Friday, March 7, 2014

Heroic Acts - Scene 1

Every heroic act is a result of deep commitment behind the scenes backed by a heart and faith strong enough to usurp 

Murphy's Law from its throne.  

-Neb Notsgnivil

I am lucky enough in my life to have close ties to some such people who I consider heros for this reason the first would be my daughter Autumn and with her permission, one day I will proudly elaborate.

Today - there is the barely 19 year old "EDEN", who, as I write this - is somewhere over the Pacific ocean headed this way towards the musician's Shangrala" aka - SXSW '14.

I took this picture of Eden during her first tour of Texas

Now - EDEN 2014

She's got her act together and is coming back 

to show us all how it's done.

Earlier this morning, I was preparing for our Kiwi cousin's crash landing on the couch tonight. I started thinking about her amazing journey of pure commitment to her music.. The first thought was about how she is   actually paying her way to come and be here from busking the streets of Auckland and teaching music.

One of the many articles that are being published about her lately make note of EDEN's old soul. I am glad that the press is noticing what would be hard to miss upon encounter, along with her elegant musicality and subtle radiance that washes over you like the first sunshine of spring.

Eden is an amazing person despite her popularity..She politely thanks me when I tell her this.. On the surface I guess she is thinking I am just giving her a compliment , but hopefully, later in her reflections, I hope is that she realizes that my intention is of trying to relate as an artist and that she doesn't feel alone in this world.

This part is only about my experience: 

Now I want to talk about the next thought I had this morning.. That's about potential psychological obstacles set in place by skeptics -interpreted by myself (a young soul) as buzz kills who create serious potholes along one's Yellow Brick Road.

Why would anyone ever try to assassinate my beloved spirit?

The acceptance of a new ideas into the following four predictable stages: 

Stage 1, skeptics proclaim that the idea is impossible.

Stage 2, skeptics reluctantly concede that the ideal is possible, but trivial.

Stage 3, the mainstream realizes that the idea is more important than the trivializing scientists in authority lead them to believe.

Stage 4, even the skeptics proclaim that they knew it all along or even that they thought of it first.

Here's two of my family accounts of skeptic's damages.

My uncle Ed Schlee  and his pilot - William Brock were bound for glory, potentially setting a 'round the world flight record in 1927. They made it all the way to Japan. While they waited out unfavorable weather conditions, Uncle Ed's wife became so worried that she convinced the US Navy to cut off all fuel supply rendering his failure to continue his fate's stride across the Pacific Ocean, home. He became a depressed alcoholic and the rest is not history.

On my mom's side of the family, my grandmother was a child prodigy actress in San Antonio. I don't recall the exact details, but the next thing I do recall is that she left home at 15 yrs. old and when her "respectable" dentist - father caught up to her in NYC, she was auditioning for a Broadway play. He scooped her up and brought her home. She enrolled in the UT Law school becoming the youngest female lawyer ever to graduate. She never practiced law and suffered from depression till she died.

Before museum and gallery talks, my father used to tell me that he hated listening to artists talk about their experiences to a crowd, so his advice was to keep my mouth shut.

As his child, throughout my life, I was easily influenced by him. The negativity was damaging to my self esteem. I fought hard to look deeper and the freedom I found is not commendable, but I will say that on the other hand, I am keenly aware of others who did believe in me. I look to grace in that and look forward to passing the spirit of support on to the next. 

EDEN is coming to Texas, Patti and I for these reasons will take her under our wing. Her daddy, Jeremy will be here April 1st to behold the wonder of his ATX street wise daughter's tour of her new stomping grounds.

I am so proud for EDEN's heroic journey and will sign off with this sage advice from a friend about his wife's path: "I don't have to understand what she's in to, but I do need to support her."

Just in case you were wondering…here’s a little    about me

You might remember me from your school…

I was the kid who was always getting called down in class for cutting up or daydreaming.

I had the attention span of a gnat. 

I did however like to build tree houses and forts in the woods.

Okay, I confess, I excelled at drawing in order to get girl's attention. I became good at fixing bicycles because I loved to Angel drive and crash them into telephone poles, I was learning to play guitar and I had a great passion for the vast Texas Gulf Coast and SURFING.

I came to realize sometime after I graduated from high school that the most logical way for me to deal with the grown-up induced dilemma of "what I was going to do with the rest of my life"

was to keep "trying on” lots of different things that interested me at the time. I thought I'd just let my life unfold like an open book, to be filled with significantly adventuresome chapters.

Surfers, by nature are opportunists, If not, we'd never catch good waves – right? So being a totally indoctrinated surfer, this idea of experiencing life like surfing seemed perfectly do-able to me, certainly more than one of those formal educations. I discovered that potential learning opportunities are like sets of juicy waves that never stop rolling in...

