10 Little Paintings

by Drew Martin
If you look too long at fingernails they start to look like little hooves. In a sense they are.  As an unadorned male I never personally thought too long about painting my nails so I never really appreciated their potential. Not until I found out one of my friends from childhood has a salon. Her "mostly nail pics on here" Instagram feed was a bit of a revelation for me for what can be done with the 10 little blank canvases at the ends of our hands. Here are some of my favorites. To see more follow her on Instagram @michellerose222.

A Man Full of Trouble

by Drew Martin
I was walking around taking pictures of Alex Da Corte's show A Man Full of Trouble at Maccarone this afternoon when the gallery assistant said, "You know we have professional pictures of the show already, right?" Perhaps he felt bad seeing me in the contorted positions I assumed to get certain shots. He did say it as if he wanted to help me...or better yet, to relieve me of my own efforts. I said, "Yeah, but I am trying to get pictures like this." And I showed him the following photo on my camera display.

He was a little surprised that I showed this particular shot to him because it seems like the least significant piece in the show. He said, "Oh yeah. That's actually the artist's favorite piece here. In fact, it was the inspiration for the rest of the show."

There are some really interesting pieces such as this free-form neon light sculpture.

And because I start off every morning with a bowl of cooked oats, I immediately gravitated to a tall sculpture with an over-sized replica of a Quaker Oats container. I did not pick up on the reference of this and the stack of $100 Ben Franklin towels to Da Corte's hometown - Philadelphia.

One of my favorite pieces is this pair of Kit Cat Clocks because in a span of almost 30 seconds their pendular tails seem to be matched for about five seconds before they fall back out of synchronicity.

 Here are a few more pictures I took of the show:

Right Here, Write Now

by Drew Martin

In our busy schedules and hectic days there is still an oasis of idle time where routine takes a late siesta. It’s a a fuzzy hour in the mid-afternoon. If you try to do work during that time you won’t be efficient so you might as well get up and walk around and discover something new. I was at a late luncheon today and instead of joining a couple colleagues to take a taxi back, I decided to walk off the meal and stop in a gallery or two before returning to my office. The first place I visited was the Westbeth Gallery where I took some pictures of the participatory installation Write Now. The gallery has multiple rooms and tables with Post-it notes, pens, and messages on the wall: What Do You Want To Leave Behind in 2016? or What Do You Want The World To Bring Into 2017?

When I was about to leave, the gallery sitter asked me if I had written something. I hadn't, so I put down my camera and drew the following Someone For Everyone Post-it here.

William Carlos Williams and Paterson of Paterson in Jim Jarmusch's New Film - Paterson

by Drew Martin
Last night I saw a special screening of Paterson that was introduced by its writer and director Jim Jarmusch at the Williams Center for the Arts in Rutherford, New Jersey. The Center honors the great poet and physician William Carlos Williams, or as joked in the film Carlo Williams Carlos, who was born, practiced, and died in Rutherford.

The City of Paterson is close to my heart and home. I go there for runs by its beautiful waterfall and up in the hill-top park of Garret Mountain. I bring my friends there to show them the falls - the largest east of Niagara, and I talk about it to everyone I meet. Paterson is one of the most historic cities in the country and has a wealth of culture. If you have read On The Road, it is where Jack Kerouac begins his quest, and returns to visit his aunt. More famously, it was the inspiration behind Williams' epic poem Paterson.

Jarmusch’s Paterson is an ode to Williams through the uneventful life of a NJ Transit bus driver/poet in Paterson, named Paterson (played by Adam Driver) whose more eccentric wife, Laura (played by Golshifteh Farahani) has a thing for black and white patterns, which she uses to adorn their small home, dog, and cupcakes.

The main theme in Paterson is duplication and once you start thinking about how ubiquitous it is in the film, you feel like it is the underlying structure of the universe. We start with the repetition of words in the poetry-narrative by Paterson conceiving and then writing down his thoughts. And it is in the dialogue: in one of the first scenes Paterson and Laura discuss having kids - twins. “One for you, and one for me” Paterson offers in a tone and manner that does not expand the conversation but rather neatly wraps it up. This is how he approaches his life through poetry – packaging ideas in tidy, economic lines.

