#42 Mark

Hello, Stevie Lane.

Hi Jonathan.

So you you've been a producer at the show how long now? For four and a half years, and how many times have you watched me strut into the studio, grab hold of the microphone and thought to yourself, I could do that.

Today is your day for all of that.

I am asking you to take over forever for an episode. I have for you a Stevie Lane exclusive.

Okay.

It takes place in the art world, and you are an artist. I make jewelry, You make ear rings. I do you make regular rings?

I make regular rings.

Have you ever made a toe ring?

I've never made a toe ring.

How about a toe ring connected to a chain that runs to the belly button?

Ring?

That seems that seems dangerous.

I hope that this has nothing to do with the story you've brought me to.

No, No, But it's about art. It's about art.

Do I get to do I get to introduce the show? Absolutely hit me from Gimblet Media. I'm Stevie Lane and this is heavyweight. That was great.

Just maybe like a little more energy, a little brighter, like you're baptizing as ship, like you're calling bingo numbers, project your voice all the way to the back of the room.

From Gimblet Media.

There, I'm Stevie Lane. And from Gimblet Media, I'm Stevie Lane. And this is Heavyweight Today's episode Mark right after the break.

Whoop here, I'm here.

This is Mark and is Michigan, where he lives and works as an artist. His studio is littered with spools of wire and buckets of paint and huge paper mache heads because Mark makes giant puppets. How are you doing today?

Better than that sharp stick in the eye.

Mark is a lot like a puppet. He's goofy and enjoys joking around. He even sounds like a puppet. But before Mark started making puppets, his dream was to be a famous painter. It's a dream he missed out on by only an inch, literally one inch. Mark's story begins forty years ago. He was in college studying fine art.

And part of the program was that you got to go to New York City and apprentice with an artist, and this was supposed to be a kind of launching point for your career.

This would be Mark's chance to work alongside a real artist, someone who would help him make connections and eventually discovered. So the fall of his senior year, Mark set off to New York City in pursuit of his dream.

This was nineteen eighty one and New York was just almost a caricature of itself. It was like, you know, I got there during a garbage strike, so when I arrived, the streets were literally filled with piles of garbage ten twelve fifteen feet high. Right. I remember my first day. I got there and I put all my clothes in the wash machine of this you know, flea bag hotel they put us up in, and I went down to

So it wasn't these clothes that Mark showed up for the first day of his apprenticeship with an artist named Joe Zucker, whose art today can be found in the collections at MoMA, the met and the Smithsonian. Joe's studio was in a Tribeca lat where he lived with his girlfriend.

When I first showed up to Joe's studio, I brought my portfolio with me. You know, I don't know what I thought they were gonna do, Like Oh my god, your art's so great. Here takeover for Joe.

You know, like Joe did not ask Mark to take over for him. He didn't seem very impressed by Mark's portfolio or by Mark.

From the get go. I just didn't get off on a very good foot, you know, like if you go into a room and you can just tell like someone's told a story and it's not in your favor.

Had they had apprentices before or were you there first?

Yes?

Oh yeah, they made that clear. They had somebody right before me who was great, you know, Richard, He was the best. I can never live up to. Whoever this mythical person was. So it was intimidating.

But most intimidating of all was Joe's girlfriend, Britta Levey Britta LaVey, as glamorous as her name.

My sense was that her job was to be a firewall between anybody else and Joe and his work. You know, she was kind of a gatekeeper, and honestly, I don't you know, I don't think she liked me.

At the time Mark showed up on his doorstep, Joe Zucker had been hard at work for months on a series of fifteen six by six foot paintings about boxing, each representing a round in a match, and the fifteen completed works were to be displayed in a solo show at the Holly Solomon Gallery. The self proclaimed princess of pop art, Holly Solomon launched the careers of artists like Robert Maplethorpe and was famously the subject of an iconic

So this was a big deal. These one person shows could make or break you. You get plenty after that at or could be the end of your career.

Joe tasked Mark with building the wooden frames that would go around the paintings.

It was labor intensive, but completely brainless. You know, he is needed something to keep me occupied.

