Peacekeeping

by Drew Martin
A neighbor came over Saturday night with a bottle of wine to catch up on life, because we have not seen each other in a while. She is originally from South Korea, so I pulled out an album of pictures that my uncle took when he was there on a peacekeeping mission for the army in the mid-1960s. The album is actually a 1965 desk calendar of Korea. He placed his photographs on the dates pages, opposite the full-color calendar image for each week.

My uncle died in a car accident a couple years after returning to America, a couple years before I was born. I have only had the album for a year but I have looked at it many times. This time, however, one picture caught my eye; an American family (parents, and a young boy and a young girl) standing outside their house in a southern region of the peninsula. I took it out of the book and noticed that my uncle wrote the date, their last name and the location on the back of the photograph. I Googled this information and (in a matter of seconds) found an article written by the boy in the picture (now a man in his 50s) about this period of his life. He was born and spent his childhood in Korea because his parents were missionaries.

Since Saturday night, I have corresponded with the "kids" in the photograph, and the album is en route to the sister's home, where she will show it to their mother. There were several pictures that will bring back memories for them, and even though I do not know much about my uncle, more important than this keepsake is knowing that this family was a slice of home for him. I remember being abroad in my 20s and meeting such families and thinking, "I want this some day too." I believe this family inspired my uncle because after he returned to America, he prepared to go back overseas and teach English and do missionary work in Afghanistan.

I snapped some pictures of the album spreads before I sent it, and noticed that my uncle had established a relational display of his photographs to the calendar images. Sometimes his pictures almost mimic the professional shots. Other times they are (obviously) more personal and detailed, such as a picture of him rappelling from a mountain that is shown in the calendar. Many of the arrangements are humorous, such as (top) a picture of his buddies on a summit, opposite two pretty women who appear to be checking them out (wishful thinking).

There are also a couple arrangements that are insightful and have more meaningful social commentary. In one spread (middle) his pictures of a bunker, from inside out, are opposite an ornate Korean interior. His exterior shot of the bleak bunker is placed just above the caption for the color image, "The throne of the Yi Dynasty kings, suffering from desuetude but not from regal grandeur."

Perhaps the spread that is most poignant (bottom) is one with a picture of a lone woman washing pots, above an image of several women hunched over, toiling in a rice paddy. It is opposite a sexy/sexist picture of a catwalk of Korean beauties in their swimsuits. The caption for the show, which appears just below the paddy image is "Miss Korea hopefuls take to bathing suits to display their physical charms."

It Rained So Hard Last Night, I Thought The World Was Coming To An End

by Drew Martin

It rained so hard last night, I thought the world was coming to an end. The rain was so intense that it flooded my dreams. I dreamed that I decided to take a train from California to Malaysia. The train started on land but quickly moved out into the stormy ocean. At first the tracks were just beneath the surface, and the train maintained traction, but then the tracks dropped off and the train whipped around in the twisted waters like an eel. The ride was harrowing and just when I thought we were goners, the train pulled into a station. The port was called Bonn but even though it seemed like a modern, German place, how could it be? It was nighttime when I stepped off the train. A light was on in a small house across the street, and a second-floor window revealed a young, naked, baltic couple taking a shower together. They turned out to be a scene playing on a large plasma television. I did not want to continue on the trip. I wanted to return, with hopes of making it back before midnight so I spoke to the conductor. She agreed to my request and offered to refund my ticket. She began to fumble rectangular coins in her purse but could not find the right amount. I expressed fear of going farther and she spoke about fatal voyages on this way that had earned special names. She recalled "The Flame" a train of homeless men, which caught on fire and sank. A young American woman also wanted to return, and it seemed certain that we would.

Any City, All the Details

by Drew Martin

I recently saw a conversation on Facebook about Los Angeles as a good place to live and work as an artist. The comments developed into a dialogue about what certain cities have to offer. The thread was started by an LA-based artist who posted a remark made by Gary Garrels, a Senior Curator at SFMOMA (previously with the Hammer Museum and MoMA), that LA offers a nurturing community for artists and access to curators, gallerists, and collectors from around the world. Others chimed in on Atlanta, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Istanbul and Asia.

I think the answer to where you should set up as an artist is unique to each person. There are so many things that factor into what kind of lifestyle is desired and the relationship to your work that make a particular setting the right place for you. New York has an amazing art scene but the cost of living is astronomical. Cities such as Los Angeles and Berlin also have great art communities but it is still possible to find relatively lower rents there compared to New York. San Francisco did not get a glowing report from a couple commenters, which surprised me.

