Author: Taylor Norman

LISA HENSON

Posted on by Taylor Norman

“When we were children my friends heard that my father was a puppeteer and they just felt sorry for us,” says Lisa Henson, daughter of the late Jim Henson and CEO of his namesake the Jim Henson Company. “They thought he was like a birthday party puppeteer or something,” she adds with a laugh.

It wasn’t until 1969, when Lisa was 9 years old, that her father’s name entered the pop-culture psyche with the debut of the affable, puppet-driven PBS children’s television show Sesame Street, home to the likes of Big Bird, Ernie and Kermit the Frog. Almost a half-century later, Jim’s legacy lives on, not only in his world-famous cast of Muppets and otherworldly characters but also in the company’s pioneering, award-winning work in the fields of puppetry and animation.

“It was a very informal household, with art projects and all of us making things in our free time,” says Lisa, the eldest of five children Jim shared with his wife, Jane. The pair met as students at a puppetry class at the University of Maryland, College Park, and went on to work together on Henson’s first TV show, Sam and Friends, in 1955. After marrying Jim, Jane eventually hung up her puppeteering hat to become a stay-at-home mom but nurtured her artistic side, serving as both a mentor for up-and-coming puppeteers and as a volunteer art teacher at her children’s school.

 

“I think we all embraced the fun of having an art studio or a woodworking shop in the garage, or a playroom where you could get all the art supplies out,” says Lisa of a childhood spent in Greenwich, Connecticut, and later in Westchester County, New York. And despite Jim’s ever-expanding ragtag cast of Muppets (which grew to include Muppet Babies and Fraggle Rock), her father’s creations rarely made an appearance in their daily home life. Instead, Jim’s imaginative streak manifested itself in other forms. “He carved spectacularly ornate Halloween pumpkins and made special handmade Christmas ornaments every year and added them to the collection,” recalls Lisa. “Some of that creativity that he was always overflowing with was seen in the projects that all families do—but they were done a little more wildly and creatively in our house.”

While puppeteering came second nature to her youngest sister, Heather, Lisa—a self-described “shy, anxiety-filled youth”—was more drawn to the behind-the-scenes creative process. Armed with a degree in folklore and mythology from Harvard University (where she also served as the first female president of the Harvard Lampoon), Lisa received a job offer upon graduation as a junior executive at Warner Bros. in Los Angeles, where she worked her way up the ranks for the next 10 years to the position of executive vice president of production, lending her name to blockbuster films including Lethal Weapon (1987), Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).

“I feel like my work at the studio was actually too exciting at that time to give it up. I was also enjoying being independent from the family business,” explains Lisa, now a mother to two teenagers, who also went on to serve as president of Columbia Pictures. “I felt that, if I ever did go back to work in the family company, I would like to bring as much knowledge and experience that you can pick up on the outside and bring that in.”

And in 1999, she did just that joining the leadership ranks as an official staff member of the Jim Henson Company, nine years after her father’s untimely death in 1990. “My father asked me to come work at the company every year until he died, which is a little sad for me that I never did make that decision while he was alive,” says Lisa.

Continuing her father’s legacy in children’s programming, Lisa’s proudest career moment to date is Sid the Science Kid, an Emmy-nominated preschool show that started airing in 2008 and broke new technology ground with its merging of digital animation with hand puppetry. “It was very exciting to start making a program for PBS when it’s been so many years since Sesame Street first aired,” she says. (The Jim Henson Creature Shop still creates the characters for the show, which is now owned by Sesame Workshop, which just signed a five-year partnership with HBO.)

And while children’s television programming remains at the heart of the Jim Henson Company (Dinosaur Train, Pajanimals and Hi, Opie! to name a few), the company has a history of bringing state-of-the-art puppetry and animation to the big screen, too, from classics such as Labyrinth (1986) and MirrorMask (2005) to an upcoming sequel to 1982’s The Dark Crystal. Meanwhile, the company’s Henson Alternative brand is geared toward an adult audience, with projects including the staged improv show Puppet Up!—Uncensored.

So what makes her father’s work live on? “He clearly created a cast of characters that lived on beyond him,” says Lisa (her own favorite being Rowlf the Dog, not only for his piano-playing skills but also for his all-American sensibility and folksy nature). “I always love the diversity of the characters, and I think people respond to the way that they are a mixed-up troop. He didn’t try to design a perfect cast of ideal individuals. They would be forgettable if they were just perfect princesses and superheroes.”
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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG

Posted on by Taylor Norman

A successful artist’s work nearly always survives beyond the artist’s death—but how do you actively preserve, and perpetuate, their ideas? Take pioneering rule breaker Robert Rauschenberg, whose artworks from the 1950s through to the early 2000s questioned the very meaning of art. Like the blank canvases he called his White Paintings (which were said to have inspired fellow Black Mountain College alumnus and close friend John Cage’s silent musical score, 4’33”), his collages made from Moroccan trash (the ones he didn’t sell he threw into a river), his stuffed goat or his blank piece of paper with the self-explanatory title Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), an artwork said to have taken him one month and 40 erasers to complete. When Rauschenberg died in 2008, leaving behind him a legacy that existed not just in museums but in people’s inspiration, the question was, how do you caretake a vision once the visionary is gone? How do you ensure that ideas live, breathe and continue to evolve?

The task was entrusted to a woman named Christy MacLear, who, as head of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, is dedicated to keeping not just the work but the ideals of Robert Rauschenberg alive. “What we do is defined singularly by the values that we have defined, and those values were defined by the people who were closest to Bob,” says MacLear. “So it’s not just that we give grants, it’s that we give grants to things that are fearless, that are creative problem-solving, that are global-minded and interested in peacekeeping across borders. We will fund projects that may fail because we are funding risk-seeking or catalytic types of moments in an artist’s career.”

The foundation provides a sanctuary where artists can push the boundaries of their own vision, à la Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg’s former home and studio on Captiva Island off the coast of Fort Myers, Florida, is now a 20-acre compound accepting 10 new artists every five weeks from varying geographies and disciplines. And the rest is up to them. “They get to come in, they get a house, they get a studio or a dance studio or a sound studio and they get to work on their artistic practice,” says MacLear. “We don’t expect anything to come out of it and we don’t ask them to give us anything in return. What we find is that most artists come in and with that degree of liberty, they actually expand their artistic disciplines. We find that with that open space for their creative practice, they interact and try something entirely new.”

Performance artist Laurie Anderson is an alumnus—as are many emerging artists. Some go on to become well known for their art, some don’t. While on Captiva, they are all rewarded equally, though. Rewarded for being risk takers and fulfilling the foundation’s goal of seeding new generations of rule breakers—artists after Rauschenberg’s own heart.

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the most influential artists of the last half century. He also happens to be one of the most missed. Instead of trying to explain this, we sought out those who knew him best to share insight into what made him the father, friend, and artist he was.

 

Los Angeles, 1969. Sidney B. Felsen

 

“I think Bob is one of the greatest artists that ever lived, but it was his intelligence, his sense of humor, his concern for everyone else, his practice of philanthropy, his willingness to give and give and give that made him the GREAT MAN he was.”

Sidney Felsen

New York, 1958. Jasper Johns

 

I’m at my dad’s house in Captiva. He has chosen to come home from the hospital and has spent the last few days of his life in his studio. I have read the excellent obituary of my father by Michael Kimmelman in the online NY Times, but then Bob’s secretary, Bradley Jeffries, tells me to go back and read it again. I ask why and he tells me to look at the comments. There are over a hundred comments and virtually all of them say either I never met Bob Rauschenberg but he changed my life or I met Bob Rauschenberg and he changed my life. Of course, as Bob’s son, people have been telling me all my life how much my father’s work meant to them, but when he has just died and I’m wrestling with the idea that he is gone, it has a whole new meaning to have over a hundred people step forward and say that he’s not gone. To have over a hundred people come forward and say that they have incorporated his spirit, his work, his generosity and way of looking at the world into their own spirit, their own work, their own generosity and way of looking at the world–at that moment that is a magically wonderful thing for me.

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is, for me, all about this idea that Bob is not gone. It gives us a chance to keep organizing shows of his work to keep blowing people’s minds; it gives us a chance to fill his studios with 70 artists per year who are pouring out great work made with great excitement; it lets us keep his philanthropy flowing. It lets us keep creating people who can say I never met Bob Rauschenberg but he changed my life.

Christopher Rauschenberg

A dealer owed Bob quite a sum of money. Desperate, Bob was able to obtain a court order and was finally paid. “What then?” I said. And Bob’s response was, “I gave him another show!”

Irving Blum

Knowing Bob had a big impact on my life. He was a true artist. He had a huge gravitational pull and held himself to a higher standard than anyone I’ve ever met. Bob defined integrity. If the rest of us could exist at his level the world would be perfect.

Chuck Arnoldi

All I have to do is sum it up in two words: Brilliance and generosity. I miss him deeply.

