Soapbox Derby winner has uphill battle

On the obstacle course of life, it's the hurdles that get you where you need to go. Swerve around them, and you miss a flight into the finer things life has to offer. In the case of the Southeast Texas Soapbox Derby race, staying the course on the straight and narrow is the way to win. And that's how Axle, a little boy with heart, placed third with more obstacles than his mother thought were possible to zig zag. But she — I, was proven wrong.


Two years of tinkering with washers, wheels, axles (the car parts), bearings and weights had brought them closer as a father and son team. This year, they planned to think more on the science of the weight of the car versus the slope of the hill and the wind and things this mom doesn't "get." But an emergency trip to take care of 'Grandma in Ohio' took dad, Jeff, out of the race. Axle kept his chin up but I know what he was thinking, no dad, no race.


Time to opt out  This mom's understanding of things mechanical will certainly be a hindrance to the boy. "No," said his sponsor "It's an experience he will remember the rest of his life." True enough. And sponsor Tom Flanagan and his family offer to mentor and support him. We're back in the race. With Jeff in Ohio, I am now a single, working mom with a derby car to maneuver.


Does the steering work? Turn it left, turn it right. Yep, seems to work. Do the brakes work? Step on 'em. Yep, seem to work. Now to the polishing and lettering. Lots of polishing. Look isn't mom good at this, isn't that car shiny, I say to myself. Weighing in, we collect our car number — thirteen.


"Look Axle, lucky thirteen! Thirteen is so lucky, buildings in Las Vegas won't allow floors to be numbered thirteen."


Off to the practice run. Crash! Right into the rail of the Maurey Myers Bridge! Vertigo sets in at the thought of Friday night traffic on the Interstate below. It seems the steering pulley had come loose. Back to the drawing board. Thank God for kind people and Soapbox Derby mentors and wire and pliers and sleep. Ours is the first race in the morning.


Saturday is a day of nose to nose heats. We make it to the finals. Time to hit the sack and see what Sunday brings. At the bottom of the hill, where the weekend culminates in eliminations and advances, emotions are like wheels braking on gravel. My stomach is in knots. Spinning down the hill, Axle crosses the finish line last. His head remains down until the weigh out. His back in a hump rises and falls after a long, deep breath and he comes up smiling, skipping off to the loser's bracket. And that's really what makes him a winner, but third place ain't bad. Oh-doo-dah-day.

Rauschenberg: Patchwork of dreams shapes his life and art

                                As published in the Beaumont Enterprise, May, 13, 2008

LAFAYETTE, La. - Robert Rauschenberg, a 15-year-old kid growing up in Port Arthur in 1940, wanted to be a minister.

Today, at 79, he's known as the Pope of Pop. Some say the day he won the Venice Biennale painting prize in 1964 was the day the earth stood still. At 39, he had become an icon within the church of art, and elsewhere.

He never became a minister. Nor did he become a pharmacist, another of his youthful dreams.

Instead, he merely shifted the course of art.

In the last three years, Rauschenberg produced 14 large-scale collages entitled "Scenarios and Short Stories," mounted last month at the new Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette. His "Scenarios and Short Stories" will be on display through Sept. 3, along with work by Rauschenberg's photographer son, Christopher, and his longtime friend and collaborator Darryl Pottorf. Rauschenberg attended the opening, which kicked off Rauschenberg Festival Week in Lafayette. The show is dedicated to his mother, whom he watched expertly piecing together fabric in Depression-era Port Arthur, one of the influences in his collage- and collaboration-based style.

And last week, the New York Post reported that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is close to purchasing Rauschenberg's 1955 masterpiece, "Rebus," for about $30 million from French billionaire Francois Pinault.

And when Time magazine needed an artist's rendering of American emotion on the first anniversary of Sept. 11, it turned to Rauschenberg. "Only Rauschenberg could sum up the vast amount of information we have received since that day in one piece of artwork," said Dr. Lynne Lokensgard, professor of art history at Lamar University.

How did a shy, religious young boy from Depression-era Port Arthur, from a time and place where the talent to draw or dance were not especially valued, become a driving force in the world of art and ideas of the 21st century?

Rauschenberg would say it was the resistance he faced when he had a new idea. And, face it, his idea that art could be made from anything and could be interpreted wildly was radical.

"Rauschenberg is a relentless and courageous innovator. He didn't play it safe. Many of us, when we find success in a niche, we cling to that success as a lifeboat. People like him don't look at the world as limiting, they look toward the future. His approach influenced everybody in my generation," said Keith Carter, a celebrated photographer at Lamar.

Port Arthur days

Being one of the art world's icons is a long way from gritty Port Arthur.

"We didn't have any museums when Milton was here. That's what we called him then," said Dovie (Horton) Logsdon, a classmate from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur. "But we all had to make the best of what we had. Everyone here was either farming or working with the railroad. We had to create our own culture."

Art was foreign to Rauschenberg when he was growing up in the working-class town.

