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BORING Book Review 😩
22 Plays2 months ago
Lol, I'm just being dramatic. I actually give a 'fair to middling' review of Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome friends to another episode of life's effin nuts.
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host, JR. One man's stories and ruminations on being human in an upside down world. Life's effin nuts. Life's effin nuts.
Catch-Up and Berkeley Scene
00:00:29
Speaker
It's been a minute since I've talked to you, my friends.
00:00:33
Speaker
It's been a minute. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. It's been a minute.
00:00:43
Speaker
Oh, boy. and need some auto-tune. need some auto-tune over here. My voice is rusty, crusty, and dusty, man.
00:00:55
Speaker
Rusty, crusty, dusty. Happy Tuesday, friends. hope it's sunshiny. And bright where you are. It's relatively sunshiny and bright where I am in Berkeley, California. I see birds flying through the sky. I see scattered clouds.
00:01:15
Speaker
I see leaves dancing in the wind.
00:01:20
Speaker
Time marches on. Life continues.
00:01:28
Speaker
that The thread continues to unspool everything. Yep. the The thread continues to unspool.
00:01:38
Speaker
All right, friends.
Book Recommendation: 'Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher'
00:01:40
Speaker
I read a book recently called Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher.
00:01:47
Speaker
Did you catch that? Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher. Very good book.
00:01:56
Speaker
very very very very Very, very, very, very, very good book. Do any of you all read out there? We got any readers in the audience? Do people read these days still?
00:02:09
Speaker
Outside of scrolling through tweets or whatever?
00:02:15
Speaker
We got readers out there? i hope so. I like reading. Reading is a meditative act.
00:02:24
Speaker
Reading is like nutrients for my soul.
00:02:31
Speaker
Reading is of a vehicle to, for me at least, more groundedness and more presence.
00:02:46
Speaker
So short nights of the shadow catcher.
00:02:50
Speaker
I recommend going to your local bookseller. Local, not Amazon. Local. If you have a local bookseller. it's It's a slightly obscure book. So you probably have to place an order for it. They probably won't have it at the actual bookstore. But don't be lazy.
00:03:08
Speaker
Don't just go for the one-click purchase on Amazon. Don't just go for the one-click purchase on Amazon. Nope. Nope. nope Nope. Don't do that. Be patient.
00:03:20
Speaker
Place an order with your local bookseller.
00:03:24
Speaker
Slow things down.
Edward Curtis: A Life's Work
00:03:33
Speaker
The book is basically a biography of this guy named Edward Curtis.
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Speaker
And
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Speaker
and don't know if I can recall all the little details of his life. But basically he grew up in the... He was born in the late 1800s, I believe.
00:03:57
Speaker
And...
00:04:02
Speaker
He got really into photography. And I think my understanding was that photography was a relatively new technology.
00:04:13
Speaker
And...
00:04:16
Speaker
He... Let's see. how do i want to How do I explain this, man? Why is this interesting? Why should you pay attention? um
00:04:29
Speaker
He kind of marched to the beat of his own drummer. He was really into the outdoors.
00:04:37
Speaker
He was very entrepreneurial.
00:04:41
Speaker
And early on, as he started to fall in love with photography... He had a desire to photograph
00:04:51
Speaker
ah local indigenous tribes. He grew up in, or he wasn't born there, but he kind of grew up and spent his formative years in Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. And he i think he kind of sensed that the tribes that lived there were slowly becoming extinct essentially. And that,
00:05:16
Speaker
Cultures were being lost right before his very eyes.
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Speaker
And
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Speaker
there there was like one remaining matriarch. I can't remember the name of the tribe from that area, but it was this old woman who they called Princess Angeline. And Edward Curtis took a photograph of her and it was very powerful image.
00:05:46
Speaker
And over time,
00:05:52
Speaker
he decided like this, this is what I want to do with my life. I want to go to as many reservations as I possibly can to document this very core part of American history that is quickly fading from
00:06:15
Speaker
He wanted to take pictures of indigenous elders. He wanted to take pictures of the different ceremonies. He wanted to get um to capture the stories and the mythologies and the spiritual practices, the songs, the languages.
