Storytellersunplugged

by Janet Berliner

A few months ago, I wrote about the art of interviews and the fun of doing profiles. One of the sub-sets of my essay was pointing out that some of the best interviews are arrived at opportunistically. You see or meet someone famous, introduce yourself, and jump right in.

The worst that can happen is that you’re rejected, which is more good practice for the vicissitudes of writing; the best is interviewing someone fascinating and ending up with a publication, a byline, and a check.

In that first blog, I included an opportunistic interview I’d done with Marion Maley, Walt Disney’s Birdsinger. I got so many positive responses that I thought I’d throw another one at you.

The day I interviewed Ray Bradbury, at a Chinese restaurant in Santa Cruz, California, he introduced me to Joseph Mugnaini, artist, filmmaker, teacher, writer. Joseph, Ray told me, was a special man whose friendship and work had long been a part his life.

I quickly discovered that Joe had an intensity that rivalled Ray’s, and a wonderful sense of the absurd. When he offered the information that Heinlein had his place in Santa Cruz electronically protected, making him a prisoner every time the electricity went off. This he called “…a wonderful Science Fiction irony.”

At that moment, I determined to interview him.

Joe declared himself perfectly willing to do an interview. He told me his optimum venue was cocktail hour at the Crow’s Nest in Santa Cruz and that day would be fine. The sky was darkening and the boats in the harbour below were tugging at their moorings when I got there and sat down opposite Joe at a table with a view. He tipped his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, raised the first of many glasses, and toasted decadence. Then grinning, exposing the space where teeth should be, he placed his hand on my knee.

“Anytime I see something pretty I have to touch it. But rest easy. I’ve forgotten why it feels so good and what I’m supposed to do with it,” he said.

The man was seventy-seven years old, craggy as Red Rock Mountain, and irresistible.

Who, you may well be asking, is Joseph Mugnaini? Here’s a quick Vita.

Joseph Mugnaini was best known for his illustrations of The Martian Chronicles and other Bradbury ventures. He taught at Los Angeles’ Otis Institute of Art at Parsons College and had written three art textbooks. The film “Icarus” by Ray Bradbury, with artwork and animation by Mugnaini, was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Golden Eagle Award. Mugnaini had also illustrated Ben Hur, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and numerous other books. He had been the recipient of numerous awards. His work was represented in many public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress. At the time of the interview, he was working with Bradbury on a prime-time TV series about the Smithsonian and putting together a portfolio of lithographs, “Ten Views of the Moon.”

Back to the interview. Mugnaini’s enthusiasms were infectious. Sometimes senseless, often controversial, and always colored by expletives, his views spilled out into the atmosphere he loved best–booze, broads, and bar talk. Well past typical retirement age, he said he had no time left for sacred cows. He proved it by offering opinions on everything from politics to polemics, from astrology to art.

I asked him, “You obviously love women. Since we’re in California, how did you feel about Ferraro, for example, having presidential aspirations?”

“Around election time,” he responded, “I was in a restaurant on Highway 5 near Santa Rosa, California. There were a couple of guys wearing cowboy hats sitting in the back. One guy says, ‘My wife just bought a dog. I don’t like female dogs, and I don’t like Eye-talian bitches, so I’m going to call her Ferraro.’ I had to get up and walk out. There’s a lot of ignorance in this country.

“With all the power we have, we have a lot of parochialism, which is dangerous. I’m the kind of guy who will take a wasp out of my swimming pool because I like to save its life, but if you could take a politician and slice him up an inch at a time, man I’d love it, including our great president.”

I asked him about politics in the academic world.

“I don’t teach regularly anymore,” he said. “I don’t even go into the office. In fact, I only go to the john because I have to. If I could pee out the window, I would. I used to be head of the art department at Otis Parsons. I only survived because I had sharp teeth and bit back. Now I can keep out of politics and it’s kind of nice. I’m old enough now to be totally free. I don’t give a damn.”

Why, then, did he still teach?

“I learn a lot from my students,” he told me. “There’s a symbiotic relationship between teacher and student. You get great feedback from young people searching, searching, searching. The book I’ve been working on is made up of tapes, videotapes, and notes students made over years and years. Students don’t take down notes they don’t go along with, so in a way, it’s already edited; all I have to do is get it together.

“The new book’s about drawing. In my later years, I’ve found out that drawing is a pragmatic thing. It’s not just conceptual, it’s tactile. I’m not talking about emotions. I’m talking about the fingers. Just like you can actually feel the wetness of a brush,” he says as he picks up a napkin, “you can feel the dryness of this, and you’re conscious of space.

“You never see a guy like Segovia watching his fingers on a guitar. He doesn’t have to. His fingers are pure catalysts, transferring music from one space to another, from brain to heart to guitar. In art, you first have to separate concept from fine art and drawing if the whole is to make sense.

“People used to think drawing was a discipline you had to endure before you could paint masterpieces. That’s a lot of bull crap. Drawing means understanding form. It means being able to read form and space the way a good composer must understand the structure of music. All art, visual art, is abstract.”

“Is that true of commercial art, as well?” I asked.

