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.

Banksyrupt

by Drew Martin

I had at English professor in college, for a post-WWI American literature course, who told us (1,000 students in an auditorium) that whenever he read a book, he started with the final chapter and then flipped back to the beginning so that he could understand how the novel was constructed. Perhaps this is unthinkable to people who take spoiler alerts seriously. Personally, the ending of a movie is always the most disappointing part because I have no capacity for fictional/edited suspense.

Several people recently told me I "had to watch" Banksy's film, Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010). Every one of them said I would love it and all of them said they were not going to tell me the ending. That alone, made me not want to see it.

I watched the movie this past weekend on Hulu. Having now viewed it and recalling how these acquaintances spoke about it, I don't think any of them got the real joke.

Exit Through the Gift Shop is a mockumentary, not as obvious as Borat (2006) and This is Spinal Tap (1984), more like Mail Order Wife (2003). It is a collaboration between Banksy and Shepard Fairey, telling a story of street art through an eccentric character, a bumbling and hapless filmmaker - turned art superstar Thierry Guetta a.k.a. Mr. Brainwash (MBW). Guetta is Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, wrapped up into the body of Panza.

In the spirit of Duchamp, who could turn a urinal upside down and display it in a show as "fountain", the ménage à trois, Banksy-Fairey-MBW try to deepen the game of modern art.

I find the What is art? and What is reality? themes in art and film not very interesting; asking the wrong questions. They are hackneyed gimmicks that function something like graffiti; superficial distractions. Apparently, the public and media gobbled this film up when it was released. Instead of getting into the silly ping-pong match of whether or not the movie is a prank, the media should have played along with it and made up interviews with Banksy, but unlike the artist, they try to follow some guidelines.

I am glad I saw this film because it helped me make sense of two other nonsensical films I tried not to watch in the past week, Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page, and (much, much worse) Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Both fall into the What is reality? category. Inception is about extracting information from people in their dream worlds, with the ultimate goal of the much harder task of planting an idea (inception) that will subconsciously be carried out in the real world. The challenging aspect of either circumstance is navigating different levels; dreams within dreams. One of its flaws is that it is so close to The Matrix (1999) that it was painful to watch. Knight and Day is a rogue agent film (because the good guys are actually bad guys, etc.) and is simply a waste of time.

While I found Inception predictable and oversaturated with effects and stunts, I like how it unintentionally serves as a model for how an audience needs to be baited, little by little, into the murky depths of farce. This is done by creating a trail of morsels, which lead into more and more unbelievable situations.

Of course, the first level for any kind of cinematic deception happens when the audience sits down in front of a screen. From that point on, all reality is lost.

It is not hard for me to draw a comparison between Cruise and Banksy in that their careers are based on maintaining a continual deception. They both need a fantastic role to define themselves. Everyone ventures into gray areas now and again, but the healthy person will retreat to his or her "back to the basics" self. It takes a peculiar individual to live a life behind a character, and is not someone we should probably pay too much attention to.

The Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology

by Drew Martin

There were two school assignments that stand out in my mind. One was a 40 page research paper I was required to write (on prosthetics) in the 8th grade and the other, for my 12th grade English class, was to interpret a Greek play in anyway we felt would honor the subject. I made a theatre mask out of clay and used it for a discussion with my fellow students. That was an interesting class. The teacher had Ph.D. (not common at his level: his dissertation was on E. E. Cummings), he wore jeans (which no other male teacher did at the time) and he set up a curriculum to be less about high school and more about college. Additionally, he took a little liberty with his room, with a couch, a record player and a few other man-cave elements. For another project, we were asked to select and analyze a poem, I felt free enough to choose Gary Snyder's Hiking in the Totsugawa Gorge.

The title has more words than the actual work. The entire poem is:

pissing
watching
a waterfall

I brought attention to the cascading structure of the poem and how the reader assumes the writer is actually looking at a waterfall but that he himself is also creating his own little waterfall.

