Mark Pointer - undefined magazine Book 10

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features:

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Helen Hill: Experimental Animator Skipp Pearson is the face of SC Jazz Amanda Ladymon reflects on giant vaginas Poetry Society of South Carolina David Axe is a regular guy Blue Sky Drift Fences by Tom Poland Wendell Culbreath is THE Dubber Ivan Popov is the Russian who belongs here South Carolina Poets on the New Year

on the cover: Blue Sky by James Quantz

contributors Cynthia Boiter … Associate Editor Mark Pointer … Associate Editor Kristine Hartvigsen … Managing Editor

Ed Madden … Poetry Editor Kyle Petersen … Music Editor Jay Quantz … Lead Photographer Sarah Kobos … Photographer Scott Bilby … Photographer

Betsy Newman … Writer Sumner Bender … Writer Robert LeHeup … Writer Tom Poland … Writer Laura Bousman … Design Intern

Subscribe now at: www.undefinedmagazine.com These pages are the labor of many talented hands, from writing, design and editing, to sales and marketing. We encourage you to contact us with any feedback or story ideas at our website. Please support the artists, your community leaders and advertisers. For advertising information please contact us at: 803.386.9031 or ads@undefinedmagazine.com undefined magazine is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any manner, in whole or in part, without the publisher's written permission.

Write us at: undefined Magazine 709 Woodrow Street : 321 : Columbia, SC 29205 803.386.9031 ©2011 All Rights Reserved undefined : book ten

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A message from the editors.

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Thompson @ Bombshell Beauty Studio { Special thanks: Jenny Andrew Zalkin @ the Army-Navy Store

We know we aren’t the first to say that growth means change or that the absence of growth is death, but we would bet a pretty penny – if we had one – that no other local arts publication is as dedicated to the concepts of growth and adaptation as we are at undefined.

The great Southern author, Ellen Glasgow, said that the only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions, and we think about that a lot as we balance on that thin rail that separates consistency from the mundane. We realize that our readers would not be our readers if what you wanted was more of what you can already get from picking up any periodical from the top of the piles of the other fine publications around town. Over the past year of our consistently published bi-monthly magazine – something we are proud of, and you know why – you have told us that you like being able to count on us to keep you on your toes when it comes to cutting edge artists and their projects. We take this seriously. We like it that you depend upon us to surprise you.

That’s why, in the interest of keeping things interesting, we offer you surprises, changes, and consistencies in this issue of undefined.

We welcome two talented additions to our editorial staff: Kristine Hartvigsen, the former editor of Lake Murray Magazine among others, who is acting as our new co-conspirator and managing editor, and Kyle Petersen, our editor of music. You’ve read the works of both Kristine and Kyle in our pages before. While their roles have changed and their duties increased, the character they bring to the magazine remains the same.

This issue also takes a look at a couple of promising young artists who are just starting out, as well as some established artists who are doing anything but resting on their laurels. In researching the lives of two of South Carolina’s art pioneers and living legends, jazz musician Skipp Pearson and visual artist Blue Sky, we learned a lot about the tenuous tasks of growth, changing without fail, and being dependable about shaking things up.

We learned that, despite whatever obstacles lay before us, staying true to our vision will help us surmount them.

We learned that being poor and exhilarating is better than being rich and boring.

And we learned that this magazine, its makers, and our readers could find no greater models for living a good life in the arts than these two gentlemen from our hometown.

To our artists, their patrons, and our readers, Happy New Year from undefined.

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“Cartersville“ James Quantz

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story: Betsy Newman

film

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his year’s Indie Grits Film Festival will feature the premiere of The Florestine Collection, the final film of South Carolina animator and DIY filmmaker Helen Hill. Hill was murdered by a home intruder in her adopted city of New Orleans on January 4, 2007. Her husband, Paul Gailiunas, has completed The Florestine Collection, which explores the life and work of Florestine Kinchen, a seamstress from New Orleans.

Helen Hill was born in Columbia in 1970. She began making films in the 5th grade, inspired by documentary filmmaker Stan Woodward, who served as a visiting artist with her class at Brennen Elementary School. In her short life she made nearly 20 films, and while she was not a famous filmmaker, her 1995 film, Scratch and Crow, is included in the National Film Registry of culturally significant works at the Library of Congress. Only 36 when she died, she was a respected member of a dynamic group of independent media artists.

Hill was a teacher and an activist as well, and her desire to be an agent of social change manifested itself early on. In her application to Harvard, where she was an undergraduate from 1988 to 1992, Hill stated that she wanted to learn more about film, as a way “to help society recognize its faults and see solutions.”

She met Paul Gailiunas at Harvard and, following graduation, the couple lived in New Orleans for a year. They left to pursue their respective graduate degrees in separate cities. After Hill earned her MFA in experimental animation at CalArts, they were reunited in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Gailiunas was studying medicine. There Hill joined the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative (AFCOOP) and helped found a women’s film festival, Reel Vision.

She began teaching animation workshops and conducting “film bees,” at which she helped members of her community make Super 8 and 16mm films.

In December 2000 Helen and Paul returned to New Orleans, where they settled in a low-income, predominantly AfricanAmerican neighborhood. Hoping to benefit the city they loved, Gailiunas opened Little Doctors Neighborhood Clinic, offering low-cost medical care to the poor, and Hill became active in the

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New Orleans alternative media scene. She advocated lowbudget filmmaking techniques and taught classes in experimental animation, encouraging her students to “create his or her own vision, to animate his or her own revolution.” In her 2001 movie Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century, the animated character of Madame Winger “assures her audience that you don’t need computers, big money, or the latest digital gizmo to make a film. You just need a good idea.”

Hill began work on The Florestine Collection in 2001, after finding more than a hundred of Florestine Kinchen’s hand-sewn dresses in a trash heap in front of the dressmaker’s home in New Orleans. Not knowing the identity of the seamstress, Hill nonetheless A still from The Florestine Collection. recognized the singular beauty the aspects of Florestine Kinchen’s dresses are similar to the doof the dresses and sensed a profound story behind them. She it-yourself (DIY) style of eccentricity common among these took them home and spent several weeks hand-washing and New Orleans artists. … She was quite resourceful, often using repairing them. Ultimately, she was funded by the Rockefeller parts of the same fabric in several different dresses.

Foundation to make her film.

In her application to Rockefeller, she described Kinchen’s work.

Seeking to find out more about the maker of the dresses, Hill began to make inquiries among people in the neighborhood.

She worked with no sewing machine, making loops of embroidery thread instead of buttonholes. She often pieced together parts of skirts or shirts to make the dresses. One dress is a man’s shirt on top and a hand-sewn bottom. Even though a wide variety of fabric styles is used, there are some unifying aspects. Each dress has a decorative edge across the bottom and a decorative end of each sleeve. Even her simple hand sewn slips include a decorative strip of black fabric along the bottom. The dresses are strikingly unique and reflect a true individual style.

I talked to an older neighbor of Florestine Kinchen as she sat on her porch. I learned Florestine Kinchen’s name and that she was an African-American woman who worked as a seamstress. She had lived alone since her sister’s death and had died in her 90s.

Among the dresses was one photograph of three people. I believe that one of the women is Florestine Kinchen, wearing one of her dresses.

Hill located the church to which Florestine Kinchen belonged and recorded interviews with her friends and family. She planned to include these recordings in the film, which would be a combination of animation and live-action film.

The dresses resonated with Hill.

I washed the dresses and tried them on. They fit. They not only fit, but in a very particular way that I prefer: loose on top and cut just above the knees. And they were quirky and lovely, just my style.

The character of Florestine Kinchen would be portrayed as a silhouette figure. Pioneered by the German animator Lotte Reiniger, this style of animation is the movement of hinged paper cutouts, cut from black paper and sometimes lead. I believe the delicate, old-fashioned style would be appropriate.

Also, the absence of details seems appropriate since I never met Ms. Kinchen. I would animate her sewing the dresses and walk-

She recognized in Kinchen’s work a familiar sensibility.

Working at Recycle for the Arts, I met many artists who piece together recycled objects to create unique styles of art. Many of

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"Helen Hill was an artist, filmmaker, community activist and subversive southern belle…Her life was an inspired art project."

Case of Helen Hill,” he describes the New Orleans alternative media community to which Helen belonged.

ing through the neighborhood we shared. I will also include some colorful drawn animation because the dresses are so amazingly colorful.

The traumatic events wrought by Katrina floodwaters in 2005 exposed painful aspects of the social fabric of New Orleans and the nation generally. Class- and race-based inequities were laid bare. The failure of the government at every level became obvious. Yet the post-Katrina spotlight also inadvertently illuminated a small but significant community of independent media artists working devotedly in old and new media forms.

Some are amateurs, in the purest sense. Others are working professionals making small films as an avocation. Still others cobble together piece-work and part-time projects that allow them to pursue their creative talents – getting grants, work-for-hire, teaching gigs, and freelance projects. Neither dilettantes nor careerists, they integrate homemade media into their everyday lives, often affiliating their practice with local social and political activism. The filmmaker Helen Hill, we now understand, is a radiant emblem of this community. (from Old and New Media After Katrina. Diane Negra, Editor. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

The Florestine Collection was to be a celebration of the dressmaker, whose legacy Hill had almost literally stumbled upon.

But she envisioned the film as a political piece as well.

As a white person and a community activist in a predominantly African-American city, I feel it is important for me to take part in breaking down racial barriers. This film will be one way for me to address these issues in a film, which will be watched by the people of New Orleans.

Hill began pre-production work on The Florestine Collection, storyboarding it with the silhouettes that she planned to animate. Then Hurricane Katrina emptied their New Orleans neighborhood and drove Helen and Paul and their young son, Francis Pop, to Columbia, where they moved in with her mother and stepfather, Becky and Kevin Lewis. The Katrina refugees were frequent attendees of the Nickelodeon Theatre during 2005, before returning to New Orleans. When Helen was killed, the family had a special screening of her work at the Nick, as part of her funeral service.

The Indie Grits Film Festival will feature multiple screenings of The Florestine Collection on Saturday, April 16. The first screening will be private, for family and friends, with at least two more to follow that evening. The 2008 McKissick Museum exhibition, titled The Dresses of Florestine Kinchen: A Tribute to Helen Hill, will be on view during Indie Grits as well. Featuring thirty of Kinchen’s dresses and interpretive panels, the exhibition does an excellent job of contextualizing the film. (At this writing, the location of the screenings and exhibition were still being determined).

Earlier that day, as part of the Nick’s Family Film Series, the theater will host a handmade film class; that afternoon, in front of the Nick, there will be a sewing workshop in the spirit of the Florestine dresses as part of Crafty Feast, an indie festival focused on handmade crafts. The workshop will be free of charge.

