Conversations with Fred Dewey (Part 1 of 3)
A democracy activist in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, Fred was someone we knew too briefly but we are happy to celebrate him in this series of posts.
In Search of Freedom X
A night stroller passing by the corner of 2nd St. and Ashland in Santa Monica in recent years might have thrown a glance into the small living room of an older adobe duplex apartment, the residence of the late Fred Dewey.
I can imagine Fred sitting there reading, taking notes, talking excitedly to friends on his cellphone in the lamplight, against a backdrop of several thousand books spilling over from his floor-to-ceiling shelves.
I first felt Fred’s energy in late 2019 when I got an ebullient introductory email from him suggesting we talk. He had discovered Solidarity Hall and recognized us as kindred spirits.
More than that, I think he appreciated that we could bring a new audience to his work, one which included younger people and people of color. He was close to ecstatic about all this.
Less than three years later, not long after he passed, the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Group—which includes artists Jeremiah Day, Renée Petropoulos and Lucas Reiner, poet and novelist Brooks Roddan, and curator/philosopher Sue Spaid—invited me to inhabit Fred’s Santa Monica apartment for a week as “writer-in-residence.”
My goal was to make notes for an article (which became this introductory post) on Fred’s life and presence in various places: his Santa Monica apartment, Beyond Baroque (the cultural center he directed for some years in nearby Venice, as well as his homes in Berlin, Asheville, Brussels, and elsewhere.
I spoke to his old friends, neighbors, and collaborators. Most remarked on how stunned they were by his sudden passing in mid-2021, as though they had been abruptly cut off before finishing some important conversation. Although I knew Fred for only for the last two years of his life, I felt exactly the same way. So many interesting ideas Fred and I were batting around and then he was gone.
At Fred’s November 2021 memorial service held in the courtyard at Beyond Baroque, around two dozen friends and family members came together. Each shared their own versions of Fred, often very different from the other people's version of the man. “He had autonomous circles of friends who did not even know of each other until the memorial event,” as his longtime friend the L.A.-based artist Dorit Cypis recounted to me.
We all came to realize there were many facets to Fred, an arts impresario, writer, editor and—most importantly—a cultural activist in a rare sense of the term. Like a figure out of some lost European world, Fred was a public intellectual interested in every shape of language and its relation to society and justice. He used language as a tool to convene, as in the fourteen years of public programming—some 1,400 events--he produced as Beyond Baroque’s longest-serving Executive Director (1996-2010).
He launched Beyond Baroque Books in 1998, publishing over twenty books by Ammiel Alcalay, Simone Forti, Jean-Luc Godard, Daniel Berrigan, Abdellatif Laabi, Jack Hirschman, Christoph Draeger, Ed Ruscha, and Diane di Prima. In 2000, he curated the Venice Beach Poet’s Monument and in 2008, he secured a 25-year lease from the City of L.A. for Beyond Baroque’s space in the Old Venice City Hall.
As the great-grandson of the famous philosopher John Dewey, Fred was born into a privileged New York family. After studying semiotics at Brown and spending a number of years in Manhattan, he chose to relocate to Los Angeles in 1985, working for a while in the film industry as an assistant to director Roger Corman.
By 1992, in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict and uprising, he began holding public discussions at Beyond Baroque, becoming its unpaid executive director in 1996. It was during this decade that he also co-organized the City of Los Angeles’ first system of neighborhood councils, still very much operating today.
Around this time Fred became taken up with the writings of the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt. Real politics, Fred learned from Arendt, is not systems or parties but simply us as individual persons coming together in our plurality—i.e., our inevitable differences—in order to determine together our conditions of life. Arendt, who died in 1975, was thinking of examples of solidarity like the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Fred thought of the Montgomery bus boycott, the World Trade Center uprising, Occupy Wall Street, and the various Arab Spring uprisings a few years ago.
