“Off The Road”

This is the story of the painter and writer David Hansen,who was a self described; itinerant sign-painter,reformed ex-wino, , fry cook and newsvendor. He died a few years ago, destitute and unrecognized.
He mustered out of the US military and elected to stay in France where he studied art at the “École des Beaux-Arts Arts”
He moved to San Francisco where he struggled for years both with his addictions and his attempts to be recognized for his art.

Here is his story,
told in this anthology of his short stories and my photographs.

For more preview images:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vercingtorix/sets/72157616736520406/

Title: Off The Road
Author: David Hansen & Blaine Dixon
Rating: Excellent!
Publisher: blurb.com
Web Page: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/533538
Reviewed by: Rod Clark | View Bio

” “Let me dwell by the side of the road/off the road/and be a friend to man.” These words may be found in an early section of photographer Blaine Dixon’s beautiful compilation: OFF THE ROAD. The same words were also painted on the blistered brick above the fire pit that served as the hearth of the late Street artist and writer David Hansen in his makeshift habitat among the foundations of what used to be the International Hotel in San Francisco—a makeshift home Hansen called “The Pit.” With the help of layout designs and graphic elements supplied by Blurb, Inc., Hansen’s friend Photographer Blaine Dixon has composed a wonderful book of gritty (and sometimes brilliant) underground lit, accompanied by photographs of David, his art, his writings, his environment, his down and out friends, and all the cast off furnishings of a daring and difficult life.

What does “Off the Road” mean in this context? Does it mean being out of the hustle and bustle of ordinary life? Does it refer to the wreckage of a vehicle that was homeward bound after bar time? Is it a deliberate contrast and/or complement to ON THE ROAD, Jack Kerouac’s Bohemian classic? San Francisco after all, since the publication of THE SUBTERRANEANS by Jack Kerouac, has been a breeding basement of American underground culture, and David Hansen’s “pit” certainly qualifies as an underground studio, both by elevation and sensibility.

There are some artistic personalities that, for what ever reason, can only create in the pit, or at its rim. (Malcolm Lawry, for example, in UNDER THE VOLCANO.) Such art often exacts a terrible price from the artist and those who are close to him. Although ex-wino Hansen lived the life of a bum, he did not believe himself to be one. As his wife Rose Marie explains to his son, David is not a bum, because “he’s never stopped scheming and dreaming. Crazy dreams, but he doesn’t know enough to quit.” Yes,the dreams in OFF THE ROAD may be crazy, the syntax loose, and the spelling often creative. Not all the letters make it to the page, but when they do, they often redintegrate into real poetry:

“STRAY CATS of a beautiful Burmese breed were chasing butter- flys through shaggy stands of Timothy,” Hansen writes in “A FIRST RENAISSANCE PERIOD OF DUBIOUS BEGINNINGS.” “California poppies made of bright flecks of orange against the green glitter of an oceans’ worth of long consumed and shattered wine bottles.”

Similar bruised gems of language can be found in sections entitled “The Kandy-Kaine Pain of Painting Christmas,” “Ballad of the Blue Café,” and “Watching the City Burn.” As Hansen eked out a precarious living at the lip of disaster (as a news vendor, a painter of store windows at Xmas time, a seller of used books stolen from the San Francisco Library donation box); much of the life thus supported was documented by the eye of Blaine Dixon’s camera. Dixon knew David well. When the rains made “the pit” less than habitable, David slept on the floor of Dixon’s apartment. Blaine lent the artist money on occasion and helped him publish a few short stories. Sometimes they quarreled as friends often do, especially when divided by economic circumstance. During the period of that acquaintance, these photographs accumulated.

Following a long interval away from San Francisco, Blaine returned to find out from friend and underground art gallery owner Pat Carey that his friend David had died at the age of 52. After returning briefly to France with his wife and Child, Hansen (who had once served in the U.S. army in France and then stayed for a while), returned to San Francisco after learning that his condition was terminal—that alcohol and cigarettes had at long last done him in. Dixon then recalled that at one of his last meetings with Hansen, the writer/artist had asked him to publish his writings with all the eccentric spelling and punctuation intact. OFF THE ROAD is the result of that posthumous collaboration.

