An Interview with Tony Pierce

by Drew Martin

See the guy with the biggest smile in the picture? He's on the right with the girl's arms around him. That's Tony Pierce, and it's a staff photo of The Daily Nexus, which was taken a quarter of a century ago.

The Nexus was (at that time) a daily printed newspaper for University of California at Santa Barbara, which meant that on any given night you could walk into the office under the campus bell tower and you would find a buzz of action. It was a remarkable staff that swept the college journalists awards at the time. They were smart, young writers and editors, and had the hardest work ethic on campus. Each individual was dedicated to his or her craft. I know this first-hand because for two years I visited every night to work on the editorial drawings and for three years I contributed a daily cartoon. I got $7 a drawing and a priceless education from Tony and his colleagues. I followed some of the staff to Prague to work on the paper they started there after the Velvet Revolution, called The Prognosis, and later I contributed to an offshoot, which still exists to this day - The Prague Post.

At the Nexus Tony stood out to me because in addition to his editorial assistance he always had pearls of wisdom that he delivered with his informed thinking and cool demeanor. Even though I no longer have the privilege to go down to the newspaper office and catch a moment with Tony, I can still follow his steady flow of personal musings on his blog: busblog - nothing in here is true.

After recently reading an interview with Tony and a friend of his: 20 Questions with Tony Pierce, I wanted a piece of the action too....fortunately he was up for it. 

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Hi Tony, thanks for agreeing to do an interview. It's been like a quarter of a century since we last saw each other but your advisory asides to me have been kept close to heart.

That's super nice of you. Yes - time flies. It's crazy!

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For some reason I never tuned into the fact that you were from Chicago. Most everyone I met at UCSB was from Cali, or nearby states. Coming from Jersey, Santa Barbara was paradise but it seemed like everyone else was used to it: nice weather, stunning ocean views, attractive people. It's still my favorite place on Earth and I think you are even more enthusiastic about it than I am. How did you end up at UCSB?

It was a paradise for me too! I left for LA the day after my high school graduation and did two years at Santa Monica College. I never did well in school, but all you needed back then was like a 2.6 GPA to transfer to a UC as long as you took all the required classes.

I applied for and got into UCLA and UCSB but I didn't know which one to go to. At the time I was pumping gas at an all-full serve station near Beverly Hills. If anyone had a UCLA or UCSB sticker on their car I'd ask them about their experience.

The UCLA people would say, "oh it's great, you should go." But the UCSB people were all, "OMG it's the greatest EVER! You have to do this, eat here, drink there, hike there, take these classes, live on this street. OMG!" Their energy was wild! I'm glad I took their advice because now I am one of those cheerleaders for that school and especially the College of Creative Studies.

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What would have become of the Tony Pierce who stayed in Illinois?

I'd have a house, that's for sure. Probably a family. Couple of dogs. Backyard. I'd be the typical, fine, but forgettable dude who coaches little league and doesn't get interviewed about anything.

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How does a tenure teaching position at the College of Creative Studies at UCSB with faculty housing by Coal Oil Point sound for a second/third career? What would you teach? Give me a course description.

That would be a dream of all dreams.

One of the weird things about UCSB is the library has the largest collection of Charles Bukowski manuscripts and letters in the world and yet not even CSS has ever had a class about him as far as I recall. Even when we were in school there I was outraged that one of the greatest writers of the 20th century got no love there.

I would teach a couple of his novels Post Office, Women, and Hollywood and maybe about 100 of his poems. Then we'd watch Barfly and compare it to Hollywood. I'd also try to get his wife Linda Bukowski to talk to the kids via Skype as well as his publisher John Martin. I'd also try to get Mickey Rourke to come in and talk about what it was like to work with him.

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You refer to UCSB/The Daily Nexus as "the greatest school in the world has the greatest college paper in the world" (I totally agree). I was never officially on staff but I contributed every day for three years (for two years editorial illustrations and for three years a daily cartoon) so I felt pretty connected and I loved the vibe of the newsroom in the evening. For all of us this was on the side and yet it was such an important part of my college experience. What did you learn the most from the Nexus?

I wonder why you were never considered part of the staff. You were a regular part of the paper for as long as I could remember. And vital! Your style was so unique and unlike anything you'd normally see in a newspaper. Added to that the artwork by Debbie Urlich, Stacey Teas, Moish, Paulo, Greg McIlvane, and of course Todd Francis. And Dougie and Video Guy were doing cool things on the only Mac in the building -- the embarrassment of riches we had just on the Art Desk was insane. All of you were working at a professional level as teenagers. I could ask for an image of anything and it would be right on the money, creative, and on time every time. And it didn't look childish. And then your strip -- mama mia! I still have your book and I can't believe we didn't figure out a way to better exploit your talents.

What I learned most from the Nexus was: giving 100%, 100% of the time is easier than giving 90%. I would wake up thinking about the Nexus, what I was going to write, who I was going to interview, what was going to happen on whatever section I was editing. Who should do what. What the page should look like. I'd go to class and then skate right over to the Nexus and stay there all night. It was a total joy because almost everyone else there was on that same routine. We were all mutually obsessed and it showed in our work.

It was also nice to learn that we were as good, if not better, than all of the other California collegiate journalists, who had actual journalism classes, advisors, and teachers.

