the process itself. A final twist of anxiety is added by the fact computer operation is conducted not in English but in Nurdish, a post-modern language for which there are no reliable dictionaries – no doubt because the core tenet of post-modernism is the absurd and morally imbecilic notion meaning itself has no meaning whatsoever.

What then – besides ranting like some unreconstructed Luddite – am I trying to accomplish with Outside Agitator's Notebook?

My main intent here is to illustrate and/or verbalize those socioeconomic and political suspicions we are too often afraid to say aloud, thereby showing dear friends and other dissidents they are not alone. Part is to leave a message for the future – assuming there will be any future – that even amidst the deepening darkness beneath the Obama Bush, not everyone in Moron Nation had been subjugated to zomboid ignorance and/or pathological denial.

Another objective is purely egotistical: to showcase what little remains of my work as a photographer, thereby perhaps regaining just a trace of the potential that was stolen from me by fire and the odium of its psychological aftermath.

This is problematical for two reasons.

One is the fact my photographic best is social-documentary photography, a medium prohibited by Washington state's vindictively broad definition of invasion of privacy. A late-1970s judicial ruling – as far as I know never successfully challenged – specifically bans publication of any photograph, even news photos made in public places, should the subject later find the image objectionable. Thus my clinically-depressed decision to return to Washington state in 1986 now forever forbids me from documentation of the savage material and spiritual poverty that characterizes the human condition under capitalism – and it was this purpose I am now denied that always shaped my photographic aesthetics and intentions.

The second and far more insurmountable barrier is that of the fire itself, the mysterious blaze that in 1983 destroyed at least 90 percent of my photographs, all my research files and nearly all my writing – including the book project to which, up till then, I had devoted nearly every otherwise-unobligated moment of my adult life. Eventually entitled “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer,” it was a 24-year project in investigative journalism, an analysis – profusely illustrated with photographs – of the sociological, anthropological and semiotic evidence that defined the 1960s Counterculture as the spontaneous first wave of a revolutionary transformation (back) to matriarchy.

Despite its final form, “Dancer” began with a single question. During my college freshman year, 1959, I wrote a proposal for a dual-purpose English and sociology paper focused on what seemed to me the glaringly obvious anomaly of the folk-music renaissance: why, if the United States was bound for an era of scientific glory, were its young people resurrecting the Western World's oldest folk music? Though the paper was never written, its central concern remained profoundly compelling, leading me on a pathway of research, discovery and learning oddly akin to the widening ripples that result when a stone is tossed into a pond, a process far more spiral than linear and – or so I've been told – curiously feminine as well. Eight years later I recognized the results as what I still think of as the untold news story of the century – “the resurrection of the goddess” (that conclusion not just emerging from my notes but implicit in my photography too) – and I thus started shaping “Dancer” into a book of pictures and text.

Other writers, among them Robert Graves (The White Goddess, 1948); Gary Snyder (Earth House Hold, 1969); Edward Whitmont (The Return of the Goddess, 1983) and the aforementioned Ms. Johnston (Lesbian Nation, 1973), had voiced similar arguments. But none connected the resurrection of the goddess-ethos to what the late Walter Bowart labeled “revolution in consciousness” – his breathtakingly apt description of the Counterculture's psychological wellspring.

“Dancer” was therefore, from the perspective of the Ruling Class, undeniably dangerous. It identified, combined, photographically illustrated and thereby potentially united the revolution's diverse currents – feminism (including the re-emergence of deliberate single motherhood); environmentalism (especially the Gaia Hypothesis); the Back-to-the-Land Movement (including the instinctively matriarchal structure of many communes); the anti-Vietnam War protests; the re-emergence of the poet as cultural leader; the revolution in aesthetics typified by rock poetry; the folk renaissance (which resurrected many lingering remnants of pre-Christian liturgy); and finally goddess-worship itself – shaping all these (and much more) into a hitherto-unnamed solidarity that might indeed have eventually spawned a Countercultural tsunami strong enough to sweep away patriarchy and thereby cleanse us of the psychological mandate for  capitalism.

Inspired by the findings that produced “Dancer” but still profoundly unwilling to publicly name the goddess (whether as symbol or reality it mattered not), I used the one-time pen-name Aengus L. Forsythe to write a 1970 Northwest Passage piece describing a fictional “crypto-radical seismology faction” far to the Left of the then-notorious Weathermen. The Weathermen, I wrote, were merely out to change the political climate, while the Seismologists sought to “fault the very bedrock of civilization.”

Though there was no immediate response, 13 years later the Ruling Class seems to have answered my challenge with customary violence. The message of the 1983 fire is unmistakable. It occurred on the same day I met with an influential editor to begin a process we reasonably believed would lead to major-media publication of “Dancer.” More pointedly, a half-melted electric clock found at the fire's origin was stopped at the exact moment we began our meeting. Though fire investigators soon backed away from their initial verdict of probable arson, such malignant synchronicity as was implicit in that silently screaming clock can hardly be coincidental. It is indeed a defining characteristic of psychological warfare. Thus I cannot escape the loathsome probability my work was destroyed by government inflicted (or at least government-sponsored) arson.

All of which turns my subsequent encounters with censorship – the newest is yet another anti-OAN embargo imposed by Comcast (the fourth to-date) – into fuel for my determination not to be silenced.

The photograph above also expresses that stance – and it does so in every sense possible. The negative was part of a batch of work salvaged in the spring of 1974 from the post-fire ashes. The image is one of a series of photos I made of the late Gene Smith – W. Eugene Smith to the photographically uninitiated – on 8 March 1976, the night he was shouted down and jeered during a reception in Seattle, the most maliciously xenophobic city in the United States. Mr. Smith's alleged sin? He tried to answer a question the small-minded Ansel Adams cultists loudly damned as “mixing politics with art.”

Mr. Smith is undoubtedly the best American photojournalist never to be known in the United States. His name is a household word everywhere else on this sad planet, but here in his homeland, his persistently anti-capitalist images got him fired by Life magazine and subsequently banished to an obscurity that – tragically – extends even unto the photographic community, which damn well should know better.

Another frame of that night's take was published to illustrate my review of Smith's superb book Let Truth Be the Prejudice; I wrote the book report as editor-in-chief of Art Direction magazine. But this image shows both Smith's contemplative warmth and the relentlessly cold damage done by the flames and subsequent exposure to several months of rain. The cameras were of course M Leicas with Summicron lenses of 35mm and 50mm; this was probably with the 50. The film was Tri-X at 400 developed in D-76 diluted 1:1.

LB/28 August 2011

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