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Doniphan Blair Scores from Outside by Steven Middlestein
'During a three vacation from the North,' starts Doniphan Blair's 'Manifesto Tropical' (1981), 'I was sucked into two-and-a-half years deep submersion in the South' and 'found a thriving, completely unrecognized civilization.' illo: D. Blair
Along with publishing cineSOURCE, the Bay Area's only media journal, for ten years, Doniphan Blair evolved into its most prolific contributor. Penning almost 400 articles, Blair's subjects range from the Bay Area film industry to director Alfred Hitchcock, producer extraordinaire Saul Zaentz and the Black Panther Party, which started in West Oakland (see his top fifteen cineSOURCE contributions below).
Blair also championed indies, like the fresh perspective on a working stiff, "Everything Strange and New" (2009), by fellow Oaklander, Frazer Bradshaw, or Sean Baker's "Tangerine" (2015), the now-famous "transgender/iPhone" film.
Less known, however, is that he started writing provocative articles in the ‘80s, looking at the Holocaust, Nicaragua and cannibalism, among other outside-the-norm topics.
1970s
Originally a painter, Blair bought a typewriter in 1977 specifically to pen a manifesto, inspired by the fadism, hypocrisy and money mongering he witnessed in the art business. "The Art War Manifesto" put Ancient Currents, the small San Francisco art gallery Blair was associated with, on the map and manifestos on his mind.
Actually, Blair had long trafficked in big ideas. Before "Art War", he concocted "Abstract Aborigine", based on the notion that all humans are abstract thinkers and native to this planet, which he picked in Jamaica hanging around with the musician and innovator Victor Nuyan. The next year hitchhiking around India, he concluded that "East Actually Does Meet West" and proceeded to turn that into a philosophical touchstone.
After two years living in Brazil, he returned to San Francisco, enrolled in journalism classes and soon started publishing, although he also wrote "Manifesto Tropical" and continues to file the occasional diatribe, including an article surveying the subject, "Film Manifestos: Hot or Just Hot Air" (2013).
1980s
Blair’s journalism career began with a leg up, the surprisingly successful article and interview, "Bruno Loewenberg: Artist and Survivor". Published by the literary magazine, The Clinton Street Quarterly, of Portland, Oregon, it took a North-West Excellence in Journalism Award in 1982.
A Jewish bookman from Berlin, Loewenberg married a cabaret dancer and witnessed the rise of the Third Reich from within Germany's cultural elite, including the little-known world of German drug users, both artists and Nazis. Indeed, the Loewenberg interview became a primary source as Blair embarked on a decades' long study of the Holocaust, finally publishing again on it 34 years later (“Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed”).
Over the next few years, Blair had two more notable successes: "Last Night in Managua", about his time monitoring Nicaragua's first democratic election, and "Tobias Schneebaum: Artist, Author, Cannibal?", about a New York friend, which appeared in multiple venues world-wide, including the French monthly, Gai Hebdo Pie.
Blair's 'Art Fatwa" came out six weeks after 9/11 and promotes an alternative, artistic and peaceful view of Islam. illo: D. Blair
Cannibalism is a fascinating, if over-sensationalized subject (Schneebaum lived with tribes practicing it in Peru and Papua New Guinea). Of more interest to Blair, however, was how Schneebaum so easily passed between so-called primitive life and Manhattan, where he worked as an illustrator and painter.
Blair continued publishing throughout the ‘80s, including "The Gays of Nicaragua" (1984), "Drug War Delusions" (1989), and "Jorge Ramirez: The Guru of Guatemala" (1985). During an interview at Ramirez’s ashram in Guatemala City, in the middle of that nation’s civil war, the self-taught spiritual teacher told him, “The rich need to keep stealing so much because they have no spiritual practice. That makes their material needs almost infinite."
1990s
Although Blair didn't write about the Holocaust again until 2016 (“Holocaust Films/Books”), his ongoing research brought him to Darwin, where he stumbled on an earth-shaking revelation, the study of which occupied much of his 1990s.
Instead of "evolution is natural selection," the standard scientific position, Blair postulates that: “Evolution is natural, sexual and conscious selection.” Further research, especially into Darwin's thesis of sexual selection brought Blair to the thrilling conclusion that the secondary sexual characteristics of animals where expressed by humans individually through clothing, hair style, dance and music, and collectively and institutionally through advertising.
In addition to developing the radical thesis of communication on a continuum between pure information and highly emotive art was the combination of the two, advertising, he wrote the integrative analysis "The History of Advertising and Capitalism".
2000s
Blair jumped back into publishing with two feet one month after 9/11, after noticing no one was mentioning Islam's pacifist sect, the Sufis, which includes most Muslim artists.
