In this new installment of Phoned-In, Dan Boehl reads from his new book Kings of the F**king Sea and talks to Luke Degnan about his collaboration with Jonathan Marshall, censorship, and Spiderman 3.

In the eleventh installment of BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Madison Smartt Bell reads an excerpt from his novel The Color of Night.[podcast]http://bombsite.powweb.com/Podcasts/FFD-SmarttBell-MP3.mp3[/podcast]

Andrew Weatherhead

Melissa Broder

Gigantic

Blake Butler

BB2

Andrew Weatherhead

Melissa Broder

Gigantic

Blake Butler

BB2

Monday, 10/18 Michael Cunnigham (you remember, The Hours, Virginia Woolf, a Pulitzer Prize?) reads from his new novel, By Nightfall, at 192 Books, at 21st St. Hear what he’s been up to, peruse cool art books.

Thursday, 10/21 marks the opening reception for Gerald Slota and Neil LaBute collaboration Home.Sweet.Home at Ricco Maresca Gallery. Slota’s nostalgic, albeit somewhat eerie, photographs are paired with LaBute’s slightly depressing, often surprising, always poetic, caption-like text. Think of home, drink white wine.

International Festival of Authors in Toronto (IFOA Toronto) to host Jonathan Franzen, David Mitchell and more. Full schedule here. It’s not that far away, Toronto.

Wednesday, 10/20 the first survey of John Baldessari’s work in twenty years opens at the Metropolitan Museum of art.

Free, also opening Wednesday, at the New Museum features the work of BOMB contributors David Horvitz, Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, Jon Rafman, Clunie Reid, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Alexandre Singh, among others.

Saturday, 10/23 David Antin & Eddie Hopely read at the Bowery Poetry Club, 4:00, $6.

Trabantimino, eight years in the making and completed just one hour before its October 7th opening at Salon 94, displays bravura mechanics, a whiff of nostalgia and a sense of humor. Liz Cohen took to task three aspects of car culture: ownership, fabrication and marketing. Combining design features of two defunct models that represent different cultures— the East German Trabant and the Chevy El Camino truck— Cohen learned mechanical engineering from mentors at World Wide Customs, Oakland; Elwood Bodyworks, Scottsdale, Arizona; and Kustom Creations, Detroit. In a parody of marketing protocol, Cohen doubled up as pin-up girl, striking humorous poses for automotive shows.

The current exhibit, which marks the reopening of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn’s Salon 94 at 243 Bowery, includes a wall of black and white photographs of tools used to make the hybrid vehicle, and pin-up prints and ephemera. This mini-doc was filmed and edited by Liza Béar at the opening and on the following day.

Carlos Oquendo de Amat’s cult object-book 5 metros de poemas is an excited and sometimes surrealist counter-point to the Latin American poets of his time. Urayoán Noel reflects on the new edition by Ugly Duckling Presse and what low-tech book/objects mean in a literary culture whose loudest voices are Neruda and Vallejo.

Latin American poets don’t do object-books. Or, at least, the iconic ones don’t. We cherish modern masters like César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda for their imprint, their capacity to refashion vanguard motifs into a personal and political style. These poets helped build what critic Ángel Rama famously called the “lettered city” of Latin American literature, and, in the case of Neruda, a cottage industry, even a global brand.

But what about the back alleys of that lettered city? Recently, some younger Latin American poets have reclaimed the low-tech book/object (see Argentina’s Eloísa Cartonera), seemingly in an attempt to irreverently highlight the streets of that city less written. Knowingly or not, these poets are covering ground first trekked by Peruvian poet Carlos Oquendo de Amat (1905-1936) in his accordion-fold book 5 metros de poemas (1927), now reissued in a bilingual edition by Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse.

According to the biographical note on the book jacket, Oquendo de Amat moved from “provincial genteel comfort to a life of poverty in Lima,” where he was imprisoned for dissent, eventually abandoning poetry for Marxism, and dying of tuberculosis at age 32. 5 metros de poemas was his sole book, and he apparently wrote very little else—the Ugly Duckling edition includes four additional poems and claims to be a “complete presentation of Oquendo de Amat’s known writings.”

Far from the ruminative, pained, world-disclosing of Vallejo, 5 metros de poemas reads like the work of his excitable younger brother. There’s a giddiness about the modern world, somewhat tempered by surrealist inversions, as if to ward off a certain kind of futurist “technophilia.” What we have here is not the radical syntax of Vallejo’s Trilce, with its tricky indents, neologisms, and experiments with spelling, and punctuation. More conventional in its language, yet evidently inspired by the visual poetics of film, Oquendo de Amat’s book reveals a commitment to plasticity of expression and of experience, embodied in the book’s format: pages fold out so that each poem is a work in itself and the distinction between unit and series is blurred. The stock images of the modern world (steamships, skyscrapers, etc.) are resignified though the use of synesthesia, and the experiments with line and layout echo the jump cuts and slow dissolves of film, as images alternatively freeze and melt:

The perfume became a tree

and colors fly
from the transatlantics

(“port”)

In its at once celebratory and ironic evocations of Americana, and especially of the U.S. West and Southwest, 5 metros de poemas harks back to Vicente Huidobro’s landmark poem “Cow-Boy,” included by Tristan Tzara in Dada 3 (1918), except that here the landscapes keep dissolving until we’re left with an inscrutable ambient, a projection, between a freeze-frame and a frieze:

From a tavern
a sailor
removes ribbons from bottles, projected from infancy

He is now Jack Brown chasing the cowboy
and the whistle is a horse in Arizona

A SIGH BEHIND THE MORNING

(“port”)

Many of the most successful moments in the book are short bursts of two or three lines that read like damaged couplets, or faux-epigrammatic, like surrealist haiku. At their most charmingly deadpan, these snippets anticipate the playful antipoetry of Nicanor Parra:

The landscape is lemon
and my beloved
wants to play golf with it
(“film of the landscapes”)

Not all of the book holds up as well. Oquendo de Amat’s cinematic poetics is better suited to the short poem that sets a scene, the Cubist still-life, where each page is a tableau. Some of the longer pieces sag under the imagistic weight. Such is the case of “new york;” despite some evocative couplets about Coney Island and Wall Street, and some very clever stabs at concrete poetry that nicely riff on Manhattan’s spatiality—the poem ends with a text box that reads “FOR RENT THIS MORNING”—, it never resolves into more than a roll/role call, featuring “Rudolph Valentino,” “Mary Pickford,” “hoop games,” “park rangers” and a cast of countless others. Still, even if overwrought as poetry, “new york” might work as a foreshadowing of various kinds of contemporary detritus poetics: Flarf, spam, infomercials. The title pun pays off, as the book reads like a fractal of poetic meters. Of course, the titular “metros” also evoke subway tracks that link underground distances, from New York to Paris to the dream-ports where poetry docks.

The experience of reading this book is an experiment in its own right: with the Spanish original on one side and the English translation on the back, comparing the two versions requires constant folding and unfolding, which is somehow appropriate, given the poet’s polymorphous aesthetic, and the intricacies of translating a book this conceptual. Translators Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman make one fortuitous decision: they go colloquial, choosing idiomatic phrasings to render the images clearly, and simplifying the syntax when necessary. (This is, after all, a deliberately minor poet, not one, like Clayton Eshleman’s Vallejo, who would seem to require some sort of wonderfully over-invested, tour-de-force translation.) The result is, for the most part, lively, entertaining, readable, and true to Oquendo de Amat’s breezy, unenjambed line.

There are, however, some perplexing decisions and/or oversights. In “film of the landscapes,” the place name “Campo de Marte” (the “Champ de Mars” in Paris) is left in Spanish. In “antwerp,” a line from the original is omitted and the line “E l  c a l o r  e s  c o m o  u n  p e n s i o n i s t a” is rendered as “H e a t  i s  l i k e  a n  o l d t i m e r” (I think the poet means “boarder” or “lodger” here, since the heat stays for the summer and then leaves suddenly; either way, “oldtimer” is an odd choice). Elsewhere, in the aforementioned poem “new york,” the phrase “La brisa dobla los tallos / de las artistas de la Paramount” becomes, confusingly, “A breeze hurries the growth / of Paramount actresses,” instead of what I would render simply as “A breeze bends the stems / of Paramount actresses” (I’m guessing the translators interpreted “doblar” as “to double” rather than “to turn/twist/bend”). There are a few more weird choices and awkward phrasings sprinkled throughout the book.

Still, the translators and publisher are to be commended for their labor of love, which brings a long-lost cult book into the kind of transnational circulation it both celebrates and mocks, but which it ultimately deserves, if only as a reminder of the diversity and complexity of modern Latin American poetry. How cult is 5 metros de poemas? Well, I had been hearing about it for almost 15 years, since my undergraduate days at the University of Puerto Rico, but had never seen a copy, only anthologized poems here and there. (There is no copy at the New York Public Library, which is saying a lot.)

Ugly Duckling is known for its elegant yet quirky letterpress editions and artist’s books, and for its expansive, international list of innovative writers. While they have a successful Eastern European poets series, this book represents their first foray into Latin American poetry in translation. It is a promising start. Beautifully presented, 5 Meters of Poems is a joy to read, and a significant contribution to our understanding of Latin American vanguard poetry beyond such canonical figures as Neruda and Vallejo. Here’s hoping for many more meters!

5 Meters of Poems is out now from Ugly Duckling Presse.

BOMBlog’s B.C. Edwards reviews a single story from Joe Meno’s collection Demons in Spring.

Drawing by Geoff McFetridge

It’s interesting to review a single story pulled out of a longer collection. With no other points of relation, the story is forced to exist alone and is far more defenseless than a piece side-by-side with others of its ilk. Still, “An Apple Could Make You Laugh” by Joe Meno is quite lovely. There is a quiet truth it evokes about the base nature of human desire and lust in the modernized world. This is not new ground to be traversed by any means, but Meno covers it well and with a very measured hand.

The song “Ring of Fire,” was made famous by Johnny Cash but was written by his then married-to-another-man but soon-to-be wife June Carter. Curiously, the song was written about the deep uncontrollable extramarital lust that she, herself, was feeling for Cash, who was married himself but in love with Carter. The fire of hell that one would be cast into for cheating on a spouse is also the same fiery and sultry lust that one feels at the thought of the act. In the song that unrequited passion is all the stronger and seeps from  each word, note and chord. Meno evokes many of the same sensory illusions by means of the pictures his two characters draw for and then surreptitiously pass to each other as they move quietly through their nondescript work days and their nondescript jobs. “Kissing you would be like this… a picture of a man made of ice kissing a woman who is actually a stove.”

The story follows two unnamed co-workers through a very stilted and yet rather vibrant office romance. Meno’s skill comes across in how painfully well he maintains these two qualities. The more intense the narrator’s feeling for his object of desire grow, the more roundabout and obtuse their methods of communications become, thus the more heightened his fantasies grow, thus the more intense the feelings become; and on in a cycle to an unsurprising but remarkably well written end.

But the strength of the piece isn’t the imagery, rather it is the familiarity the reader feels with the emotions that Meno lays out. It’s difficult to write such simple, genuine people and put them in regular comprehensible surroundings and not bore your reader. But here it works. Meno’s prose borders on the poetic and that marries perfectly with his characters and the subject matter of the  piece. If there is anything about the piece that falls a bit short it is, curiously, the illustrations themselves. When providing visual content for written work, the images need to live up to the quality of writing, at the very least be as strong as the images that are  present in the text. But here, Geoff McFetridge’s, illustrations (while quite nice) do not succeed.

Each story from Joe Meno’s collection Demons in the Spring has been reviewed individually by 20 different literary blogs. Read them all at the Akashic Books website.

Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra’s dense, experimental and deeply funky music has just been reissued, re-alerting listeners to the composer’s unique, genre-crossing sounds. Gordon spoke with BOMBlog’s Nick Hallett about collaborating with artists like Arthur Russell as well as the ways in which his work continues to exert an influence on the dance floor in addition to the concert hall.

Peter Gordon, 1976. Photo by Pat Kelley

The recent outpouring of interest in the posthumous recordings of Arthur Russell has helped de-mystify the idea that a musical artist’s practice travels not just across concepts of sound and media type, but also more contemporary ideas of popular taste and genre. This interest has paved the way towards a re-examination of the rich community of Russell’s collaborators, who gathered around lower Manhattan and its loosely defined rubric, making what was popularly referred to as “downtown music.”  Composer and saxophonist Peter Gordon, whose Love Of Life Orchestra (LOLO) is the beneficiary of a well-deserved and well-timed retrospective by James Murphy and his DFA label this month, was a close friend of Russell’s, and the commonality in their respective practices—which delve into dance music and unabashedly radio-friendly pop and rock, in addition to more experiment-minded chamber works and performance collaborations—really shows.

In SoHo and the East Village during the late 1970s, where part of the challenge for its artists was to constantly redraw the boundaries between what was seen as serious culture and semi-populist fun, Peter Gordon convened the scene’s party band.  Along with composer-percussionist David Van Tieghem, whose day job at the time was playing in Steve Reich’s ensemble, and a generation-defining group of artists that included at various times Russell, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Ernie Brooks, Rhys Chatham, Scott Johnson, Jill Kroesen, Ned Sublette, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Peter Zummo, and many others, LOLO set out to find the middle ground between serial-minded minimalism and hands-in-the-air dance music.  The result sounds most like disco, with generous helpings of avant-mindedness and a contrarian’s wit.

A look back at this time also reveals that the first LOLO concerts predate Russell’s earliest known forays into disco (though to this point, Gordon claims “Arthur totally immersed himself in the whole genre and disco scene. This I never did”).  Add to that the lore that Gordon escorted Rhys Chatham to his first punk show (the Ramones at CBGBs), which sent the latter off on his well-noted practice with guitar ensembles, and Peter Gordon comes into view as an influential figure in a movement that has clearly affected the contemporary musical landscape, for perhaps helping to loosen its collar.  And yet it’s the journey towards the creation of LOLO (encounters with Captain Beefheart, Robert Ashley and Terry Riley on the west coast) and what happened to Gordon’s practice after the great disco backlash (major collaborations with Ashley, Richard Foreman and Bill T. Jones) which begin to fill in the portrait of an artist who has always thrived in the spaces between recognized definitions of music and sound.

Peter Gordon and I met through the community of artists who continue to perform the music of Arthur Russell (which is perhaps the cause of this Russell-oriented intro) and I interviewed him at his home in New Rochelle, New York, which he shares with his wife, the video artist Kit Fitzgerald, and their son Max.

Nick Hallett: One of the things I really want to focus on is this reconciliation process between the avant-garde impulse and the desire to make pop music and how your work engages with that process and where that process begins.  What is some of the earliest music that you remember enjoying?  What got you into music in the first place?

Peter Gordon: Initially as a younger teenager I was really into jazz.  I really liked jazz saxophone.  I was living in Germany, and so I was also into the whole British blues thing.  I used to hear groups like The Animals and The Kinks and The Yardbirds, and was into Motown, too.

NH: Those things existed very comfortably and simultaneously in your tastes when you were a teen?

PG: Oh yeah, I was listening to James Brown and the Rolling Stones but also John Coltrane and Sun Ra.  In Munich, we could take the subway in, and for like two Marks—which was like 50 cents at the time—we could get student tickets to the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra or the Munich Opera.  We could go to hear Debussy or Schoenberg and then go to a rock club and see the latest band so I never felt that conflict in a certain sense. It became clear to me early on that once I started playing saxophone I would never have the embouchure for classical clarinet playing and I never liked symphonic saxophone.

NH: So what inspired your own take on the instrument?

PG: People whose sound I really loved were Albert Ayler, King Curtis, Junior Walker.  I liked that big, sort of gutbucket type of tenor sound.  Certainly Coltrane and Sonny Rollins as well.

NH: I wouldn’t say your playing has been a rejection of jazz but your own practice kind of skirts around it.

PG: I never really got into that play-the-head-take-turns-soloing-play-the-head-again type of jazz, that dependency on standard repertoire. Also there was something about the jazz players—it was almost athletic in a certain sense.  It was always like, who plays the fastest solo?  Who’s the hottest player?  There was this sort of hierarchy, guys who knew all those be-bop solos and played really fast, and a lot of it seemed more about chops than about music. And I began being more interested in exploring a limited set of either musical skills or gestures, and really trying to look at things singularly from different points of view. Also, whatever you do in the jazz hierarchy, you’re always competing against Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

NH: So it seemed better to strike out on your own and go in a different direction—

PG: Yeah, I mean I don’t know how conscious it was, but it was just less interesting to me to follow that path.

NH: So who were your mentors in composition around that time?

PG: Well, at that point I didn’t really have mentors—

NH: Are we talking—are we still in high school?

PG: I mean, I moved back to the States for my senior year, Los Angeles, and that’s when I met Captain Beefheart. He was a big influence.

NH: How did you meet Captain Beefheart in high school?

PG: Basically, he lived in our neighborhood.  My friend Richard Benedon had met him and we would go over to his house all the time.  This was when he was recording Trout Mask Replica and the whole band was living in the house and we used to hang out. And my friend would go make out with his girlfriend or whatever in the other room, and I’d be stuck and just have to talk with Captain Beefheart for hours. And that’s where I really saw that here was someone doing rock music, influenced by blues, but really treating it as an artist. It wasn’t coming out of [John] Cage or an academic lineage, but he was really informed, I think.  And through Beefheart there was that Zappa connection.

NH: So through the arty, West coast freak-out rock thing—

PG: I don’t think there is any genre you could have put Beefheart in at that time.  One the reasons I never sold a million dollars in records is that I never really consciously thought of those genres, I was always interested in the spaces in between. Around the same time, my father—who was a radio journalist­—went to interview Harry Partch, so I was basically there for the interview.  It was at the UCLA production of Delusion of the Fury. Then when I got a copy of the record of Terry [Riley]’s In C, that sort of blew my mind in a certain way.

NH: Did you meet him around that time?

PG: No I didn’t meet him until later until I went to Mills. And I didn’t know anything about him, but a friend of mine, Steve Bartek, said, check this out. And it was like, wow.  I had always been fascinated with simple patterns and the layering of simple patterns.  I started thinking that if you could change any aspect, any parameter of a pattern, then that might suggest a different world.  It might even suggest a different genre, just the placement of where you put the bass note or the kick or whether it’s irregular, whether it’s a syncopated pattern, or the phrasing of that pattern. So if you have just a four-note pattern and you start shifting its rhythmic components, you will start suggesting a whole different range of genres.

NH: Well that’s definitely exemplified in Machomusic, and I kind of want to talk about what brought you to that because that kind of seems like a milestone piece for you in terms of defining a sound you went with and expanded upon. You developed a whole practice around it.

PG: Well, I think it was probably in many ways my farewell to San Diego, UCSD, at that time. Before that I had written a very finely intricately notated string trio. I wrote a really nice piece for like six flutes, prepared piano, harpsichord and celesta.  These earliest works had been more pointillist and textural in a certain way. But this one had more to do with the saxophone and you know I began looking for the music inside myself rather than anyone else’s idea of what music should be. Basically I was interested in hearing this type of music and I guess I was the one to make it.

NH: So was it a reaction? Was it a rejection?

PG: Yeah, originally the title was “Eat Shit, Fatherfucker.”

NH: (laughter) And you want that to go on record in BOMB?

PG: Let me think about that one. Actually there were six saxophone players all in drag, all wearing beards.  We had a quad sound set up where we were all mic-ed.

NH: And you had analog oscillators.

PG: Yeah, we had 16 Buchla oscillators turned to that F, very loud, which then started to drift over the course of the piece. It was almost like a shout in a certain sense. At that time I was interested in pattern music, becoming curious about repetitive music and also open structures, and just that physical act, that relationship you have as a saxophone player in just blowing. So in that sense it was like a scream, a bursting out. And it was double-billed with a performance of [Robert Ashley’s] The Wolfman.

NH: That seems like a nice pairing!

PG: Yeah, it was great because the only way you could beat Machomusic was with Wolfman.

NH: (laughter) I mean, in a very different kind of way I feel like Bob Ashley works with trying to reconcile these ideas of the “vernacular” and the “experiment” and I’m curious how studying with him at Mills encouraged or influenced you.

PG: I liked Bob’s ability to recognize a performance ensemble as a social unit, a community, which can have many different types of organization and any one of those organizational types of the players or musical material was as valid as the other.

NH: And then his community ended up having a big influence on who you would end up collaborating with when you moved to New York.

PG: Well, I think that tends to happen in establishing networks, whether it’s people from a certain town or a certain college. I think that’s really New York’s story, you know. So Bob moved to town and a number of us moved to New York at around the same time. For me it was kind of unplanned because I still hadn’t finished school yet, but I was on the road with a rock band, a 1950s-type revue and we did a month in Chicago at the Playboy club there and then suddenly I arrived in New York.  That was in 1975 and I stayed in the East Village and met Rhys [Chatham] and Arthur [Russell].

NH: But you were just on tour then, you hadn’t settled?

PG: The tour ended in Chicago and I went to New York.  Everyone else went home.  I just ended up staying. Everything just seemed to be jumping.

NH: So what energies were you drawing on in New York when you first moved here and how did the community, not just the people that were coming from Mills and Bob Ashley’s circle, conflate with the people you were meeting?

PG: Well, a lot of the scene was centered around the Kitchen, certainly. I think Arthur was probably music director then.  I met him shortly after I moved here, when Rhys and I were looking for a place to jam.  Arthur briefly had a storefront on East 4^th Street, and so he let us go and jam there and we sort of talked about this unabashed interest in pop music as well as in experimental music.  It was like a common bond and a secret between us.  I mean, not a secret, but it was like everyone else thought we were both crazy in that sense. And at the time everyone was playing in each other’s projects. Doing a concert at the Kitchen was a really big deal, but I was able to get a date at Artists Space and so I asked Rhys and Garrett [List] and I think Arthur played on that as well. In that same way, Arthur was writing his Instrumentals at that point and he brought me in and I helped him copy the score. And he brought me in to play sax on some of the [John] Hammond sessions, which were my first recording sessions in New York, at Columbia Records.  Then I started doing these ad hoc ensembles, like we’d perform at Phill Niblock’s loft or at Sobossek’s, which was a bar between 5^th and 6^th on the Bowery where Rhys worked sometimes as bartender, and we could go in weeknights or whatever, book a date, and then we’d put together a band and play music. Like a precursor to LOLO [Love of Life Orchestra] was the Normal Music Band. I think we did a performance as the Dukes. But it also had a bunch of horns and stuff, I had an interest in big band voicing as well. I seemed to mix a lot of different styles at that point.

