Behind Rocky Schenck's Recurring Dreams

Don’t know who Rocky Schenck is? You should. The film director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) collects Rocky's work and wrote the introduction to his new collection of fine art photography, The Recurring Dream. Rocky not only makes hauntingly beautiful hand-tinted photographs, he also makes films, music videos, and has worked with Adele, Francis Bean Cobain, Robert Plant, Ray Bradbury, Ellen DeGeneres, Willie Nelson, B.B. King, T-Bone Burnett, Nicole Kidman, Stevie Nicks, Patti

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LaBelle, Dionne Warwick, and John Prine. He says that many of these luminaries come across his work, feel an emotional connection to him, and reach out to collaborate.

Rocky Schenck has lived and worked in Hollywood since he left the University of North Texas years ago, but his childhood in Texas and his family's artistic heritage informs his work. The author John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story) describes Schenck’s photographs as stills “taken from a movie that exists not on film but rather in one’s memory, with all the fuzziness typical of remembered impressions.” Schenck has talked to many media outlets about how he approaches his art and how he reflects on his ties to Texas. We've compiled some of the most interesting insights into his life and process to celebrate the publication of The Recurring Dream.

Don't miss Rocky Schenck's book signing and artist reception at The Wittliff Collections in San Marcos on Sunday, October 2nd. More information here. He'll also have an exhibition opening at the Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday, October 20th.

On growing up in Texas and his family's artistic heritage:

"I grew up rather isolated on a ranch outside of Dripping Springs, Texas, where I spent much of my childhood painting landscapes and watching old films on TV before and after school. I became obsessed. I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I started writing, directing, and photographing little movies. My Dad bought me a twin lens Yashica stills camera, and I learned photography while shooting stills on the sets of my little epics.

My early films and photographs were all in black and white as I attempted to duplicate the look of the vintage films I saw on TV. I never had formal training as a photographer or a filmmaker. I also loved to draw when I was a child, so my parents enrolled me in an oil painting class. My ancestors were classically trained artists who moved from Europe to Texas in the 1850's, and I was a big admirer of their work. I suppose I wanted to learn how to paint in the rather romantic style of their paintings. I started selling my little landscapes around age thirteen.

— From a piece in KYKYLYKY; interview by Jan Walaker

Inside the Artist's Studio

Two Prospectors Book Trailer

We're proud to announce that Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark is an IndieBound Next List pick for November. See the full list here>>

Two Prospectors features the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard and long-time friend Johnny Dark. Get a glimpse into the life, philosophy, and creativity of one of America's leading dramatists by watching this book trailer and, of course, picking up the book:

Directed by Jana Birchum
Archival material courtesy of the Sam Shepard Archive, the Wittliff Collections, 
Texas State University

Buy Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

Editor Chad Hammett on Understanding Sam Shepard Through His Letters

Chad Hammett teaches fiction at Texas State University and edited the letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark to create the highly anticipated fall 2013 title: Two Prospectors. Coinciding with the release of the book this week, Chad shares how he poured through years of correspondence to discover these 'two prospectors':

Buy Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

I’m the East Texas son of farmers and honkytonkers and I happen to like to read.  I like to write, too, but reading came first and that is what compelled me to make a life of literature. I found out in college that they called it being an English major for a reason. You experience quite a bit of writing done under the Union Jack. You read Americans, too, like Hawthorne and Melville, but the lives of Puritans and whalers seemed a far cry from my own background. Then I picked up Shepard’s play Fool For Love. When I got to the line in the stage directions that read, “In the dark, Merle Haggard’s tune ‘Wake Up’ from his The Way I Am album is heard,” I took a look around to see if someone was playing a joke on me. I knew that song. My dad had that album. You could start a play with the Hag? I guess you could say Shepard had me at Haggard. 

When I began this editorial project after the sale of Johnny Dark and Sam Shepard’s correspondence to Texas State University’s Wittliff Collections, the name Shepard is what piqued my interest. Of course, by this point, I knew a lot about the man’s career. He was a Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright with more than a dozen Obies on his shelf as well as an Oscar nomination to his name. I’d watched (and re-watched  the climatic peepshow scene of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (written by Shepard) as many times as my VCR let me rewind the frayed rental tape and I could quote from True West at whim: “There aren’t any mountains in the panhandle! It’s flat!”

I’d already committed a year’s worth of work sifting through the Shepard material housed at the Wittliff’s Southwestern Writer’s Collection archive and I’d discovered the way critics delved into the man’s biography in search of clues to illuminate his life and work, and also Shepard’s legendary need for privacy (likely a result of all that biographical digging). So I felt I knew Shepard.

Johnny Dark was a mystery. By this point, I was well aware of the fact that he’d been married to Scarlett, Shepard’s mother-in-law during his fifteen-year marriage to O-Lan Jones Shepard and that Dark had taken the photographs that appeared in Shepard’s Motel Chronicles. And, naturally I knew a mention of Dark opened the Rolling Thunder Logbook, Shepard’s account of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. 

To be honest, my initial search through the entire collection of correspondence turned out to be a hunt for something that wasn’t there. I’d hoped the letters would provide salient and multiple examples of Shepard talking about process and meaning, especially of plays like Buried Child and Lie of the Mind. Granted, there is some of that discussion of the writing and acting life, but my hope was naive, it turns out, so there’s something else I thought I knew. I soon discovered, though, as Shepard himself puts it in his wonderful collection Cruising Paradise, sometimes “the mind shuts down, and then suddenly, something new begins to appear.”

What emerged was more than a glance into the artistic activity of one of our most important twentieth-century writers; the story told by these letters is a tale about male friendship and masculinity, addiction, fidelity, and the changes our society has been through in the last half-century as the era of letter-writing comes to a close. Turns out this Haggard fan didn’t know a thing.

