Schizophilia

The peculiar appeal of Joan of Arc, John Nash, and Wesley Willis

By Patrick Sullivan

In a storefront on Kentucky Street, a tearful Joan of Arc was preparing herself to burn at the stake. A few blocks away, a 320-pound schizophrenic African-American man named Wesley Willis was preparing to mount the stage at the Phoenix Theatre to sing very strange songs full of very strange obscenities to a crowd of suburban white kids with very nice teeth.

Anyone doubting that Petaluma can get really weird should have been wandering the city’s streets on the evening of Jan. 18.

Joan was in town courtesy of the Friday Night Film Series, which was screening The Passion of Joan of Arc, director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s stunningly beautiful silent classic about France’s most famous heroine, a young woman haunted by strange visions and voices.

Wesley Willis was there courtesy of a bunch of underground music fans eager to pay $8 a head to hear this Chicago musician (diagnosed with schizophrenia back in 1989) sing songs like “Fuck with Me and Find Out” and “Santa Claus Was a Car Thief.”

Was it a night of martyrs in a town without pity? Or a reassuring sign that the mentally ill can have a go at the music biz, just like anyone else?

A critic of the Wesley Willis phenomenon could easily work up an ugly indictment of his audiences. The argument might go like this: Here is a morbidly obese and mentally ill black man who attracts a following by performing ludicrously repetitive songs full of verbal aggression and profanity. This is the contemporary music underground’s equivalent of an early 20th-century minstrel show–or the chicken-biting geek at an old-school carnival.

In other words–the argument might go–the kids think Willis is pretty damn funny because he’s weird, deranged, and pitiable. And maybe also because he’s black.

And there’s no question that some in the Phoenix crowd were there to gawk and provoke and enjoy themselves at Willis’ expense. Howls of laughter greeted the musician’s frequent outbursts of profanity. And when Willis wasn’t entertaining enough, the remedy was close at hand: “I want to suck your cock, Wesley!” one guy in the audience shrieked over and over. “I want to lick your ass!” Eventually, the screamer got the rise he wanted out of his target: “Shut the fuck up!” Willis screamed back.

But anyone watching the musician selling his CDs (he’s recorded twenty or so) before the show couldn’t help but notice that most fans going up to his table were courteous, even deferential. They weren’t there to mess with him; they wanted to take his picture and get his autograph.

Willis seemed to be having a good time. He laughed and joked with the crowd before the show, and he certainly enjoyed the roar of approval that greeted his appearance on the stage. Once upon a time, Willis (who hears voices in his head that take him, in his own words, on “torture hell rides”) was homeless. Now he makes a living touring and recording albums for punk icon Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles label.

Let’s turn to Hollywood for a minute. In A Beautiful Mind, a new flick based on the real experiences of schizophrenic genius John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician (played by Russell Crowe) is depicted as willing himself out of the grip of his illness by recognizing his delusions and fighting their power. Part of his cure lay in rejoining society and interacting with other people–just as Willis interacts with his fans.

And Willis’ fans get something more out of the deal than a few laughs. In fact, Wesley Willis could be seen as a contemporary example of a very old phenomenon: the tortured visionary.

Maybe that sounds like a stretch. But in a musical era dominated by Britney Spears and her ilk, a musician reporting back from the uncharted territory of profound mental illness has to be appreciated for offering something outside the pop music pale–even if his pipes are a little rusty.

From the January 24-30, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

More Than A Dream: MLK’s radical legacy shouldn’t be whitewashed.

King Fling

MLK Day has become a feel-good lie

By Geov Parrish

On Jan. 15, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 72. If he had survived. And in every conceivable sense of the word, he has not. At least, not in white America.

In many ways, Ronald Reagan did the worst possible thing for the memory of Dr. King by acceding–reluctantly–to the holiday that bears King’s name. Because the holiday has become a feel-good lie.

King is, along with Mahatma Gandhi, one of the two most revered symbols of nonviolence in the 20th century. He spent his too-brief adult life defying authority and convention, citing a higher moral authority, and giving hope to people of color seeking liberation on six continents. MLK Day, the holiday (observed on Jan. 21), has only made new generations of white people mislearn King’s story.

King is not a legend because he believed in diversity training and civic ceremonies, or because he had a nice dream. He is remembered because he took serious risks and, as the Quakers say, spoke truth to power. He is also remembered because, among a number of brave and committed civil rights leaders and activists, he had a flair for self-promotion, a style that also appealed to white liberals, and the extraordinary social strength of the black southern churches behind him.

What little history TV will give us in the next week or so is at least as much about forgetting as about remembering. It will flaunt self-congratulatory patriotism that King was American, but it will skip real self-examination about the American racism that made him necessary and how our government, at every level, sought to destroy him. We hear “I have a dream”; we don’t hear his powerful indictments of poverty, the Vietnam War, and the military-industrial complex.

We see Bull Connor in Birmingham; we don’t see arrests for fighting segregated housing in Chicago. We don’t hear about mainstream America’s contempt at the time for King and his reputation among conservatives as a Commie dupe. We don’t see retrospectives on his linkage of civil rights with Third World liberation. We forget that he died in Memphis lending support for a union (the garbage workers’ strike) while organizing the multiracial Poor Peoples’ Campaign that demanded affordable housing and decent paying jobs as basic civil rights. We forget that many of King’s fellow leaders weren’t nearly so polite. Cities were burning. We remember Selma instead.

And we forget that of those many dreams King had, only one–equal access for nonwhites–is significantly realized today. And nearly a half-century after the Montgomery bus boycott catapulted a 26-year-old King into prominence, even that is on shaky ground.

We rarely acknowledge that the overt racism of Montgomery in 1955 is no longer so overt, but still part of America in 2002. It shows up in our geography, in our jails, in our voting booths, in our shelters and food banks, in our military, and yes, in the very earnest and extremely white activist groups that still carry the banner on these issues.

In 2002, TV land’s MLK has no politics. And, for that matter, no faith. If the King of 1955 or 1965 were alive today, he would be accused of treason for his pacifism, as he was reviled for “Communism” then. Instead of the FBI vainly trying to bring him down, he, and most of his associates, would be prosecutable under new antiterrorism statutes.

And the moral outrage of Americans that made his work so effective? We don’t do that anymore. A couple of months ago we nearly starved millions of Afghans to death–instead of the few hundred thousand dying at the hands of U.S.-backed warlords today–and virtually nobody even noticed, let alone cared, in this country. It’d take a whole lot more than police dogs to make the news today. Ask any global justice demonstrator.

Instead, for white America, King’s soft-focus image often reinforces white supremacy. (See? We’re not so bad. We honor him now. Why don’t those black people just get over it, anyway? We did.) Dr. King, a nonviolent martyr to reconciliation and justice, has become a Hallmark card, a warm, fuzzy, feel-good invocation of neighborliness, a file photo for sneakers or soda commercials, a reprieve for post-holiday shoppers, an excuse for a three-day weekend, a cardboard cutout used for photo ops by ungrateful Supreme Court justices.

He deserves better. We all do.

Geov Parrish writes for WorkingForChange.com, where this article originally appeared.

From the January 17-23, 2002 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.