UNDER THE HOOD: LA Revisited

by Drew Martin
Five years ago I started a neighborhood art project called UNDER THE HOOD, which uses photography to capture the faces of the people who live and work around museums, galleries, and other cultural meeting places such as libraries. I started in my neighborhood as an extension to a makeshift home gallery, and then continued in Los Angeles, Prague, and New York. The hosts for the Los Angeles shoot, Anne Hars and Bill Wheelock of The Thinkery, really helped defined the project by turning it into a happening. We agreed I would take the pictures in the morning, and show them in the afternoon for the neighbors to take home.

Before I embarked on a trip to the West Coast last month, the couple invited me to reshoot their neighborhood. I planned to visit them but had not considered another shoot, which was hard to resist after they planted the seed. Bill later mused, "You know what this means, don't you? You have to come back every few years to takes pictures here."

UNDER THE HOOD Los Angeles 2014 took place on February 17. On the previous trip I had my two-year-old son in a backpack for the shoot. This time my 15-year-old daughter, Olympia, traveled with me. We started shooting during our morning run around Silver Lake and then joined Anne and Bill in the Echo Park area to walk their streets and to photograph their immediate neighbors. We took 200 pictures: I shot black and white film, and Olympia took a number of digital color pictures. The photographs were developed/printed midday and then they were displayed in the late afternoon on clotheslines outside The Thinkery for passersby and the people in the photographs to take home.

In the diptych on the left is a picture Olympia took of me as we helped one of the neighbors bring her groceries home. The picture on the right is of Olympia checking out the show.

Click here to flip through an e-book of select pictures from the show (but don't buy it because Blurb charges and arm and a leg)
Posted here are even more photographs than in the book:

Extreme Dreams

by Drew Martin

Extreme dreaming is one of my favorite pastimes. I often have vivid and engaging dreams. I am not sure why this is. Perhaps I eat too late, or maybe it is a southpaw thing.

My dream last night was particularly memorable because it covered several years. It started at my train station: I hopped on a late afternoon train to go into the city, but it made an impossible U-turn under the tracks and headed an hour north to the corner of my state. The other passengers (who knew where the train was going) and I were dropped off at a colonial crafts village, where I met a friend whose mother use to loom fabrics. We looked at how the older clothing was made, and walked around the village. As night approached, I started to head back for the train but could not find my friend, nor could I find a clear path in the woods. I got stuck in the village for four years and spent the entirety of the dream trying to leave but every exit plan dead-ended.

The landscape and architecture of the dream was maze-like. Stairwells, for example, split into multiple descents that either stopped at a wall or turned upwards again. Paths going downhill towards the river, ended at the base of a mountain, and the people were blissfully unaware of their limited territory.

Somehow I worked my way out of the dream labyrinth and got to the entrance gate of the region in which I had been bound. This coincided with my nearing the end of the dream. As I left the place, I looked back at the entrance gate, and then, before I could turn to look ahead, I awoke, not knowing if I was returning to the world as I knew it or if it had been destroyed during my time away from it. I had suspected that the boundaries were established to protect the inner realm with its idyllic conditions from perhaps a harsher reality or even an obliteration of the outside world.

Bukowski - Born into This

by Drew Martin
I read Charles Bukowski's Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories a few years ago. From it are the lines:

a good book
can make an almost
impossible
existence,
liveable

While most good books live up to this in an escapist way, Bukowski's writings do this by sharing the rawness of life and painful moments. He said he had the face of a ravaged lion. It was so infected in his teens that he wrapped his head in toilet paper, poked holes for his eyes to peer out, and watched his fellow students attend his high school prom; outside from a distance, boil-bleeding into his face wrapping.

The excellent documentary Bukowski: Born this Way feels more autobiographical than simply a film about him. In it, William Pakcer, publisher for the New York Quarterly, comments that one thing Sigmund Freud could not have foreseen in the 20th century (and beyond) is the Walt Disney approach to making everything cute and nice, and that Bukowski was devoted to the de-dignification of all of us and to kicking Mickey Mouse out of our heads. Similarly, Bukowski said that if your parents begin to like your work, it is getting bad, but if the cops are around than something good must be happening.

Bukowski was the working man's writer and since he was originally a prose writer, when he got around to writing poems, they came out as stories and as narratives, free of metaphor and previously established structures. That being said, when he was asked about love he said it was like a fog that burns away with the first daylight of reality.

Bukowski spent a lot of time at the horse races in Los Angeles. One reason he went was because he could see many faces there, all with a dream followed by disappointment. 