00:06:36
Speaker
He wanted to immerse himself as much as possible. And he felt like he was working against the clock. because he felt like every day that was passing,
00:06:51
Speaker
more cultures were dying, more people were dying within this indigenous world. the The old ways were very quickly dying.
00:07:04
Speaker
And he he felt this sense of urgency capture it before it was gone, essentially.
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Speaker
And
00:07:22
Speaker
first for 30 years, he did this. He crisscrossed the country 127 times. And we're not talking on like first class Delta. When he first started doing it, and most of it was like horse and horse and buggy or whatever, like, what you know, covered wagons.
00:07:46
Speaker
And he would work tirelessly. He would work 18-hour days, seven days a week, nonstop.
00:07:57
Speaker
Nonstop. Like almost obsessively. Or maybe not almost, maybe obsessively.
00:08:04
Speaker
And his his ambition was to create a 20-volume set.
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Speaker
And each set would... cover a variety of tribes and and document the aforementioned languages and photos and
00:08:26
Speaker
ceremonies and all that all that kind of stuff.
00:08:38
Speaker
I was very gripped by the book, okay? But as I'm like retelling it and like, God, I'm boring myself so much. So if I'm bored, you guys must be very bored too.
00:08:53
Speaker
so I think that instead of giving a blow-by-blow recap and boring myself to tears, boring myself to death, I think I'll just try to cut to the chase about why the book was so gripping to me.
00:09:09
Speaker
So I finished the book. I was in Chicago this past weekend and I was um At the Chicago airport.
00:09:18
Speaker
Waiting for my flight back to San Francisco. And I had some time. So as i finished the book. and For the last. 10-15 pages of the book.
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Speaker
Tears were just streaming down my eyes. I'm just sitting in the airport. No shame. Just reading this book. just Tears streaming down the eyes. My face like a. Like a wet puddle.
00:09:48
Speaker
And I think part of the reason is because
00:09:53
Speaker
ah despite his and incredibly proific prolific artistic career, 30 years, 127 times crisscrossing the country, 20 extensive volumes, I think he ended up comprehensively documenting over 80 tribes.
Curtis's Legacy and Sacrifice
00:10:14
Speaker
Comprehensively. And he he was a celebrity too. His work was very much acknowledged during his time. He had write-ups in every single major newspaper throughout the country. um he He was not college educated. he was He was like poor working class, but he ended up, he just had so much passion and and vigor that he befriended the president
00:10:47
Speaker
Teddy Roosevelt. um He ended up getting money from J.P. Morgan. He went to J.P. Morgan's office because he was broke.
00:11:00
Speaker
Despite his amazing work and all the accolades and all the recognition, he was broke. And so he went to j he got a meeting with J.P. Morgan, the richest man in the world at the time, and sat across from him in his office.
00:11:12
Speaker
And J.P. Morgan said, no, I'm not going to fund this.
00:11:18
Speaker
and And this guy, Edward Curtis, had the, they ah
00:11:25
Speaker
I don't know, the gall, the courage, the nerve to just sit there and stare at the richest man in the world and not be deterred by his no.
00:11:38
Speaker
Just stared him in the eyes, refused to leave, and pulled out his pictures and said, no, but look, look what I'm doing. Look at this. And J.P. Morgan takes the book and looks at some of the pictures and gives them $75,000, which at the time was an incredible amount of money.
00:11:58
Speaker
And over the years, J.P. Morgan funded the whole project ah to the tune of $2.5 million, dollars which is like $50 million dollars today, the equivalent.
00:12:09
Speaker
and so and And this guy, Edward Curtis, he he gave sort of talks and presentations so sold out shows throughout the country he would he like would do shows at like Carnegie Hall
00:12:26
Speaker
he was a star in some ways but by the end of his life he he he basically had no money he lived in this tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny little apartment in Hollywood at the end of his life he was going blind um he could hardly move
00:12:48
Speaker
And his work essentially had been forgotten at the time of his death. J.P. Morgan sold... he he Edward Curtis had the so had to sell the rights to his art to to J.P. Morgan. And then J.P. Morgan, their estate or whatever, they sold it to someone else for like $1,000 or something like that.