"Art Fatwa", self-published on October 31st, 2001, continues Blair’s manifesto style and details the history of Islam's peaceful and artistic visionaries and their opposition to malevolent mystics. So important was this point, he followed it up six months later with a long essay, self-published as a chap book: "What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East", which eventually became a pioneering piece on Sufism.
Although Blair first encountered Sufis traveling from Turkey to Pakistan in 1972, he started studying in earnest in 2000 and discovered that the Sufis had saved Islam three times. First when renown scholar al-Ghazali identified Sufism as "the mystical heart of Sunnism," in the 12th century; 100 years later, when Sufi orders rebuilt Middle Eastern Islam after the Mongol depredations; and finally, in the 14th century, when Rumi, Hafez, al-Arabi, Jami and the other Sufi geniuses fostered Islam's Second Golden Age.
Sufism soon spread from West Africa to India and Indonesia. But over the next half-a-millennia, while many stuck by Sufism's elevated ideals, others joined the establishment and became guru-obsessed, fetishists or corrupt, which triggered the Wahhabi counter-revolution, around 1750.
'What Happened to the Sufis of the Middle East", Blair's groundbreaking survey of the Sufis, where he claims they saved Islam three times. illo: D. Blair
Although he offended some with analysis they felt he was not educated or initiated enough to make, Sufis are known for their mysticism and art, not historical research, leaving blind spots, while Blair feels alternative groups must police their own.
In addition to the trenchant essay, Blair turned to fiction, notably "Hot Country" (2002), about his years hitchhiking and art-making around South America.
By 2006, however, he was back to journalism, writing for the pioneering Bay Area media mag, Film/Tape World, which soon self-destructed, due to owner avarice.
Given that he also did Film/Tape's graphics, layout and sales, pulling in $9,000 dollars a month in advertising, and that he had a great editor, David Hakim, Blair assumed it would be wise to put his meager savings into a similar magazine. cineSOURCE launched in April, 2008.
2008 to the present
cineSOURCE only published as a hard-copy newsprint tabloid until July, 2010 but that did provide a ring-side seat on the end of print, various editorial controversies and how to run a magazine.
As the Great Recession decimated old school advertising, Blair got "creative" and continued to serve the Northern California media market while expanding the magazine's scope. In 2015, the logo was redesigned, along with the mission statement—it now reads: "film, art and ideas for Northern California."
Along the way, Blair has taken on a prodigious writing regimen, publishing in cineSOURCE some significant articles on subjects largely unaddressed elsewhere.
Top Fifteen cineSOURCE Articles (in chronological order)
While some people look to DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" as history's first great film, Blair unequivocally nominates "The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" (1920), which not only invented horror, introduced "faulty narrators" and integrated surrealism into film, its story line predicted the ascent of Hitler and the acquiescence of the Germans.
Frazer Bradshaw's indie feature 'Everything Strange and New', starring 'Oakland Everyman' Jerry McDaniel, was lauded by critics, including Blair, and ignored by distributors. photo: courtesy F. Bradshaw
Blair hails the monumental achievement of friend and neighbor, Frazer Bradshaw, whose "Everything Strange and New" not only won the International Federation of Film Critics prize (FIPRESCI) at the 2010 SF International Film Festival but proved that smoking hot, deeply penetrating pieces could be made about modest people, for modest sums, in modest 'hoods. "Two of the saddest blowjobs in film history," notes the Hollywood Reporter, adoringly. Starring "Oakland Everyman" Jerry McDaniel, "Everything Strange and New" keeps its slow burn building 'til its penultimate realizations.
Some acerbic, hard-hitting, media market criticism and Al Gore analysis, as Blair finds his film journalism sea legs.
While everyone has the right to appropriate any technology they find useful, the Islamist extremist notion of borrowing everything but allowing nothing is absurd and turned into a cineSOURCE cartoon. illo: D. Blair
Although Hitch was brutal on women and a complete pig to Tippi Hedren, he was an artist of immense proportions who revealed his complex romantic evolution film by film. Less well known is that, beneath his porcine facade, he was a dedicated proto-feminist who put activist women at the center of many of his movies. Take "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943) where a brilliant ingenue deduces her uncle is a serial killer way before the cops and kills him herself. Or "Spellbound" (1945) where Ingrid Bergman plays a shrink who stares down a murderer, literally down the barrel of a gun, and prevails. The article includes a detailed chart of all of Hitchcock's 53 films, compiled by Hitchcock-expert Davell Swan, which produced a grade "B" overall "feminist" rating.
Although art manifestos are often flamboyant fluff, their fascinating history illustrates both the evolution of philosophical thinking in cinema and how entrenched aesthetics can be affected through "mere" words, all punched up by Blair's familiarity with the manifesto form.
