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)

Moving day: Part One

All right, enough of my political rants. You can read that everywhere, anywhere on the web, from much better informed folks than me. Here's something you can only read here:

My 19-year-old son Dan is moving out of the house this week into his first apartment. It's a big step, a big change, and one I can empathize with, for reasons we all understand.

That, coupled with the fact that I begin my faculty work with the first-class-ever at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT in about a week-and-a-half, is bringing back rich memories of this very week in my life 29 years ago. As a break
from my ranting about the grim realities of this week, I'll share some of those memories with you now.
__

During my second year at Johnson State College, a bunch of us went swimming at a spot we'd been told about, far from the campus. My friends Dave Booz and Joe Mangelynx and me wandered away from our amigos to explore the ledges above the main swimming hole. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and hot, and we decided there might be some interesting spots in the waterfall-riddled ledges above the main swimming hole. So, wearing only our cutoffs and dripping wet, we found a pathway up around to the topmost set of falls, and went exploring.

We ended up stepping our way down a series of smaller pools formed by a progression of waterfalls. At one point, the only way down to the next set of falls and uppermost pool was a rotting rope tied to a narrow but sturdy tree leading down to a wide overhanging ledge. Below the ledge was a crystal-clear pool, the sunlight shimmering off its surface.

Booz, being the ballsiest in such matters, didn't think twice: he shimmied down the rope, stepped out onto the ledge, and shouted up to us, "so, what are you waiting for?"

I made the climb down second, and then Joe did the same. Joe was (and most likely still is) a strapping fellow, built like a football player, and damned if that rope didn't break when he was about to set foot on the ledge.

So, there we were: on the ledge. The rope was gone, we couldn't go back up.

The pool was below, but there was a big problem: we couldn't tell how deep it was. The sun was shining directly down into it, and we could see every one of the perfect, round stones covering its floor with incredible clarity. We could damn near count those rocks on the bottom -- that’s how crystal-clear it was.

That pool could have been six inches deep, it could have been six feet deep: we simply could not tell.

I don't recollect how long Joe and Dave and I sat up on the ledge. We perched there a loooooong time, it seemed, until our friends were shouting up from below, asking where we were. A few shouts back and forth established we were OK and would be down soon, and all the while Dave hunkered down at the edge of the ledge, staring down into that pool. We all pondered that pool until we rationalized every possible scenario: the only option was to jump, which seemed like no option at all the longer we stared at that pool.

As the afternoon wore on and the sun moved and dropped the shadow of the ledge over us, we began to shiver: it was getting cold standing on the rock, and even with the shift in light, we couldn't tell about that pool.

Was it so shallow that we'd shatter our legs hitting those stones?

If we tried to land on our seats, was it so shallow we’d smash our hips?

Was it deep enough to cushion the sizable drop into those waters?

We just...
couldn't...
tell.

It was getting later and colder.

It was Dave who finally laughed, "Well, fuck it." He gave us a grin, and made the leap.
___

I was 21 years old and moving from Johnson State College to Dover, NJ. It was a momentous move in my life -- a definitive turning point, the most radical I'd ever dared. I was diving off a ledge into a body of water I couldn't make out below or beyond; I didn't know if I was diving into a pool six inches deep or an ocean. But this was the week I made the dive, and I've never regretted it.

I'd been a student at JSC for two years, ostensibly arriving two years earlier to study art, but instead pouring most of my energies into the theater department (thanks to Richard Emerson, who was the dept. head at that time and my advisor) and running the film program at JSC. My plans to study art were immediately derailed upon my arrival due to the small size of the college and the fact that seniors, logically enough, had first pick of classes; by the
time lowly freshman Bissette got to sign up for his classes, there were only two miserly art classes open to me, so theater is was.

As it turned out, this was for the best: Emerson was a fantastic fellow and great teacher, and I worked my ass off in his technical theater studies, particularly loving the study and application of theater lighting. The McCandless Theory of lighting the stage, it turned out, was central to the color work of two of my all-time favorite artists: the cinematic Italian horror and fantasy maestro Mario Bava, and Kansas City cartoonist extraordinaire Richard Corben. Whether Bava or Corben knew of McCandless, I had and have no idea, but McCandless's theories of light, color, its meaning and techniques beautifully articulated the visual universes of Bava, Corben, and all of theater. So, my JSC theater studies ended up feeding my art in ways I wouldn't have imagined possible. By my second year at JSC, I had talked Emerson into indulging a year-long independent study of Bava's films, and talked the rather imperious head of the art department, (the late) Peter Heller, into indulging three independent studies on comics: (1) to produce three comics publications and publish them, (2) to steep myself in a full semester of anatomical studies, and (3) to write a paper on "The Comic Epic," which was a radical thing at the time.

