Won't You Be My Neighbor?

by Drew Martin

I have been doing a series of neighborhood photography projects since the Fall of 2009, trying to understand what comprises a neighborhood; the people and places. I started by taking black and white portraits of my own neighbors who were then invited to a show in my backyard and were asked to take their pictures home with them. It was a hit; the show became a party and lasted into the evening.

Last spring, I did a similar show around friend's gallery in Los Angeles and then in the summer I continued this project in Prague as part of a larger group show. I am not trying to repeat myself; each time I do a new version of the show I think it's the last time but then another intriguing opportunity pops up.

About a month ago I bumped into John Flood of the New York Public Library, who mentioned I could do another show in the Reference Room Gallery of the Hudson Park Branch. In March and April of 2010, the library hosted TogetherAlone, a show of forty ink drawings, many of which I drew in that space during my lunch breaks. A neighborhood photo show seemed like a natural fit for the space since I having been working two blocks away from this Leroy Street branch for over 11 years and have spent thousands of hours taking in the area on my midday walks.

So I pulled out the Ricoh my father gave me when I was a teenager and bought several rolls of black and white Kodak film and started shooting. The camera has a lot to do with the shoot. It has a very short lens so it is not a setup you would bring on safari or to a sporting event. With a shallow depth of field and nice bokeh (the aesthetic quality of the blur), it's a great up-close people camera. What I especially like about it (particularly because of the black and white film I use) is its realism. A lot of subjects, however, don't care for its frankness. That being said, this is an unedited shoot; I am showing every picture I took without any alteration.

I like the element of surprise in film. You may take a picture of someone you may never see again and you are not sure for at least a day whether or not you actually got the picture. I attribute the look of my pictures of people not only to the physical aspects of the camera, lens and film, but to the time it requires to manually advance the film, adjust the light settings and get the perfect focus. People are used to quicker, digital snapshots so the extra few seconds tend to relax them a bit.

I took my time when I shot my neighbors in NJ but for the LA and Prague shows I shot 200 pictures in a couple hours and had them developed the same day for LA and the next day for Prague. That felt too rushed for me and I wanted to enjoy this project more, which having a full month to prepare allowed me to do.

I like talking to John at the library because he is always very patient and insightful. When I explained that I was going to hang all the photos on clotheslines in the reference room, as I had done in all the previous shows, he mentioned (and then sent me) pictures of the library's site, prior to construction, with the tenement houses strewn with clotheslines. And when we started discussing the idea of what a neighborhood is, he brought up Jean Jacobs, who was a big advocate of sensible urban planning and reminded me she was a longtime resident of the West Village. John was quick to point out that the neighborhood of our library is arguably the most famous neighborhood of New York. This reminded me of a coworker I sat next to when I worked as a graphic artist for BMW in Montvale, NJ.

The man was a jazz drummer who often performed in the city. When he found out I was moving to Ridgewood, NJ he said the most curious thing. "Ridgewood has done what the Village had set out to achieve". I did not understand it at the time but now I do. There is a great sense of community in my town, as there is in the West Village, the difference is the West Village also has constant changes to contend with, franchises replacing small shops, an influx of office workers and the domination of Bleecker Street by trendy stores, such as Marc Jacobs' Bookmarc replacing Biography Bookshop.

It is a really interesting (and sad) situation. One can simply work in the area and go to the Dunkin Donuts for morning coffee, Chipolte for lunch and meet up with another transplant coworker at Starbucks after work or one can absorb the neighborhood, get to know the people that have been living there for decades and support the smaller stores. Most office workers do the former. This neighborhood is the best of neighborhoods if that is what you want; and this is really true of every place. A good neighborhood is both a very defined physical space but also a psychological state.

My shoot in Prague left a lot of people scratching their heads. It was part of a show was called Freakshow II, and my idea there was to photograph people who lived and worked around the gallery, where they typically would not venture and whom the artists and gallery owner wouldn't be too keen on reaching out to. It was a neighborhood that I tried to force upon the gallery and the locals, which worked in some regards but also failed. I am glad that I did the show but it really made me realize that the idea of neighborhood is quite different around the world. In many places there is a preference of avoidance and as much privacy as possible; it's easier.

My own concept of neighborhood came from growing up in tight-knit neighborhoods in northern New Jersey where towns meld together, and block parties and neighborhood garage sales still take place. I was also greatly influenced by neighborly shows such as Little House on the Prairie. I love my role as a neighbor. I like giving a hand helping someone with a project and visiting friends on their porches for a glass of wine.

All the pictures here are from this shoot, Under the Hood - New York. A book of the show can be viewed on Blurb...

The show will be up from the beginning of May until the end of June, 2011 at:

New York Public Library - Hudson Park Branch, 66 Leroy Street, New York, NY

Viewing hours:

Monday & Wednesday 10am - 6pm; Tuesday & Thursday 10am-8pm; Friday & Saturday 1pm-5pm

Triple Rush

by Drew Martin

There is a new reality show on television called Triple Rush. It follows three New York City bicycle messenger companies and emphasizes the harrowing work the riders endure, often escaping death by the skin of their teeth. I don't typically watch television but I find this show fascinating for several reasons.

For starters, when I was a kid I thought the New York bicycle messengers were the coolest guys in the city. New York was definitely a tougher place in the 1980s and the bike messengers seemed to embrace that mad chaos. They broke all the rules, often riding opposite traffic, between streams of cars, relying on whistles gritted between their teeth instead of brakes.

I still think they are a cool, with their stripped-down fixed-gear bikes, purposefully hipster clothes and on-the-move lives.

