The Tim Viereck aka Doc Ersatz Interview,
Chapter the Second:
Johnson State College Daze

With the preliminaries of Doc's life and times now established (see yesterday's interview post), we can now launch into Doc's and my respective and shared experiences at

Johnson State College in Johnson, VT (which is still as vital as ever, per its current link, here).

Map: Where we were: Johnson, VT

We were at JSC between 1974 and 1976, a mere three years after the construction of JSC's stunning Dibden Theater, which was at the time a state-of-the-art, 'tunable' (there was a working baffle system in the walls that allowed for the tuning of the entire theater!) space. When we were part of it, Richard Emerson was the theater's Technical Director; Dick was also my advisor and mentor at JSC, about which I'll write at a later date.

JSC also had a remarkable art program at the time, which Doc and I also discuss in this installment. (Note: The opinions expressed herein are solely our own, and should be taken as such.)

I should also introduce our compadre Jack Venooker, whom Doc mentions; Jack was at JSC at the time, too, heralding from Bennington, VT, so Doc and Jack knew one another outside of their JSC experience. Jack was instrumental (along with Steve Perry, Mark 'Sparky' Whitcomb, Doc, and all my Governor's Hall 'Subhuman' amigos) in encouraging me to seriously pursue drawing comics professionally, eventually getting out of JSC to attend the first-ever year of studies at the Joe Kubert School. So, big hellos and perpetual thank yous to Jack, Sparky, Steve, the surviving Subhumans and everyone else we mention herein.

OK, that's enough context, I think!

So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Doc Ersatz, Part Two --
______________________

SB: Doc, what led to you attending Johnson State College (which is where we met)?

DOC: Well Steve, it was like this. I applied to three colleges initially: University of Denver (I'd been in Denver at an impressionable age, and it was right near all those fine Rocky Mountains), University of Alaska (born in AK, and I had a very cool uncle and aunt living in Fairbanks with kids, associated with the U) and Johnson State. My dad badly wanted me to go to his alma mater Dartmouth, but with my shoddy grades it would have taken some serious string pulling, and the whole deal just seemed pretty damn serious and, you know, academic and shit. U of A rejected me (those shoddy grades!), DU and JSC accepted, so I went as far as I could go from home - DU. A year there cured me of cities and big universities, and I spent a year working and bumming around, visiting other friends who'd dropped out after that first year, traveling all over the country with a buddy from my DU dorm.

After that trip, I ended up working for a construction company finishing an elementary school addition in Bennington (my dad used to be principal of that same school, and I'd done an outside project there during high school through the DUO program). One day, I found myself standing in an unfinished cinder-block classroom, rubbing the mortar grooves between the blocks with a broken piece of concrete to prep them for painting when a foreman stuck his head in and yelled "You guys better go a hell of a lot faster than that if you want to stay working for this company!", and I had a sort of epiphany: I don't have to be doing this shit! I have three more years of college promised to me; it's time to pick up on my free tumblers (to quote the Checkered Demon). Someplace cheap (don't want to rashly waste the old man's money), with a good view and nearby skiing... Yes! I'm already in at JSC. So I quit the construction biz, worked some more agrarian jobs until winter, went back to school mid-year and never, as they say, looked back.

SB: You were very active in JSC's lively theater scene, and in the '70s, Dibden Stage was a real state-of-the-art college theater space. What and who pulled you into that space?


DOC: Boy, that's hard to say. I did some theater club stuff, but I guess it may have been that mad bearded dwarf dynamo Dick Emerson (my favorite quote: "I don't care if you're stoned running a show, as long as you're straight when you're learning the cues. If it goes in straight, it'll come out stoned."), because as far as course work goes, I started in the technical end. Lots of characters involved in those days - Speedelstein [Stephen Edelstein], artist in residence, with his MGA's (still restoring and driving them to this day), Ken and Becka Culp-Smith in Dance (I loved lighting dance).

SB: Ya, I did, too. Ken and Becka were amazing, a real spiritual center for that whole era. What were the highlights, for you, of those JSC years in terms of theater and your own art?

DOC: One of the most memorable moments in Dibden Auditorium was working my way to a seat in the middle of a packed house when Jack Venooker's gravelly voiced boomed out, I mean BOOMED OUT! over the PA system "DOC! YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL!!!". O priceless memories of youth...

But as for performance, I guess Beckett's End Game with Scott Sampietro, and my own version of his Act Without Words #1, for which I used a stereo tape of the stage directions in lieu of actually building all those elaborate props (thank you Bob Hoyle, Mr. Rorer 714 of South Boston for that idea and the encouragement to run with it), were the most memorable. Obysseus was certainly special - I wish I had one of those damn 3 color 3 x 4 foot silk-screened posters I did for one of those - but Christ, memorable? There's that other guy Scott who got back in touch after all these years and chatted about Obysseus and all the stuff we'd done together and I couldn't even really place him! OK, a fair amount of organic mood enhancements were available in those days, as you may or may not recall, Steve, and I for one availed when I could.

Here's a classic memory from those days, my friend: someone asked me, "Why the hell do we keep getting all these spaghetti westerns as Student Movies? Christ! Why don't we ever get normal movies? That's just so weird!" The answer, of course, was that one Stephen R. Bissette was in charge of film procurement, and he happened to be doing, as an independent study, a retrospective of Mario Bava...

"Photo of Bentley Science Building at Johnson State College. September 2004"; photo source: Wikipedia. That's the Sterling Mountains behind Bentley, home of the Bentley B-Flicks, 1975-76

SB: ...which my faculty mentor Dick Emerson was overseeing! Actually, the spaghetti westerns were the Sergio Leone films, which we always showed in Techniscope on the big Dibden screen; the Bava movies were the anchor of my Bentley B-Flicks weekend movie programming, and those were the spaghetti horror films. But, ya, I kept everyone on their toes. I’m going to post my JSC movie programming list online, it was pretty amazing in retrospect: complete Sergio Leone, Mario Bava and Nicolas Roeg retrospectives, double bills like The Point and Yellow Submarine, Once Upon a Time in the West with 2001: A Space Odyssey, lots of film noir and ‘50s crime films, Anthony Mann westerns, Carnival of Souls, Women in Love, The New York Erotic Film Festival, and so on. Do you remember when someone started a chainsaw up in Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- we were one of the first colleges in the US to screen that on 16mm -- or when the non-violence class chained the theater doors shut in protest of our showing Paul Bartel’s Private Parts on Halloween?