I liked one insightful response, which included the following comment,

“I’ve been to the core of every scene in every one of these towns and if I could rewind the clock, I would have skipped all of the cities and scenes and just stuck with my painting in the lands in between….There’s something to be said for keeping your studio well out of a city or the scene, getting really deep into your work and only revealing yourself to a select few peers.”

Coincidentally, I picked up William Carlos Williams’ Paterson the night before I became engaged by the thread. Williams expressed,

“...a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody – if imaginatively conceived – any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions.“

A quote by John Dewey in the introduction of Paterson also seemed particularly relevant,

“The local is the only universal, upon that all art builds.”

(Pictured here, Peter Root installing Ephemicropolis - 100,000 staples comprise his city, and Tara Donovan's "Colony" made with 18,000 sections of pencil)

Richter Scale

by Drew Martin
A couple months ago Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild set an auction record price for a painting by a living artist: $34,000,000. Yesterday I watched a film about this 80-year-old image maker, Gerhard Richter Painting, which documents him working on a series of paintings through the spring and summer of 2009. It shows Richter as a considerate but simple man with a few tricks, often standing in front of a work in progress, trying to decide what to do next.

Of all the media, painting is the hardest for me to engage in because I often feel like I am just pushing paint around on a flat surface. Richter's method is all about pushing globs of paint around with long strips of polyurethane until multiple layers of colors yield a rich, prismatic palimpsest.

There is some irony in this because, as we learn in the film, Richter had an early but short-lived apprenticeship in a printing shop. He does not express fond memories of the job - "it was noisy and it stank" and he scoffs at the men working the machines. The method in which we see him work, however, with a squeegee-like application of paint seems to have its origins in commercial printing; inking plates and screens.

Although his approach is more methodical and laboring than Jackson Pollock's action-painting, there is something in the process and result that I found similar. Perhaps it is the totality of a series of happy accidents and something beyond the control of the artist, which is bigger than the artist.

Corinna Belz, who directed the film, stands off camera and pokes questions at the artist. There are nice, long shots of Richter in his gorgeous studio, working on his oversized paintings. In one moment he makes an addition to a painting he that is not happy with and tells Belz that he cannot paint under observation...that it is worse than being in the hospital and he feels exposed. He says painting is a secret business for the type of person who would not speak up in public and adds a comment by Theodor Adorno, that paintings are mortal enemies.

What I liked most about this film was simply watching an artist in his space. In one scene, Richter has a long surface on which he lays out childhood photos. He is trying to find some sort of order to them after having kept them in boxes his whole life. He remarks to Belz that he is thinking about throwing them away. It is an interesting scene because in archival footage from the beginning of his career, which is shown earlier in this documentary, Richter explains that his gray paintings started from his fondness of the gray in photographs. So while this man is looking at his past and the content within the frames, the viewer can look at them abstractly, as compositions of gray.

Click here to see the trailer for Gerhard Richter Painting.

Left To Our Own Devices

by Drew Martin
One thing I identify more with than any other characteristic, gender, race or whatever is that I am left-handed. Lefties are a peculiar minority and fortunately in modern America, there is no real stigma to it. The problem is that civilization seems backwards for us because almost everything is designed for right-handed people. The more ergonomic things evolve, the more right-handed things become.

I have always known and thought about the differences and dangers of being left-handed. The most dangerous power tools, such as circular saws, are made exclusively for right-handed people, with the safety switch on the right side. I always have to make an odd and unsafe gesture just to reach the switch on my circular saw. There are also the trivial, but more annoying habits, such as how cashiers always turn the receipt for the customer to sign with his or her right hand. Last week, for the first time in my life, a cashier turned the receipt for me to sign with my left hand and I thanked him. He did not do it out of courtesy but out of instinct; he was left-handed too.

I grew up thinking I was fortunate, because I knew that my grandfather and his brother had their left arms bound to their sides in school in order to teach them to use their right hands. That would be considered abuse now, but society was different in the early 1900's and people who thought they knew right from wrong, used force to make sure nothing would deviate from their path.

My first memory of my left-handedness being an issue was in elementary school. The lefty scissors were hard to come by and were always too small and did not work well so I just had to learn to cut straight with my right hand and skillfully turn the paper with my left hand. I entertained the idea that the factories only made right-handed scissors but when one did not work properly, the workers just stamped it "lefty."