The main reason I like Triple Rush is that I am friends with the owner of one of the firms, Rob Kotch of Breakaway Courier Systems. I rode with Rob for thousands of miles a few years ago when I commuted with him regularly on bike from our town in northern New Jersey into Manhattan and back. I rode every day for six months and covered six thousand miles in the broiling summer afternoons and the freezing winter mornings. Once we rode together through a severe electrical storm with lightning bolts crackling all around us.

I've stopped riding but Rob is still out there almost every morning. He does it for exercise, camaraderie with other bike commuters and for the sake of alternative transportation but he also rides to be in touch with his messengers and to get a feel for the road conditions each day.

Rob is shown in the first episode giving an eye-opening safety lecture to new hires. It's a Scared Straight approach (his words) but the rookies should be thankful. It's the only messenger company in New York City that has a safety program and Rob's been doing it for 20 years.

The show is interesting to watch because the cameras follow the riders close enough to give a sense of what it is like to ride in the city. Bike cams and quick editing contribute to the effect. In the first episode, there were 1,400 cuts during the 43 minute run time.

The amusement of the first show was watching young guns from places like Lincoln, Nebraska get miserably lost. You feel a dispatcher's pain and frustration when a new messenger overshoots his pickup location by 20 blocks. How is that even possible with a straightforward city grid in midtown? And when the new messenger is on time, something else inevitably goes wrong, like losing the "gold," the delivery manifest.

The term 'triple rush' refers to a pickup that needs to be delivered in 15 minutes or less. For the veteran messengers it's a higher commission, for the rookie, it's an impossible task.

Triple Rush is on the Travel Channel (on my Fios system it's channel 170 and it plays at 10pm on Thursdays).

Literary Aphrodisiacs: Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus

by Drew Martin

I recently finished reading Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus. While much of the text can be read as autobiographical, or at least as experiences worthy of Nin's intimate participation, there is one passage, through the character of Elena, that seems like a direct line to a behind-the-scenes Nin.

"People express audacity in various ways," said Elena. "I usually turn back, as you say, and then I go home and write a book which becomes an obsession of the censors."

"That's a misuse of natural forces," said the man.

"But then," said Elena, "I use my book like dynamite, I place it where I want the explosion to take place, and then I blast my way through with it!"

As she said these words an explosion took place somewhere in the mountain where a road was being made, and they laughed at the coincidence.

Before we celebrate Nin for her audacity and carefree spirit within the pages of Delta of Venus, it is important to read the preface and understand what fueled the writing. The preface is comprised of a few of Nin's diary entries from 1940 and 1941, and concludes with a postscript from 1976. She explains.

Here in the erotica I was writing to entertain, under pressure from a client who wanted me to "leave out the poetry."

Nin was not alone in the mission to satisfy this man. A colorful array of writers churned out the stories at a dollar a page.

The homosexuals wrote as if they were women. The timid ones wrote about orgies. The frigid ones about frenzied fulfillments. The most poetic ones indulged in pure bestiality and the purest ones in perversions. We were haunted by the marvelous tales we could not tell...We told a story and the rest of us had to decide whether it was true or false. Or plausible. Was this plausible?

Although Nin embraced the work and brought much of herself to it, the arrangement with this client was taxing.

But one day we reached saturation, I would tell him how he almost made us lose interest in passion by his obsession with the gestures empty of their emotions, and how we reviled him, because he almost caused us to take vows of chastity, because what he wanted us to exclude was our own aphrodisiac - poetry.

She penned a thrashing letter to this invisible force.

"Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities...Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine...

That being said, this abstract brawl between the Nin and the client reminds me of television scenes of good guy/bad guy fights, with an ally outside the tumble, unable to shoot down the villain because the two are so intertwined, whirling about. Nin controls the final outcome and pens scenarios and lines that benefit female fantasy more than anything else.

"For the first time, a real woman," he said. "So many have come here, but for the first time here is a real woman, someone I can worship."

I like Nin most when she is playful but I also find her fascinating when she takes something so common as a belt and loads it with meaning.

Pierre was sitting at the edge of the bed and had slipped his pants on and was fastening the buckle of his belt. Elena had slipped on her dress but was still coiled around him as he sat. Then he showed her his belt. She sat up to look at it. It had been a heavy, strong leather belt with a silver buckle but was now so completely worn that it looked about to tear. The tip of it was frayed. The places where the buckle fastened were almost as thin as a piece of cloth.

"My belt is wearing out," Pierre said, "and it makes me sad because I have had it ten years." He studied it contemplatively.

...[three paragraphs of erotica]...

Then suddenly the realization that the belt was so old, that Pierre had always worn it, struck her with a strange, sharp pain. She saw him unfastening it in other places, other rooms, at other hours, for other women.

She was jealous, acutely jealous, with this image repeating itself. She wanted to say, "Throw the belt away. At least do not carry the same one that you wore for them. I will give you another." It was as if his feeling of affection for the belt were a feeling of affection for the past that he could not rid himself of entirely. For her, the belt represented the gestures made in the past. She asked herself if all the caresses had been the same.

Racy

by Drew Martin

A couple of mornings ago I ran to my town's library with The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb in my hand, which I slid into the book drop-off before sunrise.

I read books about running simply because they bolster my will to run and they spice up the marriage of body and mind. That being said, I no longer read any one book on its own: I immerse myself in a couple books at the same time so I can compare and contrast structure and concept. The other book I am (still) reading is Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin.

