Lynas

G. Augustine Lynas (Lynas)  is a fascinating and heralded NYC treasure. He’s a muralist, teacher, and sculptor of sand, snow, ceramic, bronze, and ephemera. In this special episode, we tour the wonderful world of this one in a million artist, and dive into everything from Pluto Platters to Artivism.
SandSong.com, LynasPress.com

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G. Augustine Lynas is a freelance artist /author who has lived and worked in New York City since 1965. Although he is an experienced graphic designer and photographer, his first love is sculpture, especially ephemeral work where time is an important element. He gained worldwide recognition as a sand sculptor with the publication of his book Sandsong and the documentary film of that name (now on You Tube). Lynas’ sculptures can be found in seven NYC parks in concrete, bronze, wood and ceramics and in many private collections. For twenty years Lynas was an adjunct professor of Communications Design at Pratt Institute. 

Lynas also paints, draws, designs games and writes and illustrates books including: The ABCs of Central Park, The ABCs of Brooklyn (with photographer Peter Vadnai), The ABCs of Riverside Park, The Flying Disc in Flying Colors, and several others. Lynas has now written and illustrated his first interactive e-book called Tammy & Blue and a race against time. It’s a story about a child who forgets to color her own skin. Available on iBooks. 

Lynas, a pioneer in the flying disc world, is known as “Circus” because of his tendency to do tricks with Frisbees. He was recently inducted into the Freestyler’s Hall of Fame. At age 82, he is still physically active; biking, sculpting, playing table tennis, disc sports and is an avid Aerobie enthusiast. He is married, has three children and three grandchildren. His work can be seen at SandSong.com and his books at LynasPress.com. 

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Produced and Edited by Arts and Craft.
Theme Music: Sound Gallery by Dmitry Taras.