Laddie John Dill

About twenty years ago I received an extraordinary birthday gift from my wife Stacey. She had called Robert Rauschenberg and told him what my favorite colors are, my favorite things, and Mr. Rauschenberg made a collage of my life.

That piece of art hangs on our wall and gives me pleasure every day. It is green. It is white. It is fierce, and at the same time, dreamy.

What an honor it is to have Mr. Rauschenberg in our house.

Henry Winkler

I think of Bob often. One thought that regularly comes to mind is we should have put a recording device on him for 90 days; it would have produced material for one of the great philosphy books ever written.

Suzanne Felsen

When I think of Rauschenberg what comes to my mind is the Gluts series (end of ’80s to beginning of 1990s). I believe it’s the most actual works he made in their form and content and that they are very influential to artists working today.

The form of the Gluts wall or free-standing works, the way they are made, is in the tradition of the assembled found objects used directly in a sculpture or painting that was invented in the early 20th century by Duchamp and Picasso. Rauschenberg’s famous Combine paintings were already in that lineage, related to the invention of the collage by Picasso and Braque.

The content, the meaning of the Gluts has a strong resonance today, even if for different reasons than at the time Rauschenberg did the series, when there was a glut in oil, and he used gas station signs, industrial parts in metal …

Almine Rech

I am blessed that I knew him and his work.

Frank Gehry

Bob was the Walt Whitman of 20th Century American art. His name was Bob, by the way, not the professorial Robert.

Dave Hickey

Bob had this international inquisitiveness and enthusiasm, thinking that art was this universal language that could be accessible to everybody, as opposed to a verbal language.

David White

Robert Rauschenberg had a restless mind … an unstoppable imagination. It’s hard not to be envious of someone who wakes up and asks himself, “What shouldn’t I do? I think I’ll do that.”

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Bob was a generous spirit, always helping others, an upbeat person.

Once I was having dinner with Bob in Baltimore. After dinner we went to MICA [Maryland Institute College of Art]. We went to the artists’ studios at MICA, where three or four students were working, and Bob spent more than an hour critiquing their work.

On another occasion, my wife and I were visiting Bob in Captiva. We were staying in his guest room, where the bed was too soft for us. Bob gave up his room and his bed for us to be more comfortable during our visit.

Another thought: When we visited Bob, he always had the television on while he was working.

Robert E. Meyerhoff

I think of the endless thought provoker from Port Arthur, Texas, who visually continues to invent and rearrange the most extreme thinking with positive expansiveness.

James Rosenquist

I always knew that when I was going to see Bob there would be a lot of laughter. There was this thing he had about connections. Whether they were complex, simple, nonessential, existential or even silly, Bob got a giant laugh about connections. It was an infectious, joyful, “aha!” kind of laugh. When I wasn’t completely clear about a connection, he would bring me along with a laugh that was more than just about the irony or humor of the thing. He could make me see the point.

A long time ago I spent a week on Captiva Island at Bob’s studio, fishing, playing poker and ignoring the clock. Jim Rosenquist was down for the week and the conversations were, in my mind, epic. I was 27 at the time, so everything those guys said was epic to me.

One morning Bob invited me into his painting studio and pointed to a very large canvas he was working on and said, “Why don’t you think about what should happen on the bottom right side where I’ve already started, and I will work up here on the left.” When I got past the initial shock of the invitation, I did work on it. I did because it was clear to me that Bob considered my art-marrow to have a connection with his, just as he considered so many artists as having that connection. I think he thought, “Why not try it out with Guy?”

Years later I asked Bob what happened to that big canvas. He told me it got much smaller; he thought it would work better as a drawing on paper. Nothing about the bottom right, though.

Guy Dill

Robert Rauschenberg was already beset by physical setbacks when I met him, but he was animated by an outsized curiosity and love of being alive. He was interested and engaged in everything that met his eye, and his interaction with the world, his avidity, was inspiring. Knock on wood, I thought, I have all my capacity, my heedless good health, I can still jump and run, but I have HALF his energy, his verve, his eagerness in living. That was a lesson to me, every visit with Bob lit a fire under my complacent butt.

Meryl Streep

 

Los Angeles, 1974. Sidney B. Felsen

 

Los Angeles, 1998. Sidney B. Felsen

 

New York, 1958. Jasper Johns

 

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RITA MARLEY

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Bob had met Rita in the mid-1960s, when they were both living in Trenchtown, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kingston, Jamaica. She was a teenage single mom with a hell of a voice, and he was a local celebrity looking for a singer to help back up his group. The Wailers, as they named themselves, were in the process of creating a new musical form, based on the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of ska and, more recently, rocksteady. They called it reggae, and its hard-driving rhythm, spiritual component (Rastafarianism) and lifestyle (ganja, positivity, humility, social responsibility) were about to go global. He recruited Rita to join the Soulettes (later the I-Threes), the Wailers’ backing vocalists.

Within a year, Bob and Rita were married, Bob had adopted Rita’s first daughter, Sharon, and he and Rita started making babies. Their first daughter, Cedella, arrived in 1967. “The story that I remember the most about growing up was the one about the record shop,” recalls Cedella Marley, who now runs the family business, record label Tuff Gong International, out of Marley’s adopted hometown of Miami. “Mommy was the salesperson, and she would carry around the records on her head and just go from store to store and try to sell these records. She was really good at that. If you look at Mommy’s younger pictures, she had a really hot body. Daddy used to say he loved to watch her carry the records around when she walked, because she “wiggle,” laughs Cedella, who spent her early years in Trenchtown. “She was an artist before she became a mother, obviously, but then she combined the two when she had no choice. Then she became a businessperson because that was her role: Take care of business while Daddy remained just being the artist.”

Unlike Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones or Dylan, whose encounters with widespread fame happened almost immediately after they started recording and while they were still in their early 20s, Marley’s ascension to superstardom was gradual. But Bob had full faith in his genius. So did Rita. That confidence got them through the late ’60s and early ’70s in Trenchtown. It was a time when Marley’s early Wailers records with Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston were beloved by Jamaicans and some international music critics but just about no one else, and Rita was helping to keep the family afloat with nursing gigs. And the family continued to grow, with the addition of David “Ziggy” Marley in 1968.

Cedella’s early memories of the Trenchtown years were anything but dark. “I didn’t know we were living in the ghetto because that’s all I knew,” she says. “Nobody could really tell me that we lived in the ghetto because everybody who I knew was from the same neighborhood. And everybody’s yard was nicely clean.” There’s a famous photograph of Bob, Rita and their three children in Trenchtown during those days. Bob, the rock star in waiting, in head-to-toe denim stares intently at the camera, while Rita beams out a smile that’s so joyful it’s almost defiant. “We loved to dress in what we called your Sunday best, which was our white dress, our white socks, our little black shoes and then we’d all get on the bus together,” says Cedella. “In that time, Jamaica was sweet.”

1972 proved to be a pivotal year for the Marleys, both personally and professionally. After a brief stay in Delaware, where Bob operated a forklift at night to make ends meet, followed a return to Trenchtown, and the Wailers made a deal with Island Records, which was run by Chris Blackwell, the first man to truly grasp Marley’s genius and his potential as an international “crossover” act. The signing fee was enough for Bob and Rita to buy a house in Bull Bay, a coastal community east of Kingston. It was the first time Bob, Rita and their children had their own home outside the ghetto, a place that was lit by electricity and not kerosene lamps. “To us, it was like a mansion!” recalls Cedella. “Mind you, it was very tiny, but at least we weren’t in one room together. The girls had a room and the boys had a room. We shared one bathroom.”

 

 

’72 was also the year that Bob and Rita’s relationship took a turn into new territory. In April, Rita gave birth to her and Bob’s third child, Stephen. Within a month, Bob would welcome two more of his sons into the world with the birth of Robbie and Rohan, each born to other women. Rita welcomed both of them in as her own. “I can tell you that I don’t know what happened behind closed doors, but knowing my mother, I don’t think she was sitting there going, ‘Huh, oh my gosh, Bob, that’s so great! You have another woman!’ I’m sure that wasn’t her reaction to whatever was going on,” Cedella says. “But I can tell you that whenever Daddy would bring a brother or sister to the house and introduced them to us, immediately she was nurturing, she was loving. Whatever was happening with them behind closed doors, it never affected our relationships.”

Over the course of their marriage, Marley would go on to father four more children by different women: Karen (1973), Julian (1975), Ky-Mani (1976) and Damian (1978). Rita would add another of her own, Stephanie (1974). Bob and Rita’s marriage had evolved into the untraditional. Rather than split, Bob and Rita became closer. “It had to be love, you know, we had to love each other,” says Rita. “It was about music and loving each other, as a poor boy and a poor girl. Bob was a singer and I was a singer. We had a good combination. He was fantastic. He treated me like a brother would treat a sister.”

