Lily Iona MacKenzie's Blog, page 61

Woman on the Waterfront

Foghorns blast through the 7 AM San Francisco overcast. The only woman in the place, I saunter into the longshoreman’s union hall, trying to appear as if I did this every day. A few cigarette-scarred wooden tables offer a place for the men to gather and talk while waiting to be called to work. Billowing clouds of cigarette smoke hang ominously over everyone.

It’s the mid-70s, and I try to ignore the silence that cuts through the room after I enter. A few loud guffaws and an even louder patter of voices, all speculating on the broad who is challenging their stronghold and competing for work, follow it.

I amble over to a table set off in a corner and glance through some back issues of Psychology Today and McCall’s, surprised to see more female-oriented publications in this male-dominated place. I also am grateful for the diversion, a way to avoid the curious and mostly hostile eyes.

At first, it had seemed like a good idea when my friend’s husband—a 20-year waterfront veteran whose father had also worked there all his life—had urged me to find work there. “Look,” he said. “It’s time for women to bust into the docks. You can make at least $80 a day.”

The money convinced me, a sizeable sum at that time. I was a single parent trying to support my teenage son and myself while I went to college. The escapade also held the promise of adventure: all those romantic waterfront characters cascaded through my mind, not least of whom was Marlon Brando. I also knew that the area attracted artists and intellectuals, as well as those who were just barely making it—some from skid row.

Curious about this male bastion, I wondered if it was possible for a woman to be accepted there. Females were rare in that world, even in clerical positions. But I also wanted to know more about the culture, the interface between land and sea, a switching yard from all over the world where goods were transferred, labeled, transported, and disposed of. Why should men have a stranglehold on that sphere?

Temporarily on semester break from my graduate program at San Francisco State, and working part-time in an office, I had nothing to lose and much to gain. My friend’s husband paved the way by calling the dispatcher and letting him know I’d be there. He used whatever influence he had to increase the possibility that I would be called after the regulars had been taken care of.

And I did get sent out to a nearby wharf that first day. Hired as a clerk, my job was to oversee the movement of the containers on my list and keep track of where they were placed for unloading. That first day was relatively uneventful, and it seemed like an easy way to earn $80. Being the only female in a sea of men was not new to me. I had signed up for a drafting class in high school where I was the only girl and loved it.

At 7 AM the next morning, I appear again in the union hall. This time my presence doesn’t create as much of a stir. I post myself once more at the out-of-the-way table, glancing through magazines until my name finally is called along with two younger black guys, also university students. The dispatcher hands the three of us instructions of where to go, a wharf some distance away, and we take a bus to get there. They are lovely guys, clean cut and dressed in preppy clothes. We chat about school and waterfront work, this also being their first time there.

At the wharf, the boss tells us to board a massive cargo ship to see the hundreds of cars that we’ll be guiding into parking spaces on land. The ship has numerous levels, and we race from one to the other, amazed at how many vehicles are stored there. Finally we return to shore and are instructed to show the longshoremen where to park the cars.

I stand in front of a space, indicating with my arms that the driver should come forward to where I’m standing. A bearded longshoreman saunters over to me and says, “Hey, lady, do you want to get your legs broken?”

I don’t plan to leave the wharf with broken legs, and I tell him that, trying to make a joke. But his icy look silences me. He isn’t interested in banter. He says, “These guys are pissed to see a woman bossing them around. If you continue to stand where you are, you won’t have any legs to walk on. Stand to the side like this.” And he showed me where to position myself.

I followed his instructions and somehow got through the day intact. But I had heard enough. Though I consider myself a feminist, I didn’t burn with a desire to integrate the waterfront. Nor did I need to make a statement by having my legs broken. I just wanted to make enough money to support my son and myself as I worked my way through college. These men, however, didn’t know my intentions. They just saw me as a threat, someone who would alter their domain and change the balance of power there.

