A Ramble of Stuff. Letters 01

Toc and Tree and Wally - Woodstock 2006

Thanks for sending me your comic and poster and the invite to your opening. As it turned out, by the time ______ forwarded the mail to me, the opening was long over. I'm sorry I missed it.
You've definitely got a well-developed style in the comic. Very involving. I have to say I have no idea what was going on in the story and wish I did, but it seems you are choosing to be oblique for some reason, and that's obviously a choice you are free to make. In general, I'm interested in comics that communicate strongly and clearly, instead of staying very much in their own world, so it's not exactly my cup of tea, but good luck with it. I hope your Diamond solicitation went over well.
Best,
__________
PS letter not for publication or dispersal.

It does expect a bigger commitment on the part of readers, (that is some of my point), but I would have imagined you would have gotten it immediately. Give it another go sometime, and imagine it as a kind of mutant poetry in which the most private story you can recognize in it is your story.

A problem I see in comics is that of shallow immersion, comics seem so short lived, very rarely worth a second read because they never rise above entertainment. I have always been addicted to comics, always looking for something, and strangely always disappointed at how consistently poor they are. I have made art all my life and would never show any comics to friends because they would scoff at the bland and timid drawings, they would say, “Well ... lets look at these ('weak images') next to the grand immediacy of something like ...Vermeer or Agnes Martin. Lets read some of this dialogue, and then read some Joyce or Kazantzakis. Now ... with the utter shortness of your tiny fucking life, which of these is worthy of your attention?” You get the drift. You are never done reading the images of Vermeer or Joyce, because the criteria by which they worked was aimed at the soul which is relatively bottomless.

Are there novels you have read more than once? I have read some books over ten times, some of Robertson Davies, some Woolf, some Joyce. But, other than Jim Woodring and Max (some Chris Ware, some Francesca Germondi, and few others), there are no comics I could read more than twice, if twice. Lucky for me this is not a critique on your work because I have not read your work yet. I sent you the opening invitation and V3.1, because I saw a wonderful cover you did. It felt good, and I thought you would be happy to know that there was someone else pushing comics out of its little beshited nest.

I have chosen a rather small audience by my work, but I'm not trying to live off my comics, (as a strange matter of fact I am trying to live off my art in order to do comics, [isn't that odd?]). So I think to my self: well ... seeing that I will die pretty soon, do I want to produce a quantity of work for a fat-sized audience? Or do I want to carefully tell the story of the independent life of my soul to Brancusi, Duchamp, Rilke and The Grand Circus Psyche? Obviously I've chosen the Circus. That is my audience. You may feel that I am nowhere near this attempt but I am certain that you would applaud my desire to jump.

I feel, that there are, of course, many ways to communicate; one is the day-lit and clear linear narrative of Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Davies, it sounds like this is your way as well. I love that cup of tea. But there are also darker ways; the multiple coupled snakings of surrealism, the dreaming poetry of Neruda, Lorca, Jimenez, Thomas, Mirabai and Rumi. I am from the deciduous north, cold for six months a year but this dark warm dreaming is my place too.

Maybe this gap between comics and art is really just the question; who is its audience?

Well…Yikes! Caught in my own reflection, I am! I can't imagine you will be there at my opening, it is definitely too far even for me. I suppose I'll have to be there. I'll be the one in the corner with the eyes of a snaked horse, I'll be mute for fear of splitting my tongue, I'll be the one with a hand covering his ugly teeth fearing to frighten the flowers, I'll be the one searching every word for the back of my eyes.

Art is a disguise we've put on just to have our say. It is so embarrassing, but what choice do we have. The air whispers by kidding at our hair, the first drop of rain parts our lips, mud hugs mud to our feet and climbs us, flicked up to our ankles, and the fire leans towards where ever we sit. It's a fucking conspiracy from the elements down!

I think …my comics are for readers twenty years from now, and my comics will be there waiting for them. A plague of entertainment will kill off a generation, and then … kids will get hungry again, and will begin to forage and what's left of …you and I, well be waiting. The Mind is a scavenger, and loves nothing so much as a quietly softening corps.

I was listening to a voice in the air, and I told him that someone had asked me if I really heard voices. We laughed, and he said, "If you don't, than you're crazy."

