OPINION

A few minutes with Superstar Jones

PHILADELPHIA -- Our timed ticket for the Barnes Foundation was at 11 a.m., so with a half-hour to kill, we sat down about a block away, on the steps of the Rodin Museum, to eat our bagels.

It was a benign day, the temperature so precisely balanced between warm and cool it failed to register. But for a bright sun and some intimations of clouds on the horizon, there was no weather. We spoke to a nice man walking a nice dog named Roscoe. And a few moments after they moved on we were approached by a smiling man in good boots wearing several layered shirts and an odd hat and carrying more clothes in a fabric shopping bag. (He evoked a clean-shaven iteration of Ignatius J. Reilly having escaped New Orleans by Scenicruiser to arrive on the Ben Franklin Parkway.)

We understood he was traveling--that he was homeless--but he didn't seem in distress.

I guess he had witnessed our interaction with Roscoe, for he first asked us if we were "dog people." We said we were and we listened as he described what he said was a curious habit he's observed among some Philadelphia dog walkers that he's never seen anywhere else in his travels. He said some people encouraged their dogs to growl at homeless folks, and he'd seen a few even allow their dogs to defecate near people who were "resting their eyes" on a park bench or on the ground.

He seemed reassured when we told him we thought that was awful behavior--like he'd considered the possibility it was a common custom of which he'd somehow never became aware. Then he went on, in a gentle but insistent tone that presented as both educated and intense, dissecting the regional differences in how the transient poor were received; he'd had experience up and down the eastern seaboard. When he alluded to another Rodin Museum, we understood he had been to Paris.

I didn't take notes on our conversation, but I wish I had. For he was a perceptive social analyst who argued persuasively that what he called a very solvable housing crisis was being routinely ignored by both major American political parties. While there is plenty of housing available--some estimate that there are five times as many vacant units as homeless people in this country--the poor can't afford them. (It's not that the homeless don't have any money, they just don't have enough money. They are homeless people who receive monthly Social Security and/or pension checks.) And while that might be addressed through housing vouchers, landlords and other renters might object to having homeless people integrated into regular apartment buildings.

But there's no political will to help "those between residences" because in our politics power derives directly from money. Every vote counts, but the votes of those with the wherewithal to make political contributions or do favors for those in or seeking power are multiplied. With enough money you can buy enough votes.

Our friend also found Philadelphia somewhat meaner than other northeastern cities, an observation at odds with ours; on our first trip here we'd found the city delightfully compact and walkable and the citizens friendly and urbane. It felt more like Vancouver than New York, and was far less frumpy than D.C. We were having a wonderful time, but our bags were back at our hotel room. We weren't carrying them by our side.

Anyway, we learned that our homeless man was an artist and a filmmaker and an unabashed "social justice warrior." He was planning on making a project from his time on the streets.

It was getting near our appointed time. So I pulled out my card and gave it to him. He seemed touched.

"That's what real people do," he said, "that means you acknowledge me as a person. That's what we do where I'm from--I'm from Boston."

Then he looked at my card.

"You're from Arkansas? Do you know the Cranfords?"

Sure, we said.

"You know Chris Cranford? The filmmaker? I knew him when he was in school in L.A."

Yes, we know Chris. I asked our new friend his name.

"I'm Superstar Jones," he laughed. "Not really."

He didn't tell me his name but when I got home and emailed Chris, who recognized him as the subject of a student film he'd made when he was at the University of Southern California--Ann B. Davis Does Not Do Functions: A film about Marcus Cafferty. Chris sent me a link to the seven-minute film, and I confirmed that Superstar Jones was indeed the once up-and-coming visual artist Marcus Cafferty.

"A real interesting guy but he was different," Chris wrote in an email. "For one thing he was living in L.A. and didn't drive. So I was his chauffeur during the course of producing this film--even driving to Vegas one weekend."

In Chris' film, Cafferty talks--in the same calm but insistent, forward-pushing way we experienced on the street in Philadelphia--about his life as an artist, the way his love of the color blue proceeds from the scene in Disney's Pinocchio where Jiminy Cricket sings "When You Wish Upon a Star," his early discovery that there was something special about his drawings, that the other kids would look at his work with "something like awe," his early showings at Harvard and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, his own arrival in New York in the early '80s ...

(He's not exaggerating. While I couldn't access it, there's a monograph on Cafferty's work in the Yale University library.)

"And then I went to Paris ... from there I got a grant and went to Florence ... and from there I got to a place I always wanted to go--Kenya," he says in Chris' film. He even had a show at Michael Jackson's house Neverland. Marlon Brando came. But "most people just looked at the llamas."

Cafferty talks about using his art--"his facility"--to do more than provide him with a livelihood.

"I want my work to unify people," he says. "People as one is what it's about. Unity. It's a new time."

Superstar Jones took my card and promised to get in touch once he was better situated. I sure hope he does.

[email protected]

Read more at

www.blooddirtangels.com

Editorial on 10/29/2017

Upcoming Events