"The first art I saw that was hung on the wall as art was in California during the Navy," said Rauschenberg.

What he saw at the Los Angeles County Museum was Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" and Lawrence's "Pinkie."

"They looked like the backs of playing cards I had seen. I remember being surprised that a human being actually made them. I thought, well, that's what I do. I doodle and draw and copy the funnies," Rauschenberg said.

Believing education was the key to a better life, his father and mother - a lineman for Gulf States Utilities and a telephone operator/seamstress - sent him to Austin to study pharmacy at the University of Texas. He was expelled within a semester because he had trouble reading. He now knows he is dyslexic.

World War II was raging. A letter from the draft board saved him from coming home in shame. His first job in the Navy was to bathe and wrap corpses, and he was trained as a neuropsychiatric technician.

"No, I was not forced to fight. What I saw was much worse," Rauschenberg said. "I got to see, every day, what war did to the young men who barely survived it. I was in the repair business."

After the war, he hitchhiked back to Port Arthur. To his surprise, his family had moved away, leaving no address.

"Someone told me they thought they might have moved to Lafayette," he said.

He hitched another 120 miles to a coffee shop there. There sat his father, Ernest, who explained simply, over a cup of coffee: He'd been promoted to Lafayette.

The Transformation

Not long after a friend urged him to look into the Kansas City Art Institute, he decided to apply. In a bus terminal on his way to art school, he literally was transformed: Milton Ernest Rauschenberg changed his name to Bob Rauschenberg.

"When people got to know me better and just assumed that I had some dignity, it became Robert then," he said. "So now I'm known as either Robert or Bob."

Reinventing himself and his surroundings has been a hallmark of his career.

In 1948, he went to Paris, attending the famous Academie Julian on the G.I. Bill at 22. But after a year, he discovered the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he gained confidence and a personal style. He adored collaboration. It made him tick.

He was taught by art world giants Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Josef Albers and began life-long collaborations with fellow students, dancer Merce Cunningham and musician John Cage. He collaborated with artists of every medium; theater, dance, and even engineering. He created set designs, lighting costumes, while creating art, too.

In 1953, he moved to New York City where he met aspiring artist Jasper Johns. Together, Rauschenberg and Johns designed window displays for Tiffany's to make ends meet and explored the New York art scene. Their work in the 1950's would become the link between abstract expressionism, which dominated the art world in the '50s, and pop art of the 1960s and influences artists today.

In Manhattan, he farmed the streets for old bicycle wheels, rusted metal signs, exhaust pipes, rocks, rope and an endless array of discarded items into his studio. He transformed them into what he called "combines," a mixture of sculpture and paint. His first, entitled "Monogram," in 1955, stirred controversy. A stuffed goat wrapped in a used tire did not endear him to the hardcore New York arts community of the time.

No matter.

He thrived on criticism.

Rauschenberg was a pioneer in many ways. He opened art to entry by engineers, socialites, politicians, dancers, scientists, and even art groupies. He traveled the world with a desire to collaborate with other artists. He met with world leaders - Fidel Castro, among them - in places thought to have unstable government or unfriendly notions about Americans.

Thriving legacy

Fame and fortune came quickly for Rauschenberg, but began to take their toll in 1970.

"At the time, in New York, everyone around me was divorcing or seemed angry," he recalls. "I went to an astrologer and asked if I was the cause of it. I was told that I wasn't, and to move near the sun. I grew up on the coast and liked the ocean, so I went to Florida."

On Captiva Island, he built a home, a state-of-the-art studio and a lift for his aging mother, Dora, who died in 1999. His father died in 1963 of a heart attack on the job, but lived longenough to see his son's career start to rise.

"Our fathers worked together at Gulf States Utilities," said local sculptor David Cargill. "I remember his dad, Ernest, came to see my family in 1962, when my dad died. He was very proud to see an article about him in Time."

In 2001, Rauschenberg awoke in the middle of the night, tripped on a rug and broke his hip. He responded well to therapy after a hip replacement, but a year later suffered a stroke that immobilized the right side of his body.

Rauschenberg still is farming discarded items. Like the junk from the streets of New York, Rauschenberg now assembles images of things visually discarded in everyday life: a telephone pole, fire hydrant, a used tire, a rusted tricycle, a chair.

"He sends friends and assistants out into the world to take pictures for him, using any kind of digital camera. He'll tell them to make sure they're not very good pictures either," said Janine Boardman, his nurse and assistant.

"The images mean something to him, but he will never tell you that," said Mary Lynn Kotz, author of "Rauschenberg/Art and Life."

Last month, Rauschenberg was wheeled onto the stage at the University of Louisiana Theatre in Lafayette to kick off the latest exhibit of his work.

"A reporter asked me once, 'what is your greatest fear?' and I said it would be to run out of world," he told the crowd of reporters and VIPs. "When I die, I don't want to go anywhere, I just want to work in my studio."