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I went to Prague in 1992 to contribute to the Nexus + Velvet Revolution lovechild, The Prognosis but did more of a Heart of Darkness thing and disappeared into the anarchist squatter scene and moved up to a factory town with another squatter. I was in Czech for five years. I forgot what your involvement was. Did you spend any time in Prague?

I have three major regrets in my life: I was a bad boyfriend to a sweet young lady, I nearly died in Vegas, and I never went to Prague. When Matt Welch and crew moved there I was about to graduate and could have easily been the Bread and Circuses Editor but I was deeply in love with Jeanine Natalie and we had a cute little apartment on Madrid. So instead of going, I stayed in Isla Vista, got a job at Sears and sold tvs and stereos while trying to get a job at Warner Bros Records.

It was probably for the best because I'm sure I would have fallen in love with one of the first blue eyed Czech girls who would have kissed me and we woulda gotten married and right now I'd be coaching little league in Poland.

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Before I went off to Europe I was contributing to The Stranger in Seattle. They had just started up by the original staff of The Onion. My Bovina (A Tragic Cow Story) was getting a second life there but I axed it because I was leaving the U.S. for an indefinite time. I kind of regret that. I think it could have turned into something bigger had I stuck with it (more so than any other project I have ever had). What's something you worked on in the past that you regret not sticking with?

I have had a history of getting fired before I was able to quit. Even at the Nexus I was fired by Larry, and later banned by him. HA! So all of my personal projects, like busblog.com have been able to flourish because no one else could pull the plug.

But I would say any time I see an ex-girlfriend on Facebook or on Timehop, I almost always say, I shouldn't have broken up with her. Look at her. Remember how great she was? There were a few where clearly the end should have come sooner. But mostly I prematurely ended it, which was a mistake. Rarely do I make good decisions. That's why I am glad I asked those random strangers at the gas station where I should go to college.

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I like how you have a "bloggers who still have blogs" list on your blog. I am not on it but then again, I am not really a true blogger am I? I have 650ish posts since 2009 but I don't really qualify do I? I mean, I use the blog to post my musings but does a blogger in your mind have more of a journalistic bent, or is it more about spontaneity?

AHAHAH. I didn't know anyone even looked at anything way down there. To be honest, I'm shocked when I find out any one even reads my blog at all! As for those links I don't even think half of those people still blog, it's been so long since I've updated that. Even the

"copyright" is five years old.

You have been added because I do think you have had enough posts to qualify.

To me blogging can be either journalisty or arty or even a shopping list. But it has to be ongoing in a regular capacity of some sort. It has to be part of your routine in a way even if your routine is just weekly or bi monthly. We love the full moon and that bitch only comes

every 30 days or so.

To me what isn't blogging is, "oh yeah I guess I have a blog, let me repeat something someone else said in it today because I don't want to think of something myself." Or worse "hey heres a way I can make some money, quick!" Fortunately now that the fad of blogging has died, the actual bloggers have less noise to compete with.

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This blog is an overlapping of art, film, music, books, etc. I look at all of these media as one medium actually. Aside from blogging to express yourself, what is your favorite medium and what is a media project you would like to get involved with?

My favorite medium of expressing myself besides blogging is probably whispering in the ear of a hot babe right after it has been decided which Marvin Gaye album we're gonna listen to for six to seven minutes.

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Let me take that back a moment - this blog's starting point is art. What is your favorite artist /work of art and why?

I have several favorite artists. When I was in high school, every semester I took an art class. I drew every day. When I got to UCSB I would sit in on art history and art appreciation classes all the time because I didn't want to do the homework or take tests but I loved being in those huge classes where the teacher would show slides of flying buttresses and tell you how bad ass some artists were - even with their buildings.

I love art so much that after I saw "The Art of the Steal" (2009), I flew to NYC and took a bus to Philly so I could see the Barnes museum before they fucked it up. Greatest art museum I ever saw because the dude, Dr. Barnes, wasn't interested in anything other than the quality of the pieces and having them displayed in an interesting way. So you got to see Picassos right next to Van Goghs. Pieces you'd never seen before because he never turned any of them into coffee mugs or mouse pads. [read the busblog post on this]

The coolest thing I ever saw though was The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado in Spain. I love Andy Warhol so much. I love Shepard Fairey. Banksy. Seeing Michaelangelo's Moses blew me away, but Hieronymus Bosch was such a madman, and that piece is huuuuge. It's like seven feet tall and 12 feet wide. With sooooo much detail and beautiful color in it. The quality, technique, and mayhem going on there is amazing. That's something I'm so glad I saw in person because on the page it's weird whatever but in person you're like holy shit!

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You sometimes speak of Bree Olson and Sasha Grey very candidly. What do you think the future of pornography? Do you think it will remain in this taboo realm or surface more to even be part of people's social media interactions? Perhaps it will even be prescribed to repressed individuals. What do you think?

It's actually good that porn is in the taboo realm because that makes it hotter. And we all love and could use a little spice in our lives.

I think major things will start to change in the business of adult films soon because a lot of the profit has evaporated due to the Tube sites online. No one pays for porn.  That's got to stop. But it appears that industry is still making enough that they can churn out a bunch of titles every month.

