Jack Balas: TATTOO DETOUR 16: KINGS AND VAGABONDS

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TATTOO DETOUR: 17
HONOLULU DRAWINGS 2024

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

The seventeenth year in the TATTOO DETOUR series (since 2007), most drawings this year measure 12" x 16" and are ink on paper. Some larger later pieces are 18x24" or 24x18".

This year's series is inspired by the 1951 novel by James Jones, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, set on Oahu at the US Army's Schofield Barracks, and in Honolulu, in the months before and after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Rather than try to illustrate the novel, I have let its language resonate with my own contemporary images of guys from the beach and city. A work in progress, it may transform still in a variety of ways.

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Normally when traveling I've been content to walk around, explore and take photos while visiting art museums and galleries -- a method that works fine in New York or Paris when you're there for a week or so. But finding myself in Honolulu for an extended stay in 2007, I realized that Waikiki is a different animal altogether, relentless as it is with the shirtless men who are my muse, not only on the beach but in the restaurants, grocery stores, hotel lobbies, even on the bus. So I was tempted to go further than my normal mode and try to have a studio at the same time, namely a sketchpad and a handful of pens I was carrying around, creating a body of work out of a suitcase while living in a hotel room.

Drawing on the aforementioned beaches, and in the same restaurants and hotel lobbies, I was able to enjoy a completely different rythmn of work than I've ever known at home, at the same time surrounded by people who occasionally wandered over to look at what I was up to so long at my favorite Starbuck's table or on some bench in Kapiolani Park, or under a palm tree. And the setting of an extreme tourist spot such as Waikiki posed the enjoyable task of trying to reach beyond the predictable cliches of surfers, babes and palms. The resulting drawings are conflations of those very surfers, palms, tattoos, military guys, pigeons, lobby furniture, waves and restaurant tables, offering intersections between the surf of Hockney, Picabia, Pettibon, Guston and Westermann, fact and fiction.

Enjoy !!

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTIUON, BUT HERE ARE IMAGES AND TEXTS TO START:
More to follow!

ccccccc ccccccc
Our scope covers the full range of the human condition, man's fate and man's hope, a tribute to human dignity. We are a work of meaning and beauty.

It was the mouthpiece he had used to play the Taps at Arlington. Pulling it out now and looking into the ruby bell as if it were a crystal ball brought that day back to him. There had been a colored bugler who played the echo to his own Taps from the stand. The Negro was a better bugler, but because he was not white he had been stationed in the hills to play the echo. It should have been himself who played the echo. Thinking about it all, he put the beauty back in his pocket and folded his arms across his chest, still waiting.

He was, it seemed like, standing on a high place where all the highways met and there were signposts to all places, and where the variegated colors of the license plates whizzed by and did not see him standing there and none would stop and pick him up. Prew watched them, stooped and bent, with faces that looked to have been carved from dried and withered apples, and he felt a self-righteous indignation at the entire human race for the life these people lived, these who looked to be Violet's grandparents or great-grandparents and yet were not 40 years of age.

"Okay," Stark said, with finality. "How about a nuther drink?" The hand was over, the spontaneous conversation of relaxed tension broke out bubbling. The bottle worked back and forth now like a shuttle, weaving brilliant colors, over and under, around the strings of words. Warden grinned happily, watching the lovely beautiful brilliant shuttling of the bottle as it wove and wound and spun the web of unreality, of talk about them both, relaxing into it.

The soldier's greatest hobby, he thought as he listened to his own voice talking, the bull session, add a bottle and you have his greatest joy, also his greatest escape. The unofficial institution that is the first-string substitute for women. But soldiers are men without women, he thought, and they cannot hold each other's heads upon their breasts and pat each other's hair. But they escape just as well

_________________________________________________

And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man he can understand is that part of himself he recognizes in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can escape his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb. ccccccc The clerks, the kings, the thinkers, they talked, and with their talking ran the world. The truck drivers, the pyramid builders, the straight-duty men, the ones who could not talk, they built the world out of their tonguelessness, so the talkers could talk about how to run it, and the ones who built it. And when they had destroyed it with their talking, the truck driver and the straight-duty man would build it up again, simply because they were hunting for some way to speak.

