Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Ariel blossomed, and I was thrilled to see my once-feral child thriving with the advantages of a normal home life. Unfortunately, Sam became disenchanted with Colorado and moved back to San Francisco about six weeks later. Ariel was supposed to remain with us for the duration of the school year. One day, five or six months into that year, Sam decided arbitrarily that the experiment was over: Ariel was to return to her house immediately. Marilyn burst into tears, weeping for the opportunity that Ariel would miss. I was bewildered and did not see how to refuse, but Marilyn was crystal clear: “That child will never stand a chance if she’s raised by her mother. She’ll have no education, no training, and the options for her future will be reduced to nothing. I don’t care if she chooses to be a hippie when she’s grown, but I’d like her to know how to eat at a formal dinner, or study for college, or get a straight job if she wants to. You know that no one will see to that if she goes back.”

  This was classic Marilyn. Raised in a tiny southern Ohio community, she had pored through fashion magazines as a child, determined to experience the wider, more sophisticated world she knew existed beyond the borders of her town. When her father, a well-respected country lawyer, agreed to pay for any “educational” summer camp, she found one in Vogue’s back pages that taught French. The camp, on the East Coast, catered to the daughters of New York’s elite. Marilyn charmed them, absorbed what they could teach her, and never looked back. She understood the value of training and made her case passionately. I concurred, and we began the grueling and cruel process of a custody battle, which even an eventual victory could not sweeten.

  The court dictated that Ariel live primarily with Marilyn and me, but the stress of the hearings and the bad blood between the households caused rents in the fabric of our relationships, extending even to the grandparents. Ariel’s behavior began to change; she seemed confused and unhappy. While her mother was away, she had not had to feel torn in her loyalties or guilty about her new good fortune. Sam’s authority as Ariel’s biological mother added to the normal strains of stepmothering, and her intrusions into our life became intolerable to Marilyn. Ariel reacted to the tension as a child will, and Marilyn began to regard her not as a confused nine-year-old but as a competitor with the power of a peer. My guilt and attempts to please everyone exacerbated the problems between them. I can think of nothing crueler than trying to arbitrate a duel between people you love equally. The relationship between Marilyn and Ariel deteriorated to the point that I was forced to send Ariel away to school, and the day I explained to Ariel that she would have to go away is unequivocally the worst memory of my life.

  I had one more lucky card coming. This one was dealt by Gary Snyder, and it landed on the table shortly after I became a CETA artist. In 1975, Snyder’s book Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and then-governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown appointed him chairman of a newly constituted state arts council. Before Brown, the state arts “commission” had been a high-status afterthought composed primarily of wives of the governor’s friends, distributing a niggardly one million dollars to California’s cultural institutions. At the time of Brown’s inauguration, California ranked forty-eighth among the states in per-capita arts spending.

  The governor’s idea was to create a council of working artists to revitalize the state’s culture. Gary asked me if I would consider joining the council and baited his hook with an offer no visionary could refuse: “You’ll have an opportunity to define the state,” he promised. I shrugged “why not” and forgot about the conversation—until several months later, when I found myself sitting with the governor and his éminence grise, the enigmatic Jacques Barzhagi, once a cinema hustler from the Côte d’Azur and now the governor’s most trusted personal adviser.

  Ours was an improbable job interview. My hair had grown back to shoulder length after Wall Street and I arrived in jeans and boots, intent, I suppose, on communicating that none of this was a very big deal to me. Barzhagi’s head was shaved so close that his hair seemed to be a fine coating of dust. Rimless glasses magnified his bright eyes, and his unblinking stare hinted at a penetrating intelligence melded with a disquieting unpredictability.

  He had an edge on me at the meeting, because en route to Sacramento, my scrofulous VW had been stopped by the highway patrol, and I couldn’t resist flaunting the fact that I was en route to a meeting at the governor’s office. The trooper must have checked out this apparent absurdity, since Jacques asked immediately, “What did the cop want with you?”

  The governor was relaxed, and we talked casually for about twenty minutes, while several advisers mutely witnessed our exchange. I don’t remember the details of the conversation, but I do remember disagreeing with many of the governor’s perspectives. The last ten years had given me plenty of time to ponder cultural questions, and I was certain that neither the governor nor his advisers had been as close to the underbelly of American life as I had been. I reasoned that if I had anything to offer, it would be by remaining true to my own experience. Furthermore, though it might be fun to have a job, I was not about to sell myself to get it. I had much to say and must have struck a resonant chord, because the next thing I knew, I was a member of the California Arts Council.

  From the farthest edge of the outside, I had, after one conversation, been invited to the inside of the inside. The irony of my appointment was sharpened by the contrast in status between my lowly CETA employment and my now-elevated status as a council member. My CETA supervisors, who had gamely attempted to track my peripatetic whereabouts and comprehend the elusive nature of my project-to-be, would soon be applying to the arts council for their own funds, and this new wrinkle in our relationship was not lost on them—or me. I was magnanimous in victory, however, and turned the situation to my advantage by declaring my long-awaited project to be: the counseling of San Francisco Bay Area groups in applying for state funding! (I was so successful at this that several years later there was a political hullabaloo over the fact that the Bay Area, with a population of only one million people, was receiving 40 percent of all state arts funding, which immeasurably peeved the artists of Los Angeles, with its population of twelve million.)

