Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "Living to Tell the Tale" (2003)

The tone that I eventually used in One Hundred Years of Solitude was based on the way my grandmother used to tell stories. She told things that were supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness ... what was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.

(from Living to Tell the Tale)

Gratefully, the old fabulist is still with us. Now in his 80s and suffering from lymphatic cancer since 1999 (he called the diagnosis "a stroke of luck," he said, because it finally gave him the time to write his memoirs), master storyteller Gabriel Garcia Marquez has woven together the early threads of his family history and writing career in Living To Tell the Tale. It's the first volume in a projected trilogy and covers the author's first twenty-eight years, a time of Colombian political turmoil, family, and the ghosts of the past which surrounded him and provided the rich material for his novels.

It's remarkable that the writer who has achieved such acclaim for the magical realism of his novels found so much inspiration from the hot, dusty streets of Aracataca on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Early on, Garcia Marquez was intrigued by the power of imagination to transform life --"to render our lives believable," as he put it in his Nobel lecture. Even more remarkable is the similarity of contemporary Colombia to the writer's recollection of it from sixty years ago; many of the forces that shaped Garcia Marquez as a writer continue today. As one reviewer notes, the memoir shows the reader that what seems so fantastical in One Hundred Years of Solitude is in fact a reasonable description of Colombia, where ghosts are central to everyday life and the successor to the civil war depicted in the novel rages to this very day. The ghosts and the guerrillas benefit from an hallucinatory topography that keeps reality at bay.

The ghosts and the guerrillas created in Garcia Marquez an "outsized reality," in his own words, "a reality not of paper but one that lives within us." The unrest and violence marking Colombian politics forms more than the complex backdrop for One Hundred Years of Solitude. An assassination attempt in 1948 on a popular politician propels the young writer, Gabo, to make a choice: he can participate in the real world, or by writing create his own. When in 1950 he becomes a writer for a daily newspaper, he fills blank pages with his own stories composed on the spot. His desire to write -- which he had always shared with family, the church, to anyone who would listen -- became his vocation.

Like all great storytellers, Garcia Marquez knows to keep the action moving, and the craft of his prose, even at 80, is undiminished. A breathless succession of people, memories, and events are recalled with the sure writer's hand, and with remarkable detail. Sexual conquests are told with as much relish as the historical events; petty jealousies, rivalries, and chance meetings are equal parts of the young writer's education.

Don Ramon received me like one more disciple because he had read my stories in El Espectador. But I never would have imagined I would have become close enough to him to ask to borrow money for my trip to Aracataca with my mother. A short while later, in an inconceivable coincidence, we had our first and only conversation in private when I went to pay him, without witnesses, the six pesos he had lent me.

"Cheers, Genius," he greeted me as usual. But something in my face alarmed him. "Are you sick?"

"I don't believe so," I said with some uneasiness. "Why?"

"You look all in, but don't pay attention to me ... " He put the six pesos into his wallet with a reluctant gesture, as if the money were ill-gotten gains.

"I accept this," he explained, blushing, "as a memento of a very poor young man who was capable of paying a debt without being asked." I did not know what to say, submerged in silence like a leaden wall that I endured in the chatter of the room. I never dreamed how fortunate that meeting was.

When Garcia Marquez reaches his hometown with his mother -- a real-life return at the age of 20 to sell his grandmother's house that frames the opening section of the memoir -- he is stunned to see how little has changed. The first thing that struck me was the silence. A material silence I could have identified blindfolded among all the other silences of the world, he writes. Smaller and poorer, and levelled by a windstorm of fatality.


That Garcia Marquez escapes this desolation through his writing is the triumph of the memoir. His return to Aracataca begins the flood of recollection that turns into a torrent, and promises more in subsequent volumes. His memories, his family history, his ghosts are there to sustain him; Fidel Castro (that sometime book-reviewer and political figure, who was a spectator to the 1948 assassination melee along with Garcia Marquez) praises Living to Tell the Tale as "a work that conjures up nostalgia for the thunder at four in the afternoon, which was the time of lightning and magic."