The Perfect Mile is a well-researched, well-written and spirited retelling of the mid-20th Century obsession of breaking the 4-minute-mile barrier by three talented runners: Roger Bannister from England (who succeeded first), John Landy from Australia (the rival, who bettered Bannister's time) and Wes Santee from the United States (who never dipped under the mark, a fact that plagued him).

The Perfect Mile is a wholesome and inspiring book. Delta of Venus is quite the opposite, in every way. First and foremost, it is a product of Nin's prolific erotica. While the core of The Perfect Mile is about discipline, willpower and improving oneself, Delta of Venus is about seduction, arousal and physical gratification. Consider one of Nin's characters compared to Bascomb's Olympians,

In all but matters of love, Pierre was helpless. He could not nail a nail to a wall, hang up a picture, repair a book, discuss technical matters of any kind. He lived in terror of servants, concierges, plumbers. He could not make a decision, sign a contract of any sort; he did not know what he wanted.

Roger Bannister, by contrast, was not only a superior athlete but was a doctor as well. In fact, most of his training was done in 35 minutes during his lunch break from St. Mary's Hospital in London. Reading both books at the same time creates a stable center of polar opposites: The Perfect Mile is disciplined, Delta of Venus is loose.

Nin wrote a kind of biographical fiction based of her own feelings and experiences and by opening up those around to tell her about their own romps and fantasies. Bascomb relied on extensive interviews and multi-media/multi-sourced documentation of his subjects' feats in order to relay past events.

Delta of Venus, like Little Birds by Nin, is comprised of short stories, which function very much like the sexual encounters they express: there is a kind of foreplay, climax and then a flaccidity in the way they terminate. While Nin suggests that anything and everything can casually happen, Bascomb writes in the realm of nail-biting suspense, which I am typically immune to but found myself on the edge of my seat a couple times.

The 'Perfect Mile' refers to a showdown mile, more commonly known as the 'Miracle Mile', in which Bannister defeats Landy in the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games. It's 'perfect' because Bannister wins through his patient and even pace, which is the manner how Bascomb unfolds his story and makes us aware that we are still on a journey into the unknown, towards an ever-retreating finish line.

While Nin writes of fleshy love, Bascomb expresses the sublime in running,

...this was the moment he loved most in running, the moment when his spirit fused with the physical act of running.

Nin, however, as a more creative writer, soars even higher at times when she transcends the frolicking,

I felt the dilation of the whole universe.

It's a Zoo Out There!

by Drew Martin

During the mid 1990s, I worked for over half a year at a zoo on the side of a little mountain in Sudetenland (grazing camels from the Ústí nad Labem Zoological Gardens, pictured left). Eventually, I worked in the zoo's offices, where I maintained an international database on the Hartman Zebra and corresponded with zoos around Europe, China and India about animal exchanges for mating purposes, but for my first four months I was trained to work with all the animals, except for the orangutans and the Asian elephants, as they required special care.

My stories of this time could fill volumes but one concept I took away from the experience was that the minimum structure of each exhibit should consider the maximum amount of containment needed. For example, no bars are required to restrain giraffes; they cannot step down more than a two-foot drop so all you need to enclose them is perhaps a perimeter trench and a small stone wall.

This concept can be applied to a wide range of things; playgrounds, infrastructure and even packaging. It certainly applies to art, especially when considering how to house works by artists such as Richard Serra, which I think the Dia Beacon does quite well. (Serra’s Union of the Torus and Sphere at the Dia Beacon, pictured right). Come to think of it, all the artwork at the Dia Beacon has been placed with equal sensitivity...and consider Dia's care of Walter De Maria's The New York Earth Room (created in 1977) at 141 Wooster Street and The Broken Kilometer (1979) at 393 West Broadway in lower Manhattan.

On a humbler note, below is a picture of the indoor space (for winter and heavy rains) for my kids' guinea pigs. I took it this morning after returning from a run in the hills by my house to fetch them some fresh bamboo. This new setup is only couple of days old as I am rebuilding, repointing and painting my 130-year old basement walls and need to move things around to get to the crumbling areas.

Their "cage" uses a corner of the restored walls and a band of bricks, five high, without mortar. It is easy for me to step into and out of for cleaning and feeding and yet they have no way out as they cannot jump high enough, over or even climb up, such a small barrier. On the right side of the space, you will notice a small sculpture for their contemplation and enjoyment.

Running with Music

by Drew Martin

I like how musicians can show up with an instrument and sheets of music, sit down in a sea of other musicians, and start playing along in the collective.

I have always looked at this from the outside but I never gave much thought to the individual's perspective right before an introduction and becoming part of a group. It is not simply confidence that you can pull something off but assurance that you would complement the assembly.

I was able to look closer at this a week ago when I approached a group of elite runners I have seen religiously gathering at 7:30 every Sunday morning at a local duck pond. I am typically finishing my run when they are forming. I asked if I could join in and was welcomed but the acceptance happened once the run was underway and I held my own. Some runners were doing ten miles, others were going twice as far. Running long distances is similar to ocean swimming in that you cannot really decide halfway out that you are not in the mood. So this was a sink or swim situation.

A long distance runner's body is very much like a musical instrument. It resembles a violin or viola because the stringlike tendons and muscles are taut and need to be in tune. The body is typically light, without excess. Its performance depends on how you play it. A runner's body is also very much like a wind instrument; a flute or trumpet because of the breathing skills required, especially while carrying on a conversation. At the same time a runner is also a percussionist, keeping rhythm with his or her swinging arms and striding legs, and beating the surface of the ground ever so lightly with the soles of his or her feet.