  In my early days on the council, my revolutionary sentiments were raw and heightened by years of living without money. I identified more closely with the underclasses and, despite my love of the art forms, was antagonistic to the political proponents of “Western European High Art,” as I was fond of calling opera, symphony, and ballet. I wasted no time in announcing that it was “payback time,” that there was scant money available for the arts, and I was damned if it was all going to go to “aristocratic watering holes.” This kind of rhetoric made me poor friends and rich enemies.

  It is easy to understand how proponents of the “high arts” might have been fearful of our new regime. Governor Brown’s council was a racial and ethnic fruit salad, composed primarily of working artists, many of whom were unknown to the general public. Besides myself, the members included Alexander Mackendrick, the rumpled and angular Scottish film director (The Ladykillers, The Man in the White Suit, The Sweet Smell of Success) drier than a Vermouth-less martini, who spent a large portion of each council meeting drawing satirical cartoons of his peers. (Mine was a headbanded hippie, his arm raised as if still knocking on a nonexistent door, while tuxedoed swells are waltzing about. A liveried butler with a champagne glass on a tray is standing besides him saying, “But, sir, you are inside.”) Then there were Allaudin Mathieu, music professor and choir director from Mills College, a passionate eclectic who loved novel cultural rearrangements like pairing the Sufi choir and the Grateful Dead; Ruth Asawa, a Japanese-American sculptor, equally famous for her “origami” bronzes in San Francisco’s Japantown and for her large fountains made of baker’s dough tiles designed by schoolchildren; Suzanne Jackson, a prominent African-American printmaker from Los Angeles, quiet but deep and, unlike me, less interested in political wrangling than in production of good work; and Luis Valdez, an old comrade
from the Mime Troupe, now the artistic director and spiritual leader of a theater company called El Teatro Campesino.

  Born the son of migrant workers, Luis had left the Mime Troupe to form El Teatro after an acid trip in which, according to him, “all the grasses were pointing toward Delano.” His theatrical brilliance, coupled with a rigorous intellect and deep political convictions, had made him a force to be reckoned with in the emergent Latino movement. Luis went on to write and direct Zoot Suit, the hit musical that catapulted Edward James Olmos into stardom, and the film La Bamba about rock star Richie Valens.

  Luis is a complicated man, quick to laugh, and with a pointed sense of the ridiculous. Stocky and barrel-chested, with a dark Zapata mustache, he speaks English with the impeccable syntax and vocabulary of the cultural elite yet can pivot on a syllable into Caló, the English-Spanish argot of California. His political and personal ambitions are densely braided, and it was not always possible for me to determine the dividing line between them. During his tenure as a council member, he was always chauffeured and personally attended by someone from El Teatro, and his regal personal style sometimes contrasted starkly with his proletarian convictions. Although we were friends and political allies of long standing, we differed increasingly over what I perceived to be his attempts to include Native American issues under his hegemony, insisting on the authority to speak for Native concerns and to supervise programs (and funds) intended for them. My resistance was based on personal knowledge that most native people did not speak Spanish or consider themselves Chicanos (the term Mexicans used to distinguish themselves from the larger population of Latinos or Hispanics). They had concerns that were specifically their own and did not want them co-opted by another culture.

  Further exacerbating differences between us, Luis sought increasing control over staff appointments, at one point going directly to the governor to subvert a council decision about personnel. These quarrels eventually ruptured our relationship when, as chairman of the council, I refused to support his candidate for executive director, an able young woman named Gloriamalia Flores who had been one of our deputy directors. Gloria was extremely diligent and competent, but young and only recently out of school. Her appointment, at Luis’s behest, to deputy director of a state agency was already a major coup for an unseasoned beginner. Art politics were hotly contested and bitter internecine struggles often erupted. I told Gloria I felt she would be crushed by the competing social forces and suggested she spend another several years as deputy director under the new executive and that when that new person left (as arts bureaucrats seemed to do every several years), I promised her my backing for the job. My lack of support infuriated Luis, however, and he accused me of being a racist in a public meeting. Some years later, word came back to me through an intermediary that Gloriamalia herself agreed with my analysis of the situation.