"Man does not die when he should, but when he can," Garcia Marquez writes in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The memoir's Spanish title -- Vivir Para Contarla -- means "to live to tell it," and with such gusto and intent, Garcia Marquez intends to live long enough to complete telling his own magical tale; he eventually traveled to the United States and received treatment for his lymphoma, which has since been in remission. It's a fairly magical aspect to the life of a writer who once described himself as "a roving and nostalgic Colombian (who is) but one cipher more."

Ed McClanahan, a.k.a. Captain Kentucky: still having the clear moments

(Ed McClanahan & Wavy Gravy, 2004; photo by Pat Mackey)

Tucked away in their cells of good living and almost invisible to the global economy are Guy Davenport, our leading man of letters; Jonathan Greene, poet and publisher, Dobree Adams, weaver, at Riverbend Farm; Guy Mendes, photographer; Ed McClanahan novelist-- there are many many more. Kentucky produces home-grown eccentrics: Henry Faulkner, Sweet Evening Breeze, Bradley Harrison Pickelsimer come to mind. And lots of country artists: the great wood carvers Edgar Tolson and Carl McKenzie; Minnie Black, who made critters out of gourds until she was nearly 100. And who knows what goes on in the little towns like Sugartit, Decay, Viper, Chicken Bristle, Red Hot, Hippo, Shoulder Blade, Nada, Crum, Bugtussle, Ruin, Awe, Stop, and Monkeys Eyebrow? Maybe Kentucky is too strange for the industrial/military complex?

--Jonathan Williams, Spring 2004

Kentucky, home of straight bourbon whiskey and the Kentucky Derby, is also home to poet Wendell Berry, novelist Bobbie Ann Mason, and is also the final resting place of Thomas Merton (at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Bardstown, where he spent 27 years as a Franciscan monk). This extended roll-call of individuals is meant to illustrate the unique variety of Kentucky genius: in the hills and hollows of what so often gets disparagingly called "backwoods Appalachia" is a native intelligence that any other region of the country would be hard to equal.

Ed McClanahan, born in Brooksville, now 79, has a lengthy and varied writing career that itself finds little comparison. The gadfly McClanahan has published in college journals, Esquire magazine, literary quarterlies, Playboy, Rolling Stone; published collections of short stories, two novels, and teaches today at Northern Kentucky University not far from Cincinnati.

Yet this brief resume merely hints at his role as a participant in, and observer of "the Sixties," as the decade is so designated these days, quotation marks included. His stint at Stanford University, beginning in 1962, followed an academic arc from classes with writer Wallace Stegner (meeting William Styron, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov) into his own transformation as -- well, as McClanahan describes it:

It was an exhilarating time to be at Stanford. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement and the Free University movement and the hippie movement and what we might call, in retrospect, the General, All-Purpose Up Yours movement were all flourishing, and I was ardently attached to each and every one. By the mid-sixties I was industriously insinuating myself into every sit-in and teach-in and be-in and love-in that happened along. I was also going around the campus in a knee-length red velvet cape, accessorized with a mod-bob haircut and granny glasses and Peter Pan boots. "Captain Kentucky," I styled myself, while Daniel Boone turned over in his grave.

Stegner graciously maintained a friendship with this "psychedelic eyesore," even to sharing his office space. They discussed the inevitable cultural chasm that began to open around the University, and for McClanahan the course was set. There were friendships with Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady in 1964 (though a still, small voice told him "he'd missed the boat" by not joining the Merry Pranksters on the "Furthur" trip east -- he was a family man by then), Richard Brautigan, Robert Stone. He taught writing at Oregon State, the University of Montana, the University of Kentucky.

He was early -- 1964 or so -- in the elect of the new, hip writer, as designated by Esquire magazine. Perhaps this was due to the novella he had under contract, then called "From a Considerable Height." The literary establishment was shifting; the old lions were being shuttled to Squaresville. "Little old unpublished me," McClanahan wrote in Famous People I Have Known. "Suddenly wallowing right up there cheek-to-jowl with the biggest fish in the biggest pond of all: Mailer! Styron! Baldwin! Salinger! Bellow! And . . . McClanahan?"

The very next issue of Esquire contained a letter demanding to know who the hell McClanahan was, and what he had to show for himself. What happened, between the writer's early canonization and the publication of that novella years later (in 1983) at the age of fifty-one, was what McClanahan called "the best and worst thing that could have happened to me." He got a case of writer's block on the novel that wouldn't resolve itself until 1980.

