The Dean Hisson
August Coppola and Nicolas Cage (1986)
A Cartoon-O-Graphic Essay from Chance Encounters with Celebrity: Artists, Actors, Writers; Filmmakers, Musicians; a Couple of Simulations and a Murderer by Otto-M./D. Leopard.
“The Major Arcana is comprised of 22 cards, ranging from Key 0, the Fool, to Key 21, the World. The illustrations are rich in symbolic and mythological figures, animals, natural phenomena and objects. The very names of the cards are suggestive of magic and mystery: The Wheel of Fortune, The Hierophant, The Hanged Man…”
Eden Gray, A Complete Guide to the Tarot (1970), p. 13.
Random encounters. Chance meetings. Crossing paths with celebrities in real life. Each an archetype. Each a symbolic figure in their own particular cultural landscape. These are the famous people that I’ve accidentally encountered in my daily life. These are the Major Arcana of my personal tarot deck.
Who we meet + What we read = Who we are. The Algebra of Identity.
An Origin Story
I knew August Coppola in the late 1980s when I attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) as an undergraduate art student. As the new Dean of Creative Arts, Coppola’s approval was courted by our tiny interdisciplinary program at the school. Originally called the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts or CEIA, it was renamed during my time in the program to the Inter-arts Center (IAC). The rebranding happened because other programs in the College of Creative Arts such as Cinema, Broadcast Communication Arts, and Art proper took issue with the idea that experimental and interdisciplinary work was only being accomplished at CEIA.
The program itself catered to the wild wolves of SFSU Arts who wanted to make films or paintings, but also wanted to explore poetry or theater or dance as an interdisciplinary artistic practice. One could take classes across the creative arts but also in English, the Humanities or even the sciences if your work explored those areas.
The Dean Hisson
“Augie,” as he was called by the director of the newly minted Inter-Arts Center, attempted to reshape an educational program that he seemed to think simply cultivated oddballs and malcontents. Augie was a peculiar artistic type and should have been a kindred spirit to many of us in Inter-Arts, but instead he hovered in the shadows of business administration owing allegiance to the kind of success that Hollywood adores, being a Coppola after all. It seemed that he could tolerate the students of Inter-Arts, but he fell short of actually embracing us.
I chose CEIA because I was in thrall to Marcel Duchamp at the time and this program seemed like the closest thing to a Duchamp-based Arts program available in the Bay Area (I was also attracted to NEXA at SFSU, a program that featured team taught classes with one instructor drawn from the humanities and another from the sciences – RIP CEIA and NEXA).
At least on the surface, Duchamp, as a founder of what later became conceptual art, was anti-institutional and anti-Art with a capital “A.” The CEIA program leaned heavily into “anti-art” – post-studio forms such as conceptual design, performance, video art, etc. – and I found this appealing after deciding that it was time to complete the BA that I had started years earlier with the idea of becoming a “commercial artist” – what other kind of artist is there for students from the lower classes?
The Inter-Arts Director
I thrived in the Inter-Arts milieu of SFSU from 1985-1987.
The IAC Director liked my work and my passion for video art-making. She sought out Augie’s approval in the hope that perhaps the Inter-Arts Center would thrive at the College of Creative Arts. Augie had repeatedly threatened to cut funding for the center since arriving at SFSU. Consequently, she passed along a fairly polished cut of the video that I had been working on for about a year hoping that Dr. Coppola would find it interesting.
Krakow John: Doctor Faustus, a Videotape
My tape was a film-video collage that retold the Faust myth as a tale situated in domestic violence. It featured DADA theatrics, trash cinema elements, cartoonish humor, and critical theory. These creative and critical forms were passions for me then and they remain so still.
My video built upon the formal and conceptual experimentation of the San Francisco film and video community, a group of powerful, visionary artists who dominated Bay Area media art practice from the late 1950s onwards.