Blair's first, massively-researched expose, after "What Happened to the Sufis", investigates Saul Zaentz and John Fogerty, two Berkeley-based artistic titans, who collaborated to create the cultural force of the seminal Americana rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival. Alas, the former turned on the latter, twisting that stellar success into a tragedy, even as Zaentz started producing a phenomenal run of nine visionary, romantic and often Oscar-winning films (plus one he didn't like to mention, "Payday", 1970, penned by Ralph Gleason, which is pretty good).
Kitana Rodriquez gears up to start her quest, while co-star Mya Taylor councils caution in 'Tangerine', which Blair hailed as a masterpiece months before most critics. photo: courtesy C. Bergoch
Revisiting his research into Islam's peaceful path, Sufism, Blair takes up the defense of free speech and the cartoonists murdered at the Paris magazine, Charlie Hebdo, while noting the obvious contradictions in the radical Islamist ideology and the desperate need for innovative ideas to counter it.
Blair looks at the history of collectives in film, an industry built both by large group efforts and dictatorial captains, and the new trend to collectivize from Brooklyn to Bombay, from Oakland to Hollywood's latest indie darlings, the Australian film collective, Blue-Tongue.
A big booster for the transformative power of art, especially in Middle Eastern films like "Paradise Now" (2005), Blair dissects the power and poignancy of "The Green Prince", a documentary about the son of a Hamas leader, who ended up spying for Israel, telling all, including the taboo subject of his childhood rape, and achieving peace—at least within.
Although Stanley Nelson's new doc "Vanguard of the Revolution" (2016) is excellent, movies about the Black Panthers have been few and far between, especially odd considering their immense influence as America's Che Guevaras. Blair catalogs both their fantastic achievements and vertiginous downfall, and the films and books about them, which he feels is essential to understand what actually happened and to build on what they created. He felt compelled to research and write this piece after talking to dozens of Oaklanders and realizing the younger ones knew few of the details of the Panther experience, save that they galvanized great hope, while the elderly were deeply disappointed by Huey P. Newton's turn to gangsterism.
This shot of German cabaret dancer Clara Muller, first wife of Bruno Loewenberg, Blair's friend who he interviewed in 1982, was one of the many photos, facts and theories uncovered in his tour-de-force 'Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed'. photo courtesy Rachel Meller
“Depraved, perverted and crazed, ‘Tangerine’ is in fact a very loving film, both the characters with each other AND the filmmakers with their characters!”, is how Blair described the ground-breaking "transgender/iPhone" film in his first review. Indeed, along with a long interview, this article introduces us to the work of director Sean Baker and producer Chris Bergoch: “Take Out“ (2004), “Prince of Broadway“ (2008), and “Starlet“ (2012). Indeed, it's essential reading given they recently achieved well-deserved recognition with their theatrically-released and critically-acclaimed "The Florida Project", starring Wilhelm Defoe (2017).
In this survey of 143 Holocaust films and books, starting with the 2016 Foriegn Oscar-winner "Son of Saul", Blair introduces dozens of radical new notions and outright theories; notably how Franz Kafka wriote almost exclusively about Jews—without mentioning the word; how film noir was a brilliant cultural trope for examining the psyche of depraved individuals and helped us heal from WWII; and how the Women's Way of War—survival of the lovingest not fittest—partially saved the day. A book-length article, it has much more, some drawn from Blair's life as the son of a Holocaust survivor, his 1982 Bruno Loewenberg interview reveling elevated German drug use and other personal experience, including making a documentary on the subject.
This enigmatic Bay Area artist dominated many media, from sculpture to film, and was finally honored in 2016 with two massive one man shows in NY and SF. Less well known is Blair's thesis that along with inventing "appropriated film," Conner provided the high art antidote to the hippies' spaced-out "acid art."
Judith Linhares's 'Look Back', 2008, was one of the powerful nudes from the '#PussyPower Show' (David & Schweitzer, 2017) covered in Blair's 'The Nude in the Age of Trump and Porn'. illo: J. Linhares
Can the nude, as an art form, survive a time of more open sexuality, aggressive misogyny and the critical new exposes on male malfeasance? This is the question Blair attempts to parse with the help of the ancient Greeks and Jennifer Samet, who curated the striking "#PussyPower Show" in Brooklyn, in January, 2017.
An old hippie world-traveler himself, who witnessed the destruction of the Haight in 1971 and started a commune in San Francisco in 1975, Blair surveys the history, successes AND failures of that critical cultural movement from the perspective of its central thinkers, musicians and artists.
Steven Middlestein is a writer, editor and movie fanatic and can be reached . Posted on Jul 12, 2017 - 08:05 PM