A few weeks into Mark's apprenticeship, it came time for the show at Holly Solomon's. Joe and Britta were moving the paintings to the gallery and Mark came to help pack them into the truck.

But when I arrived that day, there was tension in the air. I could tell something wasn't right. And it turns out that the paintings are too big to fit down the freight elevator. You know, it's sort of like we built this boat in a basement, right and then tried to get it out, and nowhere along the way did someone go, hey, you know what, that elevators about the same size as these paintings. Maybe we should check this out make sure they fit.

How close was it?

My guess is they did fit before or the frames were put on.

That is, those frames that Mark had built. They were one inch thick, and they made the paintings one inch two wide. The paintings were also too big for the stairwell, so Mark says Joe and Britta were frantic trying to figure out another way to get them down from the fifth floor. They had a number of increasingly outlandish ideas, like removing a window and getting a crane to lift them out, or busting a hole in the side of the building with a wrecking ball.

It was hair brained. I mean, let's just be honest here. That was not a good idea. But the next idea wasn't so great either, and it was my idea.

It turns out, while Joe and Britta argued, Mark went over to the elevator. It was an old elevator, the kind with caged accordion doors who had to manually shut it. Didn't even have buttons, just two ropes, one for up and one for down. Mark opened the cage doors and pasted out.

And I was like, wait a second, he's painting so fit. We can't put all fifteen in it once, but we could take him one at a time. We just got to put him in on a diagonal and they stuck out a little bit right, so you couldn't close the accordion doors. But I saw that there were some latches where if we pushed those latches it would fool the elevator into thinking the doors were closed.

Mark laid out his plan, and to a surprise, Joe agreed to give it a go. And how did you feel, I mean, were you sort of like I was.

Totally triumphant, but a great idea. I saved the day.

Yeah, I mean they were about to smash a hole in this building. So Mark and Joe brought the first painting into the elevator. Mark stood on one side of the painting, Joe on the other. They couldn't see each other over the top. Joe and Mark each held the caged accordion doors open to accommodate the slightly too large frame. Then Mark reached for the rope.

And we sharked to go down, and we're going down a couple of floor and I'm like, oh, this is gonna be great.

For the first time since starting his apprenticeship, Mark felt useful. And then and then.

On one of the floors, the landing stuck out just a little further than the rest of the landings did, and as we went down, it caught a hold of the corner of this painting that was sticking out about an inch right that inch, and then the elevator just kept going and it just crushed this painting.

Oh my god.

Because the painting was like a wall in front of him, Mark couldn't see anything. So most of what he remembers about the next few moments are the sounds, the sound of canvas ripping, the sound of wood splintering and cracking like breaking bones.

But the sound I heard next, like, I didn't hear anything on the other side of the painting for little bit, and then I heard weeping. You know, I heard crying on the other side, and I didn't expect that, And I didn't know what to do about that. You know, it was just sort of like it just it was horrible. Britta, who was up three floors, was yelling through the doors down into the elevator shaft.

What happened? What happened? What's going on down there?

And Joe's like, come on, come on, we gotta go back up. We gotta go back up now. Of course you know where this story is going, right. I got the two ropes there, and all of a sudden I get this like dyslexia. I know one is for up an the other one is down, but I, for the life of me, I'm like, I'm paralyzed, And so I pull one of the ropes and it's the wrong one. And if the painting wasn't crushed before, well, when we

That was bad. When Mark finally got ahold of the right rope, he and Joe rode the elevator back up to Brita and removed the mangled painting. Joe and Britta were fuming.

They said, you know, you might as well go home.

Joe and Britta told Mark they would call. So Mark returned to the Fleabag Hotel, tail between his legs and spent the next few days in his room, waiting by the phone, willing Joe and Britta to reach out. But they never did.

They just you know who could blame them, And that's the last I ever saw of them.

For Mark, the elevator didn't just crush a painting, It crushed his dream. His plan had always been to move to New York after graduation and become a painter whose work would hang in galleries or museums, basically to follow in Joe's footsteps. But because of the elevator incident, Mark never went back to New York. And so here is the question that he's left with.