Transcript

My greatest joy of my life is to go down there and watch children playing in my sculpture now I know what it's like to be a little kid again he's a New York City treasure a sculptor of sand snow ceramic bronze and ephemera a graphic artist book publisher and flying disc afficianado Lynas is our very special guest today my name is Nancy Magarill I'm a singer songwriter composer performer graphic and web designer and I'm Peter Michael Marino and I'm a writer producer Creator performer and educator we are new york-based artists you may or may not have heard of and we are here to introduce you to other artists you may or may not have heard of I learned today because I spoke to Peter Millrose who is how we met that you do all your sand sculptures with just a frisbee well Peter is a former Junior frisbee Champion so he would think that but but uh it's it's one of the most interesting and flexible Tools in s in the world of sand sculpturing because you can use it to carry Stones Splash Water polish the sand so that it looks like marble or glass and it's a and also I'm there to play Frisbee because there's nothing more fun than playing next to the ocean even if you don't have a partner you can throw it into the wind and have it come back to you and do all kinds of Tricks which came first your skill with frisbees or your interest in creating sand sculptures I started sculpting in sand when I was about five uh when we went to the chess Peak Bay and I said to my dad I'm not going in there it's full of nasty things it's very very salty but I've always been a sculptor by the time I was in first grade I was already making chest sets out of out of clay that I dug in from the woods and problem was the woods at the Chesapeake Bay well no I lived outside of Washington DC and there were some Woods nearby and I found deposits of clay near the creek and I could make things that my mom would bake in the oven but the problem was that at one point I had four brothers and most of them didn't care about the things that I made and they would break them or walk on them and I made a lot of things when I was a kid and I got into ephemera so I realized it's not the thing that matters so much as it is the doing yeah the doing is the what I really enjoy and so if it disappears too bad uh you know that's what's gonna happen with sand right and with people right all of us right we all have to go I've always been curious about this because I feel like I'm someone who I'm very artistic yet I could never carve something out of a bar of soap right that's like the first thing they give you when you're a boy scout to see if you know how to use a knife so you seem to do sculpt when you say sculpture that's not only removing things from an existing thing but it's building things as well well many kinds of sculpture one is additive and one is subtractive like carving and marble and then there are are interactive kinds like what I do where I'm actually a part of the peace and now Earth art as it's called is very common you see people arranging Stones graphics on the beach uh Andy goldsworthy is one of my heroes and he and I have been doing this for decades but he's more compulsive about saving and photographing and make films although I did produce a documentary film what's the film well my first film was Sansung I saw that which won a whole bunch of awards it's really beautiful thank you and now there's another one that was made by Simon Mendes his very first documentary called life and sand and it's a beautiful little film but it's about 11 minutes and it shows me doing some frisbee tricks first oh by the way I don't call it frisbee I call it I call it flying disc and why is that that's for legal reasons um no it's because of my father who we really should talk about because my father was a huge influence on my life and not necessarily all good but my father insisted that you shouldn't use a brand name unless they pay you to do it and frisbee is a brand name first and the first disc that I I played with was not a frisbee in fact what was it it was a Pluto platter uh and I used to sling anything that would fly like coffee can Lids or even LPS if if they were bro if they were broken but you know there's an old saying in the world of flying discs when a ball sleeps it's a disc that is so over my head when a ball falls asleep it dreams that it's a disc because a ball is designed to fall and a disc it floats this is deep this is really deep deep well since we're on deep explain please tell us about this what sounds like a complicated relationship going to the dad dad my dad was an autodidact he grew up like Abraham Lincoln in a farmhouse with no electricity or running water or indoor door Plumbing he went to a one room Schoolhouse rode on a slate and left school at the sixth grade to go to work to help support his mother and his two brothers and where was this this was in the Ozarks in Missouri oh wow so he lived more or less like Abraham Lincoln yet when he died he spoke three languages perfectly he wrote a dictionary of disappeared Antiquated Spanish idioms wow and he was in the process of teaching himself something knew all the time in fact he had to have a shirt with two pockets in it so he could keep note cards in both sides one where he was studying the other where he had mastered and so my dad loved language and loved word plays and spoonerisms and Malo props and things like that but he was also a maniac calvinistic self-righteous he was a peculiar obsessive compulsive about everything so really fun to live with no I'm kid and in fact I left home effectively when I was 14 permanently when I was 15 and