Art above is a poster called “April 12, 1954 Buffalo NY: Gunners Meet the Fillmore Gang or the origins of the beat generation outside Decco 28”
This photo was shot when we were filming for Bad Attitude in Buffalo. You can see the snow melting into the lake.
My hair is more silver since Covid, but as Spain and my nephew, the artist Thor Badendyck, says, we each carry within us every age we ever lived.
Spain & I lived together through an age – 33 years – unmarried for 10 and then married. I was a journalist when we met (when I interviewed him) and we journalists said of ourselves that we “had ink in our veins.” That seemed to me true of Spain as well and, in fact, it seemed that journalists and cartoonists were similar: Literature is to journalism what art is to comics; the world put a lesser value on the more popular arts. But not us. We loved what we did.
Bad Attitude is my third film. My documentaries Barbie Nation and The Self-Made Man played worldwide at festivals and on television, winning two Emmy nominations; the Duke University Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award; a CINE Gold Eagle and a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Both films aired on PBS’s POV documentary showcase and are in the collections of hundreds of universities.
It was our friend Terry Zwigoff, director of Crumb, who made me think I could make films. Before that, I was a journalist, often an investigative reporter. I’m most proud of my investigation of admissions at the University of California San Francisco medical school which unseated a bigoted member of the admissions committee and my Oakland Tribune exposé of Bay Area Navy base closings which the Wall Street Journal credited with “saving thousands of local jobs.” My 1980 magazine cover story, Killer Cops, is still a good primer on how police unions keep brutal cops on the job.
I am a proud member of New Day Films, the social issue educational film distribution coop. And I still write poetry – the inspiration that came before film, before journalism.