It’s easy to apprehend the artistic milieu of Southern California artist and activist Harry Lawson “Peter” Carr (1925-1981). Carr’s paintings, drawings, and illustrations evoke German Expressionism, the New Objectivism, Daumier, and fellow poet-painters William Blake, Kenneth Patchen, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His cartoon “Money Is Everything” speaks for itself, unapologetically.
Carr died at age 55. Forty years ago, I was his impressionable student at Cal State Long Beach, where he taught “comparative mythology,” featuring Jungian, literary, and political dissections of American culture. Co-founder of the Comp Lit department, Carr took students on field trips to Disneyland, deconstructing its co-optation of myth, fairy tale, and other archetypes, while unshyly attacking its corporate … well … everything.
Nearly all the art includes narration, dialogue, commentary, anti-war and anti-nuke slogans, or instruction. Call them poems, such as this one: “I Fancied There Were Other Creatures There Besides Me.”
Fragments and long passages are embedded in landscapes and tableaus. Or become titles, this one referencing Ensor’s “Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1898.”
Carr self-published eight books. These include Aliso Creek, about his beloved Laguna Beach ecosystem; In the Summer We Went to the Mountains, set in the Sierras; and What Will We Leave the Children? One of his earliest, on newsprint, features—no kidding—the zeitgeist-inspired title Bumpers Bugs USA Sex Trees Hair Birds Girls Rocks Lizards Breakfast God Motors Fog Fishes War Sand Gray Ocean Granite.
A formal breakthrough, Bumpers tells the story of a U.S. soldier killed in Vietnam but mostly offers an alternating narrative in which an omniscient voice deconstructs the annus horribilis of 1969, Los Angeles to Long Beach to Anaheim. Illustrated, of course. The title’s subjects show up as a crazy-good compendium of encyclopedia, manifesto, and the beginning of a love letter or break-up letter. (I think he may have dropped acid.)
Five years and many dead troops and murdered Vietnamese later, this form emerges as the expression of an artist who writes, a writer who draws.
Aliso Creek is autobiography, homage to place, plea for peace, cri de coeur of ecological disaster. It’s a Whitmanic revisionist history told in multiple incarnations: sweet, damning, celebratory. Published in 1974, it assumes further horrible realities to come, including war, pollution, wage slavery.
Carr writes:
Everybody knows that nobody wants peace. Everybody knows that everybody wants excitement and glory. Even everybody down here by the beach wants to get out of a stupid dull existence. And everybody knows that the best way to do any of all this is with a lot of money. The American system is about this.
The Narrator, a self-appointed guide and artist-writer prophet, speaks with and for what he calls “Everybody.”
Everybody watches on the tube as the planet slides into the galaxy bearing too-brief lives and much death where all this is needed by God for His Big Plan which sounds Groovy and about as Big a Thing as anyone has ever thought of.
There will come too much rain. I know it. All the hills about L.A. and even now where Salt Creek used to be that they chop and carve and burn will sink and slide slowly into the ocean. All the beautiful land will go down the rivers with all the wrecked cars, boards, plumbing fixtures, Styrofoam cups, cigarette ends, and the poisonous wastes of pill-supported lives.
The fumes rise every day to greet the sun. The people do too. They say how are yuh? Maybe I won’t have to go to work today. Maybe school will be closed.
Darkly funny, right? And now, there is a new voice, that of the wise-ass crewmember of a familiar historic expedition:
Before I came up this coast looking for money like all the other white Christian Europeans, I had devoted my life to money and enjoyment like all other white European Christians back in holy Spain. I hoped to strike it rich and moral like Henry Ford or T. A. Edison. As we were sailing along I said to Juan, Juan Cabrillo, that is, look Juan, when we get there God will be on our side as usual, but in case something goes wrong we had better take some priests along. He did what I told him and we all got rich. My brother-in-law got a land-grant and they named a town, a lot of streets and a university after him. He was good and he was rich and he owned everything after the Indians were killed off. His name was Irvine.
Mic drop, with more drawings, prayer-poems, slogans, and eco-advice. And finally:
Mission San Juan Capistrano is no longer a cattle ranch and a jail. They sell weddings there instead of pigeon food, and they charge you fifty cents to get in.
The two main features of once-holy Aliso Canyon are a golf course and a sewage disposal plant.
The rock off the coast where the spirits spoke to men is now private, of course, and is the main feature of a trailer park called Treasure Island. Across the highway is another feature—Alpha Beta Market and shopping center.
Shall I tell the truth? Am I safe enough to say it? That violence washes down the streets of the L.A. basin and finally ends up here at the sea, banging on their fancy houses by the beach where they keep everybody out who is inferior—everybody who is less than white, sun-browned, dangerous to other humans and the planet.
Can I say it in public? Can I say what happened to the cliffs where the Spaniards threw hides to the first white predators on my coastline here—where sea-otters and seals and whales and abalones lived and the men and women worshipped and played and fucked and died to the whistle of cold winds over sun-bleached sands—where the popeyed flounders groped for sea-bugs and the crayfish died their countless numberless deaths and birth into piles of seashell and skeleton?
What happened?
Jack-in-the-Box.
There’s more interrogation, provocation, in a Whitmanic catalog. Lots of reckoning, if also more hopeful imagining, drawn and written here and on thousands more pages and canvases in notebooks and unpublished manuscripts.
