Salon.com > Elizabeth Bukowski

Why do elephants paint?

Thu, 23 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

If you are an artist, thank Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid for their relentless efforts to show that art is a hoax. If you're an Asian elephant, thank them for getting you a job.

href="http://www.diacenter.org/km/artists.html ">Komar & Melamid are a team of artists in New York who emigrated from Russia in 1965. Their work has ranged from paintings satirizing Soviet iconography to "The People's Choice," which used polls and market research to create the "Most Wanted" and "Least Wanted" paintings for various countries and cities. (Landscapes with lots of blue are the universal favorite.) In other words, they have repeatedly used art to make art look silly and pompous.

Now they are teaching elephants how to paint. It all started when they read reports of the plight of domesticated elephants in Asia, whose numbers have dwindled in recent years from 11,000 to only 3,000. The elephants used to make a good living hauling trees in the logging industry, but deforestation of the countryside has led to bans on teak logging. There aren't many opportunities for 6,000-pound mammals in the Asian job market. The elephants and their keepers, or mahouts, were forced to scrape by on performing tricks for tourists or doing illegal logging work at night.

Lucinda Williams

Tue, 11 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Lucinda Williams' music is something of a Baedeker's guide to the South. It's not just that the singer-songwriter, born in Lake Charles, La., shows her roots by bending the region's musical styles into a magnetic sound all her own. She's also a master of evoking the character of a place with the telling, everyday detail: "Cotton fields stretching miles and miles/Hank's voice on the radio." When she adds in the names of the cities she has known, as she does in song after song, even those who have never traveled below the Mason-Dixon line end up feeling they know Lafayette, Memphis and New Orleans.

Her fifth and most recent album, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," winner of a Grammy for best contemporary folk album in 1998, is as geographic as anything she's done. Enough cities are listed here to rival a road atlas of the South, yet the emotional journeys Williams describes resonate with people everywhere. The songs range in mood from regretful to defiant to nostalgic. But they share a conviction, or at least a flickering hope, that relief -- whether from a broken heart in "Joy" or from stifling domesticity in the title track -- is just an address change away. In "Jackson," recovery from a breakup is measured in miles: "Once I get to Baton Rouge, I won't cry a tear for you." The mournful "Greenville" urges a washed-up drunk to leave town. And a man finds heaven on earth in "Lake Charles."

Merle Haggard

Mon, 15 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Merle Haggard has given up on the idea of a sound check. We're in his tour bus on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, in front of the Town Hall theater, where he will perform in a few hours. President Clinton is in town, and the Merlemobile is being shooed away by New York's finest to make room for the motorcade. Traffic is moving in slow motion; finding another place to park this hulking vehicle could take all night.

Not that Haggard is concerned. He's been in this business for 35 years and has 41 No. 1 country songs on his risumi, including the classics "Mama Tried," "Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink" and the notorious "Okie From Muskogee." He specializes in writing deceptively upbeat songs of longing -- for a woman, for the bottle, for the past, for the road -- that are inspired by his rough-and-tumble life and the struggles of the rural working class. His singular mahogany voice and synthesis of elements of the work of artists from Bing Crosby to Lefty Frizell continue to thrill listeners and influence musicians of every persuasion. He's a living legend of country music; he don't need no stinkin' sound check.