by Jerome du Bois
I was working on a writing project when along came a local yokel writer and art bureaucrat with an email which inadvertently referred to my subject: my wife's fashion collages, just below.
So now here's Kevin Vaughan-Brubaker with a long, detailed email full of polite insults, left-handed compliments, denigrations of my wife, our life, our blog, and our very existence. (He doesn't miss self-promotion, either.) He doesn't use a single nasty phrase or obscene image. In my own reply, on the other hand, I shall exercise no such restraint.
Everybody knows I won't let my wife be disrespected, so they try to provoke me. Anyone who knows these fools should ask them why. In the meantime, such attacks hone my verbal skills, but, more importantly and for the record, in the years to come after these bozos go away, this post will shine the light of truth on the bureaucrats who are running the arts into the ground in Phoenix and Arizona in 2005. Here's another one, Kevin Vaughan-Brubaker.
Before we make the jump, though, let us first ask:
Why did this guy even email us in the first place, except to provoke us, insult us, and to bayonet the wounded?
Why go out of his way? Why bother? Who are we to him and his?
We lost the whole high-road argument to the skuzzbuckets. But he can't leave well enough alone. He's going to be sorry he didn't.
In the Phoenix art scene, he is a winner, and we are losers. He has a nice cushy job with the state government, with at least three fallbacks of fucking up reviews and screening before he gets canned, no matter how much of a jerk he may turn out to be.
We have nothing but ourselves and our words and our art. You got that, you fucking vampire? Every day, while you go off and sit at a desk and read papers --petitions from needy artists, groveling, which must really make you feel important-- we are hanging on the drop edge of yonder.
So why do you come around, anyway? Why couldn't you leave us alone, much less try to criticize something you don't even understand while you're looking right at it, you stupid blind fuckhead? Why don't you go suck martinis with all the other operators who work the system? Do you think it's going to be fun to provoke me? I've got nothing to lose, and I've got the high ground.
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 13:44:01 -0700
From: "Kevin Vaughan-Brubaker"
To: kinganddubois@cox.net
Organization: Arizona Commission on the Arts
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
Subject: Greetings
Right off the bat, nota bene. This man sucks state titty. He derives his income from my taxes, my wife's taxes, your taxes, his own taxes, to help fund the lifestyles of artists. Don't ask me why, but we cut his checks, and we help support them. Nobody asks why anymore. His formal title is "Participation Research Coordinator." What in the hellajesus does that mean? It reminds me of creepy Orwellian phrases like "Leisure Delivery Systems."
[Update: in an email, KV-B corrects me: "My position is funded by the Wallace Foundation (private money) as part of a five year nationwide study of participation in the arts called: the START Initiative." As if that changes my argument much.]
Claro, for one thing, he helps make decisions about which titty-sucking and brownnosing artists get state money.
And then he has the damned gall to explicitly cut at the roots of his own mandate, which is to nourish the arts in Arizona. If this sonofabitch can really read, he might want to check out The Collective I before he even begins to think about attacking us. We have been trying to nourish public art and all art in Arizona and this Valley for over two years. Where has he been? Why hasn't he encouraged us? What an ignorant, arrogant dick.
Mr. du Bois. May I call you Jerome?
You already did, but no, don't do it again, if we ever correspond again, which isn't likely when I'm done with you. Very few of our contenders come back for a second round. They drop off something inspid or insulting or infantile, like you, and when we tear them up you never hear a peep from them again. You wil be the same, tiddlywink.
I am interested in the following statement you make in your blog entry "New Notes On La Pionera and The New Mango":
"Third, some may object to the use of marijuana as partial financial fuel for a revolution. Our suggestion is for the reader to do some research on rum, molasses, slaves, and tobacco, for starters; and then, later, when the revolution is over and we're all passing some kind of congratulations around, we'll compare the relative human damage done by these various substances and practices."
I have only read snippets of La Pionera, but this statement has fueled my interest. It sounds as if . . . [and he drones on and on.]
Whoa. You've read "snippets?" Tell you what, shitbird, I don't care what you're interested in; when you can read, much less craft, a story like "The Legend of The Seed Man," much less one paragraph of the quality and style of our novel, then maybe you can approach the very outer reaches of the pavilions of our attention. Maybe when you give us some respect, we'll give you some. You don't come around to people who sweat out thousands of words and talk about "snippets," you thickheaded, insensitive, snot-filled twit. In the meantime, please go fuck your questions and yourself with your pants on, you high-handed, presumptuous prick. I bring my attention and my time to my choices, not yours.
On Ms. King's photos. The one you use as your banner for your blog site is compelling and conjures the phrase, 'tripping the light fantastic'. Photography is the only medium where an accidental masterpiece may occur. Not to imply that Ms. King didn't know how the photo would turn out--but it reminds me of those moments of surprise when you come home with a freshly developed roll of film and find a meaningful gem that you had no idea existed.