Gordon (right) with LOLO co-founder David Van Tieghem

NH: So what was the intention with LOLO? To be a band, like a pop band? Or was the intention for LOLO to be something more-or-less like an experimental ensemble that engaged with the rubric of pop music? Where did you define it?

PG: Well, initially it was thought of more as a process. I was interested in creating a band in which musicians and even artists—non-musicians from all sorts of genres—could create music that had a shared core. And so some people might relate to notated music, others might respond to process or instruction, or maybe chord changes.

NH: But you still were approaching this from the viewpoint of a composer as opposed to a band leader who doesn’t think in terms of the history of experimental music—

PG: This really came as much out of conceptual art as anything else.

NH: But it was never a joke band in the sense of “we’re composers making pop music.”

PG: We weren’t joking, but we had fun with it.  Jill Kroesen and I would do a version of “I Got You Babe.” And then in the Max’s Kansas City generation, we did “Crimson and Clover.”  I wouldn’t say it was all naïve either.  LOLO really came out of a joy of loving this music and enjoying going from a hypnotic pattern into a very funky anthemic type of pattern into something more abstract and pointilistic.  And it’s like taking a journey through the music and the music is a very big house and it has lots of different rooms in it and it’s multi-dimensional—you can go into one room and it’ll take you into outer space or you go into another and suddenly you’re on this river or something. And somehow just by turning this doorknob you enter into this whole other space. And it’s like by shifting the prism, by slightly shifting the point of view you find yourself in this totally different world, which is a musical world.

NH: Now we’re getting somewhere. I think it also has to do with the memory of music—

PG: Well, the memory of music and also, in one sense, the way I felt about musical choices.  I came to this from Cage in the sense that what Cage has taught us is that anything can be music: any type of sound, any gesture.  Well, what that also means that music can be treated as music, which was very freeing. So in that sense I was never really interested in copying a style, but more like we would walk through different styles. Now this was also the time of disco and even before I moved to New York, the first time I heard those early disco records, early Donna Summer or Van McCoy “Do the Hustle,” for me that was like a light bulb going off, because basically what it meant was that—especially in what Donna Summer showed us—if you could keep that groove going, then you can do whatever you want on top of it. It really frees you intellectually because it breaks down that form, you know, it extends that verse-chorus hegemony which had been really dominating music for so long. So I think a combination of both disco music, Phil [Glass] and Terry’s music, minimalism, James Brown, came together to form an extended framework for me. Then there was electronic music, which became part of the palette we had to work with as well as recording, even though studio recording was very expensive and you had to find ways to get in the studio.  Still, this became both more accessible to us and also a way of making music.  The x-y axis wouldn’t be, you know, treble, bass and the different instruments in an orchestral score, but would actually be frequency and time and that’s really how you could work. And you could make your own stage, thinking orchestrally, but represented by tracks on the tape recorder.  So rather than a score for a 16-piece ensemble, you’d have a 16-track tape composition and with tape what you could do was record intuitive impulses and either keep them or not keep them but then work with them selectively.

NH: What was the audience for LOLO when it first started?

PG: Well, we played in SoHo and the East Village for the community of different artists working, different visual artists, neighborhood people.

NH: I want to romanticize it as something that was very much for the in-crowd, but that might just be my preconception—

PG: I mean, it was. We got criticized at the time for it because we were being seen as geared towards a small community, and it was accused as just being directed toward those in-the-know. It wasn’t necessarily heterogeneous racially.  But there was a big mix of men, women, different ages, gay, straight.  Then it was around that time when punk sort of hit—I mean punk was there, right around the corner—

NH: At CBGB’s—

PG: At CBGB’s or Max’s Kansas City, the Ramones or whatever would be playing, and we were playing in the same club. And at that point New Wave began happening and I think between every cusp, there’s always a brief window when the rules are opened—

NH: A Rococo kind of period—

PG: Where sort of anything can sort of fit in.

NH: And what happened when disco gave way to New Wave? Did you feel like you associated with one side of things more than the other, or were you just going along for the ride and hoping to find a place for your music?

PG: There have always been lists like this, you know especially since the Beatles, or even before, whether it’s the Crickets or Elvis, it’s been these rock trios or quartets of attractive guys. But that always came down to the rock band image, the rebellious rock band. So in that sense I never saw LOLO as a rock band in that vein.  But I always liked instrumental pop bands.  Growing up I really liked the Shadows or the Ventures as well as different sax instrumentals. The way I thought was, every year or two there’s some instrumental pop hit, so I was hoping to create something that would break through and maybe we would get a shot at one of those instrumental slots, which usually happens in a very fluke-y way.

NH: But it’s interesting because this thinking actually paved the way towards more serious concert work and commissions for stage works that still imbue that kind of energy and process but are on the more high-toned side of things.

PG: I started getting invited to participate in different theatrical or choreographic pieces.  I met [John] Sanborn and Kit [Fitzgerald] and we started running video along with the band.  At the time it was on monitors. Then Kit and I really started working on our collaborations together, like in ’82.  Around that time I had already started writing the music for Birth of the Poet for Richard Foreman, so I began thinking in terms of larger scale.

NH: You’ve played Otello for me and what’s really exciting to me about that piece is that you really see the—I don’t want to say the graduation of—but you really hear the same ideas that you hear with LOLO, but more finely tuned.  The music still maintains this sense of abandonment that you want to feel when experiencing pop music, but it’s still very clearly within the rubric of a serious concert work.  It’s almost like a vernacular kind of music for New York in the 80s.  And this is one reason why I’ve wanted to focus our conversation on this area where the popular impulse and the experimental technique combine and connect because I find that a challenging and problematic space but also a place where you can find just an immense amount of basic satisfaction in the making of music.

PG: I think this has always been the function of opera or music theater or Broadway or Gesamtkuntswerk.  I think that’s where you find the culmination of research that’s done within music, which is also done within drama and within the media of the time.  I think that when you’re dealing with a text such as Otello, really closely dealing with such a brilliant director, Mario Martone, who was the director of [Neopolitan theater group] Falso Movimento. I think creating that narrative or that dramatic map, whether it’s narrative in a linear sense or narrative in a cumulative sense or whatever, creates that need for musical problem solving.  There were questions which I might not have thought of myself, but which would require musical answers. Music theater also provides opportunity to work in longer phrases, of 30 or 90 minutes, rather than pop music which is based on a three or maybe a six-minute model.

NH: Otello to me almost sounds like a pop song that’s been expanded to 45 minutes—

PG: Yeah, very much, but that’s also because it was a cover song, a cover of the Verdi—

NH: But mixed with hip-hop.

PG: (laughter) It’s funny, it had a low budget production and at that time a cheap rhythm box was the Roland 808. I mean I didn’t know that twenty years later the 808 was going to be…

NH: A pioneering machine…

PG: (laughter) Whatever. But I think I’ve always had that curiosity to know what’s happening in pop music because that’s where I guess I hear new sounds and patterns.

NH: The wall that I’ve always hit as a composer is that pop music surrounds us whether we like it or not.  We are engulfed in this world of pop music, so to attempt existence in a small bubble of sonic research is to deny the world outside. I feel like it’s the composer’s job to kind of interpolate the human experience, the contemporary, the relevant.  To just remain within the bubble is to risk missing out on what the world is all about.

PG: But in a sense, that’s where you roll the dice and see where your music is with the culture at the time. There’s a lot more interest in my music now than there was ten years ago and part of it is how the Zeitgeist works.

Gordon in 2010, photo by Kit Fitzgerald

NH: It’s interesting, I’ve been a big supporter of the DFA since they started and it’s almost like their label was created just to put out your music ten years into the project. Perhaps it’s in their press release or I saw it somewhere else but someone’s taking great pride in saying that this is some of the artiest dance music ever put on wax.

PG: It’s funny how that is because it’s contextualizing the music in a certain way…or re-contextualizing the music.

NH: Do you think it’s accurate?

PG: I mean I think it’s very real.  I was unfamiliar with James Murphy and LCD [Soundsystem] when I got an email that he was putting a compilation together for the Fabric label in London, but I got curious and actually really enjoyed what I heard and in the process sort of sought out and met James at one of his DJ sets. In one sense for me it reinvigorated my interest in dance music and disco music because it was kind of weird in the early 80s when the whole “Disco Sucks” thing happened, the backlash.  I’m not the only one to think that it was racist and homophobic but that’s really what that was it was about because it suddenly became marketed by British hair bands and became New Wave dance music, which was a way of rebranding the beat. But around the time that happened I became more interested in the long form theatrical, dramatic pieces and concert pieces and I started moving away from dance music. So then hearing James, what James was doing both as a DJ and then hearing what else LCD was doing really helped reignite my own interest in this side of my music. In one sense it was like replacing a missing ingredient that I had taken out of the music for a while and then putting it back in—I find things coalescing in a certain way, going through the process of sorting through scores and recordings, listening to the pieces in a fresh manner, removed from all the different signifiers of the time. Also we were the Love of Life Orchestra. Everyone else was doing songs about death—

NH: I was going to say this was the height of angular No Wave.

PG: Right, so we were very contrary to that—

NH: Contrary to the contrarians…

PG: Yeah, contrary to contrarians. And we were criticized as being too sweet and too jolly in a certain sense and too musical, because at that time it was very much a know-nothing sense of musicality.  I mean, there was some very interesting stuff.

NH: Oh really interesting stuff, but it’s avoiding the tonal choices as opposed to indulging in them.

PG: I’ve always been interested in harmony and in counterpoint. I see my music being predominantly contrapuntal music, invertible counterpoint and different types of displacement and relations of symmetry and repetitions.  I never think about, oh there’s this style or that style.  I think, how do these intervals work?  How do these rhythms work?  What are these patterns?  That’s the sort of stuff that I think about when I’m actually writing the music.

Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra is available now from DFA Records.

Last week Brooklyn’s remarkable Sharon Van Etten released her new album Epic. A few months ago BOMB Sessions was lucky enough to catch her playing  “Heart in the Ground,” check out the video above. She’s touring, too. Dates here.

In other news, for all you iPhone and iPad users Stephen Elliott has created an app for his novel Adderall Diaries and last week Michael Cunningham wrote a worthy Op-Ed piece in the Times on the many meanings of “translation,” and the National Book Foundation just named Tiphanie Yanique one of the prestigious 5 under 35 (she was elected by Jayne Anne Phillips).

This week’s calender is all about readings; on Wednesday listen to Jennifer Egan’s story “Safari” at Symphony Space, Thursday check out BOMB contributor Dennis Cooper perform at the New Museum or watch longtime literary scene extraordinaires John Giorno and Taylor Mead read at Dia:Chelsea . For the more visually inclined, Thursday night Lynne Tillman will be talking about the relationship between words and images in her work over at SVA and Keith Mayerson is showing new paintings at Derek Eller Gallery. Also notable: Roman Signer at the Swiss Institute, and John Kessler at Fisher Landau Center for Art in Queens (opens 10/17).

A short Q & A follows the (hilarious) reading. Shteyngart’s novels include The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2003),and Absurdistan (2006),. His other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Granta, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times.

]]> http://bombsite.powweb.com/?feed=rss2&p=14491 1 http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=14466 http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=14466#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:16:52 +0000 Luke Degnan http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=14466 In episode #014 of Phoned-In, Heather Christle reads from her book The Difficult Farm and from her chapbook The Seaside! Click through for the reading and a Q&A with Luke Degnan where they discuss the forest, a generation's obsession with animals, and authenticity.]]>

In episode #014 of Phoned-In, Heather Christle reads from her book The Difficult Farm and from her chapbook The Seaside!. ALSO a Q&A with Luke Degnan, she discusses the forest, a generation’s obsession with animals, and authenticity.

Listen to Heather Christle read below:

Luke Degnan: What’s your relationship to the idea of a farm?

Heather Christle: I never lived on a real one. People have been asking me that so it’s good that you say the idea of a farm. When I was little, one of my favorite toys to play with was this bag of little miniature farm houses and animals. Some were plastic. Some were wood. They were all out of proportion to each other. They were great. I loved arranging them and playing with them. It’s definitely related to the imagination for me. I have fantasies, like a lot of people around my age do, of moving into the country or even living in the city and having some chickens and things, but it’s not something I’ve been able to manage. So even the more real versions of a farm are kind of a fantasy for me. I love the idea of a farm. I really do. Especially since they’re so full of animals, and animals really get my imagination going.

LD: I asked this same question to Zachary Schomburg, but I thought I’d ask you as well. Why is our generation obsessed with animals and critters?

HC: It’s a good question right? It’s not just in poetry. It’s in music, it’s in art, it’s everywhere. Someone, when I was on tour, had just seen Zach read and had no idea that we had anything to do with each other. He started talking to me about Zach and about animals and our generation. I think he had a theory that we have a desire to get back into narrative and a kind of imaginary coherence to the world. That there was a naivete to what we’re doing. Which I think is perhaps the case to some extent. Perhaps it’s a form of resistance to the machines that we see all the time. If our field of vision is populated with so many machines, perhaps it helps to populate our minds with more animals just to balance things out a little bit. There’s a general interest in the woods too and woodland animals.

I think that a lot of that energy can be traced back to fairy tales and that kind of thing. They feel like really basic images and ideas to work with, which is helpful because then you can make the poem be about the arrangement of images and the logic of how they’re arranged. We don’t get too distracted by the animal or by the trees because they’re so basic. I’m not really thinking of real trees or real animals. They’re these kind of basic forms that are just there to be manipulated or to manipulate me. That happens too.

LD: It seems like our generation is obsessed with critters and the forest in a way that’s not so obvious to the people doing it.

HC: That happens all the time, not just with animals. You think that you have a great idea that’s really authentic to yourself and then you find out that Vice has already written an article about it or something. It’s a tricky thing too because I’ve become more and more aware of those tendencies in my own work to the point where I’m trying to back away from them a little bit and do some other things. It can become awfully predictable too. You participate in these patterns sometimes without realizing it. It’s good, probably, to become aware if it becomes a tic or something. There’s one poem in The Difficult Farm that I read called “Acorn Duly Crushed”, and I totally didn’t realize when I wrote it that there are all these Dear ___ poems out there. It had been brought up to me by someone who suggested that I maybe change that. I felt like I couldn’t change that poem. I couldn’t take away all of those dears. They seemed pretty significant to how it was all working. I hope that it broke the pattern enough as it wasn’t a particularly loving address to the forest. It is at some points friendly, but it’s also kind of insulting. The danger of writing the Dear ___ poem is that it gets awfully twee. I think that what’s interesting about the patterns that you see happening is that they’re very often authentic to a great number of people. If there’s enough of something in the air, people start responding to it independently of one another. Authenticity is a tricky goal. I’m always riddled with doubt about my own authenticity and find myself wondering if it’s something that can be consciously pursued. It’s the kind of thing that you can only reach, if it’s reachable at all, by not trying to get there.

LD: Perhaps also by not worrying about what other people have done?

HC: There’s a quote that I’ve talked about before, that is really pretty significant to me, by the painter Phillip Guston who talks about how when he first goes into his studio to paint, there are all of these noisy voices in there with him of his contemporaries, of the critics, and if he’s lucky, one by one as he’s painting, they’ll all disappear, and if he’s really lucky then he disappears too. That’s just so perfect. That’s really the best feeling that I have when I’m making something. I’m just not there. I go away. In those moments I guess I am capable of feeling authentic in those moments when I’m not there. Those feelings can only really last while you’re making the thing and then they kind of disintegrate.

Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books), and a chapbook, The Seaside! (Minutes Books). Some new poems have recently appeared in The Believer, Fence, and Skein. Born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she now lives in Atlanta, and teaches poetry at Emory University. She is also the web editor for jubilat. More information is at heatherchristle.blogspot.com.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

Kelly Reichardt teams up with writer Jon Raymond once again and plunges us into the dark side of the American dream, except the stakes in this story are considerably higher: it’s set on the Oregon Trail in 1845.

Shirley Henderson ("Glory White"), left, Zoe Kazan ("Millie Gately"), center, and Michelle Williams ("Emily Tetherow") in a scene from MEEK'S CUTOFF.

“Exaggeration is the neighbor to a lie,” Glory White (Shirley Henderson) tells her son, who has just found a gold nugget and insisted that there are “buckets more” where it came from. Exaggeration, or, rather false hope—be it Steven Meek (Bruce Greenwood)’s highly improbable tales of battles with bears and Indians or Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams)’s assertion that water is just over the next hill—is all that’s keeping these families alive in their utterly hopeless situation.

Kelly Reichardt teams up with writer Jon Raymond once again and plunges us into  the dark side of the American dream, except the stakes in this story are considerably higher: it’s set on the Oregon Trail in 1845. Three families follow their rugged, tall-tale telling guide, the ironically named Meek, through the Oregon desert. It’s soon established, though, that Meek’s credibility isn’t what the families originally thought, and as water rations run low, their situation becomes especially desperate. Meek’s Cutoff plods along at a painfully grueling pace, punctuated by the creaking of wagon wheels. Our only relief from the characters’ anguish is the scorched scenery of the Oregon desert, as depicted through Reichardt’s painterly lens. (I left the theater feeling as thirsty and dirty as the characters, perhaps a testament to the film’s success).

The particular discomfort of being a woman on the journey is felt watching the three tired wives (one pregnant), up before dawn, tending breakfast fires. We feel their anxiety as they listen for snippets of the mens’ conversations about where they’re headed. Aesthetically, the billowy dresses in the desert create some of the film’s most gorgeous scenes, such as the 30 seconds or so focused on chasing after handkerchief that’s been caught in the wind, or Millie Gately (Zoe Kazan) forging a river, holding a birdcage with a canary inside high above her head.

Meek and Solomon Tetherow (Will Patton) capture a Cayuse Indian (Rod Rondeaux), who, despite the bloodthirsty Meek’s request that he be killed, is kept prisoner in hopes that he will guide them to water. After days following him, questions begin to arise. Is the Cayuse purposely misleading them out of vengeance? Is he leaving signs, in the form of cliff-side drawings and piles of stones, to communicate with his tribe? These unanswered questions bring about a sense of dread and a fear for both the emigrants and the Cayuse, despite the romance of Reichardt’s desert. Without leaning too far into the realm of morality tale, Meek’s Cutoff reminds us of our country’s brutal history: America is a strange land steeped in greed, paranoia, and Meek-like folk heroes that embody these traits.

Check out Meek’s Cutoff tonight at the New York Film Festival.

BOMB has two excellent conversations with Kelly Reichardt; one between her and Gus Van Sant and another between her and Todd Haynes.

On a summer night last July BOMBlog contributor Richard Goldstein came across something out of the ordinary in a Chelsea gallery, among Bill Beckley’s photographs was experimental folk musician Sam Amidon. Intrigued, Goldstein picked Amidon’s brain about free-jazz, the history of American folk music, and the skills you can pick up on a beach in Nova Scotia.

Photo by James Walton.

Last July, it wasn’t just art that was on view at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, but a small gathering for a concert by Sam Amidon on the occasion of his latest release I See the Sign.  Hosting a concert, the gallery seemed suddenly more ’80s—not because of Bill Beckley’s photographs—and certainly not because of the banjo and fiddle playing Amidon.  It was a matter of energy and spirit that marked that time-before-Chelsea where art and music crossed paths in and sometimes more often outside gallery walls—the piers, clubs, and beach.

Amidon found his way to Shafrazi via the West Fourth subway station.  He had been playing banjo on the platform hustling some money to catch a film.  A man approached him with two dollars and asked for some banjo lessons.  Amidon went to the man’s house where work by LeWitt, Acconci, and Judd dotted the walls.  The two were in for more than they expected and pleasantly surprised by each others’  talents.  For Amidon, it turned out the man was Bill Beckley, a photographer who had been making story-art in the 1970s and now large quasi-abstract photos; and for Beckley, it turned out the subway player was an accomplished musician and story teller in his own right.  In time, Beckley introduced Amidon to Tony Shafrazi as he had done with Keith Haring.

At the gallery that night, Beckley’s photographs set the stage for the musician.  Reflected on a frame’s glass, Amidon’s silhouette played against the blood and lollipop reds of a large Beckley photograph.  Softly, Sam Amidon started playing his fiddle then began sawing at it with his bow.  It let out a torqued call like his voice and those shape noted ones from 1700s New England and the Northern Revivalists that influence him.  He spun the song back to melody and proceeded to take the audience on a rustic journey well beyond Chelsea.

Listen to a live recording from the show here:

Richard Goldstein: You come from a pretty musical family.  What was that like growing up?

Sam Amidon: The great thing about it was just being in the world of music. Many of my adult friends and my parents’ friends were musicians, so that was the most important thing for me. It’s not so much that I performed, though I did perform as a young child, the most important element was being in an environment of tunes. I played fiddle mostly growing up, but I don’t have any claim to authenticity for folk songs—I didn’t grow up singing and playing the banjo, but I discovered a lot of these old folk songs the way a lot of more indie people did. When the Harry Smith anthology was reissued and the Dock Boggs CDs started showing up at a CD store downtown I had a frame of reference.  My parents played that style of banjo, so I could learn that from them.

RG: Is that the point that triggered a looking back to folk music?

SA: No, it took a little longer. At this point, I was still in high school and was thinking more that what I really wanted to do was go to New York and play free jazz. I came to New York to get away from folk music because I felt that I’d done what I could with it…that sounds horrible, I felt like I wanted something different.

RG: You mention Sonny Rollins as a major influence. Were you playing sax or something?

SA: No, violin. I do talk about Sonny Rollins a lot because I’m a total jazz nerd, and I listen to jazz all the time. I especially love a set of his recordings called Live in London 1965. He was quite scared of the recording machine and these recordings were made when he didn’t know he was being recorded.

RG: So he wouldn’t be good in this situation.

SA: Exactly.  I think he was fine in interview, but playing not so much. So these recordings were bootlegged under a table or something and his playing is so beautiful on them. But no, I always played the violin which is why I never really made it as a jazz musician—jazz violin is a pretty terrible instrument.

RG: What brought you back to folk music?