Longtime Rauschenberg collaborator and friend Trisha Brown was at his side on stage and throughout the week. Brown is a widely acclaimed choreographer who pushed dance's limits and helped change modern dance forever.

"Bob is 'the' most living artist," she said. "Collaborating requires a sensibility of connecting to another artist. Upon arrival at the San Carlo Opera House in Naples, I realized our sets and costumes for 'Carmen' were lost. With only two days to opening night, I called Bob. He was taken to a junkyard in Naples where he dragged in these huge, twisted, rusted metal pieces.

"He painted and drilled day and night, no one in the opera house bothered him. They knew something magic was happening. He bought soccer flags at the airport and used them as backdrops. We wore plain black leotards that Bob cut and fringed. He was still on a ladder when the curtain opened. The audience was restless and started rumbling, then yelling. They'd never seen anything like it. It was pure perfection," Brown said.

Still coming home

The Port Arthur native who thought he'd be a preacher or a pharmacist no longer has family in Port Arthur, but he's returned several times for openings and honors bestowed on him by Port Arthur and the State of Texas.

The Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur maintains a gallery featuring a number of pieces of original artwork, posters, and pieces loaned by the artist. The museum also has a copy of the Talking Heads' "Speaking in Tongues" album cover, which Rauschenberg designed and won him the Grammy for best album packaging in 1983. In August, a Smithsonian show of Rauschenberg's work will visit the Museum of the Gulf Coast.

Soul Brothers: Aykroyd, Belushi, Alexander

Dan Aykroyd partners with Beaumont artist in 'spirit-filled' business venture

By Donna Rae Wisor
As published in The Examiner April 10-16, page 6-7B


Dan Aykroyd is putting spirits in bottles again. Only this time it is not ectoplasm and he is not playing a “Ghostbusters” character in partnership with Bill Murray. He is in a real-life business partnership with artist and Beaumont native John Alexander.

When the artist sketched an idea on a napkin during a long lunch in New York with Aykroyd, he had no idea it would lead him into the spirit world. But he is not just any artist and he was not having lunch with just any friend. He and Aykroyd go back more than 30 years. The world-reknown American landscape and portrait artist was in an exchange of ideas with Aykroyd, legendary actor/musician, entrepreneur and “proud wearer of the spiritualist badge.”

In a brief telephone interview last Friday, Aykroyd’s familiar voice bounced back from cell towers across the Northern Americas.

“I am happy to be calling you from my home in the beautiful St. Lawrence region of Ottawa, in the great state of Ontario, Canada where spring time is here and the hay is ready to harvest,” he said, sounding like maybe he had a cigar in his mouth and his feet propped up on the old milk truck that sits in a barn on his ancestral estate.

Aykroyd confirmed that Alexander had indeed ventured into the spirit world with him.

“John Alexander? Who’s that?” he said.

“The American art…,” was the incomplete reply from this end.

Aykroyd graciously interrupted.

“Aaahh, ha ha ha. Just kidding. He’s my best friend,” he said, sounding a little like the glib-tongued, Bag-O-Glass hawker he played on “Saturday Night Live.”

Recently, this seemingly unlikely pair put they’re heads together and launched Crystal Head Vodka---a kind of spirit more worldly than the myth of the 13 Crystal Heads conjured from the ancient past and brought to the fore in marketing the brand. This “very pure spirit,” according to Aykroyd, is produced in Newfoundland, filtered through Herkimer Diamonds and bottled in an “accurate glass rendering of a human skull,” --- a bottle designed by Alexander during that fateful nosh in New York seven years ago.

“He has been putting skulls in his artwork for years,” said Aykroyd.

But this is Alexander’s first go at a business.

Aykroyd, on the other hand, has been bottling “snob-free grapes” since 2005, bearing the label Dan Aykroyd Wines, with Toronto-based partner Diamond Estates Wines & Spirits LTD. He also holds the rights to Patron Spirits which he is currently distributing throughout Canada.

“This is absolutely my only one [business venture] ever, I’m not business oriented. I just came up with a very cool idea for a bottle. I still can’t believe its happening,” said Alexander from his studio in New York.

Alexander became enamored with skulls after visiting the late artist Diego Rivera’s studio and several Day of the Dead festivals in Oaxaca, Mexico.

“I had an idea to make one of those skulls like you see in Mexico and put tequila in it. I had no interest in the liquor business one way or the other,” he said.

Years later, Aykroyd was telling him about the tequila business and how it was keeping him busy.

“I told him I had an idea about a tequila bottle and Danny said ‘Draw it out on a napkin and let me see.’”

He loved the idea and asked Alexander “flat out” if he would be interested in doing this together.

“He seemed so serious about it. I actually went home and did it, front, side, all different angles. A week or so later, I showed it to him and within two weeks, we were in Canada talking to these liquor people. It’s absolutely astounding how this thing is taking off,” he said.

“Bruni Glass in Italy created a prototype that looked exactly like what John designed,” said Aykroyd.

Aykroyd decided to put Vodka rather than tequila in it.