As his writing became more personal -- "following my nose, my muse, and sometimes my muse's nose" -- there were rejections. A 1985 piece commissioned by Esquire called "Where I Live" was turned down for the reason that it was "not upscale literary New York enough for this magazine."

Country people are more trusting -- therefore more generous and kinder -- than megalopolitans, suburbanites, and other backward races because, if you'll pardon the tautology, they're more secure. Here in Port Royal we're here among friends. One tries to pull one's weight, of course; for a while there I cut tobacco and bucked hay and forked manure and castrated calves like a very son of the soil. But in the ledger where such accounts are kept, we'll never get our books to balance because our friends just keep right on being good to us.

Not that folks hereabouts don't set great store by their independence. Consider, for example, my friend and nearest neighbor, Kelsie Mertz, a farmer, trapper, beekeeper, occasional fiddler, and pretty fair Sunday painter, who takes his independence very seriously: ask Kelsie to sell you one of his pictures and he's liable to tell you to go paint your own if you like it so damn much. "Some people," says Kelsie indignantly, "think that if you've got something nice, they ought to have it!" Just so.

Yet a completed novel eluded him. By the mid-1970s the novella with the lofty title "From a Considerable Height" grew into an unfinished novel tentatively called A Hell of a Note. In early 1980, almost complete, McClanahan referred to it as Stepeasy. Then in a tangle of nerves, in March 1981 he rewrote the novel -- from first-person to third-person -- and the novel was finally published as The Natural Man. His friend Tom Marksbury wryly commented: "Maybe shit just happens, but magic takes some marinating."

By 1985, in what looked deceptively like rapid sequence, McClanahan published Famous People I Have Known. Its centerpiece -- a meditation on Little Enis Toadvine of Lexington, the self-appointed All-American Left-Handed Upside-Down Guitar Player -- had appeared in Playboyeleven years earlier. Then, in 1996 came a collection of three long stories titled A Congress of Wonders -- stories tugging at him since 1962. McClanahan, the anointed "new kid of 1964," found himself in the literary game for the slow-motion long haul.

In 1998 he published another collection of magazine pieces and stories -- My Vita, If You Will -- that indicates there will be even more McClanahan fables from far and near. It includes his memorial to Neal Cassady, early stories from his student days at Miami (Ohio), and two new pieces -- "Great Moments in Sports" and "Another Great Moment in Sports." He writes -- faster. He has developed a surer hand about writing, that trick he describes as "performing brain surgery on yourself." His website promises he's working on a a sequel to The Natural Man, called The Return of the Son of Needmore. Wait for it.

(McClanahan's collection of boots; photo by Jonathan Palmer)

McClanahan, still "out there" off the cultural grid in Kentucky, likes it that way. Again, from the rejected essay "Where I Live":

Ah, but the compensations! Our TV reception's not too good, and we almost never have to go to the movies. John Y. Brown, Jr. and Phyllis George have moved to New York, and that's been a great comfort. There are no sushi bars in Port Royal, no Volvos, no Hairless Krishnas, and hardly any joggers. We have more cows than people -- a social order in perfect balance. The world our children grow up in will be circumscribed, but they'll know it inch by inch; their society will be small but it will last them all their lives. As long as they behave themselves, they'll never run out of friends.

While you're waiting for the ultimate return of the prodigal son of Needmore, you might browse O, the Clear Moment, McClanahan's most recent collection of short stories, which was published by Counterpoint Press in 2009.

"The Difficulty of Being": advice from Jean Cocteau (and Charlie Chaplin too)

Sometimes a writer needs to read (and heed) the printed word of those gone before, and who better to point the way than Jean Cocteau and the wisdom of Charlie Chaplin? Those long-gone, black-and-white days are hard to heed these days, but they are still vibrant for those with an ear to listen. From The Difficulty of Being by Jean Cocteau, and translated by Jean Sprigge (1995, Da Capo Press), here is a paradigm of personal style.

