Merrill Markoe's Blog, page 5

Women on a Panel: The musical montage

Speaking as someone who has perhaps too frequently been on panels herself, I offer this musical montage.

A potpourri: Three short recent things by me.

1. This is a piece I wrote about Facebook reunions for The Wall Street Journal.

2. This is more or less what it looks like inside of my head when I am between projects and wondering what to do now.

3.And this is my take on a new discovery in nantoechnology that has produced a fabric so thin that soon we are all going to wear our computers.

What My Brain Looks Like AND Wearable computers.

This is more or less what it looks like inside of my head when I am between projects and wondering what to do next.

And this is my take on a new discovery in nantoechnology that has produced a fabric so thin that soon we are all going to wear our computers.

RIP Dr. Glenn Markoe: archaeologist/curator/author/researcher/my little brother

My brother died some time during the week of July 18. His health had not been great for a while because he had MS. But it was all complicated by the fact that he had been in a number of very bad accidents over the past decade that left him with assorted physical limitations.  One year he broke his shoulder, the next year he broke his hip. About a year and a half later he broke his neck in a bad car accident. Still, he worked out every day on a tread mill in his office and his death was unexpected. I kind of thought he’d eventually tell me that he had simply willed his health problems into a minor inconvenience. He was 60.

Academically speaking, my brother was an expert in a lot of arcane subject matter I could barely comprehend. He used to joke that he knew nine languages, 3 of which had not been spoken in 2000 years.  When someone asked him if he was fluent in Greek, his answer would be the question “Modern or Ancient?” He knew both.

After he received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in Ancient Art and Archaeology, he was granted a  Fulbright Research Fellowship in Cyprus. He loved Cyprus and the people he met there who, he told me, pronounced his name Glown. We found that so amusing that for the entire rest of his life when we left each other messages, we both referred to him as Brother Glown.

As a young man he worked on a fair amount of on-site archaeology digs. He also visited and traveled with his friend Thor Heyerdahl who granted permission for Glenn to use one of his photographs of The Kon TIki for the cover of my brother’s  definitive book about ‘The Phoenicians’, the civilization that gave us our alphabet.  ‘The Phoenicians’ was originally co-published by the British Museum Press and the University of California Press. But  recently  The Folio Society in London issued the book in a leather bound edition.  My brother was very excited about that. He was a leather-bound kind of guy in a digital world. He had no problem understanding Sanskrit but repeatedly told me he was having trouble with G-mail.

For the latter part of his career, he ended up curating museum shows and writing academic research papers with titles like The Funerary Iconography of the Lotus Flower.  Here is a catalog from a show he directed on women in ancient Egypt at The Cincinnati Art Museum, where he worked as  Senior Curator of Classical and Near Eastern Art and Art of Africa and the Americas for 23 years.

Probably the crowning glory of his career was a huge show he put together with his colleague Craig Morris from The Museum of Natural History in NYC entitled ‘The Lost City of Petra.’  Once referred to in a poem as “a rose-red city half as old as time,” the city of Petra is famous for its elaborate temples carved in sheer rock walls. You may remember it best as the haunting backdrop for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Here is a link to the book my brother wrote about the show. My brother spent ten years working on this project, traveling back and forth across the war torn middle east, visiting the site itself and getting permissions from the Royal Family of Jordan and the Jordanian government to ship various antiquities to this country. Here is a picture of my brother and Craig Morris with Queen Rania of Jordan.  My brother is the bearded white haired guy on the left.  Here’s a page about him from a website that went up about the exhibit.  That period of time stands out most for me as a time when I was worried about him constantly because he was not a guy who ever seemed to sense danger. In my mind, he was walking around with a ‘Take Me Hostage’ sign on his back. Ever since he was a little kid he had always appeared to be preoccupied by a private inner landscape of details from some other century. My parents referred to him as “an absent minded professor.” He was simply very trusting and good natured as he concentrated on his work and went about  collecting data for his exhibit,unconcerned that he was  not that far from where we had just invaded Iraq. “Merrill,” he used to shout at me when I issued cautionary edicts, “Where I am, it’s perfectly safe.” Still, when I went to bed at night, I had  visions of newspaper headlines describing how Al Qaeda had dropped a butterfly net over him and  taken him hostage.