“Yeah. The most realistic painting in the world depends entirely on how the space is handled. Like I tell people, if you could stand behind a guy like Van Gogh, aside from a lot of belching and farting, you would see the material going on the surface.

“When you look at the finished work, you’re still conscious of the act. If I throw an ink bottle over there and on the way it splashes, when people come in they will look at that, but what they will actually see is me throwing the bottle. The act itself is there.

“If I make a six-inch line on a blackboard with a ruler and chalk, I can tell someone in New York and say, ‘I just made a six-inch line, medium pressure, with a ruler,’ and it could be duplicated. But if I go like this,” he gestures wildly, “it could never be duplicated.

“If I had to copy a painting, it wouldn’t be a Van Gogh. Van Gogh couldn’t copy his own painting because it’s the artifact of an act. You’re conscious of the pressure of the brush, the anger or the excitement, and you can feel with your hands, and you don’t have to look. That’s what I’m writing about. It’s never been done before about art.”

“How would you relate your concepts about painting to writing?”

“Writing has to have rhythm. Writing can be done in many ways, but if you don’t have rhythm, the whole thing breaks down. As a matter of fact, a guy who had rhythm and made more sense of nonsense than I’ve ever known was Edward Lear. He had a sort of–what I call–emphatic language that grabs you by the balls.

“I did an experiment with a bunch of people for UFC at Idlewild–I do a workshop with them every year. I had a very large audience and on the blackboard I put down nonsensical terms. I put down ‘whoosh,’ ’scatterjack,’ and ’swish.’ Just wrote them down like that.

“And then, on the blackboard I made a thing with angles and then I took the chalk and I smoothed it out and a little farty kid identified the nonsensical term with a nonsensical image. Something that goes beyond what you really understand, but that’s hard to achieve. I listen to Bach, I must have counterpoint, too. A pas de deux has to use music without competing with it.”

I thought about that for a while. He ordered another drink. After it came, I asked him if what he had said was like working on a typewriter and using the hum of the machine as your music.

“Yes. The hum pushes you beyond your limitations. It gives you new boundaries, new tools. That’s what I mean when I talk about the limitation of art. If you are going to build a house of cards from here to there, you’d better either have a wide base, or big cards, or the goddamn thing will collapse.

“I take my students out in the park where there are a lot of vertical trees. I say, ‘Walk in there–what do you see?’ At first, they draw the landscape without any concept. I try to show them that they’re dealing with a bunch of verticals. Above their heads is the mass of leaves that the verticals are supporting.

“If they walked into a temple, an Egyptian temple, say, they’d have the same thing–vertical, vertical–and something above their heads. You are always enclosed somewhere. That is what influences you, not the goddamn trees, but the shape of things and the way they’re related to space.”

I asked him about Bradbury, comparing the writer’s overwhelming flow of creativity with the way some people drown themselves in religion. Mugnaini ignored the reference to his longtime friend and collaborator, preferring instead to tackle the question of religious zealotry.

“A couple of friends of mine I hadn’t seen for a long time cornered me once and tried to convert me to Christianity. I told them I was into that stuff a long time ago and didn’t need it.

“They kept on telling me what a great guy Jerry Falwell was and so forth. The only way I could get away from them was to shock the shit out of them. I told them I thought Jesus Christ was a fag. Not that I’m against Christianity in a humanistic way.”

I tried to steer the conversation away from the dangerous questions of religion to something more about his own background, asking him for a favorite story about one of his famous friends.

“There’s Noah Dietrich who wrote a book about Howard Hughes, how he designed the titty hanger and all that shit. Noah used to be on the water board for Los Angeles with the Chandlers, who started LA.

“A journalist I know, Mike Roberts, asked me to take him to see Noah, so I did. We went into the kitchen–Mary was there–and Mike wanted to know something about Howard Hughes. Noah began to talk about how the Chandlers took over San Fernando Valley and how they bought property and then got the water in so that they could make money on that property, because after all, the Chandlers started LA.

“They had the money, the railway system, everything else was theirs. So Mary said to get on the subject of Howard Hughes, but Noah kept on talking about the water project. A week later, another guy came up there, a screenwriter, and Noah told him the same story, and the film Chinatown came out of it. Remember that? And one of the characters, played by Houston, was called Noah. Did you see the film? Well, it’s right out of Noah Dietrich.”

Curious, I asked him what kind of guy Noah was.

“He was a charming sort of a guy, reactionary as hell, you know what I mean? He worked with Howard Hughes. And he supported Nixon. A sharp cat, a very sharp cat.”

We had started the interview talking about politics. I decided to ask him how he felt about what was currently happening in this country.

“When I went to vote, I looked at the sheet and I was the only Democrat. Before, you could never find a goddamn Republican. Now everybody’s a Republican.”

I asked him what he thought was going to happen in the ‘99 election. His response was to tell me that he was not a fortune teller.

“Astrologists say–” I began.

“Astrology!” he interrupted, in the same tone as he might have said, ‘Bah, Humbug.’ “It’s a different kind of prejudice, judging people by the day they were born. Fads! I think I’ll start a fad where you read the future by the creases on people’s butts.”

A pretty waitress walked by. Joe Mugnaini raised his glass. “Talking about butts,” he said, and our conversation travelled away from anything I’d care to repeat.