Beloved Bava image: Barbara Steele, Black Sunday (1960)

DOC: Sergio Leone -- of course. How could I forget? Easy. Those Bentley B-flicks were fun. I remember sitting in there in the afternoon, blowing a couple of bowls of kief and laughing my ass off. Ah, ye olde college days!

I do remember the chainsaw - that was pretty wild! The film stopped, the lights came up, and there was nothing but a cloud of blue smoke in the air! Those side exits were handy, eh? I also remember going with three friends, one of whom swore he would watch all the way through; he didn't -- I finished the movie alone, and laughing (though I admit I didn't start out that way -- the real chainsaw broke spell of silly horror.)

SB: “Silly horror”? Phaw! Now, about the art department --

DOC: As for all the art I did (I really was more of an Art student than Theater), nothing was that memorable compared to the characters involved: Peter Heller was a treasure, but Peter Heller arguing philosophy of art with Cyndi Lauper in evening drawing class was truly priceless, a memory for life.

Cyndi Lauper, post-JSC years; Time after Time

SB: Ah, yes, Cyndi Lauper. She’s one of our fellow classmates who went on to fame and fortune -- people often don’t believe me when I mention she was at JSC. I remember her as one of the more flamboyant art and dance people... any other memories of Cyndi you harbor?

DOC: Well, I had a huge crush on her, but I was too shy to approach her. I don't remember her doing dance, but she was doing voice and music. She was smart and funny and cute (and had big tits), and I loved her eclectic thrift-store fashions too. I got up my nerve to ask her to dance one night in the Student Union, but the band quit for the night as I made my way over towards her. Ah well. I coulda been another Hulk Hogan...

SB: The beauty of the theater department -- which I ended up in via default, because the art classes had no room for freshmen, and then I found the art studies so hostile to my goals -- was we did so much creative work there. I found it much more fulfilling than the art studies, except for my independent studies with Peter Heller. Let's see, your and Scott's production of End Game had that giant skull-as-apartment-complex set, and Obysseus was memorable in many ways... didn't you cook up that show?

"Silly horror": The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

DOC: No, Obysseus was there before me. I kept it going for a couple of years; I have no idea if it survived after we left. There was a Hispanic poet whose name eludes me; I believe he founded it. A very nice guy - I remember doing some tech work for a show of his, and he gave everyone involved a red rose after the show.

SB: I learned more about color from my technical theater studies and hands-on work with Dick Emerson and John Mabry than I learned in the art classes. Any other fond theater memories? We used to work with Socrates (whose last name I don’t recall) and Edelstein, and I got along great with Dick Emerson, Mabry, and loved Ken and Becka, too. We had some amazing shows come in to Dibden: Bread & Puppet, Mummenshanz, Daniel Nagrin, The Alvin Ailey Dance Troupe -- it was a heady time!

DOC: Socrates Jost, aka Socko. He and I had a great gig as roadies for the Vermont Symphony. Sometimes we would be on the road, hauling music stands and lights around in a van. Once there was a big concert at the Flynn in Burlington, and the sound shell they were planning to use behind the orchestra wouldn't fit in the van. Maestro Guigi was upset; he thought the sound would be too dead, so I convinced him to raise the back curtain and expose the brick wall in the back, artfully strewn with steam radiators, some horizontal, some vertical. With the orchestra all dressed in their formal black and white backed up with that curious industrial backdrop it really did look cool. Other times we might get paid for perhaps eight hours of rehearsal time, most of which we sat around Dibden watching the Maestro fine tune the pieces, which I found fascinating. Guigi was a tiny guy from South America; he stood on a box behind the podium and was very temperamental. I can still hear him shouting "Faster, faster! Three times faster! Six times faster! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

JSC campus, June 2005; photo source: 'Sublime CDs' blog post, "A Day in Vermont," June 22, 2005.

SB: Let’s talk about the art studies at Johnson: there was Peter Heller, who was the chair of the art department, and a tough instructor; Norm [sic] Battdorf, who taught sculpture; and the office door I remember well, Dyke & Hole: Walter Dyke and Dan Hole, who were complete opposites. Walter was an Ahab-like (in appearance) drawing instructor, who I recall actually drawing over your drawings in life drawing, and Dan was the youngest of the art instructors. I liked him, but I got into serious verbal frays with him over the legitimacy of comics as a course of study. He’d bring in pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein, arguing its inherent legitimacy and superiority to comics, which he considered an invalid medium -- not art -- and I’d go nuts because they were pirating comics images wholesale. What was your experience at JSC as an artist?

DOC: I did print making with Dan Hole. He was a nice guy, but not a big inspiration. Walter Dyke (and he insisted it be pronounced "Dick", perhaps because he was one) was, well there you have it. He had zero respect for students, as far as I could tell. When taking drawing for upper level credit, he would still insist that we draw his certain way. My strongest memory of him is him saying "You must draw it like this! And then do something busy around the articulations!" Bizarre - the antithesis of how I wanted to learn at that point. It became more clear when he had an exhibit in the Dibden gallery - that's all he did! Gesture drawings, with "something busy around the articulations"... Another experience was the selection of a new Art History teacher, do you remember that?

One student from each class was elected to be on the selection committee - what a crock! We all liked the woman who was holding the position temporarily, but it soon became obvious that the plan was to hire a snotty woman whose husband was already hired for some other position. We were all opposed, we argued, it got to be end of term and we were about to leave for the summer with no decision reached, and the Dyke himself said, in his most pompous-ass manner, "I'm sure you'll all trust us to make the best decision in this matter..." Oh yeah. Venooker was on that committee - you can imagine. We got up and walked out in disgust.