Dan Streible, professor of Cinema Studies at NYU and director of the Orphans Film Festival, has written about Helen in a new book titled Old and New Media After Katrina. In Streible’s chapter “Media Artists, Local Activists, and Outsider Archivists: The

Helen and Paul

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story: Kyle Petersen photography: James Quantz

Skipp Pearson is the face of South Carolina jazz Perched on the edge of Columbia’s Finlay Park, overlooking the vista of the city he calls his home, Skipp Pearson, affectionately known as “Pops” to hundreds of friends and fans, sits in the newly re-opened Le Café Jazz. Seventy-four years young, and ready for the future.

Le Café Jazz is just one of the latest in the many projects the Skipp Pearson Jazz Foundation has embarked on in its quest to turn Columbia into “Jazz Town USA.” The café boasts plentiful outdoor and indoor seating areas with an expansive view of Finlay Park, and its Parisian-themed décor and menu is designed to create an atmosphere of enjoyment and appreciation for jazz music – Pearson’s quintet plays there every Friday and Saturday evening as part of their ongoing effort to bring as much live jazz music to the city as possible.

Since retiring from teaching in 1997 with “the desire to do something else,” Pearson says he has been singularly dedicated to the preservation of live jazz music in South Carolina. Beginning with his weekly jazz series at Main Street Columbia’s Hunter Gatherer Brewery and Alehouse, the Thursday Night Jazz Workshop, an infamous jam session that has seen marquee players from across the country and around the world drop in to play, Pearson eventually started a foundation in his own name to further his efforts to preserve the tradition of live jazz music. Pearson routinely operates jazz workshops in public schools, gives an annual free performance on the State House lawn in May, and spearheads the celebration of National Jazz

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Appreciation Month in April. The foundation has grown into a clearinghouse of sorts for all jazz music happenings in the state.

Since the foundation blossomed in the early 2000s, Pearson has been awarded numerous awards and accolades for his current efforts and past achievements. In 2003 he was given the

should be given back to them. It shouldn't be isolated to any ethnic group or any economic level. It should be available to all.”

Pearson was into music from the very start. Starting out on drums and later switching to saxophone, he began taking fifty cent private lessons in the sixth grade. By the age of 15 he had

“Technology is ... I'm not gonna say causing the problem, but it takes away from the human art form.”

Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for the Arts, the state’s highest arts award, and has been awarded the title of “Ambassador of Jazz” for the state as well. In 2010, Conn-Selmer Paris, one of the premier instrument makers in the world, asked Pearson to become an “endorsing artist,” a prestigious position which also opens up a variety of financial opportunities for the foundation.

“I'm trying to keep the art of jazz in the mainstream so it can be passed on for generations to come,” he says. Pearson sees jazz as “part of the learning institution of life” and wants people to understand the importance of preserving the musical tradition.

“We have a lot of different entities in music these days.

Technology is ... I'm not gonna say causing the problem, but it takes away from the human art form.”

While Pearson’s concern about technology might sound like the grumblings of a Luddite, there is a definite rationale to the ideal of jazz that the perfectionist wants to preserve. Pearson can wax poetic about the beauty and importance of seeing music performed live. “Live performance is like looking at a play….

It's the musician in his natural environment, doing what he is supposed to do as a player. It's very emotional. For example, many guys close their eyes and don't open them until they are finished. Others have body movements that they use to express what they are doing at the time. When you see a [visual] artist’s work …you have to … figure out ... and study … the brush strokes and things like that... But when you listen to a jazz performer [live], you have the opportunity to watch an artist [at the time of creation].”

The sax-man’s other favorite metaphor for understanding jazz music is that of a public forum. Pearson sees the song itself as the common subject to all the players, with each improvisational turn as a personal contribution or point of view on the subject at hand. “It’s about how you feel at the time you are playing it,” he says. “Tomorrow, ten minutes later, you may do it again, and you may not approach the conversation the same way. You may not say the same words every time you play the tune.”

Pearson also emphasizes the connection between education and music, with the idea that jazz is both educational and edifying. While he acknowledges that “mostly the roots of the music originally inspired people to dance,” he wants people to recognize how “[jazz] became a listening music; it became a study. [This] created something else, an art form.” As an art form, Pearson wants jazz, as one of the great cultural products of the country, to be an integral part of what the next generation learns. Art is part of the culture of any country or continent, and you have to value that, and be able to put it where it is available to the populace,” he says. “Jazz came from the people, so it

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organized his first commercial band, a move that presages what would become a lifetime of getting bands together at the drop of a hat. After he graduated from high school, his parents encouraged him to go to college, but a brash sense of restlessness led Pearson to join the Air Force at the age of 19 – he would remain in the service for exactly four years, the majority of which he was stationed in Ipswich, England.

Instead of taking a break from music, his time in the service proved to be a catalyst to make more music – he formed a band wherever he was. One of his regular gigs was a Wednesday jazz night at a café similar to Le Café Jazz in Columbia. Pearson credits this regular gig with creating an atmosphere of jazz appreciation in Ipswich and fondly recalls the large crowds and sense of community his trio inspired. More than anything, his early music ventures in high school and in the Air Force developed in him the idea of jazz as a fluid mode of communication between people, giving Pearson the confidence to become the quintessential guy with a horn, organizing bands with ease and sitting in with bands of every shade and stripe.

After retiring from the Air Force, Pearson settled in Washington, DC, where, after working for the Smithsonian Institution, he took the leap to making music full-time. “I went out and tried it,” he laughs, “and once I found out that it wasn't as secure as I needed it to be, I decided to come back to my roots in Orangeburg.” This was not before he built a reputation for organizing a wide range of jazz and R&B bands, including house groups that backed Patti Labelle and Otis Redding, among others. Even after he returned to South Carolina, Pearson became known as the horn player in the state who could make gigs happen – making him a de facto “ambassador of jazz” long before the state legislature made it official.

With the decision to return to South Carolina, Pearson found himself pushed toward education by his soon-to-be wife, who was pursuing a degree in secondary education at Voorhees College in Denmark, and his mother, a lifelong public school teacher who had just taken a job at Claflin University. Pearson smiles when he tells the story of why he started at Claflin at the age of 28. “My mama said ‘you got a wife, she's smart; she's trying to get her degree, and you still out there trying to run down the road with the horn. You better get an education,’” he recalls. “I said ‘okay mama.’”

After his first year at Claflin, his performance was so impressive that he was offered two part-time jobs organizing band programs for the school districts in Bamberg and Clarendon Counties. Although progress toward his degree was temporarily stymied while he worked to support his wife’s education, he

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eventually went on to graduate with a Music Performance degree and to teach in those two school districts for another 24 years.

At the same time, Pearson always remained busy as a performer playing as many as five nights per week. After graduating from college he joined the National Guard Army Band, a group he would perform with until his retirement in 1997.

Between his professional gigs, his steady performance schedule with the military band, and his duties as an educator, Pearson developed a seemingly limitless range of musical contacts, coming to play with the likes of Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter and artistic director of jazz at New York City’s Lincoln Center who is often considered “America’s Musical Ambassador.”

“He was at the Spoleto Festival living at the hotel I was playing at, called the Omni back then – I was in the house trio there for almost three years,” says Pearson, who slipped the bellhop a few dollars to get Marsalis’s room number, then simply called him up and invited him down to play with his band in the

hotel restaurant. Marsalis came down to play with Pearson that night, and ever since then, when Marsalis comes into the region, he invites Pearson to play a number with him. The Marsalis connection has led to multiple appearances at Lincoln Center for the saxophonist, as well as the opportunity to bring the famed trombonist Wycliffe Jordan to Columbia’s Thursday Night Jazz Workshop.

Such is the life of a horn player with Pearson’s longevity and stature. Building these kinds of connections has been his life’s work, the endless pursuit of keeping jazz music alive in South Carolina. “What we’re doing, we plan to continue,” Pearson promises. “[This is] a lifetime thing. As I say sometimes, I got less time to be here than I been here already, but if I can stand the time, and have the energy for it just a little longer, it will be different.” Really, thanks to Skipp “Pops” Pearson, it already is.

While Columbia may not be the epicenter of jazz music, the art form is alive and well thanks to his efforts.

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“If we are to change our world view, images have to change.

The artist now has a very important job to do.

He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.”

– David Hockney

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artist

Amanda Ladymon reflects on giant vaginas and multiple organisms

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hen she moved to Columbia four years ago, artist Amanda Ladymon left her giant plaster vagina on her mother’s back patio in Dallas. Could the abandoned sculpture be a symbol of Ladymon’s leaving behind her feminist sensibilities? Don’t bet on it.

The only child of a single mother, Ladymon has always been a quiet feminist. So when an arts reviewer recognized feminist themes in her Urban Organic show last September at Compass 5 Partners/Art + Cayce, it came as a bit of a surprise.

“I was stunned because I never talk about that,” Ladymon said.

“I love feminist artwork. That’s what I focused on when I first started.”

Ladymon remembers being pulled over by a highway patrolman while driving that 100-pound vagina home in the back seat of her car. The officer kept looking at it with a puzzled expression before finally asking what it was. As an abstract painter, sculptor, and installment artist, Ladymon is used to such “what-is-it” queries. And she is happy to let people draw their own conclusions.

“With all my work, I love that when different people look at it, they see different things,” she said. “There’s always something rooted in the human body or in nature.”

Indeed. Ladymon’s work is unmistakably organic, its forms almost visibly contracting with the pulse of life being conveyed

story: Kristine Hartvigsen photography: Sarah Kobos

through their winding curves and worm-hole synapses.

Inspiration for the dramatic images comes straight from modern medicine.

“My interest in biological forms started when my grandfather got lung cancer around 2003,” she explained. At the time, she read every medical book she could get her hands on. “I was trying to understand why our bodies destroy themselves.”

Since then, many of Ladymon’s visual and thematic cues have come from highly scientific sources. With earnest, she scrutinizes cellular elements captured through an electron scanning micrograph machine. She’s equally enthralled viewing ordinary fruit fly larvae through the lens of a simple laboratory microscope. That is not to say Ladymon was a science wunderkind in her formative years. She took no joy in biology class dissections.

“I’m very squeamish,” she admitted. “But a lot of medical images, once they become digital, don’t look real to me because the color changes.”

Ladymon’s favorite scanned and magnified images are dendrites – the wiry appendages that extend from neurons to conduct electrochemical impulses from cell to cell in the body.

They are critical to neurological function.

“They look like these beautiful webs,” she said. “They have organization but also chaos.”