"I am neither cheerful nor sad. But I can be completely the one or the other to excess. In conversation, if I am in good form, I can forget the sorrows behind me, a pain I am suffering from, forget myself, so greatly do words intoxicate me and sweep ideas along with them.

They come to me far better in solitude and, often, to write an article is torture, whereas I can speak it without effort. This frenzy of speech brings an impression of a facility I do not possess.


... The white paper, the ink alarm me. I know they are in league against my will to write. If I succeed in conquering them, then my engine warms up, the word drives me and my mind functions. But it is essential that I should interfere as little as possible; that I should almost doze over it. The slightest consciousness of this process stops it.

And if I want to get it going again, I have to wait until the machinery chooses, and not try to persuade it by some trick. One must not confuse intelligence, so adept at duping its man. with that other organ, seated we know not where, which informs us -- irrevocably -- of our limitations. ...

It is the power to revolve within this space that talent reveals itself. ... So long as what 's to be said is said, it's all one to me. All the same I have my method. This exists in being hard, economical in words, in rhyming my prose, in taking aim regardless of style, and hitting the bull's-eye at whatever cost.



... I have heard Charles Chaplin deplore having left in his film The Gold Rush that dance of the bread rolls for which every spectator congratulates him. To him it is only a blot that catches the eye -- I have also heard him say (on the art of decorative style) that after a film he 'shakes the tree.' One must only keep, he added, what sticks to the branches."

Writers, film-makers, artists: what often intrigues us about an individual's creative style is "what sticks to the branches." like leaves after an afternoon rain and the western wind in summer. What's left is the artist's unique vision of the world, Cocteau's "intoxicating" sweep of ideas -- and just as often a creative process that can reveal an artist's limitations, as well.

"Up-Tight": she couldn't believe what she heard at all ...

Every generation makes its own icons to suit itself, but in the hazy days of the late sixties, the Velvet Underground upped the ante considerably in the battle of the generations. Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, first under the aegis of Andy Warhol, re-wrote the book of love to include obsessions of dirt and noise and sheer panic.

That panic and noise came out of New York City, a far way from the peace-and-love message emanating from San Francisco and the general good-vibes rock generated by Woodstock. The Velvets were more art than rock, more an experiment in tension than release. By the time they came to Warhol's attention the band had already been through some permutations of what is usually called "creative differences." There were more to come.

With that kind of tension it was obvious the band couldn't last, and each of the Velvets' four official studio albums reflected a different side of the creative battles within the group. That the band succeeded in recording at all beyond the marquee patronage of Warhol is a story of record-company insecurities as much as the band's own personal dramas. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (re-issued by Omnibus in 2003) is a relatively concise biography that details the trajectory of the Velvet Underground month-by-month, year-by-year, until the group finally splinters for good.

Out-of-focus Lou: The Velvets, 1966 (photo from The Daily Beast)

By now it's an often-told, backbiting and bitchy story. The group evolves from Lou Reed's pop-rock roots to Andy Warhol patronage and art-rock noise, through a subdued, confessional third album and finally, "despite all the amputations," to rock'n'roll. Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga have assembled a witty, detailed, mostly-oral version with first-person accounts, full of the band's personal turmoil, drug use, and ego-fueled confrontations.

The interviews illuminate the art of the music and the band's struggle for commercial success in equal measure, two opposing goals that lead to the inevitable end of the band with centrifugal force. In the main, Up-Tight is rock's original cautionary tale of too much, too soon, somehow not being enough: a template that survives, on a much different scale, with every 21st century pop sensation.

Great black-and-white photographs capture a band as interested in its own look as in its music. This is much more than a fan's book, and the Velvets' highwire act performed without a net ought to dispel any notion of the monolithic "peace and love" image of Sixties' music.

The art underfoot: "Drainspotting," a collection of Japan's colorful civic art

(A collection of Japanese manhole covers

from Reno Camerota's new book Drainspotting)

On an island chain with limited space, every inch is coveted. In Japan, public space is a premium in crowded cities like Tokyo, and increasingly so even in smaller urban areas.

This can create unexpected friction between the demands of providing more public services and devising practical solutions to existing problems. During the 1980s Japan experienced country-wide resistance to replacing ancient sewer systems until one politician came up with an idea that approached the old problem in a new way. He appealed to civic pride by suggesting, and then implementing, the idea of custom manhole covers for each community.