Thank you for your encouragement, and allowing Elizzy to quote you, I take it to Heart and keep it there. Good baddogs remember. If you-guys are ever near Woodstock please come see us, the twins have a spare-oom and you are always welcome to stay as long as you can take-it.

I try to live under the name Toc Fetch because he is an honest man. He is not …real in the common sense of the word but if I could feel formlessly honest I would be Toc Fetch. As it is I make comics about him, and try to live somewhat under him, and sometimes in hindsight I am him.

So here is my latest comic. And that really is my son Jyothi (Jyothi: the-light-that-calls-the-gods-together-and-makes-them-behave). Jyothi who now calls himself Ramsy (self named from Davies' Fifth Business). Having just moved back to New York after 3 years on the big island of Hawaii, Jyothi had to register for high school, in that meeting he introduced himself to the principal as "Ramsy", hearing this name for the first time, Eeo-his-mom didn't blink, (slipping into improv-mode, not to be outdone by her son) and so Ramsy became his name.

Ramsy is a father now too … o-sweet-repetition.

My thoughts from that discussion on line:

I am so glad someone immediately implied that antiquated notion of tracing as dishonorable among gentlemen draftsmen. "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake," said Steven Dedalus. It is this same tired notion that makes historical anthropologists search through all that is left of Vermeer and Da Vinci to find evidence of the camera obscura in their work. Or Eaken's neurotic attempt to hide the clues of his use of photographs. Durer, Caravaggio, Ingres, Warhol, Hockney to name a few of the better known who used the camera lucida, in fact photography grew directly out of the camera lucida through Talbot's dissatisfaction with his own drawing by this optical technique. And when we look at Vermeer now will we feel any less sublime for knowing how he arrived at his images? The-Fuck-No!

I believe in technology, she and I are way beyond a casual acquaintance… we're having sex frequently. And we are so high on the endorphins that we couldn't care less who sees it. And besides …I have never thought of my self as a draftsman, if anything I am more like a singular insular (very-low-budget) noir-stylie film maker. Except that I shoot nothing but "still-points," I go to the exact place a film would be leading you to and wait there gathering silence as an image. My stories absolutely cannot be told better in another medium, nothing holds the silent life of observation better than pencil (and ink is the next best thing if…in low end printing).

And a voice in my head, the proletariat pope Joey Fool, once said "If you can't print it you're on the wrong side." (of who I am)

There is this …Thing, very like gravity in its scale. I call it, for lack of other wise, the "grow factor," it is life as movement. Everything comes into being as movement (the universe, the body, time etc.). What the Upanishads call "Being-becoming." It is really a "becoming factor" and if you look for it (through drawing or any other Direct Observation) you can become accustomed to seeing it, recognizing it (re - cognizing it), everywhere. The interesting part of this observation is that there is only one "scientific" (as in repeatable) tool subtle enough to record its existence, and that tool is the pencil. The pencil in hand is the one tool that can decipher and speak this language most clearly. In my work I want the animal of the medium to interpret my stories, and it is important to note that she does not fit me, I fit her.

I am in love with the shortcuts that technology offers me. With my digital camera I can gather more info on location than I'll ever use, and then download immediately to see if I have what I need, and if not then we are immediately back to it, it is very live.
(Do you know how heart wrenchingly slow this same process is in film? I do, I make my living in NYC's local 52. Ask Hal Hartley how almost impossible it is to make art with the insistence of five million bucks and the timing of a 100 man crew jingling their two cents). Film doesn't suit me as an art form, too many hands touching the animal. But I require film as a tool because I am so utterly in love with Direct Observation in light, and film can document this very once-upon-a-time in its inductive short hand of a photograph (photo-faith), from which I have learned to deductively read. These short cuts allow me to cut a job down from what would be a year (among gentlemen draftsmen) to a month (among the proletariat).

What I have done is to redefine comics as what …I do. I have redefined the very audience of my comics before they even exist, and yes, to back myself up, in my definition, I have a day job (Third Electric). According to my definition comics are at the beginning of a change that will be obvious in ten or more years of hindsight, and all because it is a humble art … that travels (this to me is the pivot). Comics will be co-opted by art, because art is voracious, always looking for more ways to extend the life of its live-voice into to a larger more live and direct audience.