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I don't know if you would classify your new book as an anti-memoir, but that's certainly how it reads.Gary Indiana: It's sort of structured to thwart people's expectations.... I found it almost consistently painful to do because I just kept thinking, "I don't really care to reveal this much about my life." If people can pin something on you they think they know everything about you. I'm a homosexual. "Oh, he's gay," or stuff like that. I really spent my whole career trying to elude those kinds of easy classifications of what I do because being gay is not my subject. I'm interested in the world.
Your novels are already so autobiographical. So was this memoir a different conceit in that it would be explicitly about you in real life, as opposed to writing what you know as literature?GI: My novels are not in any way documentaries of my life, but I've used a lot of things that happened to me in those books, and what happened to the people around me.
Also, this is a kind of latter-day consideration: There has been so much necrophile sentimentality of the '80s, as if they were this wonderful period. They really weren't. In the '80s — everybody died. I don't know how many people I know died in the prime of their lives, and I don't want to revisit that in any way whatsoever. Also, I know everything that's happened to New York City, or most of the things that have happened to New York City, are lamentable and horrifying if you have any class-consciousness or any social conscience. I truly don't miss the old days. I'm interested in my life now and what happens in my life now. I'm not enamored of the past as my image of perfection.
How did you stumble into other mediums, like photography, playwriting, visual art, actor?GI: I think everything for me is a form of writing. It's a form of tracking my own consciousness and my own experience of the world in some way, registering it in some way. Sometimes you can't write, sometimes you don't want to write. Sometimes language is too imperfect somehow. Sometimes language doesn't convey what you want to convey. Doing photography, video or film or anything like that I always feel like I'm writing. I'm somebody who is very preoccupied with form. Anybody that really reads my novels will understand this, because no two are remotely alike formally. I try to do as big a spread as possible in terms of the formal experiments.
In this new book, your ruminations on the past, including your estranged relationship with a writer friend like Susan Sontag feel cathartic. How do you see it?GI: For at least eight years, I had daily contact with Susan Sontag. Either we saw each other, went out, talked on the phone, whatever, so I have every right to describe what I feel about Susan, what I thought about Susan. Maybe what's in the book is harsh, but Susan was a very harsh person, and she was a very difficult person to be a friend to and after a while one realized that it was impossible to be a friend to Susan and not be a hypocrite.
Gary Indiana
I Can Give You Anything But LoveRizzoli Ex Libris'The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today,” Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With
I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book yet—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.'
-- RizzoliExcerptThings to remember better: Ferd Eggan entered my life in San Francisco in 1969, the year I dropped out of Berkeley. I had what today are called sexual identity issues that made it impossible to concentrate in any degree-winning manner on Viennese philosophy and English literature, my ostensible areas of study. I had drifted away from classes and begun crashing at various communes in houses around the Berkeley campus. One was a Trotskyite commune; another featured a study group of Frankfurt School scholars with guest lectures by Herbert Marcuse (that also raised funds for the Tupamaros); another went in for encounter sessions and scream therapy; my final Berkeley commune was devoted to cultivating peyote cacti and magic mushrooms.
I met Ferd on a film set. He was helming a new wrinkle in the developing canon of narrative porn cinema from his own co-written script (“exhibitionist flashes nymphomaniac, fucking ensues!”—a meet-cute picture). I was “sexually involved” by that time—not on camera—with one of the stars of The Straight Banana, a tall bisexual Nebraskan refugee often billed as Mr. Johnny Raw, or just plain Johnny Raw, whose penis was a minor celebrity in the Bay Area.
