Mark Allen

I have an old T-shirt with a black and white photo of Albert Einstein’s face silkscreened on the front. This shirt is almost a quarter of a century old—I got it when I worked at Bill’s Records in Dallas, Texas (from 1985-87). For the last several months this T-shirt has been neatly folded and placed on the top of a stack of shirts in my studio. The stack gets moved around repeatedly. I am amazed that every time I look over at that stack of shirts with Einstein’s face on the top, a completely different person is staring back at me. Sometimes it’s downright eerie. Obviously, whenever the shirt gets moved, its creases and ripples shift ever so slightly, which affects the “expression” of the silkscreened face photo. The face on the T-shirt is always of Einstein, but isn’t Einstein necessarily. Sometimes the face looks funny, and sometimes it looks menacing. I have recreated the effect for you here: these are 27 photos of the same shirt, shifted slightly each time… continue reading

10 Comments »

In an instant, her predicament became known. It spread from outside, then into the security department, then to the employees, and then the whole ground floor. A crowd of staring onlookers amassed in under a minute.

“There is a woman trapped in the revolving door on the east side ground floor of the store!â€? people yelped, some half-panicky, some half-laughing. “The cops are here, and the fire department!â€? was the announcement that made it more grave, a mood broken by the inevitable half-whispered “Laaaw-suit!â€? yelped in a chiming voice by a Dureen in fragrances—with darting eyes and a cupped hand hovering over her mouth. “Dureen don’t leave your department!” was her quickly-strolling manager’s response, shouted with a pointed finger and a ring of jangling keys, which made her run back behind her counter and unlock her display case again.

“I hope she wore clean underwear.� and “I hope she wore underwear!� were the declarations uttered by the employees who had escaped to go gawking. “Is she hot?� was heard by employees in the crowded elevator on the way down, which was surprisingly spoken by a female voice which caused everyone look around to pinpoint who had said it, but never did.

They arrived from inside the store and outside on the sidewalk in wide-eyed waves. Everyone expected to see a woman in the throes of agony, possibly prostrate, and maybe even pretzel-like, trapped in the very-revealing glass cylinder that encased the revolving door; a butterfly in a jar. There may even be a little blood, some wailing, or at least tears! When people arrived on the scene they were mildly astonished. There was not a face wedged litigiously in agony against the glass, no trapped limbs, no gore that you could but couldn’t look away from, no screams of pain accompanying the store’s canned music, no jaws of life at the ready… but an ordinary woman inside one of the door’s four pie slice-shaped compartments, with her hands on the horizontal rail, literally walking around and around, spinning in the revolving doorway at a reasonable speed, seemingly of her own will. She was in good shape and of normal physical state. Dressed stylishly, or at least neatly and presentably, with auburn, curly hair cut into a bob, and good skin. The only stand out about her, physically, was her facial expression. It was the beaming, grinning-death-mask smile of someone caught in an excruciatingly embarrassing situation who had no idea what to do but smile. Pained, wet eyes…and a mouth with upturned lips stretched so thin and tight over her teeth, it looked like her mouth might give birth to her skull.

Oddly…

continue reading

10 Comments »

I have a piece airing today on NPR’s All Things Considered called First Football Fever. It’s a drastically shortened version of my original story The Homosexual Brain—which appeared here last August. Check National Public Radio online for air times, streams and archives. Happy Super Bowl weekend!

Not! The piece was weirdly yanked of the schedule at the last second. Oh well. My heroes Larry and Barrett of HearingVoices.com have posted it over at their site for now. Speaking of, Hearing Voices have a new hour-long weekly show coming up on NPR—stay tuned for details. Look for brand new pieces from me there, and otherwise (for older pieces, see column at far right).

4 Comments »