Borderline Dreams

by Drew Martin
I had a couple dreams last night that I remember. The first revolved around a library near my house in New Jersey where Michael J. Fox was working. There was a young man curled up on a cedar bench on the library’s back patio. He was clutching a cloth-wrapped bundle. It turns out he tried to deliver assault guns to the library the night before but it was closed so he decided to sleep on the bench to wait for the library to open. Apparently, the library had ordered the guns as a measure to protect the facility against an armed attacker. I met a woman at the library. She was a thin brunette business woman who I thought was older than me but then realized she was probably a year or two younger. We went outside and ended up lying naked on a grassy knoll under a crisp white Martha Stewart – Kmart collection quilt, and then my teenage daughter approached and told me it was time to go.

The second dream I had, started on a narrow cobble-stone street, lined by small stone buildings in disrepair. One side of the street was Poland, the other side was the Czech Republic. I was in an old, dirty Eastern European car (a Škoda or a Polonez), which was full of people. There were calls in Polish and Czech hawking the same items. One woman would yell a product in Polish, “Polish eggs!” and then another woman would yell in Czech, “Czech eggs!” This continued as the car slowly rolled down the street muddy winter street, which was barely wide enough for it. Then we stopped, and my father-in-law got out so he could buy some things. I got out too and saw crates of plums in the back of small, green farm truck. The plums were deep purple, almost black. They were huge but were all going bad and had broken skin. I realized I had to go to the bathroom so I walked down this border-town merchant’s street, and turned right down a side street where there was not much going on. At the end of the street was a tree-lined road, and beyond that was a field. Halfway down this street was an empty parking lot and a small white-washed structure with a painted sign - WC.

Botany of Desire

by Drew Martin

I saw a good documentary this weekend called Botany of Desire, which covers the origin and the evolution of apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes. This is a really well-produced and interesting film, with a great narrative of interviews from people invested in these plants and Michael Pollan, author of Botany of Desire. Pollan proposes that we look at our relationship to plants from the plants’ point of view, whose propagation is dependent on our interest in them.

Apples and tulips started their journey in the hills of Kazakhstan and were spread throughout the world by humans. The legend of Johnny Appleseed is validated but the truth behind his history is not so flattering. He is said to have been a "seedy" character and because of the way he established orchards (from seed and not from grafting), there were not many edible apples, which thereby fueled the production of hard cider and an intoxicated period in American history.

The tulip section explores the bubble economy created around this flower in Holland in the 17th century, in which one of the most precious bulbs could sell for the value of the nicest homes in Amsterdam. Ironically, the color variations that were the most exotic were caused by a disease. This documentary shows the flower auction in Aalsmeer, Holland, which is a facility the size of 200 football fields and where 19 million flowers from around the world change hands every day.

"It is like a sea of flowers. It is almost like watching paint being mixed on a palette. You watch this line of Yellow sunflowers snaking its way through an ocean of red tulips."

There are many aesthetic comments like this in the film. One of the most interesting is about the coincidence that we share similar values of beauty with a bug, the bee, who is attracted to pretty flowers and symmetry.

The section on marijuana points out that a plant must have a specialty to attract us. This can be sweetness, beauty, sustenance or, in the case of cannabis, a chemical that we can get high from. It is said that only one culture we know of did not have a botanical vice; the Inuit, because it was too cold to grow anything in their climate. Although pot had been a historic drug, it was not until the latter part of the 20th century that scientists understood how it worked in the brain. It turns out that it affects the same receptor responsible for allowing us to forget, so we are not overwhelmed by the retention of information and events.

The potato section explains how this South American tuber made its way to Europe and fueled growth in previously famished areas, but that banking on one type of potato led to a total crop failure in Ireland during the potato famine.

The message of the film is that monoculture is bad, and biodiversity is good. This is not a bad metaphor for society, the workplace, and our own personal diversity of the food we eat, what we read, and how we occupy out time.

