Maris Kundzins was a very good friend of mine since 1965. He has recently passed on to the place all great artists go when they are done here. I never knew his religious beliefs or his political beliefs. I want to honor his memory with this blog since if you Google his name, you will find out about his recent life and art, but very few people know about his life and art as a young man. I want to share what I have of his art and what I knew of his life thirty to forty years ago.
I have letters and pieces of art from that period I want to share. We communicated by letter until the last decade or so when cyberspace took over. We continued through e-mail, Skype and a few physical meetings in recent years. He generally stayed in the Seattle area since he grew up in Longview, Washington after his family fled communist Latvia after WWII. He, also, took trips to Europe especially Latvia and other places. I remained in Southern California where I graduated from high school and where my parents lived. I traveled mostly to Mexico, US and the Caribbean.
We met in college at Sophia University located in Tokyo Japan. We did what college students do when they become friends because they have the same classes and some similar interests. We hung out. Tokyo was a great place to hang out for a young person in the mid 60's.
Sophia University was a Jesuit University founded during the American Occupation to provide English University experience and Catholic experience to willing Japanese students during the day time. At night, it's International Division provided English University classes to American GIs, Embassy and corporation people. It was fully accredited (I transferred all of my credits to a US college). The professors were a mix of Jesuit priests and foreign or Japanese professors who were not priests. The American and European professors were all interesting characters with their own reasons for teaching in Tokyo. The more interesting ones were kind of hip and liberal and they liked hanging out also. We had some interesting Jesuit professors, also.
Maris attended because he had just got out of the Army and he was interested in Japanese culture and language and with the GI Bill, he could get his degree. I was there because my father was stationed at nearby Atsugi Naval Air Station, and I had just graduated from high school (1964) in southern California and after learning about it, I thought it would be a great learning experience and it was.
Maris and I and others hung out with some professors and interesting students-mostly coffee shops and restaurants after classes late at night. Tokyo had thousands of coffee shops, so we did a lot of exploring, but there were a few we really liked. One was named after Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" anthem. A lot of hip Japanese and travelers hung out there. The music playing throughout the coffee shop was classical and American folk music. Beatles and Rolling Stone music and Rhythm and Blues was very popular as well as Country Western Music.
Even though Maris grew up in the US, he had a very European existentialism attitude about him. He looked and sounded Russian. He had so many interests. He was the best listener I have ever met as well as a kind and giving soul.
Sophia University night school was very small with less then a thousand students and no college activities such as fraternities or college sports. That is why we hung out in Tokyo which alone was an amazing learning experience. There were many amazing conversations with professors, Japanese intellectual and hip types and interesting foreign students including communists, atheists, poets (including Gary Snyder) and artists passing through Tokyo as well as US military personnel and US and European embassy personnel and various Asians, also. The Viet -Nam war also entered our conversations. I was stopped by Japanese authorities and questioned and asked for my papers when some US GIs went AWOL during this period. I was only a block from the college.
The first few years, I lived with my parents on the military base and commuted about twenty five miles on a train to Tokyo. My parents let me live my life and not question me about coming back late from Tokyo. They left for California after a few years, and I stayed in Tokyo to continue my education. Maris helped me find places to live and helped me find jobs as an English teacher which we and my other friends did to make money.
On my own, every day was a learning experience, especially when I was around Maris and other friends. I began drinking alcohol when I lived in Tokyo, which Maris called the "truth serum", during those days (no one I knew did drugs except for amphetamines to stay up studying). This was mid-sixties, so the whole drug and alcohol culture had not caught on yet. We did let our hair grow a little bit like the Beatles. We knew nothing of the cultural changes in the US except for a little in the news. Mainly, we knew of hip and beatnik type stuff in movies, poetry, literature etc. We went to very nice art exhibits from Warhol to Picasso and Miro etc. I went to Rock concerts occasionally-I saw the Beatles live in Tokyo. I was raised on rock and roll from Southern California and I liked all music since I was a geeky high school band member, but lost interest to continuing to play music, but have a good collection of all kinds of Music. Maris, being a Communist Russian (Latvian) refugee liked Russian music and cool jazz at the time. I read Lord of the Rings, On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye, etc during this time. I saw a lot of classic films and Japanese movies.
As I said, I hung out with Maris and his friends or my own friends in Tokyo at night. Sometimes we would drink at bars on our adventures.
One of Maris's Japanese friends took us one night to a club where there was a singing geisha behind the bar and a few Japanese male patrons sitting at the bar. The Japanese friend explained to us that the Geisha was a transvestite entertainer. So that was new for me and interesting watching the performance. Then he began talking to one of the patrons for long time, before translating for us their conversation. It turned out that the patron was a failed Kamikaze pilot from WWII, and we were the first Americans he had ever talked to. Maris especially continued the conversation which was fascinating to say the least.