I moved into the home of two medical students for whom I was a house boy in the Ozarks or Kansas City Missouri they moved to Kansas City I moved out and one of the reasons what I had these four brothers and the other was I had a maniacal father who wouldn't let me use contractions who made me wash my hands if I touched my pants below my knees that sort of stuff so you get the idea what would we call that now obsessive compulsive compulsive yeah yeah and potentially abusive and yeah it it tortured my mother because everything he did was right and if you didn't do it his way you were wrong and so judgmental and kind of crazy and really and my mother who was very very smart my my older brother who was a mathematician and chess genius my mother could beat him at chess during the war my mother went to work for the naval gun Factory and she had the highest civil service rating that you could get so she was really smart and she took it out on my dad because if he criticized her for doing something like leaving a lamp on that wasn't in use and he would go turn it off she would turn it on on purpose wow say and say if you touch that one more time I will break your hand CU my mother was a StreetWise collabor an Italian woman who didn't take [ __ ] from anybody so not from him either okay how how I know we're both sitting here with our mouths open I know well it's also cuz I'm trying to like piece together how you went from that to becoming the artist that you are I mean it sounds like in your it sounds like you got the intelligence and you had so much stuff going on around you that you were able to internalize that and pull that all out in this brilliant artistic manner it's well because you said but at the age of five although I'm I'm not I'm not understanding Missouri to outside of yeah outside when we left Washington I had to make sand sculptures in rivers so wherever there was sand or mud or anything I would I would work natural it's a different kind of sand it's a different right yeah in fact the earliest sand sculpture photo I have is in a river in Kansas in the Republican River uh and I put fire in it so I mix all kinds of things and you documented your stuff from the beginning no I often times don't document it because documenting it affects it it's like having an audience affects it and having a camera affects it yeah so if I'm alone on the beach without a camera I am in heaven I'm next to Mother ocean I'm working with material that's free and not poisonous and available and I can make something gigantic and I can get uh a month worth of exercise in 5 hours and if my family's not there I can work uninterrupted for as long as I damn please so with the family you know there's a limit to the amount of time so for you art is something you just have to do it's not about income it's not about a need for anyone to see it appreciate it it's not about Fame it sounds to me like for you you just have this compulsion to create no matter where you are I don't know if it's a compulsion but it has preserved me um in a way that when I make art time disappears so if I'm working at home by the way I was working up until 4:29 designing a book for somebody The Dinner Bell will will ring and I'll look at the clock and say oh my God it's dinner time and I thought I haven't even had lunch yet Nancy that's what happens to you when you're trying to edit all of these episodes you just realiz of course yeah yeah I saw one of your interviews where you said that it was um that you go into a trance when you are creating it is kind of trans likee so that led me to think and I guess this might sound well I'll just say it because we talked to other artists about it there's some kind of therapeutic results there's some therapy going on in the process you're you're I hate to say killing two birds with one stone but it goes so back even now as an adult it it is um it reflects these silent moments as a 5-year-old where you're not playing Kick the Can with the neighbors you're by yourself you're escaping and you're you're at a place of Peace because you're by yourself is that accurate yeah but it's only part of the story um when I got into flying discs which started really in 1957 when it was invented I realized that when I throw it my troubles go out of my hand and they travel with this you know so and now I'm into arabes and I've thrown the arobe more than 800 feet what is arobe what is that arobe is a flying ring oh been thrown farther than any object in history by a human being more than 1330 ft and I've thrown at the distance across the Sheep Meadow or across the Great Lawn what wow it's like if you take a can and you cut off both sides right is that basically the no that's that's a tuby oh which was uh Shakespeare's favorite toy when he wanted to play of course it was yeah I meant I just I just dropped that in there cuz I wanted to see if you knew that it was sh well that's that's a flying cylinder and the reason Shakespeare liked to play it when it was called a tub because you could make it out of paper he would say tub or not tub stop so the other one is a disc with a hole in the middle it's more like a ring like a ring of Saturn it's a flat ring and why because I'm into physics but don't know anything about it why does that flat ring fly further than a regular ring a regular disc well first of all it's lighter in weight it's denser but the density is distributed over this foil shape Bern's principle is exaggerated because it has a groove on the underside and I don't know why I'm talking about this I show it to you but also it's got a spoiler on the edge like a new airplane wing right and it's a gyroscope