SA: I don’t really think of this project as folk music in the sense of folk songs.  That’s the source material and just a coincidence, it’s what I have to offer. The people I’m working with are not folk musicians, Nico [Muhly], Shahzad [Ismaily], and my reworkings of the songs are just what I do to them.  Whereas if I’m going to play folk music, I’ll get together with my friend Eamon O’Leary or Rhys Jones and play traditional irish fiddle tunes for three hours. That’s what I think of as folk music—going to play tunes in a traditional setting.  But at the same time, they are, of course, folk songs—but the way I came back to them was because I really wanted to try and learn to play the guitar—I was a fiddle and banjo player.  So as a way of learning to play I just learned some of those songs.  And as an approach to learning to write songs, I would come up with little guitar riffs that were different to change the songs around. I just got stuck at that phase…never made it to the songwriting part—I’m a failed songwriter basically.

RG: But that’s an interesting point, what you define as an authentic writer.

SA: Absolutely.  Those are super vague categories, and if you think about it, it depends on what you are considering as writing.  Though I’m not writing the words in my case, there’s a lot of music that I am. Often, I’ll come up with the music before knowing what song it’s going to be.

RG: Do you think that “reinterpret” is a better word than “cover?”

SA: Yes, and that’s a great point.  The reason it’s a better word—reworking, reinterpreting, whatever you want to call it—is because a “cover” is somebody doing somebody else’s song; whereas, a folk song doesn’t belong to anybody. There is no original; there is no one copy. You’re kind of copying 10 versions but those were all copies of 15 other versions. But most of all, it’s a malleable object to begin with.

RG: Looking back seems like a really fashionable thing to do now. Take the New Antiquarian look.  Is there a certain moment that brought about that enthusiasm?

SA: I think it’s true that that’s happening right now, but I also believe that each moment in music and in US history has a corresponding interest in folk music. People are interested in different aspects of it depending on what their interests are.  In the ‘60s you had a huge folk revival—people were into the community and the idea of it as a worker’s thing. So it was political, this sort of Woody-Guthrie-Pete-Seeger-thing. Then in the late ‘60s it was more of a communitarian thing; and then in the ‘70s…actually, I think there was a kind of Punk-old-time-string band movement that happened around the same time as the punk movement among people in hard core bands—

RG: like Captain Beefheart or—

SA: …yeah, Camper Van Beethoven, maybe and a group called The Horse Flies, who were like a half New Wave band half old-time-string-band, and The Chicken Chokers. It was kind of an obscure scene, but it was like they were obsessed with authenticity and rawness and that kind of intensity. And then Kurt Cobain sang the Lead Belly song and with it, the whole indie side of things and the New Weird America/Freak Folk thing. I’m not really in any of those scenes, but I do like to see the ways people are interested in something different about it.  So sometimes it’s the words, sometimes it’s the melody, sometimes it’s the wackiness or weirdness of these recordings. But I just love the mystery of the songs, the mystery of where they came from.

RG: How are you transforming the song? Are you transforming it to your initial feeling when you hear it?

SA: There’s no real rule to any of it.  I mean, often I’ll just love the song so I’ll sing it. It will take on a shape or other times as I said, I’ll just come up with a piece of music and a song will fit over it or maybe the ways it doesn’t fit are nice and I leave those alone. The main thing is that mystery quality of what is in there, what is confusing, strange, or comforting.

RG: You mentioned the shape a song may take, what was the shape note singing?

SA: The only reason it was called shape note is because it was a way of helping to teach people music by putting the notes into shapes on the score, like the root of the chord is a square and the triangle…But it was used specifically for a kind of choral singing, Sacred Harp music. That’s a tradition of choral singing that started in New England 200 years ago which was pushed West and South and continues in Alabama and Georgia. And now there has been a revival of it since the ‘70s across the country. 200 years ago, the dominating culture, the Puritain culture, was religious.  Many of the younger people in that society were bored with the church music because it wasn’t harmonically interesting. But they knew they couldn’t go singing drinking songs or murder ballads because they would be ostracized. So they took the melodies to murder ballads and drinking songs, put religious words in instead, and harmonized it all.  That was exciting to them and what’s cool about it is that they were totally untrained musicians. So, the harmonies are really weird and very powerful and strange, and modern and bizarre.  It continues as a more religious tradition down South as a Baptist thing but still never in church—it’s a Saturday barbeque kind of thing. In the ‘70s all these hippies got into it ‘cause they saw that it was an early form of intense rebellious weird music. I just love those songs; I grew up singing a lot of them.

RG: And you site Sonny Rollins as an influence and the charge his music has on the body. What does the singing do to your body? You get to some strange pitches and chords.

SA: For me playing fiddle is way more physical. Playing fiddle tunes is like doing tai chi. You know if you go to a Sacred Harp singing you sing loud and it does feel good. It feels really good to sing quietly, I suppose,  especially with a microphone which makes it really loud anyway.  (laughs)

RG: What do you think the orchestra brings to the work, the story-scape?

SA: Well the orchestrations and arrangements have been done by Nico Muhly. Often I feel that Nico has ideas about what the story really is about. Those might be really different from what my take is like. So it just adds this other dimension that I love. The same has been true working with Shahzad Ismaily, who plays pretty much all the nonorchestral instruments on I See the Sign. Though it’s a little bit different because he’s not thinking in the way Nico is necessarily in terms of narrative, but he is getting into the sound with me in a different way.  Collaboration takes it into a different zone which is another element of alien mystery.

RG: It seems like everything is touched by video now. What does video bring to the whole process for you?

SA: I love making videos and I would like to make more. The main connection for me to the videos is the idea of field recordings which captured so much of the personal quality of folk music.  It isn’t always performance music. Very often some of the “original versions” of the songs are just sung by a woman while her kids are asleep in the other room. Another element of those folk music recordings that inspires me is that often the musicologists, the people recording the fiddle players or singers, were getting to them way after the music had kind of died out. By definition those musicians were eccentric. I mean these are people who were living in a culture that had been very rich but basically doesn’t exist anymore. So the field recordings have this great element of bizarre insight. You’re kind of inside somebody’s whole personal space that way. The videos for me are like self-inflicted field recordings of myself.

RG: What you just said has me thinking of the early life of the songs you sing and their intention or lack of it, how you said they were never owned.  So, it’s like by making field recordings of yourself, you’re tapping into a zone of no intention, which must be really refreshing, maybe it’s similar to that jazz impulse to be free?

SA: That’s absolutely correct.  I’ve had a real block about “creating” things new, like composing or writing a song from scratch.  Somehow, I have to trick myself towards it by starting from something else or going into a zone of just playing.  And somehow the following things all have that sense of flow: playing an old traditional fiddle tune, playing free jazz; pressing record on a video recorder while I’m rowing a boat, and then talking; mumbling things with my eyes closed on a stage at an audience.

RG: What was it like producing?  You produced your mom’s album.

SA: That’s true!

RG: Did you produce anything else?

SA: Nope, just my mom’s record. I mean I’ve been involved in the making of a ton of albums through a folk band I had in high school with my friend Thomas and my brother Stefan. So it wasn’t like I was doing something that was that strange to me but it was really wonderful to get her to come out of her comfort zone from what she’d done before and she wanted to. She kept on telling me how happy she was to not have to consult with my dad about material, and I told her to keep me out of the marital disputes. But she did a great job and it’s a beautiful album.

RG: And are you…writing a novel?  I saw that on your Twitter page.

SA: I may have claimed that! (laughs) Yeah, I have all kinds of mischievious things going on but we’ll see where those things go.  That would be really fun, though I’m reading some novels.

RG: You’ve got Ulysses right here.

SA: Yeah, I picked this up at my grandparent’s house. Good summer read.

RG: And who would you like to collaborate with that you haven’t already?

SA: Um, there’s a couple of people. That might happen, but I might as well keep them a secret because it’s more fun that way. Maybe if Sonny Rollins needs help. Instead of just collaborating, I could help Sonny Rollins—musically help him.  But, maybe he doesn’t need help. One of the things that inspires me about him is that, I think, he made a decision 40 years ago to put his personal well-being and happiness above the actual quality of music.  He sacrificed his art for his life, which I find to be extremely inspiring.  So that could be a goal.

RG: What do you mean?

SA: He just started to suck, but you got the sense that he was sucking because it takes a lot of energy and potentially stress to play with only good musicians, even if they are more difficult people, or to fire somebody ‘cause they are not that good because they are a friend of yours. So he just put all those things aside and he said I’m just going to have an easy-going beautiful life and do a lot of yoga and if my music is terrible that’s okay.  So it’s going to be the new thing to get into.

RG: What about your liturgical dancing? How did that come about?

SA: Well, I do love to dance, and I learned how to do that on the beach in Nova Scotia six years ago.  One day, when I was living on a little island, I started doing liturgical dance because it was morning time.  You have to do a morning dance and an evening dance.  The Prodigal Son, for example, is a story that’s been told for many centuries.  It seemed like you could describe it in a different way, there’s the words way, and the song way, and the dance way.  There’s a lot of different ways to tell stories.

Zachary Block and Olivier Assayas discuss Assayas’s new film, Carlos. The film tells the story of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, otherwise known as “Carlos the Jackal,” a man whose violent history was twisted and erased by the political climate of his time. With his confident and exciting combination of evidence, myth and fantasy, Assayas has created a successful, if sometimes difficult, film.

Edgar Ramirez as Carlos The Jackal in CARLOS (2010), directed by Olivier Assayas. A Sundance Channel Presentation/IFC Release. © Film in Stock

Carlos, the most recent project of César nominated filmmaker and former writer for the Cahiers du cinema Olivier Assayas, is a massive 5½-hour miniseries coursing the bloody career of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as “Carlos the Jackal”. Charged with the task of telling a comprehensive story of a historical figure for whom there really are no comprehensively documented—or verified—histories, Assayas confidently and assiduously weaves the thin warp of evidence through the much thicker weft of rumor, fantasy and guesswork to create a vexing, difficult film that is almost a complete success. Instead of subjecting his viewers to contrite moralization, he scores scenes of violent terrorism to a super-cool post-punk soundtrack, and tells Carlos’ story from what Assayas terms “his point of view,” a story that caters to the hubris of its real life protagonist as much as it indelibly captures it.

I had the opportunity to interview Olivier Assayas in a busy lounge in Alice Tully Hall, just upstairs from the clamorous tumult of the New York Film Festival’s ninth day of screening.

Zachary Block: When did you first become interested in the project, what was its germination?

Olivier Assays: Well, that’s a long story. It starts two and a half years ago when this French TV producer, Daniel Leconte, comes to me with two pages about how Carlos was traitored by the Sudanese to the French against satellite images of the positions of the guerillas in the south of Sudan — because they had this really brutal war going on at that time. Ultimately, the information proved wrong and it’s very unlikely that he was traitored against those images, though we did not know it at the time. Still, I was not exactly interested because this was completely seen from the point of view of French bureaucrats and it was very much a small scale French DV movie with some elements of dialogue with Sudanese officials. But the project came with research that had been done by an American-French journalist, Steven Smith, who had gathered most of the available information on Carlos and I started looking into it and I thought it was amazing, so I came back to Leconte and said I’m not exactly interested in the project as you present it, but if you are into trying to figure out a way of telling the story of Carlos from his point of view then that’s something that I think is exciting. I didn’t understand why it hadn’t been done before, so that was the starting point and it ended up evolving from there.

ZB: Your film devotes approximately three minutes of screen time to the origins of Carlos’ political ideology: a decision which could be described as judicious, economical or timorously prevaricatory. Why did you choose to gloss over most of his history before 1975, before moving to Europe?

OA: You know, this is the central trilogy, I’m working on the prequel trilogy. (laughter) No, it would have been a film on its own and this would have been getting into some kind of biopic territory. And this is not a biopic: it’s focusing on a very specific moment of the activity of Carlos, from the moment he is hired by Wadie Haddad for the FPLP, to the moment he is arrested, and it’s built in fairly simple, big chapters, each focusing on one specific moment. I don’t think I would have actually been able to devise the dynamics of a narration of Carlos’ early years.

ZB: In the film, Carlos tells Lebanese journalist and poet Assam El Jundi that Communism is in his blood: Ilich became active in Venezuela’s communist youth movement at the age of ten, under the influence of his father, a Leninist lawyer, who named his sons Ilich, Vladimir and Lenin, and sent the future Carlos to Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow — an association which would eventually lead to widespread speculation that he was a lifelong Soviet agent, something touched upon briefly in the film, which I think you did in a really interesting way: it’s never directly implied that he was a double agent.

OA: Exactly.

ZB: And you depict the speculations in the film without actively speculating.

OA: You know, it was the only way to do it because, to this day, I just don’t have the correct answer. It’s discussed by the Hungarians the way they more or less discussed it and it’s as far as one can go. When the KGB files were opened, briefly at one specific moment in the early 1990s, we learned that he was expelled for misconduct from the university. But it’s pretty obvious that it’s the best possible cover. I never really  bought that the real KGB were out for the western states to analyze, I’ve never really bought that Carlos’ file was Carlos’ true file or that he could move in the Eastern Bloc as freely as he did, without having some kind of KGB connection. And also, Wadie Haddad is notoriously a KGB agent, but you can’t establish it, you can’t prove it, and there’s not even any solid evidence for it, so you know, it’s up to speculation.

ZB: Have you heard the story that after the El Jundi interview, Carlos went to his house, held a gun to his head and threatened him?

OA: Where did you read that?

ZB: In the John Follain biography.

OA: That’s interesting, I hadn’t heard that.

ZB: Though a massive, five-and-a-half hour miniseries can potentially relay more information than a mere two-hour feature, the expanse of its canvas is relative to that of the collected body of work on Carlos. As you seem to concede in the film’s opening placard, it has shed little light on the true nature of Carlos’ undocumented dealings in Northern Africa and the Middle East, rendering the film, to some extent, self-consciously conjectural. You talked a little bit about Steven Smith as a primary resource, but I’m wondering if there were any sources for mythology.

OA: No, there’s a disclaimer at the beginning of the film because there has to be. Obviously there’s a legal side to it, it was more or less written by lawyers. I was extremely clear that I wanted a disclaimer at the beginning of the film from the start,  because it was as close as we tried to get to the reality of fact and we can get pretty close at specific moments. There are witnesses and there have been very precise accounts but still there are blind spots and there was stuff that you could not research because you will never have access to the files of the Syrian secret service, so you have to assume what could have happened, you have to sum up in a couple of scenes the relationships between the Syrians and Carlos. But it’s not factual; it’s not as factual as, for instance, the dialogues with the Hungarian Secret Service or the dialogues of Johannes Weinrich with the Stasi because those were recorded. You know, we have transcripts. I did not want to mislead the audience because it’s a mixed bag: some stuff is very precise and researched, and some stuff is made up because I had to fill in the holes so I wanted to be very clear about it. We are in a very weird position with this film because ultimately a lot of is more accurate, more precise, more thoroughly researched than most of the Carlos biographies available on the market. So that’s a factor in the film, but I did not want the audience to be misled by that element into all of a sudden thinking that everything has this kind of scientific precision. This is a long film, it has to be entertaining for the audience, it needs to have the kind of pace that kind of keeps the audience awake and of course there are specific moments when I have to condense the narrative because you cannot go into all the details of the dealings of Carlos in the 1980s, trying to coordinate 20 different operations in 20 different countries.

Carlos plays on the Sundance Channel October 11th–13th and will open at the IFC Center on October 15th.

It’s that time of the year again! From The Social Network to Film Socialisme, David Phelps profiles some of the New York Film Festival’s main slate features. Godard still prevails.

FILM SOCIALISME (2010), Directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

“If I put so many cautionary quotation marks around these proper names, beginning with ‘Europe,’ it is because I am not sure about anything.” — Derrida, Philosophy in a Time  of Terror (2003)

“…the valorization of value…” — Marx, Das Kapital (1867)

“Private behavior is the relic of another age” — The Social Network (2010)

As psychology is the cheap tool of Hollywood plot and the bourgeois axis of identification, and capitalism’s made us itinerant mercenaries to our bank accounts or cattle homeowners branded by decor, the only ideology is that ideology is dead: men are bodies in a landscape or photos on a Facebook wall, but in any case commodity forms taken by money, that content without content, that soul without a soul. This neat outlook makes it somewhat easier to make movies—no plot and, as Godard recently explained, no characters—and so the main target and fodder both of Godard’s Film Socialisme, a documentary on-board a cruise and at a garage with national and noir stock icons passing through the frame and muttering melodramatic responses to unheard refrains (“why won’t you say you love me?”), is seemingly the unthinking image, proliferated by digital cameras, cell phones, and the local news as a commodified substitute for local consciousness: and yet the images bear witness anyway to become, as Godard said of Manet, “images that think.”

FILM SOCIALISME (2010), Directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

“What’s your point?” critics are already asking Godard, as if to keep score of his biases (Hollywood because of the Jews? The Jews because of Hollywood? Le FLP?), and shun the possibility that Godard, forever dealing in paradox and Eisensteinian dialectics, has framed his new movie like so many others as a series of interrogations because it is itself a long thought process through twining, diverse thoughts, la battaglia delli diversi pensieri. The vortex of rich Jews starting Hollywood has nothing to do with Anti-Semitism and anything to do with the historical background of the rich Jews who started a cultural mecca: a connection to Louis Dolivet’s funneling political money to Welles and Tati, culture built on blood; Hollywood as the original Jewish state searching for independence and self-realization as Palestine does now; Hollywood as the conceptual nexus of 20th century trade of merchandise—now of girls, guns, and concepts, in whose exchange Godard freely participates as well in Film Socialisme. That these ideas are irreconcilable is allowed as research, not theses. Like most of his films, Film Socialisme is a documentary in a fictional landscape and a fiction in documented reality; more than the rest, it exists in vertical montage, a twelve-tone-like piecing of evidence and incipient rhythms whose shards the viewer puts together and completes with his own imagination.

Critics praise Godard for his pop opportunism and anti-psychology, then insist on psychologizing him, while what seems like his real revolution, a return to the Soviets, has been in displacing the ongoing thought process of a character in a story to images in the world—like Henry James, his work a slow unfurling of a consciousness as it struggles to see its way through looming mysteries, here those of Mediterranean trade circulation and the missing Moscow Gold of the Spanish Civil War. Each image is self-evidence of history, metonymy before metaphor, and in a beautiful middle section of Film Socialisme, a small French family involved in local politics and dish-washing seem to look out onto the diegeses of all Europe past and present itself—and then, in a few scenes reinterpreting Jerry Lewis’ The Errand Boy, to reinterpret the continent’s music in their own internal rhythms as they go about their work. Godard doesn’t quite show characters, even as a wily boy, making a typical conflation of culture and action, offers his imaginary conductor’s baton, a walking stick, new imagined use-value as he tells the audience he can break their necks. These are people, actors in search of characters unlike almost anyone else in the festival, who think and act and act.

Without cause, animating idea, the “effect,” post-Scorsese, is still everything when conclusions have been drawn like swords. Silent Souls, structured as a lesson in machismo dread, deploys gimmickry of the camera attached to actors and dolly outs from pubic hair in the tale of two Russians grieving one’s wife in a procedural cock-strut (“she had three holes, and I penetrated all of them”) whose every ritual the widower’s companion chalks up to macho, ethnic tradition. Even here the festival’s latent thesis is knelled of globalization eroding all private rites of contemplation. Tuesday, After Christmas is shot in the house style of the “New Romanian Cinema”—long takes, indifferent pans, and a trial of public formalities and spaces—as if to explore a private melodrama without exploring it: the impending spaces are out-of-focus, and the human figures bob in and out of frame with swimming room above their heads; the dialogue is broken-marriage adultery clichés, and that’s probably the point.

SILENT SOULS (Ovsyanki) (2010), directed by Alesei Fedorchenko

TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (2010), directed by Radu Muntean

My Joy tracks behind lumbering Ukranian peasants, like the camera, stalking prey to brutalize: after two hours of brute revenge cycles, history and the script doomed to repeat themselves in a snowy, lawless vacuum, the message comes that the only solution—to both local terrorism and the movie’s non-plot—is to kill everyone, all scum. Where the Coen Brothers play a comic variation on the idea—the characters, all plot devices, initiate a deadly web that is beyond them, a cosmic irony—My Joy plays the tragic, more-and-less condescending variation that brute instinct is a choice the characters make. Just as Poetry is shot handheld and in-focus to convey its repeated, Objectivist-lite mantra that poetry “is seeing things clearly” (not transforming: it is enough to remember an apple’s red), My Joy comes with a patina of verité from Romania’s top DP: some real locations and a walking camera, a nice suggestion of a physiological art film after Klimov, Tarr, the Dardennes, Gus Van Sant, but one that without the sound design of another world’s still a gimmick that the consciousness of an unthinking killer can be mimicked at the back of his neck, the sounds faded smoothly in and out. If the gimmick’s nobler, it just means it has to be taken that much more seriously.

Certified Copy, with its high-gloss, glassy sales pitch, looks like a car commercial, as if Kiarostami directed the sun, and Of Gods and Men looks like Giotto. Le Quattro Volte, telling the platitudinous story of the seasons and Time mostly through a goat herd immersed in an Italian town’s local traditions, sort of looks like it was shot by God, and accounts in its soundtrack for each footstep of its mile-off peasants: by giving precipitate goats the reign of another overdetermined script, it is probably the most impressive movie of the year outside of YouTube.

MY JOY (Schastye Moe) (2010), Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa.

Yun Junglee in POETRY (2010), directed by Lee Changdong. Photo Courtesy Kino International.

In mid-afternoon press screenings accompanied by coffee and Raisinets, these films, the work of masters as profound as Ansel Adams, are placidly submitted to as theorems of the world guiding the consciousness to a ready end point. Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men, with its attendance to the dutiful patterns of monks’ life in ‘90s Algeria, its geometries and rhythms, turns into a moving refrain of analgesic habit against circumstance, more Mizoguchi than Ozu in its architecture of daily life, and with the usual nostrum that religious faith signifies secular, racial hand-holding—Godard shows the idea in slowed-down footage of acrobats’ leaps. Eventually the monks, symbols of Derrida’s untenable, “unconditional hospitality,” become heroic for doing nothing, evoked crisply in a montage of close-ups at their last supper listening to the secular Swan Lake. Beauvois’ insistence on the material life of men who gave up living private lives is yet another sort of affirmation of quotidian routine whatever the vagaries of the newspaper and political landscape; it could take place in the Middle Ages to no loss in audience tears. Every insistence of tradition, taken from Renaissance iconography, could as well be an extension of Silent Souls. The moral is not to go into politics.

