Earlier this month my friend Edith Sorenson and I visited the A/V Geeks HQ in Raleigh, NC (home of our friends Skip and Germaine). Skip is nationally known for his unhealthy but entertaining habit of collecting 16mm films and showing them to audiences in unusual places, but I discovered that Skip’s girlfriend Germaine has secret talents of her own. Take this delightful pillow she embroidered with “ET Loves Cum.” What’s not to love? Germaine also made Skip a Toast Chee pillow (soft sculpture) when they were first dating. While we were staying with them, Germaine was making doll clothes and wigs. What a gal!
Picture: Lola waiting for the bus near Times Square; taken with my Treo. We had a doctor’s appointment for Lo with Dr. Richard, and caught the bus back from 50th Street.
I’m on day four of my trip to New York, and I’m starting to think about things other than work. I’m writing from my brother and sister-in-law’s apartment in Chelsea. There’s a Buddhist meeting in their living room, and I’m not quite ready to join the chanting. “NAM MYOHO RENGE KYO.”
This morning I had breakfast at Cafe Mogador with Ed Halter and Thomas Beard. Ed just had a book published: From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games. Ed and Thomas are a swell couple, and talking avant garde film/video shop with them is like scratching an itch with a long back scratcher/shoe horn with the creepy plastic hand. It satisfies!
I met with Tali Hinkis of Lovid, and had a botched playdate for the girls at the Riverrun Park (89th Street). Lola refused to leave her cousins and so I went to the playdate empty handed. Rama, Tali’s daughter, was appropriately disappointed. Later, Tali and I walked down to the 79th Street Boat Basin, where I considered the feasibility of living on a houseboat in NYC. It seems possible, but was more expensive than I thought: $2500/month during the high season and less during the low, averaging about $2100/month for a 25′ vessel. It would have to be a really really tall houseboat with an elevator to make it work.
*I am secretly a native Freeport, Long Islander (along with my boyz Lou Reed and Chuck D), but have lived in Texas for 11 years.
My oldest kid, Lola, has asthma, eczema, minor hairloss, and sinusitis. Houston, it’s not worth it. Carlos and I are convinced that the damp weather and poor air quality are contributing factors. We visited an acupunturist today and he had Lola sit on my lap and hold single viles of allergens. While Lola held a vile, I raised my arm and the acupuncturist tried to push it down. Whenever my arm was weak, he associated the weakness with a reaction to the substance. Lola thought the whole thing was a laugh riot, and decided to announce “I farted” on multiple occasions. Carlos, my new agey hubbie, seemed to like the doctor, especially when he found a copy of Alexander Grey’s book on the shelf, with forward by Ken Wilber and Carlo McCormick, the triumvirate of wisdom. For some reason Carlos handed me a book on tantric sex for women.
At the end of the tests, the doc recommended that Lola eliminate wheat, sugar, milk and cheese. No more cheese blintzes, chocolate croissants, or Newman O’s. He also prescribed a number of tinctures and mysterious homeopathic drops. Fingers and chakras crossed.
Today I hired the Wallpaper Lady to install this autumn scene wallpaper mural in our living room. It’s apparently New Hampshire. When my daughter Lola arrived home from pre-school, she asked “How do we get in there?”
The Wallpaper Lady’s real name is Julie, and turns out we were both fans of the now defunct Star 790 AM radio station, especially the old timer disk jockey, Paul Berlin. Berlin had been DJing since 1950 when he went off the air in 2004, and had all the affects of a dutch uncle, with a twist of brat pack humor. I wonder where Paul is these days?
Picture: Anne and Buckminster Fuller by Suzanne Murphy
On rare occasions people cry while they’re giving public talks, and I just did. A senior’s group was visiting the theater that I run/live in, Aurora Picture Show, and they asked me about my dogs who were here five years ago when they first visited. I started telling them very matter-of-factly that both dogs had passed away this year, and the next thing I knew my bottem lip was quivering. Oh well, they caught me off guard. Everyone smiled uncomfortably, and then someone chimed in on another subject, but all I heard was “blah blah blah blah,” because I was stuck in my head.
