Tom Kupsh

review of
Tom Kupsh's A Mythic Obsession - The World of Dr. Evermor
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 19, 2014

"Review is too long. You entered 55073 characters, and the max is 20000" For the full review, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/371961-for-evermor

I 1st encountered Dr. Evermor's work at the House on the Rock in Spring Green, WI, when I was on tour w/ The 'Official" Project in 1992 although I didn't know it was his at the time. I think I had something like $75 to live off of for the rest of the tour - driving from Wisconsin to Colorado to Kansas to Ohio & back to Maryland. House on the Rock was expensive (by my impoverished standards) to get into, something like $15, & not everyone in the band wanted to risk spending the money. By the time I got out I might've spent as much as another $35 on tokens to play the automatic music machines & to buy souvenirs. That's how much I loved it. I called it one of the "Wonders of the World" - & Dr. Evermor's contributions were part of that - strictly speaking, tho, his name for HoR work wd've been "Mr. Buildmor".

Mr. Buildmor's main contribution wd've been to the "Organ Room". In Marv Balousek's bk about HoR's founder, Alex Jordon, entitled House of Alex he has this to say:

"Enter the Organ Room and we have descended into the bowels of a giant organ. In this deepest part of the wizard's ominous lair is a place where organ pipes soar like giant cave bats overhead while huge monsters of hyd[r]aulic machinery nap motionlessly on the floor. In this dimly lit world turned inside out and upside down like some kind of bizarre nightmare, suspended catwalks rise past a two-ton farm tractor hanging on the wall like a painting or past a huge propeller that once drove a whaleback freighter. A clock runs backwards in a mockery of time itself. A ladder rises dramatically, rung after rung, ending at nothing but roof beams" - p 14

Now, I think it's only a "nightmare" for people who don't enjoy being awed & disoriented by truly visionary sculptural combines of history & spatial imagination. For the rest of us, the Organ Room is a phenomenal joy. I did talk to some of the volunteer gallery attendants in there & they sd that the disorientation from the multi-leveled flooring & the superabundance of simultaneous soundtracks made it difficult to last for long as a GA in there. But for a person nurtured on the complex simultaneities from George Ives (Charles's dad) on thru Henry Brant & John Cage, etc, this is a paradise. But, one person's paradise is another person's hell. In fact, I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that the original name for this exhibit was "The Hell Room" but that it was changed from that to "The Organ Room" to avoid offending Christinane sensibilities. The story as told by Kupsh is perhaps a bit more tactful:

"At first the building was called the Inferno Room after "The Inferno" of Dante's Divine Comedy. Later, with the assembly of a huge theater organ, it would be referred to as the Organ building. " - p 22

In 1998, I was back again b/c my "Attention-ExSpanDex" tour w/ etta cetera involved driving cross-country. This time, tho, I went to Dr. Evermor's own scrap sculpture park where what was once the Guiness Book of World Records's largest scrap metal sculture, "The Forevertron" was & still is located & to the sculpture garden backyard of another HoR builder Sid Boyum (alas, deceased by then) as well as to the HoR. Impressive wd be an understatement for Evermor's sculpture park. I got to meet him & his partner Lady Eleanor: 2 charmers, indeed.

I photographed these attractions (& Dreamtime Village where etta & I stayed w/ our very special hosts mIEKAL aND & co) using our own packings of 35mm slide film & a half-frame camera for shooting filmstrips that Martin Heath of Cincecyle in Toronto had been generous to give me not long before. I cassette interviewed Dr. Evermor too. The resultant products became part of the "Say Cheese! - 5 days in Wisconsin" filmstrip that I made to document my WI exploration.

I hit it off w/ the Evermors right away. I was wearing the pants & jacket that I made in the 1980s from 100s of zippers & I think they were impressed by the similarity of our sortof "waste not, want not" sensibilities. Even tho our encounter was short, I left feeling like we were friends - a feeling that I'm sure many people have experienced after meeting these warm & friendly people. I left with a fantastic gift from them: a large photocopy of a drawing of the Forevertron in its proposed new park setting drawn by Jake Furnald.