so it's stable and the physics and the more it spins the more stable it is oh of course wow and it and it's low profile it's about this thin yeah uh we're seeing fingers how many millimet is that an inch e and of an inch okay yeah wow we and so sometimes you can't even see it because it's it's so thin what's a boomerang where you where do you fall in the boomerang scale I I love boomerangs I like paper airplanes and God I feel like a girl right now well I I represented the flying disc at the Aon Space Museum in in Queens and we had paper airplane experts there but we also had the world Boomerang champion and he put an egg on his head and threw a boomerang which circled five times and then knocked the egg off of his head oh my god you're kidding he was from Australia I'm assuming I don't know but he might have been but there were paper airplane Geniuses there was it's just it's I was honored and then they asked me to build a sand sculpture in their Giant cylindric building which is a fabulous spot where is it uh it's gone you know I mean it's all my stuff is gone except the oh my more permanent things which is another subject now I have permanent sculptures in seven New York City Parks including a snake that's 150 ft long where's the snake it's in Marine Park and in McCaron Park I have a 400 foot square turtle and in Riverside Park I have the world's fanciest sandbox where I can go build a sand sculpture it's made of concrete and on West 70th Street in Amsterdam I have a United States map in full color with bronze and Ceramics and then I invented 32 games that you can play on a map and wrote a little booklet about it and gave it to the school and don't forget the seals and turtles Right The Fountains which I know are right now they're in they're in a little manger somewhere because they're rebuilding the entire left side of our Island when I put it together that you are that person I told Nancy like I'm got goosebumps because I do the loop you know I ride my bike up and over and I and I take a break all the time when it's open at that spot and I love seeing the nannies bringing kids there and they love it not only in the summer when the sprinklers are going but in the winter I mean it's just fantastic you can it's bronze right I think it's bronze they're bronze the seals yeah they're all bronze now and there's 16 16 of them so incredible are these the ones Jerry that you told me five of them have disappeared yeah I don't want to bring that up too much but when they uh destroyed the original playground five of the bronzes Disappeared they were small life-size crabs and turtles but I did make copies of the resin seals and they're now part of the permanent thing in the new playground and they look beautiful and one of the fans was so in love with the seals that she bought one of the resin pieces and I just delivered it to Maryland to her new home oh yeah that won't fit in an apartment that's for sure wow were they um we'll get into this but you're an activist there's there's you you you oh you know about that huh yeah yeah so oh boy did you pick seals and turtles because of some you know environmental reason like seals like you know used to be clubbed and turtles eaten uh is that why those animals were chosen wish I could tell you the answer but I don't remember for sure why why they took that configuration but the most interesting thing about any of these City commissions was that I smelled the possibility of creating a sculpture when the neighbors wanted to rebuild the playground in my neighborhood at 83rd Street in Riverside Park and I produced a maette a prototype miniature of what I thought a sandbox should look like and it has about 50 sculptures in concrete and it's a container for sand and one of the the most selfish reasons I wanted to do it was that there was going to be water play nearby a river going down the middle of the playground oh yeah and that water would be available to the children so they could make wet sand right and wet sand is sculptable and when it rains I go down two blocks away and I build a sand sculpture that looks like it's made of concrete all right then the kids think it's part of the concrete and when they when they smash it they're like Superman and my greatest joy of my life is to go down there and watch children playing in my sculpture now I know what it's like to be a little kid again yeah I'm sure that's what how dare you make me get emotional just met you and what a wonderful gift that you're giving to them yeah well you know um I think it was Robert fulam wrote a book about everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten but that could be extended to mean everything I ever learned about diplomacy and sharing and making art I learned in the sandbox so I see kids throwing sand at each other in the sand pit I go down there and I say you know if you do this and in five minutes I make a face and then the kids stop throwing sand and start experimenting and the sand pit itself is designed for them to there's a ball rolling area and a little cave and lots of things to discover when you dig on the edge of it there are buried treasures and if you roll a tennis ball down the edge of it you can alter the trajectory of the ball by adding wet sand and having it bounce into another part of the sculpture and it's just so interactive you know the way people give tours of like dut places in New York I need someone to give a tour of all of your places in New York I mean it would take a few days but it's just it's just astounding that like you would just see totally different I mean we're going from sandboxes to world maps to bronze [Music]

