foxtales

Poems and Prose by Tim Fox

  • The St. Louis Artist Who Helped The Artist Formerly Known as Prince

    EXCLUSIVE TO THE WRITE FOX BLOG

    rainbow-children-prince-album-cover

    Since Prince’s death last Thursday, many stories have surfaced about his love of the arts and his compassion for others, but in 1998 both of those themes came together right here in St. Louis. The result was a lot of happier kids and one very happy artist, whose work would become the cover of Prince’s 2001 album, The Rainbow Children.

    Cbabi Bayoc is that artist. At the time, his work was on display at Dignity House, a program of Neighborhood Houses, on Union Boulevard (today the Boo Cat Club). Prince was in town for a concert in Collinsville, Illinois.

    Prince asked some staffers to drop off food and other items for the kids in Dignity House’s after-school program. The artwork impressed the staff members so much that they snapped some pictures and took them back to Prince.

    Prince loved the name “Dignity House” because of how it could empower kids. When he saw the artwork later, he loved it, too. He reached out to Bayoc to buy some of his paintings.

    “He originally bought five paintings, but about two years later one of his people called to ask about buying some more,” Bayoc remembers. “I sent him some photos and he bought three more. Then a few months later a young woman with his organization called again to buy the rights to one of them for use on an album cover.”

    The painting was titled The Reine Keis Quintet. Reine Keis is Bayloc’s wife. He painted it after she suggested that he make more paintings of women.

    “Because Prince bought all the rights, including naming rights, he renamed it The Rainbow Children,” Bayoc says.

    So what was it like knowing his artwork would be used as the cover of a Prince album?

    “It was a big honor, but I didn’t see how big it was until I started to get email from places like Japan and Australia from people wanting prints of the image,” he says. “I couldn’t provide them because Prince had all the rights, but it was exciting to know my work was being seen and liked around the world.”

    Even with the attention all things Prince are getting today, Bayoc is modest about his achievement.

    “You never know what’s gonna happen. You just keep doing what you do,” he says. “But it does give me a special feeling knowing how many people cherish the image.”

    Today, Bayoc is still producing art, and it’s still on display–in Reine’s bakeshop/art studio SweetArt in the Shaw Neighborhood (2203 S. 39th Street).

    I think I know where I’m headed for coffee tomorrow!

    Special thanks to my wife, Ellen Reed-Fox, Vice President of Development for Neighborhood Houses, for tipping me off to this story! Dignity House, which is no longer operating, was a program of Neighborhood Houses from 1975 until 2010. 

     

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  • No Stone Unturned

    My Freshman year of college, I wrote a journal entry for English class that started, “I have been a Stones fan forever.” That may have been hyperbole, but it is true that I–like millions of others–have never lived in a world without the Rolling Stones.

    Richard Cohen takes that fact as the premise of his forthcoming book, The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones. It’s one of two music-related books I’ll be reviewing together for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch next month.

    The title comes from an interview with Keith Richards. When Cohen asked the guitarist what it was like to live in a world always starring the Rolling Stones, he (typically) turned the question back on the interviewer: “You tell me. I don’t know. . . . For you, there’s always been the sun and the moon and the Rolling Stones.”

    Cohen was 26 in 1994 when Rolling Stone magazine asked him to cover the group’s Voodoo Lounge tour. In 1994 I was 28, so we’re roughly contemporaries–late entries to Generation X. His entree to the Rolling Stones was “Honky Tonk Women.” Mine was, like so many other people’s, “Satisfaction.” But what we share more deeply is a vague feeling of being “born too late.” “Time would always separate me from these guys, from this generation,” he writes. But he soldiers on.

    Cohen obviously did more than cover a tour. His book is another history of the Rolling Stones, but he promises to re-tell those familiar tales of music and madness and Altamont and decadence through the eyes of a Gen Xer rather than a Boomer. Will he see another, baby, standing in the shadows? I’ll keep you posted.

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  • Pace Maker

    For the first year that I ran, I rarely thought about pace. Survival was my first concern, then speed–breaking the 10-minute-mile barrier. But I didn’t know how to think about controlling the movement of my feet to attain that goal.

