Marwencol

by Drew Martin

Hogancamp's "The Ruined Stocking" is a bar in Marwencol, Belgium where everyone gets along because the men who frequent it are satiated by flowing booze and beautiful women. The bar is named after the owner, Mark Hogancamp (center at the bar), a recovering alcoholic who downs cups of coffee instead of shots.

"The Ruined Stocking" refers to the many staged cat fights that take place there; gorgeous women wrestle each other for the patrons, who are mainly British, American and German soldiers.

Hogancamp is married to a woman named Anna, but Dejah Thoris, the Belgium witch of Marwencol, competes for his love. She even took him back in time (in her time machine) before he met his wife, but his love for Anna prevailed. Hogacamp is well liked in his bar and around Marwencol but every so often the SS storm through the town and kill or torture people. Even Hogancamp was taken captive and beaten in the town church but was saved by pistol waving babes who shot all the SS except for the division leader who was dragged through the streets of Marwencol and kicked by the townspeople before being shot. The law of the land is that everyone gets along. If it is breached, it is eye-for-an-eye Hammurabi's code.

Mark Hogancamp is a real guy but he was never pummeled by the SS. The fact is, he had the shit kicked out of him by five guys outside a bar. He was beaten so badly that he went into a coma and his face required reconstructive surgery. When he came to, he had to relearn how to do everything; eat, walk, talk...His brain damage was so severe that he lost every single memory prior to the attack.

The Marwencol, Belgium that Hogancamp knows is actually in his yard in Kingston, New York. The buildings and the people (dolls) are 1/6 scale. Dejah Thoris' time machine?...Hogancamp made it from a junk cell phone, an mp3 player stand and a VCR that ate one of his best porn tapes. As Hogancamp explains, he had no other choice but to sacrifice the machine to save the film.

Marwencol is a documentary by Jeff Malmberg about Hogancamp and the pretend world that he maintains as his mental therapy for dealing with what happened to him and his physical therapy for restoring his fine motor skills.

What makes Hogancamp's situation remarkable and takes it beyond being a tragic victim to the realm of artistry is that he photographs every detail of his played out imagination.

The looping adventures in Marwencol create an endless narrative, which Hogancamp records in countless photographs. The images masterly display Hogancamp's intense involvement and belief in his imagination. It is as if he works less as a man with a camera telling a story and more like an embedded photographer recording everything he sees.

The magic happens in the photographs. They act as a kind of proof that this world exists beyond his mind. This is an interesting concept because the pictures Hogancamp drew prior to the attack were used in court as evidence to show the affect of the beating. So while his life and consuming pastime seem delusional, his visual narrative is so strong that it pulls the viewer into his world as only the best directors, artists, writers and musicians can successfully do.

Hogancamp's 1/6 scale reality is not a schizophrenic trap. It is a social blueprint for a fuller life. His unhealthy obsession is actually an incredibly sane desire, to be liked and have purpose. His doll interacts with dolls that have been made to resemble the people in his life but in Marwencol, Hogancamp is much more engaging.

For this reason, the details of his world are made as realistic as possible. The tiny guns have functioning triggers and clips. The soldiers bags are not simply stuffed with cotton, but carry small grenades and military caboodle. When four characters jump in a Jeep for a ride, he makes sure they are carrying enough fire power to come out of an ambush in one piece.

One of the reasons why Hogancamp has Jeep rides is because the model vehicles he gets from a hobby shop or in the mail have new tires. He complains about their newness so instead of distressing them with sandpaper and dirt, he put hundreds of miles on them, which he calculates as thousands of miles at the smaller scale.

This patient documentary is a work of art. It is brilliantly crafted to take the viewer into Hogancamp's world. While Hogancamp is dressed in normal attire for most of the film, we learn that he also occasionally dresses in WWII outfits. That is not too hard to imagine.

A scene of him sunbathing ends with a closeup on his left foot; his toenails are painted and he wears a toe ring. This segues to a scene of him opening up a closet with 218 pairs of "women's essence," high heels. The shoes were all given to him by women but more than having a shoe fetish, Hogancamp is also a cross dresser. He was before the attack. In fact, the beating happened because he told some guys at the bar that he was a cross dresser, which they took as cue to bring him outside to "teach him a lesson."

Hogancamp's private world is actually quite public. He frequents a local hobby shop, talks to neighbors and has a job a few days a week at a local restaurant. The people in his life know they are characters in his fictional life too. A photographer named David Naugle eventually saw him pulling his Jeep along the road. It sparked an artworld fascination with Marwencol. With the help of Tod Lippy, editor of Esopus, Hogancamp had a show at White Columns in New York in 2006. It was a big decision for Hogancamp. The documentary shows him thinking it over while making meatballs and looking at three of the dolls he has on a small bench beside him: Anna, one of himself and Dejah Thoris. Despite their presence, it is a very lucid scene. He speaks aloud and talks about how it is something that will take courage:

"Women want to meet the artist. They don't want to hear that the artist couldn't make it...I am still afraid to go to the city but that's were courage comes in. Courage, I was taught, that courage is to face the thing to do the thing...even though I have such great fear of doing it."

Hogancamp deliberates what he should wear for the show. Perhaps a suit, though he would rather wear a dress. He settles for men's casual and asks the film crew on the day of the show "Do I look like a beatnik artist?" Fidgeting, he complains "fuck'n man's shoes." As the opening of the show winds down, Hogancamp laments to a woman at the show that he would rather have worn a pair of stilettos and she responds that it is not too late. With almost everyone gone and the gallery floors being mopped, he changes into them and walks out of the gallery.

Hogancamp's success in the artworld is reassuring but at the same time that acceptance falls short of real, healthy relationships. What one would hope to be a reconnection with a former life actually seems to spiral away from that. His conversations at his opening about putting on high heels and being married to a doll do not go over well, and the documentary ends with Hogancamp's doll needing to create a miniature reality in order to deal with his SS beatings. As Hogancamp remarks before revealing his women's shoe collection, "It gets stranger by the moment, doesn't it?"

