but oh welcome back to the tom and doug show this is our favorite show and we have a very special guest we welcoming back once again we have the famous we had a letter writing campaign the last time you were honest people were calling in writing and said we need more ursula rutenberg more ursula less tom yes that's what it is there that you guys are too nice we are haven't really been able to get out of my mind you said something about puppets my mother had this puppet theater on main street you know your mother made these marionettes yes she did and how did she learned i mean  i counting something like eight or ten strings there yeah i mean she can do a lot of things she's got her feet wired up her hands her head i mean so how do you mother learn to do this oh i think we just practiced i mean my mother my mother grew up in switzerland and so she grew up with a tradition of puppetry in her country and but i don't think she she learned how to do marionettes that way i think you just figure it out obviously it's complicated as you can see right now it's like on the sound of music that you know yeah it's actually a real thing that they do yes in fact my mother knew maria fine tropp really corresponded with her i was about five at the time and my mother at that point discovered that i could paint and so she put me to work as the person who painted all the backdrops for the stage and so at the age of five i be essentially got my first client became a working artist which kind of had a pivotal effect on my life because it shows she i became her set painter so you even at that age you learned that you would just work for peanuts something like that yeah on other things so yeah yeah i'm trained to be an artist so that you're good so i did be so i became a mural painter in my later life which is a logical extension of being a set painter so but i you know you're right it did working for peanuts part but also you know learning at a very young age that you can have a client is a is a life it's a game changer and one of the things that was really interesting about the theater was that there was this young man named mike welsh who spoke with the dead and it turned out the dead were speaking to him in french and english i mean french and german and so he they told him how to build aid tape recorder that could record their voices and so he built this thing and then he asked my mother if she would put it if he could do it in the puppet perch in her puppet theater and so he was doing it up there and so when i lived briefly up at the puppet theater and one night i woke up in the middle of night and i heard all these voices saying to me would you know would you help us out and they were kind of like ringing little bells so i wouldn't be scared i think and i s and they were like ok and they rang all these nice little bells and they went away again so what did they want you to do i did that and i told them why they didn't tell me because i said i wouldn't bed earlier mike among the friends who had been who had set up this machine it was like he was running errands for them they would say well you know there's there's a bank account that my wife doesn't know about could you like give her the number because there's money for her there and he would go and do those type of things and then he reached the point where he was like i just don't want to run errands anymore for dead people and he dismantled the machine and they came to you and so there is a i dare you were still around and so they just wanted to test the waters to see if you know they could continue they never bothered me again so that is bizarre they were very very nice i mean it just happened that one time just the one time and i guess because they rang all those bells and stuff i didn't it didn't frighten me so i didn't get scared of the place i didn't feel like all the places on it it was just another you know but what is it that makes painting year olds different from other types of paintings oh well big scaffolds hauling huge buckets of paint first of all you have to build the scaffold and then you have to haul big buckets of paint up the scaffold you have to prepare the wall which is really the biggest job you have to make sure the wall is in shape to hold you know paint properly  you interestingly enough the thing that most people think is the most difficult which is enlarging the image is a relatively easy thing to do and kind of fun but it's the site it's like construction work it's it's a physical undertaking which i don't need to do anymore and the other thing about it is that it's you're painting in a public space and so painting a mural is a service of sorts you you have to be polite not plights not the right word but you have to be respectful of the the space that the painting is going to be end because it's going to be there forever and or at least until the mural is taken down and so it has to be something that contributes to the environment so you may not want to tell you know the most unusual or intimate story about yourself that you could in a canvas painting so does it does it change kind of the scope of what what you envision as well or is it  just really more about you know the public story it's about the public story i think i think we're all as public public aren't literally it's a public service so yes i think it should be about the public environment so you do do smaller paintings as well i do i went to graduate school and got an m f a in painting and actually highly underestimated how difficult it is to change from one medium to another and interestingly enough i can easily paint a painting that is one hundred feet long and six and forty feet high it's easy for me to complete that and it's a lot of work but it's easy for me to do it mentally and i have a lot of trouble painting a small canvas completing it it because the medium is so different and unnerves me so it's interesting you should build yourself a scaffold climb up a tree and it's interesting how psychological it all is yet so is do you feel that what's the purpose of the visual arts is it to express something about yourself that you know that you just have to get out or is it about you know putting something out there to see how different people react to it because everyone constructs their own meaning from it or is it something you don't really even necessarily care what anyone else thinks this is just something you have to do i think it's all of those things i think none of those things are contradictory i think it all falls under a general summary if you will of what we're doing how do i say this as humans we are god like we are visionary by nature i think we all intuitively know that's our purpose here as living these lives is to to see things and make them happen i think that's our true natures being creative and i think when you see how do i put this i think that a very powerful force in the way we all live myself included is that we see what's around us you know physically around us or kind of what's happening to us and we react to it and we kind of extent accept the status quo as reality and in fact our ability to see things and to see other things and make things happen so vastly exceeds the realities that we just happen to see in front of us and and so connects to our true nature as