The idea was a great success -- sewer systems were repaired and many towns received the benefit of an unexpected civic boosterism, as well as a new kind of art appreciation: thousands of one-of-a-kind manhole covers that tell local history and commemorate local heroes.

Remo Camerota's new book Drainspotting (Mark Batty Publishers) is a brick-sized photo collection of these unique artworks in appropriately less-than-coffeetable format (six-by-six inches). Besides being an unexpected and attractive art, the result has been a beneficial civic program, a great example of how the demands of politics, the needs of communities, and the aesthetics of art can combine -- and a reminder how rarely they do, too.

Since their original introduction the manhole covers have taken on new themes. Designs range from images that evoke a region's cultural identity, from flora and fauna to landmarks and local festivals. There are even fairytales and fanciful images dreamed up by school children. With its photographs organized by individual region, Drainspotting documents another distinct aspect of contemporary Japanese visual culture.

(Little Red Riding Hood: Ishibashi, Japan honors its sister city, Hanau, Germany,

home of the Brothers Grimm)

In June, Drainspotting was named best art/photography book at the New York Book Festival. The book and its current blog is just one aspect of Camerota's burgeoning, near-exhaustion multimedia career: it's also worth mentioning his Australia-based Whitewall Studios is a hot-house of music production, art, video, and Drainspotting iPad/iPod apps. His first book, Graffiti Japan, was published in 2008. He's at work on several TV productions, client projects, museum exhibitions, and another book on the history of Menko cards, a Japanese children's game with a hundred-year history.

Strange intersections: "Blue Prints" (Zeva Oelbaum) and the pop world of Bae Yong Joon

Zeva Oelbaum's cyanotype botanicals (blue photographic prints), a few examples of which are reproduced here from her beautiful book Blue Prints (Rizzoli, 2002), create an unexpected, otherworldly effect. Zeva's own words, further below, capture the scientific, photographic properties of cyanotype, but there is a romantic mood created by the simplicity of color and shape of these contemporary images from this antique and nearly-forgotten 19th-century process.

Oelbaum's work inspires others in unexpected ways. In the blog "Zoom on Bae Yong Joon," Blue Prints photographs complement the imagery of a Korean pop star. The effect is incongruous, yet the blogger known as Jaime has created a universe of romantic longing and beauty -- however silly it seems -- from joining the ridiculous and the sublime: an earnest, visual definition of kitsch. Yet the effect is unusually haunting.

In the world of pop culture blogs it can always be argued that, as in art, far less has been done with far more. In the world of pop idols, however, the unexpected (and the appropriated) has its place, even if the serious artist is blissfully unaware of how the work is used. Here are Jaime's own words, reminding all readers that romantic swoons can be a path toward understanding, as well as a labor of story-book love:

Still-life photographer Zeva Oelbaum discovered a Victorian herbarium (botanical journal) in a tiny seaside antiques shop along the coast of New England. The only trace of its origin is an inscription ‘May 18, 1896, Randolph, VT’ in graceful penmanship. This century old treasure has yellowed rippled parchment paper tied with fraying white satin ribbon. Through the delicate hands of a young woman over a century ago, the fragile botanicals were diligently arranged with strings of linen in an artful and whimsical composition. Time has worked wonders too, the pressed botanical has created a shadow impression of itself reflecting on the adjoining page.

The journal was a means of creative fulfillment, letting this young lady escape into the beauty of flowers in her peaceful surroundings. Maybe it’s that light touch of nostalgia lingering in the air, that mystical sensation from a bygone era or the mere thought of an artist’s creativity narrowly forgotten and rediscovered.

About her own work with blue print photography, Oelbaum writes:

I became fascinated by the cyanotype process when I learned that it holds an important, if unrecognized, place in the history of photography. In 1843, British botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) published a landmark volume of over four hundred cyanotypes entitled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. This book was the first to be illustrated entirely with photographs. To make the prints, Atkins placed the algae specimens on paper coated with iron salts, then exposed it to sunlight. When she washed the print in water, the outcome was a white specimen outlined on a prussian blue background. Images created in this manner came to be known as blue prints. In this way she created photograms, or "shadowgraphs" as she called them, of each original plant.