Indian Giving

by Drew Martin, with Michael Barson

Typically an interview is conducted in order to learn more about a person and for insight on a particular topic but this interview was originally designed to help decide what to do with a unique collection of advertising artwork.

Michael Barson is the Senior Executive for Publicity at G. P. Putnam's Sons and author of a number of well-received books on American popular culture, including Red Scared!, True West, Teenage Confidential, The Illustrated Who's Who of Hollywood Directors and Agonizing Love.

We regularly cross paths on the PATH, the subway system between New Jersey and New York, and we work in the same building in SoHo. A typical PATH train encounter has Michael pretending to trip over me, or nonchalantly dropping his satchel on my lap while demanding I give up my seat for him. The passengers are shocked and appalled at his rude behavior, which pleases Michael to no end. (He is very easy to please.) I turn red, squirm and try to diffuse the situation by making it known that I am familiar with these juvenile antics before he is escorted off the train by security. But Michael maintains this is high-level meta-comedy.

When he dropped his satchel on my lap the other day, I reached in and pulled out a portfolio filled with product labels and movie placards from the early 1900s to mid-century. The common theme of each piece is the Native American, more specifically - stereotypes of Indians. They are fascinating from every angle. The artwork includes commercial illustrations, hand-tinted photographs, movie posters and fruit-crate labels. Aside from a few black and white pieces, everything else is from a four-color press and the artwork has a lot of vivid fields of color along with painterly people and objects.

One of the most bizarre examples is an advertisement for a rubber heel company. It is DaDa and Surreal. In the black and white illustration a huge rubber heel hangs in the sky above a river. In the foreground, an august caucasian man steps forward in a fine pair of shoes and an all but naked Indian kneels before him, clearly demonstrating his awe at the man's wondrous shoes. Or rather, the wondrous heels on his shoes. Michael would define this as a high-level form of meta-comedy as well.

Drew:
I know you collect red scare posters, love comics and Spaghetti Western media but these "Indian" works are quite different, more indigenous. Is it an extension to the Westerns or are they simply another piece of your childhood?

Michael:
My fascination with the differing ways the American Indian has been portrayed in popular culture is probably an offshoot of my interest in the larger area of the Western, but I would say it is also the most intriguing part. And that is because of the ways our viewpoint regarding Indian cultures (and there were many distinct ones) has ebbed and flowed over the past 150 years.

These items of advertising art that you confiscated from me are in the mode of the Noble Savage - their iconography is essentially our white world worshipping the attributes of the unspoiled Redman. Or he would have been unspoiled if we hadn't already eradicated him, or at least much of his original world.

Drew:
Speaking of your childhood. Has it ended? I mean...are your interests in these topics a matter of nostalgia or is it simply a childhood continuum?

Michael:
I can honestly say it isn't due to nostalgia alone, since 80% of the materials I work with in my books and other projects are things I never saw as a child growing up in the Fifties. But yes, I do try to mine my memories of the culture in which I was immersed as a kid in order to include those first-hand examples in my writing. I like being able to say from my own experience that I liked Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates on the show Wagon Train more than I liked James Arness as Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke, and why. But you can't experience everything first-hand, so I also continue to learn about the rest of the pop culture of the day in the course of my research. Which will probably continue until the day I die.

Drew:
All of these images are, or at least the use of them is, politically incorrect on so many levels I would not know where to begin. I believe your interest in them is more a matter of campy cultural eras but do you also look them more critically and academically?

Michael:
I disagree with that assessment, at least in terms of this advertising art. There is nothing politically incorrect about having a portrait of the nobel Red Cloud on a cigar box label... It may be ridiculous to link the properties of a five-cent cigar with one of the greatest Indian leaders who ever lived, but it is not showing disrespect to the memory of Red Cloud. Rather, it is trying to add class to the product by dint of Red Cloud's legendary reputation for nobility and leadership. To me, that does not really qualify as "camp."

Of course, in other kinds of pop media - movies, comic books, paperback novels - there was plenty of disrespect going on at the same time. That is part of the schizophrenic attitude we have always shown toward the American Indian, which is why the topic continues to fascinate me.

Drew:
Is the "Indian" vanishing from magazine pages and movies because of political correctness or is there simply a drop in relevancy and romanticism?

Michael:
The recent success of the science fiction movie Avatar demonstrated that our fascination with the mythology and iconography of the Indian is still hard-wired into our cultural consciousness, even if James Cameron's story had to be tweaked and re-packaged into a somewhat different form. Although the eight-foot-tall blue-skinned native people in Avatar were technically aliens, beneath the surface they functioned exactly as the Indian cultures did in such other hit films as Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves (which won six major Oscars back in 1990) and the Disney version of Pocahontas, all of which "donated" major plot elements and characters to Avatar (as many critics pointed out at the time of its release). And most important of all was that the story in Avatar allowed a new generation of moviegoers to see a revamped, re-imagined dramatization of what the United States military (and by extension, our government) wrought upon the original Indian nations during the 19th Century.

The attacks by the heavily armed forces of the pitiless soldiers in Avatar were horrifying to witness, just as their ultimate defeat by the combined forces of the native tribes and Mother Nature was totally exhilarating. By that point, the audience fully identified with the "aliens," rejecting the brutish instincts and violent natures of the white military forces. Hence, the final shot in the movie was one of the most emotionally satisfying I can recall. That said, we aren't likely to see the Western return to its former prominence in pop culture again, in my opinion. But every now and then it can still make its presence felt, thank goodness. Those lessons are ones we should not forget.

Drew:
You mentioned pitching them for a book idea or at least an article but what is your true ambition for them?

Michael:
Sharing them as widely as possible with others who might be interested is my main ambition, I suppose. And you could say that about all of my books about different aspects of American popular culture. They all contain lessons to be learned about our past, using materials that conventional histories largely bypass.

Paradise Punk: An Interview with Meilani Marie Wenska

by Drew Martin, with Meilani Marie Wenska

Meilani Marie Wenska is a Los Angeles based singer/musician, actor, writer and artist, who is originally from Kaneohe, Hawaii. We met in the late 1980s and became friends in college as we were in the art program together.