OF GODS AND MEN (2010), Jacques Herlin as Amédée and Michael Lonsdale as Luc © Marie-Julie Maile / Why Not Productions courtesy of Sony Picture Classics

A single Lubitschian shot in Fernando de Fuentes’ El Compadre Mendoza (1934), a sidebar selection, is enough to make all apolitical political scores redundant, including its own: in a nowhere, tumbleweed town hall in Mexico, the hand of a proud bureaucrat reaches into frame to move the room’s only adornment, a poster of a beaming peasant-king with an ox-horn moustache, and the capitalized subtitle, “¡Viva Huerta!” Onto the blank wall the hand hangs the poster of an identical victor. “¡Viva Zapata!” Carlos’ 5.5 hours of a horny Marxist hustling for capital gain in another smooth, globalized world without significant language barriers or ideological development—despite the slow shift in suits and placemats and reconstructed kitchens in the movie’s background through the ages, and a callow speech about the end of Communism shunting Carlos’ relevance as a modern, political unconscious—only has consensus history to illustrate attentively, and thus an agenda to fulfill when it doesn’t mean to have one. For Carlos’ more speculative missions, director Assayas has the characters contemplate scenes never shown. The terrorist makes his way through a chorus line of girl-terrorists; like The Social Network, it builds from Orson Welles’ (hypo)thesis that “man invented civilization to impress his girlfriend,” or destroyed it. Acts of violence, taking after Scorsese, are treated with an apposite jolt of Wire and The Dead Boys. This is just historical movie convention for responsible treatments of irresponsible subjects, as the marquee idols they probably saw themselves as.

Edgar Ramirez as Carlos The Jackal in CARLOS (2010), directed by Olivier Assayas. A Sundance Channel Presentation/IFC Release. © Film in Stock

Amidst these sensible movies with their points and rules and consciences, the schlubby framing of a bad movie like Hong Sang-soo’s Oki’s Movie is deliberate comic relief; even a half-assed attempt at structural regenerations can’t keep the drunk figures in hoodies on-screen from being simply who and where they are. The happy pandering of The Social Network’s moneyed, mahogany Ivy League is  a better bromide; inheriting the cultural lineage of ’40s war/postwar megalomania movies by Welles, Walsh, and Sturges, through Copolla and Paul Thomas Anderson, it proposes the same formula of dreams, the nobody American who clawed his way into the Opera Club and a porch with Greek colonnades. Those movies also offer self-realized El Dorados for the audience’s gawking, along with the Greek message that glory’s not worth the blood and roots can’t be transcended—that poverty’s nice to go home to. The Social Network never questions its promise of frattish elitism, the coke, BJs, lan parties, and cocktail nights all lifted from reality TV, but just milks its characters’ unsuitability for the role; it’s as blind to private life as its hero. Done in dull, rhythmic shot-reverse-shot to Aaron Sorkin’s pet cadences, it’s an amazing thing in The New York Film Festival: a proudly literal-minded spray of entertaining clichés, an ad for classicist and classist elitism in a world globalized, homogenized by Facebooks.

Only Godard sets his movie in this conceptual sphere the modern world is living in; the montage of Film Socialisme, like Vertov’s 80 years ago in Man with a Movie Camera acknowledging that consciousness can exist in a multiplicity of locations, refuses to distinguish between a scene from youtube and a scene from life watching youtube, as it refuses to distinguish between various digital media possibly embodied or not, as his sound refuses to distinguish between characters potentially within a scene and characters outside, and as his script refuses to distinguish between characters: typical Godard, one’s line will be picked up by another later on. This refusal to make ontological distinctions is not just a post-modern sensibility that can’t distinguish between newspapers and comic books as printed signals to whatever outside worlds, but the work of an intelligence that sees culture (fiction) as history’s (fact’s) unconscious, the two in eternal dialogue, soul and body. As noirs sprung the buried traces of post-war trauma in the 40s, Godard stages his mystery of the World War II-era Moscow Gold as the hypothetical tale of a young girl, accompanied by brooding strings, hearing rumors of her old craggy, fedora-and-trenchcoat German-Jewish companion’s involvement. History’s a nightmare, etc., but “there is nothing invented in cinema.” Herr Goldberg, trying to enjoy his retirement on a real Costa cruise, is a screen image, not of Germany or Jews or noirs, but all Europe’s crimes: Godard as always leaves nobody unindicted. But neither is the banker proven guilty. Even the archetype leads his private life as a man (this man) in a time and place (the toilet).

That images are history’s language is intuitive, esp. to a propaganda state; “language turns on those who speak it,” says the movie. Godard’s film is as much about the death of language—in the death-grip of the state and doctrine, standards imposed on the world, an objective currency used only for its idiomatic exchange-value—as it is its birth from the material world as an intuitive means to relate, like the dream of the Deguerre disciple’s photography that would show the Holy Land to the world (Godard, “access denied” from shooting in Palestine, has the story repeated). Animals speak with only sounds; a meowing woman notes that Egyptians called the cat “the meow”; Roman Jakobson is cited for saying in ’42 that sound and meaning cannot be separated; one of Europe’s Greek chorus of voices repeats that when Ulysses returned home, only his dog recognized him. In its roots, the movie is extraordinarily simple, concerned only with breaking boundaries of monistic meanings, distinctions, while respecting the various, dialects and tones, the sounds, of the chorus, each given particular weight in reciting texts, brought into material context: Godard’s idea of racial hand-holding isn’t administering medicine but Husserl. Socialism’s not a homogenized English-speaking world, trading in once currency, but some spectra of universal contact when everyone can speak each other’s languages and swap identities, hunter or critic, like clothes. To distinguish is to make sense of things, identities, and there’s a very sensical reason why Dadaism rose nipping at the ass of Nationalism.

So the movie works not in points but lines of thought, in sounds and shapes, gradations of color and texture and breaks in format from HD to cellcam—the more ironic that critics already leave the movie wondering if Godard can articulate anything when all they can hear is some sort of music. (Independencia’s annotated the movie here). Godard’s perversion of Eisenstein’s Odessa steps sequence is like Ezra Pound’s perversion of the symbols of Chinese poetry, in Hugh Kenner’s term, like Picasso finding “a baboon’s head in the shape of a toy car.” In this late sequence of montages of and relating to the movie’s cardinal points and primal scenes (Barcelona, Palestine, Odessa, Naples, etc.), Godard matches Eisenstein’s track across falling bodies on the stairs with his own, the modern-day stairs empty except for a couple tourists getting their pictures taken. That Odessa is presumably a reference point as the black void of the Moscow Gold, or the site of the massacre of thousands of Jews in ‘41—both years after Potemkin—and not for Eisenstein’s massacre, which almost certainly never happened except in front of his movie camera, doesn’t matter. As Joyce lets words cross-pollinate in forceful rhythms and unlikely, wayward puns for new meanings and spectra, sometimes never expressed—an artificial acceleration of etymology, a synthesis of separate language frames, a slight revolution in sense so that meaning and essence is in sound instead of definition—Godard’s cross-cut Odessa is not only posited hypothetically in dialectics, and not only carries the weight of buried outrage, but freed from context bears witness on a history that came after its filming.

FILM SOCIALISME (2010), Directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

History dissolves into this iconography that never meant to signify these things—it’s the sound, the image that means. In this real location, people were massacred as in a movie made years before; and anyway the past is as much a fiction as fiction. The parodied steps scene regains force even through its inadequacy as a placeholder and becomes what it was all along: not a historical depiction, but a historical expression in line with Godard’s impossible thinking that in the 20th century, history became the images’ language: a hazard, and also a promise that filmmakers could be legislators of the earth. Film Socialisme is built out of the scraps of real life and real texts, whatever that means, edited to parallel the circulation of money and a flattened world, but in its Dadaist and socialist layering of a diegesis that spans the earth and puts it into a dialogue with itself against the official interests of gold, it’s not just a modern elegy but some form of utopia floorplan, 2010. Godard quotes Genet—“stock up all of language’s images and help yourself to them, because they’re in the desert and you must find them”—and follows the advice in the Mediterranean, called “the desert” in the Middle Ages and throughout the movie. A woman declares she won’t die until Europe is united; someone says a line about tearing down the screen between the state and individual. As Vertov’s own, similarly-constructed, equally-socialist Man with a Movie Camera opens with a movie theater being filled by people about to enter another world, my favorite image in Socialisme is a hand, probably from Godard’s Hellas pour moi, working its way out of video static, to press up against a window and the screen.

Jane Benson, THE SPLITS (Violin Duet), 2010, violin.

In her latest project, Jane Benson finds herself moving from sculpture to performance.  But she’s not going at it alone.  She’s bringing along 10 musicians and composer Matthew Schickle on what is her foray into classical music.  She’s been busy applying her carefully considered destructive nature to mass produced, yet ever-elegant, stringed instruments.  Cutting right up their middles, Benson fillets two violins, viola, cello, and double bass—what she calls The Splits—to be shared between musicians.  Each instrument takes two musicians to play, so the traditional quintet becomes a dectet.  Her intent was to bring people together, not only through collaboration, but in making the instruments whole again.  Though performative in nature, the concept had its origins with a sculptural curiosity…to open the interior space of the instruments’ bodies.

Richard Goldstein: There’s a definite kind of romance about your work and it seems to me kind of like a very specific kind of English romance with all the swans, etc. in your work…it reminds me of walking through Hyde Park.  But it’s also kind of a tweaked version of it and hybridized. These references are drawn from your English background?

Jane Benson: I always think of it as a beleagured romanticism, a broken romanticism.  I don’t know whether it actually comes from my background or comes from me having this slightly skewed and darker than natural perspective on the world.  It may even be a humor that’s there in the works; romanticisim wouldn’t fulfill me.  It’s always, if I’m going to take on something like that then I would have to Monty Python-esque it a little which I think is the nature, the topsy-turvy nature of dealing with either the subject matter and or the object and the material itself is definitely…it’s tweaked in a way that reinvents the subject and the object in that it’s recognizable in itself but it has a character and an identity that is unfamiliar and surprising, which is often not funny but has a humorous slightly sort of wry nature…

RG: …in the turn about

JB: Yes.

RG: And in that sense, the kind of tweaking of it or playing, there’s almost a science-fiction, mad side to it, too.

JB: Yeah, there always seems to be this sort of very subtle sci-fi element to the work.  It’s definitely not specific and its not heavy handed and that would apply to everything in my work.  It’s unfortunately subtle sometimes.  I’m not hitting anyone over the head with any gesture or any statement; it weaves through ideas and there’s a quiet thread, semantic, and balance through the work.

RG: It’s interesting though that sometimes in your process you do push it to the extreme, with the plucking of birds, for example, or where you cut so far the thing almost falls apart, like the wallpapers or paisley suits.

JB: The Bitches.

RG: They’re quiet but you really are quite aggressive by what you do to them.

JB: I guess you don’t really identify with your own gestures sometimes, but there is an aggressive/obsessive nature to the work.  Perhaps, that obsessiveness, which is often quiet, once it’s accumulated can be seen as quite aggressive.  In order to reinvent the object to manifest the transition or the transformation of the material, there has to be an element of destruction, I suppose—for me.  That seems to be the way I’ve developed this behavior which is…(laughs) Unfortunately, I’ve developed a destructive side to my personality, and it’s apparent in every single body of my work over the past 10 years.

RG: What have you been doing with The Mews work since we last met?  It seems like there are a lot more busts here.

JB: The initial body of work that I started exploring after The Mews show spun off from the Wig Head, first seen in The Mews, and it is a marbleized resin faceless bust that wears a clay portrait as a toupee.  So the representation of either myself or whoever is being represented is not through the bust it’s through a toupee.   The clay representation of the somebody is worn as a cock-eyed toupee on the marbleized bust.  So, I wanted to explore the idea of the wig head. I have a whole new series of wig head sculptures which fall under the umbrella of the Family Wig Head, which are basically my mother, father, and myself all worn on various marbleized resin busts.  Each toupee, or each portrait, is either the hair of myself and the face of another…so we all wear each other in comic assemblages.  Also, the busts in the original wig head series—they were faceless, but they were complete marbleized busts.  So, they looked like a Styrofoam mannequin.  But in the new works, I’ve pushed the element of cutting and splicing into the pedestal.  They’re definitely far more absurd structures—the quite formalism of the original wig head was left behind in 2009.  They are far more abstract, far more playful now.

RG: Can you tell me a little bit about your new piece The Splits, and how you arrived at the idea?

JB: The Splits is a new body of work that takes my practice into collaboration and performance for the first time.  I’m collaborating with a composer, Matt Schickle, and 10 musicians.  Basically, I’ve taken the instruments of a quintet—so five string instruments: two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double base—and split all of them perfectly down the middle.  So you’re creating two even halves, with two high strings and two low strings on each half, and the idea is that, as each half only has the high strings or low strings, they have to be played together to complete a tune.  So again, the idea of this beleaguered romanticism comes in—you can’t complete a tune unless two players play together each separated half.  Originally when I conceived of the idea, I was thinking that The Splits would play within this absurd salon-type environment and the busts, the new Wig Head series, were going to create the environment for the performance.  And that still might happen, but initially I saw them as being dependent on each other.  But as I’ve worked through both bodies of work, I think they are equally as independent as they are co-dependent on each other.

Jane Benson, THE SPLITS (Dectet), 2010, 2 violins, viola, cello, and double bass.

RG: Did The Splits grow out of a literary reference for you? I know with the work from The Mews you mentioned Against Nature, a kind of sensibility coming from that, is it on the same line?

JB: No, there was no literary reference for The Splits. I wish I could reveal the moment that I knew that The Splits was going to occur.  All I know is that I was applying for a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I came up with The Splits.

RG: How did you meet Matt or get the collaboration started with him?

JB: Through incredibly generous and open musicians that I met.  I started talking to people about The Splits and from the very moment I opened my mouth about them, I’ve been met with nothing but generosity and enthusiasm and I think I first met my violinist and then the first violinist introduced me to the cellist and another violinist and then it was, You should meet this composer.  And it’s really just been this really wonderful spontaneous community that has been created which is actually one of the ideas with The Splits because in the destruction or the halving of the instrument you destroy the original aesthetic identity, but its reinventing the instrument and creating new community.  So, you have new communities not only of what would be one violin player having to become two violinists playing together; and the new community of myself, the artist, working with musicians, and the composer.  It’s been nothing but this continuing dialogue since I started.

RG: So it’s splitting and joining.

JB: Exactly, which was initially the very idea.  It was not to destroy the instrument it was to create something new, a new aesthetic possibility.  I want to just say at this point if there are musicians cringing at the idea of splitting the instrument, I’m working with Chinese mass produced string instruments and the reason I started doing that as I was talking to musicians, it came up at numerous times, but I was talking about the price of instruments and instruments that I’ve seen and they were saying, Oh well, the Chinese instruments, these mass produced instruments, they don’t actually consider to be real instruments.  They wouldn’t play them, these cheap ones that are churned out by the factory.  So, that seemed like the perfect trajectory—these are considered fake instruments and I’ll take something that’s fake and reintroduce it, reinvent it as the split.  There’s this negotiation between the real and the fake in various forms for many years.

RG: And Matt’s writing music specifically for them?

JB: Matt is writing an original composition for The Splits.  The premier will be at Henry Street Settlement, Abroms Art Center at the end of January.  So there are 10 musicians, Matt, and myself working towards The Splits’ first performance.

RG: You’re also altering the scores, right?  You’re cutting into the paper.

JB: Yes, because each half of the instrument only has hi notes or low notes they can only play a very specific range of notes.  So the musician that’s playing the side of the violin with the high notes plays the sheet music with the low notes cut away and vice versa.  I’m also working on a series of decollage pieces that involves the sheet music and the cutting out of specific notes for each musician.

Jane Benson, SPLIT SCORE, 2010, sheet music.

RG: How do the instruments sound once you open them up?

JB: They sound very different, particularly the violin.  It seems to be that the larger the instrument, the double base and the cello, they resemble the sound of the original instrument to a certain extent. When the musicians have picked the instruments up, the element of shock at playing the double base and the cello is far less than when the violinist picks up the split violin and negotiates the sound for the first time.  The violin was actually really beautifully described by Matt as the sound, he imagines, a sitar makes through the radio, a bad radio.  The sound is much higher and the notes are much shorter with the body of the violin and the body of the instrument being cut into two—the resonance is greatly affected. You have this very short note and a note that’s much higher than the original sound.

RG: There’s a sense of completion and incompletion in your work.  How do you go about finding a sense of completion with the different pieces?

JB: It’s an interesting question, and I think I’ve been negotiating that problem quite a bit lately. The Wig Head series is actually the most formal sculpture I’ve made in a long time.  With The Splits there’s, of course, the idea and the action and I’m done.  Whereas with the Wig Heads the completion of the piece, after the original idea of the portrait to be worn as a toupee, is a negation between destruction and repositioning.  Work is initiated with the destruction of the pedestal and continues with it’s reconstruction and reinvention with the addition of the Wig Heads. Their placement is directly related to the cuts and slices in the pedestal, so the restructuring of the pedestal in the construction of the final piece requires seemingly endless formal games between cuts, slices, wigs, and busts until a formal stand off is achieved.  I think of it as a stand off rather than a balance because a formal practice is something atypical of my practice.  I don’t know whether this has something to do with this very apparent notion of completion and incompletion, but there are some I just can’t complete…perhaps I’m more comfortable with something being destabilized rather than complete.

RG: You mention some of these pieces being really formal and one of the things that sets that up is the use of the plinth. Do you think some sculpture is afraid to present itself formally…That it prefers to be more casual and laid back out of this fear of being on the plinth now and more formal?

JB: I’m not sure.  I think there’s an awful lot of formal sculpture in contemporary work.  I think maybe there’s a renegotiation of what formal might be, but it is very much about the relationships between elements of the work no matter how casual or formal.  Even a casual gesture is as formal as something that might immediately seem more apparent to be serious formalism in a work.  But it’s hard to talk generally.

Even the split instruments—currently we’re looking at them all lined up on the wall of the studio—look like incredibly formal works.  They’re beautiful.  I don’t mean my work is beautiful (laughs); I mean splitting, the very act of splitting an instrument in half and seeing the interior of the instrument, seeing something we’re never permitted to see, paired with their gorgeousness creates this absolutely flawless object.  I did have to do a little re-engineering with each half of each instrument: the bridge of each instrument originally only has two feet, but when split only has one foot, so I had to add a foot to each half bridge.  So there’s re-engineering in the bridge and re-engineering in the tail piece, in that there’s one tail gut to each tail piece, once split, I have to secure each half of the tail piece to the tail gut.

RG: So you’re just getting the recital down now?

JB: At the moment, we’re basically involved in practice sessions and actually as we speak one of the violins is with Matt.  He’s working with one of the violinists recording a short violin duet.  So, it’s practice sessions. There’s a steep learning curve working with The Splits.  So far, there have been nothing but some pretty fantastic surprises.

RG: Are you playing any of them?

JB: I’m not.  (laughs) I don’t have a musical bone in my body, which is the wonderful side of this.  There are very specific roles.  I am the sculptor and I hand the object over to the composer and the musicians, which is sort of fantastic because for one they are not precious objects any more. They are things I could mail to somebody if they need to work with them overseas or something.  But I hand these objects to the musicians and they become theirs.  They are like functioning instruments.  And also it is incredibly liberating because there is that element of completion and incompletion that you were talking about.  I hand off something that’s entirely incomplete. I have cut it and it’s useless and goes nowhere unless somebody else takes it and completes the work.  Perhaps I’m tired of incompletion. (laughs)  I need somebody else to finish my work, so I’ve decided to collaborate!

from Wilderness. Video by Chani Bockwinkel.

Earlier this summer, I had the privilege of attending an advanced showing of Wilderness, the new piece by Brooklyn-based choreographer Yanira Castro, showing at the Invisible Dog later this month. It was an unadorned, spare performance—the set, costumes, and audio component were unfinished and absent—but the movement alone was enough to keep me thinking for a long while afterward. I knew almost nothing coming to the piece, and that’s probably the ideal state in which to experience it; Wilderness is, among many other things, about the expectations ingrained in the minds of audiences preparing to watch dance, and about that which might emerge out of a less compartmentalized dialogue with the unknown, with the immediacy and potential of the performative moment. Watching, or rather participating, in Wilderness, one can just as easily lose themselves in the piece’s inherent suspense and intimacy as they can reflect on its dense and layered exploration of representation, death, and the unknowable. Yanira, who speaks modestly and smiles often, talked with me about the complexity built into the piece’s largely improvisational structure, the other works out of which it partially emerged, and the false constraints too often placed on and around modern dance performance.

Andrew Frank: I’m interested in the articulation of boundaries within this piece—could you talk about intimacy and space in performance, and why your works tend to avoid a conventional separation between audience and performer?

Yanira Castro: Your question has a lot of history for me. I’ve long been asking these questions of the theater: Why are we in this space together? Why are we experiencing this moment in time in this particular way? I think it’s a magical situation when a group of people decide to stand back and allow themselves to experience something that other people are putting on for them, and though, in a sense, it’s the ‘oldest thing in the book,’ the theatrical constructs that we have created, particularly in Western culture, are highly fabricated and controlled. I take issue with this idea that the theater is ‘conventional’ and other scenarios are “experimental”. Given a broad view of history and culture, I think these categorizations fall apart. I am thinking of the raunchiness and super audience activity of the Elizabethan stage—just for starters—which would seem radical to some audiences. When we go see a “show” or a dance performance now, it’s typically in a theater, which we’ve come to see as a traditional or “conventional” space—it’s a black box or a proscenium, where the audience experiences the performance at a certain distance—and it is a relationship that an audience, especially a Western audience, accepts rather easily. When placed outside of this very specific, formal theatrical setting—it makes some audiences uncomfortable.