Johnny Raw, aka Leonard Jones of Omaha, lived in the Marina district. I never socialized with him. I hardly knew him. I didn’t care about him. His self-involvement was hermetic and vaguely reptilian. Johnny Raw called the creeps who bought tickets to jerk off in theaters showing his films as “the fans,” and believed he was an actual movie star. He was boastful, stupid, pathetically narcissistic and sad, but such a deluded asshole it was impossible to feel sorry for him. I liked how he looked, he liked how I looked looking at him, that was literally all we shared.Whenever we stumbled over each other that summer, both in a half-drunken stupor, in the same bar, at the same midnight hour, we rushed like robots directly to the Marina in a cab, and got it on—without passing Go, without collecting $200, without spending a minute longer in each other’s company when we finished than I needed to put my clothes on and leave.
I never took my clothes off, actually. Shoes, maybe. Johnny Raw usually just pulled his dick and balls out or lowered his pants to his ankles. Gay youth of today may find it incomprehensible, but “having sex” with Johnny Raw ten or fifteen times that summer didn’t involve Johnny Raw fucking me, or me fucking Johnny Raw. I was unusually innocent for my age—and, it’s the truth, extremely pretty and sought after at 19. I admit that by my present lights, I have to agree with former President Clinton that he did not have sex with that woman. By today’s standards, I had been around far too long to hook up with men and then do nothing except service them with a Monica Lewinsky. But that was as far as I’d ever gone. No one had shown me how to go anywhere else. Incredibly or not, despite skipping grades in secondary school and thus entering a Top 5 university in a major urban area at 16, despite having read Jean Genet, John Rechy, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, and many others who had certainly “gone all the way” in the rear more often than they’d brushed their teeth—more directly to the point, even regardless of a precocious history of fellatio with other boys since 7th grade, I had no concept whatsoever of anal sex. I wasn’t aware of it as something many people did. A true son of 1950s backwoods New Hampshire, I thought sodomy was an arcane, specialized perversion, like bestiality. Believed, in fact, that a rectum capable of accommodating even an average penis was such a rare aberration of nature that only a handful of anally deformed individuals ever attempted it. “Fucking,” in my mind, exclusively meant male on female, vaginal penetration.
For months after leaving Berkeley, I lived in the attic of a hippy commune with no special theme going on, in a leased house on 17th Street. By coincidence, a tenant on the floor below was Johnny Raw’s co-star in The Straight Banana. Grinda Pupic, a licensed practical nurse whose legal name was Bonnie Solomon, helped secure the attic for me when I moved across the Bay, as a favor to a friend of a friend in Berkeley.
A relentlessly sultry, ebullient secular Jew, Bonnie’s extraordinary sang-froid enabled her to resume her end of an argument about local zoning laws between takes, while the bone-hard penis of a co-star remained idling in her lady parts. Among friends and co-workers she exuded a generally misleading maternal solicitude. At the Nocturnal Dream Shows in North Beach, Bonnie sang with the Nickelettes, a sort of hallucinatory second chorus line and feminist auxiliary of the Cockettes. We occasionally had sex together. I wasn’t a frontal virgin. Bonnie was awfully nice, and surprisingly tough.
I tagged along with her on a location shoot in the Sausalito hills, riding shotgun in a pickup driven by a hippie sound engineer, a roguishly black-bearded ex-Mouseketeer with a doomed aura named Brando Batty. (According to the State of California, that was his real name. He once showed me his driver’s license.) By nightfall I had a temp job, as emergency gaffer and continuity girl on The Straight Banana shoot. My thing with the eponymous Straight Banana (we just referred to him as Banana, really) quickly lapsed, in the easy manner of the day, into a different thing with Ferd, who already had a male squeeze and a more involving embranglement with an older woman named Carol.
Carol was not that much older, chronologically. Her weariness suggested she’d survived the Titanic and much else of cosmic historical significance. Older than a thousand years, still bitter over some deal gone terribly south in ancient Babylon, Carol sat stiffly in the cab of Brando Batty’s truck all afternoon, pencilling irritable remarks on her script or flipping through Variety. I was mad attracted to Ferd, but completely spellbound by Carol. She had the vibe of somebody who’d lived the nightmare in a big, expensive way. Short, wiry-limbed, her glossy auburn hair poodled in a perky cut, she seemed implacable enough to launch a military coup in South America.