At some point I see it going to a Netflix model mixed with the Apple music curation element because with sooooo many options, a guide is necessary.

I can also see a situation where a lot of the stars themselves worked together to make a Snapchat channel or pool together to make their own Snapchat-like app where they all put up snaps on a regular basis that are, unlike Snapchat, fully nude, and unlike the xxx industry, financially favorable for the performers. I could see them charging a small membership fee each month and placing clickable ads in between every 7th or 8th snap that would lead to merch or toys or ways to get custom items from ones favorite star.

But this giving away the farm is unsustainable and ridiculous. Maybe they should just call themselves charities right now.

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What are you looking forward to in the near and distant future?

The Cubs are on a very clear path to win the World Series. I feel like an expectant mother. Fortunately I can drink and eat sushi.

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Do you have any questions for me?

What do you do when the creative juices decide to take a vacation?

Ha. Good question. I have so many different projects for my work and personal artwork/side projects that the "creative juices" just keep flowing (fortunately). With work it's like I know that's what I am there for, to be creative, so if something is not coming forth I blame it on sitting in an office and limiting myself on purpose so I get up and walk around SoHo or the West Village and go to a nearby gallery to clear my head. Looking at art, even bad art restarts my kid brain. Also, if I cannot come up with the right solution for work I usually forget about "the company" for a moment and just respond to it personally, which usually works. Sometimes that goes into a very quirky zone, but then you realize that's what people actually want. With my personal artwork and projects, it's a little different. This blog is really helpful because it allows me to step back and be a little more analytical, and then I can forget about it and roll up my sleeves and do artwork, which always feels like playing. Sometimes I stump myself if I think about what art has to be and then I remind myself of artists I deeply like such as Andrea Zittel, who is more about creating systems to live by and systems to live in. Her work always reminds me that art can be very personal in a practical way without needing to be emotional or even expressive. Or I look at work by Toshio Saeki. His stuff is so bizarre and perverse that it always teaches me to let go of inhibitions. So to answer your question...I think if creative juices take a vacation it's because we set ourselves up for that. One thing that helps me a lot too is that I run every day, and once a week I do a really long run, which clears my head and let's me start anew. It's the eddying of pointless thoughts that bogs down the creative process. If we return to our base of childhood curiosity there is no limit.   

Thanks Tony!

Since this interview, Tony has posted a great write-up about me on his blog. Click on the image here to read:

Died (Laughing) on the Vine

by Drew Martin
I saw an article about Lele Pons last week in Adweek that quickly had me looking into her videos as one of her 11 million followers on Vine, where her friend-sourced six-second clips have been looped more than 8.3 billion times. The most ever viewed on Vine, where she coined the phrase Do it for the Vine! She has another 5.4 million followers on Instagram. 

From pictures/stills, such as this one here, it would be easy to explain this phenomenon based solely on her looks as a young buxom blonde but watch her videos for a few minutes and your attention quickly switches to her often goofy athletic performance, and social commentary.

While there have been great queens of physical comedy such as Lucille Ball, Lele takes it to a whole new level and channels her inner Buster Keaton. On one of her stunt-driven compilations there is a caption that she is surprised she has not broken any bones doing the videos, and you are thinking the very same thing as she runs into walls, dives on friends, flings herself off of bridges, and gets dragged down the road by a car.

Lele's full name is Eleonora Pons-Maronese and she was born (1996) and lived her first five years in Venezuela. Her Latin heritage is a big part of her material, which she trades with friends from other backgrounds to comment on cultural differences, such as how one might act when breaking up. In a spoof of the shower scene from Psycho, to show the Latin horror film alternative, the knife-wielding stalker is pelted away with handfuls of beauty products thrown by Lele as she screams him off. 

My favorite video by Lele is one titled Latin Mothers. It shows four guy friends walking in the door of her house and passing her Venezuelan mom who is doing dishes. The first three are "all-American" boys and they greet her as they walk by: "Hey" "Hi" and the third yells excitedly at the top of his lungs "Hi there Mrs. Pons!!" For all three, she doesn't bother to turn around, only half-heartedly raises an arm to acknowledge them. But then the fourth and last one walks in and politely says "Hola!" and Mrs. Pons spins around with a look of ecstasy. The boy, to answer her surprised look, says "Mexico" and they hug and start dancing together while Lele and her three other boy friends look on in awe, saying "Hola?"

The amazing thing is that this all happens, like most of Lele's videos, in six seconds so they have the efficiency of a cartoon strip, the slide-splitting humor of a classic silent film, and she tackles issues of race and gender through teenage micro-dramas. It is also remarkable that, despite her inherent (and inherited) good looks (her aunt was Yajaira Vera - Miss Venezuela in 1988) she can flip her beauty switch off and make herself as unattractive as she wants for the effect she desires. It's in those moments of self-judgement and self-humiliation that she gains the strongest allies in her fan support.

The boobs out shot of Lele here is the perspective and envious stare of a flat-chested girl friend, whose two bosom buddies come to her aid with falsies made with party balloons.

Lele has recently released her book, Surviving High School, to help kids cope with the frustrations of puberty, dating, and parents.

