Moving Room To Room, Tentacle By Tentacle: Michael McCall’s Long Strange Trip

By Peter Frank
Forward to:
Captain Squid & The Tentacle Room:
Adventures in Life, Love & Art
by Michael McCall
Fabrik Press, 260 pp., $35.00

Michael McCall came of age at a time when it was cool to live your art. That time may be coming back (no little thanks to McCall’s example, I’ll wager), but between coming of age and compiling this account, McCall’s lifestyle came to be regarded as more vagabond than renegade, more hippie than hip, more irresponsible than irreverent. Plenty of wannabe art-lifers gave the art-life a bad name. McCall — always an art maker, not just a goof, and always answering to aesthetic and ethical standards — wasn’t one of them, and he was brave enough to stick to his guns, keep on living his life as if it were an artwork, and keep on being committed to that life/art.

McCall wasn’t always, or even usually, at what the art world would consider the “right place at the right time.” Los Angeles in the 80s? Washington DC in the 70s? Key West ever? These were not hot spots. Except that they were — and not just in their own ways. They were loci of eccentric innovation, not just backwaters. And they turned out to be key sites in the social as well…