At 17, I was amused and overconfident, thinking I was writing A+ work; I got a B+. For 24 years I had not given Snyder much thought, so yesterday I looked up his work online.

Here is one poem I came across, not much longer, with a flipped look:

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

This next poem, written in 1958, reminds me of the moment Alexander Calder noted as the starting point for his life's work; sculpture that sought balance. He observed (from the deck of a ship he was working on) the sun on the eastern horizon and the moon, exactly opposite, on the western horizon.

Snyder, born in 1930, is often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. In addition to being a poet, he was also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist (the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology").

Common Symptoms of Contaminated Power

by Drew Martin

I have always liked the peripheral, tangential and unintended joys of things. When I was a kid, I loved sitting on top of our old bench-like wooden cabinet record player (with it silent) and looking out our big picture window (just above it), especially to watch cars trying to make it up the steep hill, diagonally situated in front of our house, in snowy-icy weather. I like the swishing of washing machines, the hissing of steam radiators, the warmth of bedside reading lamps, the beautiful red glow of electric heating coils. Just as the staff of the New York Times do not go to work every day to make a product to protect floors and carpets from puppy pee and poop, the side affects/effects and alternative lives of things are typically unintended.

One of my favorite objects to look at in my house is a Panamax M5100-PM. It was purchased three years ago with an oversized flatscreen television in order to "eliminate common symptoms of contaminated power (including loss of detail, pops, hisses, hums and visual noise)."

I had always assumed electricity was smooth and constant (a steady 110 volts in the US), except for occasional surges, like some warranted electric wrath of Zeus throwing lightning bolts our way, but it is actually quite unpredictable and jerky. Electricity coming into one's house fluctuates...in my case it's between 118 - 125 volts. The Panamax is an inconspicuous black box (but kind of cool looking) that has a digital volt meter display (pictured here) with three, soothing, glowing bluish-white Arabic numbers. You plug the box into the wall, and various electronics into it. I have no idea if it actually protects against surges and other such disturbances but even if I did not have valuable electronics hooked up to it, I would still keep it plugged in because I find it very meditative to watch the numbers bump up and down with a mind of their own. I like to think about what the wavering electricity might sound like...perhaps a kid's kazoo or a trans-galactic theremin.

Invisible Man: To See or Not to See

by Drew Martin

I recently completed Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). It is a powerful book and an important American novel so I want to discuss it here in five, consecutive postings: the use of the US flag, the use of mirrors, media references, art references and the theme of invisibility.

My post (two days ago) about media references in Invisible Man nods to The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells from 1897 and mentions the shared theme of alienation.

Ellison's reinterpretation of "invisible" gives the word its own kind of transparency through displacement from its original, concrete meaning. Not only is the definition harder to pin down but Ellison energizes its fluctuating state with multiple declarations by his narrator throughout the novel that he is and is not invisible. His invisibility is not a property of the object but a diminished capacity for seeing by the viewer. Ellison's invisibility is directly related to another's "blindness," which is another word he veers from its original meaning. Physical blindness is simply a metaphor for the mental blindness that makes him invisible.

This is most clearly demonstrated with the removal of the glass eye of the oppositional Brother Jack. What is interesting in this action is that the narrator was unaware of/blind to the fact that someone so close to him was actually blind in one eye. It is a reciprocated blindness...and the narrator fails to take the high road by quipping to one-eye Jack:

...maybe you'll recommend me to your oculist...then I may not-see myself as others see-me-not.

It is quite a bolder, more cynical character, than who is addressed by a veteran at the Golden Day at the beginning of the book:

...for God's sake, learn to look beneath the surface...Come out of the fog, young man.

My favorite concept of invisibility from this novel is itself invisible. It is so entirely invisible, that it seems to have evaded readers for more than half a century. It is the inherent invisibility of an author both in the seclusion of how he or she writes but also in the lack of identity. Unlike actors and dancers, the author is faceless and bodiless. We cannot know the gender, race, age or fitness unless its is offered to us by something beyond the text. Consider how this is handled in the title and contents of John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me (1961).

