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Saturday, February 03, 2007

Famed Artist and Musician Eric von Schmidt Dies at 75

Eric von Schmidt, a renowned Westport artist and pioneering figure in the folk music explosion of the late 1950s and early 1960s whose works touched the lives of generations of musicians, died Friday at a Fairfield convalescent home. He was 75.

His daughter Caitlin von Schmidt of Westport said her father had been in ill health since suffering a stroke in September. She said a memorial service will be announced later.

Eric von Schmidt, a Westport native and 1949 Staples High School graduate, was the son of the late illustrator Harold von Schmidt whose rustic portraits of the American West appeared on Saturday Evening Post covers and in other magazines.

He perhaps became best known as a folk and blues singer-songwriter of the folk/blues revival of the 1960s, a key part of the East Coast folk scene and crowd that included Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Dylan wrote liner notes for von Schmidt’s 1969 album “Who Knocked the Brains Out of the Sky.”

“He could sing the bird off the wire and the rubber off the tire,” Dylan wrote. “He can separate the men from the boys and the note from the noise. The bridle from the saddle and the cow from the cattle. He can play the tune of the moon. The why of the sky and the commotion of the ocean.”

In 2000, von Schmidt developed throat cancer and became unable to sing. A bout with Lyme disease made it difficult to play the guitar.

In recent years, he worked on a series of paintings called “Giants of the Blues.”

Two years ago, the Westport Historical Society held its “Giants of the Blues 1920-1950” exhibit featuring works by von Schmidt.

Last March, the Westport Schools Permanent Art Collection Committee installed several large-scale paintings from the series in the hallway outside the Staples High School auditorium.

In a fine arts coup for the town, the committee received seven of the paintings on “indefinite loan.”

An obituary in today’s New York Times described von Schmidt as “a frisky, bearded figure who combined a successful career as a painter of big pictures of historical subjects with an exuberant musical style he liked to apply to American folk classics.”

It said Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the legendary cowboy singer, lauded his spirited approach to the songs of Leadbelly, the legendary blues artist, and the folk songs of Woody Guthrie.

“Eric’s got that wild spirit, and he doesn’t water the music down for polite society,” Elliott told The Boston Globe in 1996, the Times said.

As a small child, von Schmidt watched his father performing miracles week after week in his studio across the driveway from the family’s main house on Evergreen Avenue.

The young von Schmidt painted beside him, sketched with him and often posed for him.

Von Schmidt’s foundation in music came from his mother, Forest Gilmore.

He had bought his first guitar after hearing Leadbelly sing live on a New York radio station in 1948 when he was 17.

Von Schmidt once said of his first time hearing Leadbelly: “This incredible voice … was honey-smooth but had the bite of a buzz-saw cutting through a cement block. It was Leadbelly ’live’ and it changed my life.”

As a teenager, he was encouraged by his parents to visit the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., where he discovered a body of forgotten archival blues recordings. There his second career was born.

Von Schmidt graduated from Staples High School and went briefly to the Art Students League in New York City before being drafted during the Korean War.

After Korea, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study painting in Italy in 1956-1957.

Upon his return, he moved to Cambridge, Mass., and became a folk and blues singer in the Cambridge coffee house scene and entered the Boston literary field.

His books, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” co-authored with Jim Rooney, won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in 1979, and “Notes for American Folk Music” won a Grammy in 1998.

In 2000, he was honored with the ASCAP Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

In addition to Caitlin, von Schmidt, who was twice married and divorced, is survived by another daughter, Megan Richardson of Greenfield, Mass., and three grandsons.

“He’ll be missed by a lot of people, and he had a very full and vital life with no regrets,” Richardson told The Associated Press.

Caitlin von Schmidt added, “He did what a lot of people can’t do, which is pretty much live his life by his own rules. That made it hard on the people involved with him … but he was a very loving and generous man.”

(poster by Arik Roper)

RADICAL LIVING PAPERS
A history of the free, alternative, counter-culture and underground press, 1965-75

Gavin Brown’s enterprise at PASSERBY
436 W. 15th Street,
New York, NY 10011

February 2 – March 7, 2007

Opening reception: Friday, February 2, 2007, 6pm

The Council for the Fortieth Anniversary of The Summer of Love with Gavin Brown’s enterprise opens and invites you to an exhibition of the world’s most radical living papers from a time when the press took risks and voiced opinions.

Celebrating the heyday of alternative magazine publishing in Europe and America, Gavin Brown’s enterprise at Passerby opens an exhibition of more than two hundred original copies, as well as reproductions of these seminal and obscure publications, whose influence reverberates through culture, politics, and society.

Covering politics, revolutions, evolutions of the planets, freak-outs, love-ins, support of green politics, gay liberation, power to the people, the peace parties, protests, the Panthers, peyote, LSD, pot, fiction, music, poetry, prose, prayers and more. Publications include: Actuel, Avatar, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, Black Panther Papers, Digger Papers, Door, East Village Other [EVO], The Fifth Estate, Freep, Grabuge, Hobo-Québec, International Times [it], Los Angeles Free Press, The Oracle, The Organ, Other Scenes, OZ, Rat, The Realist, Re Nudo, Rolling Stone, The Seed, Ann Arbor Sun….more.

Please note: A press conference to the unified, positive forces actively involved in the community will be held at 6pm on Friday, February 2, 2007, with active members of today’s free press.

Curated by Eva Prinz, Dan Donahue, and Thurston Moore

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 2, 2007
The Guardian

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI’s board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN’s panel as “resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work” and ask for essays that “thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs”.

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the “overwhelming scientific evidence” on global warming. “It’s a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims,” said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

“The IPCC process is probably the most thorough and open review undertaken in any discipline. This undermines the confidence of the public in the scientific community and the ability of governments to take on sound scientific advice,” he said.

The letters were sent by Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at AEI, who confirmed that the organisation had approached scientists, economists and policy analysts to write articles for an independent review that would highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the IPCC report.

“Right now, the whole debate is polarised,” he said. “One group says that anyone with any doubts whatsoever are deniers and the other group is saying that anyone who wants to take action is alarmist. We don’t think that approach has a lot of utility for intelligent policy.”

One American scientist turned down the offer, citing fears that the report could easily be misused for political gain. “You wouldn’t know if some of the other authors might say nothing’s going to happen, that we should ignore it, or that it’s not our fault,” said Steve Schroeder, a professor at Texas A&M university.

The contents of the IPCC report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. It says there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8C this century, depending on emissions.

Lord Rees of Ludlow, the president of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific institute, said: “The IPCC is the world’s leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue. It is expected to stress, more convincingly than ever before, that our planet is already warming due to human actions, and that ‘business as usual’ would lead to unacceptable risks, underscoring the urgent need for concerted international action to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. However, yet again, there will be a vocal minority with their own agendas who will try to suggest otherwise.”

Ben Stewart of Greenpeace said: “The AEI is more than just a thinktank, it functions as the Bush administration’s intellectual Cosa Nostra. They are White House surrogates in the last throes of their campaign of climate change denial. They lost on the science; they lost on the moral case for action. All they’ve got left is a suitcase full of cash.”

On Monday, another Exxon-funded organisation based in Canada will launch a review in London which casts doubt on the IPCC report. Among its authors are Tad Murty, a former scientist who believes human activity makes no contribution to global warming. Confirmed VIPs attending include Nigel Lawson and David Bellamy, who believes there is no link between burning fossil fuels and global warming.