sculptures I went to the Kansas City Art Institute majored in graphic design illustration and a minor in sculpture so I could learn techniques of uh casting in wax and lost wax process and things like that but my roommate whose name is Bill Mo he was a farm boy from Kansas who became a super doctor and I was I was uh diagnosed with a terminal cancer when I was 17 a and he said you you're not going to die there's something wrong with that and he discovered what was wrong with me after they took a tumor out of my throat and a biopsy out of the back of my leg and confirmed the diagnosis and he said no it's wrong you're if there's something wrong with that and he figured out that I had cat scratch fever and that saved my life but for 11 days I lived with the idea that I would die within a year oh my God and what that did to me was change my life in such a significant manner that I no longer take any day any tomorrow for granted because you thought it was all over and not only did I think it I knew it and I believed [Music]

it for young artists that are looking to be the next G Augustine lius or lius describe if you would the process of getting the city to uh I guess it's a grant or however it is create a commission thank you to get commissions and especially now to be able to do work in these Parks well I can answer with a cliche good it's who you know there are two two things number one you really need to know your [ __ ] you need to know what you're doing I was in Peace Corps training in 1964 and I met a New Yorker there and he said your portfolio is really strong you could make a living in New York and I said I've only been to New York as a child once and it scares the liver out of me and I don't think I could live in a big city God you're like the quintessential New Yorker to me so that's so odd to even contemplate so I get here in October 65 when Peace Corp didn't work out because my first wife had a lot of trouble in training and he made sure I had a job where I could move around and look for a real job so I was a uh an usher at CBS Television Studios meet a lot of famous people stuff and I got a immediately I got a job pretty high-paying job as a book designer at McGraw Hill where I lasted only a couple of years because I can't have a boss but I do know my stuff I knew all the things that you're supposed to know to be a good designer I knew typography I knew illustration I knew graphic design I knew how to spec I knew how to hire people and I I then got another job as vice president art director for a tiny publishing company and that lasted for another year because that bus boss was a real horse's ass and so I quit that and started freelancing in 1970 but then a friend of mine said you know you'd be a good teacher so he got me a part-time temporary post at Pratt Institute where I taught graphic design and illustration and I did that for 20 years but only once or twice a week until I realized I can't work under administrators either that's right that's the worst part of teaching in any kind of school yeah you bet yeah the worst but during that whole time I was freelancing because I had connections I knew a lot of illustrators I had designed a lot of book covers I knew other publishing companies I knew I had connections and so I started getting freelance commissions and also I'm kind of I'm friendly and I know a lot of people I know a lot of people you're amazing I I I'm cursing the universe for not like actually knowing you in real life until now because I would constantly be like I'm in your neighborhood let's get a coffee but with it's amazing young people if young people even listen to podcast maybe they're out of fashion next week I don't know but um that you did all of this stuff in the 70s connections connections connections a word of mouth no computers no websites no cell phones nothing at all and I would imagine it's because you also had a very active social life with people who know when I was divorced the first time I've never not been divorced the second time although that could be coming well if you keep forgetting to make plans maybe yeah I took primary custody of my children I had two daughters one four years old one 9 months old and I was freelancing so I had almost no social life except other mothers because there were no other fathers in the playground because I was the judge said what you want to take custody of the children and I said well my wife wants to work my ex wants to work work and I want to take care of children because that's the hardest and best and most fun job on Earth and I have two fabulous daughters and now I have a 40-year-old son from my second marriage who took seven years to make by the way which is why I'm so old and so is he but but anyway I have wonderful children and wonderful grandchildren and and I did seriously think that fathering was the best job and the best time of my life and it taught me a great deal patience perseverance also during that time you just it's all gender right like single mother single mother you know you don't hear single father was in that was in 1970 yeah yeah yeah but also you knew that it was the right thing to do because you even then as a young man still thought like you understood how children think you find I am one yeah because you are one exactly I I mean I relate to this very much I I found out very late in life that I have a gift for three to 10 year olds you know six and seven I you can leave them with me for weeks they will never be bored and nor will I once they get to 11 and 12 please take them out of my sight but but it's it's a very interesting type of person that just has that thing it's got to be because you think that way it's got to be because you there's just something the way that you operate that's that that's like how you operated when you were younger Freedom we were talking about this last week as well with another guest I think about how you were you know you didn't care about judgment as much you didn't you just were a free spirit and so you took risks and took made experiments because you didn't think about them being judged I also took an interest in my children's school and so I participated in all the parent activities but I also painted a mural on the front of the school still there I painted it in 1976 and I have also worked on it secretly about 10 times what school is this yeah which one ps87 on West 78th Street 78th and what uh between Amsterdam and Columbus OH I think that's the first place I ever did my my kid show is that place where is it on the building that we could we walk by and see it or is it inside it's right at street level on the sidewalk and um it's it's covered up now because of construction right but I have secretly gone and not just retouched it but when we invaded Iraq I erased the Statue of Liberty and replaced her with a M with a whale and then when Philipe petite walked across the World Trade Center I added him but there are some very prophetic things in that mural one of them is I represent the Industrial Revolution by Smoke Stack emitting a lot of smoke and it's passing through a Native American village contaminating it and then the smoke goes through the two World Trade Towers exactly where the planes hit oh oh God so that was weird wait you did that was prophetic or I painted it in 1976 that's crazy wow it's funny I'm I'm picturing this mural now and I would just think it's a mural in in in a after no I wouldn't even be looking into it that much because it's a mural on a a kids school you know what I'm saying that mural has been photographed over a million times oh my gosh uh and I happen to know that because somebody sent me a picture a million pictures of it another another one of my ephemeral pieces called two feet of snow was seen by a million people I saw that yeah I did a a we were expecting two feet of snow we got about eight inches so I built a sculpture that looks like 2 feet of snow but it's 6 feet tall and it's right on the sidewalk in front of my building yeah so wait let's talk about in front of your building the kiosk oh yeah let's talk about the kiosk listener that is on 83rd Street this is such a wonderful project you've been doing for how many years now you'll help me with the arithmetic here I've shown the work of 27 different artists for three months at a time okay you are not going to make me pull up Excel and do a spreadsheet you've been doing it for as long as a piece of string as long as piece of strength we are artists not mathematicians so originally there was a cardboard cylinder with Lumber verticals in sand and it was knocked over by a Paving machine in 2007 or so so the city gave us a steel sewer pipe which I then filled halfway up with concrete so an atom bomb couldn't knock it over that it's not moving and then I designed a roof and it was built by for some reason the parks department got interested and constructed this beautiful roof which has a Cupa and Eaves and then I built a rooster Weather Vein which was stolen within a week and then the parks department helped me figure out a way to keep the new Weather Vein which I got from an antique store it's an egret uh and they helped me design a way to keep that from being stolen how did you get them involved I don't even know I think it's because it's Parks Department property or they're in charge of the sidewalk there but I know the building is owned by Zars and and I don't know why it was parks department but maybe they knew who I was and I had done work for them before but anyway they were very sweet people who who installed the original roof but since then the roof had been hit by trucks over and over and over again and I finally had to trim the eaves and it still get still got hit so I said how can I prevent people from looking at the damaged roof and the solution was cover it with artwork yeah now I've shown the work of 27 different artists for three months at a time so I guess that's nine years something like that and the artists approached me serendipitously and I say okay I like your work uh let's put it up and so we make photocopies of about 30 pieces and I tape them to the cylinder and cover it with a WRA PL W or something right just to prevent them from being ruined and it's the hit of the neighborhood typically I put up a sign I hang a sign from the EES that describes the show this one doesn't have one because it really doesn't need one but the previous one was by a young painter who got into um geometrics he was a buck Buckminster Fuller fan and so all of his stuff looked like it was computer generated but it was all hand painted on canas yes and it's hard to believe that it's so precise and fascinating so to make sure that people understand what's going on I always post the history of the kiosk with a little thumbnail of representing each one of the 27 artists so each each time I put up another show there's another thumbnail that adds to the history on Instagram no on the on the on the kiosk itself oh it's always uh it's always evolving and on the front of my building by the way I had discussion with a friend yesterday because I told him that I received a videotape in the mail called gargoyles Guardians of the