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Organization and chaos converge across a five-panel painting from Ladymon’s MFA thesis exhibition that she completed at the University of South Carolina in 2009. The work currently resides in the Tapps Center for the Arts on Main Street in Columbia. It is lovely and colorful and intricately rendered. The installation combined the two-dimensional imagery of these panels with enormous three-dimensional hanging forms that could be perceived alternately as entrails or umbilici. Either way, they suggest channels of varying dimension for conveying life

The arts captivated Ladymon from a very early age. As soon as she could walk, Ladymon wanted to sing and dance on the stage.

Her mother took her to children’s theaters and enrolled her in workshops. She learned to play the piano. By fifth grade, she was playing clarinet. In high school, she started in the marching band – something she would continue for 11 years, through her undergraduate years at the University of North Texas. As a freshman, she first majored in interior design but switched to art in her sophomore year.

energy. While their symbolism is left to interpretation, Ladymon says that medical professionals often see something at the cellular level that they recognize in her works.

Ladymon insists that, with the exception perhaps of some wayward gene from her absent father, there are no artists in her biological family. That she should become one, and an awardwinning professional at that, is a bit of an anomaly.

“I feel like an oddity in the art world. I was raised in a strict family setting. My grandparents were like second parents. They had old-fashioned values. No one in my family was artistic.

Nobody,” she said. “I was a weird kid. I had a strange imagination. I spent a lot of time by myself, and I guess I had a little rebellious streak.”

“I was just not excelling in my interior design classes. There were too many rules,” Ladymon recalled. “After about a year and a half, I knew I needed to change my major. Mom wanted to be supportive in anything I decided to do, but I know she was disappointed when I switched to art from interior design. For a while I don’t think she knew what to say about my art. She came to my shows and was encouraging, but she is not the artsy type at all.”

Reading the 1987 book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari profoundly contributed to the evolution of Ladymon’s biological forms. It elevated her thinking on the physical body and the intricate minutia of its mechanics.

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“What is a body without organs? Every living creature has to take in energy to survive and release that energy in different ways,” she said. “A lot of my stuff tends to have embryonic shapes to it. Red as a color for me conveys strength and energy. It is not necessarily blood.”

Ladymon sees many similarities between the human body’s neurological and circulatory systems and the organic structures she observes in nature.

“The roots of a plant look very much like the arteries and neural parts of the human body. That is very interesting to me,” she explained. “I developed a certain aesthetic that came out as these forms, which I use to kind of invent my own organisms now.”

One of Ladymon’s biggest influences in contemporary art these days is innovative British painter and sculptor Matthew Ritchie of New York City. It is easy to see parallels in Ladymon’s work. Both draw from fundamental science in their hybrid regurgitation of multi-dimensional spatial relationships that not only provoke but also amuse and ultimately spark deeper contemplation.

Robert Lyon, who taught Ladymon studio art and sculpture during her graduate studies at the University of South Carolina, feels that Ladymon’s innate confidence in her own ability and creative instinct are her strongest qualities.

“One of the things about Amanda that impresses me is her tenacity,” he said. “Being an artist is not an easy occupation. She is pursuing it with everything she’s got.

That is really important. Nearly 95 percent of people with MFAs are no longer involved in art 10 years later.

That is pretty daunting.”

A self-described “control freak,” Ladymon juxtaposes the yin and yang of her existence quite simply: “My life is totally organized, yet my work is totally organic and messy. It has to be that way.”

At 29, Ladymon today is an adjunct professor of art history and art appreciation at Augusta State University and Midlands Technical College. In addition to preparing for solo exhibitions from Tennessee to South Korea, she volunteers as arts education coordinator for the 701 Center for Contemporary Arts, as well as curates exhibits and teaches art workshops at S&S Art Supply on Main Street. In fact, she and S&S co-owner Eric Stockard are planning their wedding for April 22 – Earth Day 2011. They met when she came into the store (then on Rosewood Drive) to distribute posters for a 701 CCA workshop.

“I fell for her the minute she walked through the door,” Stockard said. “I went home that evening and told my dad about her. I said I was going to ask her out the next time she came in the store.”

“Being with Eric is perfect,” Ladymon gushes. “He is very ‘chillax.’ He takes things day by day. He mellows me out, and in return I keep him a little more task-oriented.”

“We are not necessarily opposites,” he said. “We complement each other.”

Like Ladymon, Stockard is an artist. He says that when he first saw Ladymon’s artwork, he was captivated as much by it as by the artist herself. As someone who was raised in the arts and who embraces abstract expressionism, he noted that few people appreciate or even understand how much work truly goes into abstract art, and Ladymon achieves a depth and personal involvement that is quite unique.

“I wish my abstract stuff looked like that,” he said. “I am a part-time artist and haven’t really practiced in a very long time.

Most of my schooling was in industrial design.”

From her unheated studio that doubles as a dog house for the couple’s two pets, Noir and Oreo, Ladymon braves the cold to wield an eclectic array of materials that comprise her super-sized 3-D installations. Using anything from fabric and wire to plaster and metal, Ladymon delights in the process of creative exploration. And the scale rather defines itself.

“I think the goal for me is to do large installations,” she said.

“I am a pretty claustrophobic person. I don’t like small spaces. I have to work big. Otherwise, I feel confined.”

That appears to be the case in Ladymon’s life as well. She does everything big – including supersized vaginas.

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poetry

Poetry Society of South Carolina Celebrating 90 Years of Southern Culture “Everyone has two birthdays,” writes poet Billy Collins (citing English essayist Charles Lamb): “the day you were born and New Year’s Day.” One marks the “joyous anniversary” of existence, he says, but the other “marks nothing but the passage of time” (“New Year’s Day,” from Ballistics, Random House, 2008). [See pages 48-49 for poems by South Carolina poets on the new year.]

As this new year begins, the Poetry Society of South Carolina is celebrating the passage of almost a century – and two birthdays – and Billy Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, was in Charleston for the gala celebration.

Founded in Charleston in November 1920, the Poetry Society of South Carolina (PSSC) is the oldest state poetry society in the nation. On January 21 the Society celebrated the 90th anniversary of the first membership meeting with a gala event, a sold-out banquet for members and their guests featuring a reading by Collins.

According to South Carolina’s state Poet Laureate, Marjory Wentworth, the Society was known for bringing in the nation’s greatest living poets – “that’s part of its history,” she said – so it made sense to celebrate the anniversary with a prominent poet like Collins. The author of 12 collections of poetry, Collins was dubbed the most popular poet in America by the New York Times in 1999, and served as the nation’s Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. (The Poet Laureate – originally titled the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress – has included such literary luminaries as William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Frost, as well as prominent Southern writers such as Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey.)

Collins joins a long list of famous writers who have been guests of the Society – Robert Frost (who read for the PSSC 3 times, in 1929, 1951, and 1954), Carl Sandburg (4 times), Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Padraic Colum, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W. H. Auden, and Robert Penn Warren, to name just a few, and Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry magazine.

The Poetry Society of South Carolina was founded in late 1920

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by DuBose Heyward, Hervey Allen, and John Bennett, all prominent writers living in Charleston who championed a regionalist aesthetic and the use of local lore and regional culture—especially African American culture—in the arts. (Though criticized now for racial stereotypes and the appropriation of folk culture, Heyward’s novel Porgy and later the musical Porgy and Bess transformed literary representations of African Americans; Heyward was influenced by Bennett, a pioneer in the study of African American and Gullah culture. Allen co-edited with Heyward a special 1922 Southern edition of Poetry magazine that highlighted regionalist and dialect verse) PSSC was modeled after the Poetry Society of America, founded in 1910.

There were 250 people at the Society’s first meeting that January evening in 1921 – it was a who’s who, says James Lundy, the current president, since Heyward had invited the cream of Charleston society to join. Membership was limited to 250, says Lundy, since that was the seating capacity for the Society’s meeting hall, and there was a long waiting list of would-be members.

Historians such as Walter Edgar (in his 1998 South Carolina: A History) and Harlan Greene (in the South Carolina Encyclopedia) argue that the Poetry Society of South Carolina was at the forefront of the Southern Literary Renaissance. Edgar calls it the most significant of the cultural organizations developing in the state in the 1920s and 1930s, and Greene not only credits PSSC with the “first flowerings” of the Renaissance but also says that as an umbrella arts organization it both “fostered the cultural rebirth of the area” and contributed to the development of other cultural organizations, such as the Preservation Society of Charleston.

PSSC was also known nationally for its contests and cash awards that Lundy says were significant for the time. The organization still offers writing contests that draw entrants nationwide and publishes a literary annual featuring the prize-winning poems. While it may not have the national prominence it once had, PSSC remains the first and oldest state poetry society in the

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nation, and it continues to promote the reading and writing of poetry, hosting regular writers groups for members since the early 1920s, as well as readings by both local and visiting poets.

Along with monthly readings, the Society has also sponsored poetry walks in Charleston that bring to life – through onsite readings, sometimes in costume – the literary history of Charleston. More recently the Society hosted a Dead Poets Celebration at Magnolia Cemetery, again to highlight the literary history of the region.

Membership now is less a social registry than a community of practicing writers. Members boast about the value of the readings, but even more so about the value of the writing community PSSC offers them. “PSSC has done a great job of inviting exceptional poets to read and teach workshops,” said Susan Meyers of Summerville, winner of last year’s undefined poetry contest.

Wentworth, who has been involved in the organization since the early 1990s, credits PSSC with her first introduction to the arts communities of South Carolina after moving here in 1989.

Among her favorite memories are the society’s Christmas parties at John Bennett’s house in downtown Charleston when she first joined. “It was just like being in a movie,” she says. Everyone brought a favorite Christmas poem to recite. “It was magical.”

Denny Stiles, a member for 15 years (and president twice), credits the organization with his own productivity: “Without PSSC contests and writers groups, I would probably have written only about half as much as I have since 1994.” But Wentworth suggests further that the organization has grown into a real community, “abnormally nice and generous.”

Present at this year’s anniversary gala was John Ziegler, at 98 the oldest member of PSSC and the last living link to the Society’s founders. Originally from Manning, Ziegler attended his first PSSC Writers’ Group meeting in 1931 while he was a student at the Citadel. Later, after serving in World War II, he and his longtime partner, Edwin Peacock, settled in Charleston and cofounded the Charleston bookstore, The Book Basement. (Ziegler and Peacock are the subjects of a fascinating documentary history by Jim Sears, Edwin and John: A Personal History of the American South [2009].)

Lundy, Wentworth and Myers are all concerned about the need to extend the influence of PSSC throughout South Carolina, and Wentworth about the need for more coordination among the state’s various literary organizations. “My main wish,” says Meyers, “is that we could find a way to make the programs available to more poets across the state.” But for now, the Society remains a Charleston-based organization, with about half of the members living in the Charleston area Phebe Davidson of Westminster, a member of the Society for 19 years, thinks the organization is well on its way to alleviating concerns about the organization servicing only the lower portion of the state. "When I came on board, the organization was pretty Charleston-centric, but it still afforded some publishing opportunities statewide." She insists there's a real shift these days though.