The analogy of running and music is something that presented itself several times to me while running. Sunday is my social run. On this day, I try to arrange to run with friends. I have always noticed how each person plays his or her instrument. It can be the difference between a violinist and a fiddler or a flutist and a drummer. Likewise, a run can either feel like a well-conducted concert or a creative jam session. While running in a pack, one person might want to mix things up and change the pace. He or she steps it up and stands out from the others very much like a soloist.

While I am a smooth runner, I prefer not to run with other gazelles. I like the work horses who cover the same distance at the same pace but do so with a gutsy, locomotive drive like Emil Zátopek. It is the variety in style and age that makes a group diversely more interesting and frees up the regimen of exercise into a jazzy experience.

The Barberians: the Medium is the Massage

by Drew Martin

In Chinatown (of Lower Manhattan) you can get an underground haircut for $5 and/or a massage for approximately $1 per minute (before tipping). Depending on the age of the advanced barber, the lapse since your last trim and your abandonment of urgency, the haircut may last a good half hour.

Both the haircut and the massage are sensational, especially if you don't speak Cantonese because there is no small talk and these activities are better experienced with closed eyes because the encounter is, first and foremost, that of being touched. The difference is that the massage is an insatiable experience. You don't want it to ever end, there is no terminal sensation...or if there is, it is soon to be desired in a short while, in a greater degree. Even worse is that the head massage or back rub is clocked and pleasure is spoiled when you are trying to anticipate when it might abruptly end. It's an odd deprivation because once committed, the absence of external contact feels like something has been physically taken away/removed.

The haircut is the perfect alternative. Your desired length of hair is the limit and even if that is surpassed, a bare scalp is the terminus. While the haircut requires a lighter touch, a finely tuned sitter might find the thousand of snips just a satisfying as overall meaty kneading. What does it for me is when an old barber jacks open the straight edge and runs it down the back of my neck. Perhaps it's a thinker's preference, to assuage a crowded cranium.

Anaïs Nin!!!

by Drew Martin

When I was very young, I thought the past was black and white, like old movies and photographs. I believed life was more formal and respectable because people wore hats and gloves in public. My parents, grandparents and teachers told me it was so.

It wasn't until I read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and then (immediately afterwards) Tropic of Capricorn that I saw things clearly: humans have not changed one bit. More distant voices maintain the stasis of the human condition as well (Shakespeare is a fine example) but the difference is that Miller's writing is not rolling in 16th Century English and he comes from a time that was shared by my grandparents, who wore hats and gloves.

Although I was intrigued by the love triangle between Miller, his wife June and Anaïs Nin, which as I recall from my peripheral readings about Miller, propelled him to Paris and into the pages of Tropic of Cancer, I had not read anything by Nin until the past couple of weeks and I hadn't necessarily intended to. What a shame. I deeply regret not having read her before flying off to college because her writing is a liberating remedy to overly decent modesty.

I happened upon Nin because I recently heard a wonderful online lecture with a professor who mentioned the psychologist Otto Rank, whose patients included Miller and Nin. I went to The Strand to pick up a copy of his Art and Artist. A young employee helped me search the shelves in the Arts section where she said it could be. Looking down at me from the step ladder the young lady disappointingly told me they did not have it. I asked "What about Nin?" She all but did a backflip off the ladder in joy, telling me I had to read Delta of Venus but warned several times that it was "Over the top." Her enthusiasm was contagious. I went down to the Journal section of the basement to get Henry and June and then back to the first floor to the Erotica section to get Delta of Venus and Little Birds.

I just finished Little Birds. I only read it during my commute, which is perhaps the best environment: Surrounded by button-down suburban professionals, Nin is the perfect titillating escape into a world that trades polite conversation for bohemian romps.

I love Nin most in sentences such as:

Every kiss, like a gulp of wine, added to the warmth of her body.

Many of the stories are about artists and models in which modeling is foreplay and art is love. This is most blatant in the chapter The Maja, which references Maja Desnuda by Goya.

A painter can only see and paint his prudish wife naked when she is sleeping:

Novalis no longer desired his wife when she was awake, with her puritanical expression and stern eyes. He desired her when she was asleep, abandoned, rich and soft.

Returning unexpectedly from a trip, the wife finds her husband making love to one of the paintings of her, surrounded by a room full of her nudes. Aroused by the scene she offers herself without hesitation and they fall into passionate lovemaking.

Such writing reminds my of Peter Schjeldahl's introductory comment in The New Yorker article Long Faces: Loving Modigliani (March 7, 2011) about the painter's prestige resting more on his perennial appeal to sensitive adolescents than on grownup critical favor.

So I ask myself why I like Nin. Does she simply uncover a layer of ripe adolescence or is there something much more complex and deeper in this adult material?

Nin is restless in love and life. In most cases this is acted out in the act, in a release of internal desires but at times she expresses this in external forces. In the chapter/short story Sirocco she writes,

The wind is charged with perfumes from Africa, heavy sensual odors. It gives a kind of fever and turmoil of the nerves.

These internal and external powers are juxtaposed with jealousy and prudence. In Lina, the lady by that name wants her lover, the narrative voice of Nin, to stop seeing men. There is a temporary compliance in which Nin writes one of my favorite lines,

So we were reduced to each other's company.

In Two Sisters, this restriction is flipped for the magical realm of infatuation,

He had such magnetism in his hands that his touch, even his hand on her arm, sent warmth all through her. She lived open and sensitized to his presence. And his feeling about her voice was the same. He would telephone her at all hours to hear it. It was like a song luring him outside himself and out of his life. All other women were canceled by her voice.