Twins of all ages and walks of life serve as a double-take visual motif throughout the film, and the theme of duplication gets played out even more in the repetition of things people say to him. At one point his bus breaks down and he asks everyone to get off. An elderly twin bus passenger asks him if the electrical problem that stopped them might cause the bus to burst into a ball of fire. This dramatic question is later repeated by his wife, and then his bartender.

Duplication in inherent in the name William Carlos Williams, as it is with Paterson (of Paterson). And for that matter within the name Paterson – pater-son or father-son; and New Jersey, a copy of Jersey. It also gives more meaning to the repetition of life: waking up to his wife, eating Cheerios out of a glass, walking to and from the bus depot, talking with the dispatcher, walking the dog, and visiting a local pub at night. By showing these repeated events, the details that deviate from the norm stand out that much more - both in what is introduced as well as what is absent.

In contrast to the theme of duplication is the idea of one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable originals. Paterson keeps all of his poems in a “secret” notebook, which his wife urges him to photocopy. He never gets around to it and this leads to a great loss in the end. But through this we understand that creativity flows like water over the waterfall and what is not lost is the repetitive urge to write. 

I have not seen all of Jarmusch’s films but one scene that stands out in my mind from his Broken Flowers is a fragment of a conversation between teenage girls on a bus. It is just part of a discussion but it is a microcosm. I think this shows off Jarmusch's greatest skill - he lets you listen. In Paterson we get much more of this as Paterson overhears his passengers' conversations as he drives the bus. A discussion about anarchism is even kicked back and forth by Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman who played opposite each other as young, platonic lovers in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Here we see them grown up, riding the bus in Paterson.

The most endearing scene is when Paterson meets a young girl by the old mills who reads him her poem Water Falls and discusses poetry with him. There is also a series of mini scenes of a leaning mailbox that Paterson uprights each time he comes home from work, which functions like the broken newel cap of the staircase in It’s a Wonderful Life. It is a source of frustration but also comments on the human attention needed to maintain a home/relationship. In Paterson it plays out for one of the biggest laughs when we find out his dog is behind the gag. 

The City of Paterson is more than a set for Jarmusch. It is a city and land that yields the poems. You see this in the scenes of Paterson at the falls, where he writes at lunchtime, and also in a late night laundromat that he passes where he hears a local rapper working on his bars. Also with a reference to Fetty Wap, Jarmusch nods to a new generation of word craft.

I met Jim Jarmusch last night. I had not planned to. In fact, I was nicely asked to not approach him as press but he came over to me and somehow I got engulfed in a conversation about Paterson. So I asked him why Paterson, and he said that he started thinking about doing a film there 27 years ago. He had moved out from Ohio (he says escaped) and settled down in New York City. He said he had heard a lot about other cities and was surprised to discover all the great history about Paterson. 

You could tell it was important for Jarmusch to screen this film so close to where it was filmed and have our local support, in Williams' home town. There was a great turnout at the Williams Center for the Arts and Jarmusch said a very nice introduction to the film. Even though the movie can be shown over and over again, the effort to organize the evening that gathered an enthusiastic audience and Jarmusch’s youthful presence certainly made it a one-of-a-kind event.

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places

by Drew Martin

When I worked in a zoo in the north of the Czech Republic during a mid 1990s I was always impressed by the range of exotic sounds that reached out to me at the crack of dawn as I walked from the nearby trolley bus station to the entrance gate. Some noises were difficult to match to an animal, or even a species. The gibbons in the zoo, for example, had a high-pitched looping call that I first mistook for a tropical bird. 

Recently, I was perusing the arts section of my local library when a book on this subject caught my attention: The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places by Dr. Bernie Krause. The cover features a few different creatures: a long-legged bird, a monkey, and a couple dragonflies. There is also a bar of music. 

I expected this book to speak to my audio experiences from my zoo days through a journalist-style narrative of the animal kingdom. On this it delivers but it is so much more than what I had imagined. For one thing, unlike a lot of non-fiction books, this masterly written work follows a great arc of thought. When you read something by an author such as Malcolm Gladwell you basically get a thesis upfront followed by supportive case studies to prove the author’s point. It’s that or simply a collection of magazine-type articles. Krause, by contrast, develops an incredibly well-conceived 236-page history of sound on Earth. He outlines this through three general sound categories: Geophony, Biophony, and Anthrophony.

