Category: Projects

by Steve Rockwell

The mythic story of the seven sleepers goes back almost two thousand years. Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon was somehow compelled to include it in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He begins, “Among the insipid legends of ecclesiastical history, I am tempted to distinguish the memorable tale of the Seven Sleepers…” In his sarcastic dismissal of it as fable, he is obviously captured and fascinated by it. He gets into the weeds of it – seven Christian youths of Ephesus fleeing the persecution of Emperor Decius and concealing themselves in a mountain cave. The entrance is then sealed with stones, and they fall into a miraculous sleep lasting 187 years.

The sleeping part in itself doesn’t make the story. Believing that they had only slept for a few hours, the sleepers wake up to a completely transformed world. When one of them, Jamblichus, goes into Ephesus to buy bread, the merchant mistakes his ancient coin for buried treasure. They had fallen asleep persecuted, but wake up in a world where Christianity is now triumphant.

Entwined within Granary Lake lore and its naming, are seven actual sleepers. As reported in the Sault Daily Star December 24, 1938 edition, Mrs. Nelson Mongraln (Elizabeth Boyer) recounts: “In 1880 he (Mr. Murray, a lumber contractor) had some camps at Granary Lake. That year frost came early, November 1. The river was freezing over and the oats and provisions had to be taken in. My brothers, the Boyer boys, seven of them, loaded the scow and started up the river and were all day going. At nightfall they landed and had only unloaded the oats which they piled in a building which served as a warehouse and halfway house.”

“After their evening meal they made a bed alongside the pile of oats. During the night in some mysterious way one of the bags broke open and after a time the pile collapsed and covered the sleeping men suffocating them. Mr. Murray, their boss, discovered them eight days later.”

Magog Lake in Blind River, Ontario had been on maps since 1916. Locals, however, called it Granary Lake, which is now its official name. After my parents built their “camp” there in the late 70’s, I made annual summer visits there from Toronto. The Magog name in Biblical history goes back to Noah and the Flood. Magog was one of the seven sons of Japheth, making him Noah’s grandson. The “seven sons mythology” seems to be baked indelibly into this particular Blind River lake.

The “Seven Sleepers” migrate through the Koran in its eighteenth surah, Al-Kahf (“The Cave”) and to Scandinavia, where Gibbon makes a specific historical reference again: “Some vestiges of a similar tradition have been discovered in the remote extremities of Scandinavia.” In an oddly poetic allusion to the seven Boyer brothers of Blind River, he quotes Paul the Deacon, who wrote in the late eighth century: “in a cavern, under a rock, on the shore of the ocean, the Seven Sleepers of the North…”

When the naming of the lake from Magog to Granary was made official recently, I retained a nagging suspicion that the Magog appellation had been discarded due to its uncomfortable association. Then Magog Lake is essentially at the precise center of the “Z” Matinenda geological formation that supplied the uranium. That, in turn, fuelled the atomic and hydrogen bombs during the Cold War, heightening the possibility of nuclear annihilation.

In the Book of Revelations, Magog becomes one of the instigators of the Battle of Armageddon. After Christ’s thousand-year reign, Satan is released and goes out: “to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle…” It’s the final uprising before the Last Judgment, and the end of the world as we know it.

The naming of Blind River itself is worthy of note. To the indigenous peoples of Lake Huron’s north shore, its mouth was invisible to the eye, therefore “blind.” There is a direct Blind River connection to Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). The story itself derives from a real 1952 murder at the Lumberjack Tavern in Big Bay, Michigan. In the film, the murdered man, who is the pivot and subject of the trial, is never shown. We don’t even see a photo of him. To the viewer, Barney Quill from Blind River is an unseen presence. His daughter, Mary Pilant, becomes the visible character, who provides the crucial evidence to seal the outcome of the trial.

The legendary breakdown of Neil Young’s beloved hearse, “Mort” (Mortimer Hearseburg), in Blind River, Ontario, is part of rock history folklore. It served as the direct inspiration for his classic 1976 song, “Long May You Run.” The song famously claims, “Well, it was back in Blind River, in 1962, when I last saw you alive.” The actual incident occurred in June 1965. Young later admitted he altered the year in the lyrics to fit the rhythm and meter of the melody.