The Little Birds cover reads Little Birds: Erotica by Anaïs Nin. What is the difference between erotica and pornography? Some of her writing is very explicit. Perhaps one thing, regarding this writing, is that there are no images, no objects. Erotica is more realistic because the story is more complete. Erotica stimulates the mind as much as the body and does so with a wide range of emotions.

This is certainly the story in A Model. Lena, an illustrator recounts a conversation she had with a young gigolo, whose "handsome, aristocratic" Argentine friend and roommate would rise after his leaving the apartment each day and pull out an iron and an ironing board. While pressing his pants, he would fantasize about getting dressed, walking out on 5th Avenue and following the perfume trail of a beautiful woman, who would eventually take him back to her hotel room where they would make love.

"As he presses his pants carefully, meticulously, my friend imagines how he will make love to this woman - and it excites him"

One of my favorite passages is in The Chanchiquito. A woman poses in bed for her lover, a painter. While lying on her back, she studies the lines and forms in the old, plaster ceiling. She says to the artist. "When you are finished with your work, I want you to make a drawing for me on the ceiling, of something that is already there, if you can see what I see..." For the next three pages they joke and trace things on the ceiling. At first she points out shapes, which are evident, then she deviates with her imagination.

Then with the charcoal Laura began to search for a man. At all cost she wanted a man in this picture. She wanted a man to look at while Jan was looking at the woman with her skirt raised. She began to draw, cautiously, for the lines could not be invented, and if they wavered too much and too faithfully and according to the contours of the plaster, she would have a tree, or a bush, or a monkey. But slowly the man's torso emerged. True, he was legless, and his head was small, but all this was amply compensated for the largeness of his sex, which was quite obviously in an aggressive mood as he watched the dogs coupling almost on top of the reclining woman.

And then Laura was satisfied and lay back. They both looked at the drawing, laughing, and as they did so, Jan with his big hands still full of drying paint, began to explore under her skirt as if he were drawing, molding the contours with a pencil, touching each line amorously, very gradually traveling up the leg, making sure of having caressed every region and of having gone around every curve.

Sound as a Bell

by Drew Martin

The following is an email interview with Stephen Vitiello, whose installation A Bell for Every Minute is at the 14th Street Passage of the High Line.

Drew:
I recently walked by your bell sound installation on the High Line. I did not know it was there: I was on the way to have another look at Spencer Finch's The River That Flows Both Ways (pictured left) when I walked under your installation and one of the heavy church bell recordings went off. It was a great surprise. It changed that unremarkable space into something grand.

Do you have a favorite bell sound, or is there one that you have a particularly interesting story to?

Stephen:
There are so many of the bells that I enjoy. My favorite moment is at the beginning of the hour, when all 59 ring together. In that space, I tend to like the temple bells with their deep resonance. I recorded every bell but one. Almost every recording session had a story with it. Recording the counter bell at Good Stuff Diner was just a bit comical as I was there when people were eating and the various wait-staff watched with amusement as I pointed this very fancy microphone at their tiny counter bell. Climbing on the roof of City Hall was an experience. Going out to Coney Island to record the Dreamland Amusement Park Bell was something as it had just been dredged up after a fire from 1911 had buried it for all those years. The most personal encounter in some ways was with the nun who rang the Bell of Hope for me - this is a bell that is normally wrung for victims of 9-11. It was raining and she rang the bell for 3-minutes while a man kept an umbrella over her head. She kindly smiled and just kept ringing this big, rich sounding bell.

Drew:
The bells, rings and chimes are spaced a minute apart and cycle every hour and there is a metal sound map of NYC and all the sources. Do you have the artwork for that, which I could include here as a visual and to show the sources?

Stephen:
The sound map is a really important part of the installation but I have to say it doesn't photograph well. The subtleties of how the sign is engraved and the lighting in the space just don't show up well in pictures. I'll attach the file that was created for the engraving of the map*. It was my concept but the design was done by Kristen Becker of Mutuus Studio.

*click sound map on right to enlarge>>>

Drew:
You had one of the World Trade Center studios in 1999 for six months on 91st floor of Tower One where you recorded the sounds of the building swaying with the wind stress. All skyscrapers move with the wind: Did the sounds simply seem part of the environment, like flapping shutters in a storm, or was it a disturbing noise for you? Listening to that recording now...does it seem ominous because of its destruction or rather personal/sentimental, like the voice of a late friend or relative?

Stephen:
In general, I couldn't hear the building moving without the use of the contact microphones I had on the windows. The recording you heard was just after Hurricane Floyd broke. That was the only time I could hear the building creaking and cracking without the mics. I heard different sounds on different days. It sounds ominous to me as a sound and a sound of a big building swaying. I don't know that I associate it with 9-11. Of course, anything to do with the World Trade Center is different after what happened but I don't connect my recordings with any sort of premonition or foreshadowing.

Drew:
You were born in New York. What part of the city did you grow up in and how did that influence this project?

Stephen:
I grew up in Park Slope. I'm not sure if I have an immediate answer. I just thought of the city and the kinds of sounds that one hears. The idea of bells felt natural somehow and I realized I could trace bells to all parts of New York and to many of the cultures that I was aware of.

Drew:
You live in Richmond now. I know the city quite well because I visited my grandparents there at least once a year in the 70's and 80's and lived in it for half a year in the 1995. Richmond was considered the punk capital of the South. Additionally, GWAR (pictured left in concert) was from there. How does the music scene and the less chaotic sounds (compared to NYC) influence your work?

