1991:

"Amadeus" is screened in a 7th grade classroom. Two young critics refuse to be thwarted by the room's near-total darkness. THEY KNOW THESE WORDS WILL BE IMPORTANT SOMEDAY.

Interview with Faythe Levine

[Excerpt]At 34, Faythe Levine is a doyenne of the independent arts and crafts movement: a documentarian, contemporary folk art collector, curator of Sky High Gallery in Milwaukee, and founder of the wildly successful Art vs. Craft fair, her 2009 film Handmade Nation garnered widespread attention; in the years since its release, Levine’s work has been courted internationally and featured in such publications as ArtForum and the New York Times. In October, Princeton Architectural Press will release Sign Painters, the companion book to Levine’s forthcoming film, The Sign Painter Movie. This latest project—a collaboration with filmmaker Sam Macon—is the culmination of three years spent interviewing and working alongside American sign painters, whose craft has helped shape the aesthetics of our public spaces. 

When Faythe and I caught up in late June, it was midnight on the eve of a nasty Midwestern heat wave and several weeks sooner than we’d planned—I’d locked myself out of the Milwaukee house I was sitting and she offered up her guest room. The next day, over a supremely tasty breakfast of poached eggs, polenta, greens, and iced coffee, we talked a little bit about personal stuff and a lot about the people who paint signs.– Eleanor Piper

[Read the rest at The Believer Logger]

Coffee Creek Correctional Facility visit

to the Prison Garden!

The Elusive Beast: On Evidence and Belief in the Utterly Unproven

Some say he is an animal: he has fur

like an animal’s, and sharp teeth;

others say he is a man, or something

that was once a man; his hands are a man’s,

his eyes face forward.

To me he is neither,

what he is for you

will depend on what he wishes to show you,

what he is for you

will depend on what you want from him.

(from Margaret Atwood’s “Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man, and Two Androids.”)

This is it. It’s early December, hat-and-scarf weather here in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve just driven into a fog so suddenly dense that I had to slam on the brakes. Fog that blanketed the North Fork Reservoir like down. I crept through that fog going ten, fifteen miles an hour; climbing out until the ground glittered beneath my headlights, as though the earth were sunk with jewels. I’m alone. The wind, steady and cold, carries the smell of skunk. They say that Sasquatch smells like skunk, like garbage, like carrion. I’ve come here to find Sasquatch. I can hear the flow of the Clackamas. I can see my breath. 

Thom Powell lives in these parts, and it’s here, in these woods, that he says he’s communicated with Sasquatch. Something of an elusive creature himself, Powell is a middle school science teacher in Hillsdale, Oregon, and the author of two novels about Bigfoot. He claims to have had numerous strange encounters with the beast. “They have the ability to cloud your thinking, to interfere with your ability to perceive what they don’t what you to perceive. Some of us have experienced this thing that can only be described as a cloaking capability,” he says, adding that the Sasquatch has a complex society, that they have weddings and funerals, secret meetings. “So when you ask us to provide proof that Sasquatch exists, that it has language, those of us who’ve been doing it a while are just totally bored with that. We don’t want to talk about that because we worked past that a long time ago.”

One problem that the novice Bigfooter confronts is that hoaxes abound in this world, so that sifting around for Truth – the universally accepted kind – can get mighty hairy. Every Bigfoot believer I’ve spoken to has mentioned hoax perpetrators and perpetuators. Enoch author Autumn Williams, one guy said. Tom Biscardi, pretty much everyone agreed. Cliff Cook, proven hoaxer. And then there’s Ray Wallace.

In their day, Wallace and his brothers owned a logging company in Northern California. In 1958, the company was clearing a timber access road near Bluff Creek, when a cat skinner named Jerry Crew discovered some rather large, deep footprints near his bulldozer. These were the first of many such tracks found at the jobsite, and the media were called in to investigate the phenomenon. The Humboldt Times (who coined the term Big Foot) ran a story, and then another and another, and the story took on a life of its own. But Wallace was a known trickster, and after his death in 2002, his family admitted that the Bluff Creek prints had been a prank perpetrated by Wallace in good fun; a prank that got out of hand. 