Click here to watch the trailer.

Cloud 9

by Drew Martin
I watched Cloud 9 this weekend. It is a German film about a 67-year old married woman who falls in love with a 76-year old man. She is a seamstress and the man is a client, who asked to have alterations made to his pants.

The film is quite explicit, showing sex scenes between the lovers as well as one between the woman and her husband who is older than her lover. None of the characters are particularly likable. The husband is more into trains than his wife, the lover is regardless, and the woman is quite simple. This makes the affair less of a romantic dream and more of a geriatric romp.

While the film has been applauded for exploring the woman's angle of this extramarital affair, it is not hard to feel sympathetic to the old husband who wants to ends his days without such drama. In fact, the affair drives him to suicide.

Click here to watch the trailer

What Dreams May Come

by Drew Martin
I had a series of lucid dreams last night. I remember only the end of the one that I woke up from but there were three longer dreams that stood out. In the first one I was trying to get a special ticket to go somewhere in New York City. People were waiting in line by a polished marble wall with recessed brass plates. When it was my turn, I could not figure out any of the analog dials. It was all foreign to me; nothing made sense. A woman, with whom I had a conversation at the station earlier in the dream, appeared and helped me. She pulled the ticket-vending machine contraption out of the wall. It folded down and revealed a seismograph type device, a long brass cylinder, and something like a diddley bow. She explained that this helped translate information for Chinese-speaking commuters. I was fascinated how one, taught wire could mimic tones of the Chinese language.

In another dream I had been hanging paintings in the unfinished basement of my work building. When I went down to look at them, I discovered that another tenant had actually turned the space into a gallery. A young woman named Sophonia was furious with me because she thought I was crashing her show. She chewed me out for a good ten minutes but started warming up to me after a while. I wondered if I should tell her about the hidden space she did not know about.

In the final dream I witnessed a purse snatcher in action. I stopped him and he flipped out, because he said that woman he stole the purse from was a spy. So then I grabbed her, and she pulled something out of her pocket which I thought she was going to use against me but it turned out to be a suicide pill that she ingested, which she called Ridersol.

Whores' Glory

by Drew Martin

The best professor I had when I was working on my Masters in Media Studies at The New School was Richard Lorber, hands down. With a Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University you would expect an esoteric discourse but for the media management course I took he was always practical and focused on the future of his students.

Lorber is the president and CEO of Kino Lorber, Inc., which is a New York-based theatrical distributor and DVD label "dedicated to the best in recent and classic world cinema and independent documentaries." At the time of the class, Lorber was president of Koch Lorber Films, which distributed foreign classics such as La Dolce Vita.

I mention Lorber because I am just as eager to see a film he places his bet on, as I am by a director I admire, or one that stars an actor I like. I recently watched Whores' Glory on Netflix, which was directed by Michael Glawogger, and distributed by Lorber.

This film is not a survey of world-wide prostitution but it plants the viewer deep in the scene of three very different prostitution hotspots: the highly organized "Fish Tank" in Thailand where the prostitutes pray at small shrines so they will have a lot of clients, the maze-like "City of Joy" in Bangladesh which houses hundreds of women, and the "Zone" in Mexico where one prostitute tells a story of a father who brought his 15-year-old son to her so she could "make him a man."

While the job of these women is the same, the culture of each location and religion, make them worlds apart. Most of the film focuses on the lives of the women but there are also plenty of insights from their clients who rationalize prostitution, speak of their urges and explain why they visit prostitutes when they have girlfriends or wives.

Mother Jones interview with director, Michael Glawogger

Read the New York Times Review

Watch the trailer

Prague as Moscow...Paris...Vienna...Warsaw...

