Review, Laura Hawbaker

A white-collared office employee awakens everyday to the blathering beep of his alarm clock and drags himself to work. He guzzles his coffee the way his SUV guzzles gas. He is tethered to a nagging wife, bratty children, a mortgage, bills. He might gaze at his pristine green lawn and white picket fence and yearn in his poor, battered heart to leave it all. To toss all that responsibility to the wind, discard everything that anchors him, and set sail to freedom.

This faceless corporate drone might examine the life choices of Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz with wide-eyed wonder. Awe. Respect. Doc Paskowitz left a high-paying medical gig, a powerful position as the President of the Medical Association of Hawaii and the prospect of becoming governor. Left it all to become a bohemian beach bum, surfing the country’s waves and living a holistic life with his family, completely off-the-grid. The Paskowitzs have been labeled the “first family of surfing,” and the Doc himself called a “prophet,” a new-age guru, a man of vision.

Or, maybe, Doc Paskowitz is just a run of the mill nutcase.

Doug Pray, who has proven his affinity for American countercultures in his previous films “Red Diaper Baby” (graffiti artists), “Infamy” (grunge music), and “Hype!” (DJs), turns his cinematic lens to surfers in this latest project, “Surfwise.” Pray found documentary gold in the Paskowitz family and the man at the helm, Doc Dorian. The Doc, now in his 80s but still fit as an ox, was one of surfing’s first American advocates and is a holistic health extremist. He believes the only way to live life is to live it as nature intended: unattached to the physical world, outside the political system and free from the foibles of human society.

The Doc had nine children with his Mexican-Indian, opera singing third wife, Juliette. Throughout the sixties and seventies, Juliette and the Doc traveled the country in a beat-up RV, popping out babies and surfing. That was it. No mortgage. No bills. No material possessions. No school. Just an endless stretch of road and sea. “I wasn’t an avant-guard intellectual radical,” says the Doc. “I just wanted my kids around me, surfing with me, and school be damned.”

It’s like something out of a hippie dream, and for the first half of the film, Pray gleefully indulges the fantasy of the idea. Using photomontages and archived footage accompanied by a whimsical soundtrack, Pray paints a pristine picture of beach life. The nine children (brothers David, Jonathan, Abraham, Israel, Moses, Adam, Salvador and Joshua, and the only sister, Navah) slept together like a huddle of puppies on the floor and in the bunks of the 20-foot RV, then were set loose every morning to surf the waves. Half naked, half-fed, and half-wild, “we were like monkeys in a little monkey cage,” recalls Navah.

It is the second half of the film, when the dream is undone by the problematic reality of modern life that “Surfwise” begins to finally delve into some of the wisdom alluded to in the title. The children, having grown up and set out into the world, find out modern society wants little to do with anyone lacking even a preliminary education. “My dad trained me to be one of three things: a surfer, a bum, or a rock star,” admits Adam, who went on to do the latter as the lead singer of the 90s rock band, The Flys.

There commenced a brief boom when, as Navah describes it, the brothers went crazy with something akin to gold fever. All the materialism the Paskowitzs had been denied in their childhood reared its ugly head full force: surfing championships, endorsement deals, clothing lines, and living a vice-ridden life, followed by the inevitable crash and burn. The family fell apart and certain brothers were ostracized, such as David, the eldest, who has lived in estrangement from the Paskowitzs for the last ten years.

Adam complains about playing over 500 rock gigs in seedy venues. “You always end up in a room with a lot of stickers. Sometimes, I wish I’d been a doctor like my dad, but [with me] not going to school…” he drifts off, his shoulders hunched and face haggard. Another brother says he missed many opportunities for achievement because “I’m a Paskowitz. I’m not smart enough in the ways of the wicked.”

“My kids didn’t find out for themselves the difference between education and knowledge,” says the Stanford-educated Doc, clearly bristled when Pray questions his decision to keep the Paskowitz children out of school. “Lots of people go to college. Why don’t you film them? Why do you care about a bunch of ignoramuses and come to film us?”

Therein lies one of the most intriguing points of the entire film. Despite and because of their extremist, alternative lifestyle, the Paskowitz family attained an aura of legend, a place in subculture history. This bohemian story of wild, rabid surf children crammed into a beach-blasted RV is so interesting to the humdrum citizens of average America, that is spawned its own documentary.

Descriptive text, in participants’ own words, follows each image.

