Book Reviews

Meet your neighbors in Magnolia Cemetery

by Nick Smith February 10, 2010

Author Ted Phillips spent years researching the lives of the inhabitants of Magnolia Cemetery, digging up as many biographical details as he could for people who were often only known as a name carved on a gravestone. Sadly, Phillips did not live to see his labor of love get published.

The cemetery is a large-scale monument to man’s ability to give the murky subject of death an elegant, poetic façade. Consecrated in 1850, it lies on the banks of the Cooper River, surrounded by oak trees and shrouded with Spanish moss. It’s filled with statues, sarcophagi, mausoleums, and unmarked graves.

Phillips wrote short biographies for over 200 of its occupants, working from history books, registers, and Library Society obits. Some only warrant three quarters of a page, others a page and a half. All are concisely written, highly readable, and give just enough information to create a sense of what the person was like. If that person has been mentioned in another book or other major source, Phillips lists it. He often expounds on parents or children, and maps out their resting place at the end of the book. This is more than an encyclopedia of the dead — it’s a walking tour, a collection of human interest stories, and a love letter to a cemetery all wrapped up in a tight 200 pages.

Phillips’ love for Magnolia was kindled when he worked there as a teenager, digging graves and tending the grounds. Between burials he was able to explore the cemetery and read the names on the tombstones. He began wondering who these people were. Twenty years later he decided to answer that question in City of the Silent.

What really makes the book work is its alphabetical structure. Because the biographies are laid out by name rather than era or social status, politicians share pages with paupers, merchants with thieves, generals with carpetbaggers. By doing this, the author acknowledges that death is a great leveler. No matter who or what we are, we all end up the same way.

Some have downtown streets named after them, while others, like murderer Thomas Ballard McDow, the city would prefer to forget. With deaths spanning the cemetery’s entire history, Phillips captures Charleston’s changing society in an intriguingly morbid manner.

Phillips was a Harvard and USC School of Law grad and a member of the state Bar Association. He later became a member of the Brown Fellowship Cemetery Committee, a trustee of Magnolia Cemetery, and, for a time, a tour guide. For the last 11 years of his life he battled with the onset of AIDS. Eventually he had to retire from his work as a public defender and his beloved personal tours of East Coast historic sites. But by the time he passed away in 2005, he’d found the strength to complete most of the manuscript.

Thomas J. Brown stepped in to complete and edit City of the Silent, with Ted’s mother LaVonne Phillips as the uncredited transcriber, coauthor, and co-editor. The two collaborators will be joined by Ted’s brother Al to sign copies of the finished product at The Preservation Society’s Book & Gift Shop this week. Phillips had a longstanding relationship with the nonprofit group, working his way up from board member to vice president and secretary, so all proceeds from the book sales will go to preserving old buildings.

“I think it’s wonderful that Magnolia Cemetery’s being preserved,” says Cynthia Setnicka, manager of the shop. “It’s worth a lot of money to developers. I’m glad it’s still here — in fact it’s expanded.” She urges anyone who wants to help preserve historic Charleston to “buy the book and get the word out that it’s there. It’s a treasure.” She hopes that the information in City of the Silent will be used as the basis for an official tour.

Ted Phillips is buried in Magnolia alongside the people who inspired his book. Although they’re silent, they speak through Ted’s stories, celebrating their achievements beyond the grave.

Jeff Mapes is a bicycling revolutionary

by Nick Smith February 2, 2010

Jeff Mapes isn’t your typical revolutionary. He doesn’t sport a moustache or carry a little red book, and you won’t find his face on any T-shirts. But he’s peddling radical change with his investigative book on cycling culture, Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities.

The change may come sooner than expected. Some one million people regularly commute or run errands by bicycle, many of them in cities that have accommodated their needs with bike lanes, shared roadways, or weekend street closings.

“There’s been a steady growth of interest in this subject,” says Mapes. “Obama’s transportation department is quite interested. The stimulus bill early last year had a good chunk of transport money in it, with a pot of money for enhancements that states and locations can spend on biking and walking projects.”

This week, the Clemson Architecture Center is flying Jeff Mapes in from the bike-friendly town of Portland, Ore., where he works as a political reporter. He’ll talk about the alternative transport movement taking place in enlightened cities around the country, from Long Beach, Calif. to New York and Chicago.