Additionally, there is an absence of visual cues we might get from another profession: the photographer's camera, the painter's splat jeans, or the musician's cello (in case) being wheeled down the street. This is partly by design. The inherent invisibility of an author seems necessary to the profession and craft: to secretly observe without any obvious recording device and then to recall the invisible ideas suspended in one's imagination. This is a great advantage to an observer whose subject would certainly act differently in front of a still or movie camera. Subjects of such devices project ideas of themselves back through the lens.

There is also another fascinating affect. While the paperback or Kindle have a physical presence, their words are quickly converted into invisible memories of what was read and can be unwound by thinking about and discussing them.

Ellison's invisibility is indeed complex. In the prologue her offers:

That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

The complexity is especially of note in such a comment:

Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility...

and...

Discipline is sacrifice. Yes, and blindness.

Invisible Man is too easy reduced to/defined as the story of a black man in white America. The narrator is just as invisible and alienated from other African-Americans as he is from the Anglo-Americans. His state is a blurred one, bouncing between the extremes. Dr. Bledsoe, who is a "white is right" black man, and Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer, who is the closer to home, foreign-born African, are his two greatest enemies. Both of these men want to bury him alive. In fact, he wants to be invisible to both of them. In one of the most interesting and comical parts, the narrator buys a pair of sunglasses and then a hat to avoid being noticed by Ras and his followers. The minor disguise apparently makes several people believe he is someone else, Rinehart, a multi-faceted mystery man, who is defined as:

...Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?

Ellison starts the novel from a future time in the story and states he is an invisible man but this identity is not immediately assumed. It's developed throughout the book. At the beginning of the book, in the racist brawl organized at a local hotel for the town's "big shots," the narrator comments:

Blindfolded, I could no longer control my motions. I had no dignity. I stumbled about like a baby or a drunken man.

The idea of invisibility is introduced by one of the crazy war veterans (speaking about our narrator) at the Golden Day:

"You see," he said turning to Mr. Norton, "he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It's worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn't digest it. Already he is - well, bless my soul! Behold! A walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humaity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!"

I love how the theme evolves; over 500 pages into the novel the narrator remarks:

They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I'd help them. I laughed. Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men...

I don't want to take anything away from the book's moved readers or its influence on the Civil Rights Movement but Ellison's work reaches beyond this period and cast of characters.

When he writes in the Epilogue, "I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility," I consider his confession through the narrator that he is a "sensitive" person. To be sensitive to certain issues is to also be slightly removed from them and to acknowledge their actual qualities. While the narrator is alienated by the Anglo-Americans he also shares very intimate moments with them, whether its casually pressing up against their bodies on a crowded subway or being eagerly pulled into bed by a woman who fancies him.

Ellison can be very direct, black and white:

Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness?

Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray.

There is one reference to food that I found quite interesting. I do not know if was an unconscious wording or if bread and jam are code for Anglo-Americans and African-Americans:

good white bread...with wild blackberry jam from home.

Invisible Man: Like a Museum

by Drew Martin
I recently completed Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). It is a powerful book and an important American novel so I want to discuss it here in five, consecutive postings: the use of the US flag, the use of mirrors, media references, art references and the theme of invisibility.

It is always important to read a book, view a painting or listen to music with an understanding of its historical context. Invisible Man is inseparable from the Civil Rights Movement.

John F. Callahan comments in the Introduction:

Segregation was the law of the land and Jim Crow customs still prevailed in the South....The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision mandating integration in public schools was two years away...seamstress Rosa Parks [had not yet] refused to give up her seat...Martin Luther King, Jr. was a first-year divinity student...
Considering how progressive Ellison was as a writer, it is surprising to note that Pablo Picasso had painted Demoiselles d’Avignon almost half a century earlier, in 1907, which, like other cubist paintings, referenced the abstraction found in African art.

