In no way.
Really?
My name is Mary Jacob and I'm a writer and I live in Brooklyn.
I'm in a thought of the smell of pipe smoke that lingered in the downstairs bathroom even when her father had been gone for days.
The dinner plate that sat in the kitchen sink every morning, thin and dry as a bone sucked clean.
I'm what you would probably call a Brooklyn evangelist.
I've lived here for 15 years and I can't imagine living anywhere else.
Now I'm on my way down to see Chico McMurtry right now and he's this really cool Brooklyn artist that I'm psyched to meet.
Back in the early 80s I began making machines, humanoid machines that I would perform with.
We show them around the world and we do quite a range of different stuff.
Hi.
Hey, how you doing?
Good.
I'm Mara.
Mara, nice to meet you.
Really nice to meet you.
This is amazing.
Welcome to the robotic church.
Do all of these have different functions?
Well, they're sort of an orchestra of machines and it's a combination of sound, rhythm, action.
Are you always doing robots or were you painting first?
I was doing sort of traditional types of things, drawing and sculpture and performance.
So how'd you make the jump then?
As I was studying painting, movement, martial arts, sculpture, my paintings were getting thicker and thicker and I was interested in the human form in the composition.
So I stripped nude and I lunged myself into the painting.
I pulled back from the painting and I thought to myself that it was much of an improvement.
And finally that skin that came off of my body was even more intriguing because it had a beautiful quality of movement.
So that led to the whole evolution of these puppets, these skins that I began to make armatures and animate.
And that's how it evolved finally to the machines of today.
Do you want to run a sequence Matt?
This will give you kind of an idea of what they do as a group.
Okay.
Shall we go have lunch?
Yeah, awesome.
Music
When did you start writing things down?
Did it start in a real formal way or was it like poetry?
I was always writing, I was always writing.
Diaries?
I moved to New York to be a writer because I was working this crazy internet job and I got laid off.
Went downstairs and was hyperventilating and called my husband and said, oh my god, this happened.
And he met me under the Brooklyn Bridge and he said, you know, I think maybe now you just have to finish the book.
The mother calls me and she's like, you know what's wonderful is you can always be a writer.
You just get a job and pay your bills and then also you can write.
And I was like, I've heard that for 15 years.
I'm not doing that.
I finished the book.
It sold very quickly and it changed our lives.
I'm interested in how artists communities find that hub.
Is that what that series that you found it was all about?
You know, that's what Pete's was, is that you go into a space and you listen to somebody tell you a story and you leave.
And you feel there's some little level of humanity that you've gotten in those moments that you just didn't have before.
I don't know if you noticed, but this is a kind of special historic district of Midwood here.
There's a place I'd like to take you.
Are you into that?
That sounds great.
That's great.
This is the house that Arthur Miller grew up in.
And we're the inspiration for the death of the salesman.
No.
Really?
Yes.
The Willilove was here.
Wow.
We talked a lot about the kind of energy that you exchange as a creative thinker in Brooklyn.
You're always a little bit on the edge of catastrophe to make your ideas happen.
But it was sort of comforting to know that we both lived with that feeling.