In the summer of 1965, a 19-year-old Neil Young left Fort William (now Thunder Bay). He piled a few fellow musicians and a motorcycle into the back of Mort, a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse, and took off for Sudbury and Toronto. Roughly halfway through the trip, near the town of Blind River, the journey came to a halt. Young had missed a shift on the manual transmission while taking a hill too fast, causing the transmission to overheat and implode. The car was a total loss and they were out of money. From Blind River, he sent a brief postcard to his mother, Rassy, writing: “Dear Rassy. Please cancel the insurance as Mort is dead.”

by Steve Rockwell

Author Jerzy Kosiński’s end-of-life note was short and to the point: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call the time Eternity.” Hemisphere House in New York City became the setting for Kosiński’s final, increasingly difficult years. On May 3, 1991, he died by suicide in his West 57th Street apartment bathroom, while his wife slept. Subsequently, she discovered him naked in a half-filled bathtub with a plastic bag tied around his head.

I attended Kosiński’s 1987 Toronto lecture, at the end of which he quite eagerly consented to take part in my Pick a Number from 1 to 99 project. At the corner of Hazelton and Yorkville streets, within a week or so after the talk, a chance encounter with the author took place. Information about a future exhibition possibility of my “Numbers,” was conveyed. At the point where Kosinski was handing me his business card, however, a female companion arrived with a bulky shopping bag. Popping the trunk of the parked car, she urged, “Come on, Jerzy. We gotta go!”

A memorable part of Kosiński’s Being There talk, was learning about Peter Sellers’ absolute obsession with wanting to play Chauncey Gardiner in the film of Kosiński’s book. As a contrast to Clouseau‘s voices, disguises, and physical comedy, his Being There character became a suppression of performance – two extremes of the same actor. The Clouseau character had evolved considerably. Initially, in the 1963 Pink Panther, he was not intended to dominate the film. David Niven’s jewel thief, Sir Charles Lytton, was closer to the central figure. Sellers’ performance, however, was so distinctive that Clouseau effectively took over the series.

Excerpts of Kosiński’s Toronto talk were preserved by Harper’s Magazine under the title, “Cake Killer.” Here the author makes the point that modern culture aggressively forces the writer out from behind his books into the predatory glare of public celebrity. Annie Leibovitz photographed him as a shirtless polo player for the cover of New York Times Magazine. The result: “Once a novelist is portrayed half-naked, as I was, on the cover of a magazine, his profile clearly changes.” They lose their literary uniqueness, making them “no different than any public figure.”

Kosiński considered himself an autofiction writer, a literary genre that blends autobiography (factual life history) and fiction. The author of a memoir is expected not to lie. With autofiction, the reader understands that the author will make things up for artistic effect. It’s also a given that our memories are unreliable. Personally, I had been cautious and suspicious of the autofiction genre. One of the objectives of my 1987 Pick a Number art project, was to clearly separate the art from the factual with a “signed and dated agreement.”

“Who Killed Jerzy Kosiński?” was a 2023 Vanity Fair article by Wayne Lawson. Lawson argues that Kosiński’s suicide cannot be understood separately from the public destruction of his identity as a writer. To this he adds: serious physical illness, fear of cognitive decline, and profound depression. The larger question might be: Did Jerzy Kosiński die partly because the public could no longer distinguish the man from the mythology he had created around himself?

Is it far fetched to consider lingering survivor guilt from 1969? Jerzy Kosiński has stated that he received an invitation to visit Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate at Cielo Drive on the night of the Manson murders. Kosiński and Roman Polanski had known one another since their youth in Poland and had remained connected after both achieved international success. He had received a letter from Wojciech (Voytek) Frykowski and Abigail Folger while travelling in Europe, with plans for the Kosińskis eventually to meet the group in Los Angeles.

On the night of Friday, August 8, 1969, Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski and Jay Sebring were murdered at 10050 Cielo Drive. An airline baggage mix-up had diverted Kosiński and Kiki’s luggage while returning from Europe. The delay prevented them from continuing to Los Angeles as planned. Polanski, in his 1984 autobiography, denied that Kosiński had been invited to the house that night. Yet, a friend of Kosiński later wrote to The New York Times asserting that he had seen an invitation addressed to Kosiński. In any case, Polanski himself had been away in London at the time.

Film maker Peter Greenaway released Drowning by Numbers in 1988. The film is structured around three drowning-murders with a hidden conceptual counting out from 1 to 100. On May 2, 1991, the night before his death, Kosiński went to dinner and then a viewing of Drowning by Numbers with Polish jazz singer Urszula Dudziak. He died the following morning, in the bathtub of his Hemisphere House apartment.

by Steve Rockwell

In 1940 Murray Burnett, co-wrote Everybody Comes to Rick’s with Joan Alison. The play, though not produced, served as a model for Rick’s Café in the story that became Casablanca. Rick’s Café had not been a complete screenwriter invention. A few years prior, Burnett and his wife had stumbled on a café in the south of France. The experience stayed with them. Its mixture of refugees, expatriates, and assorted adventurers, mingling in the shadow of an impending war, had made the moment unforgettable.