Left: One is my mother’s father’s yellow coffee pot. I’ve brought it with me because it is truly a handed-down domestic item that my grandfather used daily, but also because the design is beautiful and a collector’s item today. - Malin Abrahamsson

Right: The image is of my mother’s mother’s hand-woven kitchen towels. They’ve followed me to NY for similar reasons as my grandfather’s coffee pot; she not only hand made these towels but she also used them in her home and then passed them on to my mother. I use them in my home myself because they’re beautiful and also because my grandmother’s initials are the same as both my mother’s and my own: MA. - Malin Abrahamsson

Left: Three passports, two expired and one valid, the only remaining belongings from my homeland. Vintage Japanese silk, a gift from my friend, makes me reminisce about my country once was and long gone now, like myself. - Hiroshi Kumagai

Right: it’s a picture of my architectural tools. One is to brush off the dust and the other is to measure. they are both very portable and I have been carrying these two items from places to places I explored. They are in a way my mojo. Lucky charm for my architectural work. - Jee Hoon Stark

Left: What you see on the photo is my ‘Dirndl’. That is the traditional Bavarian (South German State I am from) dress for women. I took it to New York, Hawaii and Korea with me. I never wore it in any of these places but it is nice to have it with me. - Juliane Eirich

Right: My grandma was a self taught artist, born in China and emigrated to Malaysia when she was 10 years old. This projector was one of her many medium used to preserve our childhood memories.. she taught me I can be anything I want if I have the will. - Penny Yuen

The clover lawn shimmered with sunlight where the boy played that September afternoon. Delighted by the intricacies of his own imagination there in the backyard, the boy stationed troops of plastic military figures at various positions within the waist-high jungle of grass. One by one, they’d fall down under the pressure of a thumb or forefinger, dead little soldiers.

So lost was the boy in his own little world, he couldn’t hear the family dog scratching at the door on the side of the house, yearning to be let loose on the neighborhood. And he couldn’t hear the hiss of strapping tape, and the lumbering thumps as his mother piled boxes upon boxes in the entryway of their house.

Nor could he hear the goings-on inside the home across the back fence, that of the neighbors from the street behind. A desperate junkie with a prison record and oily black hair tied into a ponytail had broken into that home, surprised the young pregnant woman washing dishes in the kitchen sink, and—out of lust or fear or power—grabbed her and pulled her to his groin. Then he withdrew a stiletto knife from his pocket and held it to her throat.

What the assailant did next isn’t clear. Her dress was likely torn, his zipper likely undone; she was likely pulled further to his groin.

All that’s known is that the woman’s husband, a young cardiac surgeon at the local hospital, returned earlier than usual that day. The husband was surprised to see the front door to his home wide open, surprised to see the shoddy van parked along the curb. He sensed something wasn’t right, and bravely, but stealthily, entered his own home.

The sound of his terrified wife, then the horrible vision of what would soon come. With only adrenaline as his ammunition, the husband bolted for the attacker, grabbing the man’s wrist with one hand, enveloping his face with the other. The husband wrestled the knife away and plunged it effortlessly into the intruder’s chest, with the same ease and precision he used when performing open-heart surgery on patients. Blood pooled over the man’s t-shirt and formed in patterns, like continents displayed on a map. The husband withdrew the knife but held it steady, and his pregnant wife screamed so loud birds flew off telephone wires.

But not loud enough to stir the boy across their backyard fence. He was still enthralled in his own little war games.

The wounded intruder fled out the backdoor and hopped the fence, landing in a patch of cacti. Soaked in blood and fear, he fell to his knees, and reached out, every finger writhing like tentacles of an octopus drifting in the current. The boy actually looked up and his eyes met those of the bloody visitor who’d just dropped in. And when the man could no longer meet his stare, the boy went back to business. Back to his toy soldiers again.

Tout doucement, tu prends ma main,
I don’t like it when my fingers are cold,
Cherie, t’as aucune chance.
Entangled between yours, my muscles are tense.

Je soupire, en esperant que tu ne devines pas,
A run would be difficult, and octaves impossible,
Tu te contentes quand meme que je suis venue.
I could force them into a chord or two.

Tu m’embrasses, une, deux, trois fois,
Paralysed now, they are numb to the pain,
Je m’abandonne a toi par politesse.
I surrendered their warmth, what else?

Je m’oublie; il ne peut jamais savoir.
Next time, I’ll just wear gloves.

2007, rabbit, graphite on found paper, 68″x78″

I worked on ‘rabbit’ for about nine months, starting in January of 2007 and finishing this December.

‘rabbit’ was a constant work in progress, accompanying me in the studio for all but three months of the year, when I was at residencies or on a cross-country roadtrip. I have been working with imagery of rabbits for a few years now, as I’m not only interested in their metaphorical potential for sexuality but also because the Norwegian side of my family is nicknamed “the rabbit clan”.