If I had not crushed a painting in the elevator, would I be living in New York now somehow having followed that trajectory of the life of an artist in New York City? Yeah, I don't know.

Why have you been thinking about this again?

Now?

Okay? So I saw this thing called the Miniature Puppet Theater Workshop, I think it was called, and so I signed up for it.

The class assignment for this Miniature Puppet Theater Workshop was to make a puppet show based on an event from your life, and the first thing that popped into Mark's head was the elevator incident, which isn't that surprising. Mark has told the story a lot over the years to family and friends to make them laugh, but it's only in working on his puppet show this last year that he's begun to think about it differently. There were two

I feel like half of this is missing without knowing Joe's perspective. It's like I'm going back to the scene of the crime, and I need the witnesses, the other witnesses. Otherwise I'm just I'm just rehearsing the same old lines in my head I've had for forty years.

What about Joe? What about the show at Holly Solomon's. The last time Mark saw Joe, he was weeping in an elevator.

I wasn't thinking this at the time. I was thinking only about myself. But now, years later, I hope, you know, I hope that me crushing his painting didn't derail him in any way. I could just track him down, get his phone number, call him up right, But a little bit of me scared.

Mark doesn't think Joe and Britta have necessarily softened in the intervening years. Case in point, Mark read in Hampton's Cottages and Gardens magazine about the dream house Joe and Britta built after moving out of the city.

It contained no guest room.

In the magazine, Britta is quoted as saying, guests are completely out of the question. It makes it easier, so they're not like the warmest. If we take their house as a metaphor.

For who builds a house without a guest room. If you're building it and designing, you I mean.

Someone who doesn't want any disturbances, which is exactly what Mark wants me to be.

It's all in your hands now.

Yeah, you know, I'm not used to being the puppet master.

Just we'm going to pull the right strings exactly.

I'm gonna label them up and down. I'll tell you that much. After the break, I roll down my sleeves and get up to business. No wait wait, I roll up my sleeves and get down and get down to business. Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. I roll up my sleeves and get down to the business. After the beating page, I've never fun owned a famous artist, and on the whole they strike me as a pretty scary bunch, cutting off their ears, collecting mommafied feet, living

Hell.

Already, I feel like the call is going poorly. Hi there, I'm calling for a mister Joe Zucker. Is this the right number?

Yeah?

Oh, hi, mister Zucker.

Why are your call?

It's a good question, I guess to ask a famous artist to be on my internet radio show to talk to an apprentice who mashed his painting in an elevator and is now immortalizing the incident in a puppet show. My name is Stevie Lane, and I actually wrote you in a voice that sounds like a small dog rolling onto its back and exposing it's vulnerable underbelly. I explained to Joe who I am and why I'm calling. I am a producer of a podcast.

I'm not. Don't do things like that. I've got enough problems.

Okay, I just want to make sure this you do. You remember you did have apprentices forty years ago when you were Yes, okay, so this is with regards to one of your old apprentices who who wanted to get back in touch with you?

Oh?

Is that one of.

His name is Mark.

I don't want to.

Deal with him. These sounds are the person that I had a problem.

Talking to Joe. I learned that he and Britta had a number of apprentices, the majority of whom Joe says were great. In fact, he and Britta are still in touch with one I assume Richard to this day.

But one of them and sounds like Jim loved to jerk talk to my wife about us. She handles all of the things that I do TV interviews, right shows. I just do the work.

So if you call her.

Okay, yeah, hi, hi, Hi, suddenly out of nowhere, Britta Levy, Hi, Hi, is this miss LaVey?

Yeah?

And you are.

An absolute nobody. I feel like saying Britta is Kurt. She sounds like someone who has better things to do, like dog nap one hundred and one Dolmatians for a fur coat. But I finally muster the courage to tell her about Mark, though not quite enough courage to get into the details of the elevator incident. I keep things pretty vague. He would like to reconnect with mister Zucker to sort of like understand, and before I know it, this pops out to apologize for the way things went. Huh.

