The Water Man

I recently read a short story by Jim Damis titled The Water Man. It is about an elderly brother and sister who live together and are visited by a young man who has come to check the water meter at their old house.

It is a candid view of a stifling yet secure relationship, which is turned upside down by a surreal event. Although the fantastical twist is Damis' signature, what I like most are his simple details of the tolerated cohabitation.

I especially enjoy the image of the sister vacuuming her brother as he reads the paper in his armchair (as if he is the armchair) without his letting on that he secretly enjoys the suction of the nozzle passing over him.

The temporal structure of the story is interesting. The patient approach of the beginning changes gears as it moves from words that sink into the fiber of the page to writing that is quicker paced, almost cinematic. Damis pulls the reader out of the first part of the story with the same force that a motorboat yanks a waterskier out of a lake...oh wait a minute, (spoiler alert) that has something to do with the story.

The entire short story is available here with permission by the author.
Click here to contact Jim Damis at jamescdamis@yahoo.com

The Water Man
by Jim Damis

They were the brother and sister who never left home. Dolores and Ambrose Culpepper lived in the same brick Tudor house from the day they were born until they became septuagenarians, watching each of their seven other siblings move out and make lives of their own as they came of age. Dolores was three years older than Ambrose, the fourth and fifth in birth order, middle children who were close to all of their brothers and sisters. But, ironically, they were never close to each other. Dolores routinely beat up her younger brother when he was too little to defend himself, and the boy paid her back in spades with overweening aggression as soon as he grew capable of it. Finally cleaning her clock, Ambrose was fond of saying years later, was the most gratifying accomplishment of his life. They found one another obnoxious and quarreled constantly, by high school settling into a modus operandi of mutual avoidance. Yet it was these two who inherited the house in their forties when their mother died, as the three lived there together for nearly two decades, Dolores and Ambrose being the ones who took care of her in her ailing last years. Their father, a merchant marine who became interested in herbivorous forest grazing, succumbed to a deceptive toadstool when the children were still small. After their mother expired in her sleep, the two siblings continued to live together for more than thirty years. Most people who have been alone under the same roof for that long become exasperated and repulsed by one another’s habits and peccadilloes, and Dolores and Ambrose were no different, except in them smoldered an ever intensifying mutual hatred that ever threatened to burst into a conflagration. And together they were stuck, as Ambrose wanted to sell the house and Dolores would not, and she could not buy his half out and he could not support himself without his half. Theirs was simply a bad situation.

Their list of grievances with each other could fill several volumes. There were money disputes, of course, such as who paid more into the maintenance and repair of the house over the years. Then there were all the jealousies and slights regarding family, their brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and who was the more respected and popular among them. And old blames forever simmered in their souls, such as Ambrose’s undying deduction that it was his sister who divulged his morbid fear of turtles to Shirley Klenk, the young counter girl at the town’s diner who never took to his woo, often teasing him that he should try the turtle soup. Dolores imputed her brother in the cartilage injury she sustained to her nose as a young woman when she stepped on a metal rake left in the high grass of their back yard, insidiously planted there by him, she believed, insofar as he knew the precise path she would be taking for her daily sun bath. There were scores of other such grudges carried between the two over the decades. Then there were the annoying habits, quirks, and idiosyncrasies they each endured over the years, irksomeness magnifying by way of a cumulative effect into something more maddening, insufferable. Ambrose, for example, was a frequent belcher, sometimes spewing cacophonous, volcanic belches, perhaps as a result of his proud prowess as a trencherman. He was a stout man with a serious appetite. These sudden eruptions would often split the silence of the house and startle, if not shock the hell out of Dolores, who would shriek in dismay and occasionally lose her footing and actually go down. She invariably heard her brother snickering in another room, or wherever he was, as he was a great snickerer and moaner too, but he always maintained his muffled laughs were unrelated to his sister’s reactions to his belches. Dolores’ obsessive house cleaning, by the same token, drove her brother into mad frenzies. If he was reclining in a chair, say, she wanted to vacuum, it was not beyond her to vacuum the chair and Ambrose himself as he read the newspaper, gliding the wide nozzle against his spacious frame with a violent fervor. She would insist, after his protests, that he should have removed himself when he had the chance. Ambrose was inordinately vain about his mustache, a thick brindled bush he assiduously groomed and emphasized by stroking with his fingers as if he were thinking. Occasionally, he actually was engaged in thought while doing this, but more often than not it was just an odd pose he favored. Dolores loathed his mustache stroking almost as much as she despised his mustache itself. She made fun of it, likened her brother’s look with it to a “dirty snide walrus,” and incessantly threatened to shave it while he slept. In turn, Ambrose named his mustache Sparky and treated it like an old buddy only he could understand, often saying things like, “Sparky and I are going to split this bottle of Burgundy,” and then would snicker. More than once Dolores lost her temper altogether at such lines as this, creeping up behind him and kicking him as hard as she could in his ample fanny. In such manner of escalating revulsions and their responses the two perpetuated their acrimony and drove one another bonkers. And yet, one discovers, as the years accrue there is solace in the sameness of daily living no matter who one shares quarters with, for predictability fosters comfort in people. For Ambrose and Dolores living together was organic arrangement, almost a sine qua non of their identities. For too long they saw themselves through the other, unpleasantly so for the most part, but nonetheless a split could have ruined both of them in some cold lonely way. Or such was the latent apprehension. They knew one another when they were young, the pillars of the family, when there was such hope and potential in them. They still needed to cling to that connection, no matter how tenuous, in their very complicated relationship. All the old arguments had been argued ad infinitum, their differences hashed over ad nauseam to no avail, so a pragmatic détente was fashioned to preserve their coexistence. And they skirted around the minefield quite deftly. Most of the time, to be sure, as flare-ups persisted here and there, the occasional donnybrook still reared its vicious head.