“ So we got the distillery, he did. We got the distributors. The rest has taken off like a house afire,” said Alexander in an accessible, lingering, Southeast Texas accent.

The two have signed bottles in Houston and New Orleans at Crystal Head Vodka launches.

“I attended those launches because people might be acquainted with me there. Otherwise I’m not too involved. But he’s the draw. The draw is the bottle itself. The other thing that makes it work and changes it from being a novelty is the fact that the vodka is so incredibly good,” he said.

The two are working on another product, mildly-spiced rum.

“That will be more problematic. We’ll have to come up with something other than a skull,” he said.

Meanwhile Alexander is working on a show of his own. He will exhibit his latest master works in New Orleans on May 2 at the Arthur Roger Gallery on 423 Julia Street.

“I owe everything to Jerry Newman, my great mentor. He was the guy who laid the foundation for my career,” he said of the late Beaumont artist and Lamar professor.


13 CRYSTAL SKULLS
If two heads are better than one, then, in this case, 13 heads are better than two. According to the myth of the 13 Crystal Skulls, when brought together, they contain vast knowledge and enlightenment capable of unlocking our most enigmatic ancient mysteries. Alone, each is believed to house radiant psychic energy, which has magical powers and healing properties, according Aykroyd’s video on the Web site at crystalheadvodka.com

Let’s hope so. But after popping the cork on this novel bottle, the 40-percent alcohol-per-volume spirit, though tasty with a glycerin after-texture, left this writer incapable of unlocking the back door, much less our most enigmatic ancient mysteries. And it is seriously recommended that if the reader brings 13 of these Crystal Head Vodka bottles together in one place, to have at least 46 friends there to level the drinking field.

Crystal Head Vodka is currently available in Texas, Canada, California, Nevada, Louisiana and Florida. It will gradually roll out into other markets in the U.S.

LIKE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS
Alexander does not claim any particular interest one way or another in the paranormal or spiritualism but says he is intrigued by the 13 Crystal Skulls myth. On the other hand, Aykroyd is a subscribing benefactor to the American Society for Psychical Research and the Mutual U.F.O. Network.

“I create my own world of UFOs in my art. Danny is an expert at it. He follows that stuff. I don’t.,” he said.

“I’ve been talking about this stuff for years,” said Aykroyd.

He has, in fact, hosted a show on the SciFi channel called “Out There,” revealing that he is a believer in the existence and government cover-up of alien life-forms. About the documentary “Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs” (2005), directed by David Sereda, he said on CNN, “They’re here. They’re looking at us in a petri dish and I’ve got to say, the way mankind is behaving, they are probably very disappointed.”

Aykroyd shares one of his psychic experiences.

“The day before my grandfather died, he came to me in a dream and waved goodbye. He was walking along and waved goodbye to me. That was vivid,” he said.

In what seemed like an unusual moment of vulnerability for Aykroyd, he said, “I am very pleased and almost, like sort of vindicated in a way. There are now assertions that everyone is a little bit psychic. There is now a group in every county in the U.S. researching paranormal activities, studying electronic voice phenomena, ghosts and psychics. Civilians are taking it upon themselves to explore this in an empirical way. Like real ghost busters.”

STRANGE TIES
“For some strange reason I have long friendships with people from ‘Saturday Night Live,’” said Alexander in another telephone interview with the Examiner last Wednesday, from his studio in Amagansett.

The reason is not as strange as the evolution of some of those friendships. Having both been married at different times to “Saturday Night Live” writer Rosie Shuster is one reason Aykroyd and Alexander know each other. Another might be that they have a lot in common.

Alexander said Aykroyd is a pretty gifted artist himself.

“I’ve got a couple of drawings of his. He is an extraordinarily brilliant man. A stunning mind on many levels and art is one of them,” he said.

Both are civic-minded and serve their communities in tangible ways. Alexander is a volunteer firefighter in Amagansett where he resides when he’s not in New York.

“I’ve been a volunteer fireman for 19 years. Dan, on the other hand, I think his love for involvement in police stuff goes back to his childhood. I’ve been down in Louisiana with his police buddies. His involvement with those guys is real. Everytime we go to New Orleans he goes to firehouses and police departments. After Katrina, he was very involved down there. It is very heartfelt and genuine,” he said.

Aykroyd admits he can hardly go anywhere without a policeman’s badge. But that is due to a slight case of Asperger's syndrome, according to his interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross. He vigorously and rather sternly recited a large number of facts regarding his appointment by the late Chief J. J. Doyle as a reserve officer with the City of Harahan Police Department in the “great State of Louisiana.”

“Harahan is a no-tolerance-city. Profiling seems to work. I work with them on programs for kids and safety. They do an excellent job down there,” he said.

Aykroyd confirmed that he could legally arrest us but only if we are in the “Great State of Louisiana.” Still, he was assured we at The Examiner would keep our noses clean while he is here in Beaumont with Jim Belushi and the Sacred Heart Band for the Christus gala on Saturday, April 18, where they will performing as The Blues Brothers.