Stephen:
I'm not that close to the music scene in Richmond. I teach at Virginia Commonwealth University in the School of the Arts and mostly interact with art students. I did rent a room at Sound of Music for a while - it's a recording studio with a connection to Richmond's musical past, where Cracker, Sparklehorse, Labradford and others recorded but mostly before I moved here (2004). I've done some small concerts with some of the local electronic musicians (Anduin for example) but in general, I don't get out much. I'm either home with family, at school or traveling.

Drew:
It sounds like you are also a tinkerer and make some (all?) of your devices. Was that something you grew up doing or did you learn about electronics later in order to execute your creative ideas?

Stephen:
I'm really not a tinkerer. I'm fortunate enough to know people who can help me if I have an idea for a device but really tend to use fairly traditional microphones, recording equipment and store-bought processors.

Drew:
I have a broken 46 inch Sony Bravia flat screen on my basement floor (my youngest kid trashed it). Any advice about what to do with it? Would you, for example take it apart and save the speakers and other parts for projects?

Stephen:
I have no idea. If it was a broken piano, I might have more suggestions.

Drew:
You have collaborated with a number of other artists. What do you get out of the collaborations and what do you like to retain just for yourself?

Stephen:
I have collaborated a lot. In the 90s, I made a number of soundtracks for video artists and choreographers. I don't think I ever thought to save the good stuff for myself. I just worked on the projects, taking the leads from the concepts and/or visual imagery that was coming to me from the videomakers. More recently, I sometimes collaborate with visual artists as well as with other musicians. I just treat each collaboration as a unique experience to try to make something new.

Drew:
What's a project you would like to do that you have not done yet?

Stephen:
There's parts of the world I'd like to travel to - Vietnam, Alaska... I'd like to do more projects in which speakers and other sorts of readymade gear are not used or at least not visible, or where objects or structures become the speakers. I'm working on a large-scale project for MASS MoCA, transforming a building into an installation. For that one, I'm collaborating with a science fiction writer, Paul Park. I'd like to find more ways to integrate written/spoken language and narrative into my work but I haven't fully worked out how to do that yet.

Drew:
Thank you for your time.

The Operation of Memory

by Drew Martin

Last night I had a dream I was on a bus in the Czech Republic. I dozed off and awoke (in that dream) in upstate New York and the nervous bus driver was trying to find his way back to his country. A few minutes later, we crossed the border again, back into Bohemia. While this was an impossible geography, it was a fine example of the overlapping landscapes of memory.

The dream reminded me of a wonderful Yale University lecture I watched two days ago on YouTube, while ironing my dress shirts. The title was Reading History and Writing Fiction with authors Penelope Lively (pictured below) and David McCullough. I only watched Lively's part but she expressed such rich comments on memory that I was intellectually satiated:

I was interested in the operation of memory, the nature of evidence, the way in which there is no single truth about an event but as many truths as there are observers, the conflicting evidence of public events as mirrored by the conflicting evidence about private life.

A few minutes later, while speaking about linear chronological history where "one thing followed another in neat sequential order" Lively repeats herself with a bit more insight:

What I was interested in was the operation of memory itself, which of course is not linear at all. There's nothing sequential about the stuff that each of us carries in the head, that set of frozen moments, slides that will surface, prompted or unprompted, and that serve to remind us who we are, where we've been, what we've done, who we've known.

Everything happens at once in the mind. As some point, in the post college years...I discovered landscape history...I tramped around Oxfordshire...in search of the corrugations in a field that indicate Medieval ridge and furrow, the lumps and bumps that betray a deserted village, the green lanes that were once drove roads and I became aware of the eloquence of the physical world, once you learned a bit of its language, as a nice reflection of the process of memory itself. All around us everything happens at once. Centuries are juxtaposed.

I especially enjoyed Lively's introductory remarks:

I have always liked that term that we use, reading a subject, rather than studying it, which carries an appealing suggestion of long term inclination rather than mandatory application. I think that for many people that's just what happens. That exposure to a particular range of books, to a particular academic inquiry at the most susceptible time of your life does indeed form a climate of mind. What you are reading will determine, up to a point, the person you will become.

I Spy

by Drew Martin

In the song Paper Planes, M.I.A. sings, "Yeah, I've got more records than the K.G.B." It's a witty line, which plays with the extroversion of singers and the secrecy of spies. But then again, for such a covert profession, spying is very high profile in American culture. It has been popularized by comics, books and movies...not to mention all the peripheral toys and merchandise.

James Bond, especially his more sophisticated/dapper older incarnations, is the ultimate secret agent. The real experience is probably closer to what is portrayed in A Beautiful Mind about the Nobel Prize winner - John Nash's schizophrenic experience, that of delusion and losing oneself in a world where the lines of truth and reality are blurred by distortions of trust. Although his problems were medical and his espionage simply a farce, the psychological burden of real-life spying must be overwhelming.

This past President's Day weekend, my family drove down to Washington D.C., the city with the most spies in the world. Despite all that the amazing Smithsonian museums had to offer, my kids were most excited about the privately run (for-profit) International Spy Museum. It is a couple blocks from the Mall but not entombed in a grandiose building.

What the Spy museum has going for it is its engaging displays and interactivity. From the start, each visitor chooses a "cover" and memorizes details of a mission, which he or she is later grilled on by a computer. If you get one of the details wrong, the "suspicion meter" jumps. I was Dimitri Ivanov, a 48 year old "fisherman" from Kirov, Russia and the computer was none-the-wiser.

