Seth Apter responds!!!

Without further ado, with a huge woo-hoo, I present here to you: Seth's Answers! (I figure they deserve a post all their own!)

Me: Your (seriously) altered DeLorean has just brought you to the working studio of one of the most evocative and innovative artists of the century. Hmmm, I couldn't really see that date - what year is it anyway, and where in the world are you?  

Seth Apter: It would be a short trip for me…both in terms of location and time. I would head back to downtown NYC in the early 1950s and join the New York School artists for one of their Art Salons. The painting pioneers of the day that would fill that space included Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Still, Motherwell, Mitchell, Newman, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, Krasner, and so many more. Abstract Expressionism was being born and the USA was being put on the art map. Can you imagine the energy and creativity that was being generated?

Me: You have one day left, and you know it. How will you spend it, and with whom?
Seth Apter: No question I would spend the day with my family. There aren’t many of us but we would all be together. And no doubt we would be eating. And knowing me I would also be updating my blog.
(Me: (slapping head) Of course you would! And we would all be ecstatic to read your final thoughts...)

Me: What smell transports you; to where and when?

Seth Apter: Although I have lived in NYC for 29 years, I actually grew up in a house in Connecticut. The smell of cut grass always brings back my time growing up.

Me: In the incomparable 1989 baseball movie Field of Dreams, James Earl Jones, as Terence Mann, says,
"They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces...The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball...This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again." Do you agree? Also, Mets or Yankees?

Seth Apter: I think everybody has their own personal form of ‘baseball’ that floods them with memories, reminds them of better days, and offers hope that the future can be as singularly special as that/those experience/s in the past. I was, am, and always will be a Mets fan. I am much more like them and they are much more like me than the Yankees will ever be. I am all about the underdog, the hope and possibilities of a better year, the scrappiness, and loyalty. Success is sweetest when it is unexpected.

Thank you, Seth! You're the best.