One dreary Tuesday in February began unremarkably enough for the two, habit and routine clamping down the tenor of their day. Dolores stirred first from her bedroom at 6:30, descending to the kitchen for coffee and maple oatmeal made in a pot on the stove. Ambrose wakened to her clanging, remaining in bed planning his own more ample breakfast until he was sure she was done cooking. Dolores sat with her steaming bowl, gazing foggily out the window, when her brother arrived to begin cooking his breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. “Looks like rain coming in,” Ambrose muttered once in peering out the back door. “At least it’s not snow,” Dolores responded. This need to always feel grateful things could be worse was another trait of his sister’s that he despised. He thought of how she always said when people die, well, at least he’s out of his pain, or if they are suffering from a serious disease, well, at least he is still alive fighting it. Moreover, he concluded, that she ought to have known by now that he rather enjoyed a rainy day from time to time, and his comment was not necessarily a pejorative one. “Yes,” he said, “too warm for any snow. A very mild winter this one so far.” Dolores rose now to wash her bowl and spoon in the sink as Ambrose scooped out his eggs and bacon, removed his toast from the toaster, and moved towards his chair at the table. “Thank God,” Dolores said. “Oh, I always loved the snow. Kids play in it and it looks wonderful. I miss it actually.” His sister shook her head in disgust. “It kills people, plain and simple, and that is not so wonderful.” Ambrose ate his breakfast in silence, chastising himself for engaging with her at all. Then he popped outside to the front yard to retrieve the morning newspaper lying near the sidewalk. He knew she’d soon be doing the laundry in the basement, so he poured another cup of coffee and ensconced himself in his leather recliner to peruse the paper. But it wasn’t long before Dolores reappeared with the monstrosity of a vacuum cleaner blaring in his face. He knew she savored running the nozzle all over him and he also knew unless he succumbed early and moved, she’d nail him. But he also perceived that she would judge this abdication as weak and would claim another kind of victory in such a case. Unless he so convincingly ignored her vacuum strokes over his body and nonchalantly continued reading his paper, which would effectually neutralize her broadside. And this is what was transpiring this February morning when the doorbell rang.

Ambrose opened the front door to find a young man in his early twenties wearing plain brown work clothes which did not fit him properly. Too big and hastily put on, it appeared, as the disheveled fellow was looking away towards the street when Ambrose greeted him. “I am here to check the water,” he said, rather tentatively, betraying bewilderment on his face. Ambrose hesitated. “Are you with the water company?” he asked. The young man seemed to think about this a moment with a quizzical expression. “Why yes, of course, I am with the water company.” Ambrose heard his sister ask who was there, and he knew she’d insist on seeing the man’s ID before allowing him in because of all the warnings of crooks posing as service men. But he could not imagine the halting, diffident figure in front of him being there to rob them. And there was something singularly familiar about him too, so the two men were soon in the basement at the far wall behind the bar. “There is the meter,” Ambrose said with a turn of his head. He knew Dolores was at the top of the stairs waiting warily. The young man seemed distracted, uneasy, as he moved closer to the meter and stared oddly at the dials. “It looks good, sir, very good indeed. Levels are quite normal. But I would still like to test the fluoridation by tasting your water.” He kept staring into the dials as he spoke and Ambrose became startled when the meter momentarily lit up with intensely bright colorful lights. “What was that?!” he cried. The young man began away from the meter. Dolores called down if everything was okay. “That is a symptom, sir, that we have more to discover here…about your water.”

Ambrose poured him a tall glass of water from the kitchen sink and he and Dolores sat at the table watching him drink it. He took several big gulps and ostentatiously smacked his lips together trying to extract telltale taste from the water. Then came smaller sips with quick little mouth smacks, followed by washing around a mouthful and gargling. He asked for another glass and guzzled it straight down, and another to drink with a straw and a soup spoon. Then he knocked back a few more glasses while writing in a small notepad, presumably records of his findings. Dolores kept kicking her brother under the table, each time harder, signifying her increasing suspicions of their water man. Finally, she whispered in his ear that she was going to call the police in a minute. Ambrose shook his head and looked incredulously at her. The water man was now sprinkling drops of water onto his tongue and nodding to himself, though Ambrose could see the consternation come over him again and again. This was a troubled soul, he thought, and wondered why he felt like he knew him, like he understood his confusion and sense of distraction? “You don’t really work for the water company, do you?” he finally asked him. The water man sat up straight now, releasing his glass of water, and relief seemed to spread across his face. “No,” he confessed, “I do not.” Dolores frowned. “Well, why’d you come here? And who are you? I’m about to call the cops,” she insisted. “You don’t seem right, son. You look lost, mixed up,” Ambrose added. “Just tell us what this is.” The water man asked for a cup of coffee, Dolores reluctantly heated some up for him. Now he seemed somehow more of a nuisance than a threat to her. She also gave him a piece of her stollen. They watched him slurp his coffee as he ate. He complimented her stollen, noting that his mother always made it around Christmas. “So did ours,” Ambrose smiled. Then the water man grew pensive and inward and it was a minute or two before he began. “I think I must be a very sick man. I cannot remember what brought me here, only that they were chasing me and I knew this is where I belonged. A refuge I could hide in. I just came here like I was caught in the flow of a river.” Ambrose studied him intently, sipping his own coffee his sister brought him. “The water man came by river,” he murmured. “And who is chasing you?” The stranger shook his head, grimacing. “I wish I knew. But they’re always following me and they are hell-bent on destroying me. Very soon they will catch up with me. You are looking at a dead man.” His eyes turned inward. “Have you gone to the police?” Ambrose gently inquired. “I have no descriptions, names, nothing. They wouldn’t believe me.” Dolores piped up unceremoniously: “What about a psychiatrist? “ Ambrose bristled. “Don’t listen to her. Nobody’s dismissing your fear.” Dolores grew exasperated and blurted: “Where’s your family? I mean, when you get yourself in trouble, nobody is going to care or help you like your family.”