“I hear from people in towns I knew nothing about,” he says. “I just heard from a guy with a blog in Wichita. There’s progress everywhere. Maybe it’s only a half dozen folks, but they’re vigorous bike advocates.” There are far more in Portland, which Mapes describes as “the most bike friendly place, with the largest road share for bikes in a large city.”

In his book, Mapes explains how forward-thinking cities in Europe and the U.S. have adopted policies that encourage cycling and walking. He uses statistics and hard facts to show that cyclists, aided by sympathetic politicians and urban planners, are helping to transform their streetscapes.

“People in the urban bike movement are rethinking how cities function,” says Mapes. Instead of organizing a city so that traffic flows in and out of it as quickly as possible, their goal is to make the journey more enjoyable. This goes beyond simple bike advocacy to a desire for “active transportation” — avoiding the asphalt jams in commercial centers where the public can do more without having to get in their cars.
 

Mapes supports denser living within a two to four mile radius because he understands that “when they get used to it, get comfortable and strong enough, people love riding around. A bicycle is a more elegant way of getting to a destination,” he adds. “It’s a great way to experience a city.”

Mapes particularly enjoys the unanticipated things that happen on a bike ride, the people you meet and things you see that would be missed if you’re stuck in a car. He recounts a recent example of the unexpected effects a ride can have. “I went to see Avatar at a big old fashioned theater three to four miles from my house. It was raining like hell, the wind was blowing in my face and I thought, ‘This is pretty sucky.’”

After the movie everyone ran for their cars, creating an instant bottleneck. “My bike wended through the crowd. The wind was at my back, pushing me along. I was speeding past the cars and I felt like I was an Avatar character, swooping and flying back home on a big beast. That blew my mind! Where else does a 55-year-old man have adventures like that?”

Signed copies of Pedaling Revolution will be available at the event, at Blue Bicycle Books on King Street, and online. The talk is sponsored by the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston and the Charleston Civic Design Center as part of a series called Revolution on 2 Wheels.

My First Movie: Take Two

My First Movie: Take Two — Ten Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First Film [Buy Now]

Edited by Stephen Lowenstein

Pantheon, $26, 286 pages

In theory, this book should be a wet dream for would-be filmmakers. It aims to get inside the skulls of talented maverick filmmakers, finding out what made them tick as they created their first features.

Interviewees include Richard Linklater, Terry Gilliam, and Sam Mendes, none of whom are known for being coy about their working process. So why is this book such a disappointing bore?
The staid format of the book doesn’t help. There are dry questions and big chunks of text. Editor Stephen Lowenstein’s repetitive interview techniques don’t help much either; he takes his subjects through their early filmic yearnings, then from pre-production to the critical responses to their films — and how they feel when their celluloid “babies” are praised or boiled in the media spotlight.

But the real reason why the book is so unedifying is its overall lack of commentary; Lowenstein comes to no conclusions of his own about the filmmakers’ processes, leaving directors to speak for themselves. Because of this, the book comes across like a series of extended interviews from a nerdy filmmaker magazine, crammed into a hardcover.

For all Lowenstein’s faults, he obviously had fun tracking down directors and interviewing them. Quite right too — the subjects have juicy stories to tell. Richard Kelly is the new kid on the Hollywood block, making the deliriously uneven films Donnie Darko and Southland Tales. He admits that visuals are his forte, and that if you mute the sound on his graduate film (Visceral Matter), then it’s watchable.

Linklater is one of the few directors in the book who seems to have attained his reputation through sheer hard work, rather than a lucky break with a studio. His attempts to make an “anti-movie” where nothing happens became an unexpected cult phenomenon — according to the book, the film’s title even introduced a new word to the popular consciousness: Slacker.

Mendes is one of the lucky ones, leaping from a Broadway revival of Cabaret to a multimillion dollar Dreamworks project. Mendes gushes about receiving advice from Spielberg (“be strong”) and is humble about this good fortune (his first film, American Beauty, won five Oscars and three Golden Globes).

The main linking element between the directors seems to be their lack of technical knowledge. When Lowenstein asks them which lenses they used, they often reply that their grasp of all that stuff is limited — they have their directors of photography to rely on for that. Being a director, it seems, is more about communicating ideas and getting a job done than creating an artwork.