00:13:10
Speaker
And that person who they sold it to just basically archived the stuff and it and it just kind of died. It was not in circulation anymore. um At another point, Edward Curtis made a ah movie, like well one of the first documentary-style movies.
00:13:26
Speaker
And critically, it was acclaimed, but then there was an issue with the distribution of the film. And so that got shelved, and that just ended up in the archives. And in general, for a while...
00:13:41
Speaker
Americans just became disinterested more or less in their, the, the history of, of this area and the, and its people. And so Edward Curtis died basically alone and penniless.
00:14:01
Speaker
And it was just, it's kind of heartbreaking. This guy who had had so much vigor, so much passion, made such ah an immense contribution and had, and had, like i said, ah for the third time, I'll say it had received accolades.
00:14:15
Speaker
This wasn't just some guy living in a hermit or, you know, a hermitage, you know, scribbling crazy words. Like he, he did real work and got real recognition, but financially just never, he just always struggled financially.
00:14:35
Speaker
And then eventually, like I said, the the work itself lost some of its value. So he died alone and penniless. Alone and penniless in this tiny Hollywood apartment.
00:14:49
Speaker
and And he also sacrificed everything.
00:14:56
Speaker
He was, you know...
00:15:02
Speaker
In some ways, it's very admirable how dedicated he was to this project. In other ways,
00:15:12
Speaker
that that kind of stuff, that kind of dedication and passion comes at a cost. He had a very happy marriage, but essentially put his work first and the marriage dissolved and became very ugly.
00:15:30
Speaker
In fact, At one point, his wife his ex-wife, Clara Curtis, took him to court for failure to pay alimony, which he denied. But there's there was a very intense scene in the book where ah this guy who had once been literally performing on the stage at full to full theaters in Carnegie Hall in New York City and hanging out and taking pictures of Teddy Roosevelt and his family.
00:15:57
Speaker
he He's in the courtroom. And I think he had just gotten back from an expedition. And so he smelled bad. He looked disheveled. He was in bad shape.
00:16:09
Speaker
And the judge was like, what's the deal with this alimony? where like And you know what's like what what's what are you doing? Who are you? what's like Tell me your story. and anyway i this is I think this is when the tears started streaming started streaming down my face.
00:16:25
Speaker
I wish I had the book here to actually quote it, but essentially he says, like I've given my life to this work. And and and and he tells the judge, I've done it for free. you know i I raised all this money with J.P. Morgan, but that only covered, I didn't pay myself, this all that only covered the cost of the field work.
00:16:43
Speaker
I've done this work for free. And the and the judge was like baffled. just like Why would you do that? Why would you work yourself
00:16:55
Speaker
down to a pulp and not get paid and then edward curtis said something incredibly poetic i wish i had the book here i'll just quote it but essentially like i i just i was an artist who who wanted to complete a project who felt that it was important and i and i the project was more important to me than any earthly comfort essentially
00:17:31
Speaker
um
00:17:34
Speaker
Yeah. And so to me, I think part of the reason there was tears streaming down my darn face at the Chicago O'Hare airport,
00:17:43
Speaker
it's because I guess like it kind of just made me feel sad for the human condition and especially maybe like artists, which in some way I identify as an artist. That sometimes artists are, you know, I'll speak for myself.
00:17:58
Speaker
um I've always been driven by a vision, ah desire to create, a vision that there's something worthwhile capturing in this world, something beautiful, something that i that I will put ahead of other things, that I will sacrifice for. And in some ways, it can be a curse to have these visions and these desires because it's something that's hard to shake
00:18:32
Speaker
And it can be and a ah destructive force
00:18:38
Speaker
to have almost like a compulsive desire to create, a need a need to create a vision that what you're doing is valuable and important even if other people don't see it.