By 1976, Bob was on the verge of making history, as artist and activist, as Jamaica’s great preacher of love and tolerance, with his wife and creative partner by his side. He had split with Bunny and Peter and, with Blackwell and Island’s support, had gone solo, with tremendous success. After years of remaining under the radar on the world stage, his sound had caught on with international audiences by way of Eric Clapton’s cover of the epic gangster ballad “I Shot the Sheriff.” Then Bob properly introduced himself to non-Jamaican audiences with “No Woman, No Cry,” an aching, joyful plea by a boy from Kingston’s Trenchtown ghetto to his girlfriend, imploring her that everything was gonna be alright. He might as well have been singing to Rita.

And then, on a quiet night at Marley’s compound on Hope Road, which for the past couple of years had served as the base of operations for his life and work, a small group of men broke into Bob and Rita’s house and shot them. Bob was hit in the arm. Rita caught a bullet in the head. Two days later, both of them took the stage for Smile Jamaica, a concert organized in support of Jamaica’s progressive prime minister, Michael Manley. They were supposed to play one song. Instead, Bob, Rita and the Wailers performed for 90 minutes.

Rita didn’t know it yet, but the failed assassination attempt at Hope Road would provide her with a blueprint for how to handle the bigger tragedy that was to come. The men who had tried to kill her and her husband were never captured or identified, but it was generally accepted they weren’t strangers. The shooters, more likely than not, had spent time at the commune/lifestyle factory/musical incubator that was Hope Road. The lesson to be learned: Only trust your blood. Soon after the shooting, Bob sat down his oldest children—Sharon, Cedella and Ziggy—and laid it out to them. “He gather us together and told us, ‘You guys are supposed to be each other’s best friends. There is no friend outside of you guys,’ ” says Cedella. “Even then, I took it pretty serious. But I’ve always remembered that as a life lesson, as a life instruction: ‘This is how you guys are supposed to live. You’re each other’s friend.’ ”

Marley’s ascent began in earnest during the mid-1970s, with the release of Natty Dread, Rastaman Vibration, Exodus, Kaya, Survival and Uprising, all masterpieces. For much of this time, Marley was fighting a losing battle against cancer. In 1981, he traveled to Germany for a last-ditch effort at alternative therapy, which failed. He ended up passing away in Miami at just 36. He never made it home to Jamaica.

 

 

Rita, now a single mother with many mouths to feed, didn’t have much time to grieve. The barbarians had returned to the gate, armed not with guns but with fabricated promises of money and other gifts that they claimed Bob had promised them. Rita didn’t flinch. “When Daddy passed, she was ganged up on, by my grandmother, by my dad’s half-sister,” recalls Cedella. “It was like they were saying, ‘You had him in life, but we’re going to have him in death. And there’s nothing you can do about it.’ But she wasn’t the woman who walked around with a sad face. You know, she walked around defiant because the odds were really stacked up against her. And she had to figure it out, she really had to figure it out how she was going to get through it, and how her children were going to get through it.”

Rita stood her ground, fought back and won. For the past 34 years, Rita, now 69 and battling health issues, remains her husband’s most passionate advocate. Thanks to her and her children’s efforts, Marley’s commitment to peace, social awareness and the power of music continues to live on via a well-organized network of nonprofit foundations and scholarship funds. His children, many of whom live within shouting distance of each other in Miami, have followed her lead. Ziggy, Stephen, Damian and Cedella are all established musicians in their own right, and most of the Marley children are active members in the many businesses and foundations their mother founded.

“After Daddy died, it became clear, real fast, that this was not going to be as easy as we thought it was going to be,” says Cedella. “But she was not intimidated by anyone. She was just supposed to curl up, roll over and be gone. And these people came in. She was like, ‘Oh yeah? Try it.’ She’s a rock. I don’t think they make them like her anymore. They don’t make them like her anymore.”

 

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MARK GROTJAHN

Posted on by Taylor Norman

FRANKLIN SIRMANS: It’s interesting—to me it seems like there’s always a sense of balance in your work. I’m just thinking about you going back and forth between painting and sculpture. Of course it’s all a painting practice, but I think that it must be something healthy in that feeling of connecting between the two.

MARK GROTJAHN: I don’t know if it’s healthy, I just know that I do better when I have a starting point. I do kind of need that. If I come to a studio and I don’t have a starting point I unravel a little bit.

FS: So how do you move between the work, then? Between, say, going into the studio and knowing, OK, this is a sculpture period.

MG: That’s something I do, I suppose; I go in and decide this is a sculpture period, I’ll be doing sculpture today. And then I’m going through a painting period, but sometimes when I’m going through a painting period I have a couple of sculptures in the painting studio. So if I need to take or want to take a break from the painting, I can go over to the sculpture and I could hit it and I can hit these paintings, hit the sculptures, a little bit at a time and then just walk away.

 

 

FS: Right.

MG: Which I really wish was also true for the “butterflies”—those I pretty much take from start to finish. I want to work on them whatever it is, 8- or 10-hour days until they’re done.

FS: That’s intense.

MG: But that’s not the case with the sculpture. In sculpture there’s just a lot more drawing time and layering, and sometimes it’s planned and sometimes it’s not and with the painting as well, I’m still just figuring out how to paint the sculptures.

FS: Uh-huh.

MG: So I may go in with an idea and it’s kind of like some impressionist-based thoughts, like clouds in the sky or some kind of Monet, Renoir, but filtered through abstract expressionism.

FS: Exactly.

MG: Then it just might turn out to be straight-out Kippenberger or something like that because I wasn’t able to pull it off.

FS: I love that balance. In some ways you can talk about it in the sort of landscape tradition that is based in representational imagery as much as in a more abstract space. I’m thinking of the Rothko-Newman kind of trajectory. Do you ever go back to older texts as a source of inspiration?

MG: Kandinsky wrote about it and that’s what I was reading when I was 15 and it was hugely important. I don’t go back to it—I’ve thought about doing that after I’ve read the text that Albers wrote on color and the color-theory plaque, but I don’t go to the text even in my head. I go to the paintings in my head.

 

 

FS: How did you come to Kandinsky at such an early age?

MG: Well, I always liked to draw, and I had a lot of learning difficulties, and I’d get tutored every day after school. I felt really really stupid. I had a lot of difficulty reading, so how does that relate? Well, I always did designs. I always liked doing designs, and a lot of them were symmetrical. I would get these weird mazes, a maze kind of a coloring book—that’s what I got from the tutoring. And I would do my own designs and then I’d just show them. I always thought of them as designs, like, “These are my designs.” And then I brought them to high school. I had this teacher and I showed them to her and she said, “Oh, have you ever looked at Kandinsky?” and I was like, “No.” So she showed me, she showed me the book The Spiritual in Art and then I started reading that and, you know, they talk about universal languages. I didn’t have any kind of conceptual backing to understand it, but it made a lot of sense to me, you know? But most importantly it gave a huge amount of validity to what I was doing as the potential of it to be something more …

FS: Are you going back to the butterflies at all? Have you thought about them recently?

MG: Butterflies have been taken off the table when I broke my shoulder. I would have liked to explore the monochrome paintings longer. I’d like to go back into that and see what I could do there, but I don’t know if I could ever make another butterfly, if I even had the patience to relearn that skill.

 

 

FS: What draws you to the monochrome aspect of that, because with the butterflies you could see where the design idea sort of meets up with abstraction and with the monochrome—is it more about an exploration of colors?

MG: For the most part the butterflies weren’t exactly monochrome.

FS: They’re close.

MG: Every triangle was different. I used a different color, but if you look at it from a distance it basically looks like one color or it looks like it slowly changes color as it goes counterclockwise, or clockwise if I painted it as clockwise … so yeah, it would be the study of color.

FS: Right.

MG: I love slight color change. I love that and I love looking at a monochrome.

FS: So do I.

MG: And with the design that I was working within that motif, it just satisfied everything. It was similar to the way that Mondrian worked.

FS: Yeah.

MG: But filled with these right angles and the colors, you know, it was regimented. And then with that there was just so much freedom; I just get so excited at really good monochromes.

FS: Absolutely. So I have a couple of rogue questions.

MG: Shoot.

FS: Do you think about an audience for your work? Do you think there’s a specific audience?

MG: Well, while I’m preparing for a show I think about creating a stage that feels great for people to come into, so I think about what does it feel like. That doesn’t mean that I’m trying to figure out what they want and do it. I want to figure out what I want, what I think makes for the best experience of a room, the best experience of the work in that room.

FS: Yeah.

 

MG: So you’ve got the work, you’ve got the room, so it’s about where those two things meet and how does the relationship work between them. If I’m doing a series of paintings that I know is going to go to a specific show, definitely at some point that starts to play into it.

FS: In the last couple of years, there’s been so much conversation about abstraction—how do you feel about or do you even think about this kind of stuff?