gate and my building appears in it even though the buildings adjacent to my building are the Cathedral of St John the Divine shart Cathedral the National Cathedral of Washington and my stupid building are you kidding me they they thought that my sculptures were part of the permanent architecture but they're just Emeral they're modeling clay and in the summer they melt and fall off and in the winter they crack and fall off oh that's great there was there was a portrait of Mother Teresa Mark Twain and Gandhi and Gandhi froze and crack and he fell off so I called him

gondi this is the beginning of a great joke Mara Teresa gandi they walk into a

bar by the way I yesterday I heard I I suppose you've seen the punster in London who stops people and says we want a pun and they give category and within two seconds he comes up with a great pun they're not always puns sometimes they're Malo props of other kinds like like uh egg corn or mandag green or a spoonerism but anyway sometimes what is a spoonerism You' said this before what is this a spoonerism I can give you an example and you'll know what it is resident Pagan instead of President Reagan oh I guess I like those I don't like puns I'm sorry I don't like I would run away from that person take off your headphones cuz I'm going to tell you the best I've heard all right I'll I'll give it a I'll give it a go I just swallowed a bunch of synonyms it was the sorest throat I've ever had oh that's good I I'll accept that I'll accept that good I had to come up with some stupid jokes for a performance gig and um and my character is English so and it's well so the the joke is which I think this falls under pun maybe um what does um British ghost call no I don't tell jokes I don't I'm a much better improvisor but I cannot repeat a joke like when you go to auditions they say like oh we love you just tell us a joke and I'll go no I don't I don't do that I'll make fun of what you're wearing or your lunch but yeah let's take time on the podcast okay I'm going to think of it right now what does um it's worth it when I get to the punch line I promise or or maybe I'm really better be yeah I was about to say that what does a mind reader call their trousers just a pair of normal pants Oh okay that's that is a real one yeah I think it's better but here is a joke that one's getting edited out this you're gonna have to edit this out too because thisty no it's philosophical and oh then it's staying in well I don't know because you're gonna have to be really kind of sensitive to this but this joke is important sounds like a setup Big Time setup no no no I'm serious okay a holocaust Survivor goes to heaven and he tells God a holocaust joke and God said that isn't funny and the guy says to God I guess you had to be there okay I just saw Ricky jves tell that joke to Jerry Feld on Instagram or somewhere yesterday I love the expression is that a fabulous joke it's so brilliant yeah that takes [Music]