Speaking of death, recently I came across a two-DVD series of interviews with R. Buckminster Fuller (Buckminster Fuller: The Lost Interviews), which I highly recommend. The interviews are from an early 1980s (Fuller lived 1895-1983) cable access show on psychic phenomena and have a humorously new agey vibe, but what Fuller has to say is fantastic. He speaks about a myriad of subjects like the death of his 4 year-old daughter, how he had contemplated suicide but then decided he could justify living by trying to improve humanity, and how he did not speak at all for TWO YEARS– his wife did all of his talking. She must have been a very loving person. He didn’t speak because he needed to unlearn everything he had been taught, in order to tap into his innate genius (Fuller believed all children are born geniuses, but it is trained out of them). When asked by the host if he believed in life after death, Fuller replied “I don’t believe in it anymore. It am convinced by the evidence.” Then he explained how when he was growing up, school children were taught that reality is anything tangible, but during his lifetime all sorts of invisible realities were discovered, like atomic energy, for instance.
Here’s an excerpt from Fuller’s 42 hours of lectures titled “Everything I know.” You can read the full transcripts at the Buckminster Fuller Institute website.
“And whenever death is no weight is lost. At first the scientists saw a little tiny bit of weight but it turned out to be the weight of the air in the lungs, the air in the lungs weighs quite a little. We take on 54 pounds of air a day, out of which we subtract 7 pounds of oxygen to keep ourselves going; and so that that residual air, and there is actually no identifiable arrow moving needle moving identification of anything being lost when the phenomena of life goes.
Now, you’ve often heard, recently, great specialists getting particularly into the chemistry in the virology and so forth, getting to the point where they say they have been able to identify in star dust the unique chemistries essential to produce the organism of life. They call it they have now, the key to life. When this man dies all the chemistry is right there. You know that. I now have to come to the absolute conclusion that the mistake is all the time in identifying the animate as being physical. What goes on in this room between you and I, and that word “between” is very important. Remember SYNERGY. What goes on between you and I which is understanding is really not implicit in your organism in your nose or your hair or anything. I simply say there is a synergetic phenomena that does go on between that is not of. It is not the physical, and everything that is going on between me and you is absolutely metaphysical. I use the word “metaphysical” the physicists, then, identify the “physical” then as energy, energy associative as matter and energy disassociative as radiation, and one convertible into the other. Metaphysical is everything that doesn’t move a needle. And there is nothing that moves any needles here regarding this information I am giving you. The quality of the information the significance of the information. That is absolutely metaphysical.”
Screening Warhol: New Takes on the Artist and Filmmaker
The Menil Collection & Rice University Media Center
April 2000
In 1964 when avant garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas headed over to The Factory to present Andy Warhol with Film Culture magazine’s Independent Film Award (a fruit basket), he brought along his Bolex camera. Mekas’ film, aptly called Award Presentation to Andy Warhol, 1964, 12 minutes, includes Andy Warhol, Baby Jane Holzer, Niko, Gerard Malanga, Ivy Nicholsen, Kenneth King and Naomi Levine. Like the films for which Warhol was being honored, Mekas’ film was an unscripted cinema verité of the 1960s New York art world. Unlike Warhol’s films, Mekas’ was short and edited.
Warhol’s passion for the unedited– his longest film **** was 25 hours– continues to elicit questions and was largely the topic of the film series and symposium “Screening Warhol: New Takes on the Artist and Filmmaker” at Rice University Media Center and The Menil Collection. Inspired by the recent restoration of some of Warhol’s 4000 plus film works, “Screening Warhol” was an impressive undertaking that included among other films a world premiere of Sunset– a commission of John and Dominique de Menil for a chapel in San Antonio– and presentations by authors and scholars Callie Angell, Douglas Crimp, David James, Lynne Tillman and Branden W. Joseph. Like many of Warhol’s films, the series was more of an endurance test than a crowd pleaser.
Warhol’s films from 1964-68 broke all of the tropes that the Hollywood studio system had developed over 60 years. No crosscutting, no special effects, no directing, no editing. Warhol’s camera was static and his characters were obliged to improvise for 33 non-stop minutes (the duration of a 1200′ film magazine). What surfaces in those endless minutes is idiosyncratic behavior, self-consciousness, humor and awkward silence. On-screen drug use made performing fun for some of Warhol’s Superstars like Ondine (Robert Olivio) and Brigid Berlin in Imitation of Christ. As they lay in bed shooting up, Ondine and Berlin seem sleepy and slap happy. Other characters seem to unravel as the camera rolls like Edie Sedgewick in Kitchen; she continually sneezes as a signal for a line cue. In Horse, a “sex” western, six or so cowboys stand around a horse for 100 minutes. The few lines written by Ronald Tavel include “I’m the Kid from Laramie. Hang me on yonder tree”. The cowboys eventually resort to wrestling and crotch grabbing to pass the time. As Lynne Tillman stated at the symposium, “Warhol’s characters were self-conscious even when they were nearly unconscious.”