Violet was like all the other second and third-generation Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Portagee, Filipino girls with their first names after English flowers, and their last names coming across alien centuries, girls whose parents had been shipped in like cattle to work the cane and pineapple for the Big Five, girls whose sons were often among the numberless hordes of little boys shining your shoes on the sidewalk outside a bar, repeating the antique legend "Me half Japanese, half Schofield," or, grinning obliquely, "Me half Chinee, half Schofield." A crop fathered by soldiers who had served their hitch and mysteriously vanished into that mythical "mainland" that was the United States."

He knew then that if he could Play a bugle the way he Thought a bugle, he would have found his justification He recognized he had a call.

The music came to him across the now bright, now dull, slowly burning cigaret of each man's life, telling him its ancient secret of all men, intangible, unfathomable, defying long-winded descriptions, belying intricate cataloguings, simple, complete, asking no more, giving no less, words that said nothing yet said all there was to say.

_________________________________________________

But in the big octagonal hole in the ground with its serrated scalloped concrete sides, it was not important, to the spectators, who was fighting or who would win. It was only important that the winy air and excitement of anticipated conflict be enjoyed, bringing back the distant continent of home where all the grave young high school athletes, who, despite their coaches with their turned-up topcoat collars and conflicting visions of Knute Rockne movies and jobs they feared to risk, fought frantically with the magnificent foolishness of youth as if the whole of life depended on this game, and who were still young enough to cry over a defeat, an illusion that their coaches never shared, a thing that like Santa Claus they themselves would lose all too soon before the widening range of vision and the knowledge that their loyalty was a commodity and could be shifted easily, and a thing that the men perched on the concrete of the boxing bowl remembered fondly in their own hunger for a return to innocence.
ccccccc

During the rest of the time before lights out they sat around on the chairless floor smoking, or leaned standing back against the bed ends, or maybe lying on a half-shaded bottom bunk, and they talked. They had no trouble passing the time because they did not talk to pass the time but because they just loved to talk, to sit up and talk and tell stories with themself as hero.

He paused. The brightly lighted revelation was surging up now again in his mind. He could see it. But how to say it? Life was enough in itself. All men should see life in itself was enough, was all, because it was there. Why did you climb the mountain, Mr. Mallory? Because it was there. Life was there, it had been put there for a purpose. That was enough. That was everything.

See all of the
TATTOO DETOUR series

xx

TATTOO DETOUR 17
Drawings from Honolulu
2024

TATTOO DETOUR 16
Drawings from Honolulu
2023

TATTOO DETOUR 15
Drawings from Honolulu
2022

TATTOO DETOUR 14
Drawings from Honolulu
2021

TATTOO DETOUR 13
Drawings from Honolulu
2019

TATTOO DETOUR 12
Drawings from Honolulu
2018

TATTOO DETOUR 11
Drawings from Honolulu
2017

TATTOO DETOUR 10
Drawings from Honolulu
2016

TATTOO DETOUR 9
Drawings from Honolulu
2015

TATTOO DETOUR 8
Drawings from Honolulu
2014

TATTOO DETOUR 7
Drawings from Honolulu
2013

TATTOO DETOUR 6
Drawings from Honolulu
2012

TATTOO DETOUR 5
Drawings from Honolulu
2011

TATTOO DETOUR 4
Drawings from Honolulu
2010

TATTOO DETOUR 3
Drawings from Honolulu
2009

TATTOO DETOUR 2
Drawings from Honolulu
2008

TATTOO DETOUR 1
Drawings from Honolulu
2007

	ccccccc	ccccccc	Our scope covers the full range of the human condition, man's fate and man's hope, a tribute to human dignity. We are a work of meaning and beauty.

	It was the mouthpiece he had used to play the Taps at Arlington. Pulling it out now and looking into the ruby bell as if it were a crystal ball brought that day back to him. There had been a colored bugler who played the echo to his own Taps from the stand. The Negro was a better bugler, but because he was not white he had been stationed in the hills to play the echo. It should have been himself who played the echo. Thinking about it all, he put the beauty back in his pocket and folded his arms across his chest, still waiting.