beings and that we forget that because we are so reactive to just what we think is reality in front of us and we forget that we can create anything we want really tom i didn't i just fell in love a little bit and well it is a wonderful thing right and and so art is one of the things that we as humans do to reconnect us with that understanding that our job is not to react to what's in front of us or what we see but our job is to see what we want to see and to manifest that and it's without being able to have vision it's very easy to forget that and art is the activity that in a way generates that energy in us it's about the inner visions that we have and it stimulates that and i know that sounds kind of abstract but it kind of really does work that way and i think maybe a way to illustrate that is with an example i mean i i worked in new york city for about fifteen years painting public art in neighborhoods in new york and so people would participate and so what did you know what would happen you would have like for instance a father who was divorced and he would have his day with the children and so he would bring he would come with his children to the mural project and they would paint together and through painting together they would kind of find a common ground where they could look at something together they could create an image together and feel like suddenly they were in the same world whereas they were really living you know pretty separated lives that type of thing you know the without some way some activity that enables that it's hard because we're so attached to kind of what we think is reality and art reminds us that anything can be reality that makes sense it's very abstract it's a lot of us and i don't think it's abstract at all i think it's very realistic it plays out in very concrete ways yeah for instance another good example is i read this i was reading about them anthropologists studying of you know ancient pots like you know some of the pots they think might have been the original pots in the world and deposited ecker ated and for a long time anthropologists thought that the decorations were put on after the pots were created and after the idea of pots had been kind of thought up and then they really came to the point by studying by these different artifacts they realized that the decorations on the pots were part of the process of envisioning making a pot that without the decoration the pot couldn't have happened because that's what the pot maker was doing while they were trying to figure out what a pot was and that it was an essential part of the process you know and my my father is a quantum chemist so he's constantly you know trying to figure out what molecules are doing and you see on the sides of his paper are all these little stick figures running around doing things and it's the same type of thing you know the stick figures aren't decoration they're what's  to take it you know to see the next thing so it's that it's that free space where you know you can envision great things terrible things whatever you want and it's it's safe to do it because it's the mind a lot giving itself more art relationship between fear and are you think for a minute stumper well i mean there's a lot of different ways that relate i mean you can use arts to mitigate fear by you know trying things out in the save zone i can also really scare yourself with art making art is scary i guess i feel like it anything that connects with people you're going to be connecting connecting with real emotion right is going to either help you alleviate your fears because you will understand something or other help you bring fears because you're understanding that you didn't expect yeah i mean i have a really interesting story about that if you really want to hear it i don't know how much time  role ok well ok this is this is the story of my last mural because it involves fear my last not technically my last meal but it's the mural where i decided it was going to be the last meryl i was painting a mural on a side of a grade school up in spanish harlem and that the mural was the whole block long was a huge mural had a lot of different components it was kind of a masterpiece of sorts it was very good nero and is it still there  i don't know i haven't gone up to look for a while they renovated the school and it wasn't clear to me whether they so it was boarded up for a long time and i wasn't clear to me what what happened to the mural and while i was there i'm going to try and give a short version of the story while i was there president clinton came to the school with billy joel of all people president clinton incredibly  but anyway so they came in it was about music it was about a music program at the school and and then he left and now when a president comes to a place like that all sorts of things get built it's amazing what all happens and but one of the things that was everything was dismantled but one thing that was left over was there was a cable from a television network that they had been using that was left on the roof of the building and i was painting on this  a mural which was a little bit unusual because i wasn't really allowing children to work with me and so i was up on the scaffold but of course kids see scaffolds and they see jungle gym they love scaffold so this kid he climbed up on the scaffold and he jumped from the scaffold onto the roof of the bit the building had a setback so the first floor was you know had its own roof and then the rest of the building went up so he jumped on to the roof i didn't think that much of it because it was relatively common for kids to do that in the the wall the  protecting anybody from falling and i was kind of like come on get down from there and what he did is he saw the cable from the television company he tied around his waist and he jumped off of the roof and said he was bungee jumping and  i don't know if it was lucky or not but that the bungee the rope cable was too long and so he fell headfirst onto the concrete you know and of course knocked himself out immediately so you can imagine i was beside myself with terror and i ended up going with his mother to the emergency room and the kid was out for about four hours and it's probably some of the worst four hours of my life mother was very nice about it and the kid woke up and remarkably was on the playground the next day and but it was a terrible thing watching somebody fall headfirst onto concrete so i was kind of getting the point where i feel like ok you know i've kind of had it with all this and it was a long hot summer and i would work late at night because was very hot i would usually finish work around one o'clock in the morning and there was a lot of people in the playground at night because it was hot summer nights and there a lot of lights so it wasn't particularly unusual thing to do and then i would walk through harlem up one hundred twenty fifth street and take the train to brooklyn and in those days harlem today harlem is gentrified in those days it was and it was still very poor and i was there was a street that i was would walk up to the train station and i began to realize this was a very kind of frightening street not in that it was like they were terrible people on it just in the sense that the level of poverty