We don't give a rat's ass what it reminds you of; once again, stumblebum, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Or you do and you're just acting stupid. Who can tell with blockheads like you? Ignorance is no excuse. One reason I'm giving you any attention at all is because you're on the public payroll, and you're just what we've come to expect from years of government sinecures. I always marvel at the idiocy of those who solidify their words in electrons and come galloping out to challenge us, secure in their words. They always regret it.
There is no roll of film involved. If you had spent more than twenty minutes with the blog, you know that we are firmly committed to the belief that we capture the dead, in the form of orbs, all around us, on our digital cameras. What's the problem? Nobody ever talks about it. We don't care what other people think. We know what we're doing. We weep. We work. We go on. It is not up to you or anyone else to legitimize or deligitimize us. You are nothing to us.
We have been documenting these things for several years, and we were even preparing a large multimedia exhibition for Bentley Projects, all about American ghosts and orbs. We did not know how this digital photograph you refer to (we change the banner, that's why the pop-up) would "turn out" --in digital pictures, they don't "turn out," they happen instantly-- but here is its history:
It was taken by me, not Catherine, with a Canon A70, in the early evening of December 26, 2004. We have the precise time, but others may look it up as well: it was right around --and I mean within a minute-- of the Indonesian earthquake which unleashed so much death.
That's just a fact. But of the thousands of digital ghost photos we have taken, none has ever turned out like that one. It's not about tripping the light fantastic --a superficial urban term about youthful ambition-- no, we document tripping over death, and instead of picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, and running away, we confront the truthful depth of it, vivid on your television even as I write these words.
I really enjoy the picture of the two lovebirds in the tree (reminds one of the childish song..."k.i.s.s.i.n.g") and the quotation. Having grown up on the edge of Encanto Golf Course . . . and he drones on about soul mates and he and his wife ten years and then we see this is all just polishing the knife because then:
The new images of Ms. King's collages leave much to be desired, I'm afraid. There is nothing new or exciting in these types of cut and paste pastiches of art. During my years spent as a resident assistant in undergraduate dorms at the University of Puget Sound, I saw countless numbers of these collages that bored students would create and tack to their walls. I suppose as artists we find success to be a hit or miss proposition depending on the eye of the beholder.
You are one stupid mofo, hyphen-man. You don't read or look in an even cursory manner. I can't believe I help pay your salary. The title is "Fall Fashion Boards 2005." In English. The images are painstakingly and painfully cut out of actual individual images, not pastiches or melanges or clever juxtapositions. The viewer is privileged to behold the fashion concourse Catherine King holds in her mind. I would ask you to ask your wife for some insight into this psychology, but if she's like most women in this town, she has the fashion sense of an employee of Dress Barn.
This is part of the article I was working on:
. . . let us admire the triptych above. Catherine has meticulously cut out, with her damaged hand, thousands of images collected from fashion magazines over the last five years, and then selected the best, according to her criteria. Each panel has a conceptual theme. I'll get to both the criteria and the themes below.
[Five years; longer than most of the bozos at the Hamberger School take to get their twee degrees.]
Formally, she flips the usual boring horizontal male (and, too often, Christian) triptych of three vertical rectangles, and erects a strong wide column of panoramas of female power, armor, beauty, the work, and adornment. A stand-up woman, to evoke an earlier piece.
Also, she made sure we rendered it large enough to overfill the screen top and bottom, so the viewer must scroll up and down. This is to acknowledge, she told me, that this is digital net art on a computer, that we live in the third millennium, and that it is fall, the season when the male, and Apollo, and the sun, retreat, to be overwhelmed by the deeper, more mysterious and uncanny light-and-shadow of autumn, when the female takes center stage, and owns it.
Catherine calls the top panel "Whole Looks and Jewelry," the center panel "Accessories," and the bottom panel "Separates." To me these correspond to the classical Greek divisions of head, thorax, and legs and feet. I want to examine them in detail, but first let me advance this caveat: the categories overlap. Remember, we are dealing with shifting, Chthonian, oceanic, female energies here. Rulers wilt, measurements melt. Still, I try to make sense of it, 'cause, after all, I'm just a man. Her man, and proud of it.
That's what I was working on.
I still don't understand why all the chickenshits in this town, like you, have to always attack my wife and her work --flowers, ghosts, fashion, art. It's beautiful work, but you go out of your narrow tight-assed way to criticize it. Why? And before you even think about answering, we've already heard "If you can't take it, don't dish it out." We can take it, I'm dishing it out now, but ask yourself --hell, ask your wife-- why you must attack Catherine King and the fashion boards she uses as working canvases while she continues to develop her astounding wardrobe.
Finally, this weenie has got the gall to plug the two poems he's going to have in the dumbass Urban Legends show at the library. (That's another review I'm already working on.)
Then, in a PS, he advertises several upcoming Az Arts events. Like we would ever have anything to do with those turds, but he blithely goes ahead anyway, as they have ever done with us. They stab you, then they hold out a band-aid.
Callous callous callous.
Stay away from us.
Posted by Jerome at September 1, 2005 11:15 PM | TrackBack