The chemical formula for cyanotypes was developed the year before by British astronomer Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) as a reliable and efficient way to copy his calculations. Before his discovery, draughtsmen were typically employed to duplicate notes and charts. Herschel also coined the terms "photography," "negative," and "positive."

I found working with the blue print process liberating. Released from any obligation to reproduce details, I started to explore the interactions of shapes both formal and organic. As the objects became less precise, I became freer to interpret them.

It was rewarding to work in this nineteenth-century medium to create a contemporary body of work that both expanded upon this form that Atkins had mastered and my own photographic vocabulary.

Zeva Oelbaum's website can be found at http://www.zevaphoto.com. All images from the book Blue Prints created by Zeva Oelbaum and published by Rizzoli Books, New York.

A talk with Fred Tomaselli: "the big wipe-out of the '70s"

"Field Guides," photocollage by Fred Tomaselli (2003)

BOMB magazine recently featured an interview with artist Fred Tomaselli, whose geometrically-arannged assemblages are both beautiful and provocative. Although his work doesn't draw from specific pop-culture images there is a free-wheeling use of bright color, strong line, and bold shape that echo the immediate impact of commercial advertising, and with reason; as a child in California his bedroom window looked out over the candy-apple colors of Disneyland.

His collages -- many with whirling, jewel-like appliques in a ground occupied by human figures -- are layered with acrylic, a gloss that enhances what Tomaselli refers to in the interview as his escapist art: "it seemed that escapism was our dominant commodity," he tells David Shields, whose recent book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010) is itself a kaleidoscope of thoughts about the disconnect between current writing and contemporary thought.

Shields makes the case for a new approach to writing which is increasingly open to "unprocessed material": “randomness, openness to accident and serendipity; . . . criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; . . . a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.” The internet as a new, random, reflexive source for the creative artist.

Here's an excerpt from Tomaselli's BOMB interview reflecting on America's burgeoning "culture of the unreal" in his childhood.

Fred Tomaselli California played a significant role in inventing and perfecting our “culture of the unreal,” and my sense of reality has been forever altered by growing up there. Back then, both the left and the right were actively manipulating reality in rather novel ways and a lot of those manipulations escaped like kudzu to infest the rest of America. On the right, you had the corporate-entertainment/government complex, which gave us Disneyland, Hollywood, Richard Nixon, and, of course, Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s masterful blending of entertainment and politics first succeeded in California. After he became president, our nation of toddlers would never again accept anything less than “happy talk” from its future leaders.

At roughly the same time you had post-Manson/Altamont California, which was not a very pretty place. You had the Symbionese Liberation Army literally going up in flames and throngs of burned-out hippies disappearing into the New Age, but all that seemed to be happening somewhere else, like in rural communes or on TV. What I mostly saw was a baroque mix of youth culture on the skids: coked-up disco freaks, gang bangers, bikers, flamboyant glam rockers, skuzzy stoners and, a bit later, punk rockers.

Like many disaffected, white, working-class youth at that time, I was a stoner (a hippie without ideology, I guess) and then I eventually morphed into a punk rocker. While I slogged through the big wipeout of the ’70s, another crash-and-burn was going on as modernism was coming undone. All that utopianism had been reduced to smoldering rubble and it seemed appropriate to dig into this trash heap of history and see if there was anything worth saving.

The one big common denominator in all of this was our culture of escapism. Even though serious artists weren’t supposed to make escapist art, it seemed that escapism was our dominant commodity — it was responsible for the shape this country was in. It was also somewhat responsible for the shape I was in, so I started there. ...

"Organism," photocollage by Fred Tomaselli (2005)

Tomaselli's careful constructions are a visual reflection of how unlimited choice can lead to a need for escape. Human figures are surrounded by galaxies of bright objects, about to be overwhelmed by a process of choice made no less random by the every object's apparent availability. In such a situation, how does the individual make critical decisions?

Tomaselli's California childhood made it apparent that, in an unreal American culture at least, we could have it all. The realities of a new century, however, remind us that there are limits to everything: even in a seemingly infinite age of information, the individual, and the artist, retains the necessary ability to choose.