The water man rose and looked at his hosts. “You are wrong. Maybe for some it is true, but my family is like a vast lot of quicksand desperate to suck me under. You see, I come from a very large family and I still live at home and can’t seem to leave and every time I do they come looking for me or send people after me. My mother is all alone now except for my sister, and she needs me there. It may kill her if I leave. We are very close. My sister is bad, she can be quite destructive to her when they are alone. She is mentally unbalanced. I work for my older brother at his embroidery factory. I’m the bookkeeper and buyer. My life is a grind but I am trapped and cannot leave without guilt and morbid fear of flopping on my own as poetic justice for being selfish. I have a girlfriend whom I love but she wants to go to California to try to catch on in the movies. I’m afraid she’ll go without me if I keep stalling.” He stopped and gazed at Ambrose in a strange pleading way. “There, I told you my plight. I don’t know why. I’m not right, my head’s not right. I think I’m here because you can advise me. What should I do?” Before Ambrose could answer the water man dug out a huge mixing bowl from a cabinet and started filling it with water. He seemed to know exactly where it was. When the bowl was full, he placed it on the kitchen table. Ambrose became spellbound now, gazing upon the still surface in the clear glass as the water began turning brilliant dazzling colors that seemed to convey all the awe of time and space and the unknowable. Dolores could not see the colors, however, and now Dolores shouted that she was going to call the cops but her brother and the water man did not hear her, they were transported by the magical bowl, which now expanded until it was as big as the kitchen itself, hovering, and Dolores was livid, furious with a vengeance so mean she ran down to the basement and got out the watervac and soon she had it going with its execrable din of suction lowered into the bowl, where Ambrose and the water man, shrunken, were sailing around in an outboard motor boat, having a real blast as the water was calm and so kaleidoscopically beautiful and suddenly on that boat Ambrose had the most magnificent de ja vu of remembering this so perfectly as a dream of his younger days, only it was the younger man in the boat’s dream, the water man. I am the water man, Ambrose realized, the water man is me dreaming this all those years ago. I am the old man in the dream now. The water became rough and they heaved and pitched violently, submerging almost completely as the water man frantically struggled to steer them into safer waters. The splendor of unearthly color already faded from the water, as it turned inky, the terrible deafening drone of Dolores’ watervac ever draining the bowl and pulling the boat down. Ambrose knew their time was limited and there was so much he wanted to say to the water man, urgent counsel he needed to communicate. The boat heaved so badly it nearly capsized and they were bailing water with pails and the watervac drowned out any chance of being heard. But Ambrose had to advise him what to do, he shouted at his boat mate as best he could. The watervac grew louder and the force of its suction became overwhelming and Ambrose in one last brave attempt to say what he had to say lunged towards the water man and got as close as possible to shout: “You must by all means get out of that house! This house! Go to California with Marjorie! You love her! Go anywhere she goes! Siberia! Mongolia! Leave that house now and go with Marjorie! Marjorie! My darling! Wait for me, sweetheart!” But it was all lost in the ear-splitting drone and the mad pull, the water man could not have heard Ambrose at all, although he saw him shouting something his way as the boat tossed and heaved for one final time before the powerful suction of the watervac swallowed them under for good.

Ambrose found himself flat on his stomach, sprawled across the kitchen floor in soaking wet clothes. He was lying in a big puddle of water amid broken pieces of glass strewn around him. He managed to get himself on all fours and saw Dolores standing over him with her arms akimbo, shaking her head. “Well, I suppose you’re all right. Of all the dumb things—dropping that bowl of water while that dopey water man put on his little show for you,” she was saying now. “Where did he go? The water man,” Ambrose asked as he slowly rose to his feet, looking around. “Who, the screwball? He said he had to go to the bathroom and went upstairs. He must be still up there. Go see, so I can clean your mess up here.” Ambrose looked high and low, but there was no trace of the water man upstairs or in the attic or anywhere in the house. He never heard me, he repeated to himself, he must have woken up. Yes, of course, and then gone back to sleep. Whatever the case, the water man was most certainly gone. Ambrose put on some dry clothes and went outside for a walk. He was still quite shaken and needed some air and exercise to think straight. It still looked like rain, he thought he felt a drop. So much of growing old is dreamlike, he thought, the line between real and surreal in the mind becomes blurrier. One lives largely in the past, often an unreliable past at that. But this was something else. He could not fathom it. He began reminiscing about his old flame, Marjorie Theroux, the only woman he ever truly loved. She never really left his mind, but long ago had moved to the shadowy outskirts. Now he envisaged her once more, her lustrous blond coils, pretty blue eyes, her stunning beauty. He heard her lovely happy laugh again. He remembered how they’d walk holding hands on these same streets more than fifty years ago. He saw the bower by some woodland where he’d sometimes steal a kiss from her. He walked by the soda shop they used to frequent, now a drug store. It was drizzling lightly now. He remembered whole conversations, the songs of the day they sang, old friends of theirs, the parties. He thought about the day she left, when they parted with a long hug and kiss at the train station. There was some vague plan that he’d meet up with her in the months ahead in California. But neither of them really believed that he would. Ambrose thought about all this now and began to cry. He was heartbroken and deeply pained with regret. He never saw Marjorie again. Bittersweet were his memories, but he was glad he had them. In fact, he cherished them. He realized now that they were all he had to prove that he had lived.

The End

Blade Runner and the Future of Photography

by Drew Martin
I recently rewatched Blade Runner, the 1982 neo-noir sci-fi film set in a gritty and untypically rainy Los Angeles in 2019. I looked at the use of photography in the film and was a bit surprised. For one thing, I did not see anyone taking pictures in the whole movie; not even during the amazing chase and shooting/Rasputin-like death scene of Zhora, the semi-naked exotic snake dancer. People would be all over that in 2012 but nobody has a smartphone in 2019.

In 1982 photography was still an entirely analog medium and video was king. So what we see in Blade Runner are boxy clusters of small multi-monitor video stations, including the setup used to record the psychological profile test of Leon Kowalski, one of the skin-jobs - replicants who are visually indistinguishable from humans.

The primary role of photography in Blade Runner is that of memory. This is a play on how the medium was viewed at the time; photography equals the past, which is quite different than what it has become in this era of social media; showing I am right here, right now.

The replicants (Zhora the snake dancer was one too) are used for pleasure and labor on off-world colonies. Predicting wayward and rebellious units, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the genius creator of the replicants and the head of the Tyrell Corporation, builds in a fail-safe: a four-year lifespan. This short existence has tragic consequences. The replicants do not emotionally develop like humans and they are desperate to extend their fleeting lives.

Tyrell experiments by implanting his niece's memories into a new unit, his assistant Rachael, and he does not tell her she is not human. Rachael falls in love with Deckard, a Blade Runner - a special detective used to hunt down and kill deviant replicants. Back at his place, she shows him a picture of Tyrell's niece as a little girl and explains that it is a picture of her with her mother. In another scene she plays the piano from the implanted memories, and reaches for a photograph of someone from Deckard's past (pictured here, left top).