 

Why Hieronymus Bother?

by Drew Martin
In chapter 16 (season 2, episode 3) of Netflix's Macbethian House of Cards a reporter, Lucas Goodwin, continues to investigate the death of his colleague-girlfriend, who was pushed in front of a speeding metro by the vice president of the United States. He gets involved with a hacker known as Hieronymus Bot who, before their face-to-face encounters, interacts with Goodwin through a computer-generated character on an iPad that a bike messenger delivers to Goodwin while he is waiting at a booth in Waffle Nation. When Goodwin turns on the iPad, Bot's live voice is animated by strange blue birdman with a big, bulbous copper kettle on its head. For a viewer who does not know the reference, this must be a bizarre sight but the creature is lifted straight out of the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych Garden of Earthly Delights, which he painted around 1500. In the original, the birdman is devouring a naked man, while sparrows fly out of the victim's buttocks. There are few art references in House of Cards so the nod to Bosch seems a little out of place.

Never Retreat, Retweet: Going all the Weiwei

by Drew Martin
I just finished watching a documentary about Ai Weiwei called, Ai Weiwei, Never Sorry. His saying, Never Retreat, Retweet references his communication through and popularity on Twitter. He turned to Twitter after the Chinese government shut down his popular blog, which he used to investigate and document the death of thousands of school children crushed by poorly built schools ("tofu" construction) that collapsed in a 2008 earthquake. This documentary reflects on his New York years (1981-1993) and takes us through his detention in China in 2011. Weiwei plays the role of the artist dissident like others more famously before him, including Václav Havel. And while he seems a bit secondhand when he says he is more like a chess player than an artist (an obvious rehash of Duchamp's conclusion) the documentary acknowledges such creative influences but also drives home that he has the skills to make all the work he hands off to his assistants. One helper says his studio role is like that of an assassin: he is told to execute something and he does it as an extra set of Weiwei hands. While this film is a promotional biography about Weiwei, and I would have appreciated a more critical voice, the peppered presence of Evan Osnos, China correspondent for The New Yorker, offers a deeper probe of journalism. He pokes the married Weiwei about his out-of-wedlock son (but does not get very far), and comments that while Weiwei safely watched (from the US) the deadly protests of Tiananmen Square in 1989, he was even more influenced by the televised Congressional hearings to investigate the Iran–Contra affair, especially that such an internal government case was made public.

The Museum of Interesting Things

by Drew Martin
The iconic feature of the most highly designed Edison cylinder phonographs is the speaker horn that rises like smoke from the mechanical box, like a manifestation of sound itself, but the most fascinating part of the device is the cylinder itself. Yesterday I saw such an Edison product with a decagonally flared speaker, which was playing an acrylic cylinder (he also used wax). Despite some scratchy popping sounds it was amazing to hear how close he was able to approximate the human voice and musical instruments with a setup that is actually quite low-tech, and from more than a century ago. The phonograph used the speaker as the microphone, and a special inscription needle to etch the funneled noises into the cylinder material. To listen, the needle uses a playback tip, which transfers the etchings into audible voice and music that are amplified by the speaker horn. The phonograph I saw yesterday at a local science fair was part of the collection of the Museum of Interesting Things: A traveling, interactive demonstration and exhibition of antiques and inventions.

Do Look at the Sun

by Drew Martin
Huitzilopochtli, Malakbel, Shapash, Aryaman, Ra....pick a name from the hundreds of solar deities from world mythologies and you evoke some of the most powerful characters from the history of humans.

There is one mortal character from an urban legend (of the American Urban Mythology), let's call him Raymond, who takes LSD and decides to lay himself on a grassy knoll and bask in the warm sunlight of a hot summer day. He takes off his shirt to work on his tan, joins his hands behind his neck so that he can prop up his head, and stares at the sun. He is mesmerized and cannot take his eyes off the glowing ball of fire. As the legend goes, Raymond is permanently blinded because his pupils fuse together. We were told this legend countless times by our moms when we were little, and it was commonly shared with the other kids in the neighborhood because it is dangerous and blinding to look at the sun, and the command "Don't look at the sun!" needs a backup story.

At a local science fair yesterday I had an opportunity to look at the sun through a high-end telescope with a protective filter and was blown away. The telescope was fairly small but the image of the sun was very crisp, much clearer than the image pictured here, and it was living in the sense that you could see the movement of the arcs of fire flaring up from the surface. This setup was arranged by a local college, Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. I have also been to their open-to-public observatory nights before, where you can see amazing views of Betelgeuse and other-worldly sights.

Kids Are Brilliant Geniuses

by Drew Martin
Just when you think you are ready to write off a generation of millennial kids as sheltered neo-slackers, you see their unique brilliance shine through. Today, I stopped by the local science fair at my town's high school, which was wall-to-wall with table-top booths. There were, of course, the standard baking soda volcano models, and other experiments you would expect at a suburban event like this that was put on by elementary school kids but then there were also some really engaged students. 

