Local Anaesthetics: The English Surgeon and The Flying Scotsman

by Drew Martin
I watched an interesting film yesterday called The English Surgeon. The first impression was "Oh, this is a real documentary about real issues. It is not trying to entertain, distract or fool me." The English Surgeon is about a leading British neurosurgeon, Dr. Henry Marsh, who leaves the comfort of his hospital and home to help Igor Petrovich perform brain surgeries against all odds in Ukraine. The premise is moving but sometimes the film reads like a Monty Python skit or a mockumentary such as Spinal Tap or Borat. Ukrainians must hate this film. All the landscapes are muddy. All the architecture is bleak. All the people seem to be peasants with brain tumors who cannot even form a proper queue. Bespectacled Marsh is a quixotic character, who shouts 'bloody hell' at his computer, salvages medical equipment from his London hospital and builds his own shipping crates in his garden. Adding to the potential farce is a young patient who is epileptic due to a large brain tumor. He is a bit of a town fool, who all-to-willingly goes under the knife. The Ukraine hospital is ill-equipped and does not have all the anaesthetics Marsh would typically use so he recommends to the young man to have the whole procedure under a local anaesthetic since the brain has no feeling. This means that while the young man is having his skull cut open and the tumor sucked out, he is also alert and babbles. After listening to the drilling and sawing of his cranium, he remarks that he understands why boxers can fight so long.

I also recently saw a film called The Flying Scotsman about Graeme Obree, a young bipolar and suicidal Scottish cyclist. Obree builds his own bike, using parts from his wife's washing machine, in order to break the world hour record, which is one of the most grueling sporting events. Obree's life is a great story but this was not a particularly good film. I am, however, drawn to tales of resourceful people who can tinker with and transform things into elevated objects. This ingenuity is taken to another level in The English Surgeon. The Marsh-Petrovich duo shop around second world markets to look at power drills for operations. They sit in a small apartment kitchen, modifying discarded penetrators (drill bits for bone). Petrovich saws off the sheathing of a penetrator on the edge of his kitchen table with a hack saw just before eating dinner. One wonders if this team could even jump start a car together but soon enough we see them in scrubs performing a successful operation on the young man, who is thereafter cured of his epilepsy.

Marsh was discouraged by others to help and Petrovich even received death threats for trying to buck the system. Petrovich questions what to do with one's life that will be most beneficial to others. While he and Marsh challenge the left-over Soviet system, they also know there are limits. In many instances we see them simply turn away patients, telling them it is too late to do anything and that they have inoperable tumors. In these moments we see the souls of a good people. The patients do not counter with anger and threats of lawsuits. Instead, they apologize for wasting the doctors' time and thank them. In one instance they tell a beautiful 20-something woman to return with her mother who is in Moscow. The young lady thinks she has something like Lyme disease, but Marsh explains to Petrovich that she has an inoperable tumor, will likely go blind in the next year and probably will not live for another five years. Petrovich says he does not know how to tell her this because she is so carefree and giggly, Marsh offers that he always has someone else with the patient when breaking such news. Marsh says they are constantly playing Russian roulette with two loaded guns to the patient's head. One gun is their illness, the other, the possibility that something will go horribly wrong. Contrasting the success of the epileptic's operation is a botch job with a young girl. Marsh operated on her in London but it was failure. He further damaged her brain and she lived out her remaining two years in misery. Marsh keeps in touch with the family. The film even takes us into the home of the mother where he is greeted lovingly by her relatives and then he visits her grave, marked with an enormous headstone with a bust of the young girl.

Francesca Woodman

by Drew Martin
I just watched an excellent documentary on Netflix about Francesca Woodman. It is called The Woodmans and is stitched together with very sobering interviews with her parents, brother and friends. Her parents, George and Betty Woodman, and brother Charlie are all artists and had quite an aesthetic life together in artsy homes in Boulder, Colorado, New York City, and Florence, Italy.

Francesca was a photographer who focused on black and white nude pictures, mainly of herself and other young female models. In 1981, at the age of 22, she committed suicide by jumping off a building in lower Manhattan. Her father said she was having a bad day; she found out she was not going to get an National Endowment for the Arts grant and her bicycle was stolen. Her parents question how they raised her, immersed in their own projects, fulfilling roles as professional artists, which Francesca never became. Interest in her work bloomed after her death. Her posthumous fame is met with mixed emotions by those who survived her.