An interesting twist on photography is in one of the most classic scenes in the film. Deckard takes a photograph (with Vermeer lighting) from Leon's apartment. He scans it back at his place and enhances the hell out of it, as if the image has labyrinthal memory/resolution within it. At the end of the scene, he prints out a hardcopy with Polaroid framing.

Jerome Klapka Jerome and the PO-PO

by Drew Martin

I heard this joke when I was in Poland: A doctor delivering babies all day in a busy hospital, whacks every tenth newborn on the head with a wooden mallet. His perplexed nurse finally asks him why he does it and he explains, "We need more police officers."

The police are ridiculed in most parts of the world but, for some reason, are glamorized by the entertainment industry in the United States. I loved watching CHiPs as a kid so I was totally disappointed when I moved out to Santa Barbara for college and saw the California Highway Patrol in shorts hiding behind citrusy bushes on mountain bikes, waiting to give moving violation tickets to students who guilelessly pedaled by them on the concrete footpaths of my campus. The most outrageous example of this kind of shamelessness involved my roommate who rode his bicycle home from a party with one too many drinks in him. He slipped off his pedal, face-planted on his handlebars, lost three of his front teeth and had to go to the hospital to stop all the bleeding in his mouth. When the surgeon finished stitching him up, a couple of police officers entered the emergency room and slapped him with a ticket for "drunk driving" and even suspended his actual automobile drivers license for six months.

I had always defended the NYPD because I thought of them as real crime stoppers. Maybe the term hero got thrown around too much after 9/11 and devalued our expectations of them but they seem to have become quite petty recently. Just the other day a baby-faced "officer Kennedy" pulled me aside and gave me a summons on the subway. This young hall monitor and his pal ate it up and detained me for 20 minutes. The situation even got sillier when another doughy recruit pulled up on a Segway. During this time they also started harassing a poor young guy from Africa who didn't speak a word of English and was scared out his wits. He became very distraught and almost threw himself in front of a train because of how they treated him.

Let's say I have to pay the fine if they don't accept my mail-in statement. The encounter at least stirred up a memory of my grandfather and gave it new meaning. My mother's father was a real Virginian. The only thing I remember him saying about New York City was how much he hated it; particularly because of an encounter with an "Irish cop." This always confused me because he was part Irish. Actually that's an understatement; his maternal grandfather, Patrick, from Ireland was born on St. Patrick's Day and died on St. Patrick's Day. So this situation allowed me to switch from trying to understand what might have happened to my grandfather, to feeling his presence (in a sense) with PO Kennedy.

At this point I could have justified the value of the fine to share a lost, precious moment with my grandfather, but then it got better. Jerome Klapka Jerome flashed into my mind. This guy wrote with such modern wit and presence that it is hard to believe he penned his works more than 100 years ago. Jerome is most known for Three Men in a Boat but I liked better Three Men on the Bummel. A bummel is a journey with no specific destination, length or ending. He goes on a bummel by bicycle with two mates from England through the Black Forest in Germany. It is the 1900 equivalent of British guys who fly over on a few pounds to Prague for a weekend stag party, wearing only their underwear.

Jerome approaches unlawful conduct as a matter of recreation within a desired budget:

Now, in Germany, on the other hand, trouble is to be had for the asking. There are many things in Germany that you must not do that are quite easy to do. To any young Englishman yearning to get himself into a scrape, and finding himself hampered in his own country, I would advise a single ticket to Germany; a return, lasting as it does a month, might prove a waste...

In the Police Guide of the Fatherland he will find set forth a list of things the doing of which will bring to him interest and excitement. In Germany you must not hang your bed out of your window. He might begin with that. By waving his bed out of the window he could get into trouble before he had his breakfast. At home he might hang himself out a window, and nobody would mind much, provided he did not obstruct anybody's ancient lights or break away and injure any passer underneath....

This is the charm of the German law: misdemeanour in Germany has its fixed price. You are not kept awake all night, as in England, wondering whether you will get off with caution, be fined forty shillings, or, catching the magistrate in an unhappy moment for yourself, get seven days. You know exactly what your fun is going to cost you. You can spread out your money on the table, open your Police Guide, and plan out your holiday to a fifty pfennig piece. For a really cheap evening, I would recommend walking on the wrong side of the pavement after being cautioned not to do so. I calculate that by choosing your district and keeping to quiet side-streets you could walk for a whole evening on the wrong side of the pavement at a cost of little over three marks.

So if, for example, you piss on the street in New York, the cop whose attention you rouse is supposed to give you a summons with a hundred dollar fine. That's a really expensive nature break and you will probably be distraught if you get it unintentionally. On the other hand, if you want to make a film about urinating in public, you can get some cameras rolling, pee anywhere you like and soon enough one or two men will show up in police uniforms (maybe even on a Segway), accost you, give you a summons and then let you go. That's it. The acting and script is provided for you by the police. If you pay the fine by the court date, which will be a month away from your stunt, it does not appear on your record. You do not even need to appear in court if you pay by mail within 15 days.

Writing and Directing Sculpture, and the Failure of Communication

by Drew Martin

My very first post to this blog more than three and a half years ago was Synesthetic Interpretations: Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. The article was originally published shortly after Clarke's death in the Czech art magazine, Umělec with the title Writing and Directing Sculpture. The text was locked up in a black rectangle like a monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although the text of the magazine article and the blog post is the same, the magazine title emphasizes the idea that the monoliths, which helped creatures intellectually and emotionally evolve on Earth, were not unlike the objects of art that influence us on a much deeper level then our sensory interactions. The blog title focuses on Kubrick's creative and conceptual leaps.

I was always kind of proud of this article but I was just told by a friend that I have it all wrong. Kubrick did not work from Clarke's book, they developed the screenplay together while Clarke concurrently developed the book on his own. A starting point for all of this was Clarke's short story, The Sentinel, written two decades earlier, in 1948.

The Kubrick show at LACMA and the buzz around it got me thinking about all of this again. Perhaps my theme should have been about synesthetic interpretations by both men of a shared vision. That being said, Kubrick does it three years later with A Clockwork Orange based on Anthony Burgess' novel. Moments that Burgess triggers with names and words, are detonated by Kubrick with sounds and music.