When I left that day, I realized my friend’s husband had used me for his own purposes, though I wasn’t totally clear about what they were. Was he genuinely interested in integrating the waterfront? Or was he just trying to test his own power. If the latter were true, he had abused our friendship and put me in great peril. After working at the docks for so long, he must have known what the men’s reaction to me would be. If the former were true, had I made any dent in the male prejudice against women in that line of work? I doubt it.

So my two days on the waterfront were just that: a time when I experienced directly and vividly the reaction some men have towards women in a world that they still dominate. I can see why, even today as enlightened as some of us might be, women continue to suffer from prejudice. I too had grown up assuming that men were the fairer and better sex. Certainly they seemed to hold all the cards. But I also went through the tremendous consciousness-raising period of the 60s and came out of that time with a much different view of womanhood and myself.

While my experience of working on the waterfront was brief and may not have changed the dockworkers’ lives, it did change mine. For the first time, I felt directly the physical threat that so many females face day in and day out. I had taken my gender and myself for granted, floating through life on a cloud of good will. And while I knew that women continued to be the second sex in spite of advances in numerous areas, I had never expected to face such bald hostility just because I happened to be female.

Filed under: Links Tagged: feminist, longshoremen, threat to females, waterfront, woman on waterfront

Crossing Borders with Peter Rice Jones

Peter Rice-Jones, a third generation Albertan, began his career as an artist more than three decades ago, specializing initially in painting and later in sculpture. In the 1970’s, Rice-Jones became involved with Native cultures in Northern Alberta and the Northwest Territories. The Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal chose Rice-Jones to paint a series of six murals in the Diamond Jueness High School in Hay River, N.W.T., the largest being 28 feet long and 16 feet high.

In 1974, Rice-Jones was commissioned by the Saddle Lake Indian Band to produce two documentary films, one depicting their first one hundred years of history from the Band’s perspective, and the other depicting a popular Cree Indian legend. Both films were done in the Cree language and subsequently translated into English. Rice-Jones also helped design and build one of the first Native-owned and controlled Interpretive centers in Canada. The museum is famous for its depiction of mid-nineteenth century Cree Indian history.

After studying bronze casting at Western Washington University in the late 70’s, Rice-Jones won the 1981 Molson’s Brewery All-Around Championship Trophy for his sculpture “Yesterday’s Champ.” In 1986 he worked with the well-known artist Austin Deuel in sculpting “Hill 881 South,” a monumental 10-ton bronze that is the Viet Nam Veteran’s Memorial in San Antonio, Texas.

The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation selected Rice-Jones’ sculptures “Winter Warrior” and “The Challenger” as their promotional art pieces to raise funds throughout Western Canada, and he recently began a series of paintings and sculptures inspired by the ancient cultures of Western North America.

Rice-Jones is often invited to be a visiting teacher at art schools in Canada and the U.S. where he demonstrates bronze-casting techniques. His paintings and sculptures are in many private and corporate North American and European collections, including Jack Palance, Molson’s Brewery, Mr. and Mrs. Norman Manning, and the McLeod Dixon Law Firm.

 

When I was nine, I first met Peter Rice-Jones, an artist who crosses many borders: the Canadian and American border, painting and sculpting, writing and the visual arts, commercial and the fine arts. Peter and I attended Stanley Jones School in Calgary from Grades 4 through 6. Our art teacher Miss Fate had a long, witch-like chin and nose, her shoulder-length hair bleached blonde and cheeks blazing with rouge. She didn’t inspire any of us to make art.

Fortunately, she didn’t discourage Peter from creating: he was already “fated” to become an artist. He says, “I was probably about seven or eight when I started, after the war. I was out west of Cochrane on the ranch and my aunt Jean got me drawing. We had to make our gifts on birthdays and Xmas. When I was younger, I used to turn the crank on the forge. As I got older, I got to use the materials, so I would put together horse shoes and make little hat racks. I also got pieces of bones and made bone handles. Most of the things were made out of metal or bone.”