Yes, there have been hoaxes. Does this force us to approach all evidence with mistrust? All proponents of Sasquatch with scorn? Benjamin Radford, in his wry Tracking the Chupacabra, recalls his years searching for lake monsters and Bigfoot as a “robust history of gumption (and near-spotless track record of failure).” Nevertheless, he sets off to find another mythological creature, the Chupacabra. This requires gumption, yes – and a sense of adventure, and the belief, common in Cryptozoology, that there have simply been too many sightings for every last one to be a hoax.

Guy Edwards is, at 37, one of the younger members of the Oregon Bigfoot community, and he considers himself an armchair journalist on the topic of Sasquatch. To that end, he runs a website called Bigfoot Lunch Club. He’s also been my unofficial guide through the world of the ‘Squatch and an indispensable source of information. Guy has never seen a Bigfoot but he is a believer, and is a strong proponent of developing a solid methodology for its study. 

“I think we just need some good, solid models, and then to test against those models,” he says. “So if it is an orangutan relative, what do orangutans do? If it is nocturnal, then that’s a different story. Then we need to ask, what do lemurs do? Most people think it’s nocturnal, but to me, that would be a question of – why would a primate be nocturnal? Most primates are not.” Guy is part of what’s known as the flesh and blood camp of Bigfoot believers. These are people who seek physical evidence of the Beast and who believe said evidence is out there and deserving of real scientific study.

For evidence, many Bigfoot stalwarts point to the Patterson-Gimlin Film. Taken at Bluff Creek in 1967 and named for the two ranchers who shot it, the film is short and grainy, but inarguably depicts an ape-like biped walking through the woods. Among believers, the biped is known as Patty, and Patty is a large-breasted, barrel-chested, seven-foot-tall female Bigfoot. However, the film is not without controversy, as accusations of hoaxing and other shady dealings have swarmed it from the beginning. For one, a fellow named Bob Heironimus claimed that Roger Patterson paid him to put on an ape suit for the film. Guy Edwards believes that the footage is real, but concedes that it cannot be the be-all, end-all evidence. Footprints, a body, DNA, bones – this is what Guy and many others want to see.

Dr. Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University is the most vocal and respected academic in the flesh and blood camp of believers, and his work – influenced by the late Dr. Grover Krantz – focuses on footprints and dermal ridges, mid-foot flexibility in bipedal locomotion, DNA evidence, and evolutionary linkages that he claims are suggested by his vast collection of Sasquatch footprint molds. Some people say that Meldrum’s work is pseudoscience, but among believers, he is a pillar.

In the footsteps of Krantz, Meldrum posits that the creature we call Bigfoot is a possible descendent of Gigantopithecus Blacki. This presumed-extinct oversize ape, writes Meldrum, has left “a meager fossil record consist[ing] of two mandibles and isolated teeth…. That an ‘extinct’ giant ape is accepted by science on the basis of such scant fossil evidence, one might ask why serious consideration has been slow in coming to the hundreds of documented footprints (not to mention sightings, vocalizations, hair, scat, etc.).” The argument goes that the dearth of physical evidence isn’t reason enough to rule out Sasquatch.

Ron Morehead, a Bigfoot researcher from Mariposa, CA, calls himself “absolutely, a believer.” He’s ruddy-faced with a shock of white hair; he’s not very tall. His first encounter with the Sasquatch came in 1971, when he was at a high-altitude hunting camp in the Sierras. As he tells it, “there were six of us at camp. We were disturbed during the night by horrific sounding somethings. The tracks that were left were eighteen-inch, five-toed prints. This was the beginning of several years of this particular family of creatures coming around our camp.” 

Since then, Ron’s spent a great deal of time in the Sierras, making recordings that he has released collectively as the Sierra Sounds. “At first the sounds were very intimidating, like they were trying to scare us off,” he said, “but then it kind of mellowed out after a couple years. I think they trust us, trust that we’re not going to shoot our own. They’re like a people, and that’s what I say. If you treat them like Native Americans that don’t want to be found, well, they don’t want to be found. They don’t want anything to do with us.” 