The screenings at Rice Media Center were a measure of tolerance levels. Typically more than one half the audience abandoned ship before the end of the evening. Lasting the entire duration of a film was an achievement. On Frameworks, an internet listserve for experimental film, the resurgence of Warhol’s films around the country is a hot topic. A message with the subject heading “Boredom/Warhol” elicited 22 responses on kinds of boredom, Buddhism and boredom, Boredom and the Ego, Structural Film, time and boredom, etc. One of the responses came from Callie Angell, one of the “Screening Warhol” symposium speakers and Adjunct Curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum. (Angell is currently cataloging over 1000 reels of Warhol’s films.) Angell described Warhol’s films as producing “productive boredom” which elicits a heightened perceptiveness. Similarly, a critic for the Village Voice commented after watching 25 hours of **** in 1967, “I became all perception, no memory, no intelligence.” He also admitted that being on speed helped.
Written for Houston Sidewalk, 1998
If there was an award for the busiest, most prolific artist of 1998, Mel Chin would be in the running… But didn’t he win that award last year? This Houston native is well-known for 30 plus years of socially conscious mixed media works, installations, and monumental sculpture. Not shying away from controversial subjects, Chin continues to tackle some of the most difficult ones – human rights violations, environmental deterioration and erased histories.
Maintaining 3 residences in North Carolina, New York and San Francisco, Chin has been roving the lecture circuit this year from Stanford University to University of Houston. This summer, Chin’s work was included in Blaffer Gallery’s “Putt-Modernism” exhibition (his contribution to the miniature golf course was “hole number 4″ called “Shelter”, addressing the bombing of Baghdad during the Gulf War). In October, Chin along with Arlan Huang and Binglee had an exhibit at China 2000, New York, and his one-person show “Inescapable Histories” (traveling through 1999) has made stops at Washington State University and University of Alabama.
Objects from “In the Name of the Place”– the collaborative project headed by Chin and the GALA (Georgia/Los Angeles) Committee which involved placing discrete conceptual elements on the set of Melrose Place– were auctioned off at Sotheby’s of Beverly Hills in November ’98. Proceeds were donated to two women’s college funds, the Fulfillment Fund and Jeannette Rankin Foundation. You can find out more about this project at www.mpart.com.
On the publishing front, Chin’s development in land reclamation , Revival Fields – an ingenious project that uses plants called “hyperaccumulators” to remove heavy metals from contaminated soil, was highlighted in the 1998 3rd edition of “Earthworks and Beyond” by John Beardsley, published by Abbeville Press.
Mel’s current work-in-progress is an opera about “warfare in the plant world” called Stimme Von Eden (Voice of Eden). He intends to open the opera in Germany and later tour the U.S. In addition, Chin’s collaborative landscape project with Bob Wood, the “Threshold Project” continues at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California.
And finally on the Houston front, Chin’s commission for the downtown Sesquicentennial Park– seven 70-foot-tall stainless steel columns containing 1,050 drawings by children born in 1986– was completed in May 1998.
Image: Phone booth transformed into an aquarium by artists Benoit Deseille and Benedetto Bufalino as part of the Lyon Light Festival in France.
Written for “The Unlikely Muse” Houston Sidewalk, 1998
In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film “The Birds”, Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hendren) finds refuge inside a telephone booth as vengeful birds pummel the glass enclosure with their beaks. This terrifying film moment– with a telephone booth as a transitory safe haven– has been imitated often in film and on television, including a recent X-Files episode (“Patient X”) when Maria Covarrubias (Laurie Holden) is waylayed in a phone booth by a boy exposed to alien black oil.
From Superman’s famous changing room to sexual turn-on, the telephone booth is a curious urban artifact– a privately owned glass housing that provides silence, protection from the elements, reading material, a good view and a phone. Like a precursor to artist Andrea Zittel’s self-contained comfort units, the phone booth is a type of functional cosmopolitan armor, purchased anonymously for five minutes with a few coins dropped in a repository.
Myrmidon Corporation on W. 20th Street in the Heights– with hundreds of telephone booths stacked in their stockyard– looks like a call box graveyard– but this is misleading. These telephone booths (know in the business as “Superman Enclosures”) are actually enroute to be sand blaster and painted for resale to the public. Most people in the market for refurbished enclosures are looking to make a few bucks by operating their own payphone business, but others have noticed the less obvious potential in these salvaged aluminum boxes. According to Robert E. Driver, Jr., President of Myrmidon Corp., creative citizens have purchased these enclosures for uses as varied as a private wet bar, a snake aquarium, a homemade smoker and a pool area phone. Driver says while he’s heard of people surviving severe storms in telephone booths, marauding birds would be a first.