The Woodmans is a well made film, punctuated with Francesca's beautiful photographs, which feel very fresh and relevant today. Click here to see a trailer of the film.

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation

by Drew Martin
I recently finished reading E = mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, by David Bodanis. He treats the formula as a character and the descendant of each component: E, m, =, c and ². The book was inspired oddly enough by a remark from Cameron Diaz about wanting to know what the equation means. Bodanis looks at E = mc² from a different angle. Instead of trying to tackle relativity or create another biography about Einstein, he focuses solely on the history of the formula.

E   In the early 1800's, Michael Faraday unified disparate concepts of energy, which had previously been looked at as unlinked forces.

=   In the mid 1500's, Robert Recorde promoted the equals sign as a computational symbol because he argued that nothing could be more equal than a pair of parallel lines of equal length. There were many competing symbols, which included // and ] [ . History favored Recorde's symbol. A century after its introduction, = found its way into the  language of equations.

m   Before having his head chopped in a guillotine because of his association with Louis XVI, Laurent Lavoisier demonstrated the conservation of mass, which helped recognize the commonality of different forms of matter.

c   Most people know that the c in Einstein's equation stands for the speed of light, but why c? C stands for celeritas, Latin for swiftness. Galileo was the first person who thought about measuring the speed of light. Ole Rømer was the first to best estimate c to be roughly 670 million miles per hour even though his work was not accepted at the time (late 1600's). Compared to the speed of sound, Mach 1, the speed of light is Mach 900,000. James Clerk Maxwell's 1821 breakthrough explained the mutual embrace of electricity and magnetism, leap-frogging light across the universe. It was one of the greatest theoretical achievements of all time.

²   Émilie du Châtelet (pictured here), Voltaire's companion, objected to Newton's idea (mv¹), which stated that how objects make contact is simply a product of their mass times velocity. Châtelet revived Gottfried Leibniz's competing view (mv²) and supported it with evidence from the Willem 's Gravesande that energy is equal to a mass times it velocity-squared. Gravesande's experiments were simple; measure the deep of penetration of a metal ball falling into a clay floor. A ball propelled three times as fast does not go three times deeper but nine times deeper. If the speed of light is 670 million miles per hour then c² is 448,900,000,000,000,000 miles per hour.

E = mc² is a conversion formula and a way to express the vast amount of energy stored in mass.

Rice Dream

by Drew Martin
I just awoke from a dream in which I was attending the first day of a language class. It was either for Japanese or Chinese...I cannot remember which it was. I was in a well-lit classroom full of pupils at desks. The old instructor placed a bowl of rice in front of each student. Then he explained...

Lesson 1: stare at the bowl of rice and think about  all of the combinations of rice grains as a way to form a character.

It was a very Zen approach to kicking off the study of a language...I liked the lesson. I think this dream came about because of a recent focus on endangered languages. Google linked to the Endangered Languages Project last week. Additionally, the most recent issue of National Geographic focuses on endangered languages. I have also been having conversations with friends about various languages and about the availability of studying Mandarin in high schools in the United States. This dream also made me think about the relationship of food and language. Eating moments are typically a time for conversation, but I was thinking more abstractly...how does the shape of food influence our written language and how does our language affect how we prepare food?

Hiding in Plain View

by Drew Martin
I have written before about the Franklin Mineral Museum in "the fluorescent mineral capital of the world." Zinc deposits from this site have produced 357 different mineral species. I visited the Museum again yesterday and was reminded of the artist, Teresita Fernández and her interest in the collection. The following is from an interview between Anne Stringfield and Fernández:

AS: In thinking about context, I keep coming back to Robert Smithson as the artist whose work most strongly parallels yours. Your mirrored pieces could be seen as descendants of his Mirror Displacements, you both take a profoundly intellectual approach to your work, you share an interest in frames and boundaries, in cycles of building and ruin, and so on. Just how important is he to your practice?

TF: Smithson is an important artist for me. He prompts this inclusive view of the world where all references are permitted simply because they strike a chord with the artist; where expectations about place are reversed and ideas become inverted. I have a cabin on a lake near the Franklin Mineral Mine, in the area where Smithson spent so much time. This is the place where I’ve reread all of his writings. Smithson’s best work is all still intact, there to be explored, not in art museums, but virtually untouched in the very places he conceived it. You visit the mine, and enter a shabby little chamber full of dull, ordinary-looking rocks on shelves. When the lights are turned off and UV lights are turned on, the rocks glow with fantastic colors. It’s otherworldly. What interests me is that the rocks were always phosphorescent, you just couldn’t see it—it’s something hiding in plain view. And Smithson does this all the time, a kind of anthropomorphizing of the landscape so that you, as the viewer, are not privileged. He makes the landscape, in fact, look back at you.