Peter Heller was the Art Department. Without him, it would have been something of a waste of time, I think. Artist, philosopher, provocateur... he was a brilliant and important guy.

SB: Peter ended up the be-all and end-all at JSC art studies for me; he taught me everything I came away with, really, and was a demanding task master. We put together an intensive independent studies program for me my second year. He hammered anatomical studies into me; I drew every bone in the human body, from six different views, over a six month period. I hated it, but I sure learned it! Peter was amazing, just amazing -- he made it all worthwhile.

Doc gesture drawing/print; note the utter lack of "something busy around the articulations..."

DOC: That's the thing in a small place like Johnson. There are brilliant people who are there for much the same reasons as you are: the beautiful setting, the fine under-utilized facilities, the countryside full of interesting and inexpensive places to live (but hopefully not too much of the sheer laziness that motivated me, but yes, you find that too). You have to go where the good people are - Heller, Addison Merrick in English, Dick Emerson, and others, regardless of what they're teaching.

By the way, it was John Battdorf, not Norm.

SB: Oh, of course, sorry. Brain fart.

DOC: Another good guy; I took one class with him, where I pretty much fucked off but actually learned many useful things: Plastics and Mold-Making. I've used that skill in actual paying work over the years, and it should be said that I worked for Dick Emerson's company about 15 years later too, with John Mabry and Joel Krasnov.

____________________________

...and we'll leave it at that for a while, folks. Doc and I are continuing the interview, and I'll post future chapters down the road a piece, most likely picking up the narrative thread in July, after MoCCA.

The best is yet to come! We'll be getting into our Johnson State College days a little more, Doc's funding of my first-ever comic publishing experience with Abyss #1 (1976), and much, much more: Doc's stint at the Dino DeLaurentiis studio in North Carolina, David Lynch and Blue Velvet, working with Douglas Trumbull, etc. It'll be worthwhile reading, I promise.

Have a great Sunday, and see you here tomorrow...

"Why the hell do we keep getting all these spaghetti westerns...?"
Beloved Leone imagery: Once Upon a Time in the West (1969)

Josie's Show and Doc's Chalk Talk, Chapter the First

(A Saturday Morning Entertainment, in Two Parts)

Last night, I bopped on down to David Fairbanks Ford's White River Junction landmark and happening place the Main Street Museum for the 7pm opening of CCS graduate Josie Whitmore's new arts, crafts, and jackalopes gallery show.

A fine time was had by all, and it was also great to catch up with Antoinette Jacobson, sister of filmmaker Nora Jacobson, and the woman who worked on the construction and orchestration of the amazing fire organ (centerpiece of sister Nora's excellent feature film Nothing Like Dreaming). Broke artists all, it's my goal now to arrange a creative-economy means for Antoinette to land a couple of banjo lessons from Gabby, if the logistics can be arranged at no cost to either of 'em.

There was indeed lots of fellow CCSers and WRJ community folks, good food (vegan and otherwise), wine, lemonade, live banjo music provided by Gabby 'Ken Dahl' Schulz (playing from a huge glass case, like a live museum exhibit) and more.

Josie curated the show (those are Josie's exquisite jackalope wash drawings featured on the announcement and spot illos, here), featuring watercolors, jewelry, photography, paintings and crafts by Josie, Judith Howland, Sigrid Lium, Marion Settle, and fellow CCS graduates Elizabeth Chasalow and Colleen Frakes. Elizabeth's photos and 'dead pet' cloth creations are showcased handsomely, and Colleen Frakes -- who you met via her interview here on this blog this past week -- has several books and paintings on display, including three huge female superhero paintings ($300 for the set). I tell you, snag these now, while Colleen's work is affordable! She's going places in this world, as is every artist at this show.

Here's the official announcement:
____________

ARTS, CRAFTS, AND JACKALOPES!

Area craftswomen exhibit top-notch wares at the Main Street Museum,
White River Junction, VT. June, 2007.

The Main Street Museum is proud to announce "Arts, Crafts, and Jackalopes," a month-long exhibition celebrating the handiwork of some of the Upper Valley's most talented women artists. The show will feature: photography, paintings, apparel, accessories, jewelry, log cabin quilts, comics, and soft sculpture. A wine and cheese reception will be held on the the exhibit's opening night at 7pm on June 8, 2007.

Featured Artists: Elizabeth Chasalow, Colleen Frakes, Judith Howland, Sigrid Lium, Marion Settle, and Josie Whitmore

Arts, Crafts, and Jackalopes will open on June 8, 2007 at 7pm at the Main Street Museum in White River Junction.

_______________

The show runs until July 8 and items can be purchased during regular museum hours. If you're in town, be sure to drop in, savor the show, and drop some dollars for whatever catches your eye (and don't forget the Quechee Gorge Mall is just 5 miles away, on Route 4 West, where lots more CCS goodies await you in the Antique dealer venue, Booth 653).

Here's Josie's site, brimming with goodies, which is well worth a visit this morning, and

more of Josie's art for the event (along with CCS and life pix, paintings and pointers) are here -- and it's likely Josie will be posting photos from last night here at some point, too.

Thanks, Josie!
_________________________

Now, on to Part One (of many) of the promised interview with my ol' compadre Tim Viereck, aka Doc Ersatz.

A little background, though the interview will provide ample backstory: Doc and I met and became fast friends when we were both at Johnson State College in upstate Johnson, Vermont back in 1974-76, and we've stayed in touch over the years. Doc is a man of the world and an incredibly creative fellow; his life and times have embraced expansive travel, sailing, hiking the Canadian tundra, music, theater, cinema (he worked on Blue Velvet!), state-of-the-art simulated realities (he worked on the miniatures for the famous Back to the Future ride at Universal City Studios) and oh so much more. Meet the man who once knew Cindy Lauper, who co-founded the Council of Edacious Souls, who picked up a shard of Dennis Hopper's shattered skull off a North Carolina floor and who bankrolled the launch of my comics career.

Meet -- Doctor Ersatz!
__________________________

SB: Now, where did the moniker Doc Ersatz come from? You're about the least ersatz fellow I've ever met.

