Art

Sumo on Clay
J. Foye

Pictured is a fragment of a larger sculpture formed from Sumo on Clay, a performance at the Torrance Art Museum on March 26, 2011. During the match, two sumo wrestlers left impressions of footprints and other movements on a wet clay mat. Foye then used the mat as a mold for a sculpture.

The criteria for winning a sumo match are as follows:

1. The first wrestler to touch the ground with any part of his body other than his feet will lose.

2. The first wrestler to touch the ground outside the circle will lose.

3. A wrestler who uses an illegal technique will lose.

4. The loincloth becoming completely undone will also result in a loss.

5. A wrestler may be declared shini-tai (“dead body”), and will lose, regardless of the above rules, because he was placed in an impossible position from which to fight.

Interview

An interview with J. Lax, a 2020 US Census Worker. Edited for clarity.

What were your responsibilities as a 2020 US Census worker?

I went door to door verifying the mailed-in data. The Census breaks out the work into three stages. First, they collect the mailed-in form data; then, they define a control group within neighborhoods and send people out to verify the results; lastly, they verify the control group’s verification. It was very thorough. It can be trusted.

What was the Census work like?

We verified residences as well as the people who had counted themselves. Most of the time the counts were correct, but the residences weren’t specific enough. Like, I might notice pirated electrical lines, then follow them. Where do they go? Once I found a stand-alone lean-to that was someone’s dwelling. At another address,I discovered a converted attic. This data informs the next census mailing. The lean-to will get its own mailing, and so will the attic.

I’m reminded of Harry Potter and The Cupboard under the Stairs.

My supervisor would have to make the call on whether that was a separate dwelling.

Noted. Did you enjoy the Census work?

I felt that it was important work. But the solitary work—which generally accompanies most tasks that involve geography—confirmed that it wasn’t for me. You’re at your computer alone. You make the visits alone.

What’s your take on gerrymandering?

Gerrymandering disregards the Census’s authentic demarcation of neighborhoods. To me, it’s like Africa during post-colonial independence—drawing country’s boundaries with no regard for the tribes that lived there, their movements, and habits. How did that work out? Not well.

Because of your knowledge of geography, what do you notice generally, that other people may not notice?

I read the landscape. Instead of reading a book, you read what you see. We all do this, but most of the time it’s nonverbal. For me, it’s more conscious. For example, have you heard of Broken Windows Theory? If you go into a neighborhood and you notice a bunch of broken windows and a lot of signs saying, “Don’t Park Here,” or “No Loitering,” it sends a message subconsciously to anyone going through that neighborhood that it’s OK to commit crime, because it already exists there.

Wherever I go, I read the landscape. When I visited Panama, I noticed that they locked their trashcans in a cage above ground. Why?

[Editor’s note: In 2010, around the time that J. Lax visited Panama, the capital, Colón, had very few public garbage cans. Only six percent of the population paid for trash pickup, because it was too costly.]

What’s your favorite map or map type?

I like all the maps.

It could be a map made with string and nails. I don’t care.

If you’re bored, what do you do about it?

I look for rocks, pick them up, and watch them dry.

I like the potential in everything. What’s on the other side of the hill? Let’s go look.

Art

Root Ball
G. Slonaker

Recollection

Rock Dog
S. Miller

My mother didn’t own a great many knick-knacks, because a tasteful home doesn’t include them. But there were a few exceptions to this rule. One object in particular was a paperweight in the shape of a dog, made out of flat brown river rocks, held together with thick globs of semi-transparent glue that were almost as big as the rocks themselves. The dog’s right eye was closed in a painted-on wink, calm like a meditating Buddha; the left eye, however, was formed using a plastic googly eye, and its tiny black bead rolled around inside a transparent disc, conveying zany excitement and anticipation that something fun would happen any second now. Rock Dog was ready for it.

 Rock Dog was completely out of step with almost everything else that staged our home. It was neither stately nor sophisticated. It was neither tasteful nor elegant. It had no pedigree and no status. It appeared to have been purchased from a flea market.

 Nevertheless, for many years, Rock Dog occupied a prominent position at the front of my mother’s desk, next to a severe fluorescent lamp and a pencil holder. Her desk was like a tank ready for battle: made of steel, overlarge and serious, with a return. She needed a desk like this to dominate household finance, which she attacked with purpose, though it made her cranky. My father wisely stayed away from this room.

