Michael Martone - Racing in Place - Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

Black plastic frames top the top halves of the lenses that are outlined below with silver wire rims. Silver rivets at each top corner of the frame and at the points where the temples are attached. The delicate clear plastic pads rest on each side of the nose. The pads are connected to filaments of wire that corkscrew with the twist of a dental instrument and then, with a touch of solder, are stapled to the wire frame. A silver metal bridge, etched with streamlining filigree, spans the gap between the plastic brows, grafted into slots, pinned by pins just slightly larger than this period. Men's glasses. The glasses of the Eisenhower administration, the Kennedy administration, the Johnson administration. NASA glasses. Vince Lombardi glasses. Colonel Sanders glasses. Malcolm X glasses.

E

"I will never see you again," the optometrist told me as he fit my glasses to my head. Delicately, with two fingers of each hand at each hinge, he wobbled the frame on my nose and then removed it. He turned away to bury a plastic earpiece in the chemical sand. "These will never break," he said, looking at the sand. "They were built by NASA engineers."

E

A pair of glasses. It is like a pair of pants, a pair of pliers-one object composed of two joined similar parts that depend on each other. My left eye has always been stronger, though both have needed correction since I was in fourth grade. My first pair was from Sears. The temple pieces were anodized aluminum and contained, in a compartment near each hinge, hidden tiny springs that tensed the temples to hug my head. They left a mark, an indentation even.

E

The plastic part of mine is black. The company calls it ebony. And the metal trim is silver. There are variations of color. Black Briar. Grey Briar. Mocha. Tortoise. All can be combined with gold wire fittings instead of the silver. All the plastic colors can be molded to simulate wood grain, but that is a whole other line in the catalog.

E

The silver metal bridge piece, the ligature between the contrasting black plastic brows, can look, if you look quickly, like it actually has been broken there and then taped. I have worn glasses taped that way. I used black electrician's tape but the adhesive was gummy. White athletic tape was better. I've taped the temples too, swelling at the hinge, a gall at the fork of a twig. The tape on the bridge turned gray after I punched the slipping frames back up my nose. The frame's internal integral supporting spring was sprung by the break never to be right again. The tape grew spongy and soft.

E

Printed in white on the inside of both temple pieces is SHURON 53/4 USA. The USA is in a generic sans serif type. SHURON, the company name, is more eccentric, complicated, a brand after all. The S and the H are in caps but the u, r, and n are lowercase, though printed the same size as the S and H. The 0 can go both ways. The name is definitely a homonym advertising fit. It might also be a pun on a founder's name. Several lines of frames retain "Ron" in their names. The style of my glasses is the "Ronsir." The "Ronwinne," an all wire frame, made its seven millionth sale on September 3, 1946. The brand itself, SHURON, has remained hidden, unlike the contemporary designer eyewear that prints its signature on the temple hinge or temple piece or even on the lens itself.

E

"SHURON" makes me think too of the great lake, a lisp, slur and all. I picture a kind of lake like a lens draped over the bridge of the state's northern peak, wedged on Michigan's cheek. A pool of organically shaped glass, its surface glassy.

E

Others have pointed out Superman's unique take on secret identity. That is he puts on a disguise when he masquerades as one of us, wholly un-super men and women. As a hero he is singularly maskless. His civilian glasses are his mask. The style of Superman's glasses is closer to the SHURON "Freeway" or "Sidewinder," a big, black chassis, plastic all around. In Clark Kent's case, glasses distort the visage if not the vision. I remember that the lenses of his glasses were crafted from the porthole of his childhood spaceship, all the better to surreptitiously deploy his heat vision, his X-ray eyes, without a tell-tale meltdown of the standard terrain material. No one could see how he really sees. Think about it. When Superman uses his X-ray vision all he would see is lead, as the vision would penetrate everything, layer after layer, until the beam ran into the lead layer somewhere that would finally stop it. Glasses do change a face but we read glasses in a certain way. "Weakness," in this instance, is the disguise. The glasses are a visible visual crutch perched on the nose. Helpless without them, stumped and stumbling. Those glasses also clue nearsightedness and manifest in the wearer a concave hunch. Picture books held up to the face; a kid bent over comic books. Superman adopted glasses as his disguise, an emblem of the vulnerability of mere mortals. The glasses show he sees us while he sees through us.

E

Call 800-242-3636 and ask for John Rogers. He is the spokesperson for the SHURON Company. He wears glasses. He will point out that, to a certain extent, the company is now a costumer more than a regular manufacturer of eyewear. A company employee does nothing else all day but handle the liaison work with Hollywood, and Mr. Rogers will reiterate the company line that they are the source for "retro" eyeglasses. See SHURON frames, he says, in almost every major motion picture and TV series where "retro" frames are worn. The company could provide a list of such appearances. Their glasses are stars. They are the glasses of stars. Mr. Rogers is less sure who actually wore the frames before the frames settled into a fixed time, were indicative of an era. Kevin Costner, playing Jim Garrison in the film JFK, is wearing a pair of SHURON's Ronsir frames. Mr. Rogers is less sure that the real Mr. Garrison wore SHURON Ronsirs. But chances are he did. Style implies change, seasons. SHURON has been making the exact same Ronsir frame since 1947, but the frames they make today are encrusted with cultural quotation marks like the simulated jewelling available on SHURON's NuLady Deluxe line that was introduced recently as a "retro" style. My glasses grew into their self-consciousness. They were glasses, and then they were "glasses."

E

I am not sure that Malcolm X's glasses are a SHURON Ronsir. The design of the device in the upper outer corner of the frame is slightly different. The studs on the temples too are a variation. These fittings are the showy side of the hinge apparatus. They are the decorative rivet heads. The business end of the hinge is hidden behind the frame and attached there and on the temple with two screws, each sunk into the plastic. The screws are set in reverse fashion. One screw is screwed inside out so you can see the slotted head. The other has been screwed from the outside in, its head hidden by the detailing devices mentioned above. In the detailing of my devices, the metal caps are horizontal and inscribed with parallel horizontal lines. The rivet on the frame then flairs out like a spearhead pointed toward the lens and the eye. This detailing, I imagine, is all proprietary, the actual trademarking subtleties of the manufacturer. Look closely at the famous picture of Malcolm X. The one where he is pointing up and outward. He is before a microphone, and his lips are caught forming a fricative, the upper teeth visibly biting the lower lip. Look! The temple piece and the frame piece appear to be capped by a device more diamond shaped, the arrowhead without the shaft, the mathematical symbols (> <), "more than" and "less than" aimed at the eyes. Spike Lee noticed the detail of the detail, or, at least, I think he did. The glasses Denzel Washington wears playing the character of Malcolm X seem an exact match for the ones Malcolm X wears as Malcolm X. I am amazed by this attention to detail. The glasses, and getting them right, are that important. In fact, the rivet heads' > and < are like two halves of the X separated and pointing at each other.