By Michael Hooper
A small encounter in the physical world can be a gigantic moment of the heart. I recently spent three wonderful days getting reacquainted with an old friend named John Giles. He and I met through a mutual friend Arlen Lazaroff, a Nebraska poet and artist who was active in the poetry circles in Omaha from 1985 to 1995.
Lazaroff and Giles were part of an explosion of creativity happening in the music, art and literary scene in Omaha at the time. Poets and writers often met at The Antiquarian Book Store run by Tom Rudloff in the historic Old Market neighborhood. I often went to the Old Market several times per year in those days, particularly when I lived in Omaha's Hanscom Park neighborhood and worked at the Papillion Times in 1987. The Old Market had a Bohemian ambiance in those days, with its record stores, bars and restaurants, including the French Cafe.
Rudloff was a scholar and linguist who owned a five-story building full of books, records and art. With bushy eyebrows and a deep voice, he was a charming man who was curious about everything. He often sat with other book people on couches and chairs near the entrance. When you entered his salon, he asked if you would like a cup of coffee. Rudloff encouraged Erich Christiansen in his study of philosophy. I bought The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. Arlen found great records in the music room for his growing collection of psychedelic rock. Among others in this movement were Margery Coffey, and Richard Chilton, Randy Galaska, and Eadweard Rhawn York.
Margery Coffey was the Godmother of this emerging crowd. She and Richard Chilton live on the Winnebago Reservation and had adopted a lifestyle of creating art and literature. Coffey's paintings of native Americans are highly regarded by critics. I love her blue period when she painted lonely souls at a nursing home in Alma, Neb. The faces of her subjects seem haunting and tragic. Coffey is not afraid to tell the truth. Human life is a tragedy. We're born. We live. We die.
Perhaps the greatest emerging poet at the time was a young woman named Renee "Talonia" Novy.
Talonia had big frizzy hair, soft brown skin and mysterious eyes. Her race, she said, was a mix of European, African, Bohemian and Jewish. She often performed at Kilgore’s, a coffee shop popular among the poets at the time. Arlen took me to Kilgore’s one night, where I saw Talonia perform in a raging, majestic fashion, as if she were floating on stage. Broken promises, shattered dreams and lust for living, her poem Fast Against the Train speaks volumes to the intense emotion she gave to living.
Tragically, Talonia, 29, and her 7-month old daughter Jamesin Novy-Sullivan died after getting struck by a motor home on Interstate 680 in Omaha in 2003.
These Nebraska poets, including Giles and Lazaroff, were involved in the Youth for Peace movement. The group traveled all the way to Washington DC to deliver their message of peace, meeting with Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska.
They loved creating art and music in a collaborative way. Arlen recorded with musicians like David Nordin and Dereck Higgins, a musician who has been an Omaha pioneer with rock bands over the years. My favorite was Digital Sex with Higgins, Stephen Sheehan and John Tingle.
311 of Omaha, and Lincoln's For Against and The Millions were popular bands in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Saddle Creek Records was founded in Omaha in 1993 as Lumberjack Records by Mike Mogis and Justin Oberst; Bright Eyes and The Faint were among its recording artists.
The Reader
John Heaston, editor of The Reader, was active in these groups, he supported them by publishing their news and events in his magazines.
"Johnny championed my work," said visual artist Eadweard Rhawn York. "He featured me twice on the front page."
John Giles worked for Heaston in publishing articles in Sound magazine. Indeed they published an article of mine about a seminal poetry gathering on the Platte River, where we built a fire and read late into the night and danced to jazz in the early 1990s.
The Omaha Press Club was going to roast Heaston in May but he died the day of the roast, said his friend Kris Kluver. The roast, led by his brother Ben, went on anyway. Those who spoke spared nothing. Heaston would have loved it, Kluver said.
Heaston, 53, died after a four-year battle against leukemia. John Giles says he got to see him before he passed.
Scherzkopf
In the early 1990s, Eadweard Rhawn York tried to get press in The Omaha World-Herald. But he kept getting rejected. The Bemis Gallery also rejected the local artist, preferring instead to favor artists from New York and Europe. So York created a character named Scherzkopf (which means joke head), who was supposedly a rising German artist. York painted multiple paintings and attributed them to Scherzkopf. He sent out press releases and photos of his work. The Omaha World-Herald became interested and wrote a story about the German artist based on the press releases. When the art show was displayed, a reporter tried to interview the German artist only to find out it was York the whole time. Needless to say York was banned from the OWH after that.
Margery Coffey encouraged artists to publish their works and she helped several poets create chap books through her own publishing firm, Black Prairie Dog Woman Studios, featuring the works of Dennis Hastings, Arlen Lazaroff, and John Giles. Margery and Richard Chilton published many works on their web site Jackalope Arts. Looking over the statistics of the web site usage, it turned out a lot of hits were coming from France, Giles recalled.
Sometimes it's hard to be loved in your own country.
In the 1990s, Arlen and I wrote a book called Shattered on the Plains, about eccentric men and women in Kansas and Nebraska.
The act of creation. That was what this movement was all about. Margery and Arlen made the front page of The Omaha World-Herald
when their art was censored in Fremont, Neb. Fremont conservatives were offended by Arlen's art featuring a nude man and woman with the phrase, "The End of Sex is a Family."
John Giles and I have been talking about doing an art retreat for a couple of years now, and it finally came together this summer when we spent three days together at our cabin in northern Minnesota, working on art projects, and discussing our mutual history with these fascinating people in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I took John to a hayfield near a grove of trees by our cabin. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing, we felt so alive. It was in that moment, he told me his full name was John Matthew Giles. As a preschooler he was called Matthew. When he went to first grade, he said there were four other Matthews in his class so he went home that day and asked his mother for another name and his mom said, "well your Dad calls you John." The next day he told his teacher, "I am John."
John and I ate fruit and drank water and then went swimming in the lake. We stayed in the water for a long time, the water felt so refreshing.
That night John Giles painted a figure emerging from blackness with big lips and hypnotizing eye.
He painted in low light inside of a garage in the night time so there was not much to be seen, only imagined and his imagination went wild.
The spirit of creation brought us together again, after a separation of almost 20 years.
I am grateful for the time with my friend creating new memories and remembering the glorious time we experienced in the late 80s and early 1990s with all that great art, poetry and music coming out of Nebraska. What an incredible time to be alive.
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