When released in 1942, Casablanca became one of the most influential films in Hollywood history. Somehow, popular entertainment, political drama, and romance, molded into something durable that withstood the test of time. Casablanca became art without announcing itself as “art.”

La Belle Aurore, the café that Burnett experienced in 1938 in the south of France, may have been just one of many potential models for Rick’s Café. It has been suggested that the American Bar at Hotel Eggers in Gothenburg, Sweden, might also have fit the bill. The hotel itself was built in 1859, making it one of the oldest continuously-operating hotels in Europe. Their American Bar was completed in 1884, predating the fictional Rick’s Café Américain of Casablanca by over 60 years.

In 1942, Hotel Eggers hosted a similar cast of wartime characters. Already, by the 1890s, besides its American Bar and restaurant, they had the Moriska Café – Moorish, Moroccan atmosphere of their own. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine is neither the conventional romantic hero nor the traditional action hero. Though his shell of tough guy cynicism eventually breaks, his public declaration of “neutrality” is clear, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” At Hotel Eggers the “tough guy” had been Ebba Eggers. In 1942 at her husband Axel’s passing, she went from liquor cashier at the American Bar to full operational management and owner. By reputation, she ran the “velvet” establishment with an iron hand.

Neutrality at Eggers was strictly enforced by the Swedish Secret Service. While a British naval attaché might be sipping a dry martini at one counter, a Nazi trade delegate might be sitting in the adjacent velvet booth. At Rick’s Café, these bristling edges would have been smoothed by Sam’s piano and song, anchoring the room emotionally. Played by Dooley Wilson, he is one of the film’s most important supporting characters.

Eggers had an equally legendary musical connection, only real. Opera tenor Jussi Björling made the American Bar at Eggers his personal playground. While spies were mapping out shipping lanes in the corners, Björling was unwinding at the bar, holding court with admirers. He had made this his sanctuary away from an exhausting global performance schedule. Because of its superb acoustics, it had to be Room 136, on the first floor. With its balcony overlooking Drottningtorget, the door ajar, he loved to practice the scales. Björling had become an international star after performances in Vienna. The Metropolitan Opera in New York became his principal international stage.

Depending on its use, something no larger than the olive in a martini, became a focal point in the war. Gothenburg SKF was the world’s leading manufacture of these parts, and Hotel Eggers sat just 78 steps from the Gothenburg Central Station. Its location was ideal for surveillance. The intelligence battleground centred on a component vital to both the Nazi Luftwaffe and and Allied aircraft production – ball bearings.

Code-named by MI6 as Operation Bridford, the brains behind it had been George Binney. Its objective was simple – bring ball bearings, and other strategic materials to Britain. Binney modified a fleet of high-speed Motor Gun Boats, and disguised them as civilian merchant vessels. Gay Viking was the first to pierce the German blockade, supplying 40 tons of high-grade ball bearings and specialized machine tools.

Ebba’s tenure at Hotel Eggers, however, turned out to be short-lived. On February 12, 1948, she was a passenger aboard the Danish Air Lines DC-3 Sejr Viking, flying from Copenhagen to Zürich with a planned stop at Frankfurt. The aircraft crashed near Ulrichstein, Germany. Ebba was among those killed. Her death brought the Eggers family era of the hotel to an end.

Just three years after the tragedy in 1951, our family arrived in Gothenburg, Sweden. Travelling as we had by rail from Stockholm, in just 78 steps we had a temporary home in a white hotel in the shape of a square with a courtyard. As a five-year-old by the window, after endless hours facing the interior, this particular feature of Hotel Eggers as a designed space, etched into my mind permanently.