13 yrs later, in 2011, I was back. Dr. Evermor had had one or more strokes, he & Lady Eleanor were divorced (but still partners), & the good Dr. was living in a nursing home. When I emailed Lady Eleanor telling her I was coming & asked her if she remembered me she replied that of course they remembered me & sd she still had a foto of me in the zipper clothes. When we met, she even gave me a color print-out of it! THAT'S considerate!!

This time I shot mini-dv at the park & then Lady Eleanor took my girlfriend & I out to eat where I shot more footage of her talking about personal trials & tribulations of recent yrs. THEN we went off to visit Dr. Evermor & his cronies at their home where even more footage was shot of the various tale-tellings. Despite the sadnesses, it was a wonderful time.

NOW, I'm finally getting around to making a movie that combines the 1998 footage w/ the 2011 footage & I decided it was about time to read this biography that I picked up in 2011 before I cd really delve into movie editing.

I'm happy to say that this bk, written by a man who worked w/ Tom Every (aka Mr. Buildmor aka Dr. Evermor) is respectfully & lovingly written. The author, Tom Kupsh, clearly has genuine feelings for the great accomplishments of the Dr. & the Lady. While the bk is realistic, there's no snarky I'm-envious-of-this-guy back-stabbing going on. I'm giving it a 5 star rating not b/c the writing's genius (it's not) but b/c it's a great exposure to a phenomenal person's life work. The Everys & their work shd be known & loved the world over. My copy is even signed by both of them w/ multiple words & flourishes. Oddly, neither of their dates given jive w/ each other's OR w/ the actual dates when I got the bk. As part of Tom's signature says: "Time Binder / Time Traveler"?!

I do, at least, point out, however, that a possible shortcoming of Kupsh's approach is that the bibliography starting on p 191, doesn't include Marv Balousek's House of Alex wch seems to fit in the 'unauthorized biography' category & includes highly critical material about Alex Jordan, who Tom Every worked for in the 1970s.

Kupsh starts off w/ a wonderful quote before his Preface:

"Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

"It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.

"—Rumi" - p vi

The comparison to Noah is particularly apropos considering the nature of the Forevertron's transcendental purpose. SO, the bk's off to a great start. I do have a bone to pick, tho:

"He is somewhat of a celebrity in the world of self-taught artists and has earned the respect of scholars and collectors who eagerly seek him out." - p vii

"in the world of self-taught artists": being "self-taught" is commonly used as an implied put-down of sorts: 'Oh, y'know, he's self-taught': the implication being that that's somehow inferior to learning how to do things from other people in an institutionalized setting. Well, show me one of these lauded professors who's built anything as incredible as the Forevertron. The point is that the accomplishments of 'self-taught' anything often far overshine anything by those of taught people if only by the superior ingenuity required to not have techniques & ideas handed to you on a silver platter. Besides wch, no-one's completely 'self-taught' - the alert person learns something from every available source. The un-alert person just learns what they're fed in school & then waits for someone to pay them before they lift a finger. Don't expect much of a visionary nature from 'insiders'.

"All of the writing and reporting about Tom and his work falls into three categories: First, what I call weekend-getaway pieces, which appear in local and regional newspapers, on television, or in guidebooks. These are of uneven quality, and sometimes the research is scant or incomplete and often filled with misconceptions. Second, more serious reporting about Tom and his work does occasionally appear in the form of feature articles found in nonart magazines and art sections of newspapers. Some of this research is well researched and well written. Thirs, there are a growing number of serious and scholarly pieces in publications that focus on outsider art; these works are well researched and carefully written and some are cited in the bibliography of this book." - p vii

As I'm writing this review, I also put online an interview w/ me conducted by aundre-g talking about Outsider Art for issue 3 of his zine "Strike". I don't mention Dr. Evermor in it. I'm not sure I even considered him an "Outsider Artist" at the time but now it seems obvious to do so. Here's the link: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/InterviewStrike.html

& much to Kupsh's credit, he does succeed in going a bit deeper here than any of those categories. This bio cd be 2 or 4 times as long, it cd get more into what it's really like to be an outsider in this, or probably just about any, culture but maybe it'll stimulate someone else's doing exactly that. It's an excellent intro & can stand on its own even if someone does or does not surpass it.