Yeah, well, if that's how he feels, you know, one certainly wouldn't all object to that. I'm sure we can figure this out.

Forty years later, Britta is still Joe's gatekeeper, and just like that, the gate swings open.

Hello.

Hello, that's a journal.

You're right back yet you got me there. I was like talking to you as though you were there. Hey, it's Stevie. I just want to let you know that.

We're on Hi.

What does Stevie want to talk about now?

Stevie wants to talk about the upcoming conversation with Joe and Britta and the apology I promised I outlined from Mark the terms of our parlay. I ease into it. I mean, I hope it doesn't. I hope it's not what you don't want to say. I mean, I think my impression from like the last time we spoke was that it in part it is. But I think, and I'm not saying this, I mean, you know, I understand like accidents happen and stuff, and you know I'm on

Sure, I mean, and I can see.

That Mark is happy to apologize, but having to apologize it makes him realize that Britta and Joe still harbor resentment, which makes him nervous.

I'm getting that feeling in my stomach like I used to get. You know, what was it not? Trepidation?

Dread?

Dread? I have a little dread here.

I mean, you know, if you feel like you can't do this, then we should have that conversation.

Do you have friends, Is this is what you do to them?

No?

I have.

I have crushed paintings before my life. I can do this. Yeah, we're gonna crush this.

We're gonna Scheduling for Joe goes through Britta, and in the coming days, I'm on the phone with her frequently, more frequently than anyone else in my life. I sort of feel like Britta Leave is my new best friend. Hello, Hi, Britta, how are you?

Oh Stevie, how are you?

I'm fine. Britta's working on a documentary about Joe, a book of Joe's work, organizing Joe's archives. Never once when I call is she just sitting at home relaxing.

I'm driving around and everybody's going off to the beach, and I thought.

What the fuck about me?

Where am I going to the beach?

You know?

But as busy as she is, she always picks up when I phone, even if she's in the woods.

I was trying to dig out some swamp plant.

Wait, it's a week You're literally out in the woods with a shovel.

Like yep, and was almost arrested because some asshole drove by on her bicycle and you saw me it was the big shovel.

I'm going to call the police. Don't you have anything better to do?

Britta has strong opinions and isn't afraid to call people out, like at one point, she tells me about another apprentice of Joe's, and keep in mind this is one that she actually liked.

He was totally useless, and it was very sad to see this young, untrusted man child, you know, trying to find a place in Joe's studio.

I'm the kind of person who will go to absurd lengths to avoid hurting someone's feelings. Once on a date, I made up a whole fake roommate and that fake roommate's fake sister, Lillian, who lived in Virginia Med School second year. But I was visiting and locked out of our apartment and needed my key, so I had to go just to avoid telling the guy I was bored. When I got back to my apartment, I half expected Lillian to be there, so I let Britta know that

Okay, my hands are a little clammy. I don't know why. Why am I like twenty one?

All of a sudden again, on a Friday after work, Mark and I get into a video call. Mark is in his basement, his son's drum kit behind him. His beard looks freshly trimmed. Britta and Joe arrive right on time. Well, it looks like Britta's entered the room. I think I'm going to admit her.

You ready.

Whenever you are countdown like three, two, one, So they're connecting.

Hello, Hello, Hi Hello.

In the frame, Britta and Joe are seated side by side. Britta has greta garbo eyebrows rounded like question marks punctuating the question, and you are. Joe is in his early eighties now. He has artsy glasses, and, like Mark, a gray mustache and goatee.

Hi Mark, Hello, Britta, Hi Joe. Been a while, no forty years? You guys look great. You look as young as you ever did it.

Flattery gets you every So.

Joe remembered Mark's name on the phone, he doesn't seem to remember Mark's face.

You were from the great Lyrics Hard Association, That's right, Yes, yeah?

Did you get to pick Joe's studio?

I don't think I did you. You probably didn't get to pick me either.

No, no, we didn't. We just got what we got.

After exchanging a few more semi pleasantries, Mark dives in.

First of all, I want to just say thank you so much for offering to be here today. I'm so glad.

