November 2nd, 2019. Happy Halloween. Welcome to Marwen.

For all that I’ve always believed that the best art comes from pain, and the best artists are often truly seeking healing, I’ve always been uncomfortable with idolizing the damaged artist. The ones who become great as they seek solution – or absolution. 

Yes, these can be great people (it’s funny how in context what I REALLY mean is “great men and great women” with all the historic, arms akimbo, statuesque stride that that implies, but “great people” just sounds like a Trumpism – “they’re really great” – sans the AWE that I mean to imply – maybe that’ll change as we get used to non-sexed pronouns?) – but the ones who use their art as a crutch or a coping mechanism but never grow past it… for whom the art is more a side-effect of psychosis than it is a mechanism by which they triumph over the world – I think we need to be cautious with them – they never have the emotional maturity to deal with their accolades… the reward system in their head is already screwed up and can go increasingly awry.

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Halloween night we played at a friend’s house – a “permaculture” farm which was kind of fascinating. I’d never heard of this particular agriculture method – theoretically based on Native American techniques in which you basically keep different tiers of human-sustaining plants and animals Living in tight (and somewhat artificially-enforced) harmony. A different method of ensuring density of production on agricultural plots that looks sloppy as Hell, but sounds pretty reasonable. I have no idea of the numbers, whether it’s “better” than more European methods of farming. It sounds like it’s probably a good deal more “organically” sustainable (though I place no personal judgment on “organic” vs “inorganic” methods!)

The collective that tends the tiny farm is a half dozen robust, tanned and beautiful people – including my friend Conor Brendan – who’s simply one of the best Americana musicians in the area. An incredible voice, interesting arrangements, his band “The Wild Hunt” turns on a dime from driving freight train tunes to mourning, beautiful, moody pieces that leave the whirling dancers unsure what to do with their energy. Don’t worry… the next song will whip you round again….

And when I first booked Conor, a couple of years ago, he was fresh on the revolution that was Standing Rock as so many of my liberal artist friends were – but unlike the vast majority of them he’d actually gone out and stood with the tribe against the invading pipeline. He came back with horrible tales of police brutality and as he recounts the stories you hear audience members mutter “fascists” in the knowing tones of kids who DIDN’T go out but TOTALLY believe. 

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I’ll hold my opinion on the subject because I wasn’t there. In the broader world I think we probably need energy more than we need religion, but anything that encourages us to think outside of the oil-box is probably a good thing… neither here nor there…

I’ve seen lots of artists get wrapped up in causes. And they’ll make dreamcatchers and burn sage and they’ll throw fundraisers and write very, very angry songs. It’s like catching a religion – and JUST like religion, few of them go and WALK the walk along with the talk. And for this I intensely admire Conor Brendan as an artist. 

It took me a while to buy into him, but I’ve become a believer – and he is hurt by the world intensely and he turns and makes this into something beautiful, and threw a party where I didn’t feel threatened, I watched people release themselves dancing and whirling and storytelling rather than by getting drunk and making out in a corner. My personal cloud of negativity was jarringly out of place and eventually even my mood went from “I don’t remember the last time I had THIS much fun” – in a negative way – to a positive version of the same sentence.

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But I’m not that guy. Sitting in the back watching everyone dance and the musicians drive in their major chords, I’m just still working it all out and my music is still solving the problem of ME. And so I must admit, I was happier driving home in the small, twisting country roads, avoiding fallen branches and post-storm detritus than I was listening to the music and watching the All Hallow’s Eve frenzy… as my little Saturn gets shoved around by the post-storm winds (they turn out to also be pre-storm winds) I enjoy the fight of just keeping the car under control. Maybe that says a lot of the same thing as how I think about my music. 

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But I’m cognizant of enjoying the fight. We come home and I listen to other bands, intelligent lyrics, not-so-intelligent lyrics – I look at artwork, graffiti and sculpture. Good communicators. Bad communicators. I think back to Mass MoCa and the Walters and the Visionary Art Museum and they all have such different baselines for what art is, but not such different baselines for how the artist is treated. 