MG: Sometimes I see some people that are making paintings that are interesting. And that’s always really exciting; there’s always people making good work. I don’t know where that work is being made always or who’s making it but I know that somebody out there. I draw a difference between abstraction and non-objective painting.

FS: Right. Is it harder now? I think in some ways the best thing that I find about painting in general is that tightrope that you walk between something that is recognizable and something that is not and creating a space where me as a viewer can go in many different directions based upon the experiences that I come to in the work.

MG: That seems good to me. I’m OK with both the verging on representational and non-representational, and I’m also OK with straight-out non-objective. I like it all, you know, it just depends, as long as it’s rigorous.

FS: Yeah.

MG: I like it when it’s hardcore—how else would you say that and not sound too pretentious? Does “rigorous” sound better in an interview?

FS: I’ll try to figure out the best.

MG: If I’m reading that in like a magazine and it says “hardcore,” you know, it’s like what the fuck?

FS: I know. I think it depends on the words that are around it.

MG: Right.

FS: I was also interested in thinking about background. We talked about Albers, Kandinsky and Mondrian, but are there artists in our generation that you respond to?

MG: In our generation? Does that mean 40 to 50?

FS: Yeah, I’m right there with you.

MG: 40-to-50 age group, I think Mary Weatherford has been making some really great paintings.

FS: Yeah, me too.

MG: Those are exciting, and I really like Ivan Morley’s work and Tauba Auerbach,

I really like her work. I like her Fold paintings.

FS: Yeah.

MG: I mean, the way she installs her Fold paintings.

FS: Absolutely.

MG: It’s glorious. And then occasionally I get the opportunity to see some of Kai Althoff’s paintings—it’s crazy what he is doing. It’s surreal, like Gustav Klimt. Those are exciting. And then Tomma Abts—there is a lot of talent.

FS: Do you work at home and in the studio or just in the studio?

MG: I only work in the studio. I lived in my studio for a long time, so I did that. And that was useful.

FS: It’s work, right? You mentioned before 9 to 5?

MG: Yes, I’m a 9-to-5er, for sure.

FS: I have to ask, what’s up with your Instagram? Your Instagram has been amazing. What are you doing? I can’t figure it out.

MG: Well, Instagram has really freed me up, totally freed me up, in a way that is part of my art. It’s freed me to write, it’s a place—it’s another little studio you can have to do whatever you want.

FS: But obviously the audience is different and the expectation is different, so you can talk in different ways. I think it’s a great space to explore.

MG: I do a lot of posts. I think a lot of people don’t follow me because I clog up their feed.

FS: You do post pretty frequently—it’s awesome. So that’s really it … I’m really happy you could do this.

MG: Thank you.

FS: I really appreciate it, Mark.

MG: Glad we got a chance to do it.

 

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Posted in Art

MASSIMO VITALI

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Deserted, unspoiled beaches are often associated with perfection. As I was walking along the beach on one of those perfect days in early June, I suddenly flashed on a particularly compelling photograph by Massimo Vitali—one of his famous crowded beach scenes viewed from a great distance, with throngs of people milling about like miniature dots along the Italian shoreline. I was struck by the contrast of his vision of beauty and the desolate beach ahead of me.

Vitali is known for his complex and arresting panoramic photographs. He prefers that his work not be simplified as merely “beautiful,” though he admits that, on the surface, his pictures are much nicer than he would like them to be. I myself have always found Vitali’s placement of humans dwarfed against vast natural landscapes to be strangely sobering.

 

 

In that moment, I found myself longing for the vitality abundant in Vitali’s images—a human dimension to juxtapose against the pristine natural scene I was experiencing. I went back to look at his photographs and realized that Vitali had gotten at something … a struggle with which I am all too familiar: how to marry the complex, difficult, often messy human realities with the surface dimensions of style and fashion. I was compelled to dive straight into the center of this contrast between the perfect and the imperfect, between the light of possibility and the darkness of human destiny, between human fragility and the eternal power of the natural world. So I headed to Lucca, Italy, to meet with the man who has made a career out of capturing these contradictions in single frames.

My first exchange with Vitali came in an email from his iPhone and went like this: “Can you do it a bit later? I am photographing the Pope”—as casual and direct as if he were telling me he had an errand to run. I found him to be just as laid-back in person. We met in the morning for an espresso at his usual spot in Piazza San Michele. Vitali arrived on a state-of-the-art bicycle, wearing Birkenstocks and a black puffer vest.

 

Massimo Vitali - Humanity Magazine

 

Returning to his home and studio afterward, we jumped right in: “You have the landscape, you have the sociological and tropological art and other things—the more people get out of it, the better it is for me,” he says. As he walks me through the layers of his images, I ask whether he considers his work a study of the human condition. “I hope so,” he replies, “that it’s contradicting, that it’s not only nice pictures, girls in bikinis and blue sea … I hope there is more. The beach is a good place to try to understand the way we are, the way we behave.”

To better observe and capture the subtleties of human behavior, Vitali builds himself a visual study platform about 3 meters (10 feet) high. “The beach is a very good way of spying on humanity,” he says.

Vitali credits a Joel Meyerowitz image of a Cape Cod beach scene as the inspiration for his own interpretation and perspective on beach photography. “I remember exactly this picture on the beach,” he explains, “and everybody was looking at the sea, and he was taking pictures on [from] the back. So I remember the first time I went to take these pictures of the beach. I wanted to be in front, I wanted to be in the sea—looking at the people.”

 

 

It’s all about the people for Vitali. “I would never go to a beach without people—it’s just boring. I can’t survive [without them].” Vitali’s curiosity about people is not disconnected but deeply empathetic, which is clear as he describes his most recent work documenting the Syrian refugees migrating into Europe.

Massimo Vitali refuses to photograph refugees in their most vulnerable moments of arrival. “This is my little fight against reportage photography,” he says, insisting that when he takes his photographs that the refugees are in “normal places that look like normal people traveling. I’m trying to transform the idea of this disaster [of refugees], of millions of people invading Europe, into something very familiar.”

 

 

I left Lucca with the impression that Vitali has walked through the looking glass and is looking back at us. But his view from a great distance, his insistence on complexity and layers of meaning, is not without tremendous compassion and undeniable beauty. I returned to my own world inspired and hopeful about the possibility of resolving all the different passions and pursuits that the world suggests are contradictory: the head and the heart, style and substance, aesthetics and ideas, love and perspective.

Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The evidence of Vitali’s work and life shows us that he has done much more than function. His quest has raised the stakes for all of us who work in creative fields and want our lives to matter more. Grazie, Massimo.

 

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BRUCE WEBER

Posted on by Taylor Norman

It was autumn in San Clemente, 1989, when I received a phone call at my office by someone wanting to know if Christian Fletcher would be available for an Interview magazine photo shoot by fashion photographer Bruce Weber. This was years before every surf company and surfer was making annual trips to the East Coast for their summer surf “schmooze” session. Christian had been getting a whole lot of press, a lot not so good. We were working on Wave Warriors, Astrodeck and Christian Fletcher Clothing and getting ready for the North Shore. We figured what the heck—how could it hurt to have a little blurb in a magazine made mandatory reading on the New York scene by the famous (or perhaps infamous) Andy Warhol? Probably a great fit for the irreverent, brash, appropriately unapologetic teenage surf star. So the date was set, and the location was to be our home, which coincidently was next door to what had been President Nixon’s Western Whitehouse. The irony was certainly not lost on the mild-mannered Bruce.

He arrived with a few assistants, wardrobe, hair—an entourage of around 10. He was beyond gracious and put us totally at ease by talking about mutual acquaintances he had shot over the years. His knowledge and pure admiration of the whole surf scene was amazing. What started out as perhaps a footnote blossomed into “The Flying Fletchers” and a friendship that has lasted through decades of personal ups and downs that life has a way of hurling at you. Perhaps it’s these valleys of lows that have allowed me to know what a truly great and gifted man Bruce really is.

He has the most extraordinary eye for spotting talent, and I don’t mean superficially, although there is no doubt about that. I mean he senses something inside people, that his genuine interest and pleasure in discovery allows even the most modest to open up and let him in without the fear that their trust will be violated or left unnurtured in any way. It is this rare gift, of being truly interested in others, that I believe is at the heart of all of his work, whether it’s his professional shoots or something completely personal like his film A Letter to True, which he wrote as a love letter to his dog after 9/11 to express the sorrow he felt after losing so many. He’s truly remarkable in his ability to share the extraordinary in what most would glance at briefly and pass by as merely ordinary. His body of work is beyond amazing in its capacity to allow you to see the world through his seasoned eye, one that still has the ability to inspire the rapture of the newly discovered. From his iconic shot of an exquisitely proportioned Olympic athlete in Calvin Klein white briefs to a soft, intimate look at his longtime friend Elizabeth Taylor at home in rollers, each subject is approached with an eye to detail that seems almost sculptural.