skill I wrote a book called Tammy and blue and I Illustrated it and it's about my daughter who when she was four years old said Papa why are we two different colors why are you darker than I am and so I wrote a book about a colorless child who lives in a black and white world and blue comes into her life and enables her to color everything uh and in the electronic version of this book because it's only electronic I've never published a paper copy of it uh you touch the word yellow which appears yellow in the text you hear a bell you touch her night gown and it turns yellow and you hear an arpeggio a and then after she's colored everything in her life all of her objects every page of every book her chair all of which by the way I invented all these pieces of furniture and things in the book and you can see samples at Linus press.com anyway she walks past the mirror which is no longer tinted blue because blue was infusing everything in the room she sees that she forgot to color her own skin so she cries herself to sleep as a raceless child and she's drawn in that's a way that she could be any nationality uh in the morning she wakes up she's a black silhouette against an open window and if and what you hear is all of the arpeggios strung together and it's pacle Bell's Cannon and if you touch the window all the different panes of the window you can see her in front of the mountains the ocean the Jungle the desert and she's anywhere and and she's any race making me cry again there you go son of a [ __ ] and you you put this out all on your own I didn't online asess I I didn't write the code but I had a friend write the code for me and it's I think it's a lovely book The illustrations are very dated because I drew them back in the 70s maybe 60s but they're still pretty and um yeah you can see samples of it on on my website oness I read about a kid recently that was color and they went up to their mom with the white crayon and said this one doesn't work well um the subtitle of the book is Tammy and blue and the Race Against Time oh so there's a hidden meaning in there word play we're back to the word play it's our secret [Music]

yeah what are you doing for the rest of the day what are you doing this weekend I'm I'm curious well I'm actually in the middle of Designing a book for a woman who's already published several books and she's a great painter unfortunately she died a year and a half ago and her brother who is a dear friend of mine is on his deathbed oh God but I'm postumus designing this book for well you're not postumus designing it I hope you couldn't possibly postly design something oh yeah you don't know me that well do you we have really spun out of control here look I am I'm the dumb one on this show but that I know well I've been asked to put this disclaimer on the last page this book has been postumus published with the help of Friends by by her brother Peter or something like that so it has a biography of her her name by the way is Ellen um Shire sh sh I if you look her up on the internet you'll see that she is a fabulous painter fabulous illustrator but before she died she put together this little children's book and I'm designing it for her so um all the text and illustration are done it needs a biography and a disclaimer and a copyright which I know how to do but it already has and it already has an ending you don't have to write the ending right okay that's good you know like uh I'm thinking like rent the musical Rent that well her said That's all folks for now little did she know that she was die before she my gosh I know that you said the other day when I saw you that your book is at a store on Broadway and 83rd is it something that you would publish that book and put it there as well well she has two of my books the ABC's of Central Park the ABCs of Riverside Park the ABCs of Brooklyn which I did about four years ago sold all of the the printing all at once uh like in the first year but then nine Brooklyn bookstores closed in one one year and never returned the unsold copies and and my partner who was delivering them because he lived in Brooklyn he said I don't want to deliver the books anymore I'm tired of doing that so I never reprinted it but that book was very special it had a paragraph on every page like B is for the Brooklyn Bridge but then I put a paragraph so that if the children said what's so special about the Brooklyn Bridge the parents could read the paragraph and say well it was built 100 years ago and the wife the wife of the designer took it over when he was sick and and so they would sound intelligent and then I also designed um the uh ABCs of San Antonio and just did it as a job uh and then I created during the pandemic I created a coloring book for frisbee players flying disc of fishion notos in big words uh called the flying disc in flying colors and it's a very complicated coloring book with fancy Elizabethan backgrounds with a freestyler in the foreground with descriptions of the freestyle maneuver you know every maneuver has a different name I love this anachronistic image oh I love this can people get all of these on song.com or where can they get it oh Linus press.com okay lus l y n press.com we'll put we'll put put a link to it on the show notes that's great yeah and I have a link in Sansung also uh early in the conversation I mentioned the word activist and your eyebrows leapt off the screen um and we've talked recently to a few people who uh We've bandied about the word artivist um so since we're talking about word play and since we mentioned activist and it it made your you changed your position in your chair what do you have to say about arists activists in uh during the Nixon Administration I developed a um I don't know exactly what to call it a project called the 11th hour news subtitled Communications for change my financial backer was Paul R who was a multi-millionaire who made his fortune selling patriotic rolling paper company bloody draft cards American flags a rolling paper with a filter tip on it so that they would look like a regular cigarette he made Millions he had a Rolls-Royce that was painted by um that pop artist who lives around no no the pop artist who lives around the corner from me whose name will come to me oh Peter Max Peter Max yeah so his roll Royce was painted by Peter Max and he lived above the place where we were assembling packages that were postcards and stamp sheets with a a dozen stamps on them like Easter seal stamps M the postcards had images that were anti-war Pro environment we were in the basement of the building on 20th and fth Avenue where Paul lived and we were assembling the packages to be distributed to all the head shops in the northeastern region there were 500 head shops which used patriotic rolling papers and we were ready to distribute these packages that would sit right next to the cash register the trick of the deal was you could buy a postcard a nickel or a stamp sheet for a nickel but you got a free mailing list which included Court valheim jedar Hoover Richard Nixon speo agnu everybody involved in the CIA and everybody in Congress who had anything to do with military Appropriations and that factory where we were assembling these was sabotage and Paul Rob disappeared oh that's where I learned that political activism can be really scary and Dangerous and Never to be heard from again I don't know what happened to him I heard from one person that he moved to India to Goa the island W um but he's probably just as scared as I was uh my phone was tapped my brother was arrested on a pot charge my girlfriend's phone was tapped so what are you doing to prepare for the next round of activism artivism I'm active in my neighborhood in my building I'm very active in my building and the Block Association and as far as I can uh in politics but it's it's risky well it's also it's it we're dealing with some crazy [ __ ] [Music]