Ultimately, I think we are talking about proximity and the anonymity of the audience and the comfort that audiences have with that ability to “disappear” that this setting provides them. I personally have long taken issue with a fixed division between audience and performance because it enforces a very specific relationship and it gives the audience very little choice in how to participate in what they are witnessing. In dance, this distance is very pictorial, it’s an image that is framed and is outside of us, and that we can project onto in the same way that we can project our emotions on a film. It is safe and controlled. The audience is cocooned in darkness and presented an image to consider, hardly to participate in. There are examples of how within this format expectations can be subverted, but there are limitations. Dance, in particular, has a history of intimacy that is lost in this theatrical environment. In some forms, ballet, for instance, it even goes so far as to not hear the dancer’s feet landing or to hear their breath. The dancers are really image-only—devoid of body. My question has been how to create a scenario or environment for the audience that gives them some of that intimacy back, that puts a sweaty body back into their reality, and it’s a question that’s fraught with a great deal of difficulty because of the audience’s expectations of performance. It is difficult to get past expectations to intimacy or exchange or a freedom of choice. I’ve learned to try to give audiences the time and space to adapt to an unfamiliar environment so that they can bring themselves to the situation. Ultimately, that is my interest…an attempt for intimacy between people where the scenario facilitates exchange. My latest project, Wilderness, is, for me, the next question in my exploration of this particular relationship, which I find is at the heart of everything a performance is— the relationship between the people coming and the people who are doing something for them.

WILDERNESS (rehearsal), 2010.

AF: This piece is partially based, in some sense, on three films, and you typically use other art forms as partial ‘sources’ for the work you make. How do you interact with these other mediums, and how are they translated into new, unique works?

YC: I use source mediums to immerse myself in a feeling or state, in something that I’m interested in exploring, and in doing so I begin to think about different ways of coming to the same central notion. It is a way of staying alive or present in the thing I am involved in. It is a way of continuing to engage in a conversation with the world. This tends to involve reading everything I can and seeing films that are related in some way to ideas from which I am working. Just now, I finished reading the Old Man and the Sea, because it seemed to have a really urgent connection to a character that is present in Wilderness. By immersing myself almost as if by osmosis, ideas slip themselves in and inform the work. I don’t think this is very radical, and I am not very didactic about it.

AF: Is the hope, then, to illicit the same emotion or sensation in the audience—a kind of translation?

YC: Yes, sensation and a certain emotional world. In that way, it is kind of vampiric. As an example, I was really influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. There’s a scene in the film in which these men are gathered around in a circle, discussing the death of a colleague. They are trying to discern the cause of his death, as well as the motives for his devotion to the creation of a park for a poor community. The task has evidently brought him to his death. Their conversation becomes a series of arguments about the purpose of work and of living, and grows incredibly emotional. The men are on their hands and knees and their faces are strained and highly emotive, in a way that we’d now think of as unrealistic; it’s highly stylized. The soloist Peter Schmitz and I spent a long time looking at this clip, at how the faces of the men were transforming and how this manipulated the emotional content of their speech. Those pitches and emotional resonances, rather than the content of their actual speech, were inserted into the dance. We took the emotional grittiness, and the stylization of the scene as a source and inspiration. In a way, it is like channeling—taking a very specific thing from a work and inserting it somewhere else. It’s something I do a lot. For other pieces we have used the fingers quivering at the holster at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, looped a scene from Gus van Sant’s Elephant (switching casts and repeating the lines as quickly as possible), and mangled the words of pop songs. It is usually connected to an obsessive quality—repetition or the most miniscule and ridiculous attention—to get to something. It is hard to even say exactly what—but to get to a certain place, a certain resonance, almost like a pitch or frequency. I really think of choreography as math: you do something the right amount of times… and something else happens.

AF: This project is a highly collaborative one—it includes work with a musician and an installation designer, and the dancers are responsible for much of their own choreography as well—how does your identity as a choreographer figure into this? How much is it your piece, and how much is it that of the collaborators, the dancers…

YC: It’s not a collective in the sense that, to me, a collective is a group of people that come together and say “we want to make a piece about X”, and together they go about researching and thinking about ways in which to address that question. The project is conceived by me. Initially, with Wilderness, I had these ideas about a piece that centered around a figure that was an older man, and that three films were somehow connected to that, and that the piece, at first, would investigate the approach of the end of life and the final transformation. The section that followed would then be a quartet that formalized this person’s experience in some way. That was basically the kernel of what I was interested in—the life and the representation of that life.

The first person that I asked to join me was Peter Schmitz; it was really important for me to find the right person to play that figure and for that person to have a strong emotional center. At the time we began speaking about the project, Peter was going through significant changes in his life; he was about to have hip surgery and he was very injured. We didn’t know what to expect from his body. So, finding him and working with him, spending many hours improvising with him, and choosing which of the improvisations were important to the project and how they were going to follow one another and how they weaved together—that was the work I did with Peter. There were many hours where I watched him, seeking out the movements that seemed pertinent to the project, guiding each other through improvisations with descriptions or themes or physical tasks. My role as the choreographer is to direct the outcome: sometimes that means improvising in front of the performers, other times it means bringing in film clips to learn verbatim or use as inspiration, other times it means structuring an improv—it entails a lot of editorial decisions. Lately it has meant the construction of excel grids to keep all the video footage of improvisations intact. Really, it is a kind of alchemy of all the people involved in the project because they bring so much of themselves to these ideas and sometimes balk at them—and then there is a dance of persuasion. In the end, there is this thing that is at once what I’ve always wanted to see and that I never imagined I would see; it’s a sort of weird animal: part bastard, part twin.

Peter Schmitz. WILDERNESS (rehearsal), 2010.

AF: Watching this piece, I thought a lot about storytelling, in the verbal, performative sense, which is an art form in which there is a very conscious acknowledgement of the demands placed on the speaker by the audience; it’s an exchange Wilderness seems, in part, to be addressing a kind of absence in a lot of other performance—the lack of a kind of exchange. Is this at all an appropriate analogue for the work your doing here?

YC: I was definitely thinking about translation. And the demand on the audience to in some ways see the same “story” twice in two different vocabularies and the time it takes to decipher each and see the connections. I was thinking about the life lived—the solo— and the sort of reorganization or representation of that life—the quartet— that is something entirely different from the life itself—a ghost or a sign. That representation, almost a kind of recording, is a highly formal thing, very much like language in a sense. The moment is multiple, the language that we use to describe it—formalizes it, codifies it, fixes it. What’s interesting about the piece, for me, is that it’s a live performance that is reproducing a live performance. And a live performance is the history of all the other performances and all the rehearsals that preceded it. It is a thickly layered experience.

For Peter the piece is an improvisation based on a slew of other improvisations, and that was something that was very clear to me from the very beginning. It had to be—while structured—connected to the decision in the moment and the history of a past. It could not be an entirely new improvisation every evening and neither could it be set. It could not rely on going on automatic. The quartet, on the other hand, is largely set but the dancers are given rules on top of that, which have the ability to create chaos. The way that the quartet approaches the space is very different from how Peter approaches it; he’s the center and the attention is fully on him. When the other dancers enter, its not really about them, it’s about the space that they are taking care of, and the task of representing. They are the language, the translation of his life. And that is distant and cold and strange and meaningful. It is like the painter painting an apple. It is not the thing itself so what are you getting across by painting it? For me, it is not about commenting on the apple or making me think it is the apple but about perception, how we look at the world. The quartet is giving me back the solo in ways that I could not perceive it before—through a different language—through distance.

But I don’t think I answered your question at all! Maybe you were getting at how the storyteller must respond to the audience in the moment. They can’t tell the same story the same way. They need to be present in the telling. That is an appropriate analogue…I am very concerned about creating rules or tasks based on audience behavior so that the dancers can’t slip into the pleasure of dancing. It is very easy to get into your own kinesthetic loveliness. That doesn’t interest me. I’m interested in their awareness of the audience, and the exchange of information, the decisions that are made because of one another—not only how to populate the space but where to take a moment. I want them—audience and performer—to be reading one another, really activating the space between each other.

AF: Though the piece, as I saw it, was without the installation elements that the final performance will include, I know that there is an interactive musical score at work, one that responds to the audience in some way. What are you views on the function of music in modern dance? Is the interactive sound in this project formed as a kind of response?

YC: I’m not interested in a score that “works” for the dance; I’m interested in creating an environment that has a logic of its own, a visual logic, a sound logic, and because it exists and it is set up in a particular way it creates a sound that becomes the piece—together they form a comprehensive environment. I don’t like the idea that music should serve a piece. That kind of hierarchy just does not interest me. I am more interested in being in a dialogue with people that I am collaborating with and letting that conversation weave a mode or way of conversing within the piece that makes sense to each of us. I don’t really want there to be a separation of elements. It is rather that these things are in the world together and produce this effect. What this means is that moments are not replicable, and
I am fine with that.

AF: Could you expand upon the notion of wilderness and the unknown? It seems to appear in the piece in three different ways: the experience of the audience, the territory into which Peter’s figure is approaching, and the literal landscape created on stage. There’s then, what might be referred to as, a kind of multiplicity at the center of the piece. I’m wondering how this relates to your understanding of other art forms, as well as the construction of meaning in a piece like this. Is movement inherently “multiple”? How do you arrive at a metaphorical construction like the notion of wilderness? Is meaning, in a piece like this, distinct from interaction with audience, or does it form out of that interaction?

YC: I think these questions are really the heart of making work—regardless of medium. What any work attempts, I think, is a new language, which inherently requires interaction. How do we pass this language from the artists involved to those that are participating as witnesses? How do we create “meaning” together? And I do think that movement, language, words, and gestures are inherently and irrefutably multiple because interpretation can never be fixed. There are too many eyes, too many doers and too many experiences in the world to distill even the singular meaning of a color. Dialogue would be completely unnecessary if there wasn’t interpretation. If we all saw the same thing, we could all go home and not speak to one another. Engagement means the need for the unknown, the thing that we don’t quite understand, the thing that is not understood by boundaries and lines, that passing through them only means more questions. And that is essentially wilderness to me—the unknown thing that you keep moving towards, the
line of the forest that you keep entering and which is transformed by your entrance and your interpretation. Wilderness is the space between you and me, between the performer and the audience, between the moment when you were outside talking to your friend and the moment you entered this space. In the world of the piece, wilderness is all these things: the literal environment the audience walks into, the “space” that the soloist enters when he exits, and this relationship at the heart of performance that we have been talking about.

AF: There’s clearly a great deal of complex structure underlying each of these pieces, much of which is certainly beyond the audience’s comprehension. What purpose does it serve for you, and how do you hope that it is experienced by the audience?

YC: The way I see a lot of this functioning is slightly underneath consciousness, for me and the audience, so that it allows for the sort of magic of the performative moment and so that the pieces can live in a place where the experience is being written in the present. To search for these structures while watching the performance would cause one to be distracted, to no longer bear witness to this writing. I feel it’s my job as the choreographer to layer the pieces for myself, as well as for the performers, and to try and know the many ways in which it is working, but I don’t ever expect that the audience will understand them all directly. For the audience, it is a world, a logic, a place they are in. It is an act of immersion—again going back to wilderness. The purpose, for me, is to lose control of the thing. I hope it has a life of its own, that when I walk away from it, it is rich enough that it belongs individually to each person that has an experience with it and one that I could not have foreseen. There is no singular agenda and maybe…that’s just how I see the world: in spirals and tangents and multiplicity.

Wilderness will show at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn October 27th–November 2nd. More info here.

Fred Tomaselli (American, b. 1956). Big Raven, 2008. Acrylic, photocollage, and resin on wood panel, 84 x 72 in. (213.4 x 182.9 cm). Private collection, courtesy of the artist, White Cube, London, and James Cohan Gallery, New York

Bring some color into these gray days and head over to Gagosian for a John Waters book signing! If that’s not enough spectacular strangeness for you, get lost in Tony Oursler‘s 21st century obsessed virtual installations and sculptures at Lehmann Maupin. Also, recent BOMB artist Fred Tomaselli has his hallucinogenic paintings and collages up at the Brooklyn Museum, Astrid Lorange and Joan Retallack are reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, and for those of you on the west coast Rebecca Solnit is giving a performative reading at SFMOMA.

In other news, actor James Franco just bought the rights to Stephen Elliott’s The Adderall Diaries and is planning on writing, directing and starring in the main role. Check out an interview with Elliott here.

Leonora Carrington is considered the last living member of the inner circle of pre-WWII Parisian surrealists. She’s 93 years old. And she’s still alive and creating art in Mexico City.

I’ve often had fantasies of tracking Leonora down, of hopping on a plane to Mexico to find her. It would be the beginning of an epic journey, and I imagine us having a brief but meaningful encounter where she would bless me with a near-century’s worth of wisdom on what it means to be an aging woman artist. I imagine myself emerging from this experience spiritually renewed and ready to tackle this life—to develop a total, life-long commitment to creativity. I wrote on my blog that when the artist Louise Bourgeois died, I had this irrational regret for having not met her while she was alive. In hopes of trying to divert another repeat of my Louise-regret, I began trying to get in contact with Leonora Carrington.

I found that there was someone else who had been on a similar mission: The Guardian journalist Joanna Moorhead. Joanna is a cousin of Leonora, but until recent years she had never met Leonora, nor was she aware of her artistic legacy. Joanna did end up tracking Leonora down. She flew to Mexico and wrote several articles on her cousin. I decided to contact Joanna, thinking maybe I could find Leonora through her.

My name is Jackie Wang. I am a writer who is extremely interested in the work of your cousin Leonora Carrington. The Hearing Trumpet is one of my favorite books of all time, and I’ve always loved your cousin’s gleeful rebellion against surrealist representations of women: the view of woman-as-muse, as femme enfant, and so forth. The character Marian Leatherby in Carrington’s Hearing Trumpet was 92 years old, and now Carrington herself is 93, which means she has just surpassed the age of her character. I am really interested in writing a piece on Carrington, focusing on what it means to be an aging woman, how they are ignored/delegitimized. I was wondering if you knew of any way at all that I could get in touch with Carrington. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time. Take care. —Jackie Wang

Leonora’s surrealist occult novel The Hearing Trumpet is about Marian, a 92-year-old woman. Her family, who assumes she is senile and has lost her mind with age, commits Marian to an institution. Leonora herself had been institutionalized around the time her lover—the famed dada/surrealist artist Max Ernst—was arrested during WWII. The institution Marian is sent to in the book turns out to be a strange cult headed by the mysterious couple Mr. and Mrs. Gambit. The elderly women sleep in bungalows that resemble a boot, a cuckoo clock, a mushroom, a birthday cake, an igloo, a circus tent and a lighthouse. Marian forms alliances with other women and unearths elaborate conspiracies revolving around a portrait of a winking nun. This book brought me immeasurable joy, especially during moments when the women would get together, dance and flail their arms around, compelled by an inexplicable urge.

We began by nodding our heads in time to the drumming, then our feet. Soon we were dancing round and around the pond, waving our arms and generally behaving in a very strange manner. (…) Never before had I experienced the joy of rhythmic dance, even in the days of foxtrot in the arms of some eligible young man. We seemed inspired by some marvelous power, which poured energy into our decrepit carcasses.

Old ladies, more alive than ever. Leonora is most famous for her paintings, but her writings are just as brilliant. It’s a shame that more people don’t treat The Hearing Trumpet like the literary treasure it is. Not only does it succeed at creating totally engrossing worlds, characters, and narratives; its structural complexity will knot your brain. Leonora establishes different logics and sequences of events and undoes them as she goes along, like a dream that abandons each preceding moment as it moves forward. There are layers within layers, unforeseeable digressions. Reality is shattered completely.

When Leonora left Europe, she landed in Mexico and was joined by two other surrealist women expatriates: the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. These three women worked together, inspired each other, and continued to develop as artists as they were virtually ignored by the art establishment. Older women were often the subjects of their work. They painted and photographed each other. After reading the narrative recounted by Joanna Moorhead, I wondered how much of The Hearing Trumpet was inspired by the little artist clan they established in Mexico. I immediately recognized Remedios in the character Carmella:

Varo and Carrington, in particular, found they shared a deep intensity of imagination. They encouraged each other in feats of daring: Varo would write letters to strangers, their names picked at random from the phone book, inviting them to attend dinner parties. There were also endless experiments in cookery, with surreal recipes served up to unsuspecting friends, including an omelette made with human hair, and ink-dyed tapioca passed off as caviar. But while the wild lives of the surrealist men in Paris attracted much attention, those of the surrealist women in Mexico passed largely unnoticed.

Remedios Varo wearing a mask mad by Leonora Carrington and Kati Homi.

Picture via

When I had the impulse to contact Leonora’s cousin, I was thinking about old ladies, institutions, and conspiracies. My partner had told me of this schizophrenic old woman named Phyllis who she had met in a mental hospital. When we were walking down a side street in Northampton toward the lot we were parked in, Phyllis appeared. It was a moment of cosmic coincidence. She was ambling down the street holding a plastic bag containing her lunch, her gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. We stopped to talk to her and stood there for about 20 or so minutes listening to her fantastic stories. In The Hearing Trumpet, a younger woman named Carmella is Marian’s only real friend. I imagine Carmella and Marian’s bond to be similar to the bond between Phyllis and my partner. Carmella is the only one who really listens to Marian. She gave Marian the trumpet.

Like the character Marian who was obsessed with uncovering the story of the winking nun, Phyllis too is perpetually on a quest to uncover secret histories. But—like Marian—Phyllis goes largely ignored. To most, Marian and Phyllis are just some crazy hags. But as you read The Hearing Trumpet it is clear that Marian is incredibly lucid and perceptive. When I listened to Phyllis talk, my brain kind of melted because I was fed more information than I had the stamina to process, and everything seemed so painfully true. I realized that her problem was not that she didn’t understand anything. She understood too much. How was it possible to conflate the two? I suppose the secret to understanding the distinction is to open our ears. Even though the character Marian was physically almost deaf, maybe it is actually we who need hearing trumpets.

Leonora Carrington, ADIEU AMENHOTEP,.

Picture via

Today I received an email from Leonora’s cousin saying:

Hi Jackie. Sorry for the delay. That’s great that you’re such a fan of Leonora’s work. She’s an extraordinary woman and it’s a huge privilege to know her and to be able to spend time with her. She’d be very supportive I think of the idea of a piece about women and ageing, but I don’t think she’s up to a chat on the phone or by email—she is elderly now, and life is increasingly tough when you’re her age. Why not expand the piece a bit to take in other fascinating later-life women, and then you won’t need direct input from Leonora? Let me know if I can help further; I want to be supportive to anyone interested in Leonora, but I don’t want to make her life difficult by asking her to speak to people when I know she finds this stressful.

All best,
Joanna

Alas, I will never get to meet Leonora. Which is okay. She is very, very old, and I wouldn’t want my girlish fantasies to cause her any strain. I’ve come to accept this sobering response and indirect rejection because in this strange way, her elusiveness reaffirms the stance that I loved her for, her rejection of the role of the muse demanded by the culture surrounding surrealism. Leonora will not be anyone’s muse. Not even mine.

Roman Opalka, OPALKA 1965 / 1 - ∞, Detail 5583850 - 5595003, acrylic on canvas, 77.17 x 53.15".

Roman Opalka’s grayscale paintings were the first conceptual art works that I could engage without explanation. I was a child at the 1995 Venice Biennale, the year Opalka’s paintings were mounted in the Polish Pavilion. Like all of Opalka’s exhibited work, these were from the OPALKA 1965-∞ series, comprised of daily sound recordings, photo self-portraits, and a sequence of canvases primed in black or gray and covered in tiny rows of painted numbers, starting in 1965 with the number one. From a distance, his surfaces appeared monochromatic; as I approached, snowdrift gradients began to appear. Up close, the effect was impressionistic, or more accurately pointillist—a crowded collection of methodical, nearly identical brushstrokes. I could see that for each number, Opalka renewed the paint on his brush and then allowed it to be exhausted, so the ends of some numbers were barely visible. Until that point, I had relied on explanations from others to understand artwork, but even as a child, Opalka’s clarity of purpose spoke to me directly.

Opalka is a super signature artist; his oeuvre can be best understood as a body of work. Each painting has a start and finish, but the work is emphatically sequential. Besides the obvious counting, Opalka adds one percent more white paint to each canvas. Yvon Lambert is currently showing four of Opalka’s very pale recent paintings, which are numbered in the 5 millions. Over a sound system, Opalka reads out the numbers in low, raspy Polish as he writes. Ostensibly, Opalka’s work represents the passage of time. So why choose acrylic paint, when pencil might be better suited for neatly writing numbers?

As Robert Pincus-Witten wrote in his 1972 essay for Artforum, ‘Ryman, Marden, Manzoni: Theory, Sensibility, Mediation,’ Robert “Ryman is interested in painting as theory and one is therefore tempted to say that he is not interested in painting at all.”  Pincus-Witten argued that Ryman emphasized “intellective processes” rather than the act of painting. Like Ryman, Opalka does not explore paint as paint, instead letting the qualities of the medium dictate the stringent rules he sets for his practice. Yet the fourth dimension, time, that is the focus of Opalka’s work, lends the installation an underlying tremor of anguish, enlightenment, humor.

Opalka’s practice is rigidly linear; each painting starts on the upper left, and ends on the lower right. There can be no touching up. Yet the muscle of Opalka’s work lies in his ferocious editorial process. His artistic life is pared down to these paintings, these recordings, and a series of daily self-portraits, not on view at Yvon Lambert, NY, in which he is shot in the same white shirt in front of the same white background, at the moment when he has stopped painting for that day. The aesthetic modesty of Opalka’s work belies the epic ambition, the monumental heft, of his artistic project.

Roman Opalka, PASSAGES is running at Yvon Lambert through October 9.

Roman Opalka, OPALKA 1965 / 1 - ∞, detail of Détail 3595783 - 3613343, acrylic on canvas, 77.17 x 53.15".

Head over to Fowler Arts Collective for their very first exhibition, which, along with the Keene army, will be exhibiting work by BOMBlog artists Elizabeth Hoy and Leigh Van Duzer.

Saturday, October 2nd
7-11pm
67 West Street (on the second floor) between Milton St. and Noble St., Brooklyn
Look for signs directing you into the space.
http://www.fowlerartsbrooklyn.org

The ubiquitous Steve Keene is a painter probably best-known for the cover art of Wowee Zowee, Pavement’s best album.