Pictured here are images I took yesterday of the same fluorescent rocks that Fernández describes (in regular and UV light)

Red Shoes Black Swan

by Drew Martin
I recently watched Aronofsky’s The Black Swan, a title often said in the same breath as The Red Shoes. The 1948 classic references the Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about a proud girl whose flashy shoes make her uncontrollably dance. She cannot stop them and goes so far as to have her feet chopped off by an executioner. Her amputated feet keep dancing, however, and her only escape from them is when she ascends to heaven. The Red Shoes film is entirely about ballet whereas The Black Swan superficially uses dance to stage a coming-of-age drama. I asked a colleague who was a professional dancer in his youth what he thought of The Black Swan. He replied: “First and foremost it was a horror film, coincidentally about dance. It could have been about any crazy girl.”

While The Red Shoes is an obvious source of The Black Swan, what came to mind when I was watching the latter was the 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou by Buñuel and Dalí, and The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Un Chien Andalou has many moments that reverberate through the 83 years of film that follow it, such as the slamming of a pursuing aggressor’s hand in a door frame. While that too is played out again in The Black Swan, what I found particularly deliberate were the totally focused, gross-out body scenes. In the beginning of Un Chien Andalou, a man slices open the eye of a woman (it is actually a calf’s eye). In another scene, ants crawl out of a hole in his palm (a theme Dalí repeats in his paintings, which alludes to the decomposed state in which he found his boyhood pet bat). In The Black Swan, Nina (Natalie Portman) scratches and pokes at herself, opening up sores. She pulls a tag of loose skin above her finger nail up to her knuckle, plucks a black feather from her shoulder and stabs herself with a shard of mirror, creating a blood-soaked (and very yonic) orifice in her abdomen. These shock-accents are also the film’s greatest weakness. To make a coming-of-age film about a young woman and to use the menstrual and first-act blood of womanhood is not only a little too obvious but also sullies its nature. The comparison to The Glass Menagerie is because of the oppressive mother in a fatherless household and the general raw-American-neurosis, which the play captures so well. It is a much more dimensional study of the confines of a broken home. Unfortunately, the characters in The Black Swan are flat. What I prefer most about Menagerie’s approach is the use of glass to symbolize the special fragility of becoming a young adult.

I rented The Black Swan from a local library, watched the 1973 televised production of The Glass Menagerie with Katharine Hepburn on Netflix and saw Un Chien Andalou and The Red Shoes on YouTube. 

The 16-minute-long Un Chien Andalou can be watched here at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahWBVjz75f8
The Red Shoes can be watched in its entirety at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEkhWm7xsvw

If you do not want to watch the whole movie, at least watch the dance sequence from 1:03:20 to 1:18:44.

Smash His Camera

by Drew Martin
Smash His Camera is a must-see documentary for anyone interested in photography, celebrity, first amendment rights and another quirky character from New Jersey. (Click here to watch the trailer). Ron Galella is the despised and admired focus of this film. Robert Ebert says of him..."He is a viper, a parasite, a stalker, a vermin. He is also, I have decided, a national treasure."

The term paparazzi originated from Fellini's La Dolce Vita, with the news photographer character, Paparazzo, which means an annoying "mosquito." Galella is certainly annoying. He stalked Jackie Onassis. She sued him and won. He crept on Marlon Brando, who reacted by knocking out five of his teeth.

Galella lives in a Sapronos-like house in Montville, New Jersey. His basement is full, and very well organized, of thousands of pictures of celebrities, which he sells to newspapers and galleries. Despite a parade of negative testimonies in the film, it is hard not to like this dedicated, driven creature who spent his career showing people how they really are and not as they want to be seen.

Free Form

by Drew Martin
Three of Bill Bollinger's raw, cast-iron sculptures were recently on display at Algus Greenspon in the West Village. Another venue for his retrospective is the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, which is showing his work until the end of July. The Greenspon show of Bollinger's work, entitled Aluminum channel, cast iron, paper: 1966-1977, had a variety of his work but the cast-iron pieces dominated the space. They are solid, free-form works, which he made in reaction to the emptiness of conceptual art as well as to large-scale bronze sculptures that assume mass but are actually thin, empty shells. Art holds the process of its creation and what is reiterated by this work is the red-hot pouring of molten iron into loose sand molds, the long cooling period and the final tilt-up grunt of the artist to see what he has formed. They are deliberate and accidental, with a feeling of experimentation. There is a sense of pre-purpose, like they are the work of early humans refining methods that will evolutionarily lead to a terra-dynamic plow, a battle sword, a structural steel beam, a chassis of a car, or even...one day...an envisioned sculpture that will conjure these thoughts.