By Drew Martin
In a very short scene in Mission Impossible III, Tom Cruise as agent Ethan Hunt disguises himself as Pavel Sobotka, a scruffy Bohemian. Sobota/sobotka means Saturday in Czech. Cruise even poorly utters two sentences in Czech to an airport ticket agent, "V Číně jsem ještě nebyl. Je tam hezky?" (I haven't been to China yet. Is it nice there?). The Czech cover is not random.

Movie trivialists say Hunt obtains the Czech passport in the first movie, but this scene is somewhat comical and does not tie the viewer to Prague, where that movie is set and filmed. The Mission Impossible (IV) - Ghost Protocol street scenes of Moscow are actually Prague, and the courtyard shots of the Kremlin are on the grounds of the Prague castle. It is interesting that three of the four films have a Czech connection. This made me think about other cities for which Prague has been the substitute. In addition to Cruise's Moscow, Prague was Warsaw in Yentl, Paris in The Bourne Identity and Vienna in Amadeus, which was directed by the great Czech director Miloš Forman. Prague has a multitude of locations and a very strong film history, centered around Barrandov Studios.

Once, to my surprise, I was walking around the West Village in New York City and happened upon a Prague street, which was designed for an episode of Law and Order. The exterior of the Blue Mill Tavern was masked with Alfons Mucha designs and cars on the streets had Czech or German license plates. It was not a believable scene but it was still interesting to see an attempt made to create a place that has served as a location for so many other places.



Thinking at a Walking Pace

by Drew Martin
In the early 1990's my friend's car broke down on a road trip in northern California, so we were stuck in Berkeley for a week while the engine was being fixed. I passed the days walking around. One morning, I came across a schizophrenic homeless man who was talking to a spaceship in the sky through a telephone receiver, cut at the cord. My thought at the time was not that the man was crazy but that one day people would be walking around talking into mobile phone devices, and this act which seemed absurd would be common.

There is a great interview in Interview (February 2013) with the sculptor Charles Ray, by the writer Will Self. Part of their conversation focuses on my prescient reaction to the man chatting with his mothership. Self writes,

I remember flying to Sweden in the '90s, before there were handsfree sets for cell phones in England. I landed in the airport in Stockholm and saw these middle-aged businessmen wandering around the terminal talking to themselves. I couldn't even see a cell phone. I thought, "This is schizophrenia. It's a form of electronically produced schizophrenia."

Ray and Self are big walkers. The first time I encountered Self was in an article (that I read while walking to another town) about how he flies into big cities and walks from the airport to the center, i.e. JFK airport to Times Square. Much of their interview is about walking. Self recalls a line from Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, "We think at a walking pace." I like this a lot because there is movement to thought. Thought standing still is meditation. Thoughts racing, are just that. But our meandering thoughts do have a pace to them that share a tempo of a decent walk.

Pictured here is Sleeping Woman (2012) by Charles Ray.

This Can't Be Love

by Drew Martin

I am in the middle of a major closet cleaning/reconfiguration in an attempt to restore my mini home gallery. I have piles of clothes everywhere, which include old leather jackets I will never wear again, and a stack of suits that never really fit me well in the first place.

In my grand vision of the universe, everything has a purpose so it is hard for me to throw something out without thinking about how it might fit into a future art project. Last time I tried to throw out an old suit it turned into my homeless self-portrait project.

Looking at a pile of my clothes brought back memories of the former Your Hit Parade star, Dorothy Collins (1926-1994).

When I was 10, we moved out of a tiny house in Montvale, New Jersey and into a new, bigger home across town. For a few years one of our immediate neighbors was Dorothy Collins and her third daughter, Melissa. Dorothy was born Marjorie Chandler, in Canada, and adopted her stage name in her teens. At that time she lived next door, she went by Holgate, after her second husband and father of Melissa, actor Ron Holgate, who she was divorcing at that time.

Dorothy was a bit eccentric. She lived in a beautiful old house and said there was a ghost in it that would open up the dishwasher door at night. We did not see her much but as young boys we liked her because her driveway had a roundabout, around which we would race our bicycles, and we all had a crush on her daughter.