Drew:
It has been more than a year since I saw you in Los Angeles. Thanks for coming to my show. It was great to see you there. You still look young, healthy and happy. You mentioned a web series video project you have been working on. What is that about?

Meilani:
In April of 2010, I wrote a screenplay based on my experiences with my family when my grandmother died. I decided to promote the screenplay by turning the first part of it into a web series. So I adjusted the script, roped in some friends to help, hired a crew, and did a casting. Shot it in three days this past April.

Looking at the footage, I am so impressed with the talent of everyone involved. Editing has been a lot more work than I ever imagined, but I’m done with the rough cut and in the middle of color correcting at the moment. Basically I’m teaching myself how to do all of the post production as I go along, using Youtube tutorial videos and a book on Final Cut Pro.

Drew:
I know you have been playing/singing, acting and writing poetry...do you still paint?

Meilani:
The last few years I’ve mostly done paintings and drawings as gifts. Ironically, I’m living with a painter/photographer, and really should get back into it. I love the oozey texture of paint and playing with color. Soon enough…I’m content artistically now with editing, playing jazz and acting.

Drew:
One thing I remember about you from college was that you went to work at a gardening center and were making concrete garden statues. I find that kind of intriguing. Was that like an ongoing sculpture project, which required skill or was it more of a mindless, rough job? What did you learn from it?

Meilani:
Wow, I haven’t thought about that job in years! It was a business with a loyal following, pumping out these little concrete statues every day. I’d come home covered in cement dust and mud, and it was mostly hard labor. But there was a finesse to it, little details that if you got wrong, perhaps a gnome wouldn’t have a nose. I knew after that job that sculpting was definitely not my thing, but that with business acumen, you can make a good living through selling art.

Drew:
You seem to immerse yourself in beauty, with your boat and trips to various paradises. Well, it is more than that...you just seem to have a beautiful life on many levels. I guess what I want to know is if this is a philosophical decision and everything simply falls into place, or is it something rooted in your past that is just second nature or is it something more directed...a kind of general aesthetics you pursue and make happen?

Meilani:
Well, I’ve been really fortunate in the last two years, with buying the boat and being able to travel around. California has a ton of amazing natural wonders--you don’t have to drive for more than a few hours. I’ve found that being in nature confronts you with the incredible world we inhabit, and effortlessly lifts your spirit.

And spending time on the boat is fantastic. The quality of light on the water and the surrounding boats is gorgeous, and the marina is shockingly full of wildlife. I’ve seen a sea eagle, sting rays, sea lions, jellyfish, and the most enormous schools of fish, just sitting on my boat while docked a mile back from the open ocean. Love it.

As far as philosophy goes, I do believe that a person is creating their own life at every minute, through thoughts, beliefs, and actions. You make little decisions all the time which have impact, and your general vibe can attract luck or misfortune. You really have to choose what side of your personality that you’re going to feed, and things can fall into place if you go with the flow and allow them to happen.

I can’t say my life’s been a walk in the park; the past year has had many challenges and tribulations for me on both personal and professional levels. But I’ve come through it all, and am just trying to be the best person I can be.

Drew:
You were in some all-girl punk bands...PMS, if I recall correctly. That was quite hard and aggressive, the opposite about what I was getting at in my previous question. Does that side of you still exist? Do people need that kind of release no matter how pleasant life may be? And, for that matter, is that the key to a better life?

Meilani:
Oh, most definitely, that side is still around! One of my favorite things to do is drive on the curvy part of Sunset Blvd. near UCLA with the sunroof open, blasting loud punk rock, and passing as many cars as I can. I also did boxing and a very aggressive martial art for about 10 years. Life is not perfect, and we all get stressed out. And the release, whether punching and kicking, or rocking out, feels so good.

Drew:
I thought I did not like Los Angeles, but I really liked it on my last visit. It seems like a really good place to live and have a personalized life. What do you like about LA? What is unique about it?

Meilani:
I love how LA is right on the beach, and the climate beats anything, except Hawaii. People say LA has no character, but there are a number of neighborhoods with flavor—like Echo Park or West LA. Another thing I like is how LA is truly an international melting pot—you can find entire neighborhoods of every ethnicity in the world.

The Wrong Idea at the Right Time: An Interview with Bill Wheelock

by Drew Martin, with Bill Wheelock

Bill Wheelock is a Los Angeles based conceptual artist and the author of The Wrong Idea: Maurizio Cattelan in the Economy of Attention. I recently reached out to him to discuss Maurizio Cattelan's media ubiquity.

Drew:
It seems that everywhere I turn, there is an article about Maurizio Cattelan because of his Guggenheim retrospective. So I thought it would be a good time to finally get around to reading your The Wrong Idea: Maurizio Cattelan in the Economy of Attention. You wrote it in 2005. How has it aged?

Bill:
I think the concepts are all very much present, only some of the facts have changed. Immediately after finishing the book, The Wrong Gallery moved from the Chelsea NY streets to the Tate Modern, which drastically altered the context. I had written that the Wrong Gallery was one third an object in and of itself; one third a frame for other objects, and one third an institution. The move to the Tate crystallized its state as an object. The pathos seemed to have left it in the revered halls of the Tate. It is harder to suspend one's disbelief with all that validation.

There has never been a place for a commercial gallery actually within a museum, although there have been some recent strange bedfellows (such as Jeffrey Deitch’s position as director of LA MoCA). My book opens with discussion of a recycled Cattelan piece; he claimed to have buried an old sculpture, Kitakyushu, 2000, under the floor at The Whitney Biennial. It will be interesting to see how, if at all, these two iterations of the same piece could hang in his “All” retrospective.

Drew:
I was not sure how to read your book because I typically fall into the mindset of the writer but here I realized you might want to revise sections so I kept a distance. That being said, I liked it a lot. I started it one evening and finished it the following afternoon. I am a very slow reader but I found it engaging and it seemed very relevant. What prompted you to write it?