    Then, last week, a running partner told me something that makes so much sense it’s embarrassing that it hadn’t occurred to me before. To go slower, keep your feet under your body. To go faster, let your feet extend beyond your body. Think about and feel where your feet are in relation to your core and consciously make adjustments from there.

    The result, of course, is smaller or wider steps, which means more or less ground covered, which means a faster pace–without killing yourself by making your legs actually move faster. They just move a little further with each step.

    The impact of such a modest adjustment, and my consciousness of it, started be thinking about similar modifications I could make to cover more ground in my life. Rather than straining to run faster, I could just be more mindful of what is happening right under my feet. Where do I stand? How does it feel? Is it time to stretch, or time to tread lightly?

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  • Apocalypse Prince

    The first Prince song I remember hearing was “1999.” It was playing on my sister’s stereo as we got ready for church one morning. Its slowed-down-speech intro–“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, I only want you to have some fun”–sounded like both a promise and a threat.

    It was the early 1980s. I bought the album 1999 in 1983. That year, a miniseries called The Day After aired on ABC. Set in nearby Lawrence, Kansas, Kansas City, Missouri, and environs, it followed the survivors of a nuclear blast.

    Nuclear war was the constant, nagging fear of my troubled teen-aged mind, and of many people’s in those days–not least of all, Prince.

    As I would learn later when I started working backwards and bought his 1981 album Controversy, the end of the world brought about by nuclear weapons was a theme for him. The song “Ronnie Talk to Russia” opens, in a childlike, sing-along chorus, with: “Ronnie talk to Russia / Before it’s too late / Before it’s too late / Before it’s too late / Ronnie talk to Russia / Before it’s too late / Before they blow up the world.”

    In the end, the song turns personal. “The world” turns to “my world.” That’s how I felt, being 16 or 17 years old. They wanted to blow up “my world.”

    “1999” was not a song. It was a manifesto. It was personal. It was a recipe for living a rational life in an irrational world.

    From that ominous spoken intro to the references to death, war “all around us,” a mind saying “prepare to fight,” and the rhetorical child’s question at the end–“Mommy / Why does everybody have a bomb?”–“1999” set the agenda for what would follow: songs about a world where we should “pretend we’re married,” “play music, sex, romance,” and, most poignantly, be “free.”

    “Everybody’s got a bomb / We could all die any day / Before I let the happen / I’ll dance my life away,” Prince sang. And why not? In a world gone mad, what else can you do?

    Party on, Prince. Party on.

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  • Lovin’ the ‘Lou

    Ellen and I moved to St. Louis in 1994. The driver was mainly my new job at the Missouri Historical Society, but Ellen’s parents were here, too, and I’d always known I wanted to live in a bigger city than my hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, or my college town of Columbia.

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  • Reading on Empty

    My sister taught me how to read the summer before kindergarten. Not so remarkable for lucky kids these days who have access to academically progressive preschool programs, but in the ’70s it marked me as advanced. I still remember the Sunday night my mom got a call at home saying that the next day I would be leaving my first-grade classroom at reading class time to go to the second-grade room for reading. (more…)

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  • On the Run

    I never thought I would be a runner. I ran cross country for about two weeks in high school, but I dropped that when my hating it conveniently coincided with severe pain in my left knee, which turned out to be the result of several osteochondromas (non-malignant bone tumors) rubbing against the muscles and tendons. (more…)

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  • A Good Kind of Crazy

    Like most people’s, my life has a soundtrack. And like most people my age, it started with AM radio in the early-mid ’70s, which morphed into FM radio in the late ’70s, which segued into college radio in the ’80s. And like all people do as they age, I romanticize the music of my youth and struggle to understand, let alone appreciate, what has come since. (more…)

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  • Why “Film” and Not “Movies”?

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    Isn’t it pretentious to use the term “film” rather than “movies”? Why yes–yes, it it. But for me, there’s a critical distinction between a work of art and a work of mass consumption–not that the two are mutually exclusive, mind you, and sometimes a movie can become a film with the passage of time and the haze of nostalgia and vice versa.

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