00:18:53
Speaker
Yet at the end of the day, despite whatever vision we have, whatever efforts we made,
00:19:03
Speaker
like life like you know like We get old, we die. We don't have happy endings sometimes. Or maybe a lot of times we don't people don't have happy endings. like it's just just For me, i don't I've always felt like aging and dying is sad, man.
00:19:22
Speaker
life Life can feel full of so much promise and potential. Especially when you know when you're younger. just feel like a million possibilities.
00:19:37
Speaker
feel like, you know, when you when I was younger, at least I just felt like and mortality obviously didn't really feel like a thing. You know, you I felt kind of invincible when I was younger.
00:19:48
Speaker
and it's just so sad sometimes that life can end
00:19:54
Speaker
and
00:19:56
Speaker
in decay life or in most if you go if you grow to be old life's going to end in some form of decay whether it's physical decay mental decay relational decay
00:20:09
Speaker
um I don't know, like psychological decay. Like, I don't know. i guess it would be really cool if you kind of die happy and fulfilled, which I'm sure there are, you know, people like that. You just had had a great life. You have a legacy, ah family to care for you as you're growing old. I guess that would be the ideal.
00:20:31
Speaker
But someone like this, Edward Curtis, who his his life was his art. That's why he gave everything to his art. um and it kind of destroyed him in a lot of ways.
00:20:45
Speaker
And so even though he had done this great service to humanity, he, he didn't, uh, and, and who knows? i don't, I've obviously wasn't there when he was on his deathbed and, and they didn't, I don't think they got into very, very specific detail in the book. Like what his sort of,
00:21:06
Speaker
you know dying words were or dying sentiments um but I know they that they did talk about towards the end of his life he's definitely struggled with depression and he hated he hated this tiny little apartment that he lived in and in Hollywood um but yeah i guess I just I guess I related to it in some ways
00:21:32
Speaker
And obviously I'm nowhere near as prolific as an artist as Edward Curtis or or I've made nowhere near, not even, I mean, not even like a smidge close to the contribution that he made.
00:21:44
Speaker
I'm not saying that I relate on that level, but I think I relate just in terms of,
00:21:52
Speaker
I mean, I guess, I guess I could, I could potentially see myself, you know, ending in circum, hopefully not, but just the the way that I've been oriented throughout my life just to like, you know, value kind of art and like the search for truth and beauty.
00:22:13
Speaker
i do kind of center my life around that in a lot of ways. And in some ways it's been great and wonderful to do that. It's allowed me to work on some really cool projects and do some really cool things and go to some really cool places. But there's a chance that at the end of that road is,
00:22:32
Speaker
A lot of sadness and loneliness. and um
00:22:39
Speaker
yeah But here's the thing.
00:22:44
Speaker
Here's the thing.
00:22:48
Speaker
His work, Edward Curtis's work, had
00:22:53
Speaker
it came back to life long after he died.
Rediscovery and Impact of Curtis's Work
00:22:59
Speaker
so People started hearing, I don't know, somehow like the work, the material that had been archived was kind of re resurfaced. And people were like, holy shit. like but how why Why is this in some dusty basement?
00:23:18
Speaker
this is This is some of like the most important anthropological work that we've ever seen. Like this guy did 20 freaking volumes, over 80 tribes, captured hundreds of languages and dialects.
00:23:36
Speaker
He like he captured entire cultures that otherwise would have been lost.
00:23:43
Speaker
And the pictures, the images, freaking gorgeous. Are you kidding me?
00:23:49
Speaker
Why are these in archives?
00:23:55
Speaker
And then also, i think i think I think the work started being rediscovered in around the 70s. And during that time, there was like kind of a new movement to
00:24:09
Speaker
find ways to connect with the history of this land and the people who are here. So there's like a new appetite for that. And so for that movement, this was just a treasure trove.
00:24:22
Speaker
And then further, one of the things that was very meaningful to me about the book, you know as I was reading, i kept i kept kind of wondering like how much of this is like voyeurism or,
00:24:37
Speaker
um I don't know, kind of like preying on a culture because, you know, Edward Curtis was white. And so, And he was like raising money for this project from J.P. Morgan. I'm like, is this is this kosher?