Bones and metal still inspire him. Bear and deer skulls compete for space in his studio with skimming tools used by miners in the northern part of Alberta early in the century, bits and bridles, and wagon wheels. Visiting Peter’s studio and home is like stepping into another era. Relics from the past meet you everywhere: a glass case holds ancient Chinese coins, a decorative bronze button from a Chinese noble’s robe, and beads the natives used for trading and for money. An ancient oil lamp from Thailand looks ready to be lit.

In the midst of all these artifacts, Peter paces and smokes, hammers and files, transforming wax and sometimes clay into the three-dimensional visions he carries in his head. He looks himself like the artifacts surrounding him, head thrust forward, skin roughened and reddened from years in and out of the wilderness, wearing a red plaid flannel shirt and jeans. He’s as at home on a horse as driving his GM truck. Back stiffened from major surgeries, a result of wrestling with one too many large bronze sculptures and roping calves in rodeos, he walks with a slight forward tilt.

Peter, who has worked in the traditional Western genre, has sculptures of a cowboy barely keeping his seat, one hand gripping the reins, the other clasping his cowboy hat, flailing the air, horse and rider balanced precariously on the base that holds them, a symbolic depiction of the kind of balancing act Peter has managed in his own work. The rider tries to lasso the three long-horned steers on the same base. Nearby a bear and elk stand serenely on their pedestals. These more realistic pieces contrast dramatically with the eerie, abstracted other-worldly elk, horses, and buffalo, or the stylized images of female forms, some examples of Peter’s contemporary work.

This is the range he covers in his sculpture. For several years, the realistic, western genre provided him with income to support the contemporary art. The other genre allows him to be more innovative, exploring his own visions.

Peter says, “In the realistic art, there’s a certain commonalty amongst those of us who do it. There’s a certain repetition, in the sense that some of us are a little more skilled than others, some of us are a little more creative than others; but by and large, western art is western art. It’s more commercial.

The contemporary art that I do is much more experimental, much more challenging. I think in some ways it requires a great deal more skill than the western art, not just in terms of imagination, but technically too. All bronze sculpture requires great technique.”

On January 9,1995, Peter was hospitalized for a month at Foothills Hospital because of a massive brain hemorrhage, something very few people survive. Since he felt he’d been given a second chance at life, he made a commitment while in the hospital to create art that wasn’t influenced by his need to make a living. Since then he’s focused completely on his contemporary sculpture.

As is true of many non-native Canadian artists, Peter has been influenced deeply by indigenous culture and art. His primary knowledge comes from the Cree. He worked among them and has been through many of the traditional Cree rituals, sweat lodges, and tobacco and healing ceremonies. He also has a daughter whose mother is Native. Peter insists, “I’m not an Indian. Nor do I follow traditional ways in their entirety. But I’m aware of them.”

In his contemporary sculpture, Peter tries to follow what he thinks of as maps, laid out two to three thousand years ago. Through waking dreams—visions—he visits the past, “the old people, the ancient ones.” He says, “I have a lot of knowledge about the old ways from my association with some of the contemporary tribal people. I have some very close friends who are traditional people. They got me started and taught me the freedom of being able to make those journeys. They follow the old ways that have been practiced for hundreds of years. Their beliefs, their attitudes, their philosophies come from hundreds and hundreds of years of tradition.”

medicine man

The skills these earlier people mastered interest Peter about the “old ways”—”They were phenomenal in terms of their culture and their art and their level of sophistication, the way they developed as a society. The ancients built a bridge in the Andes out of stone that is still standing to this day. And there’s no steel in it. There’s just stone upon stone upon stone.

The Anasasi built these incredible dwellings out of cliffs. They didn’t have cranes. They just built them. There’s one village that has 3,400 homes. This was 500 years before the birth of Christ. There are 400 miles of paved roads. I’ve walked on them. So then you get to thinking, ‘What were these people like?’ They’ve got miles of irrigation canals. Right? And they were an integral part of the ecosystem. And from that they developed a phenomenal spiritual sense.”