An aside: How did that go? Well, as for (1), only one published comic was completed, Abyss #1, that ended up being my key portfolio piece when I applied to the Kubert School; as Peter Heller said when grading time came, "This is remarkable -- I never thought you'd finish even one, much less publish it. Forget about three, I knew you were overreaching. You finished one. So, good for you." I completed (2), but Peter was so depressed by the comics I chose to analyze that he dismissed that project altogether, simply acknowledging it as "completed" and moving on. This was before the term 'graphic novel' even existed, and Peter had refused to permit adapted works (like Joe Kubert's Tarzan into the blend; thus, the works I studied in that pre-graphic novel era were Enemy Ace, Kamandi (alas, New Gods had been canceled before completion, so it had been rejected by Peter as being irrelevant), Kona: Monarch of Monster Isle, and Jack Katz's just-out-of-the-starting-gate The First Kingdom. Peter couldn't stomach looking at any of them -- Charles Schultz and Pat Oliphant were the only contemporary cartoonists he had any respect for -- so that was that. As for (3), I indeed completed initial anatomical studies to Peter's satisfaction, drawing every bone in the human body from three-to-four different views (working from the science lab skeleton and a brace of anatomy books), and four different views of the full skeleton. "Good, good," Peter muttered while gritting his cigarette holder between his teeth, "now, we get you to UVM to draw from cadavers. You must learn to draw the entirety of the human body. You've got the stomach for that, yes?" Well, no -- my one session drawing from a cadaver was a bust, not due to squeamishness, but because I couldn't take my eyes off the dead man's face, wondering who he was, had been, and how his body ended up where it was. End of aside.

The decision to even apply to the Kubert School had been a major leap of faith. Peter told me from our first discussion, "Listen, little man, you're going to be competing with New York City art students to get in there, the best of the best. Look at your chin: I can see the weakness in you there, in your face. You won't be able to hack it. You need to stay put here. There's nothing for you there."

I spent that final blissful summer in Johnson, prolonging my JSC stay by tutoring at the College's summer learning program. The campus was and remains an insular, lovely spot, and it was a great way to see out my stay at JSC. That was a maturing process: I was tutoring high school students who still didn't know how to read or write, which astounded me at first. I worked in particular with two students, one a tow-headed young man who was frustrated with anything that forced him to work indoors, the other a brunette young woman with intense green eyes who grew up on a horse farm and didn't see why reading was so important, though her frustration and the toll it took on her sense of self-worth was readily apparent at the close of our first session. She was hungry to make connections, doing so often by diverting our studies: knowing I loved horror films, she regaled me with her account of a film she'd seen that spring at the drive-in, Don't Open the Window, which had made a big impression on her. I assigned her to write a synopsis of the film, and write a new ending; it was the only writing assignment she'd completed with any passion. I was accepted as a peer by the other tutors, most of whom were older than me, either seniors at Johnson or graduate students, while I was a lowly college sophomore bolting from what would have been my junior year to pursue a new adventure: entering the first-class-ever of a wholly new college in Dover, NJ, The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc.

To everyone but my closest friends at JSC (including the three who had talked me into going to the Kubert School: Jack Venoooker, Mark 'Sparky' Whitcomb, and Steve Perry), this was a crazy endeavor. In 1976, the thought of anyone, much less a hick from Duxbury and Waterbury, making a career in comics was a reckless, delusional undertaking -- I mean, comics weren't a profession, they were a hobby (to quote my old buddy James Harvey, "Art it just a hobby"). To be pursuing it at a brand-new college that wasn't even accredited, could not offer or accept grants or scholarship, and was furthermore based in (groan) New Jersey, seemed crazier still. Only Peter Heller took it seriously, but did so only to test my mettle; when I applied even after Peter stared me down and cut me down verbally, he called me into his office with an arrogant wave of the hand, pointed to the empty chair next to him, and bellowed, "You did it anyway, didn't you?" I nodded yes, and he smiled and said, "Good for you." And that was that.

My parents (who, thankfully, are still with us) were making the big move to Florida from our home in Colbyville, VT. My Dad had worked hard to convince me to stay put, to take over the family store and make Colbyville my home. I think he thought I'd settle down with Jill Chase, my high school sweetheart who lived up on Blush Hill (Jill would marry and remarry, live in Japan, and raise a daughter). I had no interest in such plans, much less staying in Colbyville.

More on that in a moment: first, I have to impress upon you the precipitous drop I was about to make from that cliff-ledge into I-didn't-know-what was made all the more perilous by the fact my parents had sold the store and home and were pulling up stakes to move to North Port, Florida.

There was, after this week 29 years ago, literally no going back. There would be nowhere to go back to.

So, my saying no to considerable pressure to take over a thriving business -- the store and our home, a living and a house -- was a big fat no, and one at the time that seem completely irrational. Give up all that -- a certain future -- to try and find a means of making ends meet in comics???. It made no sense to my father.

But I had to do it, I had to give it my all. I knew if I didn't, I might regret not taking that plunge every day of my life -- whatever it led to, I knew I had to make the leap.

When my best friend Bill Hunter was found dead in his basement two years before (an apparent suicide), I swore I would make use of the time Bill no longer had and do what I wanted to do with my life. That was making comics -- and the Joe Kubert School sure looked like a lifeline to me! My father had always expressed his disgust with my staying indoors and drawing, and my desire to make comics made no sense to a man who'd served in four branches of the US military, worked as a lineman for the Green Mountain Power Company, and went into business for himself twice: once with the Eagle Oil Company (a heating oil business based in Duxbury), and again with Bissette's Market, of which there were three incarnations. My brother had done the Bissette name proud when he joined the Air Force, but I wanted no part of it, and my need to draw and tell stories simply didn't fit Dad's worldview.

That all changed in a heartbeat: the moment my father and I met Joe Kubert. When Joe shook my Dad's hand -- that steel-crushing Kubert handshake I still love -- my world was forever altered, for the better.

(Continued tomorrow)