TIM VIERECK aka DOC: Ah, the old Franklin Nigel Q Ersatz, DAM.

This can be traced back to a Firesign Theater routine, an advertisement for "Ersatz Brothers' Coffee - It's got zest-appeal!" My best friend growing up, who shall remain nameless (hey, he's in a government job) and I collaborated on an art project after our freshmen year of college. He'd taken a silversmithing class at UVM [University of Vermont]; I had gotten hold of some slabs of black soapstone from an old soapstone sink, which I was carving into pipes (hey, it was 1972!). We made a sculpted stone pipe in the image of a snarling, eye-patched pirate, which came out pretty damn nice. His head-scarf was carved in the stone, but his eye-patch and the cord for it was inlaid in silver. His remaining eye was bone with an ebony pupil, and he had bone, ebony and silver teeth. We put it on consignment at a shop in Bennington, but first we needed a case for it. I found some kind of nice tin box with a hinged lid, but it needed a label. Ersatz Bros. was a natural for us, and though I ended up with that tin as my stash-box for many years (yes, you saw it many times Bissette, don't lie now), the pipe was shop-lifted. This quelled what little enthusiasm I might have had for capitalism and free enterprise right there, mate. But I have attached the working drawings of old Cap'n Crunch, can you believe? Just went out to the shop, pulled the sketch-books off the shelf, and there it was. Sometimes I amaze myself. Sometimes not.

State's Evidence, Fig. 1: The original Cap'n Crunch drawings, circa 1972

Oh, what was the question? Right, Dr. Ersatz... I made a linoleum block business card for Ersatz Bros., with our motto "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum", which I stuck on my dorm room door upon my return to academia. Martinetti Hall, Johnson State College, January, 1974. I wrote my real name on it, but Dr. Ersatz is what took. One guy actually called me "Zatz", but everybody else, and I mean even my professors, called me "Doc" or Doctor Ersatz. The DAM is for Doctor of Applied Miracles, the term for Physicists in some nightmare Sci-Fi novel where the Christians have taken over the world: you'd probably know which one it was, Steve.


SB: I ain't telling, but some joker will undoubtably post the info in the comments and that'll be that. Your family has a palatial spread outside of Bennington, VT. Sticking to what you're willing to share in this public arena, what's the Viereck family story and legacy, as experienced in your lifetime?

DOC: My parents bought that place in 1954. They were New Englanders of the coastal persuasion, but had ended up in Alaska after the war and college. I was born in Cordova, AK, but they figured it was a little grim up there for raising a bunch of kids, what with the isolation, the cold, and the 220 inches of precipitation. They applied for teaching jobs in a couple of places they knew from their college days (they met through the Dartmouth/Vassar Outing Club - what can I say?). The train between Poughkeepsie and Hanover went through Bennington in those days, and they got a job offer there they liked. The Superintendent wrote them, apologizing that the salary was only a fraction of what they made in Alaska; they wrote back explaining how much a single egg cost in Cordova!


We moved into the old farmhouse, built circa 1785, right around my first birthday, after the big Husky had given birth to a litter of eight in the back of the car. They paid $12,500 for the place, with around 56 acres, a couple of barns and various outbuildings, a nice brook, a sugar-woods (now Ye Olde Feasting Woode), hay fields, a swamp, a pine woods, and a separate parcel just for firewood. The neighbors thought they were totally nuts paying that kind of money for a beat old farm. God damn flat-landers!

As to the future of the spread, I don't know. My folks are getting on, as they say, and no consensus has formed. My youngest sister, who lives across the road in a tiny little house, would love to get the farm back on its feet and do a goat operation of some kind, but family dynamics being what they are (does "dysfunctional" mean anything to you, Steve?), it'll be hard to make that work. La Madre is still into total control, naturally, though I think we siblings would back the goat plan to the hilt. (The hilt... now, that makes one wonder where to place the blade up to it... Oops, sorry)

For better or worse, the farm has held the family together over the years, and without it the Feast would probably never have happened, and certainly wouldn't have continued. What's next? I wish I knew...

"The Naughty Shepard" by Doc; hmmm, is that lamb on a spit or German Shepard? (see bogus witness account of the Feast, below)

SB: What got you into art, Doc? Just the bit I've seen over the years covers a lot of ground, in many media. What are your earliest memories that led to your making -- stuff?

DOC: My mother's family was into art. My mother painted, and also illustrated my dad's books; her mother painted and was an architect. I was always encouraged in my art, whatever it was, from drawing to making Da Vinci-esque glider models or miniature crossbows. I can't believe some of the shit I was indulged in. For example, stuffiness (and I refer here to the actual non-movement of air, not the cultural aspect) in classrooms always bothered me, especially in the spring when it got hot. In 7th grade I made this contraption, mostly out of balsa wood and tissue paper, which clamped to my desk and used a foot pedal to operate a simple fan. They actually let me use this thing in class! Go figure. By the end of the following year, I had moved to a compact battery operated design with a propeller from a wind-up plane mounted on a little motor... and again, they allowed it in class. Fun.

But I suppose most of the early "stuff" I made was for my bear. I had this little up-right humanoid bear, actually an antique Stieff, which my mother had gotten second hand when she was a kid. She had made quite a bit of stuff for him herself, but I did immediately eliminate the bi-sexual aspect of the wardrobe. She had named him after Winnie-the-Pooh's cousin (actually an alias for the Pooh himself), "Poodle". Unfortunate, but who cares when you're a kid? At some point I got a very nicely-made little monkey for his side-kick (I named him "Monkey", OK?), and I made or accumulated a lot of costumes and props.



I figured out how to run the sowing machine when I was eight, and made a white canvas winter camouflage suit for him. I made him Roman armor with a big "P" on the front out of beaten copper, and also he fitted the original GI Joe uniforms and weapons. I made him a parachute to fit the GI Joe harness and chucked him out my bedroom window. Stieff collectors, eat your hearts out! My youngest sister had toy horses, and we used to play together, taking them all on expeditions in the yard and gardens.