Bill:
It was actually my Master’s thesis rewritten to remove most of the boring academic structure. I am drawn to his defiance, and was myself defiant against my thesis committee, who insisted it was a poor career move to focus on a living artist. I suppose to a monograph author, that may be good advice. The artist could openly object to a critic’s opinion or drastically change course. Cattelan has threatened to quit art all together after his retrospective, so they may have been right. I don't consider my book a monograph. I could have chosen any number of Duchamp’s heirs. Cattelan was the last one I proposed whom my thesis committee were willing to accept, three months before graduation.

Drew:
From the title, I thought you were going to write a criticism of Cattelan but you have an affection for him, as you do his influencing predecessors; Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Joseph Bueys, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein to name a few. What is the draw for you to this kind of artist?

Bill:
All of the above artists play with more than just craft or concept but also the preconceived notions of what the viewers expect to see in an artwork. Although Zen is a different tradition altogether, there is something of an ego-smashing proposition involved for the viewer of this type of conceptual gamesmanship. The environment has changed from Duchamp, Bueys and Manzoni’s war-influenced Dadaism to a more economic absurdity practiced by the likes of the Madison Avenue artists of the American 80s or the Derilique art from the Un-Monumental 90s. Cattelan’s oeuvre plays a comfortable counterpoint to a post economic meltdown universe (toasted economelt anyone?). The book’s first chapter is in empirical first person because I do feel a physical and emotional reaction to works so in tune and on time, however conceptual their form.

Drew:
What do you think the cynical prankster really thinks about art deep down inside, beyond the clowning around the art world for which he is paid?

Bill:
Budweiser’s best ad just reads “Who cares if they’re real.” If they touch you, they are real enough. All glibness aside, most comedians are also depressive and contemplative offstage. I give him the benefit of the doubt.

Drew:
And how do you think this affects how art is taught to children and is appreciated by people not involved in this game that Duchamp began?

Bill:
The Duchamp game is an adult game. Some educators think all art should be public for all ages. I admire those who step up to the challenge and attempt to teach this liberally, but generally disagree with it. A child CAN drink a fancy red wine, but to appreciate it one needs to know what you have your hands on. Most children have a naive and limited idea of the economic environment. I can’t tell you what to the prerequisites are to get the most out of a work of meta-art, but I can say it is a critic’s responsibility to contextualize unfamiliar work. Absurdity can be most definitely taught to students of any age, so one could approach Cattelan from that direction. Trouble is when you explain humor, you tend to kill the timing.

Drew:
What do you think the near future of art has in store? And more importantly, what role do you think art could have in society that is different from the past and today?

Bill:
Well, we are in an economic depression, which is usually good for creative arts. Highly educated people have a lot of time on their hands, as intellectual employment is tough to find. I expect there will be some resurgence of craft and labor intensive work that has been lacking in the last fifty years or so. What is different is that the work of an artist has become a mainstream lifestyle and not freakishly marginal, so we are unlikely to see too many Elvis-famous heroes emerge, instead collective movements and participatory social commentaries like we are seeing in the Occupy movement are arising. People are mad as hell and they aren’t going to take it anymore, but they don’t seem really sure where exactly to go yet. Leadership seems scarce. My own crystal ball is still busted.

Drew:
You write about art and you make art. Is there a time and place for each with some kind of loose schedule or is it more of a leap frog in which you exhaust your interests/energy for one before you engage the other?

Bill:
I tend to follow my enthusiasm from project to project, without too much discipline, but once committed to seeing something through, I’d be lost unless some kind of structure or deadline is imposed. Technology permits both writing and photography to be built on the computer. Working on both feel like the same kind of weaving of patterns into the weft of the web. Blogging has been a tremendous help for me. The tools we have today allow no differentiation between the action of writing, film editing or image production. Plus, space and materials are practically free! I rely on Dropbox, iCloud and the blogosphere to sneak a bit of work in whenever I can get away with it. I edited photos recently while in a doctor’s waiting room, and later that day blogged them in line at the DMV with my phone.

Drew:
What have you been up to since our last interview? What projects have you been doing?

Bill:
Along with The Hairy Prone Companion, I have started a blog called HafoSafo identifying local news around my neighborhood. Lately I am engaged in a top secret book project for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) that I can’t talk about or I won’t finish (see former comment on structure & discipline...). I am privileged to be working full time digitally photographing The J. Paul Getty Museum’s tremendous collection of over 150,000 - and growing - photographic prints as my day job. I read a lot and try to brag about it on Goodreads and am also hopelessly addicted to audio books. I may try to record and upload a free version of Ivan Goncharov's "Oblomov" to LibriVox.org. When all else fails, I work on motorcycles- which I find tremendously comforting as there is always and only one right way to do everything.

I also interviewed Bill in the summer of 2010: Always Thinking: An Interview with Bill Wheelock.

Lady In Red

by Drew Martin

This past Sunday my parents and I stopped for lunch in Washington, D.C. at a cafeteria in the National Gallery of Art. It was a welcomed break during our long drive from Richmond, Virginia to our respective towns in northern New Jersey.

My father had recently finished reading David McCullough's The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris ("about young Americans — aspiring artists, doctors and writers — who went to study and work in Paris between 1830 and 1900, then returned home to make their marks") so we viewed Gallery of the Louvre painted by the American Inventor Samuel F. B. Morse (morse code) during his stay in Paris.

We whisked through a few other galleries in the museum. My longest pause was by Antonio Canova's Reclining Naiad (1824) but the work that really caught my eye just before we exited was Study of Lilia (1887) by Carolus-Duran (Charles Auguste Émile Durand). It is so red, so mysterious. Even after 125 years it is so fresh. Lilia's youth and beauty radiates from her pale neck. It love it!

After Life

by Drew Martin

There is a touching scene in the film My Architect when the director, Nathaniel Kahn, rollerblades around his father's genius Salk Institute, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California. Its architect, Louis Kahn, designed some of the most intriguing buildings in the 20th century. Oddly, he also kept three families. Nathaniel seldom saw his father; the film is a search for him in the architecture he left behind.