The claim is made that the Every family history has a famous pirate in it. Dr. Evermor embraces this lineage:

"Two hundred years before, a distant relative, Henry Every (Avery), had given up legitimate trade and had become a well-known pirate holed up on the island of Madagascar. The "arch-pirate," as he was known, would later be lionized in the stage production of Charles Johnson's play The Successful Pirate. Henry Every also inspired a fictional tale of piracy in Daniel Defoe's novel King of the Pyrates in 1719. Tom holds the pirate Henry Every in fond regard, thinking himself cut from the same cloth; he even went so far as to name his truck the "Fancy" after the arch-pirate's ship." - p 1

Now, I certainly 'get' the 'romanticization' of pirates as people who've 'had enuf' & who retaliate against the mainstream imperialist culture w/ a ferocity & daring that teaches the more successful oppressors that some people fight back. But even reading Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias - Moorish Corsairs & European Renegadoes, obviously so titled to emphasize the freedom of pirates, will reveal that pirates were also slavers & that, as w/ most high-profit crime, the brutality of the mainstream society is mirrored here w/o its make-up on. Take this bit from Henry Every's wikipedia entry:

"Following his discharge from the navy, Every began slave trading along Africa's Slave Coast. In 1693, he was again employed as a mariner, this time as first mate aboard the warship Charles II, which had been commissioned by England's ally, Charles II of Spain (the ship's namesake), to prey on French vessels in the West Indies. After leaving London in August 1693, the Charles II anchored in the northern Spanish harbor of Corunna, where other vessels were assembling for the expedition. The crew grew discontent as Madrid failed to deliver a letter of marque and the Charles II's owners failed to pay their wages. On the evening of 7 May 1694, the restless sailors mutinied. With the Charles II renamed the Fancy and Every elected as the new captain, the Fancy sailed south en route to the Indian Ocean, soon plundering five ships off the West African coast." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Every

Ok, slaving was business-as-usual then but, still, there must've been strong humans w/ energy & integrity who had scruples against it & who weren't so hot-on-the-heels-of-wealth as to stoop so low. Ok, the sailors mutinied against not being pd, that's completely understandable & shd be a lesson to exploitative elites the world over, but all they ended up doing was switching their targets from who they were hired to attack to anybody else they cd victimize. They were mercenaries. & like all mercenaries, the bloodlust isn't exactly satiated w/ merely the winning of monetary gains:

"The battle roared on for hours as the pirates boarded the Ganj-i-Sawai. The captain of the Mughal ship, terrified, ran below decks and hid among the concubines. After a fierce battle, the surviving Indians surrendered. The exact date of the battle is unknown, but probably sometime in July of 1695.

"Looting and Torture:

"The survivors of the battle were subjected to several days of torture and rape by the victorious pirates. There were many women on board, including a member of the court of the Grand Moghul himself." - http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/Pirates/p/Henry-Every-The-Pirate-Who-Ke...

There are always apologists for this kind of behavior regardless of whether it's done by the 'good guys' or the 'bad guys' but I prefer a more gentle & sensitive world. I recently witnessed one of Disney's popular "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies. I was somewhat astounded by how utterly violent the movie was, admittedly in a very aestheticized way, but still I'd never before seen anything by Disney that went so far in this direction. I've always associated Disney w/ a less traumatic family fare. END OF TANGENT.