yeah I spend a lot of time in the Adera and um it's not far from the Olympic Village and Lake Placid they still have the Lou there I think actually like people regular people can just give it a try and wipe out on it but you did Snow sculptures I mean you do sand sculptures concrete sculptures bronze sculptures ceramic sculptures and freaking snow sculptures well in 1977 I spent 44 hours making a snow sculpture on the lawn of the Museum of Natural History woolly mammoth and I got a lot of media attention a lot of media attention and that and did you just do that on your own for fun I did but I had to get permission yeah so I took a head a small model of the mammoth up to their public relations people and they said well a standing mammoth's going to fall on somebody and kill them and so I right in front of her I made it seated by bending the clay and said I said will this be okay and she said well you're going to have to stay with it and I said okay uh it's going to take me a long time to build it so I built it actual size 38 ft long and while it was being being interviewed by Robert pots on CBS he said aren't you afraid of and before he could get the word vandalism out some kid jumped over the fence and knocked the tusks off the be the tusks oh that's horrible and so I said Tusk

Tusk and that's why they went extinct really was a recreation so I just I rebuilt the tusks and um and so it made the front page the times and all kinds of wonderful stuff and that's how I won the commission to do this the snow piece but while it was there it was the the Olympics after the Munich assassinations so the security was super tight Y and they wouldn't let me have any snow there was no natural snow and all the snow that they were piling up on Mount van heldenberg was Machin made and it wouldn't give me any because they wouldn't let trucks in because of the security so I had to make snow sculpture out of junk that they scraped off the speed skating rink and off of the highway if there was any and and some ice blocks from the kitchen and so I said literally like walking around just grabbing repurposing bribing people wow yeah I bribed the the mayor of the Olympic Village but I also had a crew of nine people there to document this wow so I had a sound guy and a lighting guy and a my buddy I was in the AV business so I was making uh mostly audiovisual stuff but my friend my partner steuart Goldman and I decided that Olympics you got to make a film so we made a film called Olympic Village Journal which was about my struggle to make a snow with no snow yeah right and I had ice windows I had 300 candles inside of the the sculpture but I also was experiencing vandalism but not what you might expect it was drunken athletes who had lost their events oh and they took it out on your sculpture yeah so they knocked over the screen that was supposed to see an image that would come out of the mouth of the sculpture and I had this whole thing planned uh and also my assistants were getting sick or tired weak or Frozen and and and then during the whole process my wife was having a miscarriage so I had to fly in it's the worst snow storm we've ever had in a single engine Piper Cub to get back to New York and when I got here all the airports were closed oh my God so we had to land in the outer borrows in Westchester somewhere and take a god and then I went back up and nearly died of Frozen North and oh my God it what an adventure snow snow everywhere and not a bit to use for my art so what um do you have it documented in film that we could see it somewhere it's called Olympic Village journal and if you Google that you can see it you can see a short version of it I think oh great it was originally a half hour um but we cut it down I feel like I know someone who was big part of the the video team but I guess there were lots of events there so that's like saying I live in New York do you know this guy here y I got to see only one event and it was the hockey game that everyone Raves about the the Miracle on Ice I think they called it US the US beat the Russians I was so exhausted that I didn't even remember being there well I'm sure hauling all that ice around and also there was a lot of trouble it was really really a an adventure nearly killed me well I'm glad it didn't and we're not doing a postumus interview with you thank goodness hey thanks for checking us out links to today's guests can be found in the show notes don't forget to subscribe like us rate US and tell all your friends about arts and craft