I think more now about thinking as a left-handed person. I mean...we are obviously more creative, right? But now I think about how the very structure of a conversation or argument has a shape to it. It is not something you can take a picture of but it does exist. I am starting to explore the affects of left-handedness beyond creativity and how this might even influence my relationship with, and understanding of people.

Last week I was delighted to stumble upon a British website dedicated to Anything Left-Handed. That is were my certificate here came from, as well as the survey results, which show the percentage of left-handed practices by lefties. The site has a downloadable left-handed calendar, information about the International Left-Handers Day (August 13th), lefty products and "facts" such as:

Left-handers are generally more intelligent, better looking, imaginative and multi-talented than right handers - based on discussions among members of the Left-Handers Club!

From Raga to Riches

by Drew Martin

I do not know exactly when or how it began but I started listening to classical Indian music in my late teens. I did not have any ties to the music; I simply liked the structure of the raga, the complex and linguistic rhythm of the tabla and the sympathetic melodies of the sitar, which can dissolve an hour into a timeless feeling of bliss. It was other-worldly, but from a world I wanted to be part of so I literally started consuming Indian culture. I filled my belly with saag paneer and naan, read everything related to Gandhi, took anthropology classes at college about India, and studied Hindi. A great figure for me since this inception was Ravi Shankar, not only because he played so well but because he extended his talents to the world without inhibition, and released an artform from its trappings. Even though his music was distinctly regional, he helped make it universal. When a coworker and I started to share an office more than a year ago, I immediately confessed my love for the sitar. Thereafter, we enjoyed many afternoons listening to Indian music together, typically prompted by the question "Do you want to raga?" or simply the suggestion, "Let's raga." My fondness of the genre is so strong that the sitar became the center of my first ads for the Museum of Peripheral Art. The campaign is a series of images of someone with a sitar in a modern, public situation, with the tagline, "Do You Mind if I Sitar?" playing off the courteous question, "Do you mind if I sit here?" Rest in peace Ravi Shankar. Thank you for sharing your gift with us.

Art21: a Reverence for Things, a Hope for Tomorrow, and the Invention of Languages

by Drew Martin
Art21 on PBS.org has a series of 20-minute profiles of contemporary artists they have compiled since 2001. In 2009 I watched everything that had been filmed up to that season and then recently realized there was another batch to enjoy. This morning I finished watching the last one that I had not seen, on Rackstraw Downes.

Downes speaks of reverence for all things, even scratches in raw, concrete floors. Pictured here (top) is a detail of a painting he did in the desert, of stark structures. His attraction to such a place is its simultaneous state as both a ruin and construction site; an abandoned construction site.

"They weren't shapes our culture teaches us the buildings should be in."

He dislikes the label of landscape art, which he says is by recipe, and jokes that the only way a landscape artist can reinvent himself is to move. Instead, he considers himself a painter of his environment. He adds that anytime something three dimensional is interpreted on a flat surface, it becomes a metaphor, and perspective is only an attempt to standardize the perception of space. He also talks about the wandering eye and how a painting unfolds over time.  He says that when he approaches a place there is a literary theme but that disappears in the process of painting, "reason A disappears" and he fixates on shadows and other details.

When my twenty minutes were up with Downes, I finished up where I left off last week with Robert Mangold. I love his comment that romanticism takes us beyond the formal idea. I also reached back to one of the first videos by Art21, on the quirky Andrea Zittel (the "small-space living advocate,") whose work focuses on the efficiency and isolation of space. Pictured here (middle) is one of her projects.

Zittel minimizes her living quarters, has worn uniforms based on Russian constructivism, and even spent a month on a floating concrete island she made in Danish waters. Zittel traces this fascination of small spaces to thrifty family vacations in a Volkswagen Westfalia bus and sailing trips on her family's boat. She never liked sailing but was interested in how the boat was organized for habitation. She offers,

"No one really wants perfection. We are obsessed with perfection. We are obsessed with innovation and moving forward but what we really want is the hope of some sort of new, improved or better tomorrow."

I love Zittel's concluding remarks:

"Things you think are liberating can actually become confining or restrictive or oppressive. And things that you think are controlling can actually give you a greater sense of security and liberation in the end."