De NADA

by Drew Martin
Following art can take you around the world: Basel, Berlin, Bilbao, etc. Thursday night it took me to Basketball City, Pier 36 on the Lower East Side for the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) art show. I think the battle of the booths approach to seeing art is an overwhelming, if not horrifying experience, but there were a few interesting pieces that caught my eye.

The first piece that pulled me in was an animated video encased in a quirky, stone-like monitor by Ashley Wick. In the same, smallest of the small booths, was an even more curious piece by Scott Kip; a dust clock. Tall and narrow, like a handsome wall clock, the piece is the closest thing I have ever seen to a living Švankmajer film. At the top of the dust clock is a small window to spy on a bead of metallic dust revolving on a path within the space. It moves like an old-school stop-action film. Open a small drawer at the bottom and it stops. Put your hand into a circular orifice in the center and it lights up.

One painter I liked there was Akira Ikezoe. When I mentioned to the lady at the booth that it is so much like Hieronymus Bosch, she sighed and said they get that a lot. He also had a video on display, but even more interesting than the animation were the individual sculpted cases for the flash drives of the movie file.

Two other works that caught my eye included a model of a jet engine, cutaway and made of foam, plastic, and wood. Colorful little globs of plastic demonstrate air density and flow. The other piece was a once drum-set stool sliced, reupholstered, and accented with what looked like blond horse hair. It's as if Méret Oppenheim were still around and had a couple classes at FIT under her belt. I especially like the surreal stool because I have a drum-set stool in my basement, which I have looked at sacrificing for an art project, but would never have been able to come up with something that is both fashionable and erotic at the same time.

Similarly, with all the amps lying around my house, I also liked a booth with a series of large, acoustic-softening wall hangings with one side perked up by an amplified wire. Pluck the wire to play a tune through the amp.

One of the more subtle surprises was a large, circular op-art spiral design. The unique effect of this piece was that there was a play of shadows across the surface, from the slightly raised pattern.

I also liked a booth with a dark wall and a series of measuring sticks leaning at an angle from the floor and holding pictures to the wall, which ranged from personal shots like this one below, to pictures of mountains.

And finally, the most controversial work in the show, and perhaps one of the less visible (I did not look up to see it when I fist walked by) was the Star of David made with bacon. A Piss Christ of sorts.

Character Development

by Drew Martin
Never in my life did I expect to put political signs outside my house, but there they are: Voigt, Walsh, Hache. I have always been withdrawn from politics but what changed me very recently was having attended a public meeting over urban-scale development in our small town where I have lived with my family the past 16 years. 

With an overwhelming majority of residents arguing against the development of a monstrosity of a parking garage and high-density housing in the town center that would dwarf the historic buildings and drastically increase traffic, it was remarkable to witness how our mayor flat-out ignored the consensus of the people who live in the area.

My main argument was not against any development but for reasonable buildings that fit into the town. At the meeting I addressed the council and spoke about character. Most of the new development is going to happen a couple blocks from my house so I felt a specific need to defend the character of our neighborhood as well as that of the town. I gave personal examples of beautiful places I have lived including Santa Barbara and Prague and explained how these cities have character that was nurtured into places that everyone wanted to visit.

But forget about my ideals, and think about those places you love the most. You have at least one place in your mind. Perhaps it's your hometown, or an off-the-beaten-path village you visited somewhere on vacation. And then plop a five-story parking garage in the center of it with a couple hundred cars pulling in and out of it. Not so nice anymore is it?

It seems a little trite to talk about these local politics against what's happening at a national stage but it comes down to stewardship and having a sense of control where you live to make you understand that government at every level needs to be of the people, by the people, for the people. What also needs to be very clear is that many mistakes that have dire consequences, such the contaminated water of Flint, Michigan are not pure accidents but rather inevitable disasters, often due to the poor planning of a few people.

Addendum:
It was a landslide victory for Voigt, Walsh, and Hache. Power to the people!

The Music Room

by Drew Martin
No wonder no one calls me anymore to hang out. My idea of a good time is to watch a 1958 Indian movie. 

I just finished watching Jalsaghar (The Music Room), It is a classic black and white Indian Bengali film about the fall of an aristocrat, the rise of a self-made man, and the music that they compete to host in their music rooms. We never see the neighbor's modern house with electricity. We only know that he is the son of a money-lender, has cars, and (my favorite line) can play tabla in a pinch. [I wish I had neighbors who could play tabla in a pinch.] 

For a Western audience, the film has elements of Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard. And it doesn't really matter what the aristocrat is smoking in his hookah all the time, his greatest drug is music. It intoxicates him so much that he ruins his family and their fortune to hear it in his music room. He sells off his wife's jewelry to celebrate his son's initiation ceremony and in the final scenes he gives all that is left in his family vault to a young dancer. (Pictured here and in the video clip below). But at that point his life is already ruined: his wife and son die in a storm at sea after he sends for them to be present at an impromptu performance he decides to host in his music room. 

The film is a little obvious with symbolism: bugs, reflections, and light but they are more dramatic flashes than overused motifs.

Even though I am a big fan of classical Indian music and that would have been enough of a draw to this movie for me, it was the title The Music Room that really caught my attention especially because of the tie here of music to intoxication. Like much of the arts in America, music has a very practical side to it: it motivates us, and makes us dance athletically, and sing along. It is a cathartic storytelling and is about making us feel more powerful. Even classical music, which one might sit back to enjoy without interruption has an uplifting, and pure connotation to it. In this film, however, music is like hashish or opium.