This is a wonderful book, a suitable accoutrement for your suburban studio or homeless shelter, a fascinating visual and literary documentation of a creative life lived on the edge—in San Francisco, where the Golden Gate opens to the sea like an escape valve for manifest destiny. OFF THE ROAD captures a person, a place and an ongoing milieu that was first documented by the beat generation in the early fifties. Mostly, these are pictures and poems of a shattered life, fragments of a gleaming jug that once held a rare liquor, or at least a few fingers of “Thunderbird,” that inexpensive elixir of the lost. We can lament the life that might have been—but no one can say who or what Hansen might have been if he had lived differently. Some art can only be created at the edge of the abyss—and this is what we have left of David Hansen, more than what many leave behind them. Blaine Dixon has created and preserved a treasure here. If only every artist had a friend like this…. “

“Polk Gulch”

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/568036

“This book is dedicated to Pat Carey, distinguished artist, activist and once owner of The Nanny Goat Art Gallery on Bush Street.

She was a tireless Mother Teresa to the runaway teens who inhabited Polk Gulch in the 1980′s (some of whom are pictured in this book), which ultimately led to the establishment of San Francisco’s Larkin Street Youth Center.”

Before the Castro District in San Francisco California achieved fame as a gay playground, Polk Gulch, the area of Polk Street between California Street and Geary was known for its gay bars, raucous Halloween parades. elegant Shops, restaurants and sadly the young male prostitutes and drug addicts. The neighborhood was also home to a large number of elderly, minorities, and a small colony of former North Beach bohemians.

This book is a photographic record of Polk Gulch as it was in 1980.

Johnny Lee Ray, San Francisco Bay Guardian Arts and Entertainment editor says……
“…a rave for Blaine Dixon’s Polk Gulch…”, “Blaine’s black-and-white eye is a West Coast counterpart to the Times Square views of Larry Clark and Gary Lee Boas,.. “the book’s final contemporary color section is packed with wise irony.”, “Polk Gulch proves small publishing is still spirited, intelligent, and surprising.”

Roberto Friedman, Arts Editor of San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter, says, ” ‘Polk Gulch’ a collection of photographs by Blaine Dixon, is a look into a time and place…Polk Street circa 1980…the vintage storefronts and the habitués who loitered there are presented in glorious black and white.”

Donn Saylor, theater writer for the Boston Examiner, critic for The Edge and owner of snark.com says…
“There are some intensely emotional pieces of work here, mesmerizing freeze-frame commentaries on society, art, and sexuality.”

The San Francisco City Library has nine copies of  “Polk Gulch” and two copies of   “Off The Road” The libraries of;  San Francisco State University,  UC Berkeley,USC,UCLA,Stanford , Columbia University, and Cornell  have “Polk  Gulch” in their permanent collections.

For more preview images:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/vercingtorix/sets/72157612595330999/

Title: Polk Gulch
Author: Blaine Dixon
Rating: Excellent!
Publisher: blurb.com
Web Page: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/568036
Reviewed by: Rod Clark | View Bio

When Blaine Dixon returned from living in L.A. to his old stomping grounds in San Francisco, he moved into a place on Bush St., near the Polk Gulch Neighborhood. At the time he had no idea what the Polk Gulch scene was all about, but shortly after arriving, in the spring of 1980, he decided to attend an art show in the neighborhood. There he met an old ex-wino/writer/artist friend, David Hansen, who was displaying his cross hatched drawings in the gallery. Blaine also met the gallery operator, Pat Carey, a compassionate and lively woman who was deeply concerned about the welfare of street children in the neighborhood. Upon finding out that Blaine was a photographer, Pat immediately began to pitch him on the idea of photo documenting the plight of young prostitutes and runaways that hung out in the Polk Gulch neighborhood. She promised to do a show of the resulting work in her gallery. Dixon did the show and also took some photos for papers and magazines. A friendship grew between Dixon and Carey. They were both artists and activists who wanted to reveal the plight of these street children to a larger oblivious world. Gradually, their friendship and what grew out of it became the catalyst for the creation of POLK GULCH.