As for the rest of it, I'm a "one thing leads to another," "go with the flow" kind of guy, as opposed to "goal oriented." I didn't grow up dreaming of bending glass and making neon art, for instance, I just had a girlfriend who wanted to work in a movie studio, where I got a job building sets and hanging signs, got to know the tube-bender, a wonderful kinetic artist from the Mid-West, and when I had some time and money, went to Kansas and took his course. He and I are still great friends, but now I'm doing something different, like mainly raising kids. Now, talk about "a piece o' work", you ought to meet my kids!

SB: What about them kids? Let's jump the chronological rails for a moment or two and let's here about your family -- how did you and Tamara meet, when did you start your family life, and how about them kids?

DOC: Tamara was a great friend of my sister Meg's. They knew each other in Yellow Springs, Ohio, home of Antioch College, which neither of them actually attended. Meg mentioned her a few times as someone who should come to the Feast, and she gave me her address and I actually did send an invitation. She was in Med School and insanely busy, but eventually she got a little time off and came. I tell everyone that I met her at the Feast (the 21st, "Feast of the Majority", which few get; 1991), but of course I actually met her a day or two before when she showed up to help. So we took a shine, and commuted between Catskill, NY, where I was doing archeology, and Columbus where she was doing medicine, for a year or two, traveled together, and moved out to Tacoma, Washington, together, where she did a fellowship in rural medicine.

Our daughter, Raphaela Danielle Singleton Viereck, was born there, actually in Federal Way, WA. What a name for a town! Best to leave it at "Tacoma," and hope no one is familiar with the term "Tacoma Aroma"! Our son, on the other hand, Jasper Anselmo Kingsbury Viereck, aka Pom or Palm Barrel, lucked out, being born at the Midwifery Center in Taos, New Mexico, five years later. That'll sound cool no matter where he ends up, no? Incidentally, we got married when Rapha was 3, old enough to take part and enjoy the celebration. What a party! We got married on Columbus Day, 1997, at our really nice rental house down on the San Ildefonso Pueblo reservation, under a golden cottonwood tree in a walled garden. The Ramon Bermudez Group played (if you can find their CD, I recommend it highly; this was our big splurge!), our friend Norma Naranjo of San Juan Pueblo catered (she's one of the best native cooks around; she's catered for the Smithsonian), and we spent the wedding night in a wonderful old movie tipi in the back yard (the damn Indians had chained off the canyon where we planned to camp). Eee, what a party! You should have come out, Steve.

Say, if you read A Fair Wind, And Plenty Of It by Rigel Crockett, you'll find that in the midst of the crisis of trying to get the tall ship Picton Castle ready for her first circumnavigation under sail, with too little money and less time, the Captain suddenly declares a holiday for all and mysteriously disappears for a week. That's my cousin Dan -- I had to twist his arm a little, but I didn't want to wait two years for him to get back and I had no interest in getting married without my primo as my best man...

As for those kids, unless they do their goddamn homework today, and without a huge fuss, I've got nothin' to say about 'em!

SB: Hey, share that SpiderBaby Comix story with us --

DOC: I knew what story you meant instantly, but to recall it exactly... Instead, I spent some time searching old emails and finally came up with:

“So I came into the living room this morning, Saturday morning. Videos have been banished for two weeks, as punishment for faulty behavior patterns, and Tamara and Pom are ensconced in an easy chair, she reading aloud. How sweet, how special!

I read an email, fill in a petition against the repeal of the estate tax, peruse some jokes sent by a friend, as the words drift into my consciousness: "... said grace, his robes moved... shifted and quivered as if hidden limbs were moving... limbs where no human being ever had limbs... "

Arrggghh! Spider Baby Comix has found my six-year-old!

I turned his attention to Tyrant, and read a couple, but even after one, he said, "That next one doesn't look so good - it doesn't have much blood... I like the blood!," and after two, he went back outside to play.

To play whatever secret games he plays...
alone...
in the shadows...
by the ditch,
perhaps with little helpless creatures...

Thanks, old buddy -
Doc”

Now, to update that story, I should say that as they've aged a little, they've gone more to Tyrant, and like much of the world, want to know when the rest of the series is coming out... Yeah, yeah, I know; I'm talking about the rest of the world.

SB: Nice try, Doc, but my “where’s Tyrant?” callouses are thick and resist such feeble prodding. Anyhoot, I love that SpiderBaby Comix story.

DOC: As I said back then, "I knew yer cockles would be warmin'".

SB: OK, now, what are you up to these days, Doc?

DOC: These days, I irrigate my fields, I prune my fruit trees, I collect the money for La Acequia Del Gavilan (part of the ancient Spanish system of irrigation ditches), I take care of the local community water system as President and Certified Operator, and I do most of the ordering for Ojo Caliente Volunteer Fire & Rescue, where I also respond for fires and car wrecks. Hey, I just completed an Advanced Extrication training last week, where we cut up a school bus and a semi, and chopped up numerous wrecked vehicles piled precariously on top of each other. Fun. Also, I've been building a set of kitchen cabinets for a friend up the road. The lowers are in, and they can't say enough good about them. They brag on them to all their friends, which is heart warming of course, though I'm left thinking "Well what the hell did you think I'd make? These are the materials, the designs, the finishes you picked out, did you really think I could turn all this great material into a pile of crap?" But they seem to find it artistic, I guess. Now if I can just find time for the uppers...

SB: The Feast -- please, explain, Doc. The Feast, St. Edacious, all of it.

DOC: The Council of Edacious Souls Feast has been going on for several decades; this year's will be the 37th. It all started when... Actually, my cousin (or primo, as we say here in Mew Mexico) Danny, now aka Captain Daniel Dawson Moreland, commander of the three masted barque 'Picton Castle', had an idea back in 1970.

There's a mostly uninhabited island off the cove where he (and other of our maternal line) lived in Connecticut. He and his friends (including me) loved to get out there and camp, away from all parental and otherwise authoritarian influences, and, due to the substantial rat population, mostly in nets up in the trees. There were several groups, each with their own distinct tree or grove, only rule: No Daps! (kids from Darien, poor bastards). The camps were made entirely of flotsam and jetsam - very picturesque, with furniture made of stakes driven in the ground, lashed up, netting woven in place, swings, a great flat rock suspended on an old hawser from high in the tree serving as a side-table, old spars lashed in high branches netted for sleeping platforms - you get the idea.