A more positive side to the pirate mindset might be represented by this: "The Every coat of arms contains the Latin motto "Summ Cuique," which translates as "to each his own." These days it could be translated as "do your own thing," a motto that would be lived up to in its fullest in the person of Tom Every." (p 3) Some of us chafe under the rule of others.

"Tom has not tried to accommodate society and its norms in his life and work but rather has tried to ignore everything and everybody that does not fit his vision. He is at heart an anarchist, and he has occasionally paid the price for this stance." (p 181) Ha ha! I'm an anarchist & one of the prices I pay for having a philosophy that values true justice instead of the bullshit Injustice System that we live under currently is that I'm relegated to a highly marginalized position while those around me who don't articulate their criticisms of society at all or nearly as deeply get financial rewards out the wazoo.

I admire Kupsh's matter-of-fact & respectful descriptions. Here's a part about Dr. Evermor's dad:

"He told Tom that he chose Platteville because the dress code was not as tough as the code at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and he didn't have a lot of money. He made his way through the first two years there attending classes during the day and sleeping in the warm powerhouse, where he had a part-time job watching the boiler gauges at night.

"After two years in Platteville, he transferred to the university in Madison, where he pursued a degree in civil engineering. After graduation, he took a job with the state, where he spent his working life making his way up through the ranks and ending up as a chief of engineering services for the State of Wisconsin. During his career, he was responsible for the layout of state highways." - p 3

Like all people who grow up w/ a healthy respect for "Waste Not, Want Not", the young Tom Every started in on an appreciation for the reuse value of things at a very early age. For those of us who've worked toward or at least supported recycling, this characteristic makes his work all the more important:

"What Tom really liked was collecting loads of newspapers and hauling them to collection centers in his red Radio Flyer wagon. It was wartime, and the whole country was collecting and recycling strategic materials; it was a patriotic duty to collect materials for the war effort. Young and old alike did what they could. As the war came to and end, interest in collecting and recycling waned for most people, but not for Tom. He kept gathering up almost anything that people didn't want: paper, used toothpaste tubes, scrap metal." - pp 4-5

When I was a kid I'd walk the mile to the nearest commercial area & pick up the recyclables on the way. By the time I got there I'd earn enuf by turning in bottles to buy a MAD Magazine or a comic. Otherwise, I wdn't've had any money. Sometimes I wonder whether some people who throw things out their car windows have something similar in mind. Mostly I think they're just being lazy & uncaring. Nonetheless, I've seen people walking along & picking such stuff up for the sake of getting the pittance they can for it. It saddens me that people are so desperate but, at least, there's something that they can make a little money from.

"Dad would take me twice a year to collect old signs from sign makers. He had a box built into the back of his 1940 Ford and he loaded that thing up with those old signs and we used them to patch the buildings—always trying to figure out how to do something with what you've got.

"One day in 1950 his dad got tickets to the fights at the University of Wisconsin Field House. There, from a ringside seat, Tom first saw Alex Jordan. By this time, Jordan was really too old for the sport, but he boxed that day as a heavyweight." - p 6

Enter Alex Jordan, the founder of the House on the Rock, who Tom Every wd go on to work for & collaborate w/. Both Jordan & Every might be called 'pugnacious' - or at least stubborn in their pursuits of their goals despite societal resistance - wch, in my experience, almost inevitably brings into play some of what I call Criminal Sanity. As a 10 yr old, Every had a brush w/ the law wch he subsequently replied to w/ an imagination that's probably characterized his whole life:

"The next day, the constable showed up with a fifteen dollar ticket for each of them for operating a bike at night without a light."

[..]