  Gary Snyder’s contributions to the council were unique. He explored this political territory the same way he explored a new ridge with a pack on his back—by keeping his eyes open, practicing mindfulness, and determining carefully where to place his foot next. His method sometimes appeared stodgy (as his mountain walk did when I first noticed the way his feet splayed out flat, as if they would “splat” when they landed), but his pace never faltered and he never stumbled. Despite the fact that he rarely chose paths of obvious political expediency, he never seemed to create antipathy or enemies among those with different philosophies or opinions. It was fun to watch Gary chair meetings in the state capitol, appearing before the legislators with a red bandanna around his forehead, his hair tied Navajo style, wearing either his Amish suit bought from a mail-order catalogue (of which he was uncommonly proud) or his natty fishing vest with a hand-embroidered turtle on the breast, representing Turtle Island—the symbol of a reimagined America known by its ancient native name. Speaking from the dais under the state flag, he would cheerfully explain to the representatives of High European culture why scarce arts dollars should be shared with Asian, Latin, Micronesian, rural white, and black cultures. He would disarm community arts people with minitreatises on excellence as a form of radical practice and the necessity of being truly inclusive when speaking of cultural diversity. Restive as partisans might be with his premises and conclusions, Snyder’s explanations were so interesting, informative, and articulate and his goodwill so evenhanded and genuine that I know of no one who ever took exception to the manner in which Gary considered their brief.

  The two remaining members of the council played decisive roles in my further education and deserve mention. Noah Purifoy is a short, muscular African-American man then in his sixties with gnarly hands, a pugnacious thrust to his posture, and a deliberate and somewhat querulous voice. A Los Angeles sculptor of found art, he is a deep thinker about creativity and culture. According to Noah, all artists work in fundamentally the same manner, no matter what their medium is. Following a hunch, an impulse, or a hypothesis, they make a move, a line, a sentence. They step back and regard what they have done, then they act again and review again, discovering where they are going incrementally. This antipodal shifting between the realms of logic and intuition is the core of the creative process. It is, according to Noah, a problem-solving mechanism of the highest order because it utilizes and integrates both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Noah’s “hunch” was that the council itself should operate according to the same creative process, using as its starting position the policy and program intuitions of the members. Since most of us were working artists, we were comfortable leaping into the unknown in this manner. Purifoy asserted further that just as the creative process was a problem-solving mechanism for the artist, the community of artists could serve as a reservoir of creative problem solvers for the state. Artists could even save the state money if they succeeded in cracking some of the obdurate problems plaguing it.

  When the council began to design programs, we used Noah’s ideas as our template and discovered how readily they expedited our ideas of service. If we want to have art in the state, we reasoned, we should create opportunities for artists to serve the state’s needs. If we paid a subsistence wage for twenty hours of weekly work, the artists would create art on their own nickel in the remaining time. There was no need to pay them for making art, and doing so has been one of the major controversies and political problems of arts funding. Even the densest legislator could understand the equation of payment for service.

  It was fascinating to track the reactions as the council began to explore and articulate this idea. A contrary philosophy known as art-for-art’s-sake was articulated among the representatives of the state’s “High Art” institutions. They argued that art had no statement to make nor any practical significance (which I always considered a dangerous argument to advance when asking taxpayers for their money). They contended that to attach a work of art to any purpose outside of its own organic evolution was to debase the work, and I can certainly agree with the latter part of the statement. But such arguments could not (or would not) address that all choices—especially by a government agency—are inherently political and reflect the interests or worldview of one group or another. Art-for-art’s-sake is the philosophy about art of a group accustomed to dominance, which mistakes its political power for revealed truth. They did not accept that their worldview was only one among many, some of which were far older and at least as well developed.

  The new council was in charge now, however; this was our philosophy, and we were damn well going to run with it. Legislators found it easy to support our program, at least in the beginning. Once they understood that they were being asked to vote for services rendered and not grants, they were greatly relieved, and this distinction saved us a lot of political flak (a lesson that has not been learned to date by either the National Endowment for the Arts or any other state arts council of which I am aware). The major cultural institutions learned that it made no practical difference whether they received their money for community service and outreach or as a grant
, but that there were tangible political benefits to the former option—such as the opera being funded to teach singing in the public schools. A father who might never go to the opera would not begrudge state funding to an institution that was giving his children tangible benefits. In this way the council sidestepped much of the class antagonism that often invisibly undermines adequate arts funding.

  The remaining member of the council, my polar opposite politically, temperamentally, and stylistically, became in due course my ablest teacher in the realm of politics. Karney Hodge was president of the American Symphony Orchestra League, one of the bastions of wealth and privilege in America’s upper-echelon arts community. He is a solid man with the square face and tightly curled hair of a Roman pugilist who has aged well. It was obvious that Karney was on the council to represent the art interests of those who generally do best in our society. As their representative, he was a minority of one: impeccably groomed, shirts crisp and fresh, tasteful gold accessories winking against subdued, classically tailored suits. Karney made no apologies for his style or agenda, but he was patient and extremely skillful, biding his time and reminding us consistently that the “establishment arts” (as I was fond of calling them) were also “a part of the big picture.”

  Karney laughed easily and expressed an upbeat bonhomie that never rang false yet never obligated him either. I began to admire his skill in addressing issues without rancor, spinning our vocabulary of “fairness” and “inclusion” on its edge to include his constituency as well. He could be stubborn when necessary, though, lowering his head and presenting an adamant forehead to his adversary like a bull. He was a keenly competitive tennis player, and through his Fresno pal George Zenovich, a jazz-playing state senator, he had easy access to the legislature. His wife Marilyn Jean was charming and ebullient, and his children seemed fit, happy, and successful. There was much to admire and emulate about Karney, and I did both.