"Since that time, it's become a more genuinely statewide operation through workshops and readings sponsored in partnership with other organizations. I find that especially heartening," For more information about the Society, see: www.poetrysocietysc.org. story: Ed Madden

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story: Robert LeHeup photography: Mark Pointer

interview

David Axe

is a regular guy

ng, funny and opinionated, uld find him open and engagi wo ly like you , nds dla Mi the from Columbia, where he’s fee shop or bar in dent and comic book writer pon res If you met David Axe at a cof cor te war ce lan free a is C-Span or that he used to wri imagine that he respondent for BBC Radio and just a regular guy. You’d never cor a n : bee 101 y has Arm Axe t ing tha lud w tten, inc wouldn’t kno about the many books he’s wri w kno lived for well over a decade. You n’t t uld tha wo ts ly den bab stu pro p Cor rs Training at Wired.com. You South Carolina Reserve Office of for the “War Room” column y rsit n ive ow Un his ut ut abo abo rk 6 wo in 200 r, a nonfiction Fix, a graphic novel he wrote Inside ROTC in a Time of Wa Carolina Press; or about War th

by NBM Publishing.

Sou ed of y lish rsit pub ive Un and tle the bat by with the carnage of was published in 2007 tion ina fasc like onicti add Iraq battling an personal war while he was in List.

Ten Top 6 It made Amazon’s 200

likely to find any pirates,” he says.

Why would a young man put his life at risk in the company of people who have as much interest in killing him as they do keeping him alive? Money? Hardly. Axe lives below the poverty line like most of us, realizing more than most that “below the poverty line” for Americans is “the executive suite” in most other places. Fame?

Have you ever heard of him? Granted, in the field of Internet-based war correspondence, he’s one of the better-known scribes. In a 2010 article on the writer, Rolling Stone described his work as “hot” and gave War is Boring major play.

Axe is more under the radar than the IEDs he routinely dodges on correspondent duty in the Middle East. In fact, the most attention he receives is from people who read his blog, War is Boring, which focuses on his work and the potential psychological effects of war reporting on journalists. His blog receives roughly 60,000 hits a month.

And who reads his blogs?

“Mostly fucktards,” Axe says. “There’s like 40 percent constructive criticism and 60 percent are people who live with their mom and masturbate in the basement.”

Axe’s motivation is simple. He writes so that he can understand the world around him. He uses his craft to miniaturize life in order to separate the important bits and see how they interact. He chooses war because that’s where the most important minutia reside. In hot zones, no one cares about spilling their coffee or getting into a fender-bender. To people at war, those issues are laughable.

This wide disparity in cultures allows stories to practically splatter onto the page, permitting details to fall like Jackson Pollock paints, leaving a written canvas that is both relatable and abstract to most who view it. This point is made all the more real when you stand in line with Axe at a local coffee house or bar.

He laughs more freely than most people who know what he does would ever think he could, essentially unfettered by concern for the inconsequential dramas from which the rest of us cannot seem to escape.

To set himself even farther apart, Axe has chosen to write his war stories in graphic novel form, a medium too often ridiculed and dismissed by non-readers as sophomoric. Inspired by such authors as Ted Rall (To Afghanistan and Back) and Joe Sacco (Palestine), he grew roots and found success in an industry notorious for being practically impenetrable.

H

e might not tell you about his new book published by the New American Library, War is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World’s Worst War Zones, which he co-wrote in 2010 with Matt Bors; or his other new book, Love and Terror, a sequel to War Fix which will be published by NBM. He also has a book coming out in late July called From A to B: How Logistics Fuel American Power and Prosperity. He was kidnapped twice in Chad in the summer of 2008 and was caught in an ambush in Afghanistan in the fall of 2009. He would likely say nothing of the Taliban shooting at him either. He won’t mention any of these accomplishments and close calls any more than he’ll demonstrate the kind of battle-shocked demeanor one might expect from a 32 year-old man who has experienced the sights and sounds and shit that he has. No sign of a tumultuous past, no paranoia, no thousand-yard stare. David Axe – just a regular guy.

Having recently returned from a month-long trip to Afghanistan, one of many, Axe shows no signs of trauma to himself or his psyche, a far cry from the war-torn mentalities of so many returning from war zones. His nonchalant demeanor is rare indeed, born from the ability to disconnect that he has cultivated after so many trips to places most of us can’t even imagine – Iraq, Lebanon, East Timor, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, the Congo, Chad. Since 2005, Axe has visited eight different war-torn countries, all tallied, if you include the time that he spent hunting pirates while on the USS Donald C. Cook off the coast of Somalia. That’s right. Pirates. When asked if he was scared at all, he responds like he doesn’t really want to talk about it.

“There are millions of square miles of ocean, and you’re not

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“My comic books I’m really proud of. The other stuff is just work,” Axe says. “Books like From A to B, they’re boring. If I’m lucky, there are probably 10,000 people who may want to read that book. I wrote (From A to B) because I like it and because it’s another job. Somebody’s got to write them, and not everyone needs Harry Potter or Twilight.”

Why did Axe choose to report wars rather than to fight in them? To use cameras rather than M-4s? The man has spent years touring war-torn countries, years wading through anarchic maelstroms to tell the true stories of the brutality he has witnessed daily.

“I don’t trivialize our soldiers,” he says “The tragedies are by no means lessened by those involved. It’s simply that there are worse wars being fought right now.”

But coming from these violence-riddled places, surely he had felt the bloodlust that so many eventually succumb to in the dark heat of aggression. Asked if he’d ever be tempted to pick up a gun and join the orgy of violence, Axe replies that any weapon he owned would be more a philosophical point than a practical one.

“I don’t believe that any one group or person should have a monopoly on violence,” he explains. “I just don’t want to kill anyone.”

That said, it is worth mentioning that Axe has a fully functional, matte-black Bulgarian AK-47 mounted in his kitchen. Ironically, he views himself neither as a war correspondent nor an artist, though, by definition, he is both. He’s become an integral and welcome addition to the Columbia art scene, which he regards dismissively, not in arrogance but from a belief that Columbia doesn’t care much about its writers. Axe believes that the other artists, though sparse, barely funded, and rarely prolific, are still very capable and filled with potential.

“But,” he adds, “this is Columbia. Our standards are reduced.”

Though some would argue that there is a tragedy in this statement, it hasn’t stopped Axe from staying in the city. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in English and found love, friends, and enough time and space to fulfill the niche he’s made for himself, acknowledging that this is what he very well may be doing for years and years to come. This is, of course, contrary to what Axe has been doing and where he is going next.

“I’m fucking retired,” he exclaims. “I have a deep affinity for my job and for extreme travel, but I don’t feel a dark drive to go gallivanting around shithole war zones. I’ve done it.”

You see, this is only a ritual Axe goes through every time he returns from a combat zone. He returns from the hell his art has

compelled him to visit, relaxing with the catharsis he’s been able to wrest from his work, but only for a day or so. Then there are the TV spots, magazine articles – think The Village Voice, Esquire, C-Span, Popular Mechanics, and Rolling Stone, for example – deadlines, and scripting. After only a few weeks, the war-lust kicks back in without fail, and off he goes. Axe plans to return to Afghanistan in March of 2011, for example, to report on the impact of the U.S. military’s withdrawal, both on the troops and on the Afghanis. Once more into the breach, David Axe style.

For this reason, Axe is an artist in the truest sense of the word, driven to attempt an understanding of the riotous world around him. His talent and passion have brought him to the deadliest parts of the world, and he’s returned with stories of both beauty and atrocity that move us to contemplate the horrors that some may believe to be innate in us all. Yet to watch him stroll down Main Street talking on a cell phone, he’s clearly just a regular guy.

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story: Cynthia Boiter

photography: James Quantz

artist

Blue Sky If the painter, muralist, and installation artist Warren Edward Johnson bristles at the moniker of local artist to his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, it is not because he doesn’t love his home – it’s primarily because he is so much more than a simple local artist to the veritable United Nations panel of fans in foreign countries who follow his work devotedly; a reality too many of Columbia’s local art lovers fail to appreciate.

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K

nown as Blue Sky since with techniques in plein air painting – a practice he continues to legally changing his name this day. in 1974 while absorbed in “Nothing rivals the experience of painting outside on a period of celibacy, vegetarianism, location,” Sky says. “I do it now and I think about the a type of meditative consciousness Impressionists and the direction that those innovators took art called Nirvikalpa Samadhi, and the in back then; it amazes me. Impressionism may well have been tutelage of a couple of fairly the greatest period in painting because of the way it opened intense hallucinogenic substances, people up to seeing the beauty in everything around them.”

Sky built a reputation based not Sky reminisces about his early days of plein air painting when he was one of a gang of young artists who would pile into cars only on the paintings and murals carrying paints, easels, wine, beer, and bread. he created in South Carolina, but “We would head out to the park and paint for hours, and some on those he designed and installed of those paintings actually turned out pretty good,” he says. throughout the United States.

“Besides, there’s nothing more fun than partying with a group of Duplications of the artist’s works artists.” have been featured in dozens of Though passionate about art at an early age, the lack of both international books and journals money and, sometimes, confidence proved to be obstacles in the over the past 30 plus years. young man’s realization of becoming a professional artist. In Examples of his art, particularly addition to serving as a technician in the Air National Guard, his (literally) world-famous trompe l’oeil mural Tunnelvision, Sky also worked at various jobs including typesetting and layout located on the external wall of the for R. L. Bryan, designing fluorescent signs inside and out, AgFirst Farm Credit Bank on designing and building parade floats, drafting large scale Taylor Street in downtown blueprints, and instructing others in the art of ballroom dance.

Columbia, appear in periodicals alongside those of such Though he enrolled at the University of South Carolina in 1958, luminaries as Johannes Vermeer, René Magritte, and Hans he frequently skipped semesters due to a lack of funding Holbein. If Blue Sky is not a megastar in South Carolina, rest for tuition. Much of his success at the university can be credited assured that, in many other places in the world, he is. to his mentor and chairperson of the Art Department, One of four children born to Jesse Johnson, who grew up in an Edmund Yaghjian. orphanage on Columbia’s Millwood Avenue, and an anxious but In 1944, Yaghjian was living an elite life in New York City, artistically gifted mother named Linnie Rae Aiken, Sky grew up where he had studied under John French Sloan and Stuart Davis, in a home that was short on money but long on art. When times leading members of the Ashcan school of realist artists, and was were tough, Linnie Rae painted with shoe polish and taught her teaching at his former alma mater, the Art Students League of son how to sculpt with clay dug from the backyard of the house New York. But in 1945 he left New York to enter academics, first on Woodrow Street that the Johnsons shared with another at the University of Missouri, then at the University of South family. Sky’s artistic talents presented themselves early and, as a Carolina. Sky was impressed by the fact that Yaghjian’s art had boy, he drew everything from abstract sketches to World War II aircraft with precise detail, often along the pages of his notebooks and homework. A Hand Middle School teacher noticed his young talent and encouraged the boy to enter art competitions and poster contests, which he tended to handily win.