(cont.)Gary Indiana "I CAN GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE" LaunchGary Indiana "Diving for Teeth"Gary Indiana Reads "Bella is Bella"______________________
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'"I never dreamed about my mother before her death," begins Jancie Lee's latest book,
Reconsolidation. "Since her death four months ago, I haven't been able to escape her in my dreams."
'What we are entered into thereafter is the author's intense mourning, grief, in the midst of which she pieces together a collage-like inquisition of her parent's death by aneurysm. The fragmentary range of facts and feelings are splayed across a shifting sand of approaches and inquisitions, confessions, interpolations.
'The effect is somehow both sobering and otherworldly at the same time, a heavy, breathing kind of light. Lee's voice is clear and clinical in presenting and confronting what has been brought before it. Each page is spare and thoughtfully considered, open, trying to find a center to its loss. It moves between sharp rational facts to questions without answers to quotes from Derrida and Sebald to the author's confrontation with her own OCD and forms of regret to an ongoing analysis of why we remember what we remember and what remains in phantom ways of what has passed.
'As much as the reality itself, Lee takes considerable time prying into the spiritual fugue state from which the words of the book are derived. She writes, "new information is often incorporated into the old memory. The emotional or psychological state you are in when you recall that memory will inevitably influence the reconsolidated memory. Recalling a memory during these stages of inadequacy, repentance, sought-after impossibilities, recalling a memory under these conditions may be dangerous. The memory, a symbol for a strange form of affliction and permanence of love, may be changed forever."
'The book begins to feel alive. It is thinking within its own Wittgenstein-like thinking. It has its own brain and its own heart, one as replenishing in spirit as it is haunted. I can't remember reading a book that so precisely and empathetically allows the reader to consider death and existence so directly. Its openness and willingness to search for meaning in the midst of pain is refreshing in its calmness.' -
- Blake Butler, VICEJanice Lee
Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer youPenny-Ante Editions'Memory assists perception, grounding our understanding of those around us and those who have left their traces through time – but how reliable is memory really? Memory is malleable, shaped and shifted through consolidation and reconsolidation. Consolidation is the neurological process that stores memories after an event’s occurrence; reconsolidation refers to a process whereby consolidated memories later become unstable, causing false or loose recall.
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Reconsolidation: Or, it’s the ghosts who will answer you is a lyrical montage born out of the eternal loss of a loved one. Powerfully crafted during grief’s inertia, Janice Lee elegantly weaves the present with recollections of a tenuous past, arresting memory’s flexible and vulnerable position in the lifelong process of mourning. A eulogy for a loved one – pure and honest –
Reconsolidation is a poetic search for a lost connection.'
-- Penny-Ante EditionsRelatedThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
When I close my eyes and try to remember my mother’s face, I see instead a blurry image that comes to stand in for my mother. That is, all I can really see is a blur with hair, a face without details, a body without specificity. There is no characteristic that marks this blur as my mother, yet I can confirm that it is her, even if it’s not really her, even if none of the details are visible. I know it’s her because I can feel it. And in these moments, in the after, this is how memory works. Feeling and approximation standing in for physicality and presence.
The entire world forms along a wound. And the deeper the wound, the more intimate the relationship. Loss as a chasm that can’t be closed, rendered through an inarticulateable restlessness that persists and severs a person’s trajectory.
I knew briefly who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. And then suddenly these questions became terrifying. Who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. Question marks that dot the periphery of the horizon line. A setting sun is devastating because the magnetization felt from the dimming light guarantees a certain surrender, a certain uncertainty, traumatize without a frame, just the resonant light.
The hardest part about losing someone is that marked feel of their absence. It creeps up genuinely and creates a paratactic assault. Symptoms include peculiar changes in behavior, revelations that ruin rather than inspire, schemes that disappear, and dietary changes.