Geophony covers the sounds made by the Earth: wind blowing, water gurgling, ice cracking, storms thundering, volcanoes erupting, wildfires raging, and the ground rumbling. Krause takes the reader back millions of years when the only sounds you would have heard on the planet were that of the Geophony. Even more mind-boggling is the idea that these sounds influenced all the other sounds that came after them. He explains how a bird’s call is fine-tuned to the Geophony soundscape. For example, a bird that lives near a waterfall will have a call that can be heard over the constant rush of water. I could add that this seems in line with the loud call of seagulls who are typically communicating over the crash of waves. 

Most elegant is Krause’s description of waves around the world and how the cadence and strength differs greatly and is even affected by level of salinity, and the rake of the shoreline. He compares the drawn-out thunderous crashes of the surf at Big Sur to the delicate quick patter off the coast of Tanzania. 

One thing I question after reading this book is his inclusion of plant life in the Geophony. For example, he describes how the wind blowing over broken reeds is nature’s first Pan-flute, which presumably could have been an inspiration to music-making humans. In terms of evolution, plants and animals share a common primordial ancestor; the same spark of life. For this reason, there should probably be a Botaphony to speak entirely to plants including their slow growth sounds, and the array of animated noises they can make including that of falling trees and limbs, and the rubbing together of branches. In fact, the sound of wind and fire are often botanical. Think of the rustling of leaves and the crackling of burning wood. 

The Biophony, as described by Krause includes the noises made by creatures great and small. Whale calls can circle the Earth in open water. Shrimp snap their claws so loudly that they create a sonic bubble around them that stuns their prey.

Krause is a professional musician and sound technician but what is expressed most in this book is his skill of being a good listener. This translates to his talent as a writer and makes me realize that reading is simply a form of listening. The most notable takeaway from Krause is to appreciate the sounds of our world and to really understand the connections within the bandwidth of an environment. The most poignant example of this is the common notion that certain creatures vocalize simply for mating and territorial claim but this overlooks the most fascinating element of how they might harmonize and synchronize their calls, which still provides them with a medium for hooking up with mates and staking their turf, but is also a defense from their auditory predators who cannot pinpoint a single source when confronted with their surround-sound. That is, until this sound is disrupted by another noise, which might come from the Geophony, such as a storm; the Biophony, such as a howl or a growl; or more commonly, the Anthrophony, which is the noise we and our creations make. 

Krause breaks the Anthrophony down into Electromechanical noises from that range from pencil sharpeners to pile drivers, and Physiological noises from sneezing to shouting. He also explains Anthrophonic sounds as controlled and incidental.

Krause’s mission with this book seems two-fold. First, it is an educational read about understanding sounds and learning to listen. But it also has a sound-environment protection agenda. He writes about “bioacoustics information” versus “uncorrelated acoustic debris” or less politely, “acoustic garbage.” He explains how our brains labor to filter out harmful noises. Interestingly, while we might feel that we can adjust to invasive sounds, our bodies unconsciously continue to display the same nervous tension, fatigue, and irritation as they did when the noise was first introduced and perceived as stressful. He compares artificial white noise to fluorescent lighting. Not too long ago some employers introduced artificial white noise to their companies in hopes of focusing the attention of their staff. The results were counterproductive and could not compare to natural white noise such as waves and waterfalls, which have unique cadence patterns with subtle signatures that do indeed pacify humans. 

The most upsetting part of Krause’s exposé is the fact that fatal whale beachings, which are sometimes induced by the hemorrhaging of their inner ears, might be due to Navy sonar testing. Aside from the physical pain they experience, they become disoriented and go off course.  Krause’s environmentalism via the natural soundscape makes perfect sense: he illustrates the density of sound with graphs of his recordings that reflect the shocking but expected reduction of life through various activities such as logging. The removal of vegetation is devastating but Anthrophonic noise pollution alone is enough to disrupt a habitat as well. 