Upon entering Dreher High School, Sky fell under the mentorship of the art teacher, Moselle Skinner, who introduced Sky to the Abstract Expressionism she had learned about during her studies in New York City.

Recognizing his almost precocious talent, Skinner offered Sky his own art studio behind the school’s art room and made it available to him at any time. It was while in this private studio that Sky first began to paint with oils as well as to leave the studio behind to experiment Freshman drawing project by Warren Johnson

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shown at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1944 and the Carnegie Institute in 1945, but he was more moved by his mentor’s lack of affectedness when it came to his talent and the way he respected the various talents and temperaments of his students.

“He was a well known and immensely talented artist and we would sit for hours in Yaghjian’s office just talking and looking at art magazines,” Sky remembers. “One afternoon I was sitting in his office reading a magazine and Yaghjian walked in and wanted to know why I wasn’t in class. I told him I didn’t have the money for tuition. Yaghjian reached for his checkbook and handed me a check, and that’s how I went to school that semester.”

It was also Yaghjian who got Sky his first New York job in 1961 illustrating books for Harper New York; an exacting practice that proved financially successful but taught the young artist that he was less interested in precision design and more interested in being true to his own artistic purpose. “I think Yaghjian planned it that way,” Sky says, cutting his gaze to the corner of his eye and smiling.

Upon graduation from USC, Sky was already freelancing for West Columbia’s Colite Company designing large scale signs and getting comfortable working with the kinds of heavy duty materials and tools he would one day use in his sculptures. His frustration with oil paints’ lengthy drying time led him to work with not only watercolors but also automobile paint, a process he learned from Yaghjian. Still discovering his own style, he focused on paintings of room corners with their commonplace furnishings for a while. Then in 1963, during one of his beloved group plein air painting sessions, he created Round Sound, a realistic watercolor painting of a pair of railroad signal lights that he mounted in a contextualized mixed-media frame. The painting first won the 1963 Motorola Regional Art Show and then, out of hundreds of entries, caught the eye of Henry Geldzahler, judge of 1964’s Sixth Annual Springs Mills Art Contest, who awarded the painting Best in Show and lauded it in a press release for its “technical ability and freshness of vision.”

At the time, Geldzahler was serving as the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and, over the years, he developed a pattern of moving in close social circles with the artists he endorsed – artists like Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Frank Stella, David Hockney, and South Carolina’s own Jasper Johns – who had also studied under Yaghjian for three semesters at the University of South Carolina. Upon Geldzahler’s discovery of Blue Sky at the Spring Mills Art Contest, he invited the artist to travel to New York where he planned to introduce him to various gallery owners and art patrons “in the know,” Sky says.

“I went to New York during the summer of 1964, and Geldzahler took me around, and I met the people he wanted me to meet. But they didn’t really impress me,” he recalls. “I knew I was meeting people who were important and who, I guess could have helped me out in my career. But I didn’t like the lifestyle – we weren’t communicating. I just never felt comfortable.” Sky and Geldzahler lost touch after their summer visit.

Sky did return to New York City the next year, however, and he worked there as an industrial design draftsman for wages on

“If you look at my painting prior to 1967, prior to LSD, then look at it afterward, you’ll see an amazing transformation” which he could barely subsist while he also studied at the illustrious Art Students League of New York. The crowds and noise of the city bothered him though and his long mass transit commute took time away from his art. In April, a long and disappointing Sunday afternoon drive to the city’s nearby Jones Beach, with its traffic and small, over-crowded plots of sand, proved to be the last straw for the young Southern man who, the next day, resigned from his job, packed his belongings in his car, and headed home to South Carolina.

“It was like a rebirth for me,” he remembers. “At 27, I’d always dreamed that one day I would be a New York artist painting in an apartment somewhere, happy and productive. I expected it, and maybe I was on the way to making it happen, but it didn’t feel right. I don’t think it ever would have.”

Sky drove directly to the beaches of Pawley’s Island where he stood on the sand that stretched as far as he could see, and then cried most of the way home. But the experience of living and

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working in New York served him well.

“It told me something – how much I love South Carolina,” he says. “A lot of people blame their failures on where they live.

They think that if only they lived in a more progressive place or if only the people around them were different, that their lives would be different, too.

Suddenly they would be successful and happy and everything would be perfect.

I’m here to say, ‘not necessarily.’”

Time back in South Carolina found Sky in graduate school at what was USC’s Hilton Head Island arts campus working in watercolors, devoting himself to representational art – his subject almost always being the Southern landscape that he had so bitterly missed while in New York – and antagonizing almost every authority figure who crossed his path. “I think I was a pretty sarcastic SOB back then,” Sky wryly admits now.

But within a matter of just a few years, a pattern began to emerge in which the artist would experiment with new painting styles and subjects and, quite often, the patrons who saw his works would scoop them up as fast as he could make them. Dave Cuthbertson, owner of Columbia’s now defunct Laurel Gallery,

beach scenes. Every painting in the show sold. A repeat performance two years later resulted in another sold-out Havens show. Finally, it looked as if the artist had found his way to succeed on his own terms.

Yet despite his success, Sky felt troubled.

“Since about 1970 I had become pretty much a party guy.” Sky says, recalling a string of time that centered on fast cars and alcohol that left him feeling empty.

“But I reached a point where nothing was satisfying; I knew there had to be more. I read the Bible and said to myself, what is this all about? Then I went into a little shop that was in Five Points called the Joyful Alternative and asked for a book that would help me understand the meaning of life.”

Sky was directed to the book, The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda; his reading of it signaled the beginning of a spiritual journey that the artist says he is still on.

“I went celibate for seven years and became a vegetarian – I still am,” he says. “For a while I ate mostly fruit and nuts … went from weighing 180 pounds to 117 pounds when I was working on Tunnelvision. But the most meaningful thing I did was learn to

“I developed a ritual of walking a single rail of the railroad tracks every morning in the dark without looking down.” practice Nirvikalpa Samadhi,” a type of intentional consciousness that allows the practitioner to meditate even while moving.

“I developed a ritual of walking a single rail of the railroad tracks every morning in the dark without looking down,” he says, explaining that he would begin his trek on the tracks at Greene Street in Five Points, even in icy weather. “At first I could only go about 10 steps without falling; by the time I was done I could go a solid hour on the rail without falling off. I was fine-tuning my mind.”

Sky practiced this ritual every day for about 15 years, often walking directly toward an on-coming train, balancing both his body and his fear, leaving the rails at the last safe moment to do so. He quit the practice only when he and his wife Lynn moved from their Green Street home. “I don’t actively meditate anymore,” he says, “But I still practice focusing – that’s what painting is for me. It is the ability to focus on something until you see it clearly. We think we already see things clearly,” he says shaking his head, “but usually we don’t.”

“You can’t paint something until you really see it. Perception is everything, and manipulating perception is what my murals are all about. If anyone looks at one of my murals, for example, and they say, ‘that’s a good mural,’ then I’ve failed,” he explains.

“I want people to question their own perceptions.”

Sky’s own ability to question and study perception was enhanced by the use of the semi-synthetic psychedelic drug, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, as well as the occasional ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms. “You can’t paint while

invited Sky to stage his first solo show there in 1967; which was followed by a successful student show at Hilton Head Island; and, in 1968, a request from publisher Robert Wilkins to sketch architectural landmarks for Sandlapper Magazine. Blue Sky’s first truck back painting – literally a painting of the rear of an industrial vehicle and the first of many automotive creations to come – was chosen for inclusion in the 1970 American Watercolor Society exhibition in New York City, despite the artist’s absence from the organization’s official ranks. A painting of a 1957 Cadillac, painted with automotive lacquer and entitled, Cream Puff, was given the Purchase Award in 1971’s Springs Mills Show and was deemed by the adjudicator, Perry Rathbone, director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to be “a distinguished work … subtle and poetic.”

That same year, gallery owner Betsy Havens staged an exhibition of Blue Sky’s work which consisted of, in large part, watercolor depictions of South Carolina

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you’re using these substances, but they certainly blow the cobwebs out of your mind when you approach painting afterward,” he explains.

“If you look at my painting prior to 1967, prior to LSD, then look at it afterward, you’ll see an amazing transformation,” he goes on, “It becomes extremely colorful. Previously, I mostly saw and used browns and grays; after LSD, there are colors you haven’t seen before. It peels away veils from your mind. As a defense mechanism your mind protects you from reality – but LSD is less merciful. It shuts your control center down and what you see is unedited. As an artist I needed to see the channels of power that are flowing underneath the surface.”

According to the artist, he eventually reached the point that he didn’t need the drugs anymore. “Their work on me was done,” he says.

It was about this time in 1974 that the artist, who still answered to his given name of Warren Johnson, made the decision to legally change his name to Blue Sky. “I felt like I was no longer the same person and I wanted my name to reflect that transformation,” he says. And it was soon after that he was moved to begin what may be the defining project of his career – the 75 by 50 foot trompe l’oeil mural, Tunnelvision; the first of its kind in South Carolina and a public art creation that put Columbia on the map for arts and oddities throughout the world. But oddity was not what the artist was going for.

“I wanted to paint something that would embody a passageway for the transformation toward illumination that I had made in my own life, and I wanted to graphically demonstrate how most people see enlightenment” he explains, “and it literally came to me in a dream. I had tried three different times to get the South Carolina Arts Commission to fund the painting of a mural on the north wall of the Federal Land Bank on Taylor Street, but I was turned down every time. Finally, I woke up one morning and recalled a dream about the tunnels in the mountains of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and it all fell into place in my mind.”

On his fourth application to the SCAC, Sky was granted funding in the amount of $3000 to paint the year-long project, virtually all of which went toward purchasing supplies. Painting with exterior acrylic latex enamel from the bucket of a one-man moveable scaffold called the Sky-Car that he designed and built himself, Sky painted to the music of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with an eye toward authenticity and realism.

The 1975 unveiling of the painting garnered international attention. The following year the mural was featured in People Magazine and Readers Digest and the artist was flooded with requests to give talks and, most importantly, create more murals.

Uninterested in the attention, Sky left Columbia and took temporary refuge in a Kriya monastery in California. The Carmel area of California has since served often as an interim sanctuary for the artist who disdains publicity but loves his art and coming back to his home in Columbia.