We watched “Welcome to Marwen” last night and the tale of a battered man struggling with the brain damage caused by a hate crime through the use of action figures and photography is really quite intriguing. I liked watching the action figure sequences and I have learned to appreciate Steve Carell now that he’s managed to be something more than the Office’s “Lovably” misogynist-idiot Michael Scott – but the tale of a woman wandering out of an abusive relationship and (unknowingly) into caring for the brain damaged man next door seems so … 90s … and there is a VAST disconnect for me between a man taking photographs of jeeps and dolls in his backyard and the big New York gallery show with wall-sized prints. Who is making all THAT money? Who’s lining it up? Who’s printing those prints?

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This is all based on a true story, which is, at least on the surface, a more appealing tale :

“Unable to afford therapy, Mark [Hogancamp] decided to create his own. In his backyard, he built Marwencol, a 1/6th scale World War II-era town that he populated with dolls representing his friends, family, and even his attackers. He used the small dolls and props to redevelop his hand-eye coordination, while he dealt with the psychological trauma from his attack through the town’s many battles and dramas.” (http://marwencol.com/about#about-marwencol) 

The movie, a Hollywood blockbuster with stunningly beautiful women and really cool special effects, implies that he’s a dysfunctional entity who the local women all seem to croon over, and eventually he graces his damaged charms upon the one who’s been waiting all these years… his art doesn’t heal him… he seems to have an external catharsis generated by an obsession over the next door neighbour. And it’s that tale of the artist that seems so tone deaf to me – and so dangerously off. Celebrating the concept of “damaged artist”, possibly at the expense of celebrating the REAL artist (googling “Mark Hogancamp” it bugs me that a picture of Steve Carell comes up before a photograph of Mark – sans any indication that Steve’s NOT Mark!)

Of course, maybe telling his tale is not as palatable. I can’t find anything about his prior Life beyond being a married, privately-cross-dressing alcoholic Navy veteran, and I guess that’s fine because for all intents and purposes that man is dead – but here’s a recent post from his Facebook page “The political enforcement of Jim Crow was entirely in Democratic hands. The Ku Klux Klan functioned as the paramilitary wing of the Democratic party, and it was used to drive Republicans out of the South after the Civil War.” (https://www.facebook.com/mark.hogancamp) Sigh… scrolling through he seems like a kind of conservative racist… and according the Welcome to Marwencol book, during his police interrogation, one of his attackers accused Hogancamp of being a neo-Nazi who thought POWs deserved to die.

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Definitely not the tale that Robert Zemeckis would want to tell. 

In an interview from The Guardian, Mark talks about avenging himself upon his attackers “Marwencol was solely made up so I could kill those five guys… I had no way to do it in real life. I played it over in my head. I’d get caught. I’d go to prison. I’d get the chair. The first time I killed all five of them, I felt a little bit better. That violent hatred and anger subsided a little…. For 12 years now. I’ve killed them every which way. I’ve killed them in ways Satan himself hasn’t even thought of.” (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/oct/28/mark-hogancamp-marwencol-jon-ronson-miniature-town-horrors-of-war)

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The New York Times makes him entirely more sympathetic, making him out as a loner who “didn’t feel like killing Nazis anymore” (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/arts/design/mark-hogancamp-the-artist-as-imagined-war-hero.html) and hopes Steve Carell has nice legs, but the NYT manages to get his age wrong so, who knows whose tale is closer to the truth… 

But out of all the strange ways in which to portray Mark Hogancamp, how did Zemeckis settle on this practically autistic artist saved by the persistent Love of a good woman? It’s the kind of view that takes advantage of “primitive” artists, putting their obsessive output into galleries they’ll never see to be oohed and ahhed over by an audience that won’t appreciate that, often as not, the hands that make these obsessive, repetitive works are simply caught in a Hellish loop… but it’s okay as long as we get to admire a Lusitania built out of toothpicks.

(my encounter with Wayne Kusy in a bar in Chicago was probably one of the first things that got my brain thinking about this sort of treatment of “visionary” artists [creators who don’t necessarily regard their creations as “art” but whose work is recognized by the artistic community] – far from his press quote of “a lot of people who like to climb mountains like Mount Everest…I choose to build models. It’s safer.” – my interaction with him was simply “you’re from Baltimore? I’ve never been to Baltimore. My boat’s in Baltimore! Have you seen my boat?!” – a manic communication that took several tries to unwind)

Anywho – thanks for bearing with MY manic loop. I’m just trying to make sense of the world around me… and I don’t think I can put my thoughts on Mark Hogancamp into an easily digestible song… though it’s an idea.