I have listened to the Sierra Sounds, the crying and chest beating, the teeth popping and rock-rolling. There is howling and crying. Whistling, hooting, some very inhuman-sounding noises, indeed. Were these sounds made by people? By bears? Or by some unidentified primate? Unfortunately, because the study of Bigfoot is by and large considered pseudoscience, those in a position to answer that question are generally unwilling to ask it in the first place.

M.K. Davis of Benton, Mississippi has been studying the Patterson-Gimlin Film for some fifteen years, and is credited in the Bigfoot community with clarifying and stabilizing the once-shaky footage. He is adamant that the film’s Bigfoot is real, but he theorizes that Patterson and his partner Robert Gimlin walked into a Bigfoot massacre that day, insisting that there are at least ten minutes of unreleased footage showing other men, some dogs, and a pool of blood. 

“I found another film that was taken the same year, where men were down there hunting with dogs and horses for Sasquatch. On the very best image of the [Patterson] film, down at the bottom there’s a bloody red paw print of a dog. It was cropped out of most of the images that were released to the public but I got this from Mrs. Patterson. They made up this story, ‘two innocent guys just walking down the creek and they just happened upon a Sasquatch in broad daylight and she didn’t run in the woods,’ – Nope. That’s not true. They were there in an effort to hunt Sasquatch, in an effort to kill them. Patterson was not a part of the group but he stumbled upon them. He didn’t have anything to do with it; I don’t believe that for a minute. He became a part of it by accident.” 

But why would anyone want to kill Bigfoot? Davis argues that the creatures were a hindrance to the logging industry, frightening off the workers who were clearing access roads into the forest. 

Davis believes the Sasquatch are a people who have intentionally eluded society. Over the phone, he was kind, gentle- and plain-spoken, and clearly sympathetic to the Sasquatch. He told me “these people have been hiding out for a long time. And there’s also other mixes of people that have been in there. 10,000 Chinese were in there hydraulically mining gold at one time. So when you see the film you don’t know whether you’re seeing a typical Sasquatch, or a mix, or a hybrid, or what.” 

“Hybrid, meaning what?” I asked.

“Hybrid meaning a mix of Chinese or perhaps whoever happened to be in the area. Indian? Indigenous?”

I changed the subject. I asked something about the importance of Sasquatch to society. What it would mean if we were to find irrefutable proof. Rather than answer my question, he referred back to the film, in his opinion the only real evidence there is, and the only evidence we need. I admired his tenacity. I admired his disinclination to answer my fluffy philosophical questions. “I would like to elevate [the Sasquatch] if I could, but if I can’t, it’s not going to bother me. They’ve been living like that for a very long time and they’re perfectly happy as far as I can tell.” 

I’ve been wondering about the lack of physical evidence; specifically bones, and I’ve asked many enthusiasts why no Bigfoot bones have been found. Well, they’ve said, the forest is vast and impenetrably dense. The Northwestern soil is high in acidity which speeds the process of decomposition. There are many creatures who feast on carcasses, and anyway, they rhetorically ask, how many Bear bones are found in the woods? And this is a good question.

Dr. Virginia Butler is a professor of Anthropology at Portland State University who specializes in the study of animal remains found at archaeological sites. I asked her about bones.  “We can’t use the absence of Bigfoot bones to defend the case that Bigfoot doesn’t exist. We don’t find remains of many animals that we know once lived in a given area. What gets preserved for the long-term is only a crude reflection of what once lived in a given place.” Further, she explained, “in forested environments of the Northwest, bone preservation is problematic. The best places for bone preservation are caves or lava tubes in our basalt rich area. But the only way we’re going to get animal bones in there is if an animal naturally dies or a predator or scavenger drags the bones in there.”

In his own NPR interview, Dr. Meldrum stated “I don’t use the word[s] I believe in the existence of Bigfoot. To me, that connotes a conviction in the absence of proof or evidence, at least. I simply say that the evidence is there, there’s no refuting that.” Meldrum has amassed a large collection of footprint casts, which he regards as solid proof of Sasquatch’s existence.  “What does the evidence tell us?” he wants to know. “Where does it lead us, and is there something behind this persistence of this phenomenon in western North America?”