The Spy museum is dense with images and artifacts in intimate spaces. This is quite a departure from the Smithsonian museums, which were built to impress and dominate space. That model now seems old fashioned. The newer National Museum of the American Indian, which follows suit, is a handsome structure but is too much building and the exhibits seem lost to the architecture. The National Air and Space Museum, the most visited museum in the world, seems to have become more of a grand lobby for its IMAX theatre, where most of the visitors were gathered when we walked by. One could argue that today's viewer needs to be spoon fed but I think this is a much greater cultural shift, away from the do not touch object to the hands-on experience.

That being said, the objects at the Spy museum are fantastic. If the theme of espionage is not your thing, the art viewer can take on this space as a pure Dada or Surrealist experience. Magritte, Dali and the master of the common object, Duchamp, would be thrilled by many of the artifacts, which include the pigeon surveillance camera, a tree stump listening device, an umbrella gun, a coat buttonhole camera, the lipstick pistol, escape boots (pilot boots, which resembled civilian dress shoes) and, my favorite, explosive coal; a hollow shell, resembling coal, packed with explosives.

It was used by the OSS. (the American Office of Strategic Services) during WWII to find its way into locomotive furnaces and factory boilers. The most interesting part is that it came with a camouflage kit so the operative could paint the device to match the local coal color.

Meet the Press

by Drew Martin

In the fall of 1992 I traveled as a photographer with a young British journalist to Ostrava, a Czech coal mining city on the north-eastern border with Poland. Our assignment was to cover a science fiction literature convention but it was also an excuse for me to venture into Poland for the first time, after I completed the shoot.

When we arrived at the venue, we went to the registration desk to ask about accommodations. The organizer told us the price of the room, which probably was not a lot of money, but I was naively shocked. With confused, but honest, astonishment, I said something to the affect of "But we are journalists!" This was followed by a shuffling of paper, a look of casual enlightenment and then the prompt handing over of keys for a complimentary room for the two of us, accompanied by a muttering of apologies.

The only other time I played the press card was when I went to the Armory Show (March 6, 2010 at Pier 92 and 94). I already had free tickets to it but I was carrying my two-year old son on my back and he was getting heavy and restless. The show opened later than I had expected but press got a jump start so I went to the press office and told them I wrote for this blog. They looked it up and checked it out and gave me a press pass for the event.

This past weekend my family of five met up with my parents, my sister-in-law and one of my nieces at The Whitney to see the Charles LeDray (work, pictured left) and the Edward Hopper exhibits. My brother's wife flashed her VMFA (Virginia Museum of Fine Art) docent card and got two free tickets. I sheepishly inquired about entrance for the press and the young man at the cash register asked if I had a press pass.

I was a bit confused because I thought that was something they would give me. I asked if he could look up this blog and he apologized and asked me again for $18, which I un-reluctantly paid. The money was not the issue (even though I think it's too steep) but I was a bit confused by it all. I asked myself "What is a press pass in this era of blogs galore?"

So after walking around a bit, I went back to the entrance to find out more information. The same man I had spoken to before explained that you can make your own press pass. He said "Just print one out and laminate it." Really? Ten minutes prior he made it sound like a Brahman birthright that I, the Untouchable, would be eternally denied, and now he was telling me to DIY. I thanked him and laughed at/to myself.

Curiously enough, when we were leaving and I was waiting for family members to get their coats. I heard another employee at the register say "Don't you have a current press pass?" There were two European men, one holding out an old, tattered press pass and the other by his side, empty handed. The employee honored the pass without further questioning but said they changed the policy; the press pass is only good for one ticket. The other guy chimed in, "I am with the press too!" But, like me, he couldn't produce a pass or even a business card. At that point she just gave him a free ticket anyway. Behind my composed self was a much more reactive version of me flinging out my arms and spouting "WTF?!"

It was an important moment for me because I realized it had nothing to do with the flimsy press pass. Not only was I not prepared with a silly-ink-jet-patch-of-assumed-authority-sandwiched-in-clear-plastic but I was not even sure enough at that moment about myself and my pursuits. I barely supported myself. I was spineless.

I am not sure of each museum's policies but it is apparent that anyone can make up a pass, no matter how bogus, just to wiggle in. So it really comes down to integrity and conviction. Do you believe in what your represent? Does it contribute to the discussion? Is your blog unique or as insightful as The New York Times, Art Forum or whatever else it is you hope to emulate or even surpass?

It is certainly a question of the validity and future of new/social media. A person with a popular Facebook page might have more eyes scanning his or her words than a newspaper columnist and a quirky blog with only a handful of followers may be digging deeper and asking more relevant questions than a big-name arts magazine.

Yesterday I took a couple minutes and made up my own press pass so now I am legit.

It's a Colorful Life

by Drew & Olympia Martin

I just finished reading a book, which my 12-year-old daughter, Olympia, recently completed and recommended to me: A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass, published in 2003. It is a fictional story told by a 13-year-old girl/character, Mia Winchell, who has synesthesia: she sees colored shapes when she hears sounds/music. Names have colored attributes and every number and letter has its own color.

The correlations Mia mentions are:

2 - cotton-candy pink
4 - baby-blanket blue

a - sunflower yellow
b - brown
c - red
d - hot pink
f - bright purple
j - shimmering green
x - ripe cherry maroon
y - gray
z - robin's egg blue

One would think math would be a thrill for her, but it's quite the opposite, especially with algebraic formulas where letters, such as x, are treated as numbers. It's quite confusing because x is maroon, but there aren't any numbers that are maroon for Mia. To save herself from flunking, Mia devises a creative way of cheating by writing formulas on her jeans as color-specific rainbows.

