A Portrait of the Watercolorist as a Young Man

The provenance of the famed illustrator James McMullan’s iconic poster for Lincoln Center’s Anything Goes is to be found in the exhibit of watercolors from his recently published memoir Leaving China, currently on display at The John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. McMullan's father had been the child of missionaries (McMullan’s grandparents had founded a orphanage in China). His paternal aunt was devout, but his father enjoyed earthly pleasures, among them playing Broadway musical tunes from shows like Anything Goes on the piano, a pleasure which is rendered in one of the panels of the exhibit. In another watercolor, McMullan envisions his emblematic childhood self looking through a window at a crucifix. The image in the distance is more crystal clear than the foreground of the painting and it pinpoints the brilliance of the intersection between art making and remembrance. The precision and clarity of the tiny crucifix correlates to the esthetic distance conferred on memory by time. In one of the exhibit's inscriptions McMullan describes the effect on his imagination of the art he saw as a child thusly, “I believe that my first conscious idea of ‘art’ came from looking at scenes depicted in the Chinese scrolls hanging on our living room walls. I was fascinated that the lines in the paintings were so flat and obviously ‘just lines,’ but they conjured up three dimensional trees, mountains and people. It gave me a taste of the power of calligraphy in drawing.” So while the historical facts make McMullan’s memoir seem like an illustrated watercolor version of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. Leaving China records the genesis of a sensibility; it’s an ars poetica. McMullan’s memoir  might be subtitled A Portrait of the Watercolorist As a Young Man.

Stonewalled III: Post Modernist Sexuality

Sexuality is a biological drive, but it is also a figment of the imagination. If consciousness is ever separated from the body, with our species preserved as pixels of intelligence migrating through cyberspace, then the very notion of what it means to be male and female will revert to being a fiction.  Our present culture is obsessed with pornography, which has become infinitely ubiquitous and is still looked at as a virus which distracts unwary minds from a more innocent sexuality—which they might be more prone to undertake had they not become so infected. But is there reason to believe that pornography has become the fuel for migrating consciousnesses that are increasingly separated from the mother ship? We are still men and women, made of flesh and blood and hormones, but increasingly we find our functions usurped by technology. No wonder radically fundamentalist religions are so intent on shielding their followers from the influences of modernity. Enlightenment ideals of reason and equanimity have no  place amidst the brute inequities of biology. It’s no wonder that there is so much sexual dysfunction in the battered and defeated armies of heterosexual culture.  However, there is a hope. Once mankind has totally done away with its dependence on the body—Ray Kurzweil’s idea of immortality coming in the form of organs made from microprocesssors is only one of a number of possible outcomes—then sex will take its rightful place as one of a number of cultural institutions for which tickets are purchased say like for Lincoln Center or BAM.