by Adam Sobel
Since we started this podcast in 2019, we have produced about one season, of about ten episodes each, per year. If we were to maintain the recent pattern, we should have started releasing season 5 about now. It isn’t happening, as some of you might have noticed. This note is to explain why.
I’ve stopped recording interviews with scientists for the moment. Instead I’m working on another project, currently in its early stages. This new project will have some elements in common with the podcast we have come to know. But other elements will be very different, the most obvious being that it is not about science in any direct way, and that it’s yet more personal for me than Deep Convection is. It’s still early enough, and the details are still fuzzy enough, that I don’t want to say too much more than that. But I do want to say something, both because I’m excited and want to share, and because I feel I owe our listeners an explanation. So I’m going to say the most important thing, which is what, or rather whom it’s about.
The new project is about my maternal uncle, the late Sumner Crane (1946-2003).
Sumner was both a visual artist and a musician for his whole life. For most of that life, he had more or less no audience for his art beyond his friends and family, and certainly made no money at it. The exception was a brief period in the late 1970s and earliest 1980s.
From 1976-78, Sumner played in a band called Mars. Mars was central to the so-called No Wave movement, and is one of the four bands on the record No New York, produced by Brian Eno, and generally viewed as the archetypal document of No Wave. After Mars broke up, Sumner did one follow-on project with some of the same people, a record called John Gavanti that has been called the only “No Wave opera.” During the No Wave period Sumner also did visual art as part of a three-person collective, with Arto Lindsay and Rudolph Grey, under the shared pseudonym Jack Texas; this work was shown at least once, at Danceteria.
John Gavanti came out in 1980, and by all accounts the No Wave scene didn’t last long beyond that. Many of the people in it moved on to artistic careers that have continued to the present, taking the No Wave esthetic with them to varying degrees. Sumner didn’t. He kept playing music, and kept painting. But he was either unable or unwilling to do any self-promotion or hustling for gigs, so almost no one has ever seen or heard anything he did in these media outside the No Wave period. He did, however, pursue a scholarly art history project in his last decade or so, about the painter Edward Simmons, and he and Sue published four articles on Simmons’ work in art journals.
Sumner was a big influence on me in my youth. If you know me, or you’ve listened to a lot of Deep Convection, you may know that I was fairly serious about being a musician in my youth; Sumner was surely part of how I got that idea. More broadly, he lived an artistic life, and a life of the mind, and was willing to sacrifice a great deal for that. He was brilliant, eccentric, charismatic, funny, slightly crazy, and — to an extent I appreciate more now, but had some sense of even then — much beloved by many friends. He was very different from anyone else in my family, and just by being himself, he expanded my view of life’s possibilities. Later, when Sumner was in his forties and I in my twenties, he married Susan Lehman, and after that, I remember him as happier, and calmer, than he had been before. My wife and I had a lovely adult relationship with him and Sue. But then in the early 2000s, he got cancer, first in his eye, and then after treatment and maybe a year and a half of remission, it came back worse, and he died of lymphoma in 2003.
In the late 1970s, in lower Manhattan and other places where people paid attention to what was going on in lower Manhattan, No Wave had an impassioned, if relatively small following. (Most people find the music hard to appreciate, to put it gently.) But its influence went beyond its direct audience. It got written about, it had connections to other cultural trends, and some people with more fame than the No Wavers thought it was important.
But it faded… until around the mid-2000s. Then, books started to be written about it. There are several by now. These books feature Mars prominently, and include text about Sumner as well as photos of him. Social media has probably helped bring No Wave back too; apparently there’s a No Wave facebook group with 20,000 people on it. Search #sumnercrane on Instagram and you can find lots of photos of Sumner (mostly by Julia Gorton, author of the 2023 book Nowhere New York).
Maybe it was the cumulative effect of these reverberations of Sumner’s music, in the nearly half-century since Mars last performed, making him more famous than he was in life, that got me thinking about him more lately. Maybe it was the realization that I’d reached the exact age he was when he died. Maybe it was talking about my family issues, as one does, in therapy, which I started doing for the first time a few years ago, that brought my memories of him to the surface. Maybe it was the recognition that many of his friends who were on the scene — a few of whom I’d met in my youth — were still around, and that I wanted to talk to them about him, and that I guessed they might be willing to do that.
Probably all these things. In any case, as Melanie and I started talking about what to do with the fifth season of Deep Convection, I got the idea to do a few episodes about Sumner, maybe a whole season even. When I explained this idea to her, Melanie said “I don’t know if this should be called Deep Convection, but it sounds like a cool project.” That was enough for me. I got the first couple people’s contact info from Sue and social media, and started doing interviews.
I’ve now done a few. I don’t want to say with whom yet — let’s preserve the element of surprise — but they are the real deal, important originals from the scene (and, ok, my mom and Sue, who are the other kind of real deal). I hoped these people would talk to me, but I wasn’t sure if they would. Not everyone said yes, but those who did have surprised me in one way: they’ve all told me that what I’m doing is important, and urged me to do more than just a few podcast episodes.
It had taken me a while to work myself up even to speak aloud the idea of doing a of a few podcast interviews on Sumner — after all, I’m a scientist, and he was an almost-unknown artist who died more than 20 years ago. It felt a little random at first, and also more personal than I was sure I wanted to be in public. So the suggestions from Sumner’s friends and collaborators to make the project even bigger than that were, at first, more than I could countenance.
But I also knew there was a lot of material. Sue had told me that she had a large archive of Sumner’s work, because it turns out he saved everything: paintings, drawings, cassettes, and writings. I wasn’t able to see this material right away, because she lives in California now. But she told me a little about it, so I had some idea what was there, and I knew there were people in the world who would be interested in it.
I started talking to more friends about all this. As I explained it to people, my excitement came across. Nearly everyone seemed to understand it, and some seemed to share it. In late August, my son Eli and his partner Cleo happened to be able to visit Sue, and took photos of some of the paintings. Then, a little over a week ago, I got a box in the mail from Sue with many of Sumner’s cassettes and written materials. It’s an amazing collection. And Sue has more I haven’t yet seen; I will visit her in a few weeks and we will look at it together.
So here’s where we are. We have a few recordings of interviews with some important people, and I hope to do more. We have a large, multimedia archive of Sumner’s work, most of which almost no one has ever seen or heard. I have some ideas about what to do with all of this, but they are still just ideas.
Besides putting out the podcast interviews, though, there are two more ideas that are so obvious I will say them out loud. We are dreaming of a gallery show of the paintings and drawings. And I intend to write about Sumner, beyond this little blog post.
It will take time to figure out more than that, because I don’t even know yet all of what we’re working with. I have to go through this archive and try to understand the scope of it. I’m also reading, and talking to more people, to try to understand his many influences and connections. This is a substantial research project, and I’m doing it around the edges of my demanding day job. But I’m grateful to be able to do it, and especially to be doing it with the support of, and in conversation with, several of his close friends and collaborators, as well as several of mine — including the Deep Convection team — who didn’t know Sumner, but are now maybe starting to feel like they do, a little.
Does any of this have anything to do with science? It’s not obvious, but I think it does. In any case, though, this podcast has always been about a lot of things other than science. Some of those things connect with Sumner’s interests, life and work in various ways. If you’ve enjoyed Deep Convection, I hope you might stick with us, and stay tuned for whatever this becomes. And if you’re a Mars or Sumner Crane fan who’s found your way to reading this, we will have a lot to offer you. Please stand by.