	He was, it seemed like, standing on a high place where all the highways met and there were signposts to all places, and where the variegated colors of the license plates whizzed by and did not see him standing there and none would stop and pick him up.			Prew watched them, stooped and bent, with faces that looked to have been carved from dried and withered apples, and he felt a self-righteous indignation at the entire human race for the life these people lived, these who looked to be Violet's grandparents or great-grandparents and yet were not 40 years of age.

"Okay," Stark said, with finality. "How about a nuther drink?" The hand was over, the spontaneous conversation of relaxed tension broke out bubbling. The bottle worked back and forth now like a shuttle, weaving brilliant colors, over and under, around the strings of words. Warden grinned happily, watching the lovely beautiful brilliant shuttling of the bottle as it wove and wound and spun the web of unreality, of talk about them both, relaxing into it. The soldier's greatest hobby, he thought as he listened to his own voice talking, the bull session, add a bottle and you have his greatest joy, also his greatest escape. The unofficial institution that is the first-string substitute for women. But soldiers are men without women, he thought, and they cannot hold each other's heads upon their breasts and pat each other's hair. But they escape just as well

	And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man he can understand is that part of himself he recognizes in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can escape his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb.	ccccccc		The clerks, the kings, the thinkers, they talked, and with their talking ran the world. The truck drivers, the pyramid builders, the straight-duty men, the ones who could not talk, they built the world out of their tonguelessness, so the talkers could talk about how to run it, and the ones who built it. And when they had destroyed it with their talking, the truck driver and the straight-duty man would build it up again, simply because they were hunting for some way to speak.

			Violet was like all the other second and third-generation Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Portagee, Filipino girls with their first names after English flowers, and their last names coming across alien centuries, girls whose parents had been shipped in like cattle to work the cane and pineapple for the Big Five, girls whose sons were often among the numberless hordes of little boys shining your shoes on the sidewalk outside a bar, repeating the antique legend "Me half Japanese, half Schofield," or, grinning obliquely, "Me half Chinee, half Schofield." A crop fathered by soldiers who had served their hitch and mysteriously vanished into that mythical "mainland" that was the United States."

He knew then that if he could Play a bugle the way he Thought a bugle, he would have found his justification He recognized he had a call.

				The music came to him across the now bright, now dull, slowly burning cigaret of each man's life, telling him its ancient secret of all men, intangible, unfathomable, defying long-winded descriptions, belying intricate cataloguings, simple, complete, asking no more, giving no less, words that said nothing yet said all there was to say.

But in the big octagonal hole in the ground with its serrated scalloped concrete sides, it was not important, to the spectators, who was fighting or who would win. It was only important that the winy air and excitement of anticipated conflict be enjoyed, bringing back the distant continent of home where all the grave young high school athletes, who, despite their coaches with their turned-up topcoat collars and conflicting visions of Knute Rockne movies and jobs they feared to risk, fought frantically with the magnificent foolishness of youth as if the whole of life depended on this game, and who were still young enough to cry over a defeat, an illusion that their coaches never shared, a thing that like Santa Claus they themselves would lose all too soon before the widening range of vision and the knowledge that their loyalty was a commodity and could be shifted easily, and a thing that the men perched on the concrete of the boxing bowl remembered fondly in their own hunger for a return to innocence.	ccccccc

During the rest of the time before lights out they sat around on the chairless floor smoking, or leaned standing back against the bed ends, or maybe lying on a half-shaded bottom bunk, and they talked. They had no trouble passing the time because they did not talk to pass the time but because they just loved to talk, to sit up and talk and tell stories with themself as hero.

		He paused. The brightly lighted revelation was surging up now again in his mind. He could see it. But how to say it? Life was enough in itself. All men should see life in itself was enough, was all, because it was there. Why did you climb the mountain, Mr. Mallory? Because it was there. Life was there, it had been put there for a purpose. That was enough. That was everything.