In Fred’s view, real politics is also “the space where place, neighborhood, and power come together and are secured.” He wanted Beyond Baroque to be one of those spaces.
In 2014, he published a brilliant and quirky collection of essays, manifestoes and historical commentary: The School of Public Life.
How to define Fred? In his spirit of playfulness and his sense for the importance of objects as vessels of truth, here’s my attempt at “Fred in Seven Objects,” drawing mostly on things I came across in his apartment:
Object #1: Harper’s Weekly cover (framed) from December 2, 1871
Near the front door, Fred had affixed what appears to be an original cover of Harper’s Weekly with a cartoon of blind justice holding up the scales, from one of which a tiger dangles helplessly. The caption reads “The Tammany tiger strung up.” Tammany, for Fred, surely meant the Machine--the City of Los Angeles or the political parties or whatever bureaucratic enemy he happened to be fighting at the moment.
Object #2: A photo of Hannah Arendt
Also on the wall. Fred, who proudly boasted of having no graduate degrees, knew her work as well as many professional Arendt scholars. When a new and thick collection of her essays appeared some years ago, he told me he went off in retreat for a full week in order to read the book with care and his full attention. Arendt’s literary executor and posthumous editor Jerome Kohn called Fred the premiere Arendtian activist working today. Which naturally leaves us asking: what exactly is an Arendtian activist?
Fred’s answer for several years was to hold “working groups”, meaning public discussions in small groups, of texts from Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and others as a way to open up thinking about plurality and power. These events were held at sites in Berlin, Luxembourg, and Venice CA, among other places.
Object #3: A library of roughly 8,000 books
Jefferson, Lincoln, Vidal, I.F. Stone, Chomsky, Said, Sontag, DuBois, MLK, Malcolm X, Cornel West, the Beats (San Fran and Venice), McLuhan, Postman, Foucault, Baudelaire, Cendrars, Baudrillard, de Beauvoir, Holderlin, Rilke, Dinesen, Merton, Brodsky, Olson, W. Berry, U.S. history, art history, film history, media studies, Frankfurt School, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin,…
The books make me think of Fred’s deep literacy, as well as the African proverb: “When a wise man dies, a great library burns.” (I also noticed two areas barely represented: women writers and economics.)
Object #4: Poet’s Wall (Venice Beach)
With his acute sense of place and the support of L.A. city politicians like Mike Bonin and the late Bill Rosendahl, Fred must have loved the opportunity in 2000 to curate this project: four concrete walls engraved with 18 verses written by some of the neighborhood’s best-known poets.
These include Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Philomene Long (known as the “Poet Laureate of Venice”); poet and Andy Warhol film star Taylor Mead; poet and community activist Manazar Gamboa; punk rocker Exene Cervenka; and actor Viggo Mortensen.
Object #5: Fred’s Glue Sticks
In one corner of Fred’s apartment he had a wall filled with black notebooks. This archive, perhaps thousands of pages filled with Fred’s barely legible handwriting, is his spiritual testament, his scrapbooks of life. Resolutely anti-digital until the end, Fred’s notebooks are also assemblages of clippings from the several newspapers he read daily. For this purpose and to the amused appreciation of his friends, Fred made a habit using grade school glue sticks. Surely another small example of his cultural resistance.
Object #6: An old bicycle
Fred owned a car in Santa Monica but kept it parked on the street, except for occasional forays around the region. He depended on his bicycle to keep him close to the life of the streets and his many haunts, like Small World Books on the Venice boardwalk, where he was a highly valued and substantial customer over the years. Mentioning his car naturally brings to mind one more iconic item in his apartment…
Object #7: The Freedom X license plate
In the late 1990s, Fred wrote a cultural politics column called “Letter from Freedom X”, a personal avatar or persona he created from several sources: a graffito dating to the Civil Rights era, a composition by Miles Davis, and the concept of the “word and image virus” from William Burroughs. The idea was to create a fictional intervention which would, in Burroughs’ phrase, “let the future in.”