How Many Seconds Old Are You?

by Drew Martin
I was born in the 60s. Ok, it was in the last four and a half months of 1969, but I can still claim a little of that turf. The 69 always messes me up when I have to actually think about how old I am. Am I 46 or 47? 

I am horrible with math, too forgetful of my actual age, and a little indifferent to the whole matter. 

There are a bunch of apps and websites out there designed for people like me, which I decided to consult. The two websites I looked at for this post are pretty bare bones but each has its own advantage. 

The age calculator on mathcats.com breaks your age down separately into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds and it tells you when you next birthday is in days, hours, minutes and seconds but it does not give you a precise age as in years+months+days+hours+minutes+seconds. One other drawback is that when you put in your time of birth you have to adjust for your time zone. I was born in California so I had to add three hours to that time.  The coolest feature of the calculator is that it has a live, ticking display of exactly how many seconds old you are.

The only other site I looked at was myagecalculator.com, which is nice because it does tell you your age as a combined years+months+days+hours+minutes but it lacks the fun of the seconds details.This site also works with time zones, which is a little more sophisticated but you have to select from a drop down, and in this particular case it felt wrong to click on Los Angeles, when I was born up north.

Cosmic High Fives to High Tides

by Drew Martin
As a kid, my grandparents’ vacation spot at a creek near Williamsburg, Virginia was the most remote place in the world for me. My relatives had either small cabins or trailers in the thick woods and we were miles from civilization. We fished, spent time on boats, or shot at cans with BB guns or sling shots during the day and played cards at night. It was a place to kick back and spend time with relatives, but I never imagined I would have a profound, worldly feeling there. 

On a recent trip to Virginia, my brother arranged for my family stay at his own cabin on the same creek. I got up before everyone else in the morning and went out to his dock. A text from him (he was back at his house in Richmond) mentioned it must be high tide. I said it was and sent him a picture of his dock (top). Then I ran with my older son to our old stomping grounds at the creek. The water was the highest I had ever seen it so I texted my brother and asked if it had something to do with global warming. He mentioned that the tides vary with many factors. 

In that moment I looked around this marshy area of the meandering creek and I felt like I was on top of an observatory mountain in Hawaii. All of these years I never thought about how perfect of a place this was to observe the influence of the moon and sun's tractive force on Earth. Unlike the ocean coasts, the creek is undisturbed by crashing waves and blasts of wind. And unlike a steady flow of a river, the creek flows in different directions based whether it was rising towards high tide or lowering towards a low tide.

I had always felt overwhelmed by nature at the creek but that was because of water snakes, spiders, and ticks - this was a cosmic connection. Since our recent stay at the creek, I have looked at a lot of detailed tidal charts of that area and compared them to moon phase charts. What I keep reading is that tides are a "Complex Phenomenon."

They are barely noticeable at the equator and range only about a foot at high sea, but in other areas they are extreme. At the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada tides vary as much as 44.6 feet!

Although the time between high tides is (normally*) constant, around 12 hours and 25 minutes, the heights of high and low tides vary because of orbital path of the moon and how it aligns with the sun - the sun adds to the moon's gravitational effect. The bulge of the Earth's body of water is greatest when there is a new moon (when the sun and moon are aligned on one side of the Earth) or during the full moon (when the moon is on opposite side of Earth from sun). The gravitational force of the moon is actually only one ten-millionth of the Earth’s gravity [to things on Earth]. And the sun's gravitational force is only 46% of the moon, but when combined with the Earth’s centrifugal force created by the spin of the Earth, the effects are increased. The Proxigean Spring Tides are the highest because they are when the moon is closest to the Earth. Neap tides, the weakest, happen during quarter moon phases, which diminish global water bulging because the sun and moon are perpendicular with respect to Earth. The illustration here (bottom) is much simplified but is one of the better ones I found online.

*Click here to read more about this "Complex Phenomenon", which includes such morsels:

The world ocean is a complex dynamical system. The natural velocity of a water disturbance depends on the depth and salinity of the water at each point it passes. When bodies of land circumscribe bodies of water, they produce a collection of resonating systems that favor water oscillations with certain frequencies over others. From among the 300+ harmonics that can be measured, every port and coastal location has its own unique signature depending on its latitude, longitude, water depth and salinity. The result is that the 'two high two low' tide rule can be strongly modified so that the time between successive high tides can be greater than or less that 12 hours in many cases. The result is that for some locations, there can be days when only one high tide occurs.

007 Leagues Under the Sea

by Drew Martin
I have always appreciated how BBC nature documentaries develop a narrative for the animals they are observing. Perhaps it is at times too forced and scripted (as if for a children’s story) but it draws you into the fold, or pod, or whatever. Last night I watched the first episode of Dolphins: Spy in the Pod. As Brits are also famous for their spy culture, this two-episode program combines onsite observation with camouflaged espionage.

The show follows a couple different pods of bottlenose and spinner dolphins in various oceans around the world. The dolphins are filmed swimming, hunting and foraging for fish, mating, rearing their young, and above all, playing.