Dan came up with the idea of having a Thanksgiving feast on the weekend after Thanksgiving. That first year, someone cooked a turkey in mom's oven, somebody obtained a small supply of Bali Hi wine (mmm - sweet!), Dan bought plates and silver ware at the Salvation Army store, which were then renewed each year. All vessels involved were, by tradition, unregistered, under equipped, overloaded, fun. The feasters, mostly high school juniors (I was a senior), met at the family dock and were ferried out where they were then stuck until enough people wanted to head in to convince a boatman to transport them, a nice arrangement.

The note! The naming of the Council, circa 1970-71

I returned to Vermont with many fine tales of this affair, and my friend Ed and I started formulating a plot. We wanted to have a spring feast, out in the woods, in a flowering orchard, somewhere isolated enough to keep things private and where we could transport our friends and hold them marooned in island fashion. We felt that a large spitted animal should be roasted on site, with nothing from our parents kitchen involved. No silverware seemed like a good idea, so did no expenses. To this end, we formed an official club at school, faculty sponsor and all. I searched my thesaurus into the wee hours for just the right name, something along the lines of "Society of Glutinous Persons". Oddly, in my archives, I still have the little piece of note paper on which I tried various combinations, finally arriving at the Council of Edacious Souls. We had thirty members, at $1 each, and we had a raffle in which we talked the winner out of his cash prize in return for an invite. Sadly, as we didn't get things together until post-graduation, we lost track and he's never made it.

From the first couple of feasts in my parents' wood-lot, about a mile from the house and illuminated by hissing Coleman lantern, to another decade in the Sugar Woods, to the expanded two-site ( and Sanctum Profanis and Sanctum Sanctorum) with procession all lit by torches, years of varying amounts of illegal fireworks, varying amounts of live music (also of varying quality), and always prodigious amounts of excellent food, the Feast has blundered on, in good times and weird, in sickness and in health, etc. Attendance has swollen and shrunk, from an early count of 20 to 25 up to a high of 85 or 90 in the past decade. My sister Meg took to brewing truly fine malt beverages for a while, around 160 pints of ales and porter, which we labeled anew each year and placed on planks in a pit of ice...

Saint Edacious arose naturally from all this. I have been equated with the saint myself at times, though I can't see it myself; it started after the 6th Feast, when it rained like holy hell. It had never actually rained on the Feast up to that point (though it had sure rained before and after), and since I was off paddling in the sub-arctic, feasting on ptarmigan pegged with a wrist-rocket slingshot and staying dry, I was hailed by some upon my return as "Saint Edacious", and indeed, the Feast never did get rained on, wherever I personally was Feasting, up to I believe the 25th. That was too much pressure for me; it was a huge relief when it finally poured on me and washed that cult stigma away! The image of Saint Edacious came from the second Feast, and it led up to the Satan worship thing in your next question. I made a linoleum block print with our motto "Caveat Emptor" on it, and posted some along the jeep trail which led to the site, giving rise to rumors (as intended).

SB: OK, let's get to that question. I recall a 'satanic cult' news item from the Bennington papers that somehow was tied in to all of this...

DOC: It was in the Bennington and Rutland papers, but more absurdly on an Albany NY TV station. Some disgruntled parent at the elementary school where my father was principal, a self-proclaimed "Christian," tried to make trouble for him, and succeeded due to greed and America's yearning for sensationalism.

Mid-autumn of 1987, this woman called all the papers and TV news rooms in the region to report that Phil Viereck was host to a Satan worshipping Black Sabbath of some sort every summer. One reporter, on the Rutland Herald, followed it up and got the true story. He spoke with State Police in Shaftsbury, telling them that the charges seemed groundless and that he was going to print that in the Herald. So a State cop, their "cult expert" or something, actually called the anchor-babe at a struggling Albany station, who also was looking into the story for a big lurid splash, and told her that if she wanted to scoop it, she better get it on the news that night. She called my dad, informed him of the allegations, and asked for his side. He of course said it was just a party his son and his theater-type friends had, and invited her out to the site. She said something like "Thanks, but we've already been out there and filmed -- catch the news at Eleven", and in fact it ran as an "Extra", with footage from our Feast site, footage of a "Cult expert" from Mary Rose College (!) discussing this footage ("and this is the West-facing throne where the high priest or priestess would sit", a crude chair made for our co-founder due to a crippling injury he got trying to help at a car-wreck, and "this residue on the tree appears to be candle wax!" - it was blue plastic from a fire-works pinwheel), and the news teaser: "Satan Worship in a nearby Vermont town? State Police say it's no joke!", a line still quoted to this day.

So everything hit the fan, my dad came up with some good lines for the paper, my favorite being "I think we have a lot more to fear from irresponsible journalism than we do from things that go bump in the night!" To another quote of his "There's nothing remotely resembling Satan worship that goes on there", a fellow Edacian said "Well, remotely resembling... I don't know, that could be stretching it." The State Trooper moron was disavowed and eventually transferred away. The best allegation of the whole deal: the woman's boyfriend claimed to have watched from the bushes as we Mephistophelian revelers roasted "a German Shepard" on a spit! Boy, anybody who's ever roasted a good sized animal on a spit has to have a lot of respect for someone who could tell whether the critter was a sheep or a dog, let alone the breed. Incidentally, we usually end up with a good sized calf these days...

SB: Speaking of Bennington weirdness, I have to ask: growing up in the area, what kind of weird lore punctuated your pre-college years (we'll get into the college lore next batch of questions)? Had you ever heard of the disappearances on Glastonbury Mountain which Joe Citro has dubbed "The Bennington Triangle"?

DOC: Only in the sense that I do vaguely recall a Bennington College girl or something disappearing over there, but the fact is, it's a huge rough heavily-wooded remote area, so it was no surprise if some fool headed out that way and didn't come back. Lotta bears, too...