Lauren Clay’s sculptures permeate the visual field like gamma radiation, unmistakably succulent in their Easter-egg hues. Drawing from references as varied as classical Greek symbols, a Southern Baptist upbringing, and Judy Chicago, her work is at once playful and deeply spiritual.

Lauren Clay's Studio

Lauren Clay’s sculptures permeate the visual field like gamma radiation, unmistakably succulent in their Easter-egg hues. Clay’s paper objects battle the limits of two-dimensional space. She experiments with materials, colors, and processes in attempts to morph flatness into form. She extends out of the Minimalist tradition, manipulating size, shape, and absolutes in her visual vernacular. Gouache spatial concepts complement and cultivate her sculptures simultaneously. Her work confirms “the power of one small object to transform the space.” Clay’s work is a spiritual facilitator, serving to incite and expose self-proclaimed sanctity.

Lynn Maliszewski: What are you working on right now?

Lauren Clay: Since my last show I’ve spent a lot of time researching and doing some experiments. I’ve been thinking a lot about classical Greek symbols of wreaths or bunched objects— you know, the ones you see on buildings throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. They are these big, ridiculous, grand, decorative forms, but at the same time they’re also kind of autonomous. I’ve also been thinking about portals into other spaces and voids and the experience of traveling into the void.

So, right now I’ve been working on a series of wreaths and garlands. When I’m starting a new piece I usually begin with a wooden armature, then use some type of paper-mâché on top of it. Then I’ll construct around it with paper construction. Sometimes I’ll use things like balloons, or other things to help give the form more weight or volume.

LM: How does your training in painting inform your current work?

LC: Before I transitioned into making sculptures, I was painting small architectural spaces. My early work was painted on large pieces of paper that I thought of as proposals for these spaces that could probably never really exist. They are definitely relatable to my current work, but the early paintings were more architectural. Since the pieces were on large sheets of paper, they naturally curled and flopped off the wall, so I began cutting the paper. As they developed they increasingly became more and more sculptural. The painted aspect of my early work described these little minimal architectural spaces. They were imagined spaces. I think this is something that still happens in my gouache drawings. My drawings still depict these small, imagined spaces and interiors.

I’ve been using paper in a sculptural way since 2003. I have this love/hate relationship with it. In a way I’m okay with it but sometimes I feel like it corners me. I like to use paper because it’s so accessible, so easy to transform. And it’s so autonomous– it doesn’t reference anything in particular. At the same time, I feel like there’s also this painter’s impulse to take a flat surface and transform it into an illusion of space. I like the idea of transformation… I also really just like objects: things that exist in your space and aren’t just an illustration. I like making something that physically dwarfs me.

LM: Tell me about your visual language, specifically the strips of paper and tunnel forms.

LC: The small strips of paper with the curved ends that I tend to use in a lot of my work developed from this idea I had of taking the most minimal manmade form I could think of— the square, and trying to make it even more minimal. My idea was that if you curve the corners of the square, it doesn’t have four sides anymore, it has only one continuous side like a circle. It was a really silly idea but it became a predominate part of my visual language. My early visual language began with an interest in subverting the traditional, masculine forms of sculpture and painting. I felt like I was inheriting all of these heroic masculine forms, whether I liked it or not. I really love a lot of the formal devices of the Bauhaus artists, and the Minimalists but at the same time I thought they were a little sad and pathetic. All of the forms are so striped down and barren. But in my work, these really basic forms— squares, circles, and triangles, begin to multiply and become this other thing completely.

The tunnel, or stepped cone shape is a form that I used a lot in my last show at Larissa Goldston gallery. You can see it used heavily in the totem piece [Totem for Grotto Heavens Hootenanny, 2009], where these tunnel forms are embedded in the surface of the sculpture. That piece references a Chinese Scholar’s Rock, and the tunnels start to describe the surface of a rock that has eroded. Chinese painters and scholars use these rocks as contemplative objects. Painters use the rocks to help them paint imagined mountain-scapes— almost looking at the rock as you would a diorama.

LM: What influences your color choice?

LC: I like to think of color as its own entity— not really intending for it to reference anything in our day-to-day life. Sometimes I’ll choose colors that create a sense of illusion of depth, or color that will help me “bend space” within the sculpture. So sometimes I choose fluorescent colors or really saturated colors that create this crazy reflected light. The way I choose colors is probably similar in some ways to how someone like Dan Flavin or Anish Kapoor would choose colors.

I think in some ways the work, and my use of color is poetic. I feel like it’s not cool right now to be poetic or to make highly crafted objects, but I can’t help it. I find myself grasping around, trying to make sense of things that I become aware of, and I’ll end up with two things opposed, things that shouldn’t necessarily work together. In the end I find myself making connections between two things that don’t make sense on the surface, but are, in my mind, deeply connected in an esoteric or spiritual sense.

LM: How does spirituality inform your work?

LC: I was raised Southern Baptist, so it was a really prominent factor in my life growing up and in most of my family’s life it still is. I was also raised in the South so it’s just very much a part of the culture. There’s just something about growing up with all of that symbolism and imagery and connecting it to how you live your life, and what that means. At the same time there are certain things about it that I’m really drawn to, like the mysterious otherness, or the idea that something exists outside of the material world. I’m really attracted to that in a fantastical way but at the same time, I really struggle with all of those ideas. It’s just a filter for viewing the world that I’m stuck with. I can’t help but pick up on biblical themes and symbolism in everything I see or read. I think it maybe has something to do with also growing up in the suburbs. I had these two worlds: the old Southern Baptist family life with so much heavy symbolism on one side, and then on the other side, the suburbs, where everything is plastic and fake. Maybe my work is the result of continuously trying to reconcile those two worlds.

Lately my ideas as relating to spirituality have been more along the lines of Yves Klein and his monochrome paintings. I’ve been thinking a lot about him as the judo-master: in his writings he talks about standing on the judo mat, and to him the judo mat itself is a monochrome– this plane of emptiness and transient space. He talks about his paintings as windows, as framing the void. I think my work is the residue of an attempt to transcend that space like Klein. It captures that energy, or that attempt. At the same time I know my work is really kind of dorky and creepy. Maybe not creepy, but awkward. I don’t think it’s necessarily something super romantic and easy. It’s capturing that energy and that determination but, at the same time, it’s all over the place and haphazard.

Judy Chicago, Rainbow Pickett, 1965-2004, and Lauren Clay, Lonely Rainbow Picket Found Hoarding the Ten Thousand Things, 2009.

Lauren Clay’s objects stand as spiritual totems, relics from a religious journey or spiritual awakening.  Her work embraces “searching for that thing [and what] you feel when you’re in the midst of it.” ‘The unending amends we’ve made (imperishable wreath)’ (2010) encircles the void of blind spirituality. A feathered wreath transforms into enflamed residue. The perpetual undertow encircles the central cavity, finding mentions of freedom at the bottom-left of the circuit’s torturous infinity. Despite the indefinite twirl, the coral and robin-egg streaks maintain a contented hypnosis. The momentum of spirituality becomes an eternal whirlpool able to convince if not brainwash in its wake.

Flamboyant objects energize Clay’s restless quest for the legitimacy of spirituality, yearning to decipher its contrived hallucinations and the submission of the masses. Lonely Rainbow Picket Found Hoarding the Ten Thousand Things (2009) references Los Angeles Minimalist Judy Chicago’s nearly room-sized piece Rainbow Pickett (1965/2004). Clay utilizes a single monochrome beam pitched diagonally against the wall as the basis of the work. Predominantly cool-colored gems swell beneath the coral board. Clay mutates the strength and clarity of Chicago’s piece, extracting the single trapezoid and implementing it as a restrictive rather than liberated entity. No longer contributing to a united breath as it did in Chicago’s piece, the plank becomes an enforcer. The polygons are damned to life below the surface, smothered by cheery appearances. Clay’s remove from Chicago’s platonic piece depreciates religion’s role, physicalizing its transition from a massive, generalized elucidation to a restraining, overbearing despot.

Swimming through dead-ended inquiries and the encroaching comforts of religion, Clay encourages proactive exploration over effortless satiation. The Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion (2009) situates the viewer within the immersive utopia of spirituality. Clay’s bugle shapes interrupt the soothing stream of periwinkle paper, curious passageways beyond the tidal wave. They are engaged without being submerged, disrupting the ease of the façade and rustling the feathers of the composition. They are “grasping for eternity or trying to figure out if God exists or how we exist in the world and what it means.” It is unimportant whether these shapes move in or out, but rather that they provide a break from the unadulterated, apathetic, acceptable landscape. They instigate movement beyond the attractive void.

Clay refutes religion’s ability to singularly expand upon life’s questions despite its voluptuous promises. She investigates death as a sure-fire escape from religion’s ploy. Struck by its presence in traditional hymns, Clay finds solace in the divisive line, “Death is the gate of endless joy and yet we dread to enter there.” There is heaviness in the eventual nothingness of death, an experience specific and dynamic for each individual. In freedom from life’s concerns one is denied further personal enlightenment and satisfaction. Investigation of life is neutralized and closure is denied.  Clay’s Within You or Without You (2009) series of drawings epitomize the abysmal structure of this hunt for spiritual substance. The backgrounds are invitingly vivid pastels, gradient portals to nirvana’s sublime freedom. Staunch, geometric fortifications descend upon the exterior of the open utopia. Religious rustication padlocks the entryway. Death, in its assumed transcendence, functions similarly to religious assumptions in that it provides no portal to paradise, no spiritual affirmation. Rather than expanding, it stifles and suffocates. Clay’s objects refuse to define the nirvana she seeks. She urges viewers to pummel simplification of life’s spiritual voyage. Rather than rationalize, she revels in the disorientation and satisfaction of her individual quest.

Watch a slideshow of Clay’s work below:

Khavn de la Cruz is an artist with an output that is singular in its fecundity, a prolix daily output that is off the charts. Musician, poet, writer, filmmaker, Cruz is, however most well-known as “the father of Philippine digital filmmaking.” Pamela Cohn sat down with Cruz in Prizren, Kosova to discuss his prodigious output.

Photo by Michael Palmieri

According to the Philippine artist Khavn de la Cruz, there are “divine intersections” everywhere you look. I believe my encounter with him in early August to have been just that; I was inspired and refreshed in his presence. I found Khavn de la Cruz to be a frank, open, bright young man who laughs easily and often. He is also an artist with an output that is singular in its fecundity, a prolix daily output that is off the charts.  Musician, poet, writer, filmmaker, Cruz is known as “the father of Philippine digital filmmaking.”  He’s made twenty-eight features (and growing), including Son of God, which recently premiered in Copenhagen, and more than a hundred short films, many of which have received prizes in international competitions. As if all this weren’t enough, Khavn de la Cruz is also an acclaimed composer, songwriter, singer and pianist, having produced several albums (sometimes an entire album in one day) with his band Vigo in addition to staging several rock operas at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The Isola International Film Festival in Slovenia just showed his film Cameroon Love Letter (for Solo Piano), accompanied by a live musical performance, and in early November, he will conduct a film workshop in Sarajevo at the Pravo Ljudski Human Rights Film Festival. He is working on his “craziest, biggest film to date,” Mondomanila, and completing his fourth book of poetry, entitled Shockbox.

I met de la Cruz at the Dokufest International Documentary and Short Film Festival in Prizren, Kosova, which featured a program of de la Cruz’ short film works, and where we were both in attendance  as members of various competition juries. Our conversation took place in an outdoor café on a very noisy, narrow backstreet of Prizren. The Manila-based artist was completely at home among the chaotic sounds of screaming children, idling cars and motorbikes, loud boisterous conversations and thumping disco music pouring out of every doorway.  Though he sat still for the entirety of our talk,  I had noticed over the course of the week that de la Cruz had a very odd habit of literally jumping up from his seat as if an electric bolt had gone through his body and taking off down the street at a fast walk, his peripatetic muse caught by a flash of color, an interesting scent, or some other high-frequency sensation that shifted his inner compass and commanded him to follow it immediately. He was gone, seen suddenly in the middle distance before you knew what was happening. Quite strange, but, like the man himself, delightful and charming.

PC:  The intense proliferation of your work is staggering.  I come from a world where it takes some filmmakers several years to finish one film.  You come at your work in such an intensely focused, obsessive, unfiltered way of working that precludes any exterior obstacles or interference.

KDLC:  If I came at work in a more structured, commercial, strategic way, I don’t think I would have made the films that I’ve made.  It is intuitive.  I make music, too, but I really came to my voice through writing poetry, writing every day—one or two poems, or sometimes, several.  I was definitely more prolific in that than in cinema.  In cinema, I’ve tried to apply that creative momentum. There are a bunch of independent Philippine filmmakers who were quite big in the 80s, who created an underground movement in Manila.  But, ultimately, whether their goal was to make a feature film or some bigger commercial project, they never did.  Something blocked them.  And I attribute that to this idea of momentum.  If you stop, somehow it’s hard to start up again.  In a way, Woody Allen practices this type of momentum by doing one feature a year.

PC:  He’s also a filmmaker who’s faithful to his own personal rhythm, or perhaps he can realize what’s possible with the resources he’s able to gather together in a year’s time to do another movie.

KDLC:  Yes, you also might arrive at this rhythm because external forces are making it possible.  But I believe that if there’s this “unfiltered” energy, as you put it, a filmmaker can shoot every day.  That’s why I’m a bit lazy when I travel to festivals.  I don’t bring a camera with me because if I have my camera with me, it’s automatic that I’ll start to shoot and make something.  There’s a risk of not doing anything else.  One of my idols is Rumi, a Sufi poet.  He stopped writing down his poetry at a certain point; he just spoke it and someone else wrote it down because he couldn’t keep up with his own creative flood. I’m very impressed with that kind of energy flow.

PC:  Can you explain what you’re reacting to in the environment in which you work?  You make everything where you live.

KDLC:  My father is sort of against the idea of travel.  When I was young, I wanted to go places, “find myself” and all that, you know?  But he told me that I didn’t have to go anywhere.  He told me that I could just go deep right in my own little space, right where I was. I still ended up moving around but learned to use my given surroundings in my filmmaking.  Half of my films were shot in one neighborhood but you’d never know that.  My cinema is also a reaction to most mainstream movies made in the Philippines that are very much influenced by Hollywood, and a reaction to Hollywood itself, which dominates most movie screens there.

I have this manifesto called Day Old Flicks.  It’s coined after “one-day-old chicks,” which is a type of Philippine street food. [These are, literally, one-day-old male chicks eaten whole, bones and all, batter-fried and dipped in red chili sauce.]  I’ve made feature films in a day.  Shooting a short film over the course of several days is a luxury for me.

Still from Mondomanila

PC:  This must make for a very interesting personal relationship with time.

KDLC:  Yes, certainly. One of the things that is always a concern is how to cut costs.  The longer it takes to make a film, the more expensive it is.  It has to do with energy, too.  Like improvisational music played on the piano: you have this moment to create something right then and there, you just follow the beat.  It’s the idea of “best thought, first thought.”  The best take is the first take.  All the “mistakes” ultimately become part of the piece, the set design.  You allow the world into your films.  I might want to make a certain film, but then, let’s say, you have these blue chairs [pointing to the ones we’re sitting on]; you have an actor that acts in a certain way and, for better or for worse, that’s your lead actor.  You have to deal with it.  You have to incorporate everything, the bad and the good.  It becomes a collaboration with life, this type of filmmaking.  You end up making this “other” film.  If you attempted to create that script, you would not be able to do it.

PC:  There are pieces you work on solo and then there are pieces where you have a full crew working with you.  How does that collaboration play out when you’re working with other people, a particular group helping you to realize a certain vision you have?

KDLC:  These people have the same energy as I do, and bring that to the work.  It’s definitely all about the alchemy.  Each soul in the crew and the cast should connect in some way, as I said before, for better or for worse. Of course, if it’s for the worse, I don’t work with that person anymore [laughing].  But what comes out, I value.  In a way, I let my collaborators be.  I’ve been working with the same cinematographer and editor for about five or six years.  It’s a matter of trust.  That’s why I brought them in in the first place.  You can’t help but just learn from mistakes and you don’t know if people are trustworthy until you work together, so that’s necessary.  When your life develops, your art develops.  You can’t separate one from the other.

I once was making a parody on a Hollywood action movie and the hero, the main protagonist, backed out after one day of shooting.  There was the option of scrapping everything and starting again, getting another lead actor to replace him.  So I did that.  But I cast seven different actors to play the same character—all wearing the same outfit.  I wanted to make a comment on the “thousand faces of a hero.”

This is the prerogative of cinema, versus, let’s say, writing.  Literature, on paper, is static; it lives there like that forever. But cinema cannot be limited to the screenplay or to the actual production, the shooting and everything else that happens.  That’s what makes the film.

PC:  And when there’s an expensive apparatus engulfing you as a director?  What happens then when there’s very little room for “experimentation”?

KDLC:  I worked with a really large cast and crew for one of my first short films, a very expensive endeavor.  After that, I decided to make films differently—not with less quality, but definitely cheaper.  A more expensive piece doesn’t mean it’s better.  I remember trying to practice “real” filmmaking, the usual way people do it?  I fell flat on my face and my pockets were full of holes.  As I said before, I really rely more on the alchemy, and if the project fails, at least you can fail proudly.  Even if I make a no-budget film, there is still some kind of budget—people have to eat, some props need to be bought.  But each element is properly valued.  And, of course, this valuing becomes multiplied when the budget grows, especially the money that comes from my own pockets.  Filmmaking is crisis management most of the time so you do value each moment that works.

PC:  And the volume of work you put out—does this feel like a choice, or is it more of a compulsion?

KDLC:  Most of the time it doesn’t really feel like a choice, or a conscious decision.  I started making more than one feature film a year starting in 2004.  At the beginning of every year when I’m in Rotterdam, I say to my friends that I’m just going to make one film that year.  And it is because I really want to do other things—an album, other books.  But yeah, I end up having a bunch.  This year, I might be successful, I don’t know.  . . . Actually, I’ve done two features already.

PC:  Oh, well, you’ve already failed then…  (laughter)

KDLC:  I am trying very hard to limit it.  Since I have a bunch of new features that I started making last year, I’ll have films to put out through next year. I don’t know how many poems I’ve written, how many songs I’ve done.  When I came to filmmaking, the impulse was to be as prolific as I am in other ways.  It feels like I’m about to reach my saturation point.  That happened with literature.  As I said, I was writing a bunch of poems every day and some of those became songs.  Sometimes, I would write an album in a day.  And now I’m churning out films.  I never really stop writing or composing songs, but it reaches a point where it does become compulsive in the way in which I have a need to keep the chest very full or overflowing, making the most of my “artist’s life.”  You never know when you will expire.  You have to try to say what you want to say when you have the chance.

Still from The Trial Of Mister Serapio

PC:  And your relationship to those that consume your work, pay attention to it?  You have some notoriety, a good deal of critical acclaim. Artistic directors all over the world want to show your work at their festivals.

KDLC:  I consider it a dialogue, one I’m actively engaged in.  I do know artists who choose to be recluses and they’re happy with that.  I have no problems or issues with the public perception or reaction to my work.  The point is, I do my own shit, and other people do their own stuff.  Each of us is a piece of the puzzle.  Not everyone should make blue chairs.  There should be someone to sit on them; someone might want to eat them.  Each has its own function to make this world a more colorful place.

PC:  What I know of Manila, I know from the movies—what it looks and sounds like, at least.  I’ve never been there.  Maybe this is a vapid question, but would you be a different filmmaker if you lived or worked somewhere else?

KDLC:  Yes, probably.  It’s like some plants, you know, or some animals, some cockroaches, that might adapt, or might die when their environment changes.  That’s a “what if” question—I really don’t know.  I only can guess about what I would have become if I had lived in a different culture, been brought up in a different family.  I’m very much a product of my surroundings, my history.

I’ve also done a few films outside Manila, but only just because I happen to be there.  Those times when I wasn’t lazy and did something.  Or I’ve been forced to do it (laughter).  I do rely a lot on external imperative.  It’s great to have an internal imperative and want to do certain things—your soul will die if you don’t do those things, perhaps. But external imperatives like deadlines for commissioned work are essential to grow as an artist, I think.  In some way, it unleashes dormant ideas or impulses.  My first writing was done as an exercise in class—compare writing poetry to flying a kite. I would never have done that, thinking it was stupid or mundane. I wrote that assignment because I was a student and the teacher told us to do it.  After I wrote it, the teacher was very pleased, and the editor of the university journal was very pleased, so I became a poet.  Okay, now I’m a poet!  I must write more poems!  (laughter)

It’s like a tap on the shoulder.  It is encouraging.  It gives you a foundation of confidence, which, maybe, helps you go through all the blocks, the negativity, along the way.  You’re able to get the job done. There are many schools of thought.  One is, “You either have it or you don’t.”  I also believe, though, that anyone is capable of being an artist, or of expressing a passion in an artistic way.

PC:  What stops people, do you think?  Can we really be a world of artists?  Would that work?  Why aren’t we all making art, every day?

KDLC:  Well, it’s valid if you’re just not into that.  But also, I think a lot of people are just discouraged.  Maybe it was just a bite that set them back and that was enough.  Or maybe it was a real bulldozer. But whatever it was, it was enough to discourage them.  I just met a friend here in Kosova who was discouraged to become a painter because her father bought her a canvas.  That might seem like encouragement, but she interpreted it as pressure, something negative.  Fuck painting! Even though now she realizes, she really loves painting.  It’s tricky. When I started playing music, my teacher told me I had talent.  I thought that was bullshit and that he said that to every student to make them practice more.  And it was kind of drudgery, the daily practice and all, until the day I was really inspired to be a musician.  And it wasn’t based on his praise or encouragement. I think it stemmed from envy.  A high school classmate of mine got an award in a music competition.  That was it.  I was playing music, day in and day out, like crazy.

I always have a really long list of things to do, before I die.  And the list changes all the time.  And some things remain.  It keeps me going.  When I was deep into writing poetry, I was impressed by Neruda.  He wrote until the day he died in his own Isla Negra.  Maybe that’s the kind of life for me with music and cinema, maybe something else.

(Cruz excuses himself to take a call about jury deliberations, the decisions to be presented later that evening.)

PC:  I’ve just recently started to get the opportunity to jury at festivals. You jury quite a bit—how is it for you to judge other people’s work?