Once a month, Bigfoot believers and other interested parties gather for discussion at Pattie’s Home Plate in St. John’s, north of Portland. I attended a meeting in the fall in order to hear Thom Powell speak on the future of Bigfoot research; I’d been forced to cancel our prior meeting and my attempts to reschedule with him had been thwarted. More specifically, he was no longer responding to my emails. Thom is sinewy, with the complexion of an outdoorsman; he’s got short, salt-and-pepper hair and had a few days’ beard growth. 

I got to Pattie’s around 6:30. The walls were covered in pegboard and faux wood paneling, and dusty 45s hung by dusty strings from a water-stained drop ceiling. There were framed posters along the walls that said “Jazz” in a jazzy font, and Coca Cola ephemera was scattered about the place. I spotted two mannequins, numerous trophies, and a playpen with a real live baby inside. Behind the counter was a horseshoe, hung luck-side down. There were two paper towel racks on the floor by my feet, each holding full rolls of paper towels. It seemed as good a place as any to discuss our mysterious friend, the Bigfoot. There were maybe 18 or 20 people in attendance for the meeting. Ceiling fans whirred at top speed.

I sat down at an octagonal table across from a fellow named Dan Ronyak, a friendly, baby-faced man who was probably in his forties. I asked him what the most compelling evidence in support of Bigfoot might be. 

“I think the best evidence is seeing someone close to tears as they recount what they saw,” he answered. “When somebody has seen something, and they’re the average Joe, they wouldn’t have gone out of their way to make up a story like this. And then when they describe what they’ve seen, it’ll almost give you chills.” He adjusted his glasses. “I mean, I want to get to the point where I have chills and I’m scared to walk out of here.”

At 7:00, Thom began. “You might be on the cusp of a big game changer,” he said, announcing that Sunday’s New York Times would feature an article about a Bigfoot movie, “Letters from the Big Man”: “They’re actually treating the subject with an uncharacteristic amount of respect.” The next day I leafed through the Times, eager to see this potentially game changing article. The article, “In the Deep Forest, an Unusual Bond and Untamed Beauty,” was in fact a film review with very little to do with Sasquatch, but the reviewer called it a “lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic” film and its Sasquatch “beguiling…. an elusive and transformative presence.”  “Harry and the Hendersons” this is not. 

A woman who looked to be in her fifties sat behind Dan and I, intently listening to Thom while filing her nails rhythmically. Ch-ch. Ch-ch. Ronyak was wide-eyed and smiling toward Thom, nodding in recognition. There was a plump, middle-aged woman with a cute blonde bob sitting in front of us.

“It’s not for everyone to go that deep into what’s going on,” she said. “It can mess with your head. It can crack some people’s psyche to know these are not animals, to know holy cow I’m dealing with something really, really powerful. They do speak your language, no matter what that language is. They can speak Hmong, they can speak Vietnamese. I have a good friend that’s Hmong from Vietnam, her family came over in the early 70’s through Thailand to here. They were staying in Northern California and her uncle saw the Bigfoot sitting down in the river, and in his head he heard what do you want, what are you doing here? And I said, ‘was that in English or was it in Hmong?’ and she said it was in Hmong. So they do speak many languages. They speak your language, they speak other languages.”

Thom nodded, and the lady went on: “I don’t know if you’ve heard of Henry Franzoni – he dubbed a term called telepathic ventriloquism – you can hear it in your head, you think it’s being said out loud but it’s not.” 

“Right,” agreed Thom. 

I looked down at the checkerboard floor. I contemplated the wooden paper towel racks on the floor beside my feet, and their full rolls of paper towels. I looked over at Guy, who offered a wry smile and rolled his eyes like a kid whose parents have just done something embarrassing. This paranormal stuff is not for everyone.