What’s different about this documentary's approach to turning the lens on nature is that it tries to remove the presence of humans by using synthetic spy creatures whose eyes, and sometimes mouths, are outfitted with high-definition cameras. There’s Spy Turtle, Spy Tuna, Spy Nautilus, Spy Dolphin, Spy Squid, Spy Clam, Spy Puffer, and Spy Ray, all with a unique way of getting around and filming.

One advantage of the various aquatic agents is that they pique the interest of the ever-curious dolphins and attract them for up-close photo opportunities. Sometimes the spy creatures fit in too well. Spy Squid is preyed upon by a monstrous potato cod, and while filming a couple of mating olive ridley sea turtles, the female switches her attention to our voyeur and makes her moves on Spy Turtle. When the narrator announces that Spy Turtle has to stay focused and has a job to do, as it moves off, you feel a little sorry for him, even though he is just an android.

While the spy creatures might seem like a gimmick at times, and you might question how effective they are from traditional underwater filming when you see them putter out of commission, they do make some amazing finds. Spy Trout captures the coming together of two large pods to form a never-seen-before mega-pod of more than 3,000 dolphins. 

Also filmed is a garland mating dance/play initiated by male dolphins who present wreaths of seaweed to interested females. One of the spy creatures even captures the dolphins at a spa – they must get rid of their most outer layer of skin every three hours to stay hydrodynamic so the dolphins will revisit coral beds where they can exfoliate.

The spy creatures, when looked at as art objects, are pure Dada, and surreal, and remind me of a post I did about pigeon surveillance cameras, tree stump listening devices, exploding coal, and other quirky tricks of the espionage trade. For more on that, read I Spy.

Chuck Norris vs. Communism

by Drew Martin
Chuck Norris vs. Communism is a great Romanian documentary about the role illegal VHS video tapes had between 1985-1989 in the downfall of brutal communist regime of Romania when video players were hard to come by and cost as much as a car.

The video tapes were smuggled in often by bribing border guards, then illegally dubbed, copied, and distributed to individuals who would have secret screenings in their apartments.

The three people who had the most influence were Teodor Zamfir, the ring leader of the business, Irina Nistor a professional interpreter for the state television who illegally moonlighted in Zamfir's basement studio, and Micea Cojocaru another interpreter who also dubbed movies for Zamfir but turned out to be secret police - which actually saved Zamfir when his house was raided and he was able to whisper a special password to call them off.

The documentary is a mixture of reenactment and interviews with everyone from Nistor to the people who attended the apartment screenings. They recall the movies they watched and how much it changed their lives and empowered them to bring down the government. Nistor continued to do the dubbing even after things got dangerous for her because she said the films were her oxygen. And her fans appreciated her - they said that if they heard a film dubbed by Cojocaru or anyone else they considered it a rip off, and they fantasized about what she looked like. One older viewer described her voice as being shrill but at the same time pleasant and expressive, and that she went beyond the role of dubbing and really acted out the roles.

Most of the films they watched were American action films but they got much more out of them than the brawls and explosions. They understood the idea of fighting the bad guys and felt empowered. The younger people from the audience would go out in the street after the screenings and have a more "disciplined" way of playing - acting out scenes from Chuck Norris, Rocky, Rambo, Van Damme, and Bruce Lee films. They also watched films such as Dirty Dancing, Pretty Woman, and other lighthearted movies where everything had a different meaning for them - a typical shop scene would show the abundance of products in America, and common street scenes would show them cars they had never seen in person.

The censors who Nistor worked with at her dayjob with the state television axed everything for a range of reasons. The meat locker scene in Rocky displayed too much meat available for consumption, and a rabbit carrying red, yellow, and blue balloons in the Russian kids cartoon Nu, pogodi! was canned because those are the colors of the Romanian flag and they thought it might send a message that Russia had too much control of them.

By 1989 Nistor had dubbed more than 3,000 films. When Zamfir first asked her what pay she would require for each film, she suggested the amount it would cost to get a smuggled bar of Austrian chocolate. He doubled it. When people reflected on how it all happened, even despite all the bribes and payoffs to high-ranking officials, they suggested that in the end the video cassette seem so trivial that no one could image that it might actually contribute to the downfall of Nicolae Ceauşescu's regime.

Autism in Love

by Drew Martin
Today I watched Autism in Love, an interesting documentary about autism and love. It follows a few people with various degrees of autism: a couple that gets engaged during the course of the documentary, a man who is married but loses his wife to brain cancer by the end of the film, and a young man looking for love.

It is an interesting look at love because with autism there are challenges in expressing oneself as well as comprehending how others are communicating to you. Their cues for and signs of love are hardly verbal so people with autism sometimes have to rely on other aspects.

Pictured here the man who eventually proposes to his girlfriend, explaining his formula for love. L + P + 2T is Looks + Personality + 2 x how he or she treats you. He continues to explain that how someone might be ugly but scores high overall because he or she is a nice person. You want all of the people filmed to have meaningful relationships but you see the frustrations. In one moment the girlfriend of this man is explaining very soulfully how necklaces are a shield for her and instead of engaging further into the conversation, he reminds her that the weather is on and would like to watch it.