In these years, Fred initiated an annual series of public readings and critical reflections on July 4, somewhat in the critical spirit of Frederick Douglass. His School of Public Life includes two key texts in this intervention: his piece beginning, “I am a public space virus. I am Freedom X” and his equally extraordinary, “Calling All Freedom Ancestors!”, a Ginsburgian howl ending with, “THE DICTATORSHIP OF NOBODY AND NOTHINGNESS MUST FALL! …LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC…LONG LIVE THE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC LIFE!!!
Fred put his avatar’s name on his license plate which now sits on one of his book shelves. At one point a few years ago the plate got him pulled over by the L.A.P.D., an incident in which the officers claimed to be merely expressing their curiosity about the plate’s meaning, but which left Fred feeling a bit queasy.
Fred’s support for the artists and writers he encountered was somewhat legendary. Poet Will Alexander was a kind of protégé of Fred’s but he doesn’t think his “arrival” in the community of L.A. poets was the biggest gift he received from Fred. “He used to let me in Beyond Baroque evenings so I could just write all night long, in the quiet. Writing a lonely business. But that’s what it takes.”
For several years, Fred had a remarkable collaboration with his close friend, artist Jeremiah Day, and the legendary postmodern artist and dancer Simone Forti. “We three all influenced each other in our collaboration,” Forti recalls. “We used texts but we were really in search of the text that exists in between. Our idea was to hold a space and let the energy happen.”
The day before the nerve-wracking 2020 presidential election, Fred sent me a note about an idea: a constitutional amendment which would enable the forming of town assemblies—with some teeth--across the country. Somehow he thought Solidarity Hall would be the perfect little vehicle to achieve this grand goal. Here’s how he put it:
i thought it might be good to get the ball rolling with a piece for solidarity hall on the topic. especially if things get a bit dicey after tuesday’s election. the timing could be perfect. i feel somehow people might, as they were after the Rodney King riots, be yearning for a grass roots space for deliberation and more accurate representation, to keep the darn country and democracy from flying apart. but also because the system is so abjectly unresponsive. town meeting spaces being the thing arendt said was unfortunately, even tragically, not included in the constitution, the very thing that gave rise to it!!!! oops!
why not get a strong, positive proposal/manifesto out there? what better place than with you? and what better time than now? and see if it resonates?
In collaboration with L.A.-based filmmaker Dana Berman Duff, a multi-speaker filmed reading of Fred’s “What Is Power” essay, also included in his School of Public Life, is currently showing at film festivals worldwide. (A 20-minute version of the film is here.)
Copies of Fred’s The School of Public Life are available here.
Jeremiah Day’s monograph on his collaboration with Fred and dancer Simone Forti is available here.
Coming next: Conversations with Fred Dewey: Part 2 (Webinar with Solidarity Hall)
“Power and Place: The School of Public Life” (July 8, 2020)
See you next time—peace.
I love this playful and insightful inventory of Fred's apartment during your stay there not long after his passing.
". . . what exactly is an Arendtian activist? Fred’s answer for several years was to hold 'working groups,' meaning public discussions in small groups, of texts from Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and others as a way to open up thinking about plurality and power." A few months after Benjamin died, Arendt and her husband were sitting on a Lisbon dock waiting for a ship to America. There they read Benjamin's last writing, his Theses on the Philosophy of History, to each other and to their fellow refugees waiting with them. There's this brief reference in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl bio of Arendt to the discussion around this very short work (162). Young-Bruehl says only that "They discussed and debated the meaning of his moment-to-moment messianic hope," which bears at least indirectly on "plurality and power." I like to think of this discussion as maybe a prototype of the "working groups" that Fred later founded.
("Fred sent me a note about an idea: a constitutional amendment which would enable the forming of town assemblies—with some teeth--across the country." -- Jefferson's dream from 1776 to the end of his life! May it come to pass.)