I also rewatched the profile of David Altmejd. Instead of using preparatory sketches for his projects, like the one pictured here (bottom), he works directly on them, letting the process and each step dictate the next move. There are many artists I feel very close to, like Zittel, but something Altmejd said seemed to echo my own ideas and approach to art:

"I am interested in science the same way I am interested in art, with a sort of childlike fascination. I realized very early in my studies I wasn't interested in learning a language. I was really interested in inventing languages. I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what is encouraged is the invention of languages."

Art21 includes profiles on the following artists:
Marina Abramović, Robert Adams, Ai Weiwei, Laylah Ali, Allora & Calzadilla, David Altmejd, El Anatsui, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Janine Antoni, Ida Applebroog, Charles Atlas, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Bradford, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Vija Celmins, Michael Ray Charles, Mel Chin, Mark Dion, Rackstraw Downes, John Feodorov, Walton Ford, Ellen Gallagher, Ann Hamilton, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Tim Hawkinson, Mary Heilmann, Arturo Herrera, Oliver Herring, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Hubbard/Birchler, Pierre Huyghe, Alfredo Jaar, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Margaret Kilgallen, Kimsooja, Jeff Koons, Beryl Korot, Barbara Kruger, An-My Lê, Glenn Ligon, Maya Lin, Florian Maier-Aichen, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Robert Mangold, Sally Mann, Kerry James Marshall, Paul McCarthy, Allan McCollum, Josiah McElheny, Barry McGee, Julie Mehretu, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Pepón Osorio, Raymond Pettibon, Judy Pfaff, Paul Pfeiffer, Lari Pittman, Martin Puryear Mary, Reid Kelley, Matthew Ritchie, Susan Rothenberg, Robert Ryman, Doris Salcedo, Collier Schorr, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Shahzia Sikander, Laurie Simmons, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Jessica Stockholder, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Do-Ho Suh, Catherine Sullivan, Sarah Sze, Tabaimo, James Turrell, Richard Tuttle, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, William Wegman, Fred Wilson, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Andrea Zittel

Cast Away

by Drew Martin

My 12 year old son, Calder, broke his forearm at a 90 degree angle while playing soccer. The doctor in the emergency room immediately gave him morphine when he saw how much pain he was in, and then completely knocked him out to reset his broken radius.

The new fiberglass casts are amazing. Not only can you choose your color, but the application is quite easy and not messy. The doctor opens the air-proof package, removes the rolled up material, dips it in water and wraps the limb. It sets in a couple minutes.

Typically a long cast is cut open on the side, but the nurse knew we wanted to keep the cast so she cut it off along the ridge of the forearm bones. This cast reminds me of the human casts from Pompeii. It documents this little arm, arrested in time, which is healing now and will keep growing into a man's arm.

Cloud Nein?

by Drew Martin

A shared photo on Facebook caught my eye this morning as I was scrolling through recent posts on my phone.

Arthur Lam, a Hong Kong-based artist/writer/curator, alum of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the administrator of ArtCanChangeTheWorld posted a picture of a cloud suspended in the middle of a large room with arched windows (detailed shown here, top). His post included the text:

By balancing temperature, humidity and lighting, Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde created a cloud in the middle of a room.

The photograph has the sensibility of a Magritte painting but also looks like an image that would end up on an inspirational poster with a heavy, black border anchored with a word such as "Faith."

At first, I was not interested as to whether or not it was real. I liked the idea of it being a conceptual project that would still give someone who experienced it through media a real sense of its volume, its ephermeralness, and its beauty. But then I clicked on the image.

The photo has been shared more than 2,700 times, and liked more than 2,500 times. Lam's post had about 100 comments. These ranged from appreciative wows to humorous retorts such as "What's he smokin?" Several comments cried "fake!" and had explanations of why you could not make a cloud in a room, or how it must have been created in Photoshop. A whole range of human emotions were played out in the string of brief comments and Smilde's cloud captured it all, the way a natural cloud captures moisture.

Smilde's work is no hoax. He achieves the affect by spraying the air with water and then introduces a quick puff from a fog machine. The lighting of the room is essential to this series.

Click here to visit Smilde's site to see more of his work.
Click here to see a YouTube video create a cloud.