Fortunately there was no kidnapping. Instead a great exhibit was the result.  Here’s a page about him from a website that was created for ‘Petra Lost City of Stone’.  I had never even heard of the culture of the ancient civilization of spice traders called the Nabateans, builders of the city of Petra, until my brother told me about them. During that period he sometimes called me from his research sites in Jordan.  Those were the Bush years. I assumed this meant that I was probably having my phone tapped by the U.S. government.

It was always fun to attend any exhibit of ancient relics with him because he specialized in knowing about vanished worlds that are invisible to most of us. One time, while showing Andy and me around an exhibit, he took us over to a very official looking piece of inscribed rock sitting in a case on a pedestal. “That was a shopping list from the first century.” he told us.

Anyway, he’s gone now. He was a very sweet, funny, smart man and a great father to his two sons, Carey and Noah. And he was my goofy but brilliant brother. It seems surreal that he has suddenly vanished. But as we all learn, such is the weird reality lurking right underneath the one in which we all live.

We sent an obituary in to the Cincinnati Enquirer but so far they haven’t published it. I couldn’t wait any longer. So I wrote this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Road Kitty

I was driving home from the gym at about 10 the other night. I go there late because  there are fewer people. Also driving home is nice.  Its very dark and quiet, although sometimes I hear a coyote or a peacock (or the over-amplified bass booming out of a party.) On this night, as I got to the bottom of the hill, something shiny hit my headlights. Staring in to the road directly ahead of me, I saw a shape and more glare. Because I read the news too carefully, my first thought was not “animal in the middle of the road”, but “camouflaged bomb placed at intersection by Al Qaeda.” It was kind of flapping like  a paper bag or an already crunched cardboard box. I stopped the car before I ran in to it and as I carefully drove around it I thought it seemed to be kind of the shape of an animal,  tho clearly not an actual animal.  I decided it was probably another manifestation of my habit of finding faces on inanimate objects when I stare at them.

The next day I walked the dogs back to that same spot. By then I had completely forgotten about the entire incident. But once  I found this thing, lying on a nearby curb, I suddenly comprehended the rest of the scenario.

Bet the artists, who no doubt performed an exagerrated recounting of my every reaction, would be surprised that I liked their work so much, I took it home and put it on display.

A piece about GMOs and also the Pope.

Frank Connif, Judy Gold, David Feldman and I were hired to do weekly commentary about the news for Salon.com.  That appears to have vanished in to thin air with a cryptic e mail yesterday from a tech liason saying “We have all been fired.”  Meanwhile, I had just finished this week’s piece and now there is no where to post it. So I posted it here. Ah, the fun of working for the internet! It moves so fast, they’ve dispensed with the need to even tell people their services will no longer be needed. Then again, I remember at least one pre-internet television show I worked on where our cancellation was revealed when we read it in the newspaper. Oh well. On to the next thing. Meanwhile, here’s this:

 

 

This Week in Sociopaths!

 

I’ve been doing these little pieces for Salon.com for a few weeks. I shoot them at my desk, using desk lighting and the photo-booth feature on my Mac…so that should explain the production values. (Oh…and I own a green screen. And can not keep myself from using it.) The pieces are meant to be about 2 minutes long. Otherwise This Week in Sociopaths would probably last at least a week.

A video I made in my new greenscreen suit about nanotechnology

I’ve started making some videos for Salon.com about stuff in the news. This is from this past week and is based on an article I read that …well, I explain it in the video. Its only a minute and 30 seconds long: perfect for the ADD attention span with which we are all so familiar. But most importantly, I finally found a way to use my new green screen suit. After I bought it, I tried to make videos of things mysteriously floating around my office. The results were just stupid. This worked out much better.

What to say to the 3 people who come to hear you read at a bookstore.

Whenever I have a book come out, friends ask me if I will be appearing at any bookstores. I shrug and smile. This is what I am too embarrassed to tell them:

There are many perks to being an author. I bet J.K.Rowling would tell you that the only down side to a bookstore appearance is achy cheeks from smiling at so many well wishers. Steven King is probably tired of the hand cramps from signing so many books. But for a lesser luminary…oh, who can I use?  For the sake of a handy example, let's just say me… things are rather different. And when I use the word 'rather' I mean it in the sense of the word "vastly."

