With the recent passing of one of my idols, Bill Moyers, I am compelled to share my connection, albeit via electronic means only, to someone who was part of my daily existence during one of the most meaningful periods in my life.
As an art student in NYC in the 1980s-1990s, I had the priviledge of meeting a few famous people: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, to name two; with the latter being a lecturer-in-residence at my school (Pratt Institute) as I was tasked with ‘handling his slide carousels’ (ask your parents, or grandparents).
But the highlight of my time as a graduate student supervisor in the Media Library was circulating, viewing, and analyzing a multi-series program on VHS tape (with the master on Beta - ask your great-grandparents) entitled “Joseph Campbell and the power of myth”, a set of tapes that we would regularly have to review and re-master in order to manage their playback quality.
The buzz in the academic art world (and others I suppose) was to “read Joseph Campbell,” but as a visual artist, me and many of my classmates, including little Bobby Mapplethorope (he grew about a foot right after he dropped-out and became famous with his whips and such) lined up, patiently awaiting the rewinding of a tape so we could watch the magic interactions between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, sharing insights, questions, and interpretations between the myth and reality of idols, icons, gods and goddesses.
As an anti-social art-punk trying to learn how to conduct an adult conversation - let alone a librarian interview - these guys -these 2 guys- were full frontal in my daily analog memory glands of how words talk mouth use to…
Not only a gateway to the fabulous writings of Joseph Campbell, such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces among others, the videos were thought provoking and packed with enough subject matter to last any art student multiple semesters of imagery.
Beyond the melancholy I can see Bill and Joseph flowing alongside in the the Golden Bough, perhaps with Keith, Jean-Michel and Robert, but back on Earth we can celebrate a great series of moments recorded on film, video, or copied to DVD (as allowed by Section 110 (1) of the Copyright Act of 1976).
I'm sure one could easily locate a stream or YouTube clip, but below are links to the library holdings of the video series as as well as books authored by these two beautiful entities.
Other works in our library by-or-about:
Bill Moyers
Joseph Campbell
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