Enshrined in this ephemeral photodom are the Polk Gulch hot spots of the early 80’s: The Blue Café, The Bagel deli, the sole surviving gay bar at the time: Kimo’s, the Nanny Goat Hills Gallery, Teller and Freed (Coffee Roasters), the continental Gift Shop, the H20 Café. Many of these locales are now gone or vastly transformed from what they were like in the early eighties.

In these pages, the boys, girls, men, women, and several genders in between come alive. The children we see here, posturing in greasy sunlight or night time neon have either long since grown up and escaped Polk Gulch, or have died or moved on to some other futureless place. Child prostitution still exists, of course, and districts like Polk Gulch emerge in one neighborhood when they are pushed out of another; but the world we see in these stark, pre-digital photos exists nowhere but in the pages of this book, and in the memories of those who walked those sidewalks and drank coffee in The Bagel or the Blue Café.

Here, rolled out for our voyeuristic enlightenment are people, places and moments long forgotten. Halloween on Polk Street in 1980. The Exotic Erotic Ball, on New Year’s Eve–glowing with ersatz glitz and a certain gritty and terminal elegance. Through the eye of the camera we cruise down neon-lit sidewalks past a cast of unforgettable characters, startling costumes,and lots of drag (both bad and not quite so bad). On sunlit sidewalks, we encounter the all knowing gaze of The Cosmic Lady, and the mysterious smiles of the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” Meanwhile a sad host of costumed young people cruise the streets, trailed by the older men that prey on them. In one memorable moment, Blaine Dixon shows a woman artist a photo in Pat Carey’s gallery of a young man in a cap and sunglasses, waiting for a trick. “That’s my son,” she tells him. The boy had been missing for months.

Interspersed with the photos are Dixon’s notes and snippets of writing by his friend the late David Hansen; in particular, brief sketches written by Hansen on some of the locations in the photos, including the Blue Café. (Hansen is the subject of another fabulous photo book by Dixon entitled OFF THE ROAD, documenting Hansen’s final years living under the foundations of the old International Hotel.) Through Hansen’s writing, and in the faces of these lost young people we see inspiration, longing, and devastated potential. POLK GULCH is a haunting, unforgettable book, full of beauty and sadness, like a graveyard with flowers and broken glass. In it, Blaine Dixon has captured yet another world which, without his artistry, would have been irretrievably lost.

Welcome to my new blog. I will start with reposting  the latest reviews for my photo book  “Going Home to ‘Little Dixie’”

“This photo-essay book tells the personal story of my coming back home to live in Southeast Oklahoma, of getting back together with old friends and of re-discovering a state that I actually knew little about while growing up here.

356 Pages, 450 Color Photographs

“Every school in the state should have a copy of this book” -Rudy Miller, Professor Emeritus of Zoology, OSU

“Great Book!. Really captures the spirit of ‘Little Dixie’”- Megan Waters, KNED McAlester, Oklahoma radio personality.

See all the chapter heading photos here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/vercingtorix/sets/72157604821820277/

Title: Going Home To Little Dixie
Author: Blaine Dixon
Rating: Excellent!
Publisher: blurb.com
Web Page: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/574431
Reviewed by: Rod Clark | View Bio

So this is Oklahoma, “Where the wind goes whistling cross the plain.” Specifically this is “Little Dixie,” that southeast portion of the state comprising seven counties where the culture is southern, the winters are bleak, and the coffee flows like a thin black river over the table tops.