While Krause certainly struggles with the fact that our natural environment is rapidly diminishing, with technology fueling this decline, he does offer some hope that a new generation of smart-phone kids would use the recording technology in their hands to rediscover and appreciate natural soundscapes as he himself did on assignment decades ago. 

Artfully Awear at The Stable

by Drew Martin
Here are some pictures from last night's event at The Stable in Ridgewood, NJ. It was the first of an artist talk series I helped kick off through the Ridgewood Arts Council. I am a new member of the arts council and on my first meeting a few months ago I proposed the idea for the series that would have a salon feel. It was great to be able to collaborate with other members of the council to make it happen. With a $0 budget we pulled it together with catered food, a classical guitarist, a beautiful space, and of course a great artist to start it off with a lot of positive energy.

Our first speaker was Ariel Adkins of Artfully Awear. Ariel came out from Brooklyn to talk to an energetic crowd of fifty or so residents including several local artists. We held the presentation in the main room of the building, which is actually a restored stable that was built just after the Civil War for the last working farm in Ridgewood. In the upper-level loft space Ariel hung eight of her dresses on a clothes line we strung between the ceiling beams so that people could take a look at her work up close.

Artist Talk with Ariel Adkins

Chariots of Fire

by Drew Martin

The other night I watched Chariots of Fire, a 1981 British historical (yet horribly inaccurate) drama that won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. I first saw it in the movie theater as a tween when it came out but at that time it was for me simply a movie about running and not so much about its greater theme of religious faith. It highlights two runners who represent Great Britain at the 1924 summer Olympics in Paris: Eric Liddell, a Christian Scot, and Harold Abrahams, a Jewish Englishman, who won the 400 and 100 meter events, respectively.

Aside from the numerous fabrications and reversals of events, there are a couple other sticking points of this dramatization beyond what is shown. As a runner, the biggest deletion from this tale of the 1924 Olympics is the overwhelming success of the Finns in all the long distance events. I once worked with the great nephew of Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, who ran in the 1924 Olympics and dominated the 1500 and 5K meter races, and the individual cross-country race, and was on the teams that won the 3K team race and the team cross country race. His teammate Ville Ritola won the 3K steeplechase and the 10K, and his teammate Albin Stenroos won the marathon. The middle image here is a copy of the Paavo Nurmi statue (outside the Olympic stadium in Helsinki). The original is at the Ateneum art museum in Helsinki. 

While the film entertains an interfaith dialogue and addresses class issues, watching it as an adult it is hard to see past the overtly WASPy sentiments. As with the Finns, whose efforts are pretty much dismissed, black athletes are almost entirely ignored except for a few glimpses. Where on this world stage less than a hundred years ago were the Caribbean sprinters, north African middle distance elite, and East African long distance runners who now hold the world records, and what were all the obstacles these modern stars had to overcome to be selected to train and compete?

We all know that Jesse Owens was immensely popular and successful in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Within 45 minutes he broke five world records, equaled in a sixth. His long jump record stood for another 25 years and his team’s 4x100 meters record remained untouched for two decades. But Jesse was one of 17 African Americans competing and I personally do not know much about their successes.

Even though the Olympics were first recorded in 776 BCE (and probably existed for many years before then) the modern games were not rebooted until 1896. The first black athlete to compete at the Olympics was Constantin Henriquez de Zubiera (pictured top left in the top image square), on the French rugby team in 1900. The first black athlete to win a gold medal was African-American John Baxter Taylor (pictured bottom left in the top image square), as part of the US relay team in 1908.

The big turning point that brought attention to East Africa wasn’t until 1960, when the Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila (pictured right in the top image square) ran barefoot all the way in Rome and won the gold medal with a time of 2:15:16. Bikila was actually trained by the Finnish-born Swede Onni Niskanen who had been hired by the Ethiopian government to find potential athletes. He ran barefoot because the ADIDAS-sponsored shoes he was given were not comfortable and so he decided to run the way he had trained, without shoes. I always thought his barefoot marathon was light years ahead of other marathons but his time only bested the Soviet Sergei Popov’s record set two years earlier by less than a second. And three years later it was beat by Toru Terasawa of Japan, then Leonard Edelen of the United States and then by a couple Brits before Bikila returned to run a 2:12:11.2 in 1964. Tragically a car accident in 1969 left him a quadriplegic. 