w intense that it looked like a terrible state of deprivation which has a kind of a terrorist so seated with it a kind of a horror and i began to realize that this street was the street that when i was about four or five years old living here in ames iowa i had a recurring nightmare about the dark street and it was a street in a city i had never been in a city when i was that age and i realized this was the street that i had been seeing in my dreams it was the exact same street so you know i'm partly telling the story because you asked about fear and partly because this is about vision you know so i was like what you know like how is it possible that i am in the physical world now walking through a street which is the exact same street that i dreamt about internally when i was five years old and i still i have no explanation for that but apparently that can happen that the  world in the physical world can be can come inside and so i didn't know what to do because it really kind of terrified me so you know i was terrified from i was exhausted from painting this huge mural i was terrified from watching this kid fall and thinking that i was responsible for the destruction of a child's life and now i was walking down the street which just really embodied a state of complete nemesis is the best word for it and so i said so what am i going to do so i remember that in psychology a dream in a dream everything belongs to you and so i said ok if this is part of my dream then everything on the street can be interpreted as belonging to me and so therefore i can decide to walk through the street and not be afraid of anything and understand that it is an aspect of me and does not have to be feared and so i kind of made that promise to myself so i was walking home one night and i'm walking through this fear this street and i'm thinking that and in the middle of the street is a man in a wheelchair nobody else is on the street just  wheelchair so he says come over here so of course you know i've been living in new york for thirty years i know it set up when i see one so i'm like well but then i said to myself no i promised myself i would not be afraid of anything and so i walk over and i say what do you need and he says well you know i need to get some money from the bank and my brother you went out got drunk i can't do anything can you help me so i push him over to the a t m and then he says well you know i need you to lift me up so i realize this guy has to put his hands around my neck in order for me to lift him up so i think twice about that month and no i promised myself i will not feel fear so i say ok so he puts his hands around my neck and and then i try to lift him up and maybe because he didn't want to you know grip too hard he slips and he and he falls and he you know in a paraplegic falls like a sack of potatoes and so he falls on the concrete in front of me just like the kid did so i'm just like wow you know like you know maybe three days an hour you know apart from each other i watch somebody fall on dirty concrete on the streets of harlem why am i seeing this too now what am i looking at and so anyway i finally managed to get him up i kind of pulled my back in the process and he's his the a t m card is broken because he fell on it and so he kind of has me like finally i managed to like get the a t m card to work and i get the door open i drag him into the a t m room and and he's leaning against the a t m table and kind of propped up again and then all of a sudden he straightens up and takes on a completely different  posture he appears to be kind of self sufficient and he he looks me in the eye extremely directly and authoritatively and he says you did very well tonight and i'm like what he said and he reaches over any touches my arm and he says no really you did very well tonight you may go now and i said well what are you go to do how are you going to get out of here how are you going to get your money and he said you may go now so like you know when somebody tells you to go you go so i left and you know and that was the night i said ok that's it no more murals that's it because the neural must've caused the i don't know it was just you know i just i don't know why i was just like that's it you know this is going to you know this was kind of really strange and wonderful in a real way but no more gary and i went to the i went to the bank next day because i noticed that the custodian was was cleaning and i said to him that you see that guy that i came in with the other night and last night and he said yeah and i said how did that guy leave and he said i have no idea how that guy left and so it was just kind of so there might have been another thing you know if you'd been set up and he's letting you out before the trap closes and so there might have been other people or this might have just been a lesson you needed i have no idea i have no idea what was going on and you know so it's kind of like cool in a way and and it's kind of like i was actually happy that i faced my fear and i felt that something had been accomplished something had been supported but that was enough i know i didn't know exactly what it supported so what does that have to do with art and fear i think that i don't know exactly what was going on with him but i do know that you know when you paint you become so immersed in your own inner world and you activate so much inside of yourself especially with such a large painting then you become very powerful internally in terms of possibilities and this became like an event that was impossible that just happened and it and it was connected to a world that i had already seen inside of myself so i guess what i'm trying to say with art and fear is that you know there's a lot of kind of cliffs internally as well as externally and are kind of you know teaches you to go up to those cliffs it teaches you to fly it you know anybody who's done art seriously knows that you can it's very frightening in some ways you never a dull moment because you're always reaching for that front here thought and going to a front here place and you don't know what's going to be there it's an interesting you know kind of conundrum in that you say there's the sense of the power and yet there's also this vulnerability at the same time yeah you know how do those balance well i think that has to do with our understanding of what we really are and how life really happens and i'm not sure any of us have been fully equipped to answer that question i we don't live in a in a world that gives us those answers but i think we all sense that there you know the universe is interactive and somehow things are happening you know i mean every time i turn on the radio or the t v the talks to me in ways that i don't understand it you know it talks about whatever i'm thinking about who knows why that happens you know we don't know really we're not equipped to really understand that well thank you very much for joining us boggling addition of our celebrity bird wow that was really wonderful and we will see you guys here and we're all we did mention that we are here in the famous puppet studio in ames iowa doing the show this week and we will see you guys next week back on the show and doug look at me i'm just waiting for you to shut up ok thank you guys i