There is a quick interview with Woody Allen on YouTube in which he talks about his evolved understanding and appreciation of 2001. I watched 2001 again the other day and was actually a little disappointed this time around. I followed it up with the 2002/George Clooney version of Solaris.

Solaris is a 1961 sci fi novel by the Polish author, Stanisław Lem. It was published in English in 1970 and turned into a film in 1972 by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky as a response to Kubrick's 2001. While 2001 is certainly an American theme of the solitude of exploration, Lem's story is more philosophical, with a European existential pang. It is about the failure of communication between humans and an extraterrestrial life form.

Memory as Media

by Drew Martin

I have written several times before about dreams as media and about media as memory but I have never written about memory as media. All of us remember moments of our past several times a day and it is with great fondness that we recall pleasant memories, but I am not sure many people access their memory the same way one might engage with an iPod or website.

My house lost power today so I went to get some ice from the store. On the way there I stopped by the post office, plugged in my phone and computer, and twiddled my thumbs as I waited for these devices to charge. There was that first reaction; to wish I had brought a magazine or book to pass the time but then I settled back in the folding chair and thought about my memories of the post office.

My first memory of the post office was when I was with my mom as a kid. I could not see over the counter and was very frustrated by this so I asked her to pick me up, and she did. I was amazed by the depth and the activity of the place. My other great memory is from a time when I worked at a farm stand in California. I closed up at sunset and then would ride my bike a dozen miles into the mountains to where I was staying. I would stop by my P.O. box in Santa Barbara and grab my mail on the way home. It was a solitary time and it was always dark out when I went to the post office after hours; nobody was ever there. At that time I had a cartoon strip running in the fledgling The Stranger out of Seattle so I was always delighted when I found the latest issue stuffed in my box. I would put it in my bag, ride up into the Santa Ynez mountains in darkness and curl up in my little bed and read it as I fell asleep.

Heekyoung Song Style

by Drew Martin
Heekyoung Song is a media artist and curator I have gotten to know over the past year. She explores digital media and creates two-dimensional works on the computer, sometimes incorporating sound and video for interactive installations. We discussed her paintings at a recent show Edition Over Original that she curated and which included my work. We spent some time on the idea of finding the right combination of art and technology.

Two of her paintings that were hung side by side contained a young cartoonish girl, an Alice of sorts in a wonderland of candies, which are sugar-coated symbols of stress and other issues. In one of the paintings, Alice is completely computer drawn. In another painting, she is hand drawn, scanned and altered on the computer. The difference is that the hand-drawn Alice is more emotional, deeper, closer to what Heekyoung is trying to achieve in her balance of original work and duplication. The challenge is that she is creating work for a fine art audience with a look that suggests something more commercial.

I like to discuss Heekyoung’s work with her because she appreciates an honest opinion and becomes very serious and contemplative, like she is deciding the fate of her future work, but she is always quick to laugh at different ideas and directions she could take.

We talk about the difference between having a persona such as her Alice as a motif versus a character and adventures she could go on. I suggest that she takes Alice beyond the motif and turn her into a true character with a storyline. I offer that this guileless Alice could wander into North Korea and create situations based on her naïveté and the misunderstanding of the people she meets. Heekyoung kids me for trying to steer her into another conversation about North Korea. So I changed the subject and asked her what Koreans think about Japanese culture. She says that they are very serious, while Koreans, she offers are warmer, “We are more emotional, like Italians.”

Cromo-Mania! at the Boston Athenaeum

by Drew Martin

The term museum denotes a place or temple dedicated to the muses. In a parallel universe the institution that cradles history, humanity and aesthetics is the Athenaeum, which refers to the temple of Athena, daughter of Zeus and the virgin goddess of reason, intelligent activity, arts and literature.

I counted 27 clubs, cultural centers, museums and performance halls around the world that refer to themselves as an Athenaeum; 16 of which are in the United States. Compare this to ICOM's (International Council of Museums) estimate of 55,000 museums in 202 countries, and the ALA's (American Library Association) estimate of 121,785 libraries in the United States.

Last week I visited The Boston Athenaeum, which was founded in 1807 and is considered the birthplace of public libraries and museums in the United States. The Athenaeum has a wonderful exhibition in the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery through mid-January titled: Chromo-Mania! The Art of Chromolithography in Boston, 1840 -1910.

According to the press release, the term chromo-mania "was first coined in the 1860s to ridicule America's insatiable appetite for chromolithographs, a new technology as ubiquitous and popluar as the iPod is today."

This printing printing process requires separate stones for color separation. L. Prang and Company's pictures of ceramics in the exhibition are so crisp and detailed that you would swear you are looking at color photography. A framed K’ang-Hsi Vase Decorated in Colors from 1897 is hung above a massive book that shows the mind-boggling progression of how the image is created with 27 stones.

Chromolithography worked its way into the art world through reproductions and was the modern look of advertisements at the time. What I found most interesting, however, was its importance to a scientific community that valued drawing not only for a way to transcribe the magic of nature but considered it essential to the art of observation. Chromolithography was able to convey the nuances of color found in the natural world at a time when scientists complained about the "great errors" of black and white prints.

Pictured here are plates from William Sharp's lithographic series for John Fiske Allen's tome Victoria Regia: The Great Water Lily of America. 

Here: Lost in Love

by Drew Martin
I recently watched Here, which is a wonderful film that explores the crossroads and landscapes of human relationships, and how travel brings and takes away loved ones.

The movie follows Will Shepard, a satellite-mapping engineer from Northern California who is "ground-truthing" his way around Armenia on a cartography contract. He meets Gadarine Najarian, a young Armenian photographer who, after living abroad, has reluctantly returned to her family and homeland. The relationship between Will and Gadarine is unremarkable, if not commonplace between young travellers from different backgrounds. This romantic serendipity has been played out in films such as Once and Before Sunrise. That being said, this is a realistic bond and the actors were cast well and perform well.

What sets this film apart is the exploration of Armenia and the layering of metaphor of maps and images of the land. When Will and Gadarine go off the path for an intimate swim in a tucked away canyon, she tells him to leave this place off the map.