A series of sub 2:10 marathon records were set by an Australian then lowered by runners from Japan, Holland, Australia, the UK and Portugal. It wasn’t until 1988 that another Ethiopian broke the standing record by 22 seconds with a 2:06:50. That stood until a Brazilian beat it by almost a minute, followed by the phenomenal Moroccan runner Khalid Khannouchi who ran a 2:05:42. He then broke his record as an American citizen a year later in 2002 by four seconds. Since that time the records have been broken by Kenyan and Ethiopian runners and remains at 2:02:57 by the Kenyan Dennis Kimetto.

The women’s side is a different story with Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain who ran a 2:15:25 in 2003; a breathtaking record that has held off the best female Kenyan and Ethiopian runners by more than three minutes for more than a dozen years.

While it’s assumed that East Africans will continue to dominate long distance events based on early 21 Century results and a multitude of explanations from genetics to body mass index, a Runner’s World article from two years ago took a more open-minded approach through data-crunching of 10,000 top marathon performances for the past half a century in order to answer their title question: What Will It Take to Run a 2-Hour Marathon? which echoes the quest of the 4-minute mile in the early 1950s. 

To run a sub-two would require a pace under 4:35 per mile. My best mile as a mid-40’s male was a 4:34. It hurts to think about it. Runner's World came up with a perfect race for a perfect runner, which may even be run in a part of the world without much race support at present time and by someone from a part of the world not yet tested for elite long distance running. Have faith.

Check out the Runner's World article with great infographics here: http://rw.runnersworld.com/sub-2/

Sibling Revelry

by Drew Martin
The other night I was at the Whitney Museum of American Art for an event and I overheard someone from the museum addressing a young staff member as Calder. A couple minutes later I bumped into him and I asked how he got his name because I named one of my sons Calder too. His parents met at the Whitney where they had worked and also named him after Alexander Calder. Long story short, we talked for an hour about the artist Calder, this young man's artist parents, and his up and coming artist sister, Avery Singer, of whom he spoke very highly and who has a piece at The Whitney and is represented by the Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery in Berlin. I was not familiar with her work so I looked her up on my phone during my commute home and was totally blown away. Avery uses SketchUp to create blocky figures, which she projects onto canvases and then airbrushes in grayscale. This results in oversized 2D paintings with the depth of 3D renderings that nicely pull together Cubism and computer-generated images. I am impressed by the scale, the idea, and the process of her work.

Free the Ripple

by Drew Martin

I just started reading a book about the origins of music and at the first mention of amphitheater I thought about the logo for this blog about the arts and media. The rings represent how, as a kid, I visualized the radio and television waves pulsing out from New York City to my suburban New Jersey town, and they also speak to the cultural periphery around the creative nucleus of Manhattan. So when the author mentions that amphitheaters of the ancient Greeks and Romans were semi-circular, circular and oval, I wondered how the original design came about. 

Were the shapes and ringed seating inspired by watching how water ripples expand and understanding the relationship of air to water, or was it more conceptually and mathematically worked out as a matter of equidistant practicality? Perhaps it was just a progression from the natural world to the built environment by experiencing and then mimicking the vantages of bowled landscape and hillsides overlooking the sea as one witnessed either a battle or a sunset. 

I would like to believe that it was a more personal and intimate evolution, and that it has something to do with how crowds form around the action, and that the tiered seating copies how the observers naturally jockey for position with the shortest people and kids shouldering their way into the front ring so as to be able to see, while the tallest of the tall can stand at the perimeter and still get a full view from where they are. 

The semi-circle formation would favor a performer who could act out into a fan of people and even hide elements of surprise behind him or her. The full circle or oval shaped theater would give the upper hand to the audience with the advantage to see the performers from all angles as those performers would need to rotate to address everyone, or would naturally be in motion during a display of athleticism or a small combat. One would naturally favor theater and the other would be better for sport. You could imagine how the simple difference in design might even influence the future of a culture. 