While she is alive, even if you are out of touch, even if you haven’t spoken to her in months, you know that she is there. And the knowledge of that existence is enough to keep you complacent. In the knowing of her alive-ness, the knowing of her presence, whether or not you are sitting there with her, she is there.
But when she is gone, you realize suddenly and violently that she is gone. Suddenly you have memories, memories that did not exist before because there was no reason to remember. And you try to remember those memories because you know that you won’t ever be able to see her again, yet because these memories are created through a death, carefully cut holes that offer glimpses, the previous complacency becomes condemnation becomes denial becomes a forced extraction. The memories become more difficult to reach, more elusive. You want to to reach out and beckon for the ghost because you need her to affirm that your memory is still accurate and reliable, but she is reluctant. Beyond the givenness of anything, she hides from revelation, or, you are unable to to decipher it.
The absence is so marked by the knowing of her presence in life. That is, you only feel her absence so much now because you suddenly realize how present she really was, during all that time you weren’t talking to her, weren’t there with her, weren’t spending time with her, all along she was there.
The conjuration is a false and hopeless one, reliant on old photographs and ashes. She lives and dies, lives and dies all over again in every speculation of context, every reconstruction. The blurred image is tattered, torn apart by reckless pulling, and a memory born of a wound is a wound in itself.
You realize that she doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, not in any tangible form. You realize that she now only exists in your memory. And that is a terrifying thought. It shakes you, bitter and nauseous and you fall to the floor choking, gagging, laughing madly, tears streaming down your cheeks.
I ask myself, from a safe distance: How can I rely on the fact that somebody who was so important to me now only lives on in the most unreliable parts of myself? I can’t even remember her face.
It’s only the general feeling that lingers. And this feels like a fucking copout.
Memory loss isn’t simple or gradual, like a body of water moving through a canyon. It’s more like a series of catatonic attacks. Dreaded feelings that are so visceral I feel like I’m tumbling down a flight of stairs, landing in a spotlight of dust. Then, a new scarring from indelible impressions that are murky, resurrected with little or no evidence. Accuracy isn’t a term that is relevant here. Neither is truth.
In the end, it’s as if the phrase “I remember” is a performance. A performance of remembering that indicates remembering but “remembering” is so different now. Always susceptible to modulations of terror in the middle of the night, in the morning, in dreams.
While driving and inching forward in traffic on my way home last week, I happened to gaze upon an older lady, dressed in a flowery dress over a long-sleeve shirt, thick black stockings, and orange heels. Though there wasn’t anything obviously wrong with the scene, the details seemed to add up to something a little bit odd, a little bit off. Something about her hair perhaps, as if she was wearing a wig, or the way that she walked slowly, limping a little bit with a cane, or perhaps her outfit, seemingly inappropriate for the extremely warm weather. The entire experience was of watching a movie, as if I wasn’t really watching this happen outside my car window, but somehow I had been transported into a parallel dimension and this was the set of a comedy movie in which a middle-aged actor has dressed up as a woman, and this is the beginning of some bad joke. And then, a group of people cross the street and walk past the old woman, while a man gets off work and exits through a metal gate holding a lunchbox and a sweatshirt draped over his shoulder. He stays hidden from the sun with a baseball cap, and his pants are baggy and soiled. The scene seems entirely natural, entirely choreographed, entirely strange. The old woman then hobbles around the corner to a bus stop where she waits but only a few seconds before a bus pulls up to pick her up. Right on time. And at that moment, when I’m absolutely sure I’m watching some televised scene somehow through my car window, when I feel that I’ve broken some distance wasn’t meant to be breached, observing something up close that was meant to be seen from a far, I suddenly feel a rustle along my right arm. A slight tingle or breeze that feels like a finger brushing against my arm, intentionally, conceivably. A certain presence: known and felt. I run my fingers along the hairs on my arm to acknowledge it, garner a feeling, a memory. I remember my mother.