The rollerblading scene is special because Nathaniel is a grown man but the institute's large, central plaza and his carefree movements offer us a scene of a father and son playing together.

I witnessed such a moment firsthand this past weekend. I was in Richmond, Virginia for a great uncle's funeral service. This patriarch had a house at a creek off the James River where there are huge family gatherings every Fourth of July and other legendary parties. The main attraction was always waterskiing. The service seemed incomplete but afterwards we all changed out of our formal attire and drove down to "The Creek." One of the granddaughters and the only son of this man put on wetsuits and took to the water, skiing elegantly up and down the creek, which has an exotic southern look worthy of alligators.

The son is a 65 year old man but I still remember him as the young man who patiently taught me to waterski when I was a kid. On the single ski board on Saturday he looked like a teenager, cutting through the wake, reaching down to slice the mirror-smooth creek water with his fingertips. It might seem odd to waterski on the day of your father's funeral but everyone there witnessing this understood why it was important.

A body may be in an urn or coffin but the spirit of a person is unbound and everywhere. My relative, skimming over the surface of the creek in the golden glow of the sunset seemed to be immersed in his father, pulled by his father.

Mixing It Up: The House of Pancakes

by Drew Martin

I do not know what I am more amazed by, pancakes or concrete. They may not seem like kindred (inanimate) souls but they have a lot in common.

Pancake mix and cement are dry, uninteresting powders. They seem more like the end product than something with such great potential. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

But then you add water to cement and water or milk to pancake mix and you stir them a bit and they both transform into uninteresting goop, neither tasting good.

And then the magic happens, you drop some batter on a hot skillet and a sizzling circle forms and soon you have a moist, steamy cake to bathe in maple syrup and fill your stomach. You pour concrete into a form and in a matter of days you have a rock-hard structure.

It is amazing one can taste so good and the other can be so strong.

The Brother From Another Planet

by Drew Martin

I recently watched The Brother From Another Planet (1984) for the first time. Despite a lot of bad acting and an almost unwatchable ending, I really like what it was trying to do. If any movie deserves a good remake, it is this one.

This film is a kind of sci-fi take on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Both main characters end up in Harlem, which simultaneously rejects and embraces them, and both stories are rooted in the American slave narrative.

Aside from having padded feet with three horny toes, the brother, who is a runaway alien slave, resembles a man of African descent. He is pursued by two white-guy aliens referred to as men in black, who are the predecessors to the agents in The Matrix.

The beginning of the film is fantastic. The first scene is inside the capsule of an alien starship speeding towards Earth. Joe Morton plays the sole, panicky cosmonaut. The minimal, cheap effects actually work really well. There are a few beeping lights, some kind of illuminated extraterrestrial script and a lot of splicing back and forth to the anxious Morton.

The music in this scene (and peppered throughout the movie) is Caribbean steel drum, which is a perfect sound to give the pummeling of the metal capsule as it tumbles down, especially because of the increased tempo. It is a playful sound that makes the tense scene quite edgy.

For a brief moment we see a clear, evening sky. A blip flashes across it like a shooting star and the brother splashes down in the New York harbor.

With the Statue of Liberty in the background he crawls up onto Ellis Island. He is dripping wet and profusely bleeding because he lost a leg in the crash. The stump is quickly mended with energy from his hand and the lower leg and foot grow back by morning. The brother possesses such healing powers, which he uses to earn some cash by fixing broken electronic devices, particularly video game kiosks. One of the treats of the film is getting a glimpse of where we were with computer graphics over a quarter of a century ago.

In addition to the slave narrative and a subtheme about drugs, this is definitely a insightful film about communication.

The brother cannot speak. I do not know if this is a limitation of his species or that he was permanently silenced as a slave (I gathered the latter). In the end of the film, the brother meets other runaways and they are all dumb. The white pursuers speak and have some kind of screeching sound they make when they are agitated.

Despite the inability to talk, the brother understands multiple languages and, more importantly, can retrieve past conversations embedded in objects. At the abandoned Ellis Island Immigration Center, the brother is overwhelmed by a cacophony of voices/languages when he touches the interior surfaces of the building. A column in a subway station recalls the screams of a woman pushed to her death on the tracks. A discarded newspaper is of interest of him not because of the headlines or photographs but because he can retrieve the dialogue of a man who was holding it. All objects for this alien are saturated with past sounds. He reacts to seats and walls that silently witnessed tragic events as if he has touched a hot iron skillet.

When the brother wants to track a drug dealer, he actually removes his eyeball and leaves it behind in a planter to record the man's movements. He later retrieves his eye and pops it back into its socket and sees a playback of the events in his mind. In another moment he takes out his eyeball and places it in the hand of a corporate man dealing in drugs in order to show him what he witnessed first hand, the dead body of a young punk who overdosed with this man's junk.

One of my favorite scenes is when the brother first sees a wall in Harlem with graffiti. It is as if he is confused by what it is trying to say, assuming it is meant for communication beyond tagging. Finally, he finds some red, scribbled graffiti that he recognizes as a sign of his people. He cuts open the palm of his hand and leaves a message at that site with his own blood.

The film would have worked better without a lot of the heavy-handed social commentary because the best scenes are of this alien brother trying to make sense of his new world. He is constantly processing his environment.

His first mistake is to eat fruit off a stand without paying for it and he is chased away. When he observes how money is exchanged for goods, he returns to the same shop, takes money out of the register and tries to pay for more fruit only to be chased off again, not understanding his expanded crime.

The Most Important Man in the World

by Drew Martin

This past weekend I watched a fascinating documentary, Bill Cunningham New York. It is about this 80-something-year-old fashion photographer for The New York Times. It is of course about clothes and fashion, New York and The New York Times, but more importantly it is about loneliness and being part of society's bigger picture.

