Free Spirit: Growing Up On The Road and Off The Grid

In Free Spirit: Growing Up On The Road and Off The Grid, Joshua Safran recalls his childhood spent living literally outside of society -- sometimes with little sustenance or supervision, frequently with no electricity or plumbing for months at a stretch. Shaped and sharpened by the oft misguided tutelage of Claudia, his anti-establishment, hippie-Wiccan-artist mother, Joshua understood from an early age that he and Claudia were different from other families. While most parents enthusiastically sent their kids off to school, Claudia believed schools to be almost as “evil” as corporations, brainwashing kids with lies intended to preserve the status quo and perpetuate poverty, inequality, and injustice. As a result of Claudia’s unremitting determination to defy the system and realize her utopian vision of an honest, communal life, Joshua spent most of his formative years home-schooled or on the move – either studying subjects like philosophy, history, and feminist theory with Claudia or learning basic survival skills from the school of hard knocks. If being forced to endure a slew of ramshackle, makeshift homes and a string of Claudia’s short-lived relationships with unavailable men wasn’t enough for any growing boy, Joshua’s situation took a drastic turn for the worst when his mother fell for and eventually married Leopoldo, a self-professed rebel soldier/poet from El Salvador who claimed to have escaped the death squad in the name of the revolution. Of course, revolution or no, Joshua knew Claudia was smitten with his stories and overcome by his tales of bravery in the face of fascism. If only Leopoldo was half the man Claudia believed him to be and not the hothead loser who blew his family’s last earnings on liquor, drank to excess, and verbally abused and beat on his mother, then maybe Joshua would stop fantasizing of ways to end Leopoldo's one-man regime once and for all.

I had come to know of Free Spirit by way of meeting its author, Joshua Safran, a few years ago in a different, yet related atmosphere. While directing the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, I opened our annual Docs and Dialogue Series with the award-winning documentary Crime After Crime, a film very close to Joshua’s heart. Crime After Crime, which won “Audience Favorite” that festival season, is the story of the battle to free Deborah Peagler, a woman sentenced 25 years-to-life for connection to the murder of Oliver Wilson, her brutally abusive pimp boyfriend.

Film still from Crime After Crime

Joshua Safran and his partner Nadia Costa, two rookie land-use attorneys at the time, took Deborah’s case Pro Bono after Deborah had already served twenty years of her sentence. They believed that with the indisputable evidence existing in her favor, they could easily win Deborah’s freedom in a matter of months. What they were not prepared for was the almost decade-long battle that ensued to give Deborah her life back. What this incredibly powerful documentary revealed was not only the tremendous abuses Deborah and her family suffered at the hands of her former boyfriend, but also the grave injustice the Peagler family endured due to the warped and corrupt practices of America’s criminal justice system.

I invited Joshua to attend the festival and represent Crime After Crime at our screening. His personal recollections of Deborah’s case and his demonstrated commitment to bringing awareness and justice to victims of domestic violence not only moved the audience to tears, but left everyone, including me, with a sense of urgency to help innocent women like Deborah.

Joshua felt empathy towards Deborah Peagler for many reasons. He understood what it was like to feel like a powerless victim. He knew of all the tricks Deborah spoke of when she described how Oliver would treat the wounds he inflicted all over her raw and swollen body. Joshua knew first hand what it was like to watch someone you love be hurt again and again. Maybe, as a child, he wasn’t ready to take on that fight with Leopoldo, but now, with everything he had learned and overcome in his life, he was truly empowered. His fight took the form of helping Deborah Peagler win the battle over injustice, corruption, and demoralization. Through Deborah he would also fight for his mother and for the man he believed himself to be.

Score: I love this book! 4.5/5 stars
Read hardcover book published by Hyperion
Order Free Spirit: Growing Up On The Road and Off The Grid on Amazon here.

Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe

As charmed as he was charming, Sam Wagstaff was a household name in New York City’s exploding art scene throughout the seventies and eighties. In James Crump’s fascinating documentary Black, White and Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, we meet a brilliant and complex personality, who still continues to elude and astonish even those who knew him best.
 
Wagstaff, whose aristocratic beginnings first led him to a career as an ad man, found his true calling while studying art history abroad through New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. No one would have guessed that this handsome and debonair museum curator would soon take the art world by storm, presenting the kind of shows that challenged the status quo and helped to establish the careers of numerous unknown artists. Perhaps even more remarkable, is while critics continued to overlook photography as a relevant, credible art form, Wagstaff developed a growing affection for what soon became one of his two main obsessions: collecting photographs (the other, of course, being Robert Mapplethorpe). Realizing his infatuation with photography could not be satiated by his curatorial work alone, Wagstaff threw himself into collecting -- especially anonymous old snapshots, of which he, along with his friends Robert and Patti (Smith), bought up by the dozens. 

