{"id":71962,"date":"2023-01-13T01:34:32","date_gmt":"2023-01-13T06:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71962"},"modified":"2023-02-13T15:21:41","modified_gmt":"2023-02-13T20:21:41","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2023\/01\/13\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-35\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

I arrogantly recommend…<\/strong> is a monthly column of unique, small press book reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired pavement inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, ‘This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.’<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Bookshop.org is an  alternative to Amazon that benefits independent bookstores nationwide. If titles are unavailable online, please call and we’ll try to help. Most of Mr. Bowden’s suggestions are stocked or can be ordered direct from Book Beat. Thank you for your support! Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at:I arrogantly recommend… <\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Artographer<\/a><\/strong>
\nKali
\npowerHouse Books<\/p>\n

Born Joan Marie Yarusso in 1932, in Islip, New York, she was divorced by age 30 (as Joan Archibald) with two children. So, in 1962, she moved to Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and her mother paid for her children to be placed in boarding school while Joan figured out what to do with herself. One thing she did was take a few college classes in photography basics, including film developing. She built on those basics by experimenting with the results that could be produced on film\u2014color distortions, superimposition, etc.\u2014via various developing techniques. Her photographer name was Kali and she claimed to have developed 45 unique techniques for developing film. The book\u2019s end papers show how meticulously Kali detailed her experiments and strongly indicate that the effects she created in photographs were not the results of happenstance (to the extent she could control such things).<\/p>\n

Her understanding and practice of photography extended beyond the image developed to include the medium in which it is presented. Part of her process of developing photographs included layering negatives atop each other for multiple exposures and allowing images to float in the family swimming pool, as the chlorine (reduced to 5%) changed the developing colors. Out of the pool, while the pictures dried, she added to the photographic paper such debris as sand and would also spray paint over the images.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nEven though they became deeply involved in the world of photography themselves, her children seemed utterly unaware of what thier mother\u2019s hobby amounted to, and Kali never talked about it. Only as Kali was dying, when her daughter found thousands of pictures by her and was shocked both by the extent of her mother\u2019s devotion to photography and also by how good the photographs were compared to the highest standards.<\/p>\n

While comparisons to Vivian Maier are made here\u2014unknown female of exemplary talent discovered too late\u2014the living circumstances of the two women were markedly different, although both also seemed be plagued by mental health problems. After the death of Kali\u2019s second husband, she became obsessed by UFOs and would photograph and enlarge stills taken from any of eight video cameras she had surrounding her house, recording 24\/7. Some of that period is represented here, with a strong pulse of the eerie emanating from the grainy stills of her searching her backyard for the UFO lights she thought she saw when inside the house. (Her meticulous record keeping makes an unhappier reprise here.)
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nAlthough Maier and Kali share a predilection for self-portraits, Kali\u2019s are often overlaid with other images and unstable regions of color. Some of Kali\u2019s portrait images struck me as just a background on which to experiment. Vivian Maier seemed interested in the many ways in which her form could be represented in photography. Kali is interested in altering and permutating the perception of it, hiding, revealing, suggesting, juxtaposing, and layering.<\/p>\n

While her photographs certainly are of the time\u2014the psychedelic \u201860s and the rainbow-hued colors used to represent hallucinations\u2014they don\u2019t feel dated but instead feel emblematic of a time and place, as it could be said of painters and paintings from the Delft school. The pictures are posed\u2014candid and street aren\u2019t her thing\u2014perhaps in knowledge that the shot will comprise only one of several levels which together will be manipulated in various ways. Perhaps the seeds of her future dissociation were here.<\/p>\n

Artographer\u2014a term Kali invented and copyrighted\u2014makes a strong case for Kali as a photographer\u2014an artographer\u2014who did much to expand photography\u2019s possibilities and technical range.<\/p>\n

Visit KALIARTPHOTOGRAPHY<\/a>, a website devoted to her work.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Life Among the Aryans<\/a><\/strong>
\nIshmael Reed
\nArchway Editions<\/p>\n

Ishmael Reed\u2019s 3-act play, Life Among the Aryans<\/strong>, targets life in racist America during the Trump era, although it\u2019s of a piece with Reed\u2019s 50 years or so of parodying American racists and con artists, and Trump is merely their most prominent poster child. In Life, two disenchanted white men start following Leader Matthews, a racist con artist, who, of course, demands more and more money from his acolytes for various projects that never materialize. The main difference between yesterday\u2019s and today\u2019s cons seems to be that the con is nastier than ever, as suggested by this phone conversation one of the white men has:<\/p>\n

John: O, hi David. (Pause.) No I told you that I don\u2019t do that anymore. Every time I think about my former trade, I get depressed. Leader Matthews convinced me that my life has a higher purpose. To restore the America that I grew up in. A place where the Dad sat comfortably in a smoking jacket, feet propped up on a stool while reading The Saturday Evening Post. The dog fetched your slippers. Christmas trees were green. And your spouse spent all day in the kitchen preparing a pot roast and if the kids got out of line, you smacked them one. I\u2019ve stopped selling bootleg porn. (Pause.) . . . Look, I\u2019ve dedicated my life to making America Great Again. Saving what remains of Western Civilization. Staving off the barbarian hordes. Standing firm against a country that is on the road to perdition. Same-sex marriage, Hip Hop, Black Lives Matter, people refusing to stand up when the Star-Spangled Banner is played. Leader Matthews gave a long list. Sorry, David. I have a new life. I have Higher goals. (Hangs up.)<\/p>\n

Michael: Who was that?<\/p>\n

John: David Duke. He thought that I was still peddling bootleg porno.<\/p>\n

While Matthews is drumming up financial support, Congress announces that it will pay reparations of $50,000 to every Black man, woman, and child in the country. Enter Dr. Krokman, a Black \u201cdoctor\u201d who has a formula (stolen from a Black grad student) for an injection that transforms white people into black. Racism is one thing, and money another: Whites gladly get line for a shot that will transform their bank accounts from a hole in the pocket to $50K. How far will the women caught in the crosshairs of this nonsense put up with it, and to what effect? Philip Roth allegedly stopped writing comedies in the 1970s when he realized that Nobel Committees don\u2019t award humorists. The U.S. judicial system has been a world model for oppressive governments since at least the Nazis, who sent their top legal scholars here to figure out how we do it, so they could import the practices back home. (Some Nazi scholars found certain U.S. racial practices a bit too much even for sensible Germans back home.) What else could be obstructing Reed\u2019s path to a Nobel Prize but the Committee\u2019s refusal to acknowledge the grim realities of everyday life expressed through humor?<\/p>\n

Boxing on Paper: Ishmael Reed Interviewed<\/a> by Don Starnes<\/p>\n