Then he doesn't bring up the crushed painting. He doesn't make the apology, I promised. Instead, he makes the artistic choice to begin with a flashback. A flash way back.

Okay, so I grew up in Rotlan, Vermont, and.

I was you know, no sooner than he gets started, and Mark is already getting sidetracked, talking about going to a museum for the first time when he was nineteen, about a job he had as a caddie when he was a kid.

And I pulled the cart across the green didn't know you weren't supposed to do that.

To be honest, there are moments when I just have no idea what he's talking about.

Pretty nice now I've walked by them. They're lovely condos now.

But in that time, I feel like I'm watching a filibuster on c SPAN. As puppet master. I wish I could stick my hand up his butt like the open end of a sock puppet and make his mouth say I'm sorry. I'm growing impatient. And it seems Joe is too.

Laurie Anderson, she just was coming out with her first album that year, nineteen eighty one.

What event are we talking about? The serve a specific event that you can nailed down.

Oh yeah, I seize the opportunity. I feel like there's this elephant in the room, the thing that we're not talking about, which is really the reason why we're here. Mark, if you want to remind Joe and Britta why you know you were thinking about them again.

So I was in your studio the last day. I was in your studio actually.

And so finally Mark gets to it, bringing it back to the elevator incident.

And there was this two rope system, one rope to go up and another one to go down. Well, you know what rope I pulled right, the wrong rope.

I've heard Mark tell this story a lot, and every time it makes me laugh. But listening with Britta and Joe is like sitting through your favorite movie with your parents, seeing it for the first time through their eyes. The funny parts seem kind of crass, the raunchy parts cringe worthy.

And I crushed your painting, Joe, And that is what I'm here, is what I'm here to apologize about.

On the screen, Joe and Britta look confused, even more confused than a few minutes ago when Mark was monologuing about the vagaries of Manhattan real estate.

What I realized over the years was you gotta go back, you gotta say you're sorry.

You know, no, why are we talking about that paint because that's the painting he smashed in the elevator.

Remember, I didn't even know that he did it.

I thought somebody who was taking it going to take it to the Delaware broke the penict In the all of it, I.

Didn't even know that it was Mark.

I never remember him doing the damage to the pain.

In fact, when Joe thinks of the damage to the boxing paintings, it's not the elevator story that sticks in his mind at all.

Really.

Right before the opening at Holly Solomon's, it came time for Joe to sign his work.

I forgot the I was used and felt tip marker where she goes through canvas, and when I signed the paintings, it came through felt tip marker.

Was the cultra.

Joe's signature bled through to the front of the painting, So just days ahead of the opening, Joe and Bretta had to find an art restore to fix it, which is also what they did to fix the painting Mark had mashed, and as it turns out, that painting made it into the show. Was there to complete the series as Joe intended, no one could tell it had practically been through a garbage compactor, in other words, no derailment.

It was an accident. There's no sense to fix things like that. Happen.

Stuff happens, you know, yeah, and you know, no apology necessary.

But if it wasn't about the painting, what was it that made Mark quote the one Joe had problems with. What did Mark have to apologize for?

It was mostly out of too He didn't like this. He didn't like that.

Mark didn't like being told what to do, didn't like taking things too seriously. Mark admits that he made glib jokes, which annoyed Britta and Joe.

I was trying to act like I was cool and sophisticated, and I think I was on the defensive at first.

And the thing that really bothered Joe, it seems, is that after the elevator incident, Mark disappeared after forty years. The specifics are fuzzy, but here's what I gets from Mark's perspective. When Joe and Britta said we'll call you, it meant we'll call you and don't come back until we do. But from Joe and Britta's perspective, we'll call you was more of a this is a nightmare. We don't need you here right now, but see you tomorrow.

You have to realize I was dealing with Holland Solemon, which is an added part of the whole misery, because she was very difficult.

Holly was to Joe what Joe was to Mark, someone who could make or break him. Joe and Britta weren't thinking about Mark when they had Holly to worry about, so they weren't thinking about how Mark was feeling, but today they are.