One girl create a doodle-bot (pictured below) from a small, battery-powered fan and four markers.  The wandering of the bot was created by removing a few of the plastic fan blades and taping a penny to one of the remaining blades in order to make it unbalanced.

My favorite showing was by a kid who made a black, round head with a styrofoam  ball, and filled it with electronics through which he sent emotion commands for its face to mimic. (pictured above) 

There is something in hearing a ten year old talk about the motherboard of his robotic head that makes you realize these kids are alright, and they are actually light years ahead of us at that age. 

Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig

by Drew Martin
I just saw a live production of Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig at the 3LD Art + Technology Center, which is a cool theater space nestled in a nondescript parking garage in the shadow of the ground zero construction site in Lower Manhattan. It is weird to see a production about Czechs by non-Czechs, which is the same sensation I had when I watched The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Czechoslovakia. The audience I was with at that time in 1992 was primarily Czech but the lead roles of the Czech characters are played by Daniel Day-Lewis (British), Juliette Binoche (French), and Lena Olin (Swedish). Tonight's experience was a little more authentic because my friend and I started in a beer garden around the corner and then made our way to this play, which had a lively Bohemian pre-show, and was followed by a post-show of the cast members singing songs by The Velvet Underground - the namesake for the Velvet Revolution that Havel took all the way to his three-term presidency. The Pig is Havel's final work, which was co-authored by Vladimír Morávek. It started with a short dialogue from 1987 about a true story of Havel’s efforts to host a pig roast for his friends. Morávek added sections from one of the most beloved Czech works, The Bartered Bride, and what I saw tonight was something of a CzechoAmerican mashup, which did not dilute the absurdity of the search for a pig in a backward village and this comical tale's criticism of the communist regime.

No Wave Cinema and The Cinema of Transgression

by Drew Martin
I guess I sort of wanted to watch the Oscars but realized I can get a recap in five minutes on my commute tomorrow morning so I spent some time tonight digging a little deeper into the world of movies by watching Blank City, a documentary about No Wave movies, and the Cinema of Transgression. These New York-based independent film movements focused on narrative films, and politically radical interrogations of the subject matter that were about "getting the hell out of the artworld and finding a kind of cinema closer to reality." Two elements noted that lead to the beginning of the end of these movements were the financial success of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which flipped which side of money it meant to be cool, and MTV because of where that steered the entertainment industry.

5000 Moving Parts: MIT Museum

by Drew Martin

My 13-year-old son, Calder, and I are on a road trip to Cambridge/Boston, Massachusetts. One of our destinations was the MIT Museum, which we spent almost two hours in this afternoon. The museum is small but definitely worthwhile, and it has a lot of what you would expect at a technological museum: computers and other interactive displays. What really impressed me is the kinetic art show on display until November 2014, called 5000 Moving Parts, which has work by mechanically inclined creators whose machines range from bizarre to profound. One piece, Please Empty Your Pockets, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is like a kid's interpretation of how a TSA airport scanner should work, only that it is elegantly executed. The device has a lit moving bed onto which you may empty your pockets. The items you place glide under a hood and when you pick them up on the other side of the mysterious light box, their exact scan remains, and continues down/on the bed. The effect is accumulative so that a sole item might end up in a collage of other previously scanned objects. Calder scanned his winter hat, then his shoe. Arthur Ganson's works, a special feature at the museum, are the most mind-boggling. Machine with Oil, cycles a little bucket into a pool of dark oil, and dumps the contents onto itself when it is cranked up to the apex. It seems decadent, like pouring chocolate or syrup over food but then you realize this only makes the metal, geared contraption run better/smoothly. Behold the Big Bang sits long and wide like a lathe, but on closer inspection you see it is an arrangement of gears. On one end the movement is noticeable but seems to not be transferred down the system. The sign on the wall next to it reads, Note: It will take the motor, coupled with the sets of reduction gears, 13.7 billion years (the estimated age of the universe) to complete one rotation of the last gear. We exited through gift shop and got a T-shirt for my son that reads, i have an imaginary friend (square root symbol) -1. After the leaving the museum we walked around the MIT campus, and I brought him to see La Grande Voile (The Great Sail) by his namesake, Alexander Calder. A police SUV was parked right in front of the sculpture. I was trying to take pictures all around it so I asked them to move. The cop in the passenger seat said they were planning on moving in about an hour. I rolled my eyes and walked away. He shouted back at me, "No, I am just messing with you. I had to do it." Then they drove away.