When I ask Peter what he means by “spiritual,” he says, “They were spiritual in their attitude, in the way they conducted their lives, in their philosophy, in their sense of history, in their understanding of tradition. In their awareness of their surroundings. In their interpersonal relationships. Everything has a spirit. I’ve spent hundreds and thousands of hours in the mountains watching animals, and nobody will ever convince me that we’re the only ones that have a spirit. If you take that attitude, then you respect these things.”

Like some of his Native friends, Peter believes that spirits guide him, and in his art he attempts to contact this world. He says, “I’m not trying to interpret what those people were like. I’m only trying to express something that’s within myself, and it’s inspired by how those people lived, what they did two or three thousand years ago. It fascinates me.”

Peter has spent a good deal of time in the wilderness, beginning as a child when he rode his horse into Horse Canyon west of Cochrane to see the rock art. He says, “That kind of stuck with me,” and his respect for the wilds shows up in his sculptures of animals. He captures their dignity and otherness.

He also was raised with Native children. On the ranch in Cochrane, natives and non-natives lived side by side out. This experience made him aware that he had “no sense of history,” and “no sense of culture. We don’t have any history here really. In a way, Calgary is brand new. During my training in art school, I had all this technical knowledge, but I had to search for historical roots.”

This quest into the past in his art—the search for history and inspiration—began for Peter in 1986. He went for a walk in the Anasasi cliff dwellings: “It was early in the morning, and I was watching the sun hitting the rock when I started to see faces that the shapes in the cliff suggested. It suddenly dawned on me that an awful lot of their visual imagery came from experiences like that, from seeing certain shapes in the natural world. So I thought to myself, I want to try and interpret that. As a result of the experience of watching the light, I did the sculpture called ‘River Woman,’ that green vase over there.” He points to a figure that seems to have stepped out of our primordial past, the greenish patina giving it a haunting, earthy quality.

To create his contemporary sculptures, Peter enters a state between sleeping and waking—the alpha state. He can spend hours not awake and not asleep, just watching, letting his visions unfold. He says, “The sculpture is working. But I don’t finish it in the dream state. I get it going until it’s there. But I won’t finish it until I can physically touch it when I’m fully awake. I try to bring some magic into my sculptures.”

primal prayers

While Peter has been strongly influenced by the ancients, he also has had more contemporary teachers, artists who have inspired him: Rodin, Malvina Hofler, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Bob Chadwick. He says, “The West Coast Indians have also been a major influence on my life—the carvings and totem poles. The same with African art and the Haida culture: in terms of sophisticated art, they have some of the world’s best. Beautiful, beautiful visual communications. I have a great admiration for excellence, whether it’s a saddle, a bridle, or a poem. I admire craftsmanship.”

Rarely satisfied with a piece, Peter is always trying to perfect his own craftmanship. His patinas are so well integrated into the bronzes he makes that they seem to glow from within each sculpture, the colors as varied as a painter’s palette.

Peter believes that nearly dying has given him an awareness he otherwise might never have developed. This expansion comes through in his art. Since he returned to work in April 1995, he’s not only produced numerous new works, but he’s had four one-man shows, three of which have sold out.

When asked how he’d define himself and his work, Peter says, “I’m a visual communicator. Nothing more or less.”

Postscript: A rugged individualist until the end, Peter died in 2001.

Filed under: Links Tagged: artist, Canadian artist, Cree, indian, indigenous art and culture, native, peter rice jones, sculptor, spirits, spiritual, west coast indians

Vive le Québec

No place in North America equals Quebec City for its charm, unique culture, and beauty. The only walled city north of Mexico, when you pass through the portal into the city’s historic section, the focus for most visitors, it’s like entering a fairy tale complete with a castle. The century-old Fairmont Le Château Frontenac—with its towering top ringed by steeples and turrets—overlooks the St. Lawrence River and soars over the town, adding to the magical feeling.

But this impressive hotel hasn’t always dominated the old city. Many museums, churches, homes, and scenic lanes date back to the 1600s. These are the structures that define QC and give it so much charisma. The Frontenac is the icing on the cake.