The sun is setting and I watch the light that pushes through between the trees. The dogs are sitting on the dirt, holding their paws up expectantly. Darkness creeps in quickly above the orange haze, layers of colors embedded into the dimming fabric of the sky, darkening and spinning and flat and weary. The darkness starts off blurry, then crisp edges in the periphery, then murky black and deep-blue. Here, the wound revealed by the setting sun is not so different from the others, and what I remember, is a face.
Janice Lee reads from ReconsolidationDamnation Video Review at the LitPub by Peter Tieryas LiuReview of Janice Lee's Daughter by Angela Xu and Peter Tieryas Liu_______________
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'I knew almost nothing about Gregory Markopoulos’ films — I had seen only one of his films one time, just eight months before, so Beavers’ brief mention of Asclepios offered a welcome structure with which to contain the daunting stimulations of the coming days. When I reached back to the dream I had had the night before, my first in Greece, I saw that incubation had already begun. I had dreamt of a man, a New Yorker, TV producer, and hustler, whose seductions I could only partially resist. He had the oversized and suited body of Wallace Stevens, and a never-ending apartment of jewel-colored rooms. My feelings about this man were mixed: the old-fashioned aura of show-biz around him struck me as corrupt, but time alone in his apartment led me to gather the possibility of his depths. I learned that he had spent time in Europe as a young man — in snapshots he was tan and wore a white uniform. And after a nap and a face-washing I met him at a leather booth for brandy. And then he created a wild spectacle in the middle of a green park lawn.
'He had assembled a bouquet of golf clubs, and attached to the top of each a spray of colored feathers, mimicking a blossom. At the last minute a woman searched for a dark blue feather — the tableau of colors was not correctly balanced, and the addition of blue to one corner of the bouquet-top fixed the composition. And then a handful of children helped send the bouquet into the air; it grew bigger according to my lifted vantage point in the sky. The man was a spectacle-maker. He had launched the feather-flowers for the pleasure of the children.
'Like an analysand’s first dream, this one was a collage of prefiguration: the picture of a color spectacle in the sky over a lawn (the Temenos screening situation itself); the idea of cleansing and purification rituals (the face-washing, nap and brandy) necessary, according to the conventions of Asclepion mythology, to prepare for the incubatory dream-state; a deep ambivalence about submitting to a masterful figure whose visionary powers, creative bravura, and maleness are inextricably bound; and a wish for involvement in the creative act (the woman’s blue feather addition) beyond the position of worshipful spectatorship. Indeed, the Temenos presents for some — as it did for me — a dilemma regarding power. I was worried that I had traveled to Greece in order to worship at Markopoulos’ temple.
The sharing of dreams is a tricky undertaking, but I hope my rhetorical point is clear. Dreamwork is the most essential site of transformation and of non-compliance, and, outside psychoanalysis, I can think of no cultural form that makes space for the forgotten givenness and essential labor of dreams as the Temenos does. Given the problem of language and time with respect to dreams — they must accumulate, and interact with the air and the words of waking life, in order for their wishes to be legible — you might say that the 80 hour length of Eniaios is deeply sensible: it gives one a chance, that is, to make dreams a reality.'
-- Rebekah Rutkoff Rebekah Rutkoff
The Irresponsible Magician: Essays and FictionsSemiotext(e)'Sharp, acerbic, and often humorous, Rebekah Rutkoff's writings about contemporary culture reflect the present in ways reminiscent of Renata Adler's and Joan Didion's writings about urban life in the late twentieth century. Moving freely between fact and fiction, utilizing imaginary interviews, accidental stories, and critical essays,
The Irresponsible Magician approaches psychoanalysis and celebrity on a first-name basis.
'Writing about cultural figures as diverse as Oprah Winfrey, Michel Auder, the Kennedy women, William Eggleston, Gregory Markopulos, and Hilda Doolittle, Rutkoff interprets protagonists as if they were figures in a dream. Navigating a world of painting, cable television, video art, avant-garde film, memories, or Rutkoff's own photographs, these texts read images like tea leaves, opening up a space in which shadows speak more eloquently than symbols or signs.'