"As usual, Tom could not leave well enough alone. The Labor Day parade was coming up, and he was determined to create a response to his run-in with the local authorities. He got some batteries and decorated his bike with every light that he could find. He mounted a large sign above it that read "Legal Bike—Approved by the Police Department." He got one of his friends to dress up like a policeman (complete with pillow potbelly to imitate Waldo) and chase him down the street. He took second prize in the comic division." - pp 9-10

Evermor's disregard for laws that get in the way of his getting things done is nicely exemplified by this story from his adulthood:

"At the House on the Rock, Tom was collecting artifacts from everywhere and had to move a lot of very big things into and around the state. There were all of those regulations and permits that he saw standing in the way of progress. He picked his routes across Wisconsin very carefully and did quite a bit of his after nightfall, often with Eleanor following behind (with bail money) in case anything went wrong. They chanced it. he tried to avoid low-hanging power lines, but in a tight spot he used jumper boards. Jumper boards are made of one-by-six lumber; he bent the boards over the top of the load, and the power lines would hit the boards and slide harmlessly over. He was lucky." - p 24

PLEASE READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/371961-for-evermor… (més)

I met and talked with Dr Evermor when we visited the Forevertron a few years before his passing. He spoke about his work as if he really believed that Queen Victoria would be taking tea in the observation cupola while spaceships set sail for the outer galaxies, which was slightly disconcerting (something like a conversation with Luna Lovegood) until I realized he was the creator of a science fiction work in junkyard parts, and was speaking of the characters and events in exactly the way authors speak of written works. I told him "You were doing steampunk before there was a word for steampunk" and he was greatly pleased. "Some people have called me the godfather of steampunk" -- in a tone of voice that made me strongly suspect that he interpreted "godfather" in the sense of making offers-you-can't-refuse!

This book attempts, and for the most part succeeds in, telling the actual this-world story of Tom Every without debunking or tarnishing his other-worldly vision.… (més)

You had to be there.

Actually, you really, really, really have to be there. There is no way to describe The House on the Rock. There are no pictures that do justice to the bizarre acid trip that is a tour of this…. house/establishment/museum of the weird/art of the bizarre…place. And, to even appreciate what this book is about, you probably have to have been there.

This is the story of Alex Jordan, the man who designed and built The House on the Rock, collected more “stuff” than you can imagine, built strange and bizarre areas to display the collections, designed and built mechanical contraptions that boggle the mind, and effectively created an art that has never really existed.

The world’s largest carousel which happens to be so stuffed with things like chandeliers and bare-breasted mermaids that no one can ride it, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping next to two giant doll carousels, a mechanical orchestra that plays when you insert a token, a three-layer stack of life-size elephants, the Organ Room, a full-scale whale being attacked by a squid while it eats a boat, the Infinity Room. Oh yeah, there’s also a house. You get the idea. A strange, eccentric, eclectic conglomeration that, in some fevered dream way (somehow that cliché springs to mind far too easily and appropriately), makes sense.

The book does a good job of describing the upbringing that led to this interesting and strange individual. It also provides excellent descriptions of how “The House” got started, and how it became more than a house. And it is invaluable to the visitor who just wants to try and understand.

Of course, it has its problems. The author occasionally wanders, going down sidetracks that aren’t particularly relevant. And there are instances where the author seems to back away from certain truths, seemingly not wanting to explore or reveal too much. But this is not an edited publication from a major publishing house; this is a labor of love by someone who cared enough to do the deep research necessary to tell the real story. And the author had access to Jordan, meaning much of this is actually coming from the horse’s mouth.

If you have not visited The House on the Rock, this book will probably not be for you. The story of Alex Jordan, without the experience of the house, is just a tale of an eccentric and not that compelling. And your appetite to visit will be better whetted by viewing the pictures and descriptions you can find on the internet. (Or by talking to anyone who has actually visited.) However, if you have been to the House, you will want this book as a partial explanation of all you have seen and an exploration of how and why it happened.

And I’m willing to bet that, if you have been there before, reading this book will make you want to go back and see it all again. I can’t wait to find an excuse to return to that obscure section of southwestern Wisconsin.… (més)