Photo: Ben in Oaxaca

My only guidelines were:

1. If it's interesting and fun to me and won't hurt anybody...GO for it!

2. When it's not interesting or fun anymore, STOP.

This was a good way for me to go when I was young, my life seems like it's been like an "Endless summer surf safari" ever since. In retrospect it seems a bit frenetic, but and I am happy to say that this youthful energy afforded me the opportunities to travel the world and meet many fascinating intrepid travelers along the way.

But now, a new and much greater aspect of travel has entered my Safari scenario, and that is the amazing adventure that come with finding comfort in stillness and holding quiet space inside. Searching for contentment with where I am and with whatever is going on at the moment is truly for me, a first glimpse of the last frontier.

As Willie Nelson sings...

"STILL IS STILL MOVING TO ME"

Hi, 

My name is Ben Livingston, I am known as a neon/ light artist and songwriter... but really, the finest art I've come to know about creating is in sculpting my life.  

Either way, here I am, and very happy to be here with you today.

I want to tell you a little story about why I am here..  It's on account of two great guys, one is my new friend, Tim Hossler who so generously took the risk of inviting me and the other fellow is an old pal named Charles Linn, who introduced me to Tim. I'd like to tell you a story of my circuitous route to friendship with Mr. Linn, who was at the time, the editor of Architectural Lighting Magazine.  

Austin, Texas - 1985, I had been working on all the neon sets for an Austin made Tristar film by Robert Benton called "Nadine". 

I want to tell you guys a little about this job, because sign design and fabrication is tangible graphic art and on this scale it is really fun to play with. FYI doing it for film is quite lucrative... It's very hard work, but it's a lot of fun and the company and food is great! 

So here is one of the stars of the show - Austin's old Grove sign from 1932. Here it is in the first scene. 



It was pretty much totally dilapidated. 90% of the neon was broken, the rest was inoperable the body (can) was rusty and full of generations of pigeons. The paint was completely faded. It was going to have to be totally overhauled; so that's what me and my faithful crew did. 

Portrait of a young artist

 And away she goes.

Ben making Grove neon

On the set

Looking good!

I also made a few other signs from scratch. One was the Blue Bonnet Bar and Lounge flashing neon which was  Jeff Bridges' funky old Texas honky tonk...    

The Blue Bonnet

...and then there was the new fictitious - hot spot in town  - the "High-Liner Lounge" which was sign made with fluorescent light and Plexiglas.

Dang! 

"Butt ugly" 

Ain't it? 

fluorescent light was the big new thing back then that made neon signage go obsolete starting in the 50's.  

Now it's LEDs that are putting the old school neon guys out of business; again.

What I personally like about this film was that Robert Benton was sensitive enough to mark this transitory time of signage in his movie. And of course, hire me to do it.. 

My coffers were full after my work on this film was done so I decided that after two hard years of training, it was time to make my own art for a change.

The thing was, I didn't get into neon to make signs, I just had to do commercial signage because traditional training is the best way to learn this craft, so I did it the old school apprenticeship way.... 

You see, I come from a family of artistic and theatrical types. That's my model. 

One day my parents and I were having dinner and we got to brainstorming about how I might outline our entire house with neon so it would look like a giant child drew it on the neighborhood night scape and what fun that would be!

Then one day I got hold of some pictures (kind of like these) of old Soviet neon signage.. Which are these huge public notices of pride and propaganda some like "Workers = Glory" and "Conserve energy resources" etc... 

Sorry, I had to steal these off the net.

Photo credit to: Ross McRoss

Other than my mentor - the late great Stephen Antonakos' -  public neon artwork made to feast one's eyes upon, this Commie stuff was the first time signage as a "public service announcement" had ever occurred to me... This was a great big aha moment for me. 

 Stephen Antonakos

 That's when I started What an amazing opportunity! How interesting it could be if I were to create a socially conscious statement that addresses some 50,000 commuters as they pass by my studio coming east towards downtown, on W. 5th street off the Mopac expressway every day and night... 

I had an illustrator friend, Terry Powell who's paintings usually contrasted his amazing technical ability with 3D shadowing of child like drawing as part of his ongoing theme..

No doubt, Terry's artistic ideas inspired my cycle of life concept and what would become a world famous, fifty four  second animated neon anti-war statement Austin landmark. 

Enter, Frank Roberts, a hyperactive genius - self taught  radio engineer who had a strong penchant for neon, high voltage and playing with trains, real ones..  

My 10' X 10' shop doors were usually open for air, exposing me bending glass over 1000 fires or processing that glass tubing into a neon light with my 25,000 volt bombarding transformer, attracting Frank like a moth to fire. The trifecta was the railroad track 200 feet away on the other side of my dead end block.