Over the 35 years since he created what some, though not necessarily Sky himself would consider his masterpiece – “My best work is yet to come,” he says – the artist has been commissioned to create interior and exterior murals throughout South Carolina as well as in other parts of the United States.

Overflow Parking, painted in 1978 in Flint, Michigan, for example, uses trompe l’oeil to create the illusion of a parking lot that extends up the wall of the local newspaper, the Flint Journal. In Fort Pierce, Florida, the 15 by 20 foot mural Night Train suggests a huge locomotive engine emerging from a downtown wall.

Appropriately controversial, some of Sky’s other local public art displays have either appeared seemingly out of nowhere, disappeared into the earth, or required his home town’s not-alwayspatient art patrons to wait in exasperation for the unveiling.

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So early on a Sunday morning in 2000, he crept onto Main Street and installed the pre-constructed sculpture as a surprise to the waking city.

Funded entirely by the artist himself, NEVERBUST is a 25 foot long chain of welded steel links that are 5 feet in diameter and stretch between two historic buildings on Columbia’s Main Street. Though Sky had the consent of the building owners to create the installation, he feared the city would censor him if he went through the proper channels for approval of such a project. So early on a Sunday morning in 2000, he crept onto Main Street and installed the preconstructed sculpture as a surprise to the waking city. When the project finally went before the Landmark’s Commission it was unanimously approved.

Busted Plug Plaza, on the other hand, which was installed in 2001, was a project kept under the literal wraps of a giant gray tarp for the 14 months it took the sculpture to be completed. Weighing in at 675,000 pounds and more than four stories high, the sculpture of the fire hydrant in the center of the plaza qualifies as the world’s largest and is located in the Tunnelvision parking lot along Taylor Street.

Kawasakisaurus is a 2003 site-specific sculpture installation in Columbia’s Vista on the corner of Senate and Pulaski Streets on land owned by South Carolina Bank and Trust. Constructed from 16 carefully positioned abandoned motorcycles and a Volkswagen Beetle fender, all encrusted with cement and then painted the color of bleached bones, Kawasakisaurus creates the illusion of an archeological dig site for a stylized and fairly unusual fossilized dinosaur.

Rather, it created the illusion. In 2007, representatives from the bank consulted Sky about moving the site-specific art to a location along the coast of the state. They were willing to pay for the move but had no intentions of compensating the artist for the reconstruction of the sculpture.

“Besides,” says Sky, “it is a site-specific piece of art. It was constructed for that site, and it was made from motorcycles found in the old razed City Garage that had previously occupied the lot where the bank now stands.”

After a period of failed negotiations, the artist instructed bank officials to simply cover his work up with sod rather than move it, which, appallingly, they did.

South Carolinians are not short on good fortunes to take for granted – cost of living, pristine beaches, and January thaws, for example – nor are we immune from the human tendency undefined : book ten

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From top left: NEVERBUST Tunnelvision Overflow Parking Zen Truck

to undervalue what we think we know well and possess in abundance. It is always the exchange rate that tells the tale so it’s not really surprising that, like a South Carolina peach in the dessert sun, some treasures gain value when removed from the place they were raised. Artists are no exception.

Hanging in the halls of the Smithsonian Institution, The White House, and the homes of unlikely collectors like Henry Kissinger and others, are original paintings by local Columbia artist, Blue Sky. To read about his work in English, consult the pages of such respected periodicals as The Christian Science Monitor, Oxford American, House and Garden, or National Geographic, not to mention dozens more ranging from Penthouse to Weekly Reader. But to read about his work in other languages, you’ll have to set aside some time as well as a shelf in your personal library to house the books and periodicals that have covered and continue to cover the artist and his work. There is Mural Art by Kiriako Iosifidis, from Greece, Arte e Illusione

by Italy’s Anna Maria Giusti, and the Netherlander Nicolaas Matsier’s Het Bedrogen Oogde kunst van de trompe-l'oeil, which depicts Blue Sky’s Tunnelvision both within its pages and on the back cover. The writer Volker Barthelmeh, author of Street Murals (which also contains Sky’s work) and other books, even staged a gallery showing of nothing but photographs and other depictions of Blue Sky’s Tunnelvision in his small town in Germany. The list continues in languages that range from Swedish to Flemish to Chinese.

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“They listed me as one of the top muralists in the world in here. No favors there, no politics. I feel honored and proud. The real world of art may just be a crapshoot,” he goes on. “But just the same, it’s nice to be appreciated.”

Given the preponderance of international attention and accolades bestowed on one of Columbia’s own artists, it may seem surprising that Blue Sky is not universally held in higher esteem in our city, much less in the intimacy of our arts community. Yes, he was awarded the Order of the Palmetto by Governor Hodges – South Carolina’s highest civilian honor – but that was in 2000. In the more than ten years since, and with what many arts insiders consider to be a burgeoning if nascent renaissance in Columbia’s local art scene, the popularity of one of our most famous artists seems to have, if anything, dwindled.

This state of affairs isn’t lost on the man himself.

“Up until about the last five years, I felt like Columbia supported me,” he says. “Now maybe they are bored with me; maybe they think I am past my prime – that I don’t have anything new to offer… But most of the work that I have done for the city throughout my life I have ended up doing essentially for free, and I’m okay with that. My father was an orphan who

grew up to become a firefighter – a public servant,” he pauses. “I guess that’s how it’s ending up for me. I’m a public servant to a city that I love and that I call my home.”

Blue Sky reaches into his satchel to pull out two books; one a well-worn copy of a 1944 book of essays by Emerson, given to him by his wife, Lynn, decades ago – “I must have read this through 20 times,” he says, “It’s all you need to know” – the other, a copy of a new book just arrived from Belgium that features the top contemporary muralists in the world. Sky’s work is near the front, and again at the back.

“They listed me as one of the top muralists in the world in here. No favors there, no politics. I feel honored and proud. The real world of art may just be a crapshoot,” he goes on. “But just the same, it’s nice to be appreciated.”

above: Grace - Rolls Royce right: La Femme Fatale undefined : book ten

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fiction

Drift Fences

Y

ears ago I wrote about pelicans, fireflies, seaturtles, and other wild creatures. A wildlife writer I was. The job took me to strange outposts. One day I watched a biologist drive yellow pine stakes into soggy earth the color of coffee grounds. He explained drift fences to me.

“It’s a fence of canvas 18 inches high and as long as you like.

Along the fence, we sink five-gallon buckets flush with the ground every so often. Some creatures only come out at night, you know. Animals out and about crawl along it and drop into buckets.”

And then an ominous note, “We do it in places where cataclysmic change destroys the animals’ homes forever.” Standing up, he looked down the length of his fence. “At least we’ll know what species used to live in this bog.”

There are drift fences for people too. We call them bars.

teurs and some are quiet. And many suffer a case of the blues as wide as the Mississippi Delta.

And some like Arlene just want a good deal.

••• “What do you do?” This leading question breaches walls. In bars confessions pour forth as freely as the drinks. You’ll hear revelations and learn of tremendous defeats and victories. As trite as it sounds, “He left me for his secretary” is an all-too-familiar tale; it has its flip side though. One night a woman admitted to me that she had been sleeping with her husband’s boss a long time. He sent her husband out of town with great frequency. Whenever she asked him to.

Unexpected tales and events somewhat counterbalance the tales of love gone wrong.

One night I was having dinner with a woman at a nightspot when a man who looked like Jack Nicklaus sat next to us. Like Nicklaus, he was from Ohio. Turns out he was a diver, and what tales he told.

He and a co-worker were deep beneath the North Sea working on an oil production platform when a distant-but-deep, thundering rumble shook the sea. The volume grew, and the men didn’t know what to make of it. Its crescendo unnerved them. Was it an undersea earthquake? Whatever it was, they knew it wasn’t good.

On it came, closer and closer and thundering. Their heavy diving suits trembled. Panic set in and then materializing from the cold, dense seawater, an apparition glided by: a Russian nuclear club, its red star unmistakable on the conning tower.

“Fast Eddie,” as I came to call him, turned to treasure hunting.

In a second, he transported me from cold seawater to the sunstruck Caribbean. He had salvaged Spanish Doubloons, swords, and cannon balls.

“I’d love to see some Spanish Doubloons,” I said, thinking he was a phony after that wild submarine tale. In a flash, he was out the door. A few minutes later he came back and spread Doubloons, a sea-encrusted sword, and cannon balls on the counter. From nuclear subs to Spanish galleons as effortlessly as throwing back a shot.

••• Another Thursday night. Arlene wets her finger and rubs it along the rim of a cheap cocktail glass.

“Someday it’ll sing a happy little tune for me,” she says.

Arlene bores easily, drinks cosmopolitans, prefers sleeveless black tops, and swears she’ll never marry again. Her one goal in life is to have a baby fox—a red one. I can usually find her, this divorcée extraordinaire, habitué of the nightlife that she is. She’ll be at the bar fending off dilettantes, aloof, untamed, and unattainable. She drives men crazy and when they’ve had enough torture, back into the night they go.

A sigh rides the blue smoke drifting from cherry red lips, and Arlene tells me yet again why she left her husband. “He bored me to death. Can’t figure why I married him ... Nothing worse than being young and green,” she said. “Unworldly. That’s the word.”

Arlene says she’s not getting older, just better. She says she’s not like younger women who think life is all about finding a man with money. And she says she doesn’t want the messiness that comes with relationships. Love à la carte.

“I’ll sleep with a man when I want to and at the end of the evening, he can go his way and I’ll go mine.”

Life without complications and messiness. That’s Arlene.

Arlene’s seen drift fences galore and hundreds of biologists.

Men seek women and women seek men and often times things get mixed up along this crazy, upside down Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Burdened with sad baggage, some drop in hoping to start anew.

Others come to practice the art of seduction. Some are racon-

story: Tom Poland

••• One evening, I met a native of Milan in a neighborhood pub— a place with the potential for adventure thanks to the Hampton Inn across the street. Ours was a chance meeting while having dinner. A splendid brunette, a saleswoman, sat between us. After

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that night we never saw her again. Even so, Paulo and I became friends. We began to meet and talk about life here and life in Italy, and our conversations revealed new worlds. We made it a habit to meet often.

Cosmopolitan and a Casanova, Paolo adored women. One night he told me that he especially liked women with generous derrières—he held his hands apart the breadth of a sofa cushion.

As he talked, a woman across the restaurant was leaning over talking to a couple in a booth. She fit Paolo’s criterion.

“So, Paolo, that blonde? Is she your type?”

Paolo sipped his Blue Moon, studied the woman. He put his beer down, wiped crisp wheat beer from his lips, cocked his head as a curious dog does, and continued to appraise her. Then, he said, as earnest as a minister, “Noooooooo, eet does not have the prop-er ten-sion.”