The most memorable day at Dorothy's place was after her divorce when she decided to get rid of her ex-husband's clothes. She piled them all up on the part of the driveway that stretched between her house and some woods, soaked them in lighter fluid and lit them on fire. It was just her and every kid in the neighborhood, fascinated by this adult torching her past.

Click here to see Dorothy Collins sing This Can't Be Love by Rodgers and Hart on a 1955 telecast of Your Hit Parade.

The Lying Game

by Drew Martin
About fifteen years ago I went to a pow-wow of the Ramapough Mountain native Americans of the region that is now northern New Jersey. A speaker of the tribe complained about how people use the word believe in place of think, know or understand. He explained that to believe something is to have a belief in something divine or supernatural. A couple months ago I saw a comment online about Lance Armstrong, which read, I do not believe Armstrong but I believe in him. At first I understood this as, sure he doped, but I still believe in him as a man who overcame impossible challenges. But now, considering the tribesman’s comment, the word should not be split in such away.  You can know he is lying or think he is telling the truth but to believe him is to believe in him.

I am writing this while watching the first of the two-night broadcasts of the interview of Armstrong by Oprah Winfrey on Oprah.com. He admits to doping. Everyone doped in that period of professional cycling, and everyone repeatedly lied about it. What interests me is that people want to believe in sports as a field where hard work and dedication alone win titles. That is a nice idea but professional athletes are essentially entertainers and they do whatever it takes to keep their edge.

What I find remarkable is our level of acceptance of lies across the arts and entertainment industry. Authors dedicate their lives to lying in fiction, and might even write under a pen name to hide his or her identity.  The Winfrey-related controversy of A Million Little Pieces, was a situation when the author, James Frey, was lambasted for successfully passing off this book as a memoir after shopping it around as a novel that none of the publishing companies wanted. Random House published it when they thought it was real, after turning it down as a work of fiction.

 

Movies are a lot like literature. They are typically reel to reel fiction. I just rewatched Good Will Hunting the other night, which received an Academy Award for best screenplay. Matt Damon cowrote it and played the main character; an orphan from the wrong side of Boston who works manual jobs but is a mathematical genius, far from the actual truth on both accounts. So why is an open lie like this applauded? It is that a closed lie makes us feel duped, while an open lie permits us to feel like we are in on it?

In music, the rock world is ripe with stylized personalities like Bjork, Eminem, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Prince, and David Bowie (and his Ziggy Stardust). These are performers and when they are not performing there is an assumption that they have a certain lifestyle but are not expected to live a life as if it is a musical. Their fiction is regulated in song and video.

The artworld is probably the most interesting case of lying because its audience wants the artist to live by the myth. There is no director calling Cut! or end of the concert, or Terry Gross Fresh Air interview about how he or she got inside the head of the character. Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol are probably the two most saturated in this way. Dalí was so consumed by his artist nature that he considered artists who used drugs for creativity as cheats.

Pablo Picasso said that art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. And Francis Bacon said that the job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. He also said that art is the lie that returns us to life more violenty. These artists believed in the lying of art. This is quite different now. There are artists who are showman, such as Damien Hirst, who produce their work not from their heart but to simply bring a product to market, or like Maurizio Cattelan who see art as some extended Duchampian joke. There are also a handful of artists like Banksy who have completely turned themselves into a character, which he extended into the farcical artist Thierry Guetta in Exit Through The Giftshop.

 

A couple who are both in the arts, sent me this TED Talk link to Shea Hembrey: How I Became 100 Artists. Hembrey is a contemporary artist who grew up in rural Arkansas, and had never stepped foot into an art museum until he was in his 20s. But his imagination flourished and served him well when he decided to not only create his own biennale, but to dream up the 100 participatory artists and to create their work. For example, the artist collective, The Sober Dobermans, did a piece to comment on how we are over-cottled in today's society, so they affixed thousands of little "Warning: SHARP" notices to the barbs of an extensive barbwire fence.