Day in and day out Frank would show up with way too much to talk about while would bite my tongue, just trying to be polite and keep on working. Finally it dawned on me to ask him if he might be able to make this animated neon mural - dream of mine come true. So I did, and Frank said: "Sure! I have an animation program on my computer. Just draw out what you want and I'll convert that into binary code and then make a little home made computer that will make this happen.

OMG - Jackpot!!! So I bought a Big Chief tablet and started making drawings of how I'd like to see the animation play out. In turn, frank entered this into his1st generation Macintosh. Thank God I had the presence of mind to video this brilliant electronic design process he was engaged in.
In the meantime, my apprentice and helpers created patterns and made the neon and then installed it. Frank took care of the electronics.. A "clock generator he called this 1 X 2 foot long circuit board  with two "EPROM" programmed chips that he said worked like a player piano.  

What an amazing mess of wires. There were seventeen high voltage transformers, controllers sprawled out all across the inside of the building and at least 100 ft of neon glass on the outside.. 

This creation took about two weeks to complete and the day we were finishing up Ellie Rucker, a locally famous and more practical columnist than "Dear Abby" from the local paper called wanting to know if I'd be willing to tell her readers that I take neon students. I said absolutely not, teaching is not my forte' BUT you really ought to send a photographer over here tonight because we are unveiling the most amazing jaw dropping neon mural ever seen for it's debut - and you can have the scoop.

Here comes Smiley Pool ready to shoot this for the paper. Smiley was a tall, skinny, baby faced 19 year old child prodigy photographer who was a dead ringer for Jimmy Olsen from the Daily Planet.. That was the night Smiley and his pictures for Ellie Rucker and the Austin American Statesman put us on the map. Smiley works for the Houston Chronicle and won a Pulitzer for his photos of Katrina. I could have pointed him out to you in the press box at Sochi, he's shot Olympic games and Super Bowls for the last 20+ years. What a great team we all became as the mural's popularity blossomed like a hit song,  into a beloved landmark of Austin within weeks of Rucker's column.  

The Illuminating Engineers Society (IES) might sound pretty nerdy but it's actually very "behind the scenes" and necessary organization and what's more, they hold several extremely prestigious lighting competitions every year. 

In 1987 the Austin chapter of the IES called on me requesting a tour of my shop for local members. When the tour was over, the president was so impressed with the mural that he invited me to participate in the local IES lighting design competition where he assured me that everyone would win. ..."What the hell, I thought, an IES winner's certificate would look cool, framed in my office". 

So I entered, and won... Like everybody else. 

 Then a few weeks later, I received a letter stating that the Mural had won regionally in Tulsa. Frank and I flew there to receive the award. That was a fun day,

Then I received another letter months later congratulating me for winning the holy grail - The International illuminating Design Award (IIDA) and that I need to plan on being in Minneapolis in a few weeks to receive the award... 

Holy Shit!

Frank and I were very clearly the black sheep of this event. The trade magazine even made a joke of it and with that, we enjoyed the irreverence that we'd been entitled. 

As we sat at the winner's table with CEO's of GE Sylvania and various high brow lighting designers I recall the delighted surprise of two of them accepting when I'd offered them a Pez. I needed something to gauge human compatibility and a silly candy offering was indeed the device. 
Winners were required to present a statement with an accompanying slide show... I was stumped and totally unprepared for this - I am terrible with instructions and apparently, this was s big one...  

I suddenly got what a big opportunity us winners were given to strut our professional stuff.  I could see by how prepared the other contestants were to let the world know exactly how bad ass they really are. I realized in my unpreparedness that all I would be able to do would be to listen and plug in my story as i would emulate their speeches ... I listened intently, trying to to pick up some speaking ideas from these big shots as they'd articulate facts like their pride in keeping efficiency in keeping budgets under $X much a foot (which must equal hundreds of thousands of dollars) and other reasons why they were icons of modern architecture... All the while, others at our table were "shushing" Frank for laughing with new friends while handing out Pez... 

Now it was my turn to approach the podium.. I'd never talked into a microphone before and was nervous but remembering how "fun" and "ingenuity" were the reasons why we were there. 

The first slide projected our little green neon house on the huge screen behind me. A low roar of chuckling swelled from the audience. I turned around and looked at the slide and had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.. 

I took a deep breath and said: "Frank and I are very proud that this project came in at a total budget of $386.47...

Frank said:" Hell we won an Oscar for a home movie, they ain't seen nothin' yet!"

And then along comes Charles Linn, editor of Architectural Lighting Magazine. We became fast friends. Somehow he ended up trusting me to write a full length story about Neon Mural #1 for the magazine. I have never been so flattered in my life until he introduced me to this opportunity to serve you here at the University of Kansas.

Thank you Charles, old buddy! 
And that's the story of how I got here...