What might be considered a sacrifice of lovers and family for an unfettered creative working life seems more like a substitution and a fair exchange for someone who loves what he does. Cunningham is a loner but he spends his days surrounded by millions of people, documenting their styles and being adored for his instinctive understanding of fashion. For most of his career (and all of the film) he lived in a tiny artist studio at Carnegie Hall, sleeping on a cot between his filing cabinets (part of the film is about his being evicted). He did not have a kitchen or bathroom in the studio. He ate out for every meal on the cheap and used the hallway bathroom on his floor. When discussing the possibility of a future living space having more amenities he laughs,

"Who the hell wants a kitchen and a bathroom?!"

For transportation, he gets around on a classic Schwinn. He says the one he is riding is his 29th; the previous 28 were stolen.

In the end of the documentary Cunningham is asked about his personal life. He says he never had a romantic relationship, sobs to himself, and then answers the next question about church; he regularly goes because he admits he needs it. He adds that when he used to attend as a kid, all he did was look at women's hats.

When asked the first question, he suggests it is a more specific inquiry about his sexuality but skirts the topic as something that was not discussed in his upbringing. It is a heart-wrenching moment. As for relationships, he says he did not have time and it was not on his mind but that he is also human. It is an amazing idea that someone who spends his day just a thin wrapping of fabric away from a world of fleshy bodies has never opened the presents.

In the end, Cunningham talks about honesty. To play a straight game in New York, he says is like Don Quixote fighting windmills. It was a welcomed analogy because throughout the documentary I kept thinking of Cervantes' line "The road is better than the inn."

What we learn of his honesty is that money and perks are something he shuns. At a Lincoln Center gala we see him turning down an offer for food. He thanks the host and hurries off exclaiming "I eat with my eyes!" This discipline is more than declining the temptation of being wined and dined, he does not even accept a glass of water at such an occasion when he is on assignment for the New York Times so as to not compromise his position. Keeping a distance, he says, allows him to be more objective.

Although Cunningham has dedicated his life to documenting fashion, he does not give the impression of a workaholic. He is good-spirited, easy-going and his craft comes naturally so you entirely believe him when he says it is not work but pleasure. What might be simply stubbornness of another man his age is really his determined vision.

There are delightful scenes of him working with a Times layout artist half his age, who he calls a lumberjack from southern New Jersey. In one interaction, Cunningham comments on the dress and pose of an elegant New Yorker he had photographed at an evening event who they are placing in a layout. Cunningham likens her to "a John Singer Sargent painting"...the lumberjack fumbles a confused response not understanding the reference, which is specific to Sargent's scandalous Madame X, a larger-than-life painting from 1884 that damaged the reputation of the Parisian socialite, Madame Pierre Gautreau, and spurred Sargent's departure from France.

At an awards ceremony for the National Order of the Legion of Honour of France, Cunningham is decorated as an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters but spends most of the time running around taking pictures. One attendee remarks to him how funny this is and he gleefully responds,

"You think I would miss a good picture?!"

At the ceremony, the decoration medal is pinned to Cunningham's blue worker's jacket. Whenever I saw him riding around Manhattan or scanning crowds at galas in his royal-blue smock, I thought it was a printer's jacket from New York's bygone printing era but he explains in the film while on a fashion week trip in Paris that it is a French street sweeper's jacket, which he wears because it is inexpensive and has pockets.

The footage of Paris immediately follows Cunningham's remarks to the documentary film crew in New York that there is no way they are going to follow him to France for the events. Fortunately they did because there is a priceless scene of him trying to get into a fashion show. He humbly holds out his press pass to a twenty-something woman with a clipboard. She is not very helpful and dismisses him. In a minute an older man comes over, takes him by the arm and informs the woman,

"This is the most important man in the world."

This is not far from the truth in the fashion world. Vogue's Anna Wintour charmingly says in the film that everyone gets dressed "for Bill" and that he takes one or two pictures when he sees something he likes and when he does not bother it is "death." It is not that he commands that kind of power but his reaction to what is stylish is so immediate and unfiltered that it comes out as the inarguable truth.

In Paris, Cunningham crosses paths with Anna Piaggi, a fashion columnist for Vogue. He says she is the best subject to photograph in all of Europe and is why he goes to Paris. He calls her a poet with clothes.

He definitely knows who's who but not the modern celebrities since he does not go to the movies or have a television. When they pass by and he does not take their pictures, he says he has overheard people say he must be the dumbest one in the crowd. He explains that even if he recognizes a person he will only shoot her clothes if she is wearing something interesting. He says he could never be a paparazzi - tormenting people, and that what he does must be approached "discretely and quietly. Invisible is the word."

Cunningham speaks of Paris fashion week as a school that educates the eye and during his decoration speech says,

"I'm not interested in celebrities with their free dresses. I am interested in clothes."

Some scenes of this documentary are interviews with him from previous decades. In one piece he talks about how the wider world perceives fashion as frivolity but defends,

"...the point is; fashion is armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don't think you could do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization."

About his craft he says,

"It's not photography. I mean any real photographer would say, "He's a fraud! Well they're right. I am just about capturing what I see and documenting what I see."

Click here to view the trailer for Bill Cunningham New York

Gay Poodle Stalker

by Drew Martin

Perhaps the heavy metal chains of slaves and beasts of burden have been broken but people still want ownership of and obedience from humans and animals. Some roles have changed only in name; maid to cleaner. Sometimes all it takes is a possessive pronoun. My favorite is "My architect..." instead of "The architect who designed the addition to my house..." because it is exclusive and establishes a hierarchy. This pyramid is constructed every day by everyone...the toy dog as a living accessory, the gay friend as supplemental mate who really listens. The problem with all of this is that the singular focus and one-way attitude flattens the dimensions and limits the possibilities of the other.

The newest of these is the "stalker." Originally coined for a harasser with sexual intent, the term is now overused for anyone who randomly says hello on the street, emails twice without receiving a response or shares a schedule that increases the likelihood of
crossing paths.

The trend is that everyone is supposed to have one. Social media makes the occasion quantifiable, identifiable and recordable (and even encourages it to a certain degree) but the real modern twist is not the action or the new tools of the initiator but the mind of the receiver. Assuming the role of the one who is stalked establishes that one is uncontrollably desirable...a fine balance of egotism and paranoia.