Hembrey's open-lie art projects are fun and witty, but having done similar projects, I would have to say they are not soul-fulfilling because they are not real. At least, they do not feel real and there is that gnawing feeling of lying in some regard. The lie that Picasso and Bacon spoke about is very different. It is not about a quick hoax but about the fundamentals of what we understand about art.

Addo-bis: A Commuity for Artists, Gallerists, and Collectors

Check out the newly launched Addo-bis, a site dedicated to fostering partnerships between everyone engaged in the creative process: artists, collectors, galleries, and businesses.

Each month Addo-bis will not only feature a new artist, but will infuse the site with his or her work. I really like this concept and it is true to the philosophy of the founders, Jessica Browdy and Joy Harris.

I contributed an article to the new site, Owl Witness, which is about how we navigate space in art.

The image for the splash page is a photo by Alex Prager, who is featured throughout the new site. As explained on Addo-bis:

If I had to choose a favorite photographer right now, it would be Alex Prager. Why? This self-taught LA photographer understands how to create ambiguous narrative.

Ambiguous narrative is a structure where an artist sets up a scene with enough detail so an observer can begin pulling together a story but not enough information for a definitive conclusion to be made. For ambiguous narrative structure to work, an artist must lure a viewer into the work and hope that their imaginations run away with themselves. That interaction completes the work itself.  (read more)

July in January

by Drew Martin

I recently watched two of Miranda July's films, Me You and Everyone We Know (2005), and The Future (2011). The great thing about her movies is that she comes to cinema as a performance and video artist, and has a sensibility in these films that you do not find elsewhere. In The Future, July plays a character who cheats on, and leaves her boyfriend. She moves in with an older man and his young daughter. An extra-large t-shirt (possibly a nightie she slept in with her boyfriend or one of his shirts) crawls across Los Angeles to find her, like a cat seeking displaced owners. It represents the shelter cat the young couple was supposed to adopt before it was euthanized, and her boyfriend. She crawls inside the shirt and performs a slow, mesmerizing dance, like she is intoxicated by its scent. Her faceless, armless body expresses her emotions. It is a fascinating scene and it ties back into her initial plan, to do 30 dances in 30 days and post them online. None of her performances pan out, not even after holing up in her apartment in order to concentrate on the dances. This scene yields a brilliant dance, which is born not out of determination but from the emotional experiences of her relationships. She dances alone. We witness it unnoticed, and then her lover interrupts the scene. The end of the dance is the end of their relationship, and she returns to her boyfriend. The Future, as with Me You and Everyone We Know is full of unique scenes and great lines. My favorite from The Future is a comment July makes to her boyfriend when contemplating her looks:

I wish I was just one notch prettier. I'm right on the edge, you know? Where it's up to each person to decide for themselves. I have to make my case with each new person.

On Creating Reality by Andy Kaufman at Maccarone

If you are in New York this evening, I highly recommend attending the opening at Maccarone, On Creating Reality by Andy Kaufman.

January 12 - February 16, 2013

Opening Reception

Saturday January 12, 2013

5:00 - 8:00 PM

Maccarone

630 Greenwich Street, NY, NY

(between Morton and Leroy in the West Village)

This is one of my favorite spaces in New York and I like the shows the owner, Michelle Maccarone, has put on here. I just read an older interview with her in VICE magazine - still worth reading...

I got a sneak peek of the Kaufman show going up last night and it looks really great. The gallery is filled with white table showcases of mixed memorabilia. Here are two shots from the same case I took, Andy Kaufman Plays Carnegie Hall, 1979.