KDLC:  I like it.  I think the premise here, as we’ve stated, is that I’m lazy.

PC:  Yes, we keep coming back to that.

KDLC:  (softly) Yeah, the lazy brown fox (laughter).  I’m forced—yeah, back to the forced thing, too—to watch these films that I wouldn’t watch unless I’m in this situation.  Some things you like, some things you don’t like, but it definitely affects and adds to my cinema, my views, my life.  In judging other people’s work, it also becomes about discovering myself.  Among an array of elements, I discover that I’m attracted to this one; I don’t like that one.  And, of course, the other jury members think differently because we’re all unique individuals.  It’s a discovery that I like certain things that I never thought about before.  You fine-tune your aesthetic, as well, on a conscious level.  I’m usually subconscious, unconscious, more intuitive.  I do things just because I’m compelled to do them. William Stafford said it’s important for awake people to be awake.  It’s also important for dreamers to sleep.

Still from The One & Only Concert Of The Amazing Combo Of Commander Kulas & His Poor Carabao In The Long & Unwinding Road of Kamias

PC:  We’re all narcissists at heart, every human being, no matter how outwardly generous we are, how often we shine a light upon someone else.  It’s always the world according to me.

KDLC:  Yes, definitely.  In a way, that’s why someone is getting you on a jury.  Because you have a strong point of view and you’re willing to express it.  It might not be better than the rest of the world’s, but that’s your duty and so you have to pick the best film under those circumstances, which is a reflection of your aesthetic, right? Life is climbing an upward spiral.

PC:  But there also have to be resting spots.  If you’re really living life all out, it’s strenuous.

KDLC:  In a way, festivals are resting spots for me.  Not for my liver, but yes, in every other way.

PC: It’s always invigorating and inspiring in unexpected ways.  It always fuels me, somehow.  We’re allowed to be open to things that we might not be in our everyday lives.

KDLC:  As experimental, open-minded, and liberal as you think you are—you’re not.

PC:  Yes, it’s also an opportunity to encounter your prejudices, as well, that’s true.

KDLC:  Definitely.  We’re all products of our own cultural history, even when we’re trying to destroy or dismantle it.

I remember the first festival I attended.  It was a writing workshop/convention that I’d entered about fifteen years ago in the Philippines that took place in the mountains.  I even wrote a song about it.  In English, the title is “Last Week.”  “Last week is the happiest day of my life / Because we’re doing nothing / We’re just being ourselves.”  You’re among like-minded, like-spirited people.  You’re all artists or you’re for art, or world peace, or whatever.  There’s a soul connection, which is so important.  Art can be a very solitary endeavor.  I’m kind of hooked on festivals. You have to find a good balance.  Do your work; enjoy your life.

PC:  Besides your laziness, what do you consider your most valuable asset?

KDLC:  I’m not a very religious person, but I do love the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi—“make me an instrument of your peace.”  I believe that an artist is a vessel.  You can be an instrument of peace.  Or one of destruction.  Life is manifesting itself and passing through you, reflecting your interpretation back to your audience.

PC:  Does your own work surprise you in that way?

KDLC:  Definitely.  Not to be egoistic, but with my piano pieces, or my poetry, or my films—in a way, I didn’t make those things.

PC:  Well, that’s really the opposite of being egoistic then.

KDLC:  Maybe that’s why I intro my cinema work by saying, “This is not a film by Khavn de la Cruz.”  It’s letting life use you, letting it pass through you.

PC:  What do you get out of it?

KDLC:  The privilege of being that instrument.  But, as I said, I really value the momentum that’s built from this outpouring of work.  The dynamics of it can certainly change. It’s just really important to not ignore the muse.

PC:  It also takes a really strong person to encounter that muse every day.  Many artists’ instruments just get busted and they never recover from that.  You seem like a very healthy artist, if that doesn’t sound too presumptuous.

KDLC:  Well, there are some of my films where you see the contrary, my distinctly unhealthy side.

PC:  But it’s unleashed in your work; it’s not eating you from the inside.

KDLC:  My films are varied in style, subject matter, tone.  But most of my songs are sad love songs.  The Philippine pop culture—it’s very hopeless [laughs]. I write a lot of songs when I’m brokenhearted, depressed, and I use songwriting as catharsis, as therapy.  One way not to implode is to explode on a regular basis.  Not just simple explosion, but a productive one, while following your bliss.  An explosion in which you’re being negative, criticizing other people, utilizes that energy in a bad way.  If you just go about creating your body of work, nurturing your life, then your life becomes your statement.  That’s it.  You can’t be everywhere your work is, but that work can speak for you and represent your presence even when you’re not there.

For more on Philippine auteur Khavn de la Cruz, check out his website.

Joan Waltemath in her studio, 2010. Photo by Mary Jones.

Painter Joan Waltemath is the director of the Hoffberger School of Painting, at MICA in Baltimore, Maryland. For the previous 15 years, Waltemath taught at the I.S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York and in the Visual Arts department at Princeton University.  She also serves as an editor-at-large for The Brooklyn Rail. Waltemath graduated from RISD in 1976. Knowing she wanted to teach, she got an MFA from Hunter in 1993.

I visited the artist in her live/work studio in NYC where she has resided since 1976. Her aesthetic is evident not just in her paintings which are hanging on the walls, but in everything around us, the cabinets, tables, lamps, even the floor. Everything bears her mark and has been made, painted, designed, or transformed by the artist.

Mary Jones: There’s so much touch in your work. It’s one of the most striking aspects of seeing your work for the first time. The surfaces feel so fragile and sensual; it seems paradoxical that you use a knife, a construction knife. Your paintings are warm, really cared for, and done with incredible sensitivity.

Joan Waltemath: In a way, I feel that’s how we all want to be handled. It has to do with my interest in the haptic sense—the sense of touch and how you perceive, on an energetic level, through the movement of the body—what you understand through your skin, through your peripheral vision. Because of the way our eyes and minds have evolved, the possibility for what we understand from all those different angles of vision is specific. What we can reach through the apprehension of the softness or the hardness, the pristine-ness or the carefulness is also what sends us somewhere else, through our memories, on that journey that art can take us on. By entering into the haptic world, possibilities open up that just don’t occur with the images we perceive solely though our eyes.

MJ: Is there a spiritual dimension?

JW: I think of paintings as something that you live with, that the real challenge is having a painting hanging in the room with you for five years that you can still actually see.  So that it wouldn’t become something that is in your memory, that you no longer observe or would even notice if someone took it away.

I was reading Swann’s Way when I was in my 20’s, which was one of the last novels I read. In the Louvre, Marcel has this realization that painting should never reveal itself to you entirely in the first glance. I closed the book and thought “Now I know what I want to do.” I started trying to figure out how to do that.  It was such a fascinating idea to me; we assume that when we look at something we see the whole thing. But, actually when you have a planar surface whose form you can’t see entirely in one glance, it becomes paradoxical and mysterious. I began to study structures and tried to understand how to construct a path for your eye to enter and move around. So as I’m building up my paintings, I’m thinking about where you go and what happens next until the whole journey becomes enfolded into the structure of the painting. If I get it, that journey will unfold for you when you open up to the possibility of taking it.

MJ: Is an architectural framework important for you?

JW: I can speak to the architectural in so far as this: After teaching in Architectonics for a number years at Cooper Union, I came to realize how the body is the subject of architecture. Even in my early paintings, I understood then how the body was the subject, and I was exploring the implications of its position in relation to the plane and not as a representation painted on it. Through an architectural discourse, I was able to bring into focus how my paintings speak to the whole body. Once the knife is loaded and I’m pulling paint across a big area, my whole body is involved in that motion and it’s sort of acrobatic. You need a similar awareness to perceive it.

MJ: Has Feminist theory about the body influenced you?

JW: I appreciate the importance of Feminist theory much more now than I did in the ‘70s. There are issues around the body that are so volatile and determinant of one’s personal trajectory in life. However, I’m not considering the body in a social context, but in a phenomenological one, so it’s not necessarily a gendered body, but rather the human condition that frames my work.

Joan Waltemath, A LARGER VIEW, 2008–10, oil, fluorescent, graphite, pewter, interference, and phosphorescent pigment on honeycomb aluminum panel, 39 1/4 x 16 1/4".

MJ: How does the viewer experience your references to the body?

JW: Okay, here we are; we’re present. What does that mean? You see things from your peripheral vision as you approach a painting.   How does the surface shift and change as you move around it?  I’m working with pigments to make my own paint so all the surfaces have a different degree of reflectivity. The spatial coordinates in the paintings shift as you move around them. Each of them does that in a different way, and of course some are more successful than others. Some of them just fall into place and with others I really have to struggle to articulate that movement. I’m interested in the way it creates a subject/object relationship, how it binds you to the object and tells you that your own presence is essential to what you’re seeing. It only exists in the moment when you’re seeing it. Its appearance is relative to the moment, what the light is like, what time of day it is, all of these subtle factors. At another time, it will be different—there’s no absolute condition.

The series I’m making now is loosely based on the torso proportions that I’ve extracted from an underlying mathematical grid I’ve worked with since the ‘80s. They acknowledge the experience of being in front of an object, not looking at an image, and what that relationship means. This profound but often overlooked difference in perception is one of my most important subjects in painting.

MJ: You’re originally from Nebraska and were just saying your family has been in the building business. You built everything in this loft.  The cabinets, the tables all reflect the dimensions of your paintings.

JW: It’s turned out to be an important influence. When you’re younger, the kind of thinking and understanding that you grow up with is a second nature. You look for something that’s different, that’s outside of yourself, something that you don’t know. So it was very natural for me to come to NYC in the ‘70s and get a loft and just start building. I never thought about it. I remember in the beginning I wore high heels all the time. I built most of my loft in four-inch heels with a jigsaw and a hand saw, which was all I had. The first things were pretty funky. Then the more I built, the more I learned about my own limitations in terms of visualizing the third dimension. I mean when you’re a painter, you’re very invested in the plane, so it’s challenging.

MJ: When did you start writing?

JW: I started writing in Robert Morris’s class at Hunter. He had us write a paragraph a week. I had never written, I went through RISD and only wrote one paper! I never really trusted words, I became a painter. But when I was in Robert Morris’s class he convinced me that there is an important transference that happens in taking your visual thoughts and translating them into a spoken and written language. His conviction was so strong that I gave myself over to it and started to write.

MJ: How did writing become a part of your practice as an artist?

JW: When I met Phong Bui, I was looking for a venue; so that when he invited me to work with the Rail in 2000, I did. It was a fledging venture then, put out when the money and the writing came together. I started doing interviews with critics, and then would write reviews if I felt I had something to contribute. One of the first artists I wrote about was Agnes Martin. It was a way to acknowledge my relationship to her as a painter whose work I’d deeply internalized.

MJ: Writing about abstract painting can be difficult because it throws you back on yourself. It can be uncomfortable writing about what it makes you feel or think, as opposed to an intentional narrative or something concrete. Does being a painter open this up for you?

JW: As a painter, you have an incredible advantage over any writer who’s a poet or theoretician or even a musician because you know what it means to paint and you can understand the nature of the painting problems that are occurring. You know when things that look easy are in fact hard won. I usually write about work when I can see something in it that other people aren’t seeing, when I can articulate what’s not open or accessible to others in the same way.

MJ: You’ve also addressed the issue of developing a critical language for painting.

JW: Yes. Even though we’ve all accepted that the Modernist notion of the progression of styles is over, and has been over for a long time, we still haven’t really developed adequate criteria to reflect this awareness. I am compelled to write about work that allows me to reflect a particular problem in my own work. So the argument I develop is that painting is a language, and you can read what it is saying. When I write I just let myself go and interpret what I’m hearing, what I’m seeing, and how it becomes thought for me as I look. I usually write in the presence of the work.

MJ: Like many working artists today, you have a complex, faceted practice.  You’re a painter, but also a critic and an educator—very demanding pursuits. Can you comment on what this is like for you?

JW: Everything counts. Everything you do counts.

It’s Monday. It’s raining. Mostly. What better time to relive the magic that was the DUMBO Arts Festival? See below for slide show and your regular BOMB ALERT goodness.

Tuesday 9/28: Artists Marilyn Minter, Matthew Brannon, and Amy Sillman trade stories on their past “day jobs” in the discussion Will Work for Art moderated by Katy Siegel at the Whitney Museum’s Ida K. Lang Recital Hall at Hunter College, North Building, 695 Park Avenue, 4th Flr.

Wednesday 9/29: Novelist Darin Strauss reads from his memoir Half a Life at McNally Jackson Bookstore.

Friday 10/01: Joan Jonas’ “Reading Dante III” and “Reading Dante II” opens at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, 6-8pm. There will also be a performance and reception of “Reading Dante II” on Saturday, December 11th.

Saturday 10/2: Amie Siegal‘s Black Moon opens at Krome Gallery, 6-9pm.

Sunday 10/3: You’ve probably already got this on your calendar but, Abstract Expressionist New York opens at MoMA this Sunday. Maybe you’ve heard of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Koonig, Mark Rothko, and Joan Mitchell, too? Well did you know they were all BOMB contributors?

In other news:
Former BOMB Managing Editor and, current MoMA PS1 Greater New York 2010 Participant, Lucy Raven talks with filmmaker Thom Anderson in this month’s Artforum! Full article here.

Be sure and check out the current issue of the New Yorker for Fiction for Driving Across America contributor Sam Lipsyte’s latest short story “The Dungeon Master”.

Also, James Merril was interviewed in the Paris Review here.

Melissa Webb, THE TEMPORARY NATURE OF IDEAS at School 33 Art Center. Photograph by Eddie Winter. All images courtesy of the artist.

I arrived at the School 33 Art Center early in the evening to Melissa Webb’s interactive performance installation The Temporary Nature of Ideas. In this “living” installation, gallery visitors were invited to manufacture their own objects to contribute to the installation’s growth. The objects were then hung on the costumes of performers and on  rope pulley systems that were hung across the gallery. When I arrived, the gallery was relatively empty and few people had made objects to contribute to the installation. The sculptural pieces created by Webb that made up the lush, forest-like environment stood on their own as art objects to be apprehended by observation. There were ladders made of wood, branches that were carved into enormous pieces of grass, and earth-toned textile creations draped on the walls. But as people began to flood the gallery, the meaning of the work began to unfold. The real locus of the art emerged at the center of the relations formed between the participants and their environment.

All kinds of people came to the show: young artist types, children, members of the surrounding community, elderly people. They crouched down side-by-side in a room lined with green buckets full of fabric, scissors, glue, and other textile materials. The directions posted on the wall indicated that participants were encouraged to create an object to pay homage to a fleeting, unrealized idea. My friend made a booklet out of purple fabric that had the title “Thesis” glued onto it in bright green fabric, as a tribute to the James Joyce thesis she left uncompleted when she dropped out of school. She hung her object on the poofy skirt of a stilt-mounted and lavishly dressed performer. The performers walked around the gallery interacting with the participants. The interactions were unscripted, but the performers generally responded with glee and excitement whenever a new object was added to the installation. I watched a baby repeatedly hand clothespins (that were used to hang the objects participants made) to a performer before eventually dumping the whole bucket out on the gallery floor. While contemporary art is often derided by non-art appreciators for being elitist, exclusionary, and inaccessible, here was an art show that even babies could “get” because it incorporated elements of play and participation.

Melissa Webb, THE TEMPORARY NATURE OF IDEAS at School 33 Art Center. Photograph by Theresa Keil.

I asked the artist Melissa Webb—who often goes by Missy—about her feelings regarding the show and the nature of art in Baltimore.

Jackie Wang: What is your background? What brought you to Baltimore and what keeps you here? What makes the art community here distinct?

Melissa Web: I grew up out in the country—Westminster, Maryland—and started coming to Baltimore as much as I possibly could, starting when I was 14, mostly to enjoy the local band scene. I was accepted into The Maryland Institute College of Art, and there I focused on sculpture, eventually morphing into installation and performance work, and received a BFA in Fiber Arts. Once I graduated, I stayed here and established the Whole Gallery at the H&H building along with several other artists. I worked collaboratively with a few local performance groups, and whole-heartedly with aminibigcircus, with which I created performances and film for upwards of 12 years. Nothing pulled me away from Baltimore. It was and is my community, and things here keep getting better and better…there is just no good reason to leave, and every good reason to stay.

Baltimore is a very special place to create. For one thing, this is not a money-driven arts community. People don’t buy a ton of artwork here, so many artists are not as motivated by making money. This lack of consumerism can free artists up to experiment in such a wonderful way…to think of their own goals with the work rather than what would sell, and furthermore to make work that could not possibly be sold in the first place. I think that fact helps to put Baltimore on the cutting edge creatively…we are helping to expand the definition of art, and the context in which it is presented. Collaboration is really big here, and I love that. Being involved in collaborations over the years has really fed my work and has made me who I am as an artist.

Instructions for THE TEMPORARY NATURE OF IDEAS. Paintings by Paige Shuttleworth.

JW: How did the concept for the exhibition The Temporary Nature of Ideas come into being? Since the exhibit explores “unrealized” ideas, what was it like trying to execute this show in light of that concept? Did the process of putting on the show mirror the concept at all?

MW: I always wanted to make an installation in the four-story light well at the H&H building. When I lived there I used to stare out the window and dream of transforming that space. I decided that I would finally do this for the 2009 Transmodern Festival, and the organizers were willing to let me.

I have often worked intuitively, preferring this to the straightforward, planned execution of a piece. I like to allow circumstance, happenstance, space, and available materials to guide my process. This discovery in the moment is much more exciting to me than having a plan and following it squarely through. There are so many ideas that I’ve had that are already finished in my brain…they might look good in real space somewhere out there in the world, but my question to myself is always, why? I know what it looks like already, there will be no mystery or suspense involved…so in my head the idea remains. The process of creating The Temporary Nature of Ideas was an exploration of my own stream of consciousness sculpturally, as well as a tribute to the value of “the idea.” If someone has a great idea, even if it is not actually executed, it can still remain valid as an entity unto itself, and should be celebrated as such.

Joe Meduza and Melissa Webb. Photograph by Eddie Winter.

JW: What are your overall feelings about the opening? What things did you notice? How did the night unravel?

MW: The opening was so very grand…At one point I looked around and there were not so many folks in the main gallery and I said to myself, Where is everyone? Then I looked into the making room and there they all were…it was a virtual sea of bodies…friends and complete strangers literally sitting on top of one another with no regard for personal space, reaching across each other to grab a piece of fabric or a glue-gun…everyone with huge smiles, and many with intent, intense looks on their faces while they created their idea objects. Some folks spent the whole night on their creations, and the pulleys in the gallery filled up…slowly at first and by the end of the evening the installation was saturated with people’s contributions.

JW: How did this one compare to the last time you did the The Temporary Nature of Ideas show?

MW: At Transmodern people made their objects on the third floor and lowered them down on pulleys to the performers, who incorporated the objects into the environment. Participants were not allowed to enter the space, which was on a rooftop, and it was decided, reasonably so, that it would be dangerous, or damaging to the roof to let multiple people down there. At School 33, participants can immerse themselves physically into the space and choose the placement of their objects.  There is also a longer time frame so folks can spend as much time as they like in the space and contribute multiple times.

Both incarnations had / have their own individual feel to them—I loved the site-specific nature of the first one, the fact that it was originally a kind of grimy and gloomy looking space that was so drastically transformed by the installation and the objects people contributed. There was a certain drama and sense of danger of looking down from a sixth-story window into the space. It took place at night, and lighting which created giant shadows was a huge element in the overall look. I see the two as distinct scenarios, but at the same time, the sculptural elements of Temporary Nature are componential, and could work in many different types of settings.

JW: I noticed at the opening that this show gained momentum as more people arrived, which altered the energy of the show dramatically. In many ways, the show was not about exhibiting a body of work by an individual artist; it was about what happens when a bunch of people get together in a specific place, at a specific time, with the goal of making something together. Is participation an essential element in your work? Is your work generally interactive?

MW: Participation and interactivity are essential elements. This could change of course at some point, but right now that is really important to me. I see participatory work as collaboration with the audience. I feel that collaboration and intuitive processes go hand and hand because what another individual or in this case, many individuals, can bring to a piece is yet another unknown element, another layer of mystery to unfold. In this way the process continues throughout the life of the work.

Half a Life, a foray into memoir by novelist Darin Strauss, centers on a tragic accident in the author’s life. A testament to how a single event can sustain endless examination and spur a sudden onslaught of introspection, Strauss’ memoir details a personal grief evenly and openly. He discusses memoir, and his decision to explore the subject directly for the first time, in this conversation with Emily Testa.

When a book cover foretells that the story inside will be the bravest I’ve ever read, the contrarian in me takes umbrage. But by the end of Half a Life’s first sentence author Darin Strauss has laid his story’s bones bare: “Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” What follows is a painstaking study of an excavated grief, one that is by turns stark, plaintive, and, yes, very brave.

I spoke to Darin last week, and right away I expressed my surprise at his swerve into memoir. Given his celebrated novels—Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than It Hurts You—I thought he was in the habit of writing fiction. He thought so, too.

Emily Testa: You’ve said that every book you wrote before this was in its own way about the personal tragedy at the center of Half A Life. Does this realization change how you think about your career?

Darin Strauss: There’s a quote I like from Saul Bellow, where he said he didn’t want to go to therapy because he didn’t want to know why he was writing what he was writing. I knew the accident was an important thing in my life, but I thought I had successfully put it in its box. Looking back, it seems obvious. But I guess I was keeping it from myself in order to continue to write. I haven’t started a new book yet. I’m hoping I’m OK with writing real fiction.

ET: In the book, you say you wouldn’t have been a writer if the accident hadn’t happened. Is it that the accident pushed you to think and feel deeply? Or is it that it changed how you understood the world?

DS: I think it’s probably both, because I think they’re kind of bound up together. I wasn’t so introspective before because I didn’t really have much to think about. I was pretty happy—just a regular suburban kid. And then when you become more introspective you start to see the world differently. I don’t know who I would have been if the accident hadn’t happened. It might be too easy for me to say that I definitely wouldn’t have been a writer, because I was always into books. But I know it made me more thoughtful.