Will and Gadarine are modern incarnations of ancient, timeless characters. Will is digital and of the sky, always looking upwards and seeking validation from the satellite gods who leave him cryptic messages on his computer about whether or not his work is of value. Gadarine is analog and of the Earth, taking pictures of children and places from the perspective of a woman on the ground. She shoots 35mm film, as well as Polaroid for instant feedback. In the final scene, Gadarine awakes to an empty bed after Will has been called back to San Francisco. In the dim light she finds and open map of the region, which is peppered with her photographs, notes and mementos that Will has placed there. It is a union of this couple; the aerial god-like view of her land, made mortal with details of their time together. It says that a map is only a map, and while their relationship started with a joke that each other was a spy, and led to criticism that Will's work would open the area up to politicians and mafia, the detail one really seeks in an area is of humanity, not topographical precision.

Here also plays nicely with time. Will is on a schedule but is constantly challenged by earthly things: human interactions, love and car problems. Gadarine's sense of time is off. In one early scene she wakes up and asks her brother what time it is. He looks at three clocks on the coffee table next to her and reads their faces: "6:32, 4:08, 22:12. Take you pick." Perhaps it is a comment about things not functioning in Armenia, or at least not being defined by time, but this works as a metaphor for Gadarine trying to get readjusted to the pace of Armenia, equating time zones with culture zones. It is also a symbol of her biological clock. Most women her age, like a friend she and Will visit, are married with children. Meeting at a certain time, and waiting are explored as matters of trust, jealousy and respect.

Click Here to watch the trailer.

Three Days at Sea: The Story In Which A Story Swims

by Drew Martin

The question "Where were you when JFK was shot?" or "Where were you on 9/11?" takes a public event from a specific place and turns it into a ubiquitous but personal encounter. This is quite different than an experience with media, especially books. No one ever asked me "Where were you when you read The Diary of Anne Frank?" but it is an interesting question. Your age, place and state of mind when you experience a certain work of literature has quite an influence on how you absorb and remember it.

In my mid-twenties, the relationship that I had reluctantly boarded, shipwrecked and I found myself adrift in a vast, pacific ocean of solitude. I did not try to swim to land or search for other ships on the horizon. Instead, I sat on my flotsam and passed the time reading one book for three days straight: Moby Dick.

I was residing in a city of 150,000 people in Sudetenland and the only other native English speaker was a Canadian who I rarely saw. The feeling that I had when I finished reading Moby Dick was as if I had been washed ashore; spit up on the beach. So I stood up on that sandy stretch between fiction and reality and walked into town. Coincidentally, I met the Canadian on the street and we made our way to the nearest pub. We found a table on the second-floor balcony, which felt like the bow of a ship on that breezy summer day. The Canadian had a Masters in English literature and was a Herman Melville enthusiast. What luck! We sat there for a couple hours, sipping from our golden beers, recounting the tale of Ishmael, like two sailors land-locked from the sea of our language.

I've Got Your Nose

By Drew Martin
I love the game parents and siblings play with young kids in which they act like they steal the youngster's nose and then claim to possess it as a wriggling thumb sandwiched between their own fingers. It is an absurd gimmick and the fake dismembering leads to a deepening of the farce such as eating the nose or throwing it out the window.

I never paid much attention to John Baldessari's work but I have been thinking about his isolation of the nose, as he does in God Nose from 1965 (top image) and Noses & Ears, Etc.: Head (with Nose) from 2006 (bottom image). I typically try to find out the motivation behind a work but I feel like Baldessari is about something different; that it is on me to bring the details to his images. So I thought about the childish nose-stealing game, and the gold and silver fake nose that the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe wore after losing his real nose in a duel. It would come off when he sneezed and he took it off at 16th-century parties to get laughs. I thought about noses that snorted snuff and cocaine through the ages, and I remembered back to high school when classmates were given nose-jobs as presents from their parents.

To bring more meaning to Baldessari's noses, I rewatched Sleeper yesterday morning. Woody Allen plays Miles Monroe, who is cryogenically frozen in 1973 and defrosted 200 years later. The movie winds down with a comic scene of Allen and Keaton who pose as doctors in order to thwart a regime. They are supposed to clone a totalitarian leader from all that remains of him, his nose. Instead, they steal the nose, escape from a locked-down facility with a fake gun pointed at it and assassinate the remains of the leader by throwing the nose under a steamroller.

Last night I reread Nikolai Gogol's short story, The Nose, which he wrote in the mid 1830's and is a precursor of magical realism. In the first chapter, a Russian barber finds a client's nose in his breakfast roll. In the second chapter, the client, Major Kovalyov, awakes without his nose and spends some time tracking it down and confronting it, after it has taken on a life of its own. A policeman eventually returns the nose but Kovalyov is unable to attach it.  In the third and final chapter, Kovalyov awakes with his nose affixed and promenades around St. Petersburg to show it off.

The word for nose in Russian is Нос, spelled backwards it is Сон, which means "dream." There is a version of the story in which nose is substituted with a blank, so reader can interpret the dismemberment as an implied castration, which actually makes the story much more entertaining and more plausible since the character is emasculated by the loss. This also sheds light on an exchange of letters in the second chapter between Kovalyov and the mother of a woman she wants him to marry. He accuses her of stealing his body part but her response informs him that she is innocent.

Odd as it may sound, if you substitute nose with penis in this story, it becomes more believable, or at least easier to visualize. I have a harder time picturing a nose in Kovalyov's descriptions, such as his first encounter with the detached organ:

After two minutes or so, the nose emerged from the house. He wore a gold-braided, brightly colored uniform, buckskin breeches, a three-cornered hat, and a saber. The plumes on his hat indicated the rank of a state councilor. From everything else it could be inferred that he was setting off on some sort of official visit. He looked left, then right, called out to the coachman to bring the carriage up to the very door, got in and was off. 

The Double Hour

by Drew Martin
Yesterday I watched La Doppia Ora (The Double Hour), which is about a Slovenian chambermaid, Sonia, and an Italian ex-cop/security guard, Guido, who meet speed-dating in Turin. Their brief relationship is interrupted by an art heist during which Sonia takes a bullet to the head and goes into a coma. What follows is the surfacing of her double-life.

Double Hour refers to an hour/minute match (i.e. 10:10) when, according to Guido, you are supposed to make a wish. In this film it is used as the moment in which a double-life overlaps. Romantic thrillers are not my cup of tea but the twisted plot got me thinking about the history of the narrative. In a typical story, the reader/audience is teased along until the conclusion. The director holds the reins in plays and theater-movies, but controllable media such as books and online films, give the viewer control and the narrative is more vulnerable.