-- Semiotext(e)ExcerptThe Art of Transcribing a SunsetI refuse to be the dupe of a kind of magic which brandishes before an eager public albums of colored photographs instead of the now vanished native masks. Perhaps the public imagines that the charms of the savages can be appropriated through the medium of these photographs. – Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss forcefully registers his skepticism about the capacity of color photographs to transmit an anthropological journey in the opening pages of
Tristes Tropiques (its first sentence: “I hate traveling and explorers.”). He wants to keep magic for himself, on the interior of an ethnographic escapade, guarded by the boundaries of his professional expertise and sensitivity; naïve are those who believe native secrets can be imprinted on photographic paper, who fall for identification between color and the real. As he says, “Nowadays, being an explorer is a trade, which consists not, as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts after years of study, but in covering a great many miles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in color, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succession”. The proof- boasting quality of photographic forms, both still and moving, is so obvious that it exposes its own sham. And in his vision of the impressionable who are attracted to such charades and “fill halls,” Lévi-Strauss imagines a continuous flow of bodies and misguided curiosities to match the mesmerizing flow of mo- tion pictures: a foil to his solitary excursions and the erratic rhythms of their physical and mental labors. Though he doesn’t say so, these colored pictures are clearly a foil to language as well.
But in his “Sunset” chapter—the transcription of a setting sun seen from aboard a Brazil-bound ship, shortly after departing from Marseilles in 1934— Lévi-Strauss rides on color, and produces an optical trip with language. In so doing, he provides my favorite example of the power of color to shock a philosophical investigation into quiet submission, transmission occurring not via the reality-imprint of a photograph but along the surface of a colored picture that’s composed of words. Perhaps because he hasn’t arrived at his destination yet, some rough, broken-down form of ethnography can only be conducted by documenting a morphology of color; Lévi-Strauss’s refusal of the association between the pictorial and the ethnographic quiets down as he gives in to a journey that’s narrated by the sky. I read it as a lyric ode to magic without mention of magic by name—not magic-as-ritual, delicately uncovered and recorded in the heat of an inaccessible jungle, but magic in its most modest, culturally neutral state: as a picture of change.
The vision of a complete performance with so many rapidly dissolving acts, the surprise of finding the gaudy, neon and jewel-toned in the daily, and the drive to narrate the spectacle in detail combine to momentarily topple Lévi-Strauss’s professional sense of identification. He no longer needs anthropology; or, anthropology for a moment is contained in the joint beholding and transcrip- tion of a sunset: “If I could find a language in which to perpetuate those appear- ances, at once so unstable and so resistant to description, if it were granted to me to be able to communicate to others the phases and sequences of a unique event which would never recur in the same terms, then... I should in one go have discovered the deepest secrets of my profession”. His language in this chapter jumps out of the skin of its usual container; he stretches for the words to mark his vision of the sky and rushes to include it all in eight pages of sunset- hypnosis. He sees “bloated but ethereal ramparts, all glistening, like mother of pearl, with pink, mauve and silvered gleams,” then a “laminated [mass] like a sheet of metal illuminated from behind, first by a golden, then a vermillion, then a cherry glow”; there are “bulging pyramids and frothy bubblings” and “streaks of dappled blondness decomposing into nonchalant twists” and a “spun glass network of colors... shrimp, salmon, flax, straw” that, with the final setting, be- comes “purple, then coal black, and then...no more than an irregular charcoal mark on grainy paper” as night finally arrives. And then he returns to being an anthropologist, making his way through South America without the accompaniment of a painted sky. He returns to being a structuralist, a writer, and to black and white.