Written for “The Unlikely Muse”
Houston Sidewalk, August 1998
From the ‘ping’ of Pong to the ‘bleep’ of PacMan, the sounds and images of video games are the cherished memories of children born since the 1970s. Producing a pale-skinned generation with acute motor skills, beefy thumbs and the ability to “tune out” any peripheral activity, video games have had both their opponents (parents) and their champions (kids). Whichever side of the digital divide you stand on, this annual $10 billion business has left a lasting impression that has nostalgic young collectors paying top dollar for arcade dinosaurs like Asteroids, Centipedes, Defenders and Galaga.
Though determining the first video game is still an issue for heated debate, most experts will tell you it was either William Higin-Botham’s 1958 “tennis game” developed at Brookhaven National Laboratories, New York, or MIT graduate student Steve Russell’s 1962 “Spacewars”. In either case, an enterprising company named Atari took the ping pong ball and ran with it.
Today you can peek into arcade game history in the warehouse at Houston Game PCB Repair Center in the Heights, a specialized fix-it shop for wayward electronic games. Vazric Grigorian, the shop proprietor, has been “repairing boards” since 1974 when he was an electrical engineering student paying his way through school at University of Houston. Grigorian worked for a Houston-based company called H.A. Franz, a vending distributor that carried Atari’s sought-after ‘Pong’ game. In the 80s, Grigorian worked privately as a “game consultant”, researching new products and making recommendations to prospecting companies. Now with back issues of RePlay Extra piled up in his office, and hundreds of arcade games and their guts exposed in the back, Grigorian says confidently, “There’s nothing we can’t fix.”
The tools of the game repair trade are similar to those of a TV repair shop: screwdrivers, soldering irons, oscilloscopes and volt meters. Mammoth green and silver motherboards are filed systematically on shelves while a few crouched over technicians peer into the bellies of Star Trek and Ms. PacMan. And just about every landmark game is warehoused in Grigorian’s endless repository. A stroll down the peculiarly quiet aisles past Stargate and Space Invaders will leave you hankering for a roll of quarters.
Written for “The Unlikely Muse” Houston Sidewalk 1998
“Mostly what we’re doing these days is cutting off a lot of heads,” muses Timber Childress of Modern Mannequin, Houston’s only authentic mannequin repair shop. “We also fix broken fingers and cut off the knees for tabletop displays.” While Timber lends her expertise to this highly specialized and somewhat macabre sounding craft, her daughter Sherrie Childress Mendez continues the 52 year family tradition of restoring and modifying mannequins for fashion display. Behind the creaky screen door of this modest green bungalow lies an uncanny theater of fiberglass body parts.
Like an old world craftsman, Sherrie sits surrounded by the tools of her trade (airbrushes, sanders and drills) as she refinishes the surface of a headless mannequin. There’s nothing high tech about this workshop with its drop ceilings and fluorescent lights; as Timber allows when her husband Tom purchased the repair shop in 1946 all he really got was “a spatula, a bucket of puddy and a shade tree.” Philip Phang, a former cosmetologist with Dillard’s and Saks 5th Avenue is the mannequin make-up man, adept at using oil-based paints to create pouting lips and piercing eyes. And Franklin West, a congenial handy man makes the daily rounds as well as the bases on which the mannequins stand.
As Modern Mannequin expanded over the years, so did the green bungalow with makeshift additions added for storage. Every turn of a corner reveals unclothed bodies with clear plastic bags over their heads (to protect their hair and make-up). Timber points out a mannequin that looks like Grace Jones, another that could be Suzanne Summers and another that unequivocally is Sher. Among the Greneker’s, Hindsgaul’s and Rootstein’s (all mannequin manufacturers) are a few choice specimen’s about which Timber simply says “Don’t ask, their not for sale.” A priceless fiberglass Louis the 14th and a 1920s flapper are among Modern Mannequin’s prize possessions.
As headless and armless forms replace the expressive one-of-a-kind mannequins of yesteryear, Modern Mannequin does more and more amputations than high fashion makeovers. When I suggest that these anonymous forms might appeal to a wider audience, Timber informs me of a more likely explanation: mannequins are just expensive and hard to dress. - Andrea Grover
Editor’s Note: Modern Mannequin’s work can be seen at Foley’s, Neiman Marcus and Saks 5th Avenue.
To get there: Take Highway 59 to Little York Rd exit. Head west on Little York for about 1-2 miles and Modern Mannequin will be on your right side at number 619.