From their press release:

The show presents an extensive collection of ephemera and artifacts from Andy Kaufman's personal and professional life: photographs, correspondence, performance notation, scripts, props and costumes including the original Tony Clifton jacket, record collections, transcendental meditation materials, hand written drafts of his novel "The Huey Williams Story," hundreds of pieces of hate mail he received from women challenging him to wrestle, in addition to numerous personal effects. The exhibition will act as a portrait of an unclassifiable figure in American cultural history whose work has been seminal in the evolution of performance art, new media and relational aesthetics.

In lieu of explanatory text labels accompanying these materials, a rotating series of Kaufman's friends, family, and collaborators will be physically present in the exhibition at all times, for all 25 days that the exhibition is on view, representing the diverse range of relationships, which span Kaufman's life, work, and interests. A central table and chairs within the gallery space will allow these guests to interact and talk with visitors, offering the opportunity for intimate and unscripted conversations about Kaufman with those that knew him, a rare opportunity to engage with primary sources of this particular history.  (read full press release on the Maccarone site)

Hello Lonesome

by Drew Martin 

Following my take on Obselidia a couple days ago in my review Love is Obsolete, which was a bit of a rant against “love propaganda,” is this review of Hello Lonesome. Equally quirky, Hello Lonesome has a broader scope of relationships and truer meaning of loneliness. While the main character of Obselidia, George, was not actually lonely until his state of being alone was rubbed in his face, the five main characters in Hello Lonesome are alone and incomplete. They are all looking for a connection to someone else, and we see how this can be satisfied on many different levels.

For a manly voice-over artist, whose wife and daughter have left him, it is hang time with a young delivery man. For an elderly widow and her middle-aged divorced neighbor it is about maintaining the normalcy of a relationship through grocery shopping, sharing a bottle of wine and snuggling in pajamas. For a guy with a crappy job and a dumpy apartment it is fulfilled not by scoring with a professional Manhattanite with a swanky apartment, but in marrying her after she tells him she is terminally ill, and being her care taker as she dies of stage four breast cancer.

Love in Hello Lonesome  is neither obsolete nor is it the center of the universe. It is expressed in simple gestures that boomerang back with more momentum. The voice-over artist teaches the delivery man to shoot his pump-action shotgun. In one of the final scenes, the voice-over artist is stuck in his soundproof, airtight recording booth at home. The delivery man comes to his rescue, shooting the lock off the door to free him. 

I liked this film as soon as I saw the opening credits. The look is a kind of augmented reality; all the text was laid into real pictures, which were given a short range of depth by blurring out the edges. The effect of block letters, with shadows that match their surroundings is playful and it makes all the real-world environments look like miniature sets.

A Part of Virginia

by Drew Martin

I grew up with this map. The title of it is, A Part of Virginia showing Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown, with historical  events from 1585 - 1781. The start date is entered on the map underneath the curve of the text, Chesapeake Bay....First explored with a view to colonization by Ralph Lane, 1585-1586. The end date is slightly below that, to the right - The French Fleet, Comte de Grasse blocking the Channel September 5, 1781.

This print of the original hand-colored map was designed by Robert Ball in 1939 for the Williamsburg restoration. It is the kind of image that Edward Tufte, the information graphics guru, would love because is functions as a detailed map of the York River and the James River, and it is embedded with 200 years of history, including battles and massacres as well as the establishment of settlements and the burning of towns.

Captain John Smith is all over the map for different entries: John Smith trading with Indians May 1607...John Smith captured by Indians May 1607...Smith led captive through a great part the Tidewater region and finally brought before King Powhatan...his life save by Pocahontas January 5, 1608.

My first relative to America came over from London in 1619 and was one of 347 English colonists killed during the fist major Indian massacre. This is noted here too: The great Indian Massacre March 16 1622. He was on the Berkeley Hundred, shown here on the top of the smaller image.

When I was a boy, the James River on this map looked like a dragon. The Jamestown settlement (directly above the flags of the British artillery) looked like an eye next to a smiling, open mouth. All the creeks down river looked like Tyrannosaurus Rex-style arms.