One of Maris's Japanese friends took us one night to a club where there was a singing geisha behind the bar and a few Japanese male patrons sitting at the bar. The Japanese friend explained to us that the Geisha was a transvestite entertainer. So that was new for me and interesting watching the performance. Then he began talking to one of the patrons for long time, before translating for us their conversation. It turned out that the patron was a failed Kamikaze pilot from WWII, and we were the first Americans he had ever talked to. Maris especially continued the conversation which was fascinating to say the least.
Another time, after we had been at a bar or coffee shop. It was early morning like 2 am or 3 am, Maris and I were wandering around Tokyo when he said he knew where one of our professors lived. We went to his house and tried to talk to him from his front door since Maris liked him and wanted to talk to him. He was living with his wife, also a professor. Needless to say, the professor and his wife had already been sleeping and he was not happy about us interrupting his sleep. But that was Maris and me, his accomplice.
Another common bond we had as well as many of my other friends who lived in Tokyo is that we all had Japanese girlfriends. Maris married his girlfriend while he was in Tokyo and they had a son named Mario. I knew Mario as a baby in Japan and when they came back to the US to live in Seattle. My girl friend became an airline hostess and we did see each other after I returned to the US, but we did not continue to have a relationship after I left.
I returned to the US in January 1968 without getting my degree and spent that infamous year doing a lot of interesting things in California amid all of the turmoil of that year. I found out that I was a hippie because I had a beard and long hair which all began in Tokyo. I hung out with some back to nature hippies who did not use drugs but lived in trees and on organic foods. They got thrown away fruits and vegetables to eat from trash bins that were behind supermarkets .
I hung out one weekend with a group of adventurers who were to be called the Pirates of Santa Barbara when they were arrested for gun smuggling. When I met them, they told me that they were going to the Caribbean to film their adventures and were offering free passage on their old rickety boat. It all seemed kind of strange so, I kind of abandoned ship and left.
I attended a lot of rock concerts. I saw the Who, Cream, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, Spirit and many more. My cousin lived in Hollywood, and we went to the Whisky A Go Go to see Love, and Jimi Hendrix came in to see them since he had a concert at the Hollywood bowl.
I went to a political rally in my hometown when Bobby Kennedy rolled into our town and spoke from a car. It was exciting. A few days later, he was assassinated in LA.
So, it was an exciting time for me, but I had a low lottery number in the draft and I was not in school anymore, so I decided to join the Air Force and again had many adventures. I eventually was stationed in Sacramento, California at Mather AFB.
I had became disillusioned with a lot of things and I did a few anti-war things and delved into drugs
as well as alcohol while there. I decided to go up North to check out Canada. So, I made my way up to Seattle in my 1965 Mustang in 1970. I stopped to see Maris whom I was still in contact. I was there for just two days when I became very sick. Maris helped me get to the local Public Health Hospital which treated military personnel as well as Indians and merchant seamen. It turned out I had a ruptured appendix and I stayed three weeks in the hospital after surgery to remove my appendix. Maris, always came to see me and he helped me make arrangements to go back to California where I returned to Mather where I eventually got my discharge from the service.
I then went eventually to live in Sonoma County where I knew some friends and I wanted to get my degree. So, I used the GI bill to go to Sonoma State University (then it was College) and I worked at various places including Pinky's Pizza Parlor, and lived with various people at various student rental situations in 1973. This was the year of Watergate and other exciting things. During the summer, I was renting a room on a 250 acre farm outside of Petaluma.
The others were a high school teacher, who had the lease, his girl friend who was a college student, his two sons from his prior marriage, and students and other teachers. We had fun on the farm with partys and going to concerts in San Francisco and other activities. During this period from when I was discharged until the summer of 1973, I hitched hiked to Seattle and visited Maris and his family and friends. I also hitched hiked to Canada. Maris and I and his friend Jon made a publication at that time.
One day, I saw a figure walking down the dirt road that came from the main road to the farm house. I looked carefully, and saw that it was Maris. He had left Seattle and his wife and son. I was happy to see him, and after conversations with everyone involved. I invited him to stay with me. So, we spent the summer together. We went to concerts and poetry readings in San Francisco, where we saw Allen Ginsburg, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder and other poets as well as Miles Davis in concert at Berkeley. We again did what we did in Tokyo. We just hung out, played chess and of course talked about everything. Picture of work on the farm.