 

Bruce and Tai Santa Barbara, CA 2011. Michael John Murphy

 

I have had the opportunity to work with him on different projects over the years, from Versace shoots in the Keys and Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs on the beach at my parents’ house to semi-cleaned-up surf thugs on the North Shore for L’Uomo Vogue and an upcoming volume of his All-American book series. These projects allowed us to spend quite a bit of time together. Most of his friends whom I’ve met and am now lucky enough to consider more than mere acquaintances are the friends from his childhood and his early career. There is never a moment when he’s not available to give someone a word of encouragement or call back, even if he’s had a 4:30 a.m. wake-up call and wrapped at 8 p.m. He’ll have a bite to eat and share the stories of the day before retiring to edit and make the series of calls to friends who just need to hear his reassuring voice before catching a couple hours of much-needed sleep to start the process all over again at the crack of dawn.

 

The Official Meeting of the Montana Rolleiflex Camera Club McLeod, MT 1997

 

His generosity knows no bounds, and there is usually a gathering around Nan’s birthday, his wife and loving partner of more than 25 years, of perhaps his 50 closest friends and neighbors, in which every detail has been seen to, all the way down to the proper towels hanging on the line separating the cottages on the lake of a fish camp somewhere in upstate New York. It’s pure perfection, with the full moon reflecting on the water and Eartha Kitt sprawled on top of the piano under the stars singing “Happy Birthday.”

 

John John Florence Eating Breakfast Oahu, HI 2005

 

Spending a few days as a guest in Weber World, no matter where in the world that may be, was beyond what I could have ever imagined. Books on every subject were everywhere, the smell of flowers heavy in the air. Sheets so crisp and clean they felt sun-dried, beautiful handcrafted furniture, sweaters, rugs and tooled bags were all a backdrop for the most magnificent photo collection, made that much more spectacular by the completely unpretentious casual display. To say I was/am awestruck is probably a gross understatement, but never had I seen the love of beauty so wonderfully and approachably on display and generously shared. It is uniquely humbling.

He gives tirelessly to charity, supports almost every animal shelter, creates stars from the unknown and spends his few off moments shooting rolls of film of his five blond beauties—his prized golden retrievers—and one black mix rescue dog for relaxation. This is the man I know, and my life has been enriched beyond measure having him as my friend.

 

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YOKO ONO

Posted on by Taylor Norman

HUMANITY: What was it like for you growing up—your upbringing, your parents, growing up in Japan?

YOKO ONO: My family was rather unique. My grandmother went to a French school, in Japan. She was part of a very important feminist group. In England at the time, there was a feminist movement known as the Blue Stockings. Around the same time, there was an important feminist group in Japan called Blue Steps. I am sure that it was named after the English one. My grandmother was one of them. She was very, very strong and she really pushed boundaries. My mother on the other hand was an equally strong woman but expressed her strength in a more complex way than my grandmother.

HUMANITY: So you took after your grandmother.

And my mother: I learned from both of them.

HUMANITY: But you grew up in Japan, right?

YO: I was born in Japan and lived in Tokyo until I was about 2 and a half years old. My father went to the United States just before I was born. Yes. And my mother was very upset about it. I heard from the relatives that my mother cried. I was probably upset too, in her tummy. I think he just could not face it all, you know—the fact that he was going to be a father. Some men are like that. He was just concentrating on his own life. Music and mathematics. Mathematicians from other countries used to send him notes to ask mathematic questions. He was also a good pianist and would make comments to me like: “When you play the piano, you have to continue playing until you finish the work.” And he would not say much else to me.

 

 

 

HUMANITY: Was your family supportive of your art?

YO: My mother was an accomplished painter. So both my parents were very high-minded about art. I always felt very guilty that I did not become any of what they wanted me to become. My father was the first person who introduced Malevich’s work to Japan. But for his daughter, he was hoping that I would not be avant-garde. They never showed their disappointment. The way I knew was that they never came to any of my concerts. And when John and I got married [in Gibraltar], I knew they wouldn’t come to that either.

HUMANITY: What do you think triggered your creativity? What made you want to express yourself and make things to share?

YO: It’s something that came very simply to me. I just liked it. It’s just something that agrees with my brain and body.

HUMANITY: I was reading your book [Just Me, published in Japanese], the part where you talk about your daughter [Kyoko]. You expressed how you were not ready to be a mother—you were still an artist and you were still making music. I felt that you were so honest to who you are as a person.

YO: I was never ready to be a mother. It is amazing that there are many women who don’t feel like they want to be a mother. And so I wanted to say something about it.

 

 

HUMANITY: So what is your perspective on being a mother?

YO: Well, I think there’s a very clear message from the male society that women have to have children, otherwise the human race is going to disappear. So they keep saying “What a beautiful thing you’re doing,” you know, and “Women love to be mothers!” and “Women love to have children!” I just remembered that there was this English woman who was working for my mother, and whenever I would visit my mother, this woman always seemed very stiff, very angry. I said to her one day, “Is there something that you don’t like in life?” and she said, “My husband gets me pregnant every year so that I won’t leave him.” And I remembered that. I guess some men used to do that, you know, keep their wives pregnant. Can you imagine?

HUMANITY: I can’t.

YO: A terrible, terrible thing to do to someone. I think that was rather convenient for the human race. In fact I have two children, and they are very kind, very good children, so I’m very lucky. Babies are so cute. So you can’t help falling in love with them.

HUMANITY: Did you feel you were always more devoted to your art?

YO: I just felt so much better when I was working on something creative, and before I had children people would say to me, “What about having kids? That’s creative.” I really didn’t think so. I really think some people like to create that way, but I didn’t.

HUMANITY: Then why did you decide to have another baby, to have Sean? Was it planned?

YO: It’s a funny thing. John was so adamant about having a child with me. He would say, “We have to have a child. We have to.” I ended up having some miscarriages, and everyone said, “Oh, she can’t hold it.” I mean, that’s a very English expression, I think. “She just can’t hold it.” Luckily we had Sean. I remember John was crazy and wanted to announce it right away. But because of the miscarriages I said, “This time, don’t announce it, OK?” But then around the third or fourth month he said, “Now it’s safe.” I didn’t know if it was safe or not, but we announced it. John was so proud about it, it was amazing, and he tried to show to other guys “it’s fun to have kids.” And that really helped the whole world. Isn’t that amazing?

 

 

HUMANITY: How did you and John inspire each other creatively?

YO: That’s like a miracle, you know. Because I always felt that most men were dumb. I don’t want to insult my two previous husbands—they were nice people, very sensitive, and they were talented too. Toshi was very protective of me, and Tony was very good in assisting me. John used to say that: “She thinks all men are assistants!” Which was how I looked at it. So when I met John, I realized that he was not dumb at all. I thought it was so interesting that he was so different from the idea that I had about men at the time. That they could be very talented but so stiff in their ideas, but John wasn’t. He went with anything that came to him that he thought was interesting, and we hit it off.

HUMANITY: So was it easy for you and John to support each other with your art while also being partners and having a family?

YO: For me, as a woman, being supportive of him is a normal thing. Most women do that for their husbands or partners. But for men to support the woman in her endeavors, like John did for me, was very unusual at the time.

HUMANITY: Since John’s death have you had any other relationships? When I see your performances, I see you are a very sexual person, and I just wondered, what about intimacy?

YO: Well, you know, it’s a real problem. I’ll tell you that I’m thinking about many different aspects of my life in balance. And I make sure that I am working to bring a better society. It really means a lot of work, and if you don’t have somebody who is totally into it, it doesn’t work. I just haven’t met anybody that is so adamant about the kind of things that I am adamant about. And if I don’t have somebody like that, it would be just a waste of my time. Sex is a different story. But for me it is not separate. Some people might think that it is so old-fashioned, but I don’t want to have sex without a certain mental and spiritual understanding between a person and me. I’m like that. I don’t go for a one-night-stand kind of thing.

HUMANITY: You and John had an “art baby,” where you made music together, and you had an actual baby. You two really had everything together. Not everybody finds that in their lifetime.

YO: Exactly. Well, we didn’t think that that was the kind of relationship we were going to have. John, being a guy, was more practical than me. He said, “To make the relationship last, we have to do something both of us will be involved in.” He said, “I know, a big film! … There’s so many things we have to do for it, there is no time to think.” Well, we never did it, though.

HUMANITY: My favorite quote by you is: “A dream you dream alone is only a dream, but a dream two people dream together is reality.” It’s so beautiful.

YO: Thank you. I was writing many things before that and after, but that one about dreaming was inspired by our relationship. By the 10th year, John was saying a relationship can be very good and we have to tell them that. You know, “After 10 years, it’s gonna be so good!” I agreed.

HUMANITY: What are the messages you want to share with the world right now?