“A secret admirer is the same as a stalker... with stationary.”
Demetri Martin

“I've only done it once or twice every week”
Oscar Wilde on stalking

Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time

by Drew Martin

If you like the work of Andy Goldsworthy then you should see Rivers and Tides, a documentary about him and his work, which is directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer and accompanied by the music of Fred Frith.

I streamed it on Netflix this weekend and was surprised to note that it is from 2001. It is a timeless film because his artwork is timeless.

Goldsworthy talks to the camera, which functions as the narration. In one moment he suggests that the filmmaker make himself useful and put down the camera to help gather stones for a piece he is creating on the beach. It is a sculpture of flat stones he stacks in the shape of a pine cone. Four early attempts collapse while he is working on it due to the loose sand. He shouts a sharp, frustrated "Shit!" which reminds me of myself in such a moment. Finally the work is topped off and the rising sea engulfs it. The stone sculpture disappears under water. He speaks about how it is a gift to the sea. The tide recedes before sunset and exposes the sculpture again. It is beautiful to see it back in the open air after being embraced by the water, as if it has undergone a rite of passage and understands what the sea is about, with all of its creatures.

I have seen Goldsworthy's wall at Storm King Art Center and a lot of his work in photographs but the film captures the cycle of his projects, which is not possible without the ability to record time. His stone walls last years but some of his projects only last a brief moment. For one of these, he spends hours grinding a reddish stone, by hand. In the end, he holds a ball of red pigment and throws it into the river, where the stone came from. The river turns red for a few minutes and then dilutes itself as it moves downstream. During the preparation of the pigment, Goldsworthy speaks about his pursuit of the red. He comments that the red in the stone is from iron, which is the same reason our blood is red. This piece is about making the stone alive again, as it once was in its volcanic birth.

In the end of the film, the camera pans rock cliffs, which seem like unmovable walls and Goldsworthy offers that the stability of stone is undermined by its fluidity. With much of his work, Goldsworthy likes to take it to the edge of collapse. This is perhaps one of the treats of the film; watching Goldsworthy work on something and have it fall down around him. He deeply cares about his work and such a setback is often met with utter frustration but then he sets to rebuilding the structure. He is tireless.

Goldsworthy started documenting his work with photographs in order to show his teachers what he was doing. He mentions Constantin Brâncuşi who asked why should he have to talk about his sculptures when he can show pictures of them.

Much of the film is shot near his home in Scotland. The moist, green hills are full of sheep, stone walls and an exposed nature. Goldsworthy surveys the land and says that people say it is pastoral and pretty but he remarks there is a much darker side because of the history of sheep and how people were displaced and all the trees were cut down in order to accommodate the animals. He also means that there is a life cycle with decay. He comments on how we think of the signs of Spring on the surface but the evidence is below ground, where the heat and moisture blackens and rots the previous year's growth. This is a theme in Goldsworthy's work...what lies below something, affects the surface.

Goldsworthy speaks about his process but his most insightful comments are about life. He explains how he has lived in different places and how five years might seem like enough time to get to know a place, but it is not. He says you need to see children at a bus stop for years and watch them grow and have children of their own. Goldsworthy recalls a conversation he had with an older lady in his village. After mentioning all the people he knew, she remarked "You see only births and I see only deaths." He says it in a way that he was humbled by it and remarks that he tries not to forget this.

The title of the film, Rivers and Tides, seems obvious enough but Goldsworthy explains that the river is about many things, not just water. There is a river of animals and plants. It is all about flow.

One thing I learned from the film is about Goldsworthy's involvement with his projects. We see him throughout the film, piecing together icicles, reeds and scraps of stone but for a more ambitious piece, such as the wall at Storm King, he worked with wallers, who were often removing the pieces he was placing, for the sake of integrity of the wall. For this project Goldsworthy's role was primarily to define the direction of the wall. Although he was on foreign turf, America, the project was close to home because the Center's property was once farmland and what Goldsworthy found at the site where great stretches of derelict walls made over a hundred years ago by Europeans, possibly Scots. What interested him was how trees took shelter near the walls and grew back around them. Goldsworthy says the wall at Storm King "has a line in sympathy with the place through which it travels."

Although Goldsworthy engages with people and has a wife and several children, you see that he is content by himself, comforted by his own silence. Towards the end of the film he says "Words do their job but what I do here says a lot more."

My favorite comment by him is a line that you feel in his work,

"I am so amazed at times that I am actually alive."

The Triathlon and Human Metamorphosis

by Drew Martin

Last Sunday I did the running leg of a triathlon in Croton on the Hudson. It was a "Toughman" half Ironman, which means a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride and a half marathon (13.1 miles). The half Ironman is the longest triathlon you can race as a team. Our team was well balanced and took first for the coed relay.

Croton is a beautiful part of New York and the annual event takes advantage of this. The course starts down on the Hudson River (actually in the river and this year it was very murky after Hurricane Irene) and climbs up above the spectacular Croton Dam (pictured here).

The bicycle and running courses are difficult because of the extreme elevation changes and a lot of the running is on trails through the woods. That being said, it is one of my favorite places to run and the event is well organized. At the bottom of the dam you are greeted by a band and cheerleaders before entering an uphill battle in the woods. There are other cheering sections, lots of cow bells and even a rock band along the way.

At the turnaround in the woods there is also a waist-high statue of a gorilla or a yeti. It is all quite a surreal experience because you are trying to run and stay focused and yet you are a bit delirious from the exertion. Most of the other athletes had run and swum, and I had fresh legs, so it was very dreamy because everyone was really tired and I was apologetically flying by them as if they were in slow motion.

I have written quite a bit about the arts and running, how they overlap.* The triathlon culture is more diverse and has its own visual cues and aesthetics. For one thing the hydrodynamics of swimming and the aerodynamics of cycling influence what we look like and how we make things.