HEY BROTHA!
Aykroyd’s interest in spirits and brand promotion originated with his co-founding of House of Blues Entertainment Inc. now a division of the world’s largest concert company, Live Nation Inc. Yet he still goes on the road as Elwood Blues with Jim Belushi as Zee, or Zurashayda. Together with The Sacred Heart Band, they are The Blues Brothers. Aykroyd’s original partner in The Blues Brothers was Jim Belushi’s real-life brother John Belushi (Jake Blues), who died of a drug overdose in 1982. Together, they founded the Blues Brothers in 1978 during an SNL sketch. They produced a grammy-nominated, triple-platinum selling “Briefcase Full of Blues” record album. In 1997, 15 years after John Belushi’s death, Aykroyd asked Jim Belushi to join the band as Jake’s brother Zee.

It may seem an anomaly that two blue-eyed soul brothers can create triple-platinum selling blues live on stage for more than 30 years. Some say the real blues comes from a life of love lost.

“The loss of my partner when he was 33 and I was 28, that was the loss of a loved one. I think of him when we sing ‘She Caught the Katy,’ you know the one that opened the first movie. I’m really singing the blues then,” said Aykroyd.

Jim Belushi, in an interview with The Examiner last Friday, said there is nothing sad about the blues.

“The blues is the next progression from gospel. There is a great spiritual sense to the music,” said Belushi from his home in Los Angeles where looking out the window he could see the wisteria and the climbing roses.

That’s one reason Belushi performs a back flip at every Blues Brothers performance.

“I always say they pay me to fly because the show is free,” said Belushi. “I’m as strong as a bull. I box, do some yoga, tennis, basketball.

But Aykroyd, like the stereo-typed ‘white man,’ can’t jump.

“I can’t really play basketball. I’m terrible at foot ball. I like watching,” said Aykroyd.

But both of them can sing the blues and they love it.

“I do not have to think about a thing. Not business or…I just get out there and play and sing,” said Aykroyd.

After twelve years together, Belushi said the dance has gotten better.

“I’ll be dancing with ya’ in Beaumont my friend,” he said.

And Aykroyd replied, Hey brotha’.”

Then Belushi’s persona Zee Blues suddenly hit the cell towers.

“We’re reviving a new song for the Beaumont show,” he said.

Then he began to sing, “I started drinking and got real tight, I blew each and all my friends, I felt so good I had to blow it again, I said hey bartender, Hey man, looka here, A draw one, draw two, draw three…

“Look forward to it BROTHA!”

Sera's Toast

       

      The sun sets on his east Texas pasture, taking the day with it in a silent blaze. Wayne rambles over bumpy roads, rounding up memories as if he could drive them all home and park them in his driveway for show. Retelling his heroic past from a Lazy Boy chair, his wife of 65 years, Judith, nods respectfully, though she's heard it all before. His thoughts are now comfortably scrambled in vodka and Coca-Cola. His best friends these days, two Aberdeen Terriers, herd him toward the bed. His farmer-sized hands steady him against thin walls. Wayne leans against the bedroom door shutting it with his weight then hits the mattress with a thud. Like centurions, the terriers file in, surrounding Wayne's long, lean body.

      Judith puts her ear to the door. With the sound of his snore, her shoulders drop and her back straightens. She lights a Virginia Slim and sits down to enjoy the first quiet moment of the day. A halo of smoke gathers around her head when she hears a knock at the back door. Placing her cigarette in a crystal bowl, an ashtray souvenir from Germany, she lifts herself from the easy chair. Seraphina has come to return the lilies Judith had placed on the New Year's altar. Sera, that's what Wayne called her for short, is a widow, an old friend.

      He had once said to her, "Listen sweetheart, that’s a pretty name but it's longer than you are tall. Can I just call you Sera?"

       

      She was a "good-natured gal" he had always said. She had to be, married to Sonny, his partner in a Venezuelan oil drilling company in the '60s. They made the deal one night over a bottle of Jack, in a thatch-roofed bar in Caracas. When they stumbled through the door together, arms over shoulders to tell Sera, she raised her glass. In a mixed accent of Portuguese and Spanish she proposed a toast, "Well, eef we loos it all tomorrow, we jes start over. Sheers!"

      They had a hell of a run until Sonny started stealing and Wayne sent him back to Texas on a second-class charter.

      As the bouquet passes between Judith and Sera, a quaking blast from the garage shakes red pollen from the stamen onto the white, wilting petals.

      There are not many unpredictable night noises so far out in the piney woods. Dogs bark at owls and every now and then, a coyote. Exxon/Mobil trucks occasionally rumble on and off of the property to check their wells. But when the dogs are asleep, there is only the lowing of distant cattle to suggest waking life.

      Before Judith can gain a grip on the flowerpot, she sees fire clawing at the back door. Startled, she stumbles over soil and shards from the shattered lily container shoving Sera toward the front door.