One of my English professors in college suggested we first read the last chapter of a novel in order to appreciate how the author structures the story. It was common in Greek plays for the audience to know more than the characters; the thrill of suspense was to see the reaction of the actors to their revelations. This is quite the opposite of today's productions, which try to surprise us in the unraveling of multi-layered stories. Shakespeare does both with plays such as Measure for Measure, in which the audience is as clueless as most of the characters for the first part but is let in on the secret for the grand finale.

There are landmark movies such as Memento that raise the bar of plot twists but these are simply extensions of detective stories. What La Doppia Ora reminded me of was not another movie but of the time I was drugged and mugged by a French woman and an Austrian man in Valencia after spending the day with them. They had earned my trust and then revealed their plot to me in the act of the mugging.

Once I was held at knife point on the old 42nd Street while a friend was mugged in front of me. As far a narrative goes, the 42nd Street incident was a simple story line, like slap-stick. The mugging in Spain was something very different; it was a well developed and multi-layered plot. It felt like I was part of psychological thriller, especially when I went to the police to report the incident and they laughed and said, "What do you want us to do, give your money back to you?"

What I began to understand yesterday is that these complicated movie plots are not simply a bag of tricks to hold the viewers' attention but they are actually a cross section of reality which is stratified by individual perspectives that overlap with levels of understanding, misunderstanding, truths and lies. A horror film pushes our flight and fight buttons, but a romantic thriller such as La Doppia Ora affects us at a higher level and challenges the rationale we use to navigate through deception. I just wonder how much of the current interest in the multi-twisted plot is a reaction to an era where information is so accessible and exposed.

Lagerkvist's Dwarf and the Vulgarians

by Drew Martin
Dwarf is a small word, which describes a small person but it supersizes anyone who owns it as a verb; to dwarf someone or something. The extremes of this term are exhausted by Pär Lagerkvist in his novel, The Dwarf, which is set in undefined Italian states during the Renaissance. Lagerkvist published this story in 1944 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951.

The Dwarf is considered Lagerkvist's greatest novel but it is such a vile narration that you want it to end as soon as the main character gets under your skin. Piccoline is the 26-inch tall court fetish of a prince's family. He hates everyone and everything. Hatred is the core of his personality and the boundary of philosophy. He confesses,

"It is difficult to understand those whom one does not hate..."

Lagerkvist's Dwarf is an analysis of man but unlike Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire's Candide or Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince, this book is not a globe-trotting adventure to size up man to an array of characters. Instead, Piccoline serves as the omnipresent outsider surveying the world around him with biting commentary.

"Human beings need flattery; otherwise they do not fulfill their purpose, not even in their own eyes. And both the present and the past contain much that is beautiful and noble which, without due praise, would have been neither noble nor beautiful."

After 70 pages, Piccoline joins his prince on a military campaign and drags us through a lot of muck until he returns to his castle. He poisons peacemongering enemies at a feast and then his city falls under siege, which festers from the inside out with the plague. The first 70 pages are the most interesting because the reader discovers how far this character can go, especially after he decapitates a kitten in the arms of a sleeping girl.

Lagerkvist makes a lot of vague references to people and places but the most obvious is Maestro Bernardo as Leonardo da Vinci. He sketches impaled heads, designs great weapons of war, paints The Last Supper, and dissects cadavers, which Piccoline describes in one line as "ferreting in Francesco's body." Dissection is an appropriate motif for this book. Piccoline is repulsed by the rank innards of humans, but he slices open the belly of man with his sharp tongue and lets the entrails spill out.

There are many trollish mythological creatures, and characters such as Shakespeare's Puck that are in Piccoline's blood, but the most relevant predecessors for me are two paintings. The first, and most historically and geographically aligned is Bronzino's 1553 depiction of the famed dwarf Morgante, a jester to the Medici court (top image). Piccoline describes a moment when he is stripped in the most violating and humiliating manner by Bernardo for a life study. It also is telling of a passage when he is offended by a strumpet's underarm hair and explains that any body hair other than that on one's head is repulsive. Unfortunately, Bronzino's dwarf shows nothing of Piccoline's causticity, which is overflowing in Velázquez's The Dwarf Sebastian de Morra, from 1645 (second from top image). The exquisite outfit is also fitting for a passage in which Piccoline explains that his clothes are cut from the same cloth as the prince's garments.

Could these paintings have influenced Lagerkvist's character? I know very little about this witty author, but think he took great joy in sampling and assembling his characters and story from many sources. His own commentary of great art through the eyes of Piccoline is most poignant in the description of Bernardo's portrait of the princess, the unnamed Mona Lisa.

"He has painted her exactly as she is, like a middle-aged whore. It is really like her, diabolically so. The voluptuous face with the heavy eyelids and the vague lustful smile, everything is like her."

On the flip side of this influence, I tried to think of a more modern character that is the best incarnation of Lagerkvist's dwarf. Surprisingly, it is Quark, a Ferengi in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine (bottom image). He is one of the most developed characters from all of the shows. The Ferengi are dwarf-like and share Piccoline's view of humans as vulgarians. The only great difference is that Ferengi love women, while Piccoline explains that if he could ever love a human, it would be a man's man.

One thing I have neglected to explain, is that while dwarfs are of course human beings, Piccoline tells us otherwise when he speaks about his "ancient" race,

"We dwarfs have no homeland, no parents; we allow ourselves to be born of strangers, anywhere in secret, among the poorest and the most wretched, so that our race should not die out."

This otherness...this suspended diaspora is certainly a comment on the times; Lagerkvist finished this book at the end of World War II. The dwarf could be a Jewish man, or a gypsy, but he is often the persecuted homosexual. Most of the time he is simply a civilian caught up in the worst of humanity. When the enemy guests are first received at the castle, he protests with an absurd rant that Lagerkvist must have only felt for the pointlessness of war,

"I think the world has gone mad! Lasting peace! Nor more war! What flummery, what childishness! Do they think they can change the cosmic system? What conceit! And what infidelity toward the past and the great traditions!...And then there will be nothing left to put a limit to the bottomless pride and arrogance of mankind."