It also represented a year of my working life and was buttressed as much by my soul as it was by my sweat (the tape helped to get me accepted to the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as at CalArts and the Visual Studies Workshop in Buffalo, NY – a huge leap for this working class cartooning kid from Oregon).
Excitedly, the Director told me that Augie and his son Nick were going to watch the tape over the weekend. She thought that they would get the vibe of the piece and see the Inter-Arts center as a place of innovation at the college.
I got the physical tape back a week later without comment.
Scenes from a Videotape
Faust/Danny O’Day (Left), The Deal Taker. Mephistopheles/Hammer of God (Right), The Deal Maker.
Marguerite/Gretchen (Left), The Mother, In Repose and Ruin. Walpurgis Night (Right), The Witches’ Sabbath.
Father and Son
Note: This doesn’t do justice to the shape or substance of the 20 minute video, but it does give the reader a gist of the idea of a gist.
Otto M., The Auto Mechanic
I finally asked the Inter-Arts Director what Augie thought of the tape. She replied brusquely that “he called you an auto mechanic. Someone who knows how to push the buttons on the equipment.”
Obviously, I was stunned by that comment. After all, his own big claim to fame had been designing the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium Science Museum, a touchy-feely hippie trip of a sensorium you could crawl through. He had also worked as an executive at Zoetrope, his brother’s film company. (Admittedly his three-screen revival of Abel Gance’s Napoleon was sensational – I saw it at the Shrine Auditorium, with his father Carmine conducting the orchestra live, during my own hippie days hanging out in Los Angeles in the Summer of 1981.)
I was hurt, but I dismissed the comment as best I could and went on with my work. Perhaps his understanding of art making simply excluded the kinds of video and performance art that inspired me at the time. Off his radar, so to speak.
But then he moved to dismantle the Inter-Arts Center, and I spoke up. At this point I was definitely on his radar and he grew to dislike me. He sashayed around in puffy-sleeved woolen sweaters and held court on his ideas about the Renaissance in meetings with IAC students who were worried about the future of their program. How dare I contradict him publicly? It seemed like a know-your-place sort of moment and soured my experience of SFSU for a time, such is life.
For years afterwards, I was pained when I thought of him and, by extension, Nick, mocking me with the tag, “auto mechanic.” I had attempted to escape the vocational and trade schools that I had grown up in, but here it was thrown back in my face by someone who I saw as a philistine in puffy sleeves (he seemed to like them, he wore them a lot).
Eventually, I realized that coming from a world where disassembling a motorcycle engine and rebuilding it to nearly factory standards (in your basement no less) made you a star, being called a technician of the arts – even if Coppola had meant it as a slight – was not a bad thing.
I started referring to myself over the years as simply The Auto Mechanic – cartoonist, video artist, media scholar and teacher – with an abiding interest in fixing the world just a bit, if possible. Otto M. for short.
So, all these years later, I dedicate my second self – Otto M. – to August Coppola, who named me and served as a symbolic Oedipal father of a sort (ironic given the abusive domestic setting of my Faust video), and to his son Nick, who continues to transform, for the better, the world onscreen.
Next Week: Napoleon Meets the Demon Bikers in “Beyond the Tactile Dome.” A Stab at Film Criticism.
Sketches and Afterthoughts
Ok. Maybe I’m still a little bit bent about the whole incident.
Mephistopheles (left) and Faust (right) in Krakow John: Doctor Faustus. Sketches for material that may be incorporated into the final version.
Although I was highly influenced in my Faust work by Susan Sontag’s essay on Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany (I hadn’t seen Syberberg’s film at the time, but Sontag’s essay on it was exceptionally compelling), in retrospect, I must also have been influenced by my viewing of Abel Gance’s Napoleon in 1981 (Thank you Doctor Coppola). This dream sequence from the film now evokes for me several sections of my Doctor Faustus tape.
Please watch the video clip above from the Los Angeles Review of Books (and check out their website). More next week.
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More on Duchamp at Britannica.