She yells for Wayne, but there is no reply.

      The terriers scatter, disappear as the bedroom door flies open. Wayne lay still and quiet, but for the snoring. He blows air through his nose and lips, like a horse nicker and rolls onto his side.

      The two women struggle with all six feet and two inches of his dead weight until he flops to the floor.

      His eyes peel half open as he sits up. Grabbing him under his shoulders, they drag him outside, just as flames overtake the home.

      It is only a prefab house, not like the handsome homes they had known before retirement. But it held nearly every reminder of their combined 140-some years of life.

      Coatless and shoeless in the cold January night, the three are now monoliths in the field. Sera's stature is noticeably diminutive next to Wayne, her arms outstretched to wrap and warm the couple.

      Flames burn, blot out the stars.

      In minutes, the home is reduced to cinders. Indifferent to their loss, the flames turn and begin to feed on surrounding tree branches. The fire department calls. They are lost. The small dirt road turnoff is not visible in the night. A short red truck follows the glow on the horizon, getting there in time to save a few Venezuelan trinkets but not in time to save the two tiny terriers. The three watch the horror with tear-stained faces, imagining what must have become of the loyal companions — staring, glassy-eyed, no tears left.

      The final flame is exhausted. A blanket of pitch dark covers the now open field, like an old quilt with stars for pinholes.

~end~

~end~

Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008: Port Arthur native reinvented himself and art

Port Arthur native Robert Rauschenberg spent the last hours of his life in the very place he had wished.

"When I die, I don't want to go anywhere. I just want to work in my studio," said the internationally known pop artist at a news conference in 2005 in Lafayette, La., where he had an exhibition dedicated to his late mother, Dora.

With his only sister, Janet Begneaud, by his side, the artist known to many as the Pope of Pop, for his kindness and optimism, died of heart failure at 10:53 p.m. Monday in his studio on Captiva Island at the age of 82. At the artist's behest, his ashes will be spread on the beach in front of that studio Sunday with only his family and loyal staff members present, said Byron Begneaud, Rauschenberg's brother-in-law of 52 years. Memorial services are being planned for New York and Florida at a later date, as yet undecided, Begneaud, Janet's husband, said.

"He and Janet had a special bond," said Begneaud, speaking with soft R's and a slight drawl by phone from Lafayette. "Janet's been holding his hand for about six weeks. He had been in intensive care, but they moved him to his studio and cleared a path for him to see the bay."

Rauschenberg spent most of his life near the ocean, including many years in New York. But it started in Port Arthur, where he was born in 1925, at Gates Hospital. Rauschenberg often talked about his humble beginnings in Southeast Texas. His family, like many other American families, fell on hard times during the Depression, but using their wits, his family scraped by. In the Rauschenberg household, nothing went to waste. His mother used to sew remnants of fabric together to make clothes for the family. In an interview with the New York Times, Rauschenberg admitted his mother went so far as to make a skirt out of the back of the suit that her brother was buried in because she didn't want the fabric to go to waste. It was that culture of transforming trash into treasure that ultimately made Rauschenberg a star. He preferred to create his pieces out of second-hand store finds, items he found in the street and in trash bins and objects he had on hand, versus canvases or anything store-bought.

Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home by parents Dora and Ernest, he left Port Arthur and the idea that he might become a minister, to attend college in Austin in 1943. But he was expelled within a semester because he had trouble reading.

"Milton was not a scholar," remembered Dovie Horton, a member of Thomas Jefferson High School's Class of '43. "I later found out he was dyslexic."

Rauschenberg said he was "spared the shame" of returning home from college when he received a letter from the draft board. The U.S. Navy trained him to be a neuropsychiatric technician. He was to bathe and wrap corpses.

"No, I was not forced to fight. What I saw was much worse," Rauschenberg said in the Lafayette press conference. "I got to see, every day, what war did to the young men who barely survived it. I was in the repair business."

After the war, the young man, still known as Milton, hitchhiked home to Port Arthur only to find his family had moved to Lafayette.

"Janet wasn't there in Lafayette very long before she was named Sweet Potato Queen. She was a beauty and Milton was always sweet and gentle," Horton said.

And Milton wasn't there long before he left for art school and renamed himself "Bob."

"When people got to know me better and just assumed that I had some dignity, it became Robert then. So now I'm known as either Robert or Bob," he said.

Reinvention was the hallmark of his career. He worked in every medium---in theater, dance and even engineering, he created set designs, lighting designs and costumes while reinventing what the entire world thought of as art. Rauschenberg attributed much of what he learned about creating and reinventing to his time spent at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He collaborated with art world giants Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Josef Albers; dancer Merce Cunningham; and musician John Cage.

In 1953, he moved to New York City, where he met aspiring artist Jasper Johns and designed window displays for Tiffany's to make ends meet while exploring the New York art scene. Their work in the 1950s would become the link between abstract expressionism, which dominated the art world in the '50s, and pop art of the 1960s, and is still influencing artists today.

Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, a prestigious contemporary art exhibition. (Mark Tobey and James Whistler previously had won the Painting Prize.)

Amid fame, he did not forget his hometown, visiting several times in the '80s and '90s for benefits for Lamar State College-Port Arthur and the Museum of the Gulf Coast.

"He was a very generous person," said Sam Monroe, president of both LSC-Port Arthur and the Port Arthur Historical Society. "He liked people. He met people. He showed interest in everybody."

In a previous interview, celebrated photographer and Beaumont native Keith Carter of Lamar University agreed. "His approach influenced everybody in my generation," Carter said.

Donna Meeks, chair of the Lamar University art department, puts Rauschenberg in the same league as Picasso and Duchamp. "He is one of the three most significant artists in the 20th century," she said. "I don't think artists today work without knowledge of Rauschenberg."

Rauschenberg is survived by a son, Christopher, 56, a Portland, Ore.-based artist and photographer.

Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn

By Donna Rae Wisor
For The Examiner
January 9, 2009


A portrait of Parks in his “autumn years,” with hand on face, a head of billowy white hair and signature mustache, reveal a man in a crackling season---just before spring. His point of view from behind a camera, his “weapon of choice,” rose far above the heap of racism and poverty that were his adversaries. The photographic, cinematic, literary and musical works of Gordon Roger Alexander Buchannan Parks (b. 1912 – d. 2006) look toward a horizon without boundaries, to freedom.

The Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET) will exhibit his works from Jan. 17- April 12, with an opening reception on Friday, Jan. 16, from 6 to 8 p.m.. Philip Brookman, chief curator and head of research at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. will lecture.

“He was an inspiration for many generations of people, and not only artists," Brookman said in a USA Today interview in 2006. "As someone who grew up in an environment of poverty and racism, he made it his mission to end that, and he used art as a weapon to do it."

The son of a Kansas dirt farmer was not severely daunted in 1941, at the age of 28, by comments from Editor Alexey Brodovitch of Harper's Bazaar. Brodovitch said he admired Parks’ fashion pictures, but could not hire people of color due to being a William Randolph Hearst publication.

Why should he be daunted? Parks had been homeless and starving in Chicago before he worked as a busboy at a country club, he was nearly murdered while working as a porter at a flophouse and as a piano player in a brothel. He almost froze to death riding the ‘rails’ to New York where fate would have him join an all white orchestra. It didn’t last long though; the leader absconded with their salaries.

Photo clerks who developed Parks' first roll of film, had applauded his work and pointed him to Frank Murphy's women's clothing store in St. Paul, Minnesota for fashion assignments. Parks’ work caught the eye of Marva Louis, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis' wife. He soon developed a portfolio.

Parks chose to work for the notable photographer Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration after he won a Julius Rosenwald fellowship in 1941 for his photographic work at Chicago's South Side Community Art Center. By the time he finally caught his big break at Vogue and Glamour magazines he had paid his dues. It was there he established his international reputation as a fashion photographer.

Fashion was only one of many subjects Parks could interpret. Life magazine recognized his talent in 1948 and for 22 years Parks' documentary work chronicled poverty, crime, school segregation, Communist demonstrations, the return of U.S. Korean War veterans, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Panthers. His 1961 photo essay on a poor and dying Brazilian boy, Flavio da Silva, brought donations that saved the boy's life and paid for a new home for his family.

He covered fashions in women's garters, prison riots in New Jersey and gang wars in Harlem. His portraits include notables such as Winston Churchill, Grace Kelley, Alexander Calder, Louis Armstrong, Malcolm X, Ingrid Bergman, Duke Ellington, Paul Newman, Muhammad Ali, Barbra Streisand, and his literary contemporary Langston Hughes.

Parks is best remembered as the director of the 1971 film Shaft. Branching out from his photography in 1963, Parks went on to direct many films including The Learning Tree, based on his autobiographical novel. Parks composed music and even a ballet. Among his numerous books are: A Choice of Weapons (1966), To Smile in Autumn (1979), Voices in the Mirror (1990), Arias of Silence (1994), and a retrospective of his life and work titled Half Past Autumn (1997), which was made into an HBO special.

The youngest of 15 children, Parks was born into a black family in segregated Fort Scott, Kansas. His father, who provided for the family by subsistence farming, was extraordinary. Parks tells how his father, once, without provocation or permission, checked into the hospital to donate all of the skin from his back and back legs to a young burn victim. But it was his mother who died when he was only 15, who was the main influence on his life.

“I never wanted to diappoint her,” he once said.

A high school teacher told Parks and his classmates not to waste their family's money going to college because they “would only be porters and maids.” Parks never finished high school but by 1998, he had been awarded his 56th doctorate.
"I never allowed the fact that I experienced bigotry and discrimination to step in the way of doing what I have to do," he once said. "I don't understand why other people let that destroy them."