YO: I think that imagining things can really bring reality, and I believe in that. “IMAGINE PEACE” is very important to me, and that’s what I am working for. “Wish Tree” is another one. When I was a little girl and I would go to the temple in Japan, they had bushes with messages. You could buy the printed message and put it on the tree. Messages like “Health” or “Love,” just printed. So it’s not the message of that person. I believe that it is important that the person think about it from their heart. So I did this by believing in audience participation. The first “Wish Tree” I did was in Los Angeles in 1996, and the next one was in 1997 in Alicante, Spain. And then it was a surprise; people who never go to museums were queuing up to put their wish on the “Wish Tree.” So now all the wishes are collected, it’s over a million, and it will be more, but the 1 million wishes are under the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER [in Iceland]. Every year we shoot up the light, and I think it is helping a little.

HUMANITY: Who are some other people who inspire you?

YO: Everybody is an artist in a way, and it’s great that people can open up and create their own thing. Which will help all of us and our world.

HUMANITY: What other projects are you working on now and in the future?

YO: I will be having a beautiful show in NYC from December 11 to January 23. And early 2016 we will release Yes, I’m a Witch Too.

HUMANITY: Are there any current issues you want to comment on?

YO: “Don’t Let Your Eyes Dry” is something I put on IMAGINE PEACE.com. We are getting very nonchalant about the violent situations in the world that are reported every day. So our eyes are getting dry. There is a coffee shop in Jerusalem that, after a big conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, gave a discount to people who came in together and ate together, Israeli and Palestinian together at the same table. I thought it was so beautiful and I started crying. And I thought, “OK, my eyes are still not dry.” Don’t let your eyes dry.

 

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ANTHONY KIEDIS

Posted on by Taylor Norman

HUMANITY: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, your sound, your style—everything is so L.A. What does it mean to be an L.A. native? What do you love about L.A.?

ANTHONY KIEDIS: Well, it depends on your definition of a native. I was born in the state of Michigan and actually selected L.A. as my city of choice at 11 years old. After coming out here to visit my father in the late ’60s and early ’70s, I kind of weighed the cultural experiences between the Midwest and the West Coast. I was really enchanted. Los Angeles put a spell on me as a kid with its energy, and I think it does that to people. There’s something about the desert, the electricity, the palm trees—just the promise that anything is possible. That hit me like a ton of bricks, and by 1973 I made my way to L.A., which was a completely different animal at that time relative to 2015. But there is that thread that it hasn’t lost, which is, this is where you come to explore your dream; whether or not the dream comes true, you fail miserably or somewhere in between, or you find another dream you didn’t even know was waiting for you, that thread maintains. I give credit to the enchanting vibe of this place, the inherent nature of Los Angeles and its valley, its mountains, its desert and its coyotes. It’s kind of a magical trickery.

 

 

HUMANITY: What do you think has changed? What do you miss?

AK: The things that I miss are kind of at an energetic level and they have to do with things moving at a different pace, where you can pay closer attention to your own thoughts and the things that are going on around you. When I first came here it was slower and more psychedelic. The atmosphere, the air, the streets, the walking, the skateboarding, the colors, the fashion, the music—everything moved at a pace where you could kind of take it in, contemplate and create; it was a more natural, organic interaction with yourself and things around you.

HUMANITY: What have been the lessons of fatherhood?

AK: Whoa! I’m right in the middle of that book, so more will be revealed, but … I guess one thing it’s taught me is that I never really knew what love was all about until I had a son. I was in love with all kinds of different things, but I never knew what that deepest, most sacrificial, unconditional, to-die-for love was really all about. I would do anything, give anything for the betterment of his experience. It’s taught me to care less about myself and more about someone else. The ongoing lessons are things like patience and not being judgmental and full of expectations, like: “Oh, I want him to turn out this way,” or I want him to be this or to be that. You kind of have to just see where he’s going and try to help him with that. It’s so hilarious, because we grew up on the other side of that dynamic, just wondering what our parents were tripping about all the time—“Why are they so hypersensitive and care so much?” And then you get to fatherhood and you understand.

 

 

HUMANITY: When a parent has the kind of success that you have had it can really add a lot of pressure. How do you not let your success overshadow him?

AK: That’s a great question. I guess it has to do with the way you act around your kid. I try to show him all sides of life and let him know where I come from. From the very beginning I let him know that whatever he wants in life he has to earn, because if I give it to him it’s not going to mean anything. And I think, even though he’s only 8 years old, he’s slowly starting to understand that it’s all about working for what you have, working for your experience, in order to enjoy and appreciate it and feel accomplished and fulfill your dreams. I never wanted to be one of those parents who just spoils; that doesn’t allow my son to go have his own trials, tribulations, failures, experiments and journeys of self. It’s totally on me to provide that. I think I’m also kind of lucky, because he was born his own person, like whenever I try to get him to do what I like to do, he’ll say: “Dad, that’s your thing, that’s not my thing. I want to do my thing.” So far he feels no pressure. It’s so unfair when children feel like they have to live up to something. They don’t have to live up to shit, they just have to live their own lives.

HUMANITY: You’ve been so open about your battles with addiction, and presumably addiction is hereditary. Is it ever scary for you to think about—that this may be a battle for Everly?

AK: It crosses my mind from time to time, but it’s not one of those weird lingering worries that I have. Every now and then I see a kid struggling with addiction, and I know their parents had struggled with addiction, and that will be interesting to see where Everly goes with that. But I don’t think it’s a guarantee that a child gets that particular gene. It’s kind of the luck of the draw. He’s chosen such a bizarre combination of his mother and father’s genes so far that I feel like it’s a real 50-50 whether or not he’ll end up dealing with addiction. I think he’ll grow up in a world where he’s not surrounded by addictive behavior, or addictively inspired dysfunctional behavior, so hopefully he has kind of a strong emotional basis to begin with, a solid family and emotional foundation to fall back on. If it happens, it would be difficult but like many bridges, I’ll cross that one when I get to it.

HUMANITY: It’s pretty well documented the relationship you had with your father, and what you were exposed to at a young age. What are some of the lessons you learned that you’re applying in your relationship with your son? And then on the flipside, the relationship you had with your mom was definitely more traditional. Talk about that balance, and what you’re applying that you learned from them to parenthood.

AK: I’m such a different person at this point in my life than my father was when he was raising me, but there are still tons of similarities. For example, I’m a single father, so it’s just my son and me living under this roof. However, he was just very wrapped up in his own lifestyle when I was young and impressionable. He had very creative interests, but I think it’s about what not to share with a young person. He wasn’t able to slow down and contemplate how fragile a young heart can be. It was too much too soon. Me raising my son is a wildly different experience. We live in the countryside, we wake up next to the ocean, we do homework together in the morning, we exercise together, we go for long walks together. It’s kind of this other-end-of-the-spectrum experience compared with my own childhood. And my son seems to love it. He really thrives on it—he thrives on the fresh air, the ocean, the trees and all this stuff I did not grow up around. I always thought he would want to have a place in the city, and he says: “Why would I? It’s so great out here!” I still introduce him to some things my father introduced me to but live more of the reliable life that my mother offered me. In retrospect, if I look at my mother, she went to work every single day of her life. She’s so together and she just inspires me. She travels the world and takes care of her loved ones, whereas my father was much more that hippie, free-flowing, maybe-I’ll-work-maybe-I-won’t but was part of a lot of great experiences. And my stepfather was probably the most honest and caring person that I’ve ever known. He died very young, but his influence on my family is visible every single day. So I guess I’m trying to give Everly a little combo platter.

 

Anthony Kiedis - Humanity

 

HUMANITY: What do you think the difference has been this last time—why has sobriety stuck for you now?

AK: It’s been a complicated run for me. As soon as I got introduced to the concept of getting well from an addiction I loved it, because I had done this using thing to death, so when I got offered a solution, I jumped all over it years ago. But you know, it takes work and dedication, and after five years I ended up relapsing, kind of going in and out for the next five years, and that’s fucked up. So when I finally got back into it in 2000, I loved being sober, so I embraced it and I realized I have to do some things differently than I did the previous time. I made little adjustments and I tried to surround myself with like-minded people, so that I have constant reminders that the more energy I put into that, I get back 100-fold.

HUMANITY: You said something that stuck with me, that when you first went to rehab you’d see all these people that looked so different on the outside from you, but you’re actually able to see yourself in every one. And it helps with finding compassion—it’s a simple idea, to have compassion for someone else, but a rare practice.

AK: My ability to actually experience compassion comes and goes. There could be part of the day where somebody passed me up on the PCH and I’m like, “I’m going to teach them a lesson.” Something idiotic and chaotic like that. Or if I just slow down a little bit and get into that mindset that I don’t know what that person is going through. If you just pretend like everybody out there is a family member, it’s really hard to go to that place where you’re like: “I’m going to get you.” It’s about checking yourself and slowing down a little bit. I go to meetings, so I can slow down and listen to the story of somebody else. Maybe a 21-year-old girl who’s been shooting dope for the last two years of her life and is in complete hell and lost herself and then she gets a week clean and she’s in a meeting sharing about not being able to find a vein in her neck. And I’m like, yes, I do remember that desperation. That’s no good. I now feel connected to this person because I see and feel the suffering in the fact that I got one little glimpse of not having to live like that today, in this little 24-hour segment. So my life kind of depends on showing up and listening to other people’s experiences, and maybe that gives me an opportunity to actually feel a moment of true compassion. It’s work.