Golden Years

by Drew Martin

My parents just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. It is a remarkable achievement; a stretch of time longer than some lifespans, careers and even whole eras such as communism in Eastern Europe. When I was getting a gift for my parents, the lady assisting me said she just celebrated her fifty-fifth wedding anniversary and some of her friends and relatives recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversaries. I asked her what the trick was and she said, "Staying out of each other's way." I thought perhaps this Yankee cynicism might actually be the secret ingredient to a sustained marriage but what I realized on Sunday at my parents' celebratory luncheon was that it was quite the opposite. My brother gave a lovely speech and my mother worked the room but it was my father's heart-felt speech that touched me the most, as he spoke of my mother as his best friend and how she opened him up to the world of traveling, language and the arts. My parents live ten miles from me but we drove four hundred miles to the event that took place at the Williamsburg Inn in historic Williamsburg, Virginia, where they met, married and first lived together. The trip to Virginia is a painfully long drive but feels instinctual, like the migration of birds. If my parents' fifty years of marriage played out with a linear narrative of film or a novel, the celebration, like any reflective event, was like a big canvas; a mural of their life, which the kind words of the speeches and the presence of friends and relatives flattened in that moment to be viewed in totality.

Like Iceland in a Box

by Drew Martin

As a kid, I learned from a CHiPs episode that refrigerators are dangerous because you can get trapped in them, but I did not know how fiery they are. Do you know how a self-defrosting fridge works? Every six to eight hours an electric heater under the freezer coils blasts the icy mass with extreme heat. Pictured here is the inside of my own freezer going through the cycle. The photo with the grid is a picture of the heater coil in a glass tube. It is amazing to witness the defrost because it is like some kind of Icelandic paradox of volcanic fissures in a frozen landscape. This cycle happens behind a metal panel in the back of the freezer. The temperature in the freezer may jump up 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why the typical setting for the freezer/refrigerator is 0/37 (degrees Fahrenheit, respectively). I would think we could have a better system considering all of our technological advances. This apparatus has been consuming my thoughts since my refrigerator broke down a couple weeks ago. An instructional YouTube video on the subject guided me away from having my own meltdown. After watching the video a couple times, I pulled the big refrigerator out from the alcove in the wall, took out all the food and beverages, then defrosted it. Later that day I was back in business and was relieved when the temperature sank to 0/37. But two weeks later, as I had read it might, the shutdown occurred again. I knew it meant the heating coil was not working so I defrosted the refrigerator again and tried to pull out the coil but it would not unclip. With the refrigerator unplugged, I cut the insulated copper wires that feed it and removed the glass-encased coil. The coil had burned out, much like a spent light bulb. I snipped off the burned-out section and twisted together the thin coil wires. I put the heating unit back in and joined the copper wires. The freezer unit quickly frosted up like wintry pine trees and I got quite worried, but the heating unit eventually kicked in and melted away the ice. What I found most interesting was how the heater coil works. Electricity flows really well through copper. Copper is extremely conductive. The thinner wire in the heater coil is Nichrome (80% Nickel and 20% Chrome), which not as conductive but lets electricity pass with great resistance, which is converted into heat. The heater coil in the refrigerator is not unlike the coils in toasters and space heaters, which are like really inefficient light bulbs. The difference is that light bulbs use an even thinner wire made of tungsten, which has even greater resistance. Tungsten completely burns up at high temperatures in the presence of oxygen, which is why it is encased in a bulb that is filled with an inert gas or is evacuated.

Night Rain

by Drew Martin

It rained hard through the night.
If it rains hard in the day, there is a sense of power and exhibitionism.
But rain at night belongs to night things, like thieves and raccoons, grogginess and hidden passions.
It does unseen things and is reckless, like a pack of young, drunk men.
And it mixes with your dreams.
You fall asleep to it, wake up to it, and then fall back asleep to its impact, like millions of tiny meteorites.
When you wake up to the silvery light of the cloudy morning, and everything is green and wet, there is a strange silence despite the lively clicks and chirps of sparrows.