While color serves as a motif throughout the book and a metaphor for life, the story is really about discovering yourself and being understood by peers and parents. Synesthesia is an interesting theme to choose for a young adult book and Mass does a wonderful job weaving the condition into an out of everyday life and much heavier topics such as death, which is always present here.

The town graveyard is frequented by Mia visiting her grandfather's grave and her best friend, Jenna, visiting her mother's grave. While the death of loved ones (humans) happens before the book begins, pets are lost to teen mourning within its pages. Mia coincidentally waits in a veterinarian office as a classmate's dog is put down and the death of her cat, Mango, is both climatic and touching near the end of the book. It sounds corny and fantastic-dramatic to write here (because it's quite moving and captivating in the book) that the devoted father not only attempts to fly the dying cat to the vet in his helicopter (they live in a rural area), but he goes so far as to attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the expired feline when Mango dies before take-off. (It reminded me of a time in my own youth when I was trying to revive a pet hamster, through a straw).

Mass does not seem obsessed with mortality, but has simply created a book that can help kids through such difficult moments. That being said, in all of its seriousness, death is not always so grave, Mia once quips to herself that the term supernova is "an astronomer's way of saying dying" and she and Jenna have memorized the Edward Gorey (the Master of Macabre) poster of kids, with names A-Z who meet unnatural deaths (The Gashlycrumb Tinies):

A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.

B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.

and so on...

Mass researched synesthesia for her book and gathered testimonials from synesthetes who chimed in on a website. It is hard to tell at times what is Mass' creativity and what might be a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction contribution to her efforts. This seems to be the case with a passage that includes an email from a new penpal and fellow synesthete, Adam, who is 14:

If I'm eating a piece of chocolate, I'll see a rectangular patch of pink with a green stripe at the bottom. It just appears in front of me and kind of looks like a flag waving in the breeze. If it's dark chocolate, the pink will be almost red.

The book is full of great syesthetic expressions. Baby hollers appear to Mia as...silver spears shooting across the room. Screeching chalk is...red jagged lines in air. Principal Duner's name is the color of freshly piled hay.

Mia likes to paint. Sometimes she paints figures, such as a picture of her late grandfather with Mango on his shoulder, but other times she just puts on music (Mozart) and paints what she sees...

...glossy red-barnlike color of the violin, the silvery-bluish white of the flute, the school-bus yellow of the French horn.

The sophistication of Mia's synesthesia is best conveyed in the following passage:

On the bus I randomly open my art book to an artist I haven't seen before. I decide instantly that this is the guy for me. His name is Kandinsky, and the shapes he uses in his painting look a lot like the ones I see when I hear noises. His images are all twisted together and overlapping, like when I hear music with a lot of different instruments. The colors he uses are flatter, more primary that the ones I usually see, but they're still pretty close.

Though Mia feels unique, especially before she meets other synesthetes, many of Mass' characters are interesting, with their own special quirks. Mia's teacher, Mrs. Morris, is a germaphobe. She clears the first row of students and has two homework baskets for her students...one marked "ill" for kids with colds to put their work in.

Mia's 11 year old brother, Zack, is superstitious. If their father walks under a ladder, he makes him walk around the house, twice, backward. He is also a little OCD and details on a chart how many McDonald's hamburgers he has eaten in his lifetime. When asked why it is bad luck to walk under a ladder Zack responds (with one of my favorite sentences in the book)...

"It's because you're disrupting the scared triangle of life formed by the ladder, the ground, and the wall."

He is also afraid that if clocks in the house are not in sync, the space-time continuum will be disrupted. Zack's enduring/annual Halloween costume is Spock.

I was going to interview Mass about the book and writing, but thought it would be more appropriate for my daughter to initiate.

Olympia:
Why did you make the brother, Zack, superstitious and why did he seem less superstitious toward the end?

Wendy:
The superstitions were part of his general quirkiness. I think by the end, he was getting older, and had dealt with some difficult issues, and maybe he didn't need the superstitions so much.

Olympia:
What were some ideas you wanted to have in the book but did not include?

Wendy:
There was originally more of the synesthesia stuff in there. I had a scene in the lab where Mia was picking out the colors of her numbers from a big color chart.

Olympia:
Did you have a relative who liked Star Trek, like Zack, or was there another reason you referenced it?

Wendy:
Another part of his quirks. I actually like Star Trek (all incarnations!), so it was fun to make him a fan, too. That's one of the fun things about writing fiction--getting to stick things I love in the books.

Olympia:
When I heard you speak, you said you were influenced by the book The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Were there any other books that influenced you for this book?

Wendy:
That was the first book I read on the subject of synesthesia, and it really inspired me to give the condition to my fictional character. I can't think of any other books that influenced the novel, other than I wanted to write for kids and teens in the first place because of all the wonderful books I'd read when I was that age.

Olympia:
Did you get the idea of Mia writing the math equations as rainbows on her jeans or did you think of that on your own?

Wendy:
I think one of the people with synesthesia that I'd interviewed told me they had done something like that when they were in school. A lot of the synesthesia-related events in the book came directly from real synesthetes.

Olympia:
The experience when Mia lost Mango seemed very real. Did you once lose a pet that you loved with all your heart?

Wendy:
Yes, I had recently lost my cat, and wanted to approach the topic in such a way that it would help others who had either lost their pets, or would eventually.