Who says women can’t love art and science? Not Rose Marshack, a dynamic scholar and artist, computer scientist and programmer, martial arts instructor and writer who was once featured in the New York Times. The Chicago-area native, who has three degrees from the University of Illinois, is an Assistant Professor of Music and Arts Technology at Illinois State University. Oh, and did I mention she’s a rock star? She and her husband, Rick, make up half of the punk rock band Poster Children. The couple live with their two sons (6 and 1) in Champaign.
Q: You are a true rock star, but it’s been awhile since you have performed regularly. Do you miss it?
Ha! I don’t know about “true rock star” – the truth is, I somehow, very fortunately, ended up being able to play music whilst jumping around and beating myself up on a stage for 15 years, and once in a while people paid to see it. But yes, the last real tour we had was
the year before our first son was born, I think it was with The Breeders, on the west coast of the U.S. For years, I missed the touring, the driving around with no cares, playing music each night, seeing the world from the road, and then last year, we decided to play
a couple of shows in Wisconsin and we nearly died in the process. We had a home base of Chicago where we left the kids with grandparents each night for three nights, and went and played in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago and each night we’d get home around 4 or 5 a.m. like a normal tour, feeling great, but then instead of the normal waking up on someone’s floor around noon to get up and go hunt for food, we’d be awakened at 7 a.m. by a screaming baby and a hungry 6-year-old … so after that weekend, I didn’t miss touring anymore. It’s all changed. Maybe when the kids get older…
But there was so much I loved about touring, and only a small part of it was the playing live. We learned so much during all those years, and I look forward to teaching it to our children. Just from driving for hours and hours for years and years, maybe you can learn what’s really important in life. Maybe it’s not getting mad at having to wait in lines, or trying to get as much Stuff as you can get. Maybe it’s just being able to view landscape from the road, look at the sky, and learn what patience is. I think we learned a lot about how to find happiness during those times.
Q: You and your husband recently re-started doing podcasts which feature your thoughts on a variety of topics – including parenting tips. Can you share some of those tips here?
Radiozero started before podcasts; it was another way, like my tour reports/blog back in the 90s, to open our (mine and Rick’s, or the whole band’s) discussions to the public. When you have so much time on your hands, you can spend it reading books, going to museums, learning tons of stuff, so that’s what we did, and we’d go through phases where we’d discuss politics, philosophy, computer science, art, movies, music, pop culture, pretty much anything – I just looked at the http://www.radiozero.us website and saw that we did a podcast after our trip to Tibet… but we stopped doing this podcast in 2007 when we were both feeling completely tapped out from parenting. I remember
just looking at Rick and thinking, I have nothing, nothing at all in my brain. I am completely wiped out. All we could talk about were the frustrations of being new parents and we thought no one would really want to hear that; it seemed inappropriate to talk about our own kids, and I think we felt like we had no idea what we were doing, and had no right to foist any child-rearing ideas on other people.
I’ve heard people talk about brain fog, the inability to think after your first child is born, and to me it was such an incredibly tangible, disabling thing. I think we restarted the podcast now because I think perhaps we’re starting to come out of it. Child 1.0 is 6 years old now. It has taken that long. In answer to your question, I guess people will just have to listen to see if we do have any useful tips! My only tip at this point would be, “don’t listen to us!”
We have been working together since 1985. That is quite a long time. It probably helps that neither of our sets of parents had been divorced. We also really have almost all the same interests. It also helps that Rick is exceptionally understanding. Maybe I am too. But my dad said to me a long time ago, that “there are tons of ‘fish’ in the sea and tons of ‘perfect’ matches for each person, you just have to find someone who you can get along with.
A long time ago, also, (and this is going to sound really stupid and trite, but here goes) – we heard John Gray (the guy who wrote “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” talk, and what he was saying totally made sense in a really simple) way. It worked for us as people. The men (at least the ones in my marriage) are all about needing to feel like they can take care of everything, like they can make everything better, solve any problem. The women (in my marriage) all seek comfort from the men in certain ways (that he goes on to describe). Really, really simple stuff, and embarrassing to admit, but I think we may have learned a lot from that particular line of philosophy.
I really don’t feel like an artist. I’m probably only even considered an artist because I have weird hair and dress funny. I certainly have more science degrees than art degrees!
But since it’s in my job title, I’m a scientist who is trying to learn about art. And there are parts that collide in the most beautiful way. You have only to read some Richard Powers books to begin down this path, you can see that art can teach people about science, the kind of science that will save the world. There’s a quote, “Artists can scream, Scientists can’t” (Marda Kirn) – it talks about how you might use your artwork to help people better understand scientific data. There are some wonderful Mommy artists and scientists out there – one of my favorites is Natalie Jeremijienko, and another is the famous artist Mierle Ukeles, and your readers can Google these women to see what they teach.
You need to know, that Rick and I won’t listen to our own music, unless we’re performing or recording. We’d never bring out a record in public, and we used to regularly leave record stores if one of our albums would come on. It made us feel very uncomfortable.
I’ve been playing Capoeira music a lot lately. We have a lot of instrument practicing going on at our house regularly, too. And in the car, the kids are forced to listen to what might be deemed “alternative music” – older stuff from Naked Raygun, Didjits, Talking Heads, to newer stuff that my husband likes. We’re taking the kids to see Blondie and Cheap Trick at the State Fair next month. We’re all very excited about that.
We always joked, trying to figure out what music our kids would listen to in order to drive us crazy.We like punk rock. So the grungiest, loudest, most horrible, 60 minutes of feedback, grindcore, guys screaming out the scariest swear-words you could possibly imagine, would not phase us at all. We’d like it. So you’d think the kids would listen to classical music then. But that certainly wouldn’t bother us. Either would country music, unless it was new country.
But our oldest son has figured it out. When he wants to drive us crazy, he listens to our own music, in front of us, over and over again. And man, does it work.
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