I'm really sorry we didn't have the where was all to see that the student had issues, had problems, you know, yeah, And I mean I would have been devastated if I would have ruined some artists work. That would have been very difficult to overcome. So I'm really sorry that happened.

Britta isn't afraid to call people out, including herself, and as always, Mark isn't afraid to make jokes.

And I'm sorry that I crushed a painting in the elevator. So I guess we're even. I was imitating a lot of stuff, you know, because I was young, and I.

Think I think we need to stop.

About an hour into the conversation, Britta interrupts Mark. On screen, Joe takes a hold of his walker and slowly rises to his feet. He turns away from the camera, calling out goodbyes as he moves down the long hallway behind them. Britta looks concerned.

Because Joel had hip surgery and I can see he's not sick, feeling well.

I needs to laid down.

Well, thank you Joe so much for the time that you were able to spend with us, and maybe we can do this again.

Yeah, I think that might be a nice idea. Mark, please be in touch.

Bretta rushes to Joe's aid. As gatekeeper, she has spent years protecting Joe's art. Now it seems her main job is protecting Joe by everybody. I'm with that the gate swings shut. Can you move the mic a little closer? Oh, I'm sorry, that's much better. After the conversation with Joe and Bretta, Mark and I debrief.

If you go back to the scene of the crime and the victims don't remember, and you say you're sorry to them, You know, what are you really doing? You're just sort of assuaging your own guilt. But I don't think it was really doing anything them because they couldn't remember it.

Joe seemed angrier at the Felt tip marker than he was at Mark, maybe because the marker was in his own hand. Those are the mistakes that are hardest to forget our own.

So in some ways I think that you know, the person I should be saying I'm sorry to was my younger self.

In fact, the puppets Mark has been making for that puppet show. He made the Mark puppet to look like himself around age twenty, but the Joe puppet doesn't look like Joe. Instead, Mark made it to look like himself now at age sixty. So in the scenes where the Joe puppet is yelling at the Mark puppet making him feel like he's no good, chastising him for crushing the painting, it's actually present day Mark yelling at his younger.

Self, that little twenty year old Mark. I think my older self blamed him for a road that I didn't I didn't take, didn't travel down.

And then maybe my younger Mark can.

Let the older Mark off the hook too.

What would the younger Mark be letting the older Mark off the hook for?

Well, I think for you know, maybe a dream that I didn't follow through on.

Mm hmm.

But you have to make sacrifices if you're going to be a kind of blue chip elite artist in New York, which was a dream of mine. But I would have given up so much to do that. I had to give it up so much to do that.

Like what, Oh my god, I have my family, you mean yeah.

Mark grows quiet, looks down.

I am so lucky that the art I ended up doing could involve my own family.

Mark got to share his art with his three sons as they grew up. He helped them with elaborate Halloween costumes. He hosted birthday parties for them in his studio, surrounded by all his giant puppets. His sons participate in an annual street puppet festival Mark founded fifteen years ago called Festivals. One Son is a playwright. Might even help him with the Elevator puppet show, of which.

Holly I told her before not to send these philistines to my studio while I'm in the middle of working on a show, a show for you.

When Mark first reached out to me, he was struggling with his puppet show. But since the conversation with Joe, he's made progress. He's writing new scenes, new dialogue, and he's made another puppet.

We have a new character too that we were going to introduce today.

Can you guess who?

Okay?

Now who? The microphone just said little bit? Okay, do you want to say, like, you know, maybe you're sorry.

Or something anything?

Okay, let's just take it again.

From now that the Fernitures returning.

To it's good Will home.

Now that's the lash. Monstrand is scheming with the damage to take this moment.

To do so, if we ment, if we track.

Felt around for far too.

Acid. This episode of Heavyweight was produced by me Stevie Lane, along with Mohemy mcgauker and Jonathan Goldstein. Our senior producer is Khalila Holt. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Alex Bloomberg, Phoebe Flanagan, Rayhan Harmancy, Andrea B. Scott, and Bobby Lord. Bobby Lord also mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Michael Hurst Sean Jacoby and he himself Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found