Commute!

by Drew Martin

I have been commuting to Manhattan from northern New Jersey for the past 13 years. Until recently I had an easy one-hour train commute (each way) but since Hurricane Sandy shutdown the Hoboken PATH station I have had to commute by bus. It is less expensive but it also much more of a hassle and much less reliable. Accidents, bad weather and other random delays can turn the trip into a four-hour trek. What should be a two-hour round trip commute has totaled six hours. I felt compelled to record the journey from my house in Ridgewood to my office in New York in order to document this phase of my life, and also for anyone curious enough to spend about an hour and twenty minutes to see the change of landscape from a suburban hamlet to the core of the Big Apple. I must note here that this trip was smooth sailing. The footage, however, is shaky and poor quality. It is a raw capture of sights, sounds and throngs of people. The commute here starts with a quarter-mile walk to the Van Neste Square bus stop in the center of Ridgewood. I board the 6:55 NJ Transit 163P express bus to Port Authority in midtown. There is quite a long underground walk from Port Authority to the subway line I need to take down to SoHo. I ride the downtown 2 express to 14th Street and then a transfer to the local 1, which I take two stops to the Houston Street station. From there it is a one-block walk on King Street to Hudson Street.

Click here to view Commute! on YouTube.

My Left Foot

by Drew Martin
December 3rd was the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which recognizes the barriers faced by 15% of the world's population. Somewhat coincidentally, I watched My Left Foot, a 1989 film about (and adapted from the novel of that title by) Christy Brown, an Irish writer and artist with cerebral palsy who could only control his left foot. Brown grew up in a poor, working-class Catholic family/community where his disability was misunderstood and his abilities unrecognized. Despite this, his early childhood was full of motherly love and camaraderie from his countless siblings who wheeled him around in a “chariot,” a wooden cart slapped together with scrap wood and two pram wheels. At first, the young Brown is seen as mentally retarded. Even his attempts to write out mathematical formulas on the floor with a piece of chalk clutched with his toes are dismissed as nonsensical chicken scratch. It is not until he finally writes MOTHER in front of a dismayed family (in quite a dramatic scene) that his new life takes off. The best part of the film is the acting by the young Brown, played by Hugh O’Conor, and the late teen – grown Brown, played by Daniel Day-Lewis; a performance that won the Oscar.

Click here to view a fan-made trailer for My Left Foot

The King's Fog Machine

by Drew Martin
I am writing this on a foggy Sunday morning. The row of arborvitae outside my window are deep green but the buildings and trees beyond them fade into a cool gray world. The fog is appropriate because that is what I want to write about.

Last night, I watched The King's Speech. This 2010 film, set in pre-WWII England, shows us a stammering King George VI who relies on an eccentric Australian speech therapist to help him make his first radio broadcast on Britain's declaration of war on Germany. It is a wonderful film that was nominated for 12 Oscars and awarded the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay. The British Stammering Association applauded the film and said it was a "realistic depiction of the frustration and the fear of speaking faced by people who stammer on a daily basis".

Because of the nature of this blog, one would think I would be interested in the media details of the film, or some cross reference to the arts, but what caught my eye was the ubiquitous heavy air that fills almost every interior set and exterior shot. There is an intersting set of photos from the making of the film, which shows everything from the fog machines that were used, to red fiberglass period-telephone booth facades covering the modern parking meters. There is also a set of building-size period adverts that caught my eye in the film. Click here to view the Flickr gallery: The King's Speech, Filming, Southwark, London.

Additionally, there is a technical write up on the FilmLight website about how the smoke, fog, and mist were added in post-production. Click here to read the case study: The King's Speech: Molinare DI Colourist Gareth Spensley uses Baselight to help Tom Hooper perfect the details of a modern classic.

Saul Steinberg, Back in the Fold

by Drew Martin
There is an interesting article on Saul Steinberg in this week’s The New Yorker (but I cannot finish it over the weekend because I left it on my desk in Manhattan, arrrg dammit!). Anyway, it is an interesting piece that explores his womanizing and other shortcomings as detailed by Deirdre Bair in Saul Steinberg: A Biography. Just to get this out of the way, I think Steinberg was a genius cartoonist/artist.

I actually do not want to write about Steinberg, but how the picture of him and his wife, Hedda Sterne, falls in the bind crevice of The New Yorker. It is a common error/shortsightedness of layout artists who are working on Macs with big-ass monitors and only a thin line in InDesign showing them where the fold is: all they really see are flat, crisp rectangles.

I cringed when I first saw the spread but then I read the article and realized it was a happy accident because the writing expresses his calculated distance from people. The picture was obviously chosen to do this on its own: Steinberg and Sterne are separated by a fireless fireplace (which, by the way, has a beautiful little Calder sculpture on its mantel). The layout in the hardcopy emphasizes the isolation with a three-dimensional and very physical separation.

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