The man who loses his wife is the least communicative. He visited his wife regularly during her hospital stay but never really had a full conversation with her and later explains very practically that he cannot love her after she is gone because she is not there. It is painful to watch but at least you know he lived and loved.

The young man is the one you are most concerned about, and hope he will find someone to share a life with. In one part he explains about how he does not see women anywhere, and he says (to show how dire the situation is)...

It's like I feel like if someone came up to me and said "Would you want to go to a woman's prison for a week?" I'd probably say yes. "Would you go to a woman's jail for a week and be the only man there?" I'd probably say yes.

Overturned Kübelwagen on the New Jersey Turnpike

by Drew Martin
Overturned Kübelwagen on the New Jersey Turnpike is sculpture I made this morning that ties together a meltdown I had as a passenger last week on the New Jersey Turnpike after an 11-hour drive up from North Carolina, a recent conversation and contemplation I had about the "Jersey barrier" (I am from Jersey), and the affects of wars - years after they have ended.

I live in a small, crowded house with five people, so when I find myself alone I have a couple options: sleep in peace, write in peace, or go into the magical zone of creating art. So this morning I had a couple such hours and I decided to make a sculpture. I try to make sense of all the toys left in the wake of my growing children, as well as other objects sitting around the house - especially in my basement.

A six-foot-long wooden plank started it off as a good "road" project, which I could incorporate some of the Matchbox cars in our house. I had old house paint for the road and white acrylic paint for the road stripes. I researched the standard: 10-foot white stripes, six inches wide, 30 feet apart.

I thought about 3D-printing the Jersey barrier but that would take a long time and I am cautious of using it too much because of the fumes. So I designed and 3D-printed a negative cross section of a Jersey barrier, which I planned to force clay (which I found in my basement) through and cut into lengths. I pictured it working like a macaroni-making device, but no such luck: the clay just got stuck. So I ended up making a snake of clay and hand-sculpted the Jersey barriers.

One of the toy cars I found was of a WWII Kübelwagen. The front wheels were missing so that inspired me using it as a vehicle in the accident. I had just finished The Civil War Ken Burns documentary and one of the themes is about the continuation of the affects of war long after the final surrender: psychological effects and economic hardships. So the idea of WWII enemies actually causing a modern day traffic jam on the New Jersey Turnpike is the quirkiness of the piece.

Ancient Wound

by Drew Martin
I just finished watching (the entire) The Civil War from 1990 by Ken Burns. This nine-episode, 11-hour documentary is a detailed yet personal approach to the American Civil War that raged between April of 1861 - May of 1865.

Calling it a civil war plays down some of the dynamics because this was not a power struggle by the "rebels" for "the country." The South had, in fact, politically seceded from the United States by forming its own government with its own president, Jefferson Davis. In their minds they had their own country for four years: the Confederate States of America, and the military action of the North was treated as an invasion of their country by Yankees whose directive was to bring them back into the Union.

When Yankee soldiers first encountered runaway slaves, they sent them back to their southern owners as they were instructed to do because they were fighting for unification, not the abolition of slavery. President Lincoln would have agreed to a solution even if it meant letting slavery continue. He later entertained the idea of colonizing the slaves on an island somewhere. It was not until hundreds of thousands of soldiers died that he turned the war into a fight for freedom.

The documentary is an amazing display of black and white photographs. It was the first war to be photographed. I once had a book of American Civil War photographs and remember many of the dead soldiers pictures, such as the middle one here from Gettysburg. But I do not recall seeing pictures of the devastation caused by Sherman's Union army. The pictures of the destroyed cities of Atlanta, Charleston, and Richmond (top) look like bombed-out Dresden or Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had no idea that flightless 19th century armies could even logistically do such damage.

My mom's father, "Granddaddy" was a proud southerner who I still recall shaking his head in his Richmond apartment and saying with a proper southern accent, "It's a shame we lost the war." He was born less than 40 years after the war so he would have heard old timers firsthand accounts. I remember some of our families stories of the Yankees invading and what they did but I never felt connected to the events even though I went to Virginia at least once a year to visit my grandparents. I have always felt a connection to Virginia because of my family history, which dates back to 1619 Jamestown, but It was not until I started The Civil War series that I began to think much more about the war itself and how much physical and psychological damage it did. I always thought the South would remain as I remember it but on a recent trip to Virginia and North Carolina, it seems to be slipping away into a gentrified mishmash of transplanted professionals.

William Faulkner once said that history is not "was" but "is." In many ways the American Civil War is still unresolved. The Confederate States of America compared the defense of their land to the Revolutionary War, while the Yankees set up America as a shoot-first-ask-questions-later culture of invasion, which takes a horrible toll on humanity with often indirect reasons.

I learned so much from this documentary. I did not know the Confederates had so many victories despite always being out-manned and out-gunned.The last battle of the American Civil War, in Texas, was a Confederate victory. I was also surprised by the multiple accounts by the Yankees of how they admired the devotion of the southerners, while they themselves were not always sure of why they were invading. It was beyond an educational film for me and really made me explore my own southern connection.