So what would be the reason for building an oval arena when a circle seems to be a more obvious shape? The problem with a circle is that the bigger you get the farther the very center is from everyone. With an oval you can expand sideways to give more seating and greater field/performance space but then certain “midfield” seats would still be close to the action. In practical terms the available footprint of a city might have influenced the design but the other thing is that with running events, and horse and chariot races you would want to create a space that allows for long straightaways and then a great enough of a curve to not slow down the competitor because of angled running, centripetal force, and a greater discrepancy of lengths between inner and outer lanes. 

If you look at the 6^th century BC marble wonder of Kallimarmaro (the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens) there is much more straightway than turns as we have on today’s tracks, which have a 1:1 straight to turn ratio. Even in the most distorted versions of theaters, arenas, and stadiums it is hard to not see the a manifestation of sound in the shape of the venues, the rippled arrangement of seating, and how they either favor the outward audio projection of the performer verses the inward cheers of the crowd.

The Thin Blue Line

by Drew Martin

I have seen temporary purple lines painted down Christopher Street in Manhattan for the gay pride parade, and temporary green lines down the center of Central Avenue in Pearl River, NY for their St. Patrick’s Day parade. Now there are permanent blue lines being painted in northern New Jersey towns between the double yellow lines in the center of the streets to show an appreciation for the police. Previously, in other parts of the country there have been red lines painted in support of the fire department, and in Rhode Island there are red, white, and blue lines in the streets of some locations for patriotic flair.

The “thin blue line” refers to the mental demarcation that separates law-abiding citizens and criminals. The recent display of the blue line on roads is a reaction to the public outcry towards the few officers who have shot and killed (specifically) unarmed African Americans. For measure, in 2014, the FBI reported that more than 50 law enforcement officers were ‘feloniously’ killed in the line of duty, with about that number who died in accidents. The count may be higher as reported by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund: 126.

I grew up with respect for police because in my experiences they always seemed to be at the right place at the right time in my home town and NYC. For the most part, New York cops were unconcerned with petty offenses, such as jaywalking, so it was a surprise for me when I went to school in Santa Barbara and saw police officers hiding behind bushes on mountain bikes so they could ambush and ticket students who they saw riding their bikes on the sidewalk - a far cry from the swagger of CHiPs, which I liked to watch as a little kid. And after a very recent trip to Berkeley, CA I found a new appreciation for my local police in northern New Jersey. Berkeley’s town parks look like lawless refugee camps for homeless people who defecate in the bushes and heckle passersby. The small-town network of Bergen County, NJ means a police force for every town, which is more expensive in terms of taxes but it also means better paid and better trained officers, and greater stewardship. 

While public road markings are supposed to be uniform, there are no rules about what goes between the lines. It’s up to the state, county or municipality to decide. In the Village of Ridgewood, where I live, the blue line is painted in the center of the road for a couple-hundred-yard stretch in front of our library, town hall, and police station. I was running this morning very early, just after 4am, and took this picture. At that moment two police cars sped off on a medical response while everyone else was sleeping.

Dirty Pictures

by Drew Martin
I just watched an interesting documentary called Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, which brings one closer to the earthworks of the artists who started the movement including Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Smithson. The film was a treat for me because I have not been out to the desert to experience their grandest works, which I have only seen in photographs. The documentary offers great views of Heizer's Double Negative, De Maria's The Lightning Field, and Smithson's Spiral Jetty, and it surveys the land art movement with interviews and anecdotes about the artists who left the New York gallery scene behind in order to redefine what modern art could be.

Max Beckmann's Manual Labor

by Drew Martin
If you can tell a lot about a person by his or her hands then you can tell even more about an artist by the way he or she depicts them. The hands in Max Beckmann's paintings caught my attention tonight at the preview of his show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a way, the hands are a summary of the paintings, microcosms unto themselves. They not only capture the style of each specific work, but they are manifestations of how he feels towards the subject. They are typically not the delicate instruments with which we manage our most dexterous tasks but rather: meaty gloves, fleshy pistols, arthritic claws, and sometimes so fine that you want to reach into the painting and hold them.