Parks was married and divorced three times. His wives were Sally Alvis, Elizabeth Campbell and Genevieve Young, a book editor whom he married in 1973 and divorced in 1979. For many years, Parks was romantically involved with Gloria Vanderbilt, a railroad heiress and clothing designer. Parks was a close friend of Muhammad Ali, and godfather to Malcolm X's daughter Quibilah Shabazz. He is a co-founder of Essence magazine, and wrote a ballet called Martin, in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr..

Gordon Parks and his influential work continue today to be an enduring force in society for the emotional and intellectual response they elicit, according to Melissa Tilley of AMSET.

In a 1998 interview with PBS, Reporter Phil Ponce asked how Parks could explain the fact that he’d had such a remarkable life.

"I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived," he said. “And now, I feel at 85…There's another horizon out there…But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.”

Death and Art

By Donna Rae Wisor
As published in the Beaumont Enterprise 2007

In the world of art, the big money is in death, to a salesman.

Three of the top auction houses in the country hit record sales with contemporary art this week just days after the death of one of the artworld's greats, according to Artinfo.com. Rauschenberg, a contemporary of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol died Monday at his Captiva Island studio in Florida at 82.

Two days after his death, Rauschenberg's 1963 oil-and-silkscreen canvas “Overdrive,” sold for $14.6 million, according to Sotheby's Contemporary Art Evening Auction, New York, Website. “Red Body,” his pencil, gouache and solvent transfer on paper dated 1969, sold for $993,000, exceeding the estimated selling price of $500,000 to $700,000. And “Slug,” sold for $2.84 million, a 1961 combine painting estimated to sell between $3 and $4 million.

It's hard to say what that means when you consider that only three years ago in2005, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased his 1955 masterpiece, "Rebus," for about $30 million from French billionaire Francois Pinault.

The sale of a billboard-scaled Andy Warhol, Detail of the Last Supper for $9.5 million, was reported as a "mild distraction" Wednesday, compared to a sizzling duel over a Francis Bacon which went to an anonymous European telephone bidder for a record $86.28 million. The gavel went down at Christies Tuesday, on a 1995 Lucious Freud for $33.64 million, making it the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold.

All of those record numbers do mean something.

"The contemporary art market is booming," said Beaumont local and internationally-known artist Keith Carter, whose works have also been sold at Southebys.

Carter chalks it up to the economy and said there is nowhere to put your money right now.

"If you invest in a piece with a good pedigree, the returns are staggering," he said.

This is almost always the case if an artist dies.

"Unless there was a price change really soon before the death, an artists' work begins to sell for more, usually because no more can be produced," said Catherine Couturier director of John Cleary Gallery on 2635 Colquitt in Houston.

"On past artists of his caliber, like Lichtenstein and Warhol and Picasso, obviously they all have increased many, many times over the years," said Jane Eckert, of Eckert Fine Art Gallery, who represents Rauschenberg in Southwest Florida, in an interview with Mary Wozniak in Newspress.com.

Even if an artist never sold their work in the first place, death may result in sales. Just look at Vincent Van Gough who hardly earned enough in his lifetime to rub two Francs together. His fame grew rapidly after his death in 1878, particularly following a show of paintings in 1901. Fastforward to 1990, when his Portrait of Doctor Gachet sold for $82.5 million at Christie's.

The latest Rauschenberg to hit the auction block in the wake of the artist’s death is his famous series “Anagrams ( A Pun).” Signed posters and prints ranging from $990to $9000 can be found on eBay today and do not appear to have changed much over the past weeks. But that doesnt mean much.

"A lot of people, including myself, like to hold on to the work until the market stablilizes. That creates a demand. Right now, like in the case of Rauschenberg, obituaries are being written. Everyone is paying attention, even those who don't usually pay attention ," said Couturier.

Most people are not likely to be able to afford art at these prices. Rauschenberg once quipped, "I can't afford me either."

But he could afford a lot more than Van Gough and more than most artists alive today. The New York Times Reported Tuesday that he had purchased a modest beach house on Captiva in the '70s, working out of a small studio. Before long he became the " island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York."

In fact, he ended up owning 35 acres and some 1,000 feet of beach front, nine houses and studios, and a 17,000-square-foot studio overlooking the bay.

On the other hand, Rauschenberg did not likely see a penny from the auction houses.

"The auction is what is known as a secondary market," said Carter, admitting he doesn't have much to do with that end of things. "Artists don't participate in the secondary market."

Rauschenberg founded Artists Rights Today (A.R.T.) to campaign for artists to receive a royalty on resales of their art and testified before Congress in favor of royalties. Congress has not yet responded with a law.Other Rauschenberg paintings sold recently:

A portion of the series, which includes 236 paintings created from 1995 to
2002, was sold for $825,000 yesterday at Sotheby’s, according to the auction
house Web site. The vegetable dye transfer art work called “Easel [Anagrams (A Pun)] is created on polylaminate and was expected to sell for between $500,000 and
$700,000.