Burns set up the documentary to feature characters from both sides. He points out a couple soldiers from the very beginning and checks in on them a several times throughout. But if there is a personality of this epic documentary, it is the writer and historian Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (1916-2005), whose calming, Mississippi accent relays anecdotes about the lives of the soldiers in a dreamy way. His material is so rich that his presence makes up for almost a tenth of the entire documentary. He explains details such as when you see pictures of dead soldiers with their shirts pulled out and pants pulled down, that you might assume they were picked over for their possessions but that they were, in fact, casualties of the Minié ball - a fairly recent invention and choice of ammunition that shattered bones and tore at flesh. The disheveled appearance of the casualties was from them tearing at their burning wounds in their final moments. 

Towards the end of the series Foote summarizes the effect of the American Civil War with a twist of grammar. He explains that before the American Civil War, people said The United States are... and after, The United States is...

Finally, Burns' narrators recap the lives of the opposing Generals, Lee and Grant, and explains their final days. He also mentions Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain who had been in constant pain for the rest of his life after being shot with by a Confederate Minié ball in the Battle of Petersburg. At the age of 83 he attended the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which he described as a transcendental experience. A year later, he finally died because of his "ancient wound" - the last casualty of the war.

Brain, Brain - Go Away, Come Again Another Day

by Drew Martin
The movie Concussion may have been snubbed at this year's Oscars but it will not be forgotten, neither will Will Smith's performance. I like Smith from what I know of him but his performances up to this point were always a bit smug for me. Not so with this role. He does not mimic Dr. Bennet Omalu, but creates a believable character so much so that I often forgot it was Smith I was watching, and not a passionate Nigerian doctor. That's always my barometer for good acting; when the actor can act past him/herself. True of actors such as Daniel Day Lewis and Kate Blanchett. Not true of people such as Tom Cruise, Matt Damien, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, etc.

Concussion was actually quite similar to the film which won the Oscar this year for best film, Spotlight, which I posted about last month. The energy of both films is generated from the pursuit of knowledge and overcoming the obstacles that get in the way.

Smith's not being nominated for his role fueled #oscarssowhite tweets, and while the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a long way to go to achieve diversity, I think this film was pushed aside for other reasons, inherent in the plot. With the applause for Spotlight, it is apparent that it is fine to attack the church, but Concussion threatens an even holier American industry - the National Football League (NFL).

The difference between Spotlight and Concussion is, however, that Spotlight dates itself and plays off the priest molestation of minors as something uncovered and identified. Concussion is alive and kicking, and the real fallout is in the future. Exactly a year ago the NFL settled (without an admission of wrongdoing) a 2011 class action lawsuit from former players for more than $1 billion over the next 65 years to 20,000 NFL retirees. This was directly related to Omalu's work, who first discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) after performing an autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster in 2002, published his findings in the journal Neurosurgery in 2005, and presented the details to the dismissive NFL in 2007. Last week New York Jets left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson announced his retirement and cited the movie Concussion as the impetus.

While the film is titled Concussion, and such obvious head trauma has always been a concern for high-impact athletes, Omalu's work shows that CTE is actually the result of repetitive hits to the head that may not cause a concussion. It is a form of tauopathy, a progressive degenerative disease previously called dementia pugilistica (DP). This "punch-drunk" condition was initially found in boxers but is present in all athletes who experience repeated brain trauma, which causes a build-up of tau protein. Other tauopathies include Alzheimer’s disease.

If the NFL feels singled out here, which they certainly are, the film also takes on a certain anti-intellectual side of America. Omalu came from Nigeria where, his character in the movie explains, America is considered a notch just below heaven. He holds eight advanced degrees and board certifications, has a broad range of interests. Despite this he is labeled in the film (as in real life) as uneducated, and voodoo. Omalu is indeed a brilliant man, who Smith potrays with keenness. You cannot help but appreciate a coroner who speaks to his dead subjects with respect and even throws away the surgical knives after each autopsy.

The family name, Omalu, is a shortened form of the surname, Onyemalukwube, which translates to "he/she who knows, speak."

Behind: the Art Scene

by Drew Martin
A couple years ago I was a little obsessed with Fiverr, a site where people offer a range of services for only $5. Recently, I realized I still had $5 credit so I scrolled through a range of options. I found an illustrator, Alastair Laird, from South Africa who did a four-frame cartoon about a woman checking out and commenting on her butt so I asked him to place her in a museum/gallery setting. This is the result:

Museums and galleries are interesting places to watch people. There is always the couple where the guy who is clueless about the art is there merely to comply or, if he is a bit more ambitious, he will engage in the situation as a kind of foreplay. And now, with the ubiquity of smartphones, these places are more about being backdrops for selfies. 

When Kim Kardashian's butt graced the cover of the Winter 2014 issue of Paper magazine, and "broke the Internet," the Metropolitan Museum of Art joined in the public conversation. Their it's-nothing-we-have-not-seen-before twitter response was accompanied by a 6,500+ year-old bootylicious fertility statue.

So I like Alastair's cartoon here, catered for my request, because he plays with that updated meaning of self-reflection, and also pulls in the hapless fellow.

Related articles:
Freedom from Want: Kim Kardashian's Buttocks
The Jeff Koons Retrospective At The Whitney: Shiny Reflections But No Self-Reflection

Interestingly, as a cartoonist myself, I have never really done cartoons about art except for my posters for Freak Show and Freak Show II. It is a new thing for me - to pay for someone else's creativity and work. As an artist that is always from within.