— Chad Hammett will appear at the Texas Book Festival Saturday, October 26th. Click here to add him to your schedule.

Watch the new book trailer for Two Prospectors:

Two Prospectors Book Trailer

We're proud to debut our book trailer for Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, publishing on October 15. Two Prospectors, featuring the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard and long-time friend Johnny Dark, provides an intimate glimpse into the life, philosophy, and creativity of one of America's leading dramatists.

Directed by Jana Birchum
Archival material courtesy of the Sam Shepard Archive, the Wittliff Collections, 
Texas State University

Buy Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark

UT Press Book at the Heart of New, Award-Winning Documentary

In this week’s New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott reviews Treva Wurmfeld’s new documentary “Shepard & Dark” under the headline, “Two Writers Bound By Decades of Letters.” The film depicts the decades-long friendship between Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark. As Scott says,“Through it all, they wrote letters full of loose-limbed philosophizing, emotional candor and gruff wit. Those letters, which fill cartons and binders, provide the movie with its premise.” These letters now reside at the Wittliff Collection in San Marcos, Texas (the transference of which is also depicted in the film) and they will be published by UT Press for the first time in Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, available on October 15.

Sam Shepard, Johnny Dark, and their 40-odd years of friendship are fascinating. Their lives are unique case studies in modern masculinity, as both men struggled with loyalty, love, fame, and the nurturance of an independent creative drive. Sam and Johnny began their friendship in Greenwich Village in the 60s and stayed friends through unconventional living arrangements in 1970s San Francisco, Shepard’s rising fame in the 1980s, and the dramatic start to his relationship with actress Jessica Lange. Both the film and the book are deeply personal, and given Shepard’s commitment to privacy, also provide the best opportunity to understand the life behind one of America’s greatest living playwrights.

Film screenings

On October 10, The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX, hosts filmmaker Treva Wurmfeld and Johnny Dark for a screening and panel discussion of “Shepard & Dark.” Read more about the Sam Shepard collection.

The film comes to Austin on October 11, screening at the Violet Crown: http://www.violetcrowncinema.com/movies.php?bit=coming_soon

Watch the trailer of “Shepard & Dark,” released by Music Box Films:

San Antonio Express-News :: From Uncertain to Blue, Timeless Mexico

From Uncertain to Blue
by Keith Carter
Buy It Now

Timeless Mexico
by Susan Toomey Frost
Buy It Now

Picture books hook the eye
Coffee-table tomes offer wonderment, hilarity, insight.
By Steve Bennett

Betting money says the advancement of the Kindle and the iPad spells the death of the printed book. That could well be. Even though an iPad can link a paragraph on why a cheetah has spots to a video of a cheetah taking down a gazelle, it can't do what a coffee-table book does, which is announce to visitors to your fine home that you are a civilized human being, and that this — your living room — is a center of culture. (Perhaps it says something about your personal economy as well.)

Like a coffee table, you have to get out the Pledge and an old T-shirt and dust off the coffee table book every month or so. Sometimes, you'll find yourself lingering, returning to those paintings by Picasso or those photos of the Beatles.
Even though bookstores are failing, there is still room in the world for the big, bold, beautiful coffee-table book.

Here are a few recent editions that are worth their heft.

Photographer Keith Carter is a Texas treasure. He shows us what life is like — in black and white. In 1986, Carter and wife Pat eschewed an exotic vacation to Morocco and bought a three-dollar Texas map. They circled small towns with names like Diddy Waw Diddy and Noodle, then drove to these dips in the road where Carter made one photograph for each town. The title of the photograph is the name of the burg, although Carter didn't get cutesy and try to make visual poetry out of Poetry — “which,” he says, “was mostly goat ranchers.” The project became his first book. Twenty five years later, Carter has “re-envisioned” “From Uncertain to Blue” (University of Texas Press, $55), with a new essay and an introduction by Horton Foote, into a chronicle of the state and its people that is timeless and universal.

For decades, we saw the world through the lenses of Life magazine's photographers, whether it was the summit of Mount Everest or Marilyn Monroe in a party dress. “Life 75 Years: The Very Best of Life” (Time Home Entertainment, $36.95) captures the moments that have shaped our lives for generations — Robert Capa's “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War, the Mercury astronauts — in a big (13-by-16-inch) book that lets the images speak for themselves. It also features a keepsake reproduction of the first issue of Life, ads and all, from Nov. 23, 1936. Cover price: 10 cents.

On the family tree of Mexican photography hang the names of master such as Garduño, Bravo (both Manuel and Lola) and Iturbide, not to mention foreigners such as Strand and Weston. At the base of that tree stands Huge Brehme. As San Antonio collector and writer Susan Toomey Frost points out in her gorgeous new book “Timeless Mexico: The Photographs of Hugo Brehme” (UT Press, $55): “Hugo Brehme mentored Manuel Álvarez Bravo in mastering composition and darkroom discipline. His strict training with Brehme served as a springboard for Álvarez Bravo's future work.” Which not only included becoming “the Mexican master of dreams, death and symbolism” but teaching a succession of subsequent great lens men and women. Brehme emigrated to Mexico from Germany just before the revolution exploded and ran his tight-ship studio, producing portraits and postcards, for 50 years, forging a singular vision of a country he came to call home.

Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. traces African American history from 16th century slavery through Jim Crow and the Great Migration to the election of Barack Obama in the sumptuously illustrated “Life Upon These Shores” (Knopf, $50). One critic has called the book “a tour de force of the historical imagination.”

Read more at mysanantonio.com »