ET: A word I keep hearing over and over again about this book is “brave.” But if I only got one word to describe it, I’d say it’s more patient than brave. You work through this extremely dramatic and tragic chain of events—probably, I imagine, the most dramatic, the most tragic in your life to date—and you do it so patiently, waiting until each point is made, each corner of grief and guilt, each vacillating moment, before moving on to the next.

DS: Thanks for saying that. I’m uncomfortable with the word “brave,” and I was a little bummed out when they put it on the cover. It’s very nice that people said that, but bravery to me is a fireman, a policeman, a soldier. I do think I’m lucky that I chose to write about it as my fourth book instead of my first. When I decided I was going to be a writer, I told myself I wasn’t going to touch this subject because it’s very personal, and I thought I’d just invent stories instead. And then I did decide to do it, for all kinds of reasons, but since it was my fourth book I knew how to tell it in a way that I probably wouldn’t have if I had started it at thirty or twenty-five or whenever I started writing my first book. So I was able to do a better job, not only because I knew how to write books but also because it happened twenty years ago, so I had this patience you mentioned enforced upon me by the calendar.

ET: I imagine there are a few detractors out there who might deem a book about a fatal accident, written by the driver who survived, a bit opportunistic. But for me there was absolutely no question of that. The story is so fully considered. It’s so careful.

DS: The last thing I wanted was to be opportunistic, and that’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to write this book earlier. But by the time I started it I had built up a career, so it wasn’t like I was doing it to get attention. My regular publisher is Penguin, and they wanted to do the book but they said it had to be a certain length. I had already decided to write only about the accident, and I wasn’t sure if it was going to be thirty pages or two hundred pages. I just didn’t want it to feel puffed up or cheated. I wanted to respect the subject, and if I had a page requirement I thought my responsibility to the story might be trumped by my responsibility to the publisher. So when my publisher said, “We’ll do it, but it has to be 200 pages,” I said, “I’m not going to do it, then.” And then I heard from McSweeney’s and they said, “We’ll do whatever length you want,” and that was a great relief because I knew I could tell the story without any commercial responsibilities.

ET: And what felt right about the essayistic treatment you give it? For me, the most natural answer is scope—with a page requirement, I end up tacking bloated significance, or the wrong significances, on to events that I might have preferred to discuss in isolation.

DS: Exactly. I was really wary of the kind of books you read where you know they were based on a magazine article or something, and it just feels like a good story that’s been puffed up into an unnatural size. I really didn’t want to do that. And I didn’t want to write a regular memoir, where it goes into what my life was like before the accident, and then what I’m like now. That would have made it a much worse book, and it didn’t seem like it would be respectful to the event. I thought if I could just focus on this one thing, and try to think it through really well, then maybe it could be helpful.

ET: When I read books like yours, books that strike the right balance of telling me a story and making that story tell me something about my world, I feel the full weight of this tectonic shift that has happened in writing. By that I mean that most writers, and especially young ones, misunderstand the point of a novel, and that as a result, most novels aren’t as good as they could be. And I know Half A Life is technically a memoir, but I don’t think memoirs are exempt from those terms. And, besides, most memoirs are terrible.

DS: I don’t really like most contemporary memoirs, either, so I was really wary of writing one. So many memoirs fall into a kind of solipsistic writing, and I didn’t want any part in that.

ET: Speaking of solipsism, let’s talk graduate school. Like just about everybody these days, I went to an MFA program, and a pretty good one, too. But to drink the Kool-Aid there was to become spellbound by too many of the wrong details about writing—you know, book proposals, advances, anecdotal stories of the old guard. None of us thought enough about good, careful, really hard work.

DS: Where did you go to school?

ET: The University of Pittsburgh. And I worked with people I respected, and they wrote books I liked, but there was something that had happened in between the generation of people who were teaching and the people who were in school, and I don’t think any of us thought about it in the right way. Is that your sense? I’m sure my own views have completely contaminated this question.

DS: Actually, I think I had the same sense, and that was why I ended up writing Chang and Eng. I teach at NYU now, but when I was a student there, I didn’t really like it. Everyone was writing autobiographical, boring stories. It’s funny that I’ve written a memoir, because back then I really rebelled against that. I thought, my life is not that interesting, and I don’t want to draw from that narrow well. Instead, I wanted to find the best story possible, especially for my first book. And when I stumbled across the story of Chang and Eng, it was exactly what I was looking for. I mean, twins who were born attached in Old Siam, and the king wanted them dead, and they escaped to America and got caught up in the Civil War and had slaves and got married to sisters and had 21 kids? That beats anything I read in grad school. So I thought, why is no one telling good stories? It was a rebellion against exactly what you’re talking about, people doing small stories in small ways. Telling a good story isn’t exactly un-literary, it’s just that big stories aren’t often told well. If you approach a really accessible story in a smart way, that book will hopefully be the best of both worlds—it will attract readers and it will be fun to read, but it will also be considered and literary. And I couldn’t understand why people weren’t doing more of that.

ET: Do you find yourself discouraging your students from writing what I’ve come to call “the workshop story”—where, you know, a guy named Sam who’s just broken up with his girlfriend is writing about a guy named Sam who’s just broken up with his girlfriend?

DS: No, because I think that can be great. I think I was probably too dogmatic at that stage because some of the writers in my class just weren’t good. And anyway, there are so many good novels that aren’t built around stories, like what Martin Amis calls the “talent novel” that just gets by on the writer’s skill. Like Ulysses—there’s no story there. It’s just an exercise in skill. So I try not to tell people what to do, because the best thing a teacher can do is help a writer accomplish what they’re trying do. That sounds hokey, but the worst workshops I ever took were the ones where the teacher said, “This is how I write, and you have to conform to that.”

ET: Same here. I taught for a while, too, and I think that every rule about what not to do can be confounded by a someone who just squeaks through and does it in an interesting way, or in a smart way, or in a good way. And it’s hard enough to write a good book, so probably the less rules the better.

DS: I agree, but I also think principles of writing can really be taught—how to get a story going, for instance. The important thing is to teach those things and then to say, “All of these rules are meant to be broken,” and show examples of where and how they’re broken. I tell my students it’s fine if they break the rules, but that they should be convinced they’re doing it for the right reasons. If it serves the story and you can come up with a good strategic reason why it’s better than what we’ve seen in the past, then go for it.

ET: You said you don’t have your next writing project waiting in the wings. I’m just wondering if your method for finding one has changed since you’ve grown into the writer you wanted to be.

DS: Well, I’m always on the lookout for a good story. Like you said, it’s very hard to write a good book, and you have to find a story that’s going to interest you for 300 pages and maybe three years of your life. I’m desperate to find stories, and whatever sparks my interest, I’ll follow it. That certainly hasn’t changed. To me, the best advice you can give a writer is something I heard Norman Mailer say once—the difference between an amateur writer and a professional writer is that an amateur can afford to wait until inspiration strikes.

ET: That’s a great quote.

DS: Well, if you wait for the days when you really feel like doing it, you’ll never get it done. You have to grind it out and say, I don’t feel like writing this morning but I’ll have an extra cup of coffee and hopefully something will come. You might throw everything away the next day because it was no good, but you’ve got to at least get in there and roll up your sleeves and start hacking away.

Darin Strauss’ Half a Life is available now from McSweeney’s.

This weekend performance artists, poets, painters, drummers, dancers, and other interesting people will occupy the DUMBO waterfront community. But don’t be alarmed. It’s not a hostile takeover. Just the DUMBO Arts Festival (September 24-26) making its annual mark on your imagination, creative spirit and all five senses. Still, you might want to be prepared. It’s a good idea to take a look here so that when the bridge anchorage starts expanding out towards you while water balloons sail through the air to the Operatic stylings of a sword carrying acrobat you will know that the appropriate response is wonder, not fear. Notice an unusual amount of Steam Punk attire? What appear to be giant hamster balls? The casual consumption of crickets? Jonathan Lethem peddling paperbacks of Chronic City? All to be expected. Seriously (spoilers aside), with over 500 local and international artists participating you needed a preview. And you’re going to need coverage. And the BOMBlog’s not a bad place for both. Stay tuned for more highlights from the festival coming later this week!

See below for a sneak peak at Hungarian artist Farkas Fülöp’s new work, Mobile in Motion, which uses video mapping to make the stones of the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage do crazy, wondrous things.

KICK-OFF UPDATE! Today’s the day folks. And we’re here with a few more videos that will be shown at various DUMBO locations this weekend just to get you started. Set the tone. Ease you into it. That being said, the BOMBlog is not liable for any seizures induced by Thomas Draschen’s FRUEDE.

FREUDE from thomas draschan on Vimeo.

Zygote (full length) from Light Harvest Studios – Ryan Uzi on Vimeo.

St. Alban from Matl Findel on Vimeo.

In C, his newest novel, Tom McCarthy proposes a state of being that revolves many parts around an unusual temporal whole and, once again, circumvents the conventions of 19th-century realism.  Writer David Varno delves in.

C, Tom McCarthy’s latest novel, opens in slow, impressionistic time, with a guided view of scenes glimpsed through trees from a horse-drawn carriage. But the book’s time speeds up when Serge Carrefax, the central character, is old enough to build his own telegraph receiver. His mast, which takes time to build, reaches 500 meters, then 650 meters, within a single scene, as he picks up further-flung transmissions from across the seas. The novelistic conventions of 19th-Century realism, which Zadie Smith honored McCarthy for circumventing with his first novel, Remainder, in her landmark essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” are again turned on their heel.

In the middle of the book, a war artist named Carlisle voices a realist’s frustration. He has been commissioned by the Royal Air Force to document the WWI campaign in France. While spinning around in the air with the pilot, struggling to keep his paints from spilling all around and out into the sky from the open cockpit, the artist is at a loss to represent—or even see—his version of reality. Serge Carrefax, master of the skies, is unsympathetic. “Which is cloud?  Which land?”  Carlisle complains.  Serge’s reply: “Does it matter?”

For most of the characters in C, the natural world seems to go unnoticed. Oceans and streams flow behind their backs, manifesting “shapes and pictures” that they never see. They are more captivated by chemical reactions and electrical currents. While Serge’s mother is in labor with him, his father is more interested in a delivery of copper, which will allow him to receive airborne telegraph signals from the main line, and Serge will grow up to inherit the obsession with the currents that circulate in the air. The year is 1898, and this is historical fiction that is about history itself, the waves that come and go, sweeping over themselves like radio signals and weather patterns. History is generally comprehended with perspective, but Serge, as he grows, is incapable of this. Literally, he does not understand the concept; his childhood tutor, during art lessons, fails to impart on him any techniques that would represent spatial relations, and so all of his pictures are flat.

The novel’s progression is linear but not linear. For Serge, and probably for McCarthy, history is perpetually rewritten. Fighter planes’ jet exhaust is twined again and again, and also overlaps with radio waves and weather patterns, systems of energy that remain in the air as they go round and round. With this in mind, what is the most realistic way to present the world? “How you going to paint something if you can’t even see what it is?” The artist Carlisle shouts. This is not a problem for Serge, whose perception of the world is shaped by a combination of what he imagines, feels, and anticipates. He’s not a solipsist, though; he’s a futurist, and a fugitive from a J.G. Ballard novel. He’s happy to crash into things, especially while buzzing on cocaine and heroin at top speed.

The phenomenon of static repetition, and possibilities for new, unexpected results, were explored in Remainder. As in Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints, which took on new characteristics each time a silkscreen was reused, unexpected nuances developed in the scenarios repeated by Remainder’s central character. In C, McCarthy proposes a state of being that revolves many parts around an unusual temporal whole, a stasis that Serge is pulled into while observing a German missile from the cockpit that moves alongside the plane at the same speed.

The character may not change, or develop any sense of self-awareness, but McCarthy lets us fill in the dots with more freedom than we had as readers of Remainder, which made us complicit with the protagonist and his violent, compulsive act. Here, he gives us an exciting ride through the beginning of the first global, radio-connected century, with a character who sees the horrors of the Great War as amusing curiosities, but he doesn’t ignore the forces in the chain of history (or spiral, or fount) that brings us to such horrors, which we have no reason to suspect will spare us the next time.

Tom McCarthy’s C is available now from Knopf.

Samuel Maoz made Lebanon to make sense of his own experiences as a soldier in the Lebanese war of the 1980s. Montana Wojczuk assesses the film and addresses the gestation period for clear narratives that deal with traumatic events in history.

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

“War stories aren’t really anything more than stories about people,” writes Michael Herr in his 1977 book Dispatches.  When the book was released it was heralded as a new form of rock and roll journalism, a hallucinatory elegy to the Vietnam war. Robert Stone called it “the best personal journal about war, any war, that any writer has ever accomplished.”  Herr would likely disagree with this. “We got out,” he writes in Dispatches “and became like everyone else who has been through a war: changed, enlarged and (some things are expensive to say) incomplete.”

Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz says he had to make his new film, Lebanon, in part to make sense of his own experiences as a soldier in the Lebanese war of the 1980s.

Lebanon, which won this year’s Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival (awarded by a committee chaired this year by Ang Lee), is a stunning film that brings war up close, both through characters and through a visual language that underscores and deepens its political argument.  The film follows a small group of Israeli soldiers who fight out their portion of the war from inside a tank.  The film was shot almost entirely in an actual tank, Maoz says they had to build a larger than standard-size tank specifically to fit their small amount of equipment inside.   Lebanon does especially remarkable things with perspective, almost never leaving the tank itself and viewing the outside world through its scope.  Because we see the world through gun sights, we begin to share the incredibly uneasy feeling of having the power over others of life or death—and, as the sights focus in on civilian and soldier alike, the mounting anxiety over not knowing who the enemy actually is.

Although Herr, a journalist, wrote about the Vietnam War as it happened, his fragmented style made an argument against negative capability, against the idea that a narrative is possible during wartime.  Most often, artists require a gestation period for any clear narrative to emerge from traumatic events.  (There were arguably few good 9/11 books until the 2009 National Book Award Winner Let the Great World Spin, by Irish author Colum McCann.)

Zohar Strauss as Jamil. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

It is significant, then, that in the past few years we have seen a burgeoning of art and literature dealing with Lebanon’s bloody civil war, which raged through the ‘80s and decimated the city of Beiruit. From Rawi Hage’s 2006 debut novel DeNiro’s Game, which won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, about two teenagers growing up in Beruit in the ‘80s, to Ari Folman’s award-winning animated film Waltz With Bashir in 2008, understanding the harrowing effect of unpredictable terror and shifting loyalties of the Lebanese Civil War must seem particularly urgent to those who would seek to prevent its resurgence elsewhere.

The violence in Lebanon is literally all around you—during much of the film a dead Israeli soldier stinks up the tank, something rotten in the belly of the beast—and yet, because the violence is personalized Muoz achieves the difficult feat of resensitizing his audience.  Some have called this an anti-war film, but the political message is never so simple.  War here is a character, as terrifying in its unpredictability as the soldiers themselves. In one elongated moment the young gunner risks his own and his group’s lives while he hesitates to fire. Looking through the sights at a man coming closer and closer in a truck, he, and we, can see the man’s face—all at once we realize that he, in contrast to the other soldiers, is forced to look people in the eye, before he kills them.  In the gun sight’s magnified eye he can literally see a man’s pupil as the light goes out.

And yet, part of what differentiates this film from, say, Apocalypse Now, is that it’s not unrelenting.  Moments of levity are provided not by a joking sidekick, as with many war films, but through the camera itself.  The impotence of a gun trained on nothing but trees and grass relieves it of its violent potential.  In one memorable scene the soldiers find themselves unexpectedly in a field of sunflowers.  In one of the few wide shots of the film, the camera pulls back and back, the tank receding amidst the hulking flowers, their heads heavy, looking like a child’s toy under the unlikely blue sky.  Throughout the film the tank itself reflects our contradictory attitudes toward war—its hulking shell is both protection and a trap.

In an audience talkback after the New York Film Festival screening of Lebanon, Muoz said that what he remembered most from his time as a young soldier was the smell.  The violence in Lebanon stings you in the nose, and its most powerful anti-war message may lie in the fact that even months later you feel like you’ve inhaled it, in that particularly intimate way of standing so close to someone that you begin to smell them.

Find out when Lebanon is screening in your city.

John Reed’s Tales of Woe offers a parade of captivating, affronting stories that challenge and delight—er, disturb—the reader. BOMBlog’s Ben Mirov wades through the tears.

Tales of Woe by John Reed is a shamelessly unpleasant collection of non-fictional accounts of people caught in horrible, gut-wrenching situations. Approximating the look a graphic novel or pulp trade paperback, Tales of Woe contains illustrations of real-life horror stories from 11 different artists, which enhance the horrific, hilarious, unbelievable stories. One of the book’s most redeeming aspects (if you can call it that) is that it is completely void of didacticism, hope, and redemption. Instead, Tales of Woe offers a parade of captivating, affronting stories that challenge and delight—er, disturb—the reader.

Ben Mirov: I was wondering what drove you to make this book? What about this particular idea attracted you?

John Reed: To culture, to governments, to publishers, literature is propaganda.  To writers, literature is protest.  That’s the ongoing struggle; the writer loses, almost always. I recently got an email from a woman I barely know, who critiqued the book with this quotation:

“Human life is truly a short affair. It is better to live doing things that you like. It is foolish to live in this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and only doing things that you do not like.” – Yamamoto Tsunetomo

The assumption is that I was miserable writing the book, that I didn’t want to do it—and it was a painful project at times.  The critique is a common one, not only of woe but of all kinds of art and journalism, but very odd really—to assume that you’re better living secluded from the truth, to assume that that’s even possible.  These stories are upsetting because I didn’t stick a happy ending on them, because I didn’t pretend that these people, these suffering people, did something to deserve their pain.  The story of sin, suffering, redemption is the story that our culture tells over and over again.  We like to call it a universal story—but we’ve found in exportation that other cultures don’t see sin, suffering, redemption as something integral to their universe.  We like to build that structure into our newspaper reports, our historical investigations, our lives—but there’s no truth in the structure.  Sometimes terrible things happen for no reason.  Expecting something good to come of your own suffering is a sure way to misery.  And looking for reasons that other people deserve to suffer—it’s inhuman.

Another friend of mine, Ellen Pearlman, a journalist, also sent me an email with a quotation. The first Noble Truth of the four Noble Truths of Buddhism: “Life is suffering.”

BM: How did you go about culling materials for Tales of Woe? What were your sources? Were you looking for particular themes or just the most horrible stories you could find?

JR: I had this idea that we could run the gamut. Represent one of each type of miserable story. I quickly saw that I wouldn’t be able to do that. Not only were the stories that we found much worse than we expected—meaning that the stories would be twice as long and we’d have to limit ourselves to 25 (we’d planned 50)—the variety of tales was seemingly endless.  I did my best to indicate the spectrum, put pins all over the globe, and have a group of stories that held together.

Sources?  Mostly local newspapers, and after that, the internet, emails and the phone.

BM: Did you fictionalize the pieces to any extent?

JR: No.

BM: I’m curious to know how you see this book as a continuation of your previous work. Can you see a pattern in terms of your, for lack of a better term, aesthetic aims? In my mind, Tales of Woe, much like your previous work, is outsider, irreverent, and subversive towards traditional categories of literature. Or is this assessment way off base?

JR: Someone recently explained to me how all my books were the same, and I was like, Holy Cow, you’re right!  Now, of course, I can’t remember what they said. I would be satisfied if I contributed something to the death of “literature.”  I suppose I feel the same way about history. To echo Henry Ford: “History is bunk.” New books—new books like the piles of new books I have right here next to me—are extraordinary, and powerful, and relevant.  It crushes me to see some mediocre canonical tome in the hands of a high school student.  Their eyes are drifting, you know they think reading has nothing to do with them, because that book has nothing to do with them, and as soon as they get out of school, they’ll never pick up something like that again.  And who can blame them?  A conservative culture pushes a backlist, a canon, a list of greats—because that’s the most efficient way to mute the voice of contemporary artists.

BM: Can you talk about the way the book was printed and why you chose the look of the book (Tales of Woe includes illustrations from a large number of artists, is printed in white font on high gloss black paper and feels more like a graphic novel than a traditional collection of stories).

JR: We thought we could do it—that was much of the incentive.  The design software (not actually that easy to lay out a white-on-black book), the printing process, the ability to transfer large files over the Internet: the book seemed plausible.  Turned out it was much closer to implausible than we guessed, but we had Walter Einenkel, the designer, to perform the miracles.

I was always thinking that Tales of Woe could look more like an archetypal book, which I’d equate with the Illuminated Manuscript. Art and text belong together—went together well into the 19th century—until the limits of mass production made the inclusion of art time-intensive and materially expensive. More and more books have an integrated art component; it’s an inevitable evolution.

The black pages: I struggled quite a bit with that. The art popped, and in the end, it felt like the most respectful way to present the stories.

BM: Where did you find so many artists willing to participate in the project? Were they friends? How did you go about involving them in the project?

JR: I knew one of the artists slightly.  I’d met him casually once, and kept in touch with him by email.  Patrick McQuade.  He’d already done some major projects, and the work was hard to forget.  All the other artists, we found in a fairly exhaustive search. Delia Gable was the one recommendation; Elisabeth Alba brought her to my attention. I believe I told Elisabeth what I felt like I still needed to find, and Delia was spot on. We wanted all the art to share a sort of high-art, contemporary pulp feel, but we also wanted variation—like the old pulp journals—to accentuate the stories, as opposed to the illustrative style.

BM: Do you have a favorite story in the book? Is so, why does that particular story appeal to you more than the others?

JR: The most upsetting story, to me, is “Momma’s Little Angel,” because I have young children. But “Father Knows Death” is also pretty awful.  What I like about the stories as a whole—and I say this feeling a bit like an alien handed me this object and told me to hustle it—is that I appreciate my own life more. I have a hard time taking my own petty nonsense seriously.  Terrible things happen to people for no reason. I get to go home and hang out with my kids.

BM: You’ve been producing books at a frequent rate. Is there anything new in the works you’d like to tell us about?

JR: Is that frequent?  Thanks!  Though I wonder if it’s true. Well, I’m fiddling with a bunch of things. A boxer musical: a few drafts away. A web comic with Michele Witchipoo, one of the artists from Tales of Woe, called Shitty Mickey. That’s at shittymickey.com.  Season two coming soon!

Tales of Woe is available now from MTV Press.