They wither and then ... winter arrives.

One chilled night, the kind of night when frost paints a latticework of ice across your windshield, I stayed longer than usual listening to a widow, fresh from the graveside. Bereft? Sure, but demanding too, pulling me close to her by my jacket. “I was married for many years,” she said and then in apology, “It’s been way too long for me.”

This woman jolted by love’s sudden loss walks through a city razed by war. Her world is unrecognizable, but she’s a survivor, hopeful of another chance, seeking an antidote for loneliness in a drift fence of all places, a place she looked on with disdain in her haughty days.

••• To be human is to need the company of other humans, and life alone night after night extracts a toll. “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty,” said Mother Teresa.

Drift fences ... some people need to be surveyed now and then.

Some need to feel they are regarded. Some need to escape their former life now that their home and all that’s familiar is about to be destroyed.

Thus, some feel compelled to edge along life’s byways until they spot a place where conversations flow like wine, where a lonely soul can find a tonic for loneliness. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they do. Neglected wives, liberated widows, cuckolds, the estranged, the abandoned, the curious, the needy, the hormonal, the bored, those needing to prove themselves, those with agendas, those seeking answers, and others need to be plucked, plucked from the bucket.

You loners, you drifters, you abandoned, you nighthawks, you know that the loneliest time of the day takes place from 6 to 9 p.m. That’s when the night creatures, a different sort of wildlife, begin to stir. Out they come, guided by a force they cannot resist—nocturnal nomads.

Lonely? Strike out and drop in. Pull up a stool and look around.

Among the moody couples, along the clamorous bar, and in the cozy booths you’ll find spirits aplenty—not those in the glittering, beautiful bottles, but those in wandering souls—just come in from a journey along the fence. So drink life in tonight. Join the Paolos, Fast Eddies, Carlas, and others. Learn of triumphs and tragedies. Add your narrative to the mix.

And Arlene? You’ll find her sipping those cosmopolitans she loves so dearly. She’ll wet her finger and rub it along the rim of yet another cheap cocktail glass. She’ll look about to see what the night brings. As the first drink goes down, she sees worlds of possibilities. Two, and the possibilities narrow. A few more and nothing matters except eluding the boring biologist next to her who desires so desperately to pluck her from the bucket in this way station along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

••• Of course, not all moments along drift fences are so adventurous or humorous. Life is but a sojourn and we are all, alas, sojourners.

There’s an iconic painting by Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, one of American art’s most recognizable paintings, a painting of a couple and a man sitting at the bar of an all-night diner. One man sits alone. The people have spent a long night out on the town. It’s late. Very late. Something about that painting portrays loneliness and if you’ve never seen it, you should. I, myself, find loneliness transcendent in an unexplainable way and so I like Nighthawks.

Whenever I look at Nighthawks and I do so often, I think of lonely people I’ve met. In particular I think of people who suddenly vanish from the nightlife, killed by their habits. The Sicilian as Paolo called him, and the coughers who only had their smokes for companions.

“Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city,” said Hopper. All isn’t doom and gloom. You meet people who are happy in pubs, sports bars, the old speakeasies of years gone by, but you cannot escape the sad and lonely. God bless these hapless souls, these emotional drifters, the lost and the damned.

The saddest are the ill-starred women in their late 40s and early 50s who woke up one day to find themselves adrift on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Their husbands abandoned them in the prime of life, but not for another woman as the old cliché goes. They died. For one, it was a heart attack. For another, a stroke, and another, a car wreck.

Pleasant desperation cloaks these widows. They bathe in misery. Life has forced them to begin anew, but alas, time is short, and, well, their best years are behind them. The mirror, she’s no friend. Carla told me, “I never thought, at my age, that I’d be alone. I’m scared. I really don’t want to date again but I don’t want to be alone.”

Tears welled up in her blue eyes, giving them a shimmer like water running over lapis lazuli. I put my arm around her shoulders as she cried.

Carla is by no means alone. Her number is legion. Like autumn leaves, stunning women fall every day, coming down to earth in more ways than one, and they know all too well what it means.

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No stranger to drift fences, Southern writer Tom Poland has seen his share of nighthawks and drifters along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

When he’s not out on assignment or working on a book, you can find him somewhere along the boulevard. Check out his work at tompoland.net

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Having Our Say, the Delany Sisters’ First Hundred Years

by Sarah and Elizabeth Delany; with Amy Hill-Hearth.

The One Book, One Columbia initiative encourages everyone in Columbia and all of Richland County to participate by rreading eading Having Our Say, the Delany Sisters’ First Hundred Years by Sarah and Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill-Hearth. These women give a living history of their 100 years of life thr through ough their growing memories of gr owing up in the post-Reconstruction through South, thr ough Harlem’s Golden Age and into the 1990s.

one book , one columbia

more Find out mor e at www.myRCPL.com/onebook.

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artist

Wendell Culbreath is THE Dubber Musician Wendell Culbreath was born in 1964 – the year of the dragon according to the Chinese Zodiac Lunar Calendar. Dragons are known for their honesty as well as their stubbornness. They are brave, excitable, and inspire trust and confidence from everyone around them, and are viewed as the most eccentric of all the eastern zodiacs. These statements all ring true for Wendell Culbreath, the man who sits, all in black, in a rolling chair tucked into the corner of the Richland County Public Library’s audio visual room. His long dreaded locks are wrapped tightly in a head piece that juts out a foot behind him and slightly left of his head. The ease with which he sits radiates his nature – his groove and smoothness. His voice is deep and strong and he talks with a confidence that communicates that he is a force.

His pinky ring is a lion’s head poised in mid growl, just like Culbreath himself – balanced, ready to talk, listen, and communicate like a beast on the prowl. um: You grew up in inner-city Washington, DC. What was going on in the mind of the 5-year-old Wendell Culbreath?

class and I ended up writing about Malcolm X. Doing that term paper changed my life. I started to look at history, especially American history, a lot differently. I started researching and trying to figure out the different ways all these stories are told. And just getting into a little bit of Malcolm’s story really opened up history for me

Dubs: I lived in a wonderful community there; it was very unified and much different than it is today. There wasn’t all the violence and the drugs, at least not for me at that age; those things didn’t come along until round junior or high school for me – the early 80s. You knew people … you knew your neighborhood.

um: You go by the name, THE Dubber with a capital THE – what’s that all about?

um: Were you one of those kids who had posters on his wall?

Dubs: I used to play with this group called The Dubbers of King Selassie I out in LA. We had the opportunity to move back east. We were going back to DC where I thought we had a lot more opportunities and a good base spot to tour from. But it was hard because the other guys thought I had ulterior motives or something. Long story short, they left and I was stuck by myself. They kind of left me high and dry and I stopped doing music for a hot second. But I really missed performing. I realized that music is what I am here for – music is what makes me thrive.

Dubs: Oh man, the first poster I had on my wall was Michael Jackson. When I was kid I grew out an afro like Michael, I had the boots that he wore, the vest, all that stuff. I also liked George Clinton and The Funkadelics, though – I’m still a huge Funkadelics fan.

Another poster I had was KISS. I was part of the KISS Army – was a huge KISS fan, went to their concerts and everything. um: What was your favorite subject in school?

um: After that momentary period of doubt what did you do to make music happen for you again?

Dubs: Early on I was all about science, but then as I got older I changed to history. The historical research intrigued me because history is not always true. There are more sides to the story than just the one you may be told. When I was in high school there was one class where I really needed a passing grade. See I was heavily into the music scene in DC, called Gogo at the time, and I was also into underground funk, and I spent too much of my time involved in it and that started to hurt my grades. I had to do a term paper for this

interview: Sumner Bender

Dubs: Well I didn’t really force it. I knew a girl who invited me to perform with her at an art show and … I got up there and I was all nervous, … but I did it and people really dug it. I mean they really dug it. I was surprised. It just kind of started from there. I got a couple more offers to play shows and then people started asking if I

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had any tracks of music for sale. And I hadn’t really thought about it. I wasn’t sitting back strategizing on this – it just sort of flowed. I needed a name, I didn’t want to be Wendell Culbreath, that’s not gonna stick for what I am doing. So I thought, man the Dubbers of King Selassie I are over and I am the last man standing. So I deemed myself THE Dubber. Capital T. Capital H. Capital E. THE Dubber. um: Anyone who has ever talked with you has often heard you say, “Give Thanks.” Give thanks for what?

Dubs: Well, I picked the phrase up through the Rastafarian culture. Saying give thanks is different than saying thank you. Thank you is just lip service; someone does something for you and that is the end of it. But when you say give thanks you are saying more. You did something for me and I am thankful and I appreciate it, but don’t just say thanks and be done with it. Do the same. Take that good will and pass it on. Turn it around and spread it. um: Let’s get morbid. If you died and could come back as a musical instrument, what would it be?

Dubs: Easy, a guitar. um: Is that the only instrument you play?

Dubs: Well, no, no I started out on the drums, but I was in DC in an apartment and you can’t very well play drums in an apartment. Then I switched to bass guitar, and I borrowed my buddy’s bass and broke a string. So this guy who owned the bass and his boys threatened to jump me and beat me up over the money for his bass strings. And I thought, whoa man it’s no big deal, but then when I went to buy the bass strings to replace the one I broke, I saw that it cost thirty bucks for a pack of bass guitar strings. But right next to the bass strings was a pack of regular guitar strings and they only cost three bucks. That, right there, is why I started playing the guitar. um: Your new album is called Global Warning, with an n. Is that a play on the global warming weather phenomenon, i.e., global warming is heating up the earth the way you are heating up the music scene?

Dubs: Exactly, I’m heating it up. Also, I am so revolutionary that revolutionaries don’t even want to be around me. It’s like with Malcolm X. One day you realize that you are walking down a path that someone else has laid out for you, and you stop and step off that path and find yourself alone. That is what makes you a revolutionary. I realized that, no matter what, you are always gonna be alone. No one is going to think and feel exactly the way you do. Are you strong enough to hold your opinions and your thoughts when you start to feel the heat of everyone else; when you start to feel the criticism and the burn of those who don’t feel you? If you can keep it up you might change a mind or two, and you might revolutionize someone else’s thinking.

Download GLOBAL WARNING from any online music source or visit THE Dubber’s Web site at www.THEDubber.com

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Laurie McIntosh Lynn Parrott An Exhibition of New Work

Gallery 80808 March 24-29 Opening Reception Thursday, March 24 • 6-9 808 Lady Street • Columbia, SC 803.252.6134

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dance

Ivan Popov is the Russian who belongs here.