The truth is that ever since I first made an appearance at a book store where very few people showed up, even book stores where I have never been asked to appear seem to hold nerve wracking future memories. I am talking about the kind of commonly scheduled event for a newly published book in which an optimistic store manager has gone to the trouble of making an enormous sign bearing the author's name. The sign I'm thinking of may have been big enough to have been visible from the surface of the moon.

Of course everything about being asked to speak anywhere is an honor. After all, during the writing process, every author hopes for some kind of acknowledgment and validation eventually. He or she is probably imagining groups of the kind of interesting people they would be honored to have as friends.  They are certainly not  hoping to one day drive in to a completely empty parking lot, then gingerly tip-toe thru the tumbleweed in a completely empty store,  the haunting sounds of a lone harmonica echoing in the distance, as they find their way to a carefully arranged unoccupied seating area just in front of the afore mentioned enormous personalized sign .

Now the self recriminations begin as I realize that if I had acted more aggressively, weeks before, this moment might have been averted. My other author friends all have the right combination of smarts and ego that pushes them to send out high pressure invitations to relatives and acquaintances, insisting they attend .But I am always too uncomfortable with the idea of inconveniencing busy friends in the middle of dinner so I am relying on maybe some actual fans? Good luck to me!

Usually I begin the process of adjusting to the unnerving scenario that awaits me by taking cover behind a bookcase, where I can have some privacy while I calculate the right moment to ask if its okay if I cancel. At this point I am drowning in waves of terrible memories from junior high school about being forced to attend an after school social event, only to find myself trapped and standing around all dressed up, never getting asked to dance. The paralyzing unpleasantness that this feeling awakens is  so intense I can hardly breath as I  carefully weigh which are my best  options for getting sympathy: a sudden onset of the flu, a sudden death in the family, or  a sudden onset of the flu due to a death in the family (from the flu.)

But sometimes, before I can make this move and exit the premises, two middle aged women, dressed in down parkas and wearing knit caps, carrying a million paper bags, sit down in the front row.  By start time, they have been joined by a balding man in a too tight plaid shirt who looks pleased to be sitting anywhere at all, period. Is it possible they are here to see me? I suppose they could be three fans. But if that's the case, why is no one smiling or saying hi or even looking up from their I phones when I walk in to the room?

"Have some perspective." I start to remind myself, "Nothing awful has happened. Its not like you're trapped under a collapsed building in an earthquake in Turkey or have been kidnapped by The Taliban in Iraq." Though even as I'm thinking this, it is also occurring to me that both of those things would have generated a lot of great publicity for my book.

Now a story told to me by the novelist Elinor Lipman comes flooding back: about a friend of hers who, facing a 2 person audience, rose to the occasion. She bravely delivered her best reading ever , size of the audience be damned, until mid-way in  when a policeman led the whole two person audience away in hand cuffs. For a few minutes, they'd assumed they'd found the perfect place to hide out from a chase.

So I take a deep cleansing breath, knowing that others before me have survived this, and say hello to the cheery store manager who tells me how honored she is to meet me and apologizes for the small turn out. This of course makes me feel even worse. If only she had just said something like "This time of year, even Elizabeth Gilbert doesn't draw a crowd." But no, she simply shows me to a small podium on which is mounted a microphone so large I think I recognize it from the famous photograph of Pres. Roosevelt declaring War on Japan in his day of infamy speech. "Thank you," I say to her,  realizing that before I have even tried to speak in to it, the mic is creating noisy feedback.  So now I must deal with stadium miking in order to speak to three people who are 14 inches away.

Anyway, obviously a new outlook for this situation seems to be called for. I will probably have to appear at a bookstore again. But next time I will be prepared with a whole new approach.

 My New Speech for the three people who come to see me at a bookstore.

"Hello! Hello! Hello!!" Yes! That's right! A very special personal hello to each of you! You know, you're probably going to think I'm exagerating but I swear to you: This very morning,  I said a prayer that only a hand full of special people would attend tonight. So you three are actually a literal dream come true for me!