Leafing through Blaine Dixon’s photobook GOING HOME TO LITTLE DIXIE we see stark sunlight falling on the people and the land. Smiles are bright, but shy and guarded. Buildings and machines seem solid and functional. There is something both familiar and a little distancing about these photos. That is fitting perhaps, since Blaine Dixon is, so to speak, a native “once removed.” These photos were taken shortly after Blaine, who was raised in this neighborhood, returned to his family’s farm near the small town of Indianola after a period of thirty seven years in California, thirty of them in San Francisco. What the images reflect is a bit of culture shock on Dixon’s part, and a bit of reticience in the eyes of the people as the camera of the California boy glides over them. When the shutter clicked he was—like most of us, an incomer from one of those outer worlds that trickles into the long flat land through cable tv and the internet.

Around the turn of the new century, Blaine heard his mother was ill, and decided to return home. By the time he got there, his mother was in a nursing home. His stepfather passed away within the next two years. In the meantime, Blaine began the dramatic and interesting shift back to life in “Little Dixie.” He came to re-appreciate the warmth of the local people, and the lower cost of living. He began to attend rodeos and high school basketball games as he had many years before. He also began joining the bull sessions that took place every morning at TJ’s Coffee Shop during the 2004 election. Although he was an active Democrat in a mostly Republican landscape, he managed to make friends at TJs, and began taking photos of fellow patrons. When he got a positive reaction to those pictures, he began to document the larger landscape and develop the collection of images that eventually became GOING HOME TO LITTLE DIXIE.

This is no metropolitan landscape. Here there is more space and fewer people. Heading out of Indianola, the human presence is humbled by the vast ellipse of the prairie. Blaine’s challenge was to somehow capture the feeling of a culture planted in those wide open spaces in tiny snippets of film—and he does. Here the land is raised from flatness by the topography of character. Here are weather-beaten ranchers with pale sky blue eyes, winsome cheerleaders smiling from their pyramids, veterans firing a salute, a young boy peering down the sights of a vintage machine gun, Civil War afficionados re-enacting an ancient battle in unrepentant grey, bronzed oil workers wrestling with rigs, kids mugging for team photos, a pretty store clerk gazing whimsically out of a dim aisle of food, a powwow of beautifully costumed Indians–their faces rich with pride, character and the ancient history of the land, fresh-cheeked children working proudly with animals they have raised themselves, cowboys leaning into the curves of rodeo maneuvers—men and horses flowing in perfect synergy through a chaos of dust, farmers posing by the worn magnificence of their John Deere tractors, stern policemen squinting into the bright sun that falls on their squad cars.

Here too are the places where life unfolds under the western sun: TJ’s and the Harbor Mountain coffee shop, front porches, farm fields, oil wells, rodeos, backyards, and stockyards, churches and court buildings—-all modestly designed and proportioned as if in deference to the big sky overhead.

Blaine Dixon has two other fabulous photobooks, one dedicated to the final days of eccentric writer/artist David Hansen (OFF THE ROAD), and one about the Polk Gulch neighborhood in San Francisco in the eighties at a time when child prostitution was first becoming a serious problem there (POLK GULCH). Those two books were metropolitan in the sense that they were more about people than place—given the social density and ferment a large city provides. In GOING HOME TO LITTLE DIXIE however, the population is tiny, and the land (that vast work of the mysterious creator) is a much greater player in the lives of ordinary people. Here, place has a greater role in the building of character. You can see it particularly in the wonderful faces of the Native Americas at the Eufaula Powwow, a love of country, showing an age-old attachment to the land that predates the rest of us.

Many of the people in “Little Dixie” came up from the south following the horrors of reconstruction after the Civil War. Hence the culture is mostly southern, with all the warmth, faith (and possibly prejudice) that entails. But the land is western, its harsher character becoming evident when the winter winds blow. It cannot have been easy for people from say, Alabama, to come to terms with this savage and beautiful land. Some of the most amazing photos in Blaine’s book show the carnage left by a terrible ice storm that left the area paralyzed in a shroud of gleaming crystal.

The toughness and grace of the land have left their mark on people here. Somehow GOING HOME TO LITTLE DIXIE captures the warmth, the challenges and the immensity of this remarkable place. That’s why you need this book on your coffee table. Buy it now.