‘rabbit’ is a really important transition piece for me, bridging the small and intimate drawings I had previously been doing, with the larger pieces I am doing now. With the series, ‘maladies of memory’, I was working with extremely pristine, large expanses of white paper with tiny renderings of meticulously drawn imagery. Tiring of the control I was exerting over the cleanliness of the paper and the comfortable phenomenolgical relationship of the viewer with the image, I decided to work on a found piece of paper with a larger than life rabbit. I wanted to see how the viewer’s experience with the animal would change along with an exponential change in scale.

‘rabbit’ will be shown at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts in January, as part of the Fine Arts Work Center Invitational show.

Bursting out of a dim, cold room at one end of the corridor popped a scrawny little boy, no pants, sitting on a potty and moving forward by scraping the porcelain container across the invisible grit on the floor.  Tiny white hands gripped the dirty, chipped sides for support, bony knees, sinewy flanks, and sharp elbows pumped to propel him anxiously.  His amber, sunflower face screamed in delight, hard syllables of k’s and t’s bouncing around d’s and long, deep vowels embedded in zh’s.  Remote and tentative, we did not understand the words or actions.  We were strangers, estranged; we were the foreign element introduced into a little garden of life, this apparently insignificant children’s home in a seemingly inconsequential country in a frigidly-remote corner of north-eastern Europe.

Pot second emerged, supporting another little bare bottom, and then another, a chorus of sing-song eastern European words lisping inflected sounds jumping from one dingy dark wall to another in the narrow, unheated gloom.  At our feet lay a field of wildflower forest creatures.  We stood mute, cornered and confused, unsure and waiting, indecisive.  More children followed, some walking without pants, creating an orchestra of chaotic cacophony, hungry for attention and treats, their round bright faces staring up at us like tiny, pale-frosty moons with blue eyes.  In this ritual, we entered as stiffly-apprehensive gods; emboldened spirits, they stirred in us heaving emotions.  Bend down and pick up one and then another and rub their innocent-scented flowery-creature faces into your own.

Timid, we followed a worker to a brightly-lit adjacent room.  Empty—but no: chaos of stumbling perceptions, a little girl rushing toward us murmuring mama.  Small creature, with hair like a rosebud and ladybug face, a forest-spirit who had waited so she could emerge from her rook.  Frowzy, light-colored hair cut petal-short; cold red-speckled alabaster cheeks.  Uneasy eagerness and restive anger coruscated in her blue-gray eyes.  The lithe body appeared chunky, layered under tattered patches of pied leggings and sweaters, someone else’s old clothes.  Americans would be surprised to see such a waif, a Dickensian character grubbing life in a distant cobblestone past. Aura of the unfamiliar was exuded.  The smell of coarse, brown soap.  Yet what pleasure to catch the girl with outstretched arms—to collect her presence into one’s own bodily space, to touch the fair skin of her face with one’s chapped lips, to hug her tiny form, to press gently one’s biceps against her shoulders and back in this first organic embrace.  A natural feeling, a comfortable fit into the form of one’s body and soul.

Little arms and fists suddenly fluttered in the space around.  Yelling and screaming in a child’s language (vaikų kalba), and we fended off our attackers by clutching possessions, secreting them within pockets in bulky winter clothing, shouting mano, mine.  Hard candy is proffered to stall aggressive behavior.  Flashes of confused excitement.  Joy as if in a woodland cottage of childish bliss—but edges of this delightful bright spot loomed, a real shadow of darkness underlining the children’s eyes.  Haunting ghosts. One girl stared at me in greedy wonder, love in need.

Hungry tap of spoons dug and scraped in bowls for any remnant of košė; tiny hands lifted, like pagans in ritual form, bowls for tongues to lick out the invisible grainy film of leftover porridge.  How to conjure and multiply the loaves.  We had entered the Lithuanian wood; now what?  Our daughter, by virtue of our presence, received a second bowl.  Hunched at a little table with voracious mates, disarrayed, she spooned mush in her quick mouth.  Fury was in her eyes while her free arm (fist clenched) protected that second bowl of kasha.  Extraordinary extra, papildomas.  Knife-blade split a rather ordinary, barrel-bruised apple.  Halving of the blood-red whole; seeds and fruit exposed; robust hands of the dark-browed worker touch Kucia’s tiny fingertips as the harvest is handed down.  Caravaggio’s wounded Christ lifted down from the cross.

Peer over the end of the earth.  Narrow room (corridor of abyss) lined with nothing more than tiny beds side-by-side, breathing in consanguine unison.  Skinny, deprived legs could twist in-between, and no others.  Strange stillness; unsettling order.  Coldest room.  Together yet solitary confinement.  Veritable corpus callosum: demarcation of left from right, dark from light, east from west, a callous sliver of body bodiless; paradox of connected separation, common boundary where only edges touch.  Dilapidated door-less armoire shelved stiffly-silenced teddy bears, solitude’s recompense.  Ragged toy to clutch during the icy night-void.  Sadness recognized.  Stand by, grief and alienation.