In fact I have to confess, I am instantly so comfortable with you that I'm going to take you in to my confidence; Its really not my nature to gossip about people behind their backs. But from what I have heard, quite a few of the people who didn't show up here tonight are dicks. I heard from a reliable source that one of them is just finishing book four of the Twilight saga. I mean, come on! Anyone who made it through 2,000 pages of that crap couldn't keep up with people like us.

So let's begin! Just as soon as that guy hovering by that book shelf in the back either commits to sitting down or gives up and leaves the store. I can tell he's trying to decide if he knows who I am. Sir! Do you need me to tell you who am I? You have an I phone…go on my website and  read my resume! We'll wait! Uh oh. You're leaving us? There he goes! Never trust a man wearing a radio station free giveaway shirt.

Listen, before I start over again: How about if the three of us make a pact? Next person who sneaks in late, when I clear my throat, can we please all turn in unison, then break into a big hollow smile and, all at the same time say,"Welcome! We've been waiting for you!". After that we'll just  keep smiling and staring and smiling and staring for like two or three more minutes! Come on! How great would that be? I'll videotape it and we'll put it on You Tube! It'll get a ton of hits. I'll title it "Creeeeeeepy!!!"

Actually since its  just us three…does anyone mind if I  skip the reading  and…lets have a show of hands! How many of you have been hypnotized? I haven't had any hypnosis training but the fact that you're here on a Wednesday night at dinner time in the dead of winter tells me you have a limited choice of destinations. So if you'll all just play along, and when I snap my fingers, we'll all count backwards from fifty. Then somewhere around 30 , you can just drop your heads forward and close your eyes. It'll make me feel really powerful. And then when I tell you that you're a bantam rooster, get up and strut and make crowing noises for a few seconds.You'll never see me again. You have my word: I'm never coming back to this city. And after the enormous hit my ego has taken this evening, I really need you to give me this moment. Then immediately afterward, I will take the  three of you out for coffee and pie and you can show me whats in all those bags.

Then I'll go back to my hotel room and drink.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By they way, my new book is for sale here and lots of other places. Buy one and save me from having to go out and read.

 

 

Oh, the giddy hilarity of bras.

Well, now that we've made it through Valentine's Day, the excitement as we head in to President's Day is palpable. So many holidays, one after another. It can be overwhelming.

But obviously we humans love our holidays. In ancient Rome they had 159 publicly funded holidays a year. Three a week!  The ancient Romans were so busy packing and unpacking decorations and lights and preparing special meals for family that they forgot to notice their empire was crumbling. Maybe we like holidays so much because we rely on them for a formal excuse for celebration. As if there weren't a million reasons to celebrate anyway! And I can think of no better example than this  catalog I got in the mail yesterday;  a perfect reminder not to overlook the simple, mundane things in life that bring us joy. Like bras. Because a woman grows up wearing one every day from about age 11 on,  it becomes so routine, she can forget about all the merriment.

So kudos to the genius who put this catalog together. He or she had the soul and the heart to remind us how nothing is more fun than a bra!  Why, you no sooner put one on then you get so giddy, you just can't restrain yourself from clowning! Next thing you know, you've made yourself a bowl of cereal so enormous, there's nothing to do but throw it in the air!  Then you eat two popsicles at the same time and follow it up with two cannolis! Why? Because one thing about hanging out in your bra: You don't feel self conscious at all about your belly fat. Part of the magic of a bra is the way it makes you want to sit down and eat a stack of 17 pancakes (after you examine a fork full you stole from someone else, since as far as I can tell in that photo,she hasn't touched a single one of her seventeen yet.) Or order a bucket of chicken designed for a family of 12. Then you start spearing fruit! Yep! That's what a great bra will do for you: energize you so much you practically turn in to a fruit ninja!  Before you know it,  you've got a book on your head and you're using cup cakes for glasses!                                                           So…thank you bras…for all the years of wacky hilarity. Of all the underwear, you're like the second funniest. After underpants.

 

 

.

PS: Perhaps you would like to buy my new book! Here: Read review.

For sale wherever fine books are sold. And other kinds of books.