Houston We Have a Problem: Cultural Vandalism

by Drew Martin

In 1993, NASA conducted the first servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to fix its optics problem. I remember this like it was yesterday because I was living in a polluted city in northern Czech Republic. The beautifully orchestrated mission was televised while I was struggling with something much more down to earth: the Yugoslavian washing machine in my apartment had leaked all over the floor again, which required rolling up the linoleum surface of the hallway and letting a burlap base layer dry out underneath. My situation was a mess and the flawless spacewalk made me ask myself, "What am I doing here?" There have been about 500 people from nearly 40 nations on roughly 300 manned missions in space. The Apollo program, which brought man to the moon, employed 400,000 people. Despite the achievements and advancements of all the astronauts and scientists, there is a small group of conspiracists who negate we ever left Earth. Although I think science fiction feeds our curiosity and inspires our adventures, part of the naysayers arsenal is that Hollywood is pretty good at faking it as the Red Hot Chili Peppers sing in Californication, "Space may be the final frontier, but it's made in a Hollywood basement." A very well done and respectful, six-part series about the space program is Discovery's When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, which I recently watched on Netflix. I am not one to follow conspiracy theories and I am not into the myth busters genre but I watched a YouTube video yesterday called, The Truth Behind the Moon Landings, which debunks the conspiracists, who are typically old loners living in trailer parks. One of the sober people interviewed in this clip referred to the conspiracy theory as a form of cultural vandalism.

Behind the Scenes at the Met

by Drew Martin
I just finished reading Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Danny Danziger, which is a 265-page book of interviews with 49 people associated with the museum. The list includes board members, the former director Phillipe de Montebello (when he was director) and curators. Danziger paints the museum with a broad brush so we also get insights from the operational staff of food services, maintenance, security and fire safety. One quote I found interested is from the trustee, Michel David-Weill:

Art suffers from a sort of overadmiration. People don't have confidence in their own likes and dislikes, and in particular they give too much reverence to what's in museums. I strongly believe that when you don't like something, there is sometimes a very good reason for not liking it.

Museum, aside from a cover jacket with a night shot of the entrance of the Met, is void of pictures. This could be a wonderful documentary showing all the people interviewed, with great stills and pans of the artwork and the museum galleries. As a book, it could also be a lovely coffee table book but Danziger is looking for something in the candidness of conversational words, which pulls together this jumble of thoughts that would otherwise be random. What is constructed from everyone's input is the overarching theme that it is an honor to work at the Met, it is a great place to work but a financial sacrifice you have to accept as a career, for doing what you love. One could imagine that such a line up of people would be a cornucopia of character sketches but I know of the employee, Ira Spar, a research Assyriologist of ancient near eastern art and met through him, J. Kenneth More, the curator in charge of musical instruments, and I was surprised how little of their personalities came through their words. The individuals are a collective voice with Danziger's approach. Through them he details the operations of the Met and its engine of marketing, fundraising, retailing, collecting, networking and of course, displaying art. Despite the positive tone of the book, one thing I could not stop thinking about is a kind of biased curatorial display of certain sections in the Met. It seems a bit odd that the ancient Greek and Roman art is bathed in glowing light, while the African Arts are kept in a dark hall.

Adrift

by Drew Martin

Pictured here, is a detail of Mark Ulriksen's illustration Adrift, which is on this week's cover (May 28, 2012) of The New Yorker. I think this one of my all-time favorite New Yorker covers. The king of covers is Saul Steinberg's infamous drawing of a New Yorker's world view. Seen from 9th Avenue, looking west, "Jersey" is a scrap of land on the banks of the Hudson River. The landscape recedes into a patch of dirt about the size of a football field representing America with a few odd rocks and a handful of scribbled cities and states. A dotted line to the left and right, represent Mexico and Canada, respectively. The Pacific Ocean, merely a few times wider than the Hudson River, separates this abridged version of North America from three bland island lumps labeled, China, Japan and Russia. I also really like the cover Jiří Slíva did of a New York skyline where he replaced the old water towers with oversized coffee mugs feeding into the buildings. Ulriksen's new cover is a far cry New York, but I love the connection between a perilous global warming environment and a difficult climate for today's graduates who stand about here, flightless, like penguins. Although neither of these situations is humorous, Ulriksen brilliantly delivers a cool image of globalization and capitalizes on the stillness of the single image to convey a sense of idle waiting.