I

van Popov looks out across an empty dance floor at Columbia Classical Ballet studios, walls lined with wooden ballet barres and mirrors, and though his perfectly postured body is uncannily still, his eyes dance. Ridiculously tall, even sitting down, his almost intimidating blond hair is swept back from his face, nearly touching his shoulders. With his aquiline profile, the 28-year-old brings to mind old movie posters of men so masculine they wore togas and tights like it was the straight thing to do. A classically trained dancer in the strictest sense of the word, Popov came to dance in Columbia via the likes of the Mariinsky Ballet Theatre in Saint Petersburg, Russia, The Vienna State Ballet and, in the Unites States, the San Francisco Ballet.

Interestingly enough, it is here where Popov feels most at home.

“I’ve never in my life seen so many crazy professional people as I see here,” he says in broken but accurate English. “And I see myself among them.”

For a performer who grew up among a family of artists and grew into a stellar career before he was even a man, this is pretty high praise.

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It all started in Russia for Popov, whose father was the principal dancer of the local ballet company in the town of Veronezh in the southwest corner of the country, near the Ukraine.

Popov’s mother still works as a choreographer and his sister is a former principal dancer with the Kremlin Ballet Theatre in Moscow.

“The night I was born they immediately took me to see my father who was performing in a ballet at the time,” Popov says.

“So they say I was born in the ballet theatre.”

Popov attended the Moscow State Ballet Academy for five years before moving to Saint Petersburg where he studied at the Vaganova Ballet Academy under Boris Bregvadze, the same ballet teacher his father had studied under and, as Popov says, “a huge star in Russian dance.” Bregvadze, who danced at Leningrad’s Kirov Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, now the reclaimed Mariinsky Theatre, is in fact a legend among Russian dancers, notorious for only accepting students with the greatest potential to excel in the discipline.

“Bregvadze seemed almost angry with me on the first day that

46

I went to dance for him,” Popov recalls. “He remembered my father so he called me ‘Grandson’ and never let me out of his sight.”

Within three years Popov moved to the neighboring Kirov Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg to perform professionally and was promoted to principal dancer at a far younger age than is customary in Russia. “I became a principal dancer after only 14 or 15 performances, but I was young to do this,” Popov says, explaining that most dancers in Russia do not become principals until after at least fifty exhibitions of their talent.

Soon Popov was invited to join the Vienna State Opera Ballet, also as a principal dancer. “I accepted because dancing in Vienna gave me the freedom to perform [the work of] a number of choreographers whose work I would never be allowed to do in Russia,” he says, listing Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s L’histoire de Manon, in which Popov danced the part of Des Grieux, and John Cranko’s Onegin among the ballets he was most excited to perform.

After three years, Popov received another call, this time from Helgi Tomasson, artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet, inviting him to come to the United States specifically to dance with French ballet luminary, Sofiane Sylve, formerly of the Dutch National Ballet by way of the New York City Ballet.

“She is an amazing dancer,” Popov says. “It was an extreme honor to be sought out to be partnered with an artist like Sofiane Sylve.”

Once at the San Francisco Ballet, Popov found that he was less likely to be cast in the typically American-danced Balanchine dances: dances based on the work of Russian born dancer and choreographer George Balanchine. Balanchine pioneered modern ballet in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, but based his choreography on the classical Russian technique he had learned and practiced in his homeland and Europe.

“Finally, I asked to be allowed to try something from the Balanchine repertoire. I was given Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, and I showed that I could do it well,” Popov says.

Popov was so well-fitted for Balanchine choreography, in fact, that he was among a group of dancers from the San Francisco Ballet to receive an “Izzie” award, the Isadora Duncan Prize for ensembles for their performance of Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

After dancing for a year in the United States, Popov returned to Europe where he danced in Budapest with the Hungarian National Ballet, a 125-year-old company of 110 or more classically trained dancers. Though he performed principal parts while in Budapest, Popov quickly began to miss the United States.

It was during a 2007 trip to Rome to compete in the Premio Roma Ballet Competition, that Popov met Mercedes Schindler, a young woman with a similar dance training background as his own. Both artists won silver medals in their respective age categories, but it didn’t take long for the two to recognize that they had even more in common – they were in love with each other and they both wanted to dance in the United States.

“Several people recommended that I send my resume and a DVD of my performances to Radenko Pavlovich. He has a repu-

story: Cynthia Boiter

tation in Europe for helping non-American dancers come to the United States where they can have a career and a new home – which is what Mercedes and I were looking for,” Popov says.

Radenko Pavlovich is the founder and artistic director of Columbia Classical Ballet.

Pavlovich says he was delighted to receive Popov’s audition information and immediately set about the task of bringing the couple to Columbia. “I could tell he would be a perfect fit for our company and for Columbia,” Pavlovich says.

“Radenko helped me get my visa to dance in America,” Popov says nodding. “Without his help I could not have done this. They say it is easier to escape from Alcatraz than it is to get a visa to work in America. Not with Radenko helping you – it is much simpler.”

The couple bought a one-way ticket to the United States and arrived in the fall of 2010, just before the Columbia Classical Ballet’s October performance of the ballet, Oz. “It’s definitely good to have a dancer the caliber of Ivan in Columbia,” Radenko says. “We don’t have anyone else in the state with the qualifications Ivan has. He works really hard and he brings such artistry to the company. A lot of times younger dancers are more concerned with showing off and seeing how many pirouettes they can do … but Ivan is a surprisingly mature dancer for his age. I think he helps the other men in the company realize that there is more to being a great dancer than just pirouettes and athleticism. There is a sense of elegance, and Ivan has that.”

Popov is equally as pleased with the ballet company and with Columbia in general. Popov lives near the dance studio on the Forest Acres side of town where life is fairly simple. “I like it here a lot,” he says. “It is quiet, but that is the kind of atmosphere I want.”

What Popov likes the most though is his relationship with his new boss and mentor, Pavlovich. “After the first class I knew it was a good place to be,” he says. “I see Radenko’s way of working and I’m very happy to be here. In our profession, it is very hard to meet somebody who sees things the way he does. He is trying to make me a better dancer for me, not for him.”

Popov continues in a quiet voice. “If you notice, after a ballet performance, he never wants to bow when the rest of the company bows on the stage … he always wants to be behind the scenes. That is a good sign,” he says, leaning forward and nodding his head as if to buttress his assessment.

At this point, Pavlovich, who has been listening to the dancer talk from a doorway behind him, turns to walk to the lobby of his studio. He appears humbled, if not embarrassed.

“We have only been together for three months, but I feel a strong connection to Mr. Pavlovich,” Popov continues. “I have had a lot of teachers before, but there is only one person, the wonderful Boris Bregvadze, who I trust as much as I trust Radenko Pavlovich.”

He looks over his shoulder toward the awkward sounds of his newest mentor who is obviously making noise in the next room to avoid hearing what else the young man might say, and nods again, “I think I’m going to be here for a long time.”

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poetry

To Catch the First Note South Carolina Poets on the New Year Winter Song, First Note To listen for it is to wake at daylight and lie there on my back, eyes open, then closed,

Poem for the New Year

wishing hard the way a child wishes before the cake.

Motionless so the sheets

Seasons turn and nothing much is changed.

Night wraps us like a shawl, and we do not count its weight. Lying down to sleep I feel the rush of stars through space,

won't swish, and my face toward the east window— the one, come spring, raised an inch

the dance and whirl of planets and their suns.

Beside me now my husband breathes. The cat purrs

for the whole chorus.

Hands by my side, spread open, palms up to catch the first note.

deep contentment from the sweep of sheet and blanket on our bed. All the forest trees are bending toward this house, silent in the darkness, guardian and steep.

Susan Meyers, Summerville

Phebe Davidson, Westminster

Discovery (remembering the new year) Packed a spontaneous statement. Missed the morning ceremony. Left to search for the unopened door. Looked by the creek. Applied for refugee status. Sang while concealing grief. Marched to the tune of a familiar but still distant drummer (Thought his name was Hal). Made a pact with a leopard. Hoped to discover optimism. Expected to get very far.

Brian Slusher, Greenville

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Blossom waits, folded within the mothy cloak of maybe. It presses its silken ear against the walls and listens for the whistle of next, when it will burst forth like a rowdy player on Homecoming Night, smashing through the banner held by shouting cheerleaders, the fragile sign that shatters crying GO FIGHT WIN this fresh cycle of lovely becoming.

Brian Slusher, Greenville

The Spirit of Place Winter’s last remnants now thin to white muslin on the distant blue cones still peaked in snow.

A plane drones overhead while a steady spring warmth irons nerves to a calmness we thought would never come.

New leaves cluster like small green fountains spurting everywhere from the trees. A slow breeze moves among them in long whispers like the soft abrasions of air we speak.

The birds outside our five open windows built their nests last week, their tweezer beaks arriving each time with a pinch of what will do. Now they persuade intruders away with song, and white globes speckled with dark stars lie gathered in the secret woven palms of grass and string.

With so much future present, our winter’s passport longings for Tuscan hills and golden foreign light seem to have drifted away with the clouds.

Today it seems our best days could be lived anywhere, maybe, now, even here.

Fred Dings, Columbia from After the Solstice (1993)

New Year remembering Jane Kenyon And soul? The low places, distant swamp fields and the first whistles of hopeful chorus frogs.

It Was New Year’s Day When the Astronomer explained the end of space and time.

It’s very simple, he said. The universe will swell until it’s full; a wedding cake one layer too many.

Then it will cave in on itself, running backwards the chorus played in reverse. What looks like fate turns out to be the middle. If you make a toast tonight, he said, toast to astronomy and stars born back from their throat-dark slumber.

Toast to science. Toast to beginnings that will bring you once more to this bright coast and these faces.

Toast to the future when you’ll again hear the laughter of a friend, then your own punchline.

Daffodils outside in the yard's sloping back corner, withered by frost.

Hope for the warm days, temperatures rise past seventy, tubers stir again.

And who's to mock such instincts of the spirit to bloom?

Elizabeth Breen, Columbia

John Lane, Spartanburg

The soul, that plunging cold front, weighted close to any landscape's angularity

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The Cultural Council’ Council’ss 7th Annual

Friday,, April 29 Friday 6 p.m. – 9 p.m.

First Citizens Center Columbia, SC (Corner of Main and Lady)

Juried A Juried Art rt S Show how Live M usic & P erfor mances Live Music Performances S ilent A uction Silent Auction Advance Tickets $50 Call 803.799.3115 ColorTheArts.info Corporate Sponsorships A Available vailable

Presenting Pr esenting Sponsor:

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Spring 2011 FEB - MAR

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11

Allan Wendt Black Drawings

ART+CAYCE 803 765 0838 M-F 1-4 or by appt.

http://artpluscayce.blogspot.com/

1329 s t a t e st. c a y c e sc 29033

Join us for the reception Friday, Feb. 11th 5 - 8 pm