As evidenced by Lévi-Strauss’s professional un-doing in its midst, the sunset is a zone of reversal. The day trades places with the night, and announces the turn-over with paint and time; it’s a rare site of ocular access to x becoming y in a temporal register that’s both fast and slow (fast enough for the entire mor- phology to unfold in one sitting, slow enough to note and record each transition). When water is part of the tableau, the identities of sea and sky break down too— the shapes of clouds and spills of pink and purple pass back and forth. And as the stream of his documentation unfolds, Levi Strauss’s use of figurative lan- guage collects around another kind of reversal: the turning of the sky is linked to forms of art, and the comparative leap that characterizes metaphor finds in the sky the artifacts of culture. “Daybreak is a prelude, the close of day an overture which occurs at the end instead of the beginning, as in old operas”. In a double back and forth, he notates clouds “immobilized in the form of mould- ings representing clouds, but which real clouds resemble when they have the polished surface and bulbous relief of carved and gilded wood”. And in the end, the scene is a “photographic plate of night”.
Although Lévi-Strauss does not invoke “magic” in his sunset reverie, its presence hovers. For magic in its essence runs on the surprise and gratification of encounters with condensed, sped-up forms of change, foils to the durations by which changes of state—in material form and psychic interiority—take place in non-magical life. Magic offers a display of its own effectivity, turning abstract ideas into objects. In
A General Theory of Magic, Marcel Mauss tells of a Murring sorcerer, for instance, who produces chunks of quartz from his mouth as proof of a nocturnal encounter with the spirit world. But as Mauss crisscrosses content, geography and time, reviewing demonology, rites and role-acquisition in Aus- tralia, Madagascar, and Malaysia at ancient, medieval and contemporary moments, he is most interested in language; he remains a spectator who gets to use logical language and watch its illogical applications at once—the ideal position, perhaps, of the anthropologist. Mauss boils magic down to its core: “The magician knows that his magic is always the same—he is always conscious of the fact that magic is the art of changing”. And again: “Between a wish and its fulfillment there is, in magic, no gap.... [M]agic’s central aim is to produce results”. In response to criticism leveled against Mauss for drawing generalizations from such diverse examples, Lévi-Strauss re-framed Mauss’s move as the seed of a radical semiotic observation: magic is a turning of the mis- matches of language into useful material; it takes the peripheral excess (outside logic, but hovering, waiting for attention) and allows it to motor and fuel the activities of change. As David Pocock explains in his “Foreward” to Mauss’s General Theory: “Rituals do what words cannot say: in act black and white can be mixed; the young man is made an adult; spirit and man can be combined or separated at will”.
The idea that a photo could not only stand in for a mask, but also carry the mask’s contexts, auras and the anthropologist’s hard-earned understanding of it, is for Lévi-Strauss an unbearable shortcut. Photography is a variety of magic that he “refuse[s] to be the dupe of.” In contrast, in his beholding and written tracking of the sunset, Lévi-Strauss finds a way to stay with the stream of his consciousness without break—the sunset holds his perception and reverie, contains and is coextensive with it: the sunset functions doubly, as any satisfying magical event does, as object and stream.
An overwhelming number of videos made by the French-born American artist Michel Auder (b. 1944) feature sunsets:
Brooding Angels (1988), Personal Narrative of Travels to Bolivia (1995),
Polaroid Cocaine (1993),
Rooftops and Other Scenes (1996),
TV America (1988),
Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines (1993), and others. A sunset and a videotape are somehow meant to commune: the furriness of the tableau of a dropping sun; the temporariness; the bleeding colors, pale and florescent at once, tending toward gradation and chiaroscuro; and the strange impossibility of their location in the sky—all find ideal recognition among televisual tubes and scan lines and their chromatic tendencies. Video is prone to disappointment in a variety of directions. It degrades with ease, can produce unsolicited clarity, stubbornly refusing mystery, and it fails to behave and gratify like film. But when it finds its proper objects and gestures under the auspices of the right light, a poem is made. Auder once told me that making videos feels like working with language: like writing.
