Signals is my favorite Rush album. Vanessa Gould is
directly responsible for this. We worked together for a summer at the Boston
Museum of Science, and I asked her what bands she liked. When she said Rush, I
asked what album was good. a sensible Rush fan, she said Permanent Waves, or
maybe Moving Pictures. I guess Signals was cheapest, or all Mystery Train had
in stock when I went.
Vanessa Gould directed Between the Folds, a short
documentary film about origami, specifically origami as an intersection between
art and science. Gould’s narrative structure is elegant, beginning with a man
who makes the paper he folds and with eccentrics who fold “damp,” a technique
that lends paper the expressiveness of clay, to abstract origami artists, to
mathematicians who use origami to teach geometry, and ultimately to mathematicians
who map advanced maths to origami and think about the practical applications origami
suggests.
Gould said, in Nature, that she worried about the
science in the film: would the science, that so appealed to her, be off-putting
to a general audience? She said, “The aim was to show science in a poetic and
romantic way, but with depth so it could appeal to existing scientists and
maybe titillate non-scientists.” The mathematics is where the documentary takes
off; the last subject of the film is Dr. Eric Demaine, the youngest MIT
professor in the Institute’s history, a homeschooled lad who sees folding as a
characteristic of everything; he thinks we might force a virus—such as HIV—to take
a shape that would make it benign. His ideas impress more than the
hyper-detailed origami sculpture seen at the beginning of the film.
Between the Folds is Gould’s directorial debut. Inspired
by The New York Times obituary of origami artist Eric Joisel (an artist
featured in the film), her next project is a documentary about the obituary
writers at the Times.
One afternoon after work, she gave me a ride, to somewhere
I don’t remember. We didn’t listen to Rush; we were mostly quiet. She told me
she once searched the floor of her Jeep for enough change to buy some gas—50¢ to get home to Concord.
Her eyeglasses were thick. Her blond hair, too. I was intimidated by her
evident intelligence.
We didn’t forge a friendship—I imagine, if she
were to read this, she’d be hard-pressed to remember me at all. I might’ve
liked to be friends, but I was so weird I probably prevented myself from doing
anything to lead to a friendship. Until now, I only ever thought of her when I got in the mood
to listen to Signals and then lo, a week ago, I stumbled across a documentary
directed by Vanessa Gould. It’s possible the Vanessa Gould who directed Between
the Folds isn’t the same Vanessa Gould who introduced me to Rush.
It’s likely.
[The image above is a portrait by Alma Haser. To
see more of here work, visit her site.]