These dynamics inform shapes and surfaces. It is amazing how the eye picks up on this. We instinctively know what is lighter and faster. Aerodynamically and hydrodynamically engineered shapes look cool. I think that one reason we gravitate towards streamlined objects is because they appear simple; they are smooth and without complicated and frivolous details. Perhaps it is an association with examples from nature.

Aerodynamics and hydrodynamics are disciplines of efficiency. Just as there is beauty in symmetry, mathematics is also stunningly eye-catching when we witness the tangible results of its formulas for speed and resistance.

A triathlon is the most metamorphic of all sporting events. The athletes start on the beach in tight black neoprene wetsuits looking very fit and aquatic. When the swimmers emerge from the water, they have to run quite a bit to their bikes for a transition, which involves stripping down out of their wetsuits. In this event there was a place where volunteers peeled the suits off the athletes for them. (Pictured here, is our swimmer leaving the Hudson River after a 1.2 mile swim)

In the cycling portion, the participants mount their bikes and take off for a long haul. Some riders wear tear-drop helmets and have low, extended handlebars, which morphs the rider and bike into one streamlined force and a hybrid of human and machine. The shaved legs of the riders and the sleek carbon fiber surfaces are equally smooth.

In the final transition, the bikes are abandoned as are the fancy helmets and stiff shoes. Everything is left behind including the previously shed rubbery skin, and the participant begins to run. It a significant moment, born from water and beyond the assistance of technology. It is the human running free.

For someone, like myself, interested in visual identity and graphics, the event is a real treat. Aside from the numerous logos and the rainbow of colors that adorn bikes, helmets, wetsuits, and running shoes, such an occasion is rich with graphs and charts.

Below, is a map from the Toughman website, which shows the running route. It is not something you could actually use to navigate the course but at least you get a sense that it is hilly and that it is, for the most part, an out-and-back run. Personally, I like running big loops, preferably clockwise.

The next chart is interesting. It shows the elevation changes of the running course. For the kind of runner I am, this is like finding a treasure map. It tells me more explicitly just how hilly the course is, the number of climbs and when they occur in the race. I can also reason that the best runners will stay away from the event because their times would be ravaged by such topography.

Immediately after the first waves of athletes finish, the results are posted on a board. Each triathlete wears a chip around one of his or her legs with a wide, rubbery and Velcro strap. For teams, the chip is passed from swimmer to cyclist to runner. The chip is read by mats at the entrance and exit of the transition area and at the finish line. Theoretically you could cut corners, or worse, and the computer would be none the wiser. In fact, in our race I was ranked with the seventh fastest running time. Naturally, I wanted to see who was quicker but the fastest running time was listed for a woman in 413th place. The only reasonable explanation is that she cut out the few mile loop above the dam, thus placing her with a running time more than four minutes ahead of the elite male who won the overall event with a time two hours ahead of her, even with her shortened course.

These results look something like the chart on the right, which was shows our team on the top line. It has fewer columns than the overall standing chart, which details the duration of each part of the triathlon as well as the transitions times.

Finally, the best visuals of all are the pictures taken by professional photographers (for sale), like the one of our swimmer (above). My pictures are odd to behold. I do not even remember the outside of my body during the run. I do recall some internal cramps and focusing on my lungs, telling myself I was one with the air around me as I ran like the wind. I would not post an image of myself here because I am too pale and skinny. Despite all of the previously mentioned visual elements, I think the most interesting aspect of such event are the body types. Triathletes are perfect. They have swimmers' arms and cyclists' legs. As the mercenary runner, I am all legs and weigh as little as people a head shorter than me. It was a bit of a joke at the event, people asking me if I was the team's swimmer.

Even with all the visual reminders of the day, nothing can compare with the memory of participating in the event...the body moving through space and going into a zone.


*Other posts by me related to running:

Born to Run: A Do-It-Yourself Marathon
Recalling a do-it-yourself marathon inspired by the book, Born to Run

An Out of City Experience
The "third man factor" while running

Find Your Strong
Gladly brainwashed by Saucony's "Find Your Strong" campaign

Running with Music
The analogy of running and music, comparing a runner's body to a musical instrument.

Running the Media
Running as a means of communication

Murakami...About Running: A Book Review
Comments on Haruki Murakami's memoir "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"

Cause & Effect
Running as performance art

Racy
Comparing Neal Bascomb's "The Perfect Mile" (about Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile) with Anaïs Nin's seductive "Delta of Venus"

Frost Nixon

by Drew Martin

If you do not like politics and movies about politics, and you could care less about Nixon, his administration and Watergate then a good film to see is Frost/Nixon because it is about all of these things but from a very different angle. I watched it last night and found it well paced and captivating.

The movie jacket reads:
When a disgraced President Nixon agreed to an interview with jet-setting television personality, David Frost, he thought he'd found the key to saving is tarnished legacy. But, with a name to make and a reputation to overcome, Frost became one of Nixon's most formidable adversaries and engaged the leader in a charged battle of wits that changed the face of politics forever.

I just now realize it is a Ron Howard film. Although I also liked A Beautiful Mind, I still have a hard time accepting him as a director because he was burned into my adolescent mind as his Happy Days incarnation, Richie Cunningham. Knowing this however, makes it easier to see this film as a blend of the media cues I understood it was referencing: The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, All the President's Men and Rocky.

Rocky, because the series of interviews, which take place over several days, are treated like a boxing match. From the very start the reference is offered, suggesting that Frost, despite all of his training and hype, is left slack-jawed by the defending champion's first punch. Each session is treated as a physical round of sparring. Between recordings, each "fighter" is coached in the corner. There is not any visible blood, spit or bruises but these breaks mimic the "get back in there and show him what you are made of" ringside pep talks.

The interesting thing about the interview is that it substitutes for a trial that never happened because incoming President Ford pardoned Nixon. This is the most interesting concept because a trial is only a means to an end and what America really wanted was not so much that the truth be told but a real confession and admission of guilt; the truth was already out there. It is stated through one of the supporting characters in the end of the film that the fault of television is that it reduces things and dumbs them down but in this case, the closeup of Nixon's troubled and regretful face was the perfect use of the medium.