“My whole dream is just to see Bigfoot,” Guy told me once.  I asked him what he would do if that happened. He told me that he spent a few months during his twenties in Thailand as a Buddhist monk. That when he was there, he saw a man get shot. “I was almost incapacitated,” he said. “I had to prop myself up. I saw his blood. It took me a long time to get help; it might’ve been 2 seconds or it might’ve been 2 hours. If I ever saw Bigfoot I’m sure I’d have the same reaction: My knees would get weak, I’d just stand still.” 

Before Thom’s talk, I’d asked Ronyak about belief. “For me, the question ‘do you believe in…’ right away sets up the whole scenario of ‘are you a kook?’ But you wouldn’t come out and ask someone that,” he said. “When you ask, ‘do you believe in Bigfoot?’ for me it’s just something that’s out there and part of the biological community.” 

So what, ultimately, is the appeal? How do all of these folks maintain interest in something that is utterly unproven? I’ve been thinking about this as I stand alone in the dark, smelling skunks on the wind, listening to the river, listening for the call of the elusive beast. Just what led me here into the deep Oregon woods on this frosty December night? I reflect on something that Ronyak said to me, and the answer is really quite simple:

“The stories are great. Listening to people talk about something they saw, they’re sure they saw, something that I have not seen….” Dan paused then; looking past me, looking toward an undefined landscape of his own imagining. 

“I love a good story,” he said. “And there’s some truth to most of it, probably.”

eap, December 2011 - “the Beast term”

The Novelist, The Beast, The Citizen

I first read Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night in my middle-teenage years, a time when I was a pitiable sweat-and-tears mixture of anger, idealism, and profound naiveté.

To illustrate: it was around this time, having read perhaps halfway through a history of the Chinese Revolution – an account whose romantic bias in no way alarmed me – no matter – I was inspired to paint a red star on the lapel of my jacket. I tried to hide the star from my mom, who surely would have given me an oral examination on the subject of revolution, generally, and Maoism, specifically. I would have had no cogent responses and would have felt very silly indeed. I soon painted over the star.

At this time, too, I read about the SDS and the Weather Underground, I read War Resisters in Prison; I pawed through anything relating to Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, the Antiwar Movement, the Chinese Revolution, Gay Rights, Black Power, the American Indian Movement; Emma Goldman though not much else to do with Russia, Castro’s Cuba, and so on. Much of what I read was pretty good, some was very smart indeed, and most of it is a blur to me now. I mean, a lot of this stuff was also very dry reading. Among a few books that I recall – and with fondness – is Armies of the Night. Mailer was like this light-beam from the heavens amid so much gloomy text, text, text. He was energetic and brazen, arrogant and opinionated, and yet he did not take a hard and fast position. This last fact is what made the book a revelation to me. It gave me an immensely pleasurable, instructive, and less-obstructed view of what it was like, in the ten or fifteen years before I came to be, that fueled so much of my parents’ lives.

Understand: not long after his high school graduation in the mid-1960’s, my father lived a solid year in prison rather than serve in Vietnam. And my mom was wound up tightly with all sorts of antiwar activity beginning around 1968 when she left her husband.

Until I read Armies, though, when my mom talked politics, more often than not I’d roll my eyes. (Oh, great: first I’m not allowed to watch Taxi and now you’re dragging me to a meeting about lead paint. Can I get some Garbage Pail Kids, please?) (Harrumph: another draft board action story. I’m going out. I don’t know when I’ll be home.) (So the government wants to bury toxic waste in the next state over. Guess what, Ma? Your revolution failed. The world is doomed.)

I harbored the attitude because I sensed too much self-importance in my parents’ activism and subsequent nostalgia, and this just ripped my own sense of self-importance apart. I was the kid. I wanted to be the center. I wanted to learn about this crap on my own and not through their biases. And I’m sure it had something to do with having a stressed-out and overworked mom, with being abandoned by a father more interested in politics and agitation than his child. Pop psychology. That stuff: I’m over it. 

Whatever it was that made me resent their past lives, suffice it to say that nothing really changes until it does. With Mailer I found this funny, cynical, sardonic, altogether other view of that America, and it lent color and validity to my folks’ stories. He made exciting and undeniable fact of those previously-grating reminiscences in ways that no old newspaper article or stuffy academic polemic had done, and in ways that I sure as hell wasn’t ready to hear from my parents. 

