also world class name-droppers who led me to appreciate the other
Beats along with Dostoyevsky, Genet, Henry Miller, absurdist theater,
Rimbaud, Baudelaire and French Symbolism, Thomas Wolfe, and many
others along with Bebop jazz. Reading the Beats led me to Ken Kesey,
Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and the writers who
wrote about 60s and 70s counterculture. I guess this article requires me
to be a world-class berkau.*
The Beats also led me to explore Jackson Pollock then the rest of
the New York School Painters. Like the Beats, this was pretty much
an all-male club—or at least the men got the recognition. Pollock’s
wife, Lee Krasner, was very talented, but was usually referred to as
“Pollock’s wife.” The women associated with the Beats, like Diane di
Prima, Anne Waldman, Joan Vollmer, Edie Parker, and several others
were given less press, too. I knew that two strong, brilliant, and very
talented women were at the root of my autodidactic path: Yoko Ono
and my grandmother, Edee Greene.
During my research of the New York School Painters, I realized that
there was a group called the New York School Composers, and that
Cage was a part of that, along with Christian Wolff, who first gave him
a copy of the “I Ching.” Morton Feldman and of course several others
were included in this group. This led me to the New York School Poets,
and then the photographers.
The Beats, and the Lost Generation—which included Hemingway,
Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan and a long list
of others—inspired me to travel. Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s
Edge,” along with friends like my boyhood friend Mark Imhoof, made
me think it was okay to travel without real purpose, or even money. Traipsing through Europe, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Latin
America, and all over the United States, it is almost impossible not learn
about history, art, food, and see for yourself what people who you have
only ever heard about are like. Mark used to say the hardest part about
traveling is getting out the door.
photo by Ashley Inguanta
ferent artists, movements, and gave me reading lists. This was around
1990. I found out that schools like CalArts were focusing more on
theory. I started to read Derrida, Baudrillard, Lacan, Foucault, Sontag,
Deleuze and Guattari, Lucy Lippard, and other dominant theorists. Jeff
helped me get a strong grasp on contemporary art.
Mark Greenberg introduced me to the world of photography