Quebec’s Upper Town (Haute-Ville) is perched on cliffs overlooking the St. Lawrence River and provides views of the countryside for many miles beyond. Accessible by steep stairs or via a funicular car, Old Quebec’s Lower Town has its own historic charms. The Basse-Ville sprang up around the city’s harbor and was the original neighborhood of the city. Homes, shops, and ancient streets sprawled here at the base of the cliffs centering around Place Royale—a square on the site of the garden of Champlain’s Habitation (1608).

The preferred entry to old Quebec City is via the Grande Allee. Time seems to have stood still here. It’s like entering another world, another time, another place, and it works its magic on you. Only Rottenburg, another walled city, has had such an effect on me.

A horse drawn cab is the appropriate way to view this wonderful place. Our driver was a redhead, of Irish descent, but born and raised in Quebec. He spoke very clear English, his words carefully enunciated. He wore a straw hat, and the horse’s name was Dixie. We learned that the animals aren’t overworked. A vet checks them every day, and they only pull a carriage every other day.

On our fire-engine red cab, we wove through narrow cobblestone streets past stone houses festooned with window planters. In the more commercial area, the vividly colored umbrellas at sidewalk cafes competed with the flowers for lending bright patches to the scenes. We also passed the Hotel Clarendon, built in 1870, where we stayed. It’s the oldest hotel in the walled city. Located a little away from the most festive streets, it’s still in the center of the action. Our room had a window overlooking the St. Lawrence, a clock tower, a part of the Château Frontenac, and a park.

If I can generalize, this link between French and English-speaking Canada that our driver represented captures the essence of Canada, with Ottawa the head and Quebec City the heart. Without Quebec, something precious would be lost to Canadians. It’s a touchstone and, Quebec City, which lost once to the British, must not lose again. It has the exuberance, the emotional life, and the sensuality that some Anglos can lack. Quebec City also is the heart in that the Americas emerged out of European sensibility, and that presence is felt here perhaps more than anywhere else.

Filed under: Links Tagged: Fairmont Le Château Frontenac, hotel clarendon, quebec, quebec city, St. Lawrence River, walled city

In Praise of Libraries!

Yesterday, I had to kill time (terrible metaphor) while waiting to hear a friend of mine do a reading of his memoir Blackboard at Book Passage in Corte Madera. I didn’t want to drive home to the East Bay and then make another trip to Marin County, so after I finished teaching in San Francisco, I took the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County and hung out at the Corte Madera Library.

With audio and ebooks so popular, I half expected the library to be a ghost town, inhabited by print books but no one there to read them. Happily, I was wrong, and while I only check out library books to listen to on Overdrive, I was reminded of what an amazing place libraries are. I also discovered that readers still use them!

When I first arrived, there were no parking spaces near the building (I’d expected the lot to be vacant). I had to drive around for 10 minutes before I found a spot. When I walked in the door, I realized this was a happening place. It wasn’t just buzzing with library workers. But people of all ages were using the space.

The children’s section had a steady stream of kids carrying books that they wanted to check out. As I walked from the entrance to the back of the building, hoping to find an empty seat where I could work on my laptop, I discovered that nearly every seat was filled. Some visitors were sitting in overstuffed chairs reading magazines or newspapers. Others were in the computer areas, intently focused on the screens. But even more were strolling the aisles of books, checking out the latest and selecting ones they wanted to borrow.

All of this was encouraging: traditional reading has not died out in America. But what I loved most was the feeling of community I felt with this world of readers. The Corte Madera Library’s physical plant has lots of light and wood paneling, so the atmosphere is welcoming. But it also was lovely just to sit there silently with others who were enjoying the space.

No words were exchanged, yet we all clearly were there because we wanted to embrace the world that the words in these books and other printed sources represented. They opened portals onto subjects we otherwise wouldn’t know about. And I was grateful for this opportunity to reconnect with what libraries signify: the egg of learning that never stops hatching as long as we’re open to what it offers.

Filed under: Links Tagged: books, corte madera library, libraries, library, place of learning