Lagerkvist's dwarf is a simple character with a very complicated relationship to his author/creator. Piccoline explains how the dwarf jester is seen as the buffoon but points out that the real buffoons are the court poets and philosopher's with their profound meditations on life. This passage can be expanded to include the reader of the book. He is our narrator jester and while we laugh at his ways and limited thoughts he is really setting us up for a farce we are central to. His praises are the real critiques and his thoughts that are shallow on the first read are really quite profound.

"Love is something which dies and when dead rots and becomes soil for a new love. Then the dead love continues its secret life in the living one, and thus in reality there is no death in love."

EAST vs. WEST: The Graffiti Paintings of Gajin Fujita

by Drew Martin

I went to Japan several years ago looking for unique illustrations. What I found was a lot of run-of-the-mill anime. What I was seeking was actually much closer to home, in America. The paintings of Gajin Fujita sample Eastern and Western imagery and use materials ranging from spray paint to gold leaf.

Fujita is tagged as a Los Angeles graffiti artist and even though he was a member of graffiti crews it sounds a bit too rogue for someone who went to a select arts magnet high school, has a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and an MFA from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Fujita shows his work in museums and galleries all over the world, and sells his pieces for tens of thousands of dollars. His 2011 solo show, Made in L.A. at LA Louver was preceded by the Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight stating he is "the most important 21st Century iteration of graffiti's influence on art." 

I still associate graffiti with the rock-bottom New York of my youth. Like most once-taboo things, such as tattoos and body piercings, graffiti was reserved for wayward punks. The question is whether Fujita was the East LA Prometheus who stole the fire from the street and brought it to the world of fine arts or whether graffiti, like other inner city phenomena, including rap music, simply found its own way from its gritty breeding grounds into the mainstream where it has become safely popularized and is now adored by collectors.

While defacing property is still a crime, the graffiti style grew beyond itself long ago. There have been decades of recognition and sponsors and graffiti has already been embraced by advertising, merchandising and corporate branding. That being said, and despite having been raised with reputable Japanese parents in sunny California, what I like about Fujita is that he has drummed up the virility of his culture in an era when the sex and violence of Japan have been packaged through anime and filtered through a culture of cute, as well as peculiar perversities.

Gajin's fornications and altercations are unbridled and raw. They are not the quirky-fetishes of Japanese businessmen who buy unwashed panties of teenage girls from vending machines or about fighting in some kind of game environment. This is Shogun sex and violence, slicing through bodies like a samurai sword.

It is an interesting idea, that this satellite and middle-aged Japanese "kid" is perhaps more in touch with the vibe of his ancestors than his counterparts in Japan. If you look at Takashi Murakami, for example, his work starts with pop and ends with pop. Even Murakami's very sexual pieces, such as "My Lonesome Cowboy," a life-size sculpture of smooth, young man offering up a thick swirl of his ejaculation, are still presented as cartoon manifestations.

I have heard it said before that the "cute" culture of Japan is a subconscious and humbled response to the WWII nuclear blasts the nation suffered. Fujita, however, grew up on US soil in a culture that was once persecuted in America and although he is now part of a respected minority, he knows the downside of being one. There are no polite maneuvers with Fujita. He reaches back to dominant Edo period imagery and the power of sexuality.

The East versus West dialogue for Japan is not simply Europe and America versus Asia but an internal polarity as well. Tokyo and Kyoto actually stand for Eastern Capital and Western Capital. In Fujita's painting EAST vs. WEST, the jousting warriors are marked with symbols of America's eastern and western cultural capitals, New York and Los Angeles, by using the team logos for the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This rivalry is just as pronounced in almost every other aspect of American culture. It is Hollywood versus Broadway, LA hip versus NY cool fashion and many decades of artworld comparisons. That being said, Fujita's EAST vs. WEST is really East and West. The graffiti style Fujita uses originates from the East Coast - Philadelphia and New York, but the imagery is first and foremost Japanese, which he mixes with western icons such as Bugs Bunny only to bring us back to Asian culture with the title, Year of the Rabbit.

The 2007 documentary, Bomb It, about the global phenomenon of graffiti, does not mention Fujita but there is an interview with the Los Angeles artist Robbie Conal who explains that California is seen as a superficial place but what the world does not understand is that Californians are "deeply superficial." If graffiti is a superficial art, Fujita’s paintings are certainly deeply superficial.

Ultimate Simplicity Leads to Purity: Jiro Dreams of Sushi

by Drew Martin
I just watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is a wonderful documentary about Jiro Ono, a left-handed, master sushi chef in his 80s. His restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro,  has a Michelin 3-star rating (the highest recognition in the culinary world). Reservations are made a month in advance and customers pay more than $300 a plate, which makes it the most expensive restaurant in the world per minute for the patrons who might spend only 15 minutes there. The restaurant is in Tokyo (no surprise) but it is underground in a subway station corridor where you might typically find a shoe shine or magazine stand. It only has 10 seats and it does not have a restroom.

Jiro is a stickler. Apprentices are first taught to squeeze hot towels for the clients, then slice fish, and after ten years they are permitted to grill eggs. One young chef said he made hundreds for months, and all of them were rejected.

Jiro was independent since the age of nine. He says that kids whose parents tell them they are always welcome to come back home if the do not 'make it' will be failures. He recommends saying 'this will never be your home again' when they set out for the world.

The food critic Masuhiro Yamamoto sums up Jiro with the phrase "Ultimate simplicity leads to purity" and he says that Jiro has the five qualities of a great chef:

1. taking work seriously

2. aspiring to improve

3. cleanliness

4. leading instead of collaborating

5. passion

Although most of the film is shot in restaurant and at the fish market, this is not ultimately a foodie flick with a world-travel agenda. It is about being good at what you do. Jiro recommends immersing yourself in your work, falling in love with your work, mastering your skill and never complaining about what you do.

The style of the documentary is simple and well constructed. I like how the subtitles are positioned specific to the speaker. There are comparisons of Jiro's preparations to an orchestrated experience, so there is a sound track to match with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Max Richter and Philip Glass.

The title, Jiro Dreams of Sushi comes from a moment in the film when Jiro speaks about how he actually dreams of making sushi in his sleep. Click here to watch the trailer.