There’s much about Armies of the Night that I’m sure I didn’t appreciate on the first go-round. I’m certain I glossed over the last third, where the Novelist passes his baton to the Historian. But now – my goodness! Up until the Novelist takes his bow, Mailer has paraded himself around, a highly entertaining hero in his own book. And then suddenly: Them’s the facts, Ma’am. Once, a “prisoner of his own egotism, some large vital part of the March had ended for him with his own arrest,” now we have a journalist, all business, uncovering the entire weekend’s bigger picture. Once, “trusting no one else in these matters – certainly not the columnists and the commentators – would never know whether the Reverend King had given a great speech that day,” now seeking to reveal all that he missed; to tell about the armies of bikers and hippies and to flesh out the beatings that took place that weekend.

I called my mom to see what she remembered about Mailer, about Armies of the Night, about the mid-to-late sixties. “The only thing I remember about that book is him going on stage drunk and railing about how he’d just taken an amazing shit! [Sic: wasn’t it a major, desperate piss on the floor of a public restroom?] I don’t know if I have much to say about him. He was so peripheral to everything. Anyway I wasn’t at that march.” (And what of that time period? Where were you in 1967?) “I was raiding draft boards!” (No, Ma. Not in 1967, you weren’t. That was later.) “Listen, I’m at an Occupy meeting. I’ll call you back in a few hours.” As promised, she called me back in a few hours. “I remembered where I was in 1967! I was still in Japan with Hal. I think we came back to live in Baltimore in November of that year. I was miserable. I wanted to get a divorce but I needed money. So I started looking at the classifieds and ended up working for the American Friends Service Committee in Washington, DC. My first big demonstrations were in 1968. Draft board actions maybe 1969.” (Okay. Any other thoughts on Mailer? Besides the piss? Do you remember the book and did you think it was a fair account?) “Do I remember the book? Ellie: you know how my memory is.” (Okay. Thanks, Ma. I love you.)

My father, on the other hand – his mind is a steel trap. He’s largely self-taught. Last time I saw him he was reading a book in French. I said “I didn’t know you ever studied French,” and he said “Oh, I guess I’ve always just sort of figured it out as I went along. Better than reading a shit translation.” He’s a cynical bastard. He could tear Howard Zinn a new asshole if he had a mind to: none of our heroes are safe. The one time I thought it right to introduce my father to a boyfriend (we were both rooted in the Boston area, were visiting our respective families there, were madly in love, were beginning, together, what would prove to be a horrible year of make-believe, etc.), this boyfriend – an apolitical Spanish language sociolinguistics geek – this boyfriend brought up Noam Chomsky at our lunch. As a result, we were all subjected to my father’s acid retort – a Boston-nasal diatribe on the Many Deficits of Chomsky. Which was not the point, of course; Noam was but a pawn in this unfortunate game of meet and greet.

Anyway.

I feel certain that my dad has read Mailer, has read Armies of the Night, remembers the latter well, and has an opinion on both. I suspect my father wouldn’t have held back like Mailer did when he bunked with young Noam Chomsky on the night of the mass arrests at the Pentagon. I tried to reach my dad for comment but he has, thus far, declined to respond. (Thanks for nothing, pop.) 

As for me, the darling daughter: I adore Mailer at all of his different ages and with each of his many faces: the Novelist, the Beast, the Citizen. Because he was not beholden to any sect, because he felt that political parties would be better off with motorcycle gang names, because he harbored mistrust of the Press, where “nuances were forever being munched like peanuts,” and criticized the New Left for being wimpy and complicit, because he said “the Hawks were smug and self-righteous, the Doves were evasive of the real question,” and then concluded, simply, that Vietnam was a very bad war, because he loved filth and vice, and he sucked the boring out of my family’s nostalgia: I love Armies of the Night for all of that, and I love it for helping me to understand where I come from.

eap, October 2011 - “the Beast term”