No, the only strange, brooding local story I grew up with was from the area of the family camp, Jewel Clearing, and old sugar-house built by some distant relatives who settled back in behind Readsboro. There was an interesting unsolved mystery death which occurred back in there while the dam for the Whitingham Reservoir was being built.

______________________

OK, enough for one day, Edacious ones.

End of Part One -- Part Two tomorrow, paving the way for a week of CCS interviews, too!

Have a great Saturday...

Early Feast photo, circa 1977

Meet Doc Ersatz and -- Quelle Poutine!

I'm launching another loooong interview tomorrow, this one with an old, dear friend from my own pre-Kubert School college days. Tim Viereck aka Doc Ersatz will be a touchstone throughout June via a multi-part interview I'll be juxtaposing with the CCS artist/graduate/student interviews and MoCCA previews.

Tim has done -- a lot of stuff. He's a grand and entertaining fellow who has traveled the globe and enjoyed multiple careers, and he also happens to be among the key amigos from Johnson State College who launched my cartooning career. Tim put up the dough for printing Abyss #1 in 1976, and that's where it all began for me in comics.

By way of introduction, I thought it appropo to completely ravage and ruin your Friday with a reading of the one article I've written for Doc's long-running Edacien World Journal. That the one and only culinary article I've ever scribed in my checkered writing career should be motivated by utter disgust and revulsion rather than delight should come as a surprise to no one.

(This reprint here was also prompted, in part, by a short conversation outside of CCS last night around midnight -- here ya go, Sean!)

Now, about The Edacien World Journal...

This oddest and rarest of all food and festive zines will be explained in Doc's upcoming interview, and quite early on, I promise you. Suffice to say the EWJ celebrates the culinary life in all its extremes, revolving as it does around the glorious St. Edacious and all things Edacien, for which you should all be thankful, amen.

This serves neither as a fair introduction to Doc, or the interviews, or to poutine, but there you have it.

Or, should I say, "Here. Have it."

______________________

Quelle Poutine!

You must first know that I am among the afflicted who loathe wet bread -- always have, always will.

With no conscious memory of when or how this tactile prejudice branded my being, nor any reason to necessarily associate it with my Catholic upbringing, in polar opposition to my irrational love of all things repellent and grotesque to what passes for normal folks in this culture, this conundrum only occasionally upsets my applecart in day-to-day living. Wet bread is pretty easy to avoid, and easily disposed of in any case.

Whenever I travel north of my Vermont home, however, I am confronted by what seems to be a national dish of Quebec that in-and-of-itself concisely embodies this inner conflict, the rift between my gag-reflex and the unnatural allure of all that should be unholy.

Its moniker blazes from all manner of hand-painted roadside signage and in-city buffet windows, its visage gleams from functional folk artist enamel-paint renditions designed to tease hungry highway gutterballs into drive-in eateries and shines like a slavered beacon from the fashion-art fotofood of Montreal menus. It is now a staple of Quebec McDonald's -- and how often does this most debased American institution import regional cuisine into its lineup of prefab food substances? -- which was in and of itself a revelation.

It is the Eraserhead of fast foods, shimmering like a Jerzy Kosinski paragraph on a plate, simultaneously provoking the reptile-brain response of salivation and the fishhook closing of the throat. With the dip of a ladle, it transforms the most common of fried foods into the most vile of gravied dishes, a miraculous wedding of the steadfast and the vomitous.

I sing and wail, of course, of Poutine.

_________

Poutine is, in short, gravy on french fries. So noxious was my experience with this concoction that I failed to notice that cheese curds are also semi-melted betwixt gravy and fries -- though it may be that I had sampled the 'more ordinary' strain of poutine, sans cheese, which I understand is optional.

Mayhaps the poutine I have been exposed to used substandard cheese, or I incorrectly presumed the whitish lumps 'tween gravy and soggy fries were clots of fat, but have since been corrected by those in the know (to whom the cheese is very important). In the best of all worlds, this cheese curd is what is known in some quarters as 'Farmer Cheese,' a sort of virginous curd freshly skimmed and endowed with the unusual quality of making a wee, pathetic, heartbreaking sound when one bites into it -- like a petite shaved rodent.

Mind you, this only enhances the Lynchian aspects of the dish (remember the Harkonian snack 'squood' in Lynch's Dune? When Henry punctured his infant at the end of Eraserhead, it could have been poutine that gushed from within that quivering cavitied fetal torso).

Served dashing hot, this mutant food might be digestible, proffering a sensory collision of just-crisped deep-fried potato slices garnished with fresh hot turkey gravy and the virgin cheese curds at the brink of osmosis -- but my encounters with poutine in a variety of eateries inevitably delivered an at-best lukewarm snot-like evocation of my wet-bread phobia writ large and sometimes steaming.

(Speaking of steaming, the cheese element only makes this more spew-worthy to me, due to a childhood trauma involving my younger sister, a plate of macaroni-and-cheese, and her wolfing down a plate of the damned stuff with such feral ferocity that she immediately flashed it back into her plate, still steaming hot and seemingly untouched. What would St. Edacious have done? Being a mere mortal, I came away only with an aversion for mac-and-cheese.)

In that dreamlike best-of-all-worlds, freshly-fried hand-cut pommes frites are a delight; hotplate/steamed/microwaved warmup fries are already treading unpalatable flaccidity as a stand-alone side.

The addition of day-old gravy and semi-melted curds invariably tips the dish into spudspew territory, looking and smelling for all the world like canine upchuck. Much like our own current President, poutine has somehow achieved the remarkable feat of being the most visible of Quebec staples and yet evidently the most despised by its own citizenry. I could not find a single Canadian resident willing to praise poutine:
embarrassment, disgust, and quiet despair were the most frequent responses, as if this were the national dish Ilsa (that most beloved of Canadian exports alongside Molson Ale, for those of us who frequented the drive-ins in the 1970s) served to tortured souls at Abu Ghraib.