Sam, Robert, and Patti, having more than their love of photography in common, became great friends, with Sam and Robert’s relationship quickly evolving into that of mentor and protégé -- two rarefied eyes, awakened by mutual lust and desire for art and one another. 

Both born on November 4^th, exactly 25 years apart, Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe were perfect compliments for each other. Mapplethorpe, the poor punk artist raised in blue-collar Queens, would no doubt benefit from the support and guidance bestowed by his wealthy benefactor, Wagstaff, who at once had the means and the power to launch his career. At the same time, Mapplethorpe was Wagstaff’s Virgil, his guide through the underworld. With Mapplethorpe by his side, Wagstaff was no longer afraid to unleash the power and prowess of his own sexuality, which for years had lay dormant and unhinged.

Absorbing and informative, Black White + Gray seduced me with its abundance of personal anecdotes and stunning array of imagery from Wagstaff’s extensive collection of photographic prints. The interview with rock legend and punk poet Patti Smith, former lover of Mapplethorpe’s, long-time subject and muse, and his roommate at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, brought just the right touch of tenderness and warmth to a documentary filled with otherwise, pragmatic and (in a few cases) pointed commentary from art world luminaries and Wagstaff historians. 

In 1984, three years before Wagstaff would die of AIDS (and five years before the disease would also claim Mapplethorpe's life), Wagstaff sold what would be known as the world’s most valuable collection of photographs to the J. Paul Getty Museum for $5 million, and pursued his final passion, collecting American silver.

Always a bit mysterious and unknowable, Sam Wagstaff should not be forgotten, especially not by any serious student of art history or photography. His influence not only lives on through the works of Robert Mapplethorpe, but also through the way in which we regard photography today -- an art form whose future is always evolving and teaching us new things about our world.

Score: 3.75/5 stars
Watched on Netflix
Watch Black, White and Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe on Netflix or buy on Amazon here. 

The message is the media.

The next medium, whatever it is—it may be the extension of consciousness—will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual's encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.
-- Marshall McLuhan, 1962

It took me years to succumb to that nagging feeling that I was actually missing something. 

When I first took notice of how intensely television dominated the cacophony of conversations around me, I have to admit I was a little proud of my indifference. While I still owned a 20" Panasonic, I turned it on only in conjunction with my DVD player. I could attribute this habit to the person I thought I was in my twenties-- a would be artist-writer-filmmaker (dilettante) with a penchant for collecting books, reading books, and then reading about the books I still have not read (poseur). Basically, all talk and no game. All I knew was I wanted to be somebody, and since I could never focus on just one thing to be, I'll just refer to the someone I dreamed of being as a fucking awesome artist-- the kind worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Patti Smith, Bob Fosse, or Stanley Kubrick. I knew that if I was ever going to make something of myself, I could not spend my free time sitting around staring at a television set like some modern day plebeian.

Then, between my twenties and thirties, something revolutionary happened: TV changed in two wonderful ways:

1. TV is no longer static. I no longer have to sit idle and motionless to enjoy it. TV is now available through various media platforms online and I can access exactly the show I want to see by hitting just a few buttons on my smart phone. Now, when I want to catch the next episode of Louie, I can grab my headphones, head to the gym and work out while sweating through two or three episodes of what I deem one of the better comedies on television. 

2. TV is speaking a new language. In the past decade or so, television producers have begun to take greater risks on subject matter, characters, writing styles, even the kind of messages being put out there. Television is continually growing more honest, and dare I say, more real. In other words, more interesting and worthy of my time. Through this one significant transformation, those connected, and those in the know through second-hand knowledge, are dealing with an entirely different beast of prey.  

Although for years I missed out on many fascinating discussions predicting the last episode of LOST (which I still do not know an iota about) and Don Draper's dark, elusive past (which weirdly I do know a little about since watching seven episodes of season one and pretty much all of the second to last season (don't ask)), I now have access to these shows and a host of others. In today's mediated universe, if I want to devote time to watch a series from beginning to end, I can do so at my own leisure, in whatever connected setting I please.
 
So is this an improvement over the past? I don't know, but it sure seems to be. At least if quizzed on my knowledge of current pop culture, I now have seen the shows Rome, Girls, Orange is the New Black, House of Cards and Louie. Perhaps one day, I'll be able to participate in a conversation over the water cooler. For now, I am perfectly content watching on my own terms, alone or with friends. I'm glad I've eased up on television. Now if I could only ease up on myself-- but that's an entirely different beast of a blog post.