Ellison's narrator is often wide-eyed, somewhat naïve (though he does recognize a Renoir) and at times critical of African objects. While visiting a wealthy New York businessman, Mr. Emerson, in search of employment, he takes in his office:

Beyond the door it was like a museum. I had entered a large reception room decorated with cool tropical colors...I looked around the room, amazed. There were paintings, bronzes, tapestries, all beautifully arranged...I looked across to a lighted case of Chinese design which held delicate-looking statues of horses and birds, small vases and bowls, each set upon a carved wooden base...The room was quiet as a tomb...These folks are the Kings of the Earth!...There was nothing like this at the college museum - or anywhere else that I had ever been. I recalled only a few cracked relics from slavery times: an iron pot, an ancient bell, a set of ankle-irons and links of chain, a primitive loom, a spinning wheel, a gourd for drinking, an ugly ebony African god that seemed to sneer (presented to the school by some traveling millionaire), a leather whip with copper brads, a branding iron with the double letter MM...
The narrator is continually impressed and seems to respect the finer things of the upper class. An admirer of his speeches brings him back to her apartment "in one of the better sections of the city" where he is seduced prior to her indifferent husband's arrival in the early morning:

"What a beautiful room you have here," I said, looking across the rich cherry glow of furniture to see a life-sized painting of a nude, a pink Renoir. Other canvases were hung here and there, and the spacious walls seemed to flash alive with warm, pure color. What does one say to all this? I thought, looking at an abstract fish of polished brass mounted on a piece of ebony.
The pink, nude Renoir anticipates the "small, delicately plump" woman's advances, which he is hesitant to submit to but not something he denies himself:

And there was something about her voice and smile that gave me a sense of both comfort and excitement. It was not merely the background of wealth and gracious living, to which I was alien, but simply the being there with her and the sensed possibility of a heightened communication; as though the discordantly invisible and the conspicuously enigmatic were reaching a delicately balanced harmony. She's rich but human.
The harmony is quickly disrupted when she talks about his primitive nature when he gives his speeches:

"...you have tom-toms beating in your voice."
To which he responds:

"My God," I laughed, "I thought that was the beat of profound ideas."
She corrects herself:

"I don't mean really primitive. I suppose I mean forceful, powerful."
It is an exchange that makes me question my previous mention of Picasso, because what we often embrace as an advancement in art was really a cultural slight: embracing "the primitive" which feeds into the art world all the way up to Jean-Michel Basquiat and beyond.

It is an issue Ellison exposes in this passage:

These fellows whose bodies seemed - what had one of my teachers said of me? - "You're like one of those African sculptures, distorted in the interest of a design." Well, what design and whose?
My favorite art references are less direct and are formed by Ellison - the writer, but not for the benefit of a character observing art:

...men and horses of flesh imitating men and horses of stone.
And I love this image created by a man carting piles of blueprints through New York City:

"I got damn near enough (blueprints) to build me a house if I could live in a paper house like they do in Japan."
I would even go so far as to reinterpret this next sentence, simply a convalescent/medical analogy, to that of the creation of a statue coming to life, perhaps even the formation of Adam, himself. There is something of George Segal's sculptures in it:

My entire body started to itch, as though I had just been removed from a plaster cast and was unused to the new freedom of movement.
I love Ellison's scope of observation of the day-to-day:

I looked into the design of their faces...
and...

Now, moving through the crowds along 125th Street, I was painfully aware of other men dressed like the boys, and of girls in dark exotic-colored stockings, their costumes surreal variations of downtown styles.
Speaking of 'surreal variations,' Ellison is brilliant with this animism of an object and words that almost emit sounds themselves:

...a bullet struck an auto tire, the released air shrieking like a huge animal in agony.
Finally, a line I will contemplate for the rest of my life:

There was no time for memory, for all its images were of times past.