MESSIAH: Edition of 2423 of which 300 are signed 1-300, 26 copies are signed A-Z as artist's proofs, and two sets are signed as progressives.
December 4, 1978
13 colors
16-1/8" x 24"
The war began, like most wars, as a boundary dispute. The old gods were kaleidoscopic, slow, tolerant. This was a change, both in nature and degree, and it happened fast. Taking a hint from Sun-Tsu, the new religion adopted the philosophy of total war; anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword.
If only we could dance away the night. If only morning never came, and we could dance under the stars in each other's arms forever and ever and ever. Dance in a dream of love, soft sighs and whispered promises I'll love you forever I'll always love you and morning will never come. Under the night, love is a black jacquard on black silk. Come sleep in my arms and we will never awaken, and I'll love you forever. Here comes the Sun.
Death from above. Death swooping down out of the air as quick as a lightning bolt and just as random. Not one of them knew what he was doing. They didn't even wear parachutes. Half-trained, sent off in machines made of spit and baling wire, they murdered one another with the single-minded courtesy of boys. When they killed a famous one from the other side they'd fly over and drop bouquets of flowers. The men on the ground shot at all of them, indiscriminately, scarcely ever scoring a hit. War on the ground, war on the water, and now the pure ether itself was stained with blood. A ruined machine twisting down with the grace of a falling leaf to hit the ground in an Autumn litter of thousands and millions of dun leaves, swept up and burned in a funeral pyre of shattered dreams and ruined lives and lonely, heartbroken women. Five percent of the human race was killed in World War One, and the Great Influenza Epidemic that followed swept up another ten percent. Not a man, woman or child on the face of the Earth escaped infection. But, Round Two was just around the corner and in the meanwhile Hollywood turned these tragic heroes into grist for the mill. If you've got a lemon, make lemonade.
We're trapped in our own time. We look at the past through modern eyes, imagining that its residents were just like ourselves with a few minor cultural differences. We forget how much indoor plumbing and electricity have changed our world into something that Julius Caesar would have been unable to distinguish from a kingdom powered by magic. We accuse our ancestors of crimes and reproach them with ignorance, sure that if we had lived among them we could have prevented the errors of their ways. Attempts to foretell the future fall into the same snare. The residents of the future are not going to be just like us except riding around in personal helicopters and working a three day week and wearing white togas or something. They're probably going to envy us our simple and uncomplicated lives, and pity our ignorance and imagine that we were just like them except that we wore deeply unflattering garments and silly hairstyles. We visit the past in memory, and alter it by remembering it differently. The future lives in anticipation, and we try to change it to benefit ourselves. The further away from the present, in either direction, the fuzzier and more uncertain things become. We've been in the past all our lives, so we have some clear grasp of what that end of the timeline means. We haven't been to the future yet, but we will,we just don't know for how long, and we don't know what we should do when we get there. Tomorrow, for example, is the future, and with any luck I shall indeed visit it, and live there for one full day, and then leave. But I won't be back.
My six-year-old niece was given a camera to play with at a garden party. She spent a happy afternoon taking pictures of guests, most of whom were grown-ups. When the prints came back, the photographs were of people's legs and feet. It seems obvious in retrospect that a small child sees the world of adults as a forest of trousers and stockings, but at the time it came to us as a surprise. People see the whole world from their own point of view, and are generally amazed that others see it differently. This film is about a murderer of children, and the poster presents a child's-eye view.
Paolo and Francesca, Romeo and Juliet, Jihei and Koharu. No culture has a patent on star-crossed lovers. Those who die together for love are united in death. Their insubstantial shades occupy the second circle of the inferno, where they are forever blown about by stormy winds, as they were by their passions in life. In death, however, they remain forever infatuated, forever young, forever faithful. Each sunless day, each starless moonless night eases their hearts with the mindless eternal joy of a love that has no beginning, no middle and no end. This is not torture, to reside forever suspended in a crystal unchanging moment of purest joy. This is not punishment for misdirected longing. Forever in love and happy in each other's arms, forever a self-contained universe of all we ever wanted out of life while we lived. Who would not leap hand-in-hand into the icy waters of death; who would not stain the white snow with crimson blood to reap an eternity in the Lover's Quarter of Hell?
In 1792 Mary Wolstoncraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women, a feminist treatise that reads like it was published yesterday afternoon. Its central thesis is that women can have no control over their lives if they do not have control over their bodies. In 1797, she married the radical William Godwin. Godwin believed that it was impossible to be rationally persuaded and not act accordingly; that therefore men can live in harmony without law and institutions; and that mankind is ultimately perfectible. Mary died in childbirth in 1797, and her one and only daughter, also Mary, became the second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He'd taken up with her in 1814, and though they did not believe in marriage, nonetheless availed themselves of that sacrament after Percy's pregnant first wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself in the Serpentine in 1816 at the age of 21. That summer, Mary, Percy and one of his friends were sitting around one night with nothing much to do, and challenged each other to write a rattling good story, or to try and scare the pants off one another. Nineteen-year-old Mary responded by conjuring up this heart-wrenching tale of the student Frankenstein, who by means of Galvanism animates a soulless monster from grave-yard fragments. Longing for sympathy and love, but repellent to all about him, the creature pleads for a mate, but is cruelly denied. In retribution, he destroys the promised bride of his creator, and crying "Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind sinned against me?" flees into a howling waste. The pitiful monster, of course, has no name, but is commonly known by that of his creator. For every one who knows the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, there are ten thousand who know the Gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus written by his teenage bride.
The old University Art Museum, now a fire station, was the site of one of the most important graphic events of the 1960s: a show of Jugendstil posters, organized and curated by Herschel Chipp. I can't quite remember the exact date; it was in 1965 or 1966. This exhibition was seen by all of the people in San Francisco and Berkeley who were doing posters for the rock 'n' roll events of the time, and their very next posters were all but direct imitations of those of the Jugendstil, particularly reflecting the lettering of Ferdinand Andrei (President of the Vienna Secession in 1905), and Leopold Forstner of the Wiener WerkstŠtte, which were letters all made to fit into a square, or some other shape, and almost illegible. As a pressman, I printed some of their psychedelic posters, and later became a poster designer myself. Tom Luddy, with a lot of help from other people, founded the Pacific Film Archive with Sheldon Renan in 1970, and set it up in the brand new University Art Museum. Tom had operated the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, a shop-front movie house that gave the Black Hole of Calcutta a run for its money, which is where I first saw silent classics, subtitled European art films and old American flicks, on cheap dates with girls as entranced as I was with the silver screen. During one memorable show around the time of People's Park, the theater was tear-gassed halfway through the film, and hand-in-hand my date and I dashed out the back door to take refuge from marauding Alameda County Sheriffs in the first house we came to.
In late 1970 I set up Saint Hieronymus Press where it is now, and a few months later Alice Waters and her friends opened up Chez Panisse. My first poster for PFA was in 1972, on a handshake deal with Tom Luddy that continued through 1983. He never saw the designs until the posters were delivered. I'd tack up new ones upstairs at Chez Panisse, and at night we'd all of us sit around and drink wine and be pals. I've been a printer and graphic designer now for thirty years last April. Alice is looking at the restaurant's 25th anniversary next year in August. Tom's dream is alive and well after a quarter-century, and the Art Museum's roof still leaks in the rain.