Departure.  Unable to communicate, the parting is made, leaving a part of her there, while she moved with us gracefully and willingly but yet was not part of us, was in some way, beyond the understanding of others, forever, separate.  Little compact world of broken toys and antiseptic smells, lumpy porridge and cold baths, chipped rows of cubbyholes and broken pegs for tattered leggings and worn coats, all familiar, to be all forgotten.  Quietly and softly, simply the slow sound of heavy winter shoes on linoleum floor, the wooly fluster of coats, mittens, caps, and scarves.  Woolen fibers from our three coats float and join.  Absence becomes presence.

Handrail gripped.  Moment of departure constituted and consummated, her loss, her separation, her parting.  She paused momentarily with head bent forward, desiring the dream of her own room and toys, supplied to her in ample photographs and preparatory explanations, but with a tentative withdrawal, courageously without looking back, her little heart beat fast and in some unconscious archetypal way realized that by going to the base of the steps and outside the door she would leave her homeland (tėvynė) and friends (draugai).  For good.  Here, not in the court, we became her true parents, tėvai, holding her tiny-stout hands, rankos, leading her trembling-sure body.  Comfort her.

Home.  Three weary mannequins, estranged.  Cold rooms quiet from chilly dormancy.  Old parquet floors creak aloud from weeks’ silence.  Sleepy air settled by frost rolls unsure.  Imagine her early days.  She awakens.  Maybe her room (maybe the house) yields a semblance of familiarity.  Yesterday’s curtains and walls, same as last week’s.  Reciprocate the feeling warmth of the wooden floors.  Saturday, play with stuffed animals, toy horses, or dog figurines.  We in the downstairs smile to hear her movements.  Tiny plastic hooves prance on the wooden floor-boards; little voice acts out neighs and barks.  Sounds of nature become her, play chatter a rocky brook of long Lithuanian riffs naturally onomatopoeic, punctuated by tiny blurts of new-found English.  Speak to Kucia about breakfast; she stares blankly.  Attempt Lithuanian and extrude pusryčiai.  Still, nothing.  Cutely her tiny voice, smiling.  How do we reach across?

Enter her warm room, world in miniature, soft and fuzzy haven where unarmored child and man, daughter and father, become playmates, hands animating toy caricatures of dogs and horses.  Here a stable with Pinto, conversing with wild horses in neighs while dogs romp and bark.  Here a pack of wolves, threatening the safety of the stable, but then white-knight Balto intervenes to rescue.  Heroics.  Variations of this game: lost child (or dog or cat) who must be found by her parents.  Mysterious tales such as Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty penetrate Kucia’s being, analogies she draws intuitively.  Her primary hero, Peter Pan: leader of the lost; powerful, magical creature between nature-childhood and city-adulthood.

Each day and the next, commedia dell’arte as we endeavor to mimic each other, to discover unison and reveal the rhythm of feelings, not words (yet).

God spoke and there was light,
but since I wasn’t there it must have happened
unannounced, the way a tree falling in the forest
unobserved makes no sound, commits no error in its collapse.

Alexander Pope said, “To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
My friends and I scrawled this on our lab reports in physics,
because Mr. Carver always wrote “HUMAN ERROR”
with red ink on our papers. He was not amused.
Nor was God, I suppose, when the Church condemned
Galileo’s heresy of a sun-centered universe.
But Newton believed, daydreaming in formulas
I irreverently botched with my hundred-dollar calculator
and glitter gel pen.

The tilt of the Earth, the pull of the moon,
just the right mix of stardust and sperm—and somehow I slithered
from primordial sludge into public school,
my wet Sketchers squeaking on freshly waxed floors.
All I know of physics are legends and laws:
an object at rest tends to stay at rest
unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

I want to be that force, unbalanced and beautiful,
the tiniest breath of a butterfly’s wing
bringing change to a future written not in stone,
but in sand and sea and clouds.
In a cosmic glance my trials mean nothing;
the grand inquisitors who judged me
for inciting rebellion among believers
during chauvinist sermons and politicized potlucks
banished me from a land I never loved,
from a place I didn’t belong.

After recanting the Earth’s orbit
before a Church court, Galileo reportedly whispered,
“And yet it moves.” I doubt he said this.
Even Galileo feared the flames. I too renounce
my truths again and again, yet still
they stay with me, stuck fast and quick-forgiving.
I’m glad Galileo gave in, imperfect genius that he was.
But alone at night, did he drown his guilt in crimson wine?
Did he rationalize, like I do, that our errors are minor
miscalculations in the eternal human equation?
And did he remind himself that with or without permission,
the revolution goes on?