HUMANITY: How has your creative process changed over the years?

AK: It’s strikingly similar in many ways. There are so many different stages that I have to try and be available in the creative process. We’ll have band practice and improvise—I listen and kind of lose myself and find melody and find rhythm in the moment. Then there’s the songwriting process, where the guys will give me an instrumental recording and I have to sit with that music. Then there’s the part where you’re just in the car and you get an idea, and you have to pull over and work on the idea because that idea might never come again. You’re on an airplane, or a train, whatever—whenever you feel that little tiny cloud moving through you that has some energy and some ideas. One thing I learned is to seize that, because you can say: “Oh, I’ll remember that!” Sometimes I’m out there waiting for waves to come and I’ll get a great idea or a mediocre idea or maybe a couple of melodies that string together, and I’ll sit there and try to sing it over and over a hundred times so that I won’t forget. And then I get into my car; I’ll break out the phone and record it. That part has changed, being able to record everything on your cell phone is different than it was 25 years ago, when you had to have a funky little tape recorder with you wherever you went. I’m a morning writer—I get up in the morning, clear the house out and get out my notebooks and my pencils and my CDs and my boom box and I’ll just sit there and write. I find that the more regimented I can be in putting a few hours of work in every day, the more benefits I reap when it comes to writing good songs. It’s like a painter that forces himself to paint every day, just hoping that could be the day it happens. I believe to be good you have to work hard. It’s the same with Flea; he practices constantly. He’s been playing bass his whole life, but he’s no good unless he practices every day.

 

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HUMANITY: Do you ever feel pressure about getting older and still being a relevant musician?

AK: Pressure, no. Aware that it’s difficult to maintain relevance, yes. I’m hyper aware of that. We don’t have that pressure to be the next cool thing, because we’re never going to be the next cool thing. We’ve done that. I pay attention to my favorite songwriters, and they’re way smarter and way better at writing songs than I could ever be. You know, like Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Randy Newman are all just phenomenally gifted singers and songwriters; however, none of them have really been able to create real greatness in their older years compared to what they were doing in their 20s and 30s. And I always wondered, “Why?” They’re still talented, they’re still smart, they’re still in love with music; they haven’t given up in any way, shape or form, but they’re not writing songs like they used to. Every now and then they’ll stumble upon a gem, and their live shows are still incredible. I guess it’s a cycle—it’s almost impossible to write music that crushes and touches people’s hearts in that way once you’ve made it. Once you can afford a house, another house over there and another over there, it’s like that weird fine line of comfort changing you. You look back at the lifestyle of all these people back when they were writing songs that you and I will go sing later today while we’re driving around in our car, and they weren’t that comfortable. And it’s just, how do you stay great and relevant and interesting and as good as you used to be when you’re that comfortable and have other responsibilities and distractions? It’s hard. But it gives me hope when I hear a Paul McCartney song that he did in the last couple of years that reminds me of who he is deep down inside. Not that he’s got anything to prove—he’s already given the world more great songs than anybody else I can think of, but it makes me happy that he’s still able to do it.

HUMANITY: It must be a hard thing to stay humble and grounded. I read in your book about the importance of going to AA meetings and stacking chairs afterward—surprised me that you do that …

AK: Humble and grounded some days, and then some days arrogant and up in the clouds. The chair stacking is more meaningful, more powerful, more relevant, more life saving than you could ever imagine. I’m laughing because my commitment is stacking the chairs, and I cannot tell you the amount of satisfaction I get from those chairs—that’s my single-minded purpose for this evening, making sure that those chairs are stacked. It’s just being of service, being one of the wolves in the pack. It’s being present for myself and for somebody else. It’s all work in progress. I have good days where I’m connected to my humility and it feels amazing, and I have other days where I just cannot find my humility and I walk around expecting the world to fall at my feet. And that’s no fun.

HUMANITY: Do you have a mantra?

AK: I do lean heavily on the desire to be a kind person. Which takes work for me, because I can be confrontational, and I can be full of myself, but I do have the sneaking suspicion that at the end of it all, when everybody stops, the degree of your kindness is really going to be the thing that shapes your next experience. That’s what I’d like to attain within my active and silent mantra.

HUMANITY: What’s happiness to you?

AK: I find happiness in the simplest, littlest things ever. It’s nothing to do with grandiosity but everything to do with simplicity. For instance, holding my boy this morning—doesn’t get any better than that. That’s my happiness. Watching the sun come up, that’s my happiness. Being on my surfboard, touching the surface of the ocean, that’s my happiness. Popping in a CD with the new song my band’s been working on, that’s my happiness. Calling my father, hearing his voice on the phone, getting excited about calling him, that’s my happiness. Reading a book for my son at dinner, that’s my happiness. It’s kind of everywhere, all around me, if I’m right with myself. If I’m wrong with myself, I’m not finding it anywhere.

 

Anthony Kiedis - Humanity

 

HUMANITY: What are you most thankful for?

AK: What am I thankful for? Everything. It’s all a gift, it’s all happening for a reason and I’m thankful for all of it. I complain about it: I got sick two weeks ago, and I never get sick. I was so pissed off—I can’t surf, I can’t sing, I’m achy. But now I’m thankful I had two weeks to think about this. Two weeks of not running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I just slowed down, chilled out, stayed home with Everly, worked on lyrics. So in retrospect maybe I needed to get sick. I’m thankful for everything. 

 

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ELMO

Posted on by Taylor Norman

HUMANITY: How old are you?

ELMO: Elmo is 3½ years old. Elmo’s Mommy helped Elmo type all these answers.

HUMANITY: What are your favorite foods?

E: Strawberries. They’re so sweet and delicious … and red … like Elmo.

HUMANITY: Favorite games to play?

E: Elmo loves to play games with Elmo’s friends. Just this morning Elmo was playing hide-and-seek with Abby Cadabby. Elmo never found her. Elmo hopes Abby’s still not hiding!

HUMANITY: What are some of your favorite things about living on Sesame Street?

E: It’s wonderful living on Sesame Street. There are so many different people, and monsters, and animals all living together. We learn a lot and we all have a great time.

HUMANITY: What are some of the best lessons your mommy and daddy have taught you?

E: Elmo’s Mommy and Daddy always tell Elmo that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, everyone wants to play and learn and be loved. That’s a great lesson!

HUMANITY: What are the qualities you look for in a friend? What do you like most about your friends?

E: Elmo just wants Elmo’s friends to be kind and happy.

HUMANITY: What does it mean to be a good friend?

E: Elmo thinks a good friend is someone you can trust. Elmo’s best friend is Elmo’s pet goldfish Dorothy. Elmo tells Dorothy everything and she never tells anyone.

HUMANITY: So many interesting and talented people have come to visit Sesame Street. Who stands out—and why?

E: Elmo loves when people visit Sesame Street. Elmo loved planting a garden with Big Bird and Mrs. Michelle Obama. She was really cool.

HUMANITY: Is there anyone you haven’t met that you’d like to? How come?

E: Are you kidding? Umm HELLO! It’s no secret—Elmo would love to meet Ms. Adele.

HUMANITY: What’s your best advice for staying positive?

E: Lots of sleep. Elmo always makes sure to take a nap every day.

HUMANITY: If someone is mean to you, what do you do? How do you deal with bullies?

E: If Elmo felt like someone was being mean to Elmo or any of his friends, Elmo would make sure to tell a grown-up. It’s very important to tell a grown-up, like a parent or a teacher, if someone isn’t treating you nicely.

HUMANITY: Why is it so important to treat others kindly and with respect?

E: Elmo thinks you should treat people the way that you want to be treated.

HUMANITY: One of the things about Sesame Street I think is so cool is that everyone is so different but all good friends—it must be fun to learn from each other. What are some of the things you’ve learned from your friends on Sesame Street?

E: That’s the best part about living on Sesame Street. People are always stopping by, and Elmo and his friends are always learning new things. Just the other day Ms. Lupita Nyong’o visited and taught Elmo all about how beautiful different skin colors are. She’s right … they’re all beautiful.

HUMANITY: Can you tell me a little about Julia? What have you learned from her? How is she different than you?

E: Julia is Elmo’s friend with autism. She doesn’t like loud noises, but she loves playing. Elmo speaks a little quieter when Elmo is with Julia—we have such fun together.

HUMANITY: Is it important to be understanding of people’s differences?

E: Yes. Even though we’re all a little different, we’re all the same in many ways too.

HUMANITY: What do you love most about … Abby?

E: She’s great at rhyming. She’s a poet … and she doesn’t even know it. Ha ha ha.