Later in life, these early reflections laid the groundwork for a series of fabricated panels. Painted white and modelled after the hotel structure, each 32 x 32 inch square had an 1/8″ cut to define a border and a 24 x 24 inch interior “courtyard.” Inspired by 175 visits to gallery spaces in Europe and North America, the “meditations” had begun at the Bruno Bischofberger Gallery in Zürich, Switzerland. My project ended in Los Angeles, California at the Zero One Gallery in 1997. The Zürich business that Ebba Eggers had intended in 1948 had been left for future fulfillment.

by Steve Rockwell

It’s a joke readymade. My painting of Marcel Marceau was “abandoned” on Melrose Avenue on April 1, 1994 in Los Angeles. Yes, Mime on Melrose had been a sight gag – a “silent” French actor trapped within a canvas in Hollywood, where no one could hear him scream. Of course, revenge would come in the form of five Oscars in 2011 at the 84th Academy Awards.

The Artist became the first silent film, to win best picture since Wings in 1929. The Michel Hazenavicius film pulled off a historic sweep, Jean Dujardin, being the first French actor ever to win the category. So, there! To rub it in, directing, score, and costume took the remaining Oscars.

My own bias for the visual sense developed when the world fell silent as a child. When I lost my hearing due to enlarged adenoids, I compensated by just looking harder. Images of the operation itself, as a five-year-old, are still quite clear: arms being strapped to the chair, an anesthesia mask much like a small lamp shade raised to my face – then coming to, seeing the doctor waving surgical tweezers with some whitish tissue.

In the field of philosophy, the cone of “silence” seemed to have fallen over one particular thinker. Apparently, Friedrich Nietzsche had been fearful. In a confession to a friend, even the mere mention of this individual’s name publicly, might have resulted in a charge of plagiarism against Nietzsche. Karl Marx took the opposite approach. Together with Engels, they spent a year writing a 500 page attack-book in an effort to silence him. One of the most obsessive, explosive feuds in the history of political theory was the result.

Marcel Duchamp had called “Philosopher X” the primary intellectual influence on his entire artistic output. Here he found the catalyst for his break from conventional painting and subsequent invention of the ready-made. “X” argued that State, Religion, Humanity, Morality, and Truth are “spooks,” they being fixed ideas employed to subjugate the individual ego. Applied to the art world, Art, Taste, and Genius are “social spooks,” that required systematic demolition. In practice, a state of personal autonomy might be achieved through absolute indifference to societal expectations.

Readers of philosophy would recognize the mystery thinker as Max Stirner. At the core, Stirner rejected authority in any form. These illusions, mental ghosts, or “spooks,” having been banished, a “creative nothing” was possible. The ego now free from all ideologies, situated in a state of total intellectual neutrality – a clean slate. Stirner’s 1844, The Ego and Its Own, was the career-defining work that Duchamp discovered while staying in Munich around 1912.

The concept of a societal clean slate has a precedent in the French Revolution, 1793 being “Year One.” With history erased, time reset, the birth of a new world could now be governed strictly by reason. Churches across France were stripped of religious imagery, now dubbed “Temples of Reason.” Opera actress, Sophie Momoro, portrayed the Goddess of Reason in the newly-minted Festival of Reason at the Notre-Dame Cathedral.

There are thinkers, and there are doers. To implement the wiping of the cultural slate, doers are required. The tool, during the Reign of Terror, became the guillotine – a humane, rational instrument of social progress, egalitarian and swift. Another “Year Zero” was attempted in Cambodia. Somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million people died in the Killing Fields during Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979). Coming from a wealthy background, Pol Pot was educated in France, but had been a mediocre student. He had a political awakening that led him to co-found the Marxist Circle and join the French Communist Party.

During the Pol Pot regime, 1976 was the transitional year when the Khmer Rouge officially codified their radical society. Cambodia had now ceased to exist by name, replaced by a totalitarian agrarian slave-state. On January 5 of that year, the Democratic Kampuchea abolished all private property, cancelled the national currency, outlawed all religions, and stripped away basic human rights. Up until 1976 the public had not formally known who was running the country.

In 1976 Silent Movie is released. Mel Brooks played Mel Funn, a once-successful Hollywood director attempting a comeback. He persuaded a failing studio to finance an extraordinary project: a full-length silent movie. To make his imaginary film commercially irresistible, Funn tried to recruit major stars. Brooks therefore turned the film into a parade of contemporary celebrity cameos: Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, James Caan, and Marcel Marceau. They appeared essentially as themselves.

The principal theatrical poster was illustrated by John Alvin, whose design turns Brooks into a comic silent-film hero, with the huge three-dimensional SILENT MOVIE title and Brooks making the classic “shhh” gesture.

The joke is that Silent Movie itself is essentially a silent film: without spoken dialogue, communication relies on physical performance, title cards, music, and sound effects. The single exception is Marcel Marceau uttering the film’s only audible word. – NON!