00:24:56
Speaker
But one of the really beautiful, cool things in the book is it said like that there's countless, countless, countless examples of contemporary indigenous people who are who really, really, really value Edward Curtis's work and appreciate his work.
00:25:16
Speaker
um They gave a quote, one quote that I remember, they gave several quotes, but N. Scott Mamade, I think his name is, um who's an indigenous a contemporary indigenous writer, and said, like, to be able to see my my ancestors, my relatives,
00:25:34
Speaker
relatives in full in their full splendor in their full power to be able to see those images and and ah i i'm i'm paraphrasing here i can't remember the exact quote but essentially it's like that meant everything to me if i had not been able to see those images i i wouldn't know who i am where i came from what the true core spirit of my people is so that meant a lot to me too that
00:26:05
Speaker
wasn't just like this extractive thing where just this white guy going into these reservations and create it you know like sort of romanticizing these older their cultures and then creating just for a white audience to kind of be amused by like it was more than that he really edward curtis really
00:26:30
Speaker
you know i don't know he what's the word
00:26:41
Speaker
I don't know what the word is. I don't know what i'm trying to say. i don't know.
00:26:47
Speaker
i don't know. i don't know. I don't know.
Reflections on the Human Condition
00:26:52
Speaker
I recommend you read the book though. I do think it was a good book. Highly recommended. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher. You know, just kind of anytime. i don't know. I think it helped me see life a little more clearly. Because I do think that there's this phenomenon in life.
00:27:11
Speaker
at least for me, where it's like we scrap and we fight and we claw and we try our best to to have a good life, to be a good person. we We laugh, we cry, we we celebrate, we mourn, we grieve, we to do all these things.
00:27:28
Speaker
just We're just out here, most of us out here just trying our best, man, just trying to get by, trying to do what we can. As Bob Dylan used to sing, we sit here stranded though we're all doing our best to deny it Sometimes I feel that way, man, that life, man, life is life can be hard, man.
00:27:49
Speaker
life life can be and And life can be sad.
00:27:54
Speaker
Life can be sad, man. We're just out here trying our best, doing what we think is right, following our heart.
00:28:07
Speaker
But I don't know, for a lot of us, I imagine it doesn't end that well. It doesn't end that well. I often think, I've mentioned before, often think about my ah great aunt Esther.
00:28:18
Speaker
May she rest in peace. um She lived to like 101. And... one and
00:28:26
Speaker
she was a great person and I, she, she, she lived in Sacramento and, um I spent a lot of summers in Sacramento and my grandpa's house was walking distance to her house and it was this cute, quiet little neighborhood. And we'd go over to Ann Esther's and she would teach us to play piano and very sweet person.
00:28:47
Speaker
um
00:28:50
Speaker
but I always feel like
00:28:54
Speaker
In spite of all those years she lived and all that sweetness that she had and gave, like, what is the end result? The end result is, you know, a few people remember her.
00:29:07
Speaker
And that's it. That's kind of it. And so and and she I would say she had a good life, you know, she...
00:29:14
Speaker
I'd say she had a good life. And and even then, with a quote-unquote good life, sometimes the best we get is that you know a few people remember us. So, I don't know. There was something about that book.
00:29:27
Speaker
but Man, I don't know. the The vision of this guy who'd been such a powerhouse, such an artistic force, such a insatiable desire to do something meaningful, to
00:29:41
Speaker
Ending up in this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny Hollywood apartment.
Episode Closing and Reflections
00:29:44
Speaker
Not being able to move. Going blind and penniless.
00:29:49
Speaker
Something about that man, right?
00:29:55
Speaker
Short nights of the shadow catcher. Alright friends.
00:30:01
Speaker
That's it I don't know if that was the best episode. But hopefully there was something in there that was juicy for ya. Life's effing nuts. I'm JR. One man's stories in Rumanage. I'm in an upside down world.
00:30:13
Speaker
Peace.