HUMANITY: Big Bird?

E: He’s 8 feet taller than Elmo.

HUMANITY: Oscar?

E: You should see the inside of his can. It’s amazing, but pinch your nose—it’s stinky in there.

HUMANITY: Grover?

E: No matter how many times he makes a mistake, he always tries his hardest.

HUMANITY: Cookie Monster?

E: He would share his last cookie with a friend.

HUMANITY: Bert and Ernie?

E: Ernie puts bananas in his ears and Bert has a bottle cap collection … isn’t that so cool?

HUMANITY: Snuffy?

E: His snuffle is like a fun slide. Wahoooo!

HUMANITY: Raya?

E: She has the coolest sandals ever.

HUMANITY: What’s something about you people should know?

E: When Elmo grows up, Elmo wants to be a teacher. Teachers are the best.
 

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SESAME STREET

Posted on by Taylor Norman

Five years old and HIV positive, Kami is one of the most influential figures in her native South Africa. She also happens to be a Muppet and a character on Takalani Sesame, the country’s co-production of Sesame Street, which reaches up to 70 percent of children in South Africa’s urban areas and 50 percent in its rural ones. In addition to destigmatizing HIV/AIDS, Kami also educates children on the basics of her disease, including how it’s transmitted and how to deal with grief and the loss of a loved one.

As an indigenous puppet, Kami joins a unique cast of characters around the globe, developed to tackle issues affecting children or particular communities. In the 46 years since Sesame Street first aired on PBS, the preschool television series has become the go-to address for children in more than 150 countries. Through 30 international co-productions, such as Iftah Ya Simsim in Kuwait, Sesamstrasse in Germany and India’s Galli Galli Sim Sim, Sesame Street’s longstanding credo of helping kids grow smarter, stronger and kinder continues to resonate around the world.

Whether it’s a domestic production or a co-production overseas, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, takes a very mindful and studied approach to developing content. “What people don’t realize is how well researched the show is,” says Carol-Lynn Parente, who grew up watching the show and started out lugging tapes as a post-production assistant, working her way up to her current position as senior vice president and executive producer of Sesame Street.

 

 

In addition to overseeing all Sesame Street content across all platforms from the company’s New York City headquarters, Parente is responsible for international co-productions and outreach production. “The process starts off with an entire educational content seminar, where we bring in academic advisors and early-childhood-development experts and they talk about what our curriculum focus is for the season, so we can really understand what we want to teach and in the right way for the age of our audience.” Content is tested before it goes on the air and after, and tweaked and adjusted accordingly. “It’s been the most heavily researched and tested show in history,” she adds.

Internationally, the process also involves partnering with ministries of education as well as broadcasters, producers and educators on the ground. “Across the board we look at what are the most pressing needs facing children around the world where we are most uniquely qualified to make a difference. We look at our skill set and their needs and figure out where they match,” says Sherrie Westin, executive vice president of global impact and philanthropy at Sesame Workshop. Westin stresses the importance of working with local partners on the ground to identify issues on an ongoing basis. Takalani Sesame, for example, was already on the air when the South African Ministry of Education approached Sesame Workshop about discussing issues surrounding HIV and AIDS. “The reason [these shows] translate so powerfully is we don’t try to parachute American cultural lessons,” says Parente. “In South Africa, there was a real need to connect on HIV/AIDS.” In season two, Kami joined the cast after lengthy discussions and research on everything from her outfits to her personality (“We want little girls to see themselves in her but also be aspirational,” says Westin). In breaking down the stigmas surrounding HIV/AIDS, Westin believes that Kami is bound to have saved lives.

That power is also evident in places like Egypt, where a charming peach-colored girl monster named Khokha on Alam Simsim is already changing attitudes about young girls’ roles and responsibilities. In just a few years since her debut, research has not only demonstrated a positive shift in how girls see themselves, but young boys also tested much higher on gender equity. “It’s essential for us to change cultural norms in a nonthreatening way,” says Westin. “To open minds and to change attitudes is really powerful, especially when you are starting with the youngest generation.”

 

 

Westin hopes to see that same shift in mentality in Afghanistan, where an indigenous puppet will make her debut on Baghch-e-Simsim in 2016 as part of an initiative to promote girls’ empowerment and education. Since the show’s premiere in 2011, focus groups and qualitative research have already showed fathers changing their minds about sending their daughters to school. “We are not only reaching girls that have no other means of quality preschool education; we are giving them the tools for education and for being aspirational role models,” says Westin.

But it’s not just international markets that have a need for these role models and attitude shifts; Sesame Workshop remains focused on its domestic audience, too, where past programs have dealt with issues ranging from incarceration to healthy eating habits. In 2006, “Talk, Listen, Connect” was introduced as a bilingual (Spanish and English) outreach initiative designed to help military families and young children cope with issues surrounding deployment and change. The immensely successful program—which saw Elmo’s dad being deployed—has continued to expand, growing to include “Military Families Near and Far,” a designated website for young children to connect with their loved ones, as well as PBS prime-time specials and “Sesame Rooms,” which provides toys and furniture to military spaces.

 

 

Most recently the workshop introduced Julia, an animated preschool character with autism. She’s leading the charge on Sesame Street’s newest initiative, “See Amazing in All Children,” designed to destigmatize and raise awareness about autism, a disorder that affects one in 68 American children. “It’s a difficult subject,” explains Parente. “Many people want to support this community and don’t know how. We were very thoughtful and took our time figuring out how we as a media company could have an impact.” The digital project, the result of three years of production and testing, includes a “Sesame and Autism” website/iPad app, video topics for affected kids and families, daily routine cards to help with basic skills like washing hands and brushing teeth and an interactive storybook that introduces Julia to some of the Sesame Street gang.

“Every character is designed toward a curriculum goal. Everyone here takes the time to understand what it is, the problem they want to address and what are the best approaches,” says Louis Henry Mitchell, creative director of character design for Sesame Workshop, who has been with the company for 23 years (he came on board full-time in 2000). In addition to his regular roles and responsibilities (which range from directing photo shoots to assisting in the creation of Sesame Street’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloons and floats), Mitchell was tasked with designing Julia—basing his sketches off a girl he befriended while volunteering at a school for autism. “I gave three different designs, and a committee of people working together decided who would be the best representation. The one I wanted is the one they chose,” he says, proud that his gut instinct served him well.

 

 

“Wherever the characters appear, I have to make sure they look right,” says Mitchell, who co-created Kami’s look and helps oversee and evolve character design according to the standards set forth by Muppets creator Jim Henson. Artists around the world looking to draw or sculpt the characters can refer to several in-house style guides. “The eye focus is probably the single most important piece. Whether it’s still life or sculpture or drawings, the eyes are where the life is.”

 

Sesame Street - Humanity

 

As important as the finely tuned international cast of characters is the platform on which their heartfelt and engaging messages are delivered. “The evolving media environment has changed the way we produce content enormously,” says Parente, citing a large percentage of Sesame Street’s audience that now watches the show on mobile technology. As a result, the show has adapted its visual style (wide shots, for example, don’t translate well on mobile devices). The producers also create material specifically for YouTube, for example, as well as online gaming content with educational benefits. “I feel like some of the new platforms mirror what [Sesame Street co-founder] Joan Cooney stated in 1969, that she was using television as an experimental way to teach. An innovation lab is dealing with all the emerging technologies and figuring out how to use them.”

And in communities where technology is limited or access to television is restricted, the show has also found ways to reach young viewers: In countries like Afghanistan, Baghch-e-Simsim also airs on the radio, and in Bangladesh, a traveling rickshaw fitted with a television brings the show Sisimpur to children in urban slum communities.

Also of note is who is watching the content with the children, so if you think Sesame Street content is created only with preschoolers in mind, think again. “Back when the show started there was a lot more co-viewing that went on,” says Parente, referencing television as the primary medium during the show’s early days. “We know the educational impact is deeper when children are co-viewing.” So it’s no surprise that over the years, the show has seen a star-spangled list of celebrity guests, ranging from Stevie Wonder to Johnny Cash, Adam Sandler to Katy Perry. “These days there’s lots of viewing with tablets and devices that are individual, but it’s important for us to still find those moments—whether it’s with a celebrity or the comedy of a piece,” she adds.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., Sesame Workshop inked a deal with HBO to begin broadcasting new seasons of the show in late 2015. The partnership brings a sustainable funding model to the nonprofit, and episodes will run first on the premium cable network before airing on PBS, Sesame Street’s original home, nine months later.

 

Sesame Street - Humanity

 

However preschoolers around the world get to their own version of Sesame Street, the destination is one and the same: a warm and engaging place where young children not only learn the basics about numeracy, literacy and social and emotional skills but can also develop a sense of empowerment and belonging in a culturally sensitive environment. “They think it’s fantasyland but it’s real,” says Mitchell with a smile. “I work here every day. I know it’s real.”

 

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