It’s been two years since Aryan Kaganof shot SMS Sugar Man, the first feature to be filmed entirely with cell phones. In this age of digital videography where a professional production doesn’t have to cost millions of dollars to make, Lowenstein’s book should raise interesting questions about what constitutes a “movie.”

In the first book of this series, Oliver Stone refused to talk about his early films (Seizure and The Hand). Lowenstein included the interview anyway, presumably so that he could use Stone’s name to sell more copies of his book.

This time around, Linklater only briefly mentions his original Super 8 mm feature, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. His interview focuses on his breakout 35mm film Slacker instead. Lowenstein seems to be cheating, which isn’t very fair on his readers. So a more appropriate title for this book might be My First Movie of Consequence or My First Movie that Didn’t Suck.

While this book has the potential to instill you with interest in filmmaking, it’s more likely to put you to sleep because of the way it’s presented. If only Loweinstein had taken his cue from some of his maverick interviewees to do something fresh and interesting with this material.

BOOK REVIEW: Force of Nature

Force of Nature

By Mark Sloan & Brad Thomas

Published by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art & Van Every/Smith Galleries

$30

Force of Nature, a 144-page hardcover book that documents the groundbreaking exhibit of the same name, is a sober affair compared to Mark Sloan’s previous publications, which include circus/sideshow tributes Hoaxes, Humbugs & Spectacles and Wild, Weird & Wonderful. But in its own right, Force of Nature captures the exuberance of the 10 Japanese artists who visited the Carolinas last year to make site installations.

Sloan, director and senior curator of the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, co-curated the exhibition with Brad Thomas, director of the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College in North Carolina. About five years ago, the two men decided that it would be a good idea to organize an art show together, putting contemporary work on display at both institutions. The idea escalated into a mammoth multi-site undertaking, encompassing the College of Architecture at UNC/Charlotte, Winthrop University Galleries, Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston, McColl Center for Visual Art and Sumter Gallery of Art. For art lovers who couldn’t take the bus tour to the various sites, this book documents the entire project.

It’s far more than a simple catalog, though. The rich color photography shows the artists at work, using their paraphernalia, sketches, schematics, and captures the final works along with visitor reactions.

A chapter devoted to Motoi Yamamoto accentuates the sheer scale of the artist’s elaborate labyrinths made of salt, mirroring the logistical and red-tape issues that the curates faced when coordinating Force of Nature. The shots of Motoi’s salt art trickle off the page, in one instance stretching off into a distant white desert of miniature salt dunes. Close-ups show Yamamoto’s incredible attention to detail.

The Addlestone Library on Calhoun Street wasn’t the only site used by Yamamoto, who also went to Davidson and hung a 40-foot gouache on mylar drawing above a delicate horizontal piece in the Belk Visual Art Center.

On the ground floor of the Halsey, Noriko Ambe transformed trees into otherworldly drawings and cut-paper sculptures. One of the latter graces the book’s cover, giving it a three-dimensional look. One chapter shows her at work, projecting a photograph of a dissected tree trunk onto a wall and then drawing over it. For Noriko the process is as important as the final product, and the book serves her well. Wider shots indicate the relationship between her drawings, the sections of tree trunk, and her paper art.

All 10 artists get equal face time. Their creative processes receive as much attention as their completed art. Takasumi Abe is shown with helium-filled garbage bags, kite string, and an iPod, preparing to record cloud sounds. There are dramatic photos of Ayako Aramaki and Junko Ishiro, who use fire to forge their work in unexpected ways.

The book’s only failing is a consequence of the original project’s ambitious scope. Extensive blogs, videos, podcasts, and Flickr photos were posted on Force of Nature’s “online exhibit” website, telling the full story of the project from the artists’ viewpoint. Although some self-portrait photos of the participants are included, there’s no way to adequately reveal this fascinating aspect of the show. Fortunately, the online component is still accessible through the Halsey website (www.cofc.edu/halseygallery).

Force of Nature ultimately teaches and delights, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process while telling the over-reaching story of the project itself. Sloan’s photography is compelling, focusing on the forces of nature — trees, clouds, even something as common as salt — that inspired these artists to create.