When I tentatively asked ye fearless Edacien editor if he might have some contacts willing to confirm the spelling of the word and its legacy, and a Canadian willing to uphold the legacy of this most Canadian of dishes, the no-doubt sound-of-mind-and-appetite Edacien soul Francoise (bonjour, Francoise!) was quick to distance himself from the topic amid careful articulation of his own revulsion:

"It is the most barbarian food, heavy and ugly, that you can imagine. I tasted it once and have never tried again. Just seeing it repulse me. The name 'Poutine' is a transformation of the word 'Pudding.' Poutine originally means in French Canadian some situation or dish made of heterogeneous things, or a very tangled situation. 'Quelle poutine' could be sometimes translated as 'what a mess'."

Francoise went on to bemoan the export of the dish:

"I read in the newspaper that they sell it also in Michigan and that it is becoming very popular there. One more disaster in the Western fast food." Ah, but Francoise, that is Michigan. Mayhaps Michael Moore will yet mount a documentary on poutine's glorious legacy?

In researching this piece, it was curious how emphatically my contacts in Montreal distanced themselves from the subject. My old friend Gabriel wrote (setting himself apart from the many who did not respond), as if I were asking about some sort of rectal parasite. "About Poutine," he said, "you're out of luck since I am not a fan of that particular 'delicacy'." Nuff said, Gabriel, but he then added, "But my girlfriend is ... But she is from Drummondville (which claims to be the birthplace of said dish)," making both poutine and Drummondville somehow pejoratives with a single deft stroke of the keyboard. Indeed, and who am I to argue?

Still, it is rumored that for some, poutine is a point of pride (again, I hear the same about President Bush, but I've yet to find any American who admits to that viewpoint). I couldn't find a soul in Canada to defend the dish, but I am hardly a Washington Post journalist. Perhaps I should contact William Shatner.

No, I've stomached quite enough for this diversionary article.


I have, however, found a passionate poutine evangelist on the Green Mountain side of the border, one willing and I daresay eager to go on the record in defense of the dish. Roderick Bates notes that poutine has made tentative inroads into our fair state, points north of St. Johnsbury; I take him at his word. But more importantly, Rick rhapsodizes like a true Edacien, though he be not one:

"I love the stuff....I think that the fact it may be the most heart-stopping compound ever to be passed off as food that makes it so attractive to me. That, and that it combines salt and fat in great quantities -- a sound basis for any cuisine. Poutine is a great food in the same way that so many wonderful foods are great -- it is a simple idea, elevated to greatness by good preparation. French onion soup is high cuisine, but it's just stinky old onions in a beef broth with a little cheese and some soggy bread (uh-oh). Cassoulet is just baked beans, but the sausage and duck and the time put into the cooking make it a religious experience.

"Similarly, poutine elevates french fries high above the McDonald's red paper packet with ketchup squirted in. Properly done, with fresh cut potatoes hot and crisp, with brand new farmer cheese curds so fresh they squeak when you bite them, and with a good brown gravy poured over, poutine is the real thing. It is a wonderful smelling, wonderful tasting comfort food.

Sure, it has peasant origins, but so does cassoulet.

The point is that good food transcends its origins.

And poutine is good food."

When I argued the point with Rick over a couple of days, he retorted, "if you're three calories away from extinction, all that stuff is great!" Hell, if I'm three calories away from extinction, week-old rainwashed flyspecked crowpecked roadkill would do, too, the more maggots the merrier.

But Rick would have none of it! "Okay, let's push the 'four food groups' idea a little," he shot back to me. "And yeah, I know there are more than three food groups; I'm talking about the Four Survival Food Groups -- fats, sugars, water and salt. And okay, salt isn't really a food group but it is an essential, as is water. As I said earlier, these are the ones that matter when you are three calories away from extinction -- stuffing your hand into a hive and sucking down a bunch of honey will instantly bring you back. Fatty foods will give you extra calories to store away in case there's no more food for another week. Starches don't give you the instant buzz that honey does, but they convert to sugars and keep the engine running for quite a while.

"These are the primal urges that draw us to poutine, the molecular level voices from the swamps of a million years ago, where two celled organisms grabbed the good stuff and lived."

Actually, primal swamp mire pretty well sums up my experience with poutine. But again, Rick would have none of that, either.

How to improve on the dish? Rick's full of ideas. "Actually, about the only thing that could be done to improve poutine would be to build it on a solid base of vanilla ice cream. That would get the instant sugar rush, and would, given the heat differential, encourage wolfing down the whole thing while its components were still distinct, which would help to recreate the feeding frenzy aspect of the survival food experience."

O-Kay, thus poutine could be the ideal appetizer-and-dessert-in-one. Voila, I have ensured poutine's advocate divine had his say, despite my own strong, well-founded opinions.

But let me leave the final word for one who knows best. Francoise -- remember that most reasonable fellow Francoise? -- concluded his missive to ye Edacien Editor with a bittersweet blend of bewilderment and despair, "It is also amazing that many people here in Quebec are very proud of the Quebecoise origin of the Poutine. We have Celine and we have the Poutine. We have McGill and the highest income tax bill. Please save St. Edacious of tasting the Poutine. Let him taste our 'tourtière' and our 'Giblotte' and even a well done 'pâté chinois' but please forget the poutine."

We can only hope this testimonial spares our fellow Edaciens -- but I suspect it will only prompt curiosity, create an appetite for the exotic and out-of-reach, and prompt an Edacien side dish of the most glorious poutine imaginable.

In fact, ye editor has already proved that's all I've accomplished (after admonishing me for my initial draft lacking the lactic lumps). He now craves the damned stuff.

Alas, I have failed you all.

Quelle poutine!

____________________

[Stephen R. Bissette used to delineate the adventures of a swamp potato for a subsidiary of Time-Warner, for which he won critical acclaim and international awards, even in Canada. He now lives, writes, and works in southern Vermont, but has somehow missed every Edacien gathering since 1990, which has become a stubborn point of pride. However, he owes his career in comics to ye Edacien Editor, who for the well-timed 1975 investment of a mere $200 changed the world. Thus, Bissette owes ye Editor forever. Such is life.]

Have a great Friday, one and all...