 Despite the angst of paperwork, her office was one of the prettiest rooms in the house, which was an old Hollywood fixer built in the 1920s. In the afternoons, the sun shown through floor-to-ceiling stained-glass windows set in a curved wall, casting red diamond shapes down onto the carpet. Outside, a Chinese elm waved hello in the breeze. Meanwhile, my mother gnashed her teeth over reconciling the checkbook.

 My Uncle Jim had given Rock Dog to my mother long before my birth. I hardly knew Uncle Jim, who lived in Colorado, but apparently he was born with one leg longer than the other. When he was around five or six, he couldn’t walk because the doctor put a pin in one of his knees so that it would stop growing and allow his shorter leg to catch up. It was painful, but it worked.

 My aunt, too, had a birth defect: spina bifida, causing extreme compression in her neck vertebrae. For her, there was no treatment; you couldn’t just stick a pin in her neck. Like Jim, she lived far away, so visits were rare, but I always looked forward to them. She reminded me of Rock Dog because like him, she was always cheerful and ready for fun, even if she was odd-looking and clumsy. My mother explained that her siblings had been born with these problems because of Rh blood incompatibility, which at the time was not preventable, like it is now.

 One day my mother let slip that she regarded herself as the perfect one, because she had no birth defects. Naturally, I ruminated about this for the rest of my life. Being perfect did not translate to being happy, as far as I could tell. It also seemed to cut the flow of love, redirecting it to some abstraction that was never satisfied.

 Later, I learned that her own lack of birth defects was due to the fact that she was the oldest child. During her birth, her blood mixed with her mother’s; the incompatibility created antibodies in her mother’s blood. For any other babies conceived thereafter, if they have the wrong blood type, they’d have birth defects. As the first child, therefore, my mother had caused the inhospitable uterine environment for her siblings; she’d caused the imperfections, the birth defects. She hadn’t really done anything to escape defects, except by being the first.

 It was too bad that my mother didn’t know this, because if she did, she might have lived her life based on a different story altogether. As it was, she distanced herself from her siblings. And yet, there was an unspoken attachment. Rock Dog proved it.

 For no conscious reason that I can provide, besides being bored, I often rummaged through all unlocked drawers in my childhood home, looking for explanations for what felt wrong, for this baseline of woe. I didn’t find what I was looking for. Rock Dog, being singular and unique, acquired mystery, especially when his googly eye fell off, revealing a jagged white blotch; it appeared that he was winking at the void.

 As I revisit this indictment of my mother’s attitudes, I feel ashamed. I’ve been too hard on her.

 Later in life, my mother contracted Alzheimer’s, and then she died a few years after that, of a stroke. In most ways, for most people, Alzheimer’s is awful. It was awful for my mother, too, but for one thing: her mask of perfection fell away, allowing her to express profoundly deep reserves of love. What a surprise! It was as if, deep down, she was Rock Dog all along. At first, I was confused. Did it count, if she no longer was the person she had embodied most of her life? It absolutely counted. You don’t have to measure, evaluate, or understand love. It just is.

Later, when my son grew up and went to college, he told me he had trouble sleeping; or rather, he wasn’t letting himself go to sleep. He said he knew it was bad for him, but he resisted it. He wanted to have control over something.

I sent him Rock Dog and suggested he keep it on his nightstand. He needed it more than me.

Poem

Autobiography Using Stones
C. Hudak

My grandfather built stone walls.He was the youngest—an immigrantwith a point to prove and a hard, smallbody that only allowed for softnesswhen he was dancing.

Such a good dancer, all his women said,dresses unfurling in circlesand onto the floor.  He taught my father,and me, out on the terrace he builtwith what came up from the garden.

We each learned, in our own time, to findroom in the spaces we madebetween breast and navel and knee.

Did you know, he said, in some stone walls built byhand, there is nothing?Nothing to hold the stonesbut gravity, habit,and hope?

I didn’t know, I said.I didn't know.

Art

Untitled
Anonymous

Rock cliffs on Anacapa Island, California, USA. Filmed by O. Skyrus.

References:

Title: Definition of a Batholith.

Sumo: Wa-pedia: Sumo Wrestling

Trashcans: Managing Trash in Colón, Panama: A Case Study of Selected Strategies

Make art and/or writing. Send it to [email protected]. We will publish submissions in this ezine or in our first limited edition handbound chapbook.