In
Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines, Auder holds dissociated and urgent time side-by-side for 55 minutes. He has gathered, selected and ordered fragments of intercepted phone conversations (he obsessively scanned mobile calls between 1987 and 1989) for his audio track and placed them on top of slowly alternating, gazed-out-at images from a quiet beach retreat. Many images frame some combination of sea, sky and horizon line—often fringed by the silhouettes of tree tips and leaf edges—at alternating moments of daytime and sunset, noontime azure expanses and evening tableaux of the sinking sun ex- isting side by side. The shots are devoid of human figures, and there’s a suggestion that the pictures were generated out of solitude, perhaps spurred on by notes of engaged malaise. Rain falls on bricks; seagulls fly across the water; beads of water rest on pine-needle tips; a daytime moon hangs in the sky. Auder is not lost in the wilderness, however: in the second half of the video we encounter a beach house interior with a fireplace, car racing on TV, and windows through which to continue to watch the sky.
The pairs of voices from the phone calls are common and raw—the content is not always alarming but the sameness that binds them is: these conver- sations are marked by intimate and incisive stabs at the truth, and many of them by urgent concerns about sexuality and sanity. Lovers anticipate sex and taunt each other with guesses about who loves the other more; parents fret over their teenage daughter’s tendency toward unprotected sex with an unsavory boy and fantasize about forms of violent punishment; two female friends make distinctions among kinds of sex with types of men; two men wonder how to re-engage an emotionally withdrawing girlfriend; a woman describes feeling acutely rejected by a boyfriend who’s not keen on sex; two friends criticize a third for cutting off all contact with her mother and calling it bravery. There are questions about masturbation and molestation and therapy and the ethics of skipping a birthday party, and about how to best praise God and gain membership to his kingdom.
It’s not enough, though, to call Michel Auder a “voyeur”—the term most often used to explain what’s undeniably and uncannily fascinating about his work. The tag of “voyeur” stems logically from the artist’s tendency to capture images from angles of silent, secret or furtive observation, as well as from the fact that his biography and body of work are full of well-inscribed proper names— Viva, Cindy Sherman, Alice Neel, to name a few—and hence many of his videos offer the viewer a kind of ethnographic access to some of the many art-worlds in which Auder has worked and lived. But this tag is of little use in the effort to fully encounter and articulate the poetics and rhetorical acrobatics of Auder’s work, which spans four decades and many hundreds of tapes.
Yes, Auder is certainly listening in in
Voyage—but his voyeurism goes way beyond the perversely motivated acts of observation that we associate with the term. I see Auder-as-voyeur collecting in order to confirm a suspicion, intervening in the streams of talk that contain everything we might ever want to know. It requires great labor to collect the scripts of one’s own thought, and even more to collect those of strangers and reformulate them into an object of some kind—a video.
I can’t watch
Voyage to the Center of the Phone Lines without thinking of William James’s “Stream of Thought” essay from his 1890
Principles of Psychology: a proposal that thought is not made of starts and stops and discrete ideas but is instead continuous, interruption-free, and ever-changing (“we never descend twice into the same stream”). The sole place James does assert a gap—“the greatest breach in nature”—is between individual minds:
The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and you’s. Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insula- tion, irreducible pluralism, is the law.
The implicit charge is that this breach is so profound that we misperceive it in every place but the one where it actually exists—we treat it as occurring between and among thoughts and days and objects, and we value associated gestures of articulation, enunciation and concision. James doesn’t ask us to banish the recognition of separate objects and moments of thought, but simply to view them in the context both of the “greatest breach” between minds and of the ceaseless stream within a single one. In
Voyage, like so many of Auder’s videos, there is both bleeding—between day and night, water and sky, and among the private pains of strangers—and the satisfying static of switching channels as we leave the stream of one conversation and enter the current of another.
Shots of sunsets in
Voyage punctuate the video with a kind of focus and straightforward shock that mimic the urgency of these lovers and relatives and friends. Each finds the setting sun in a pose of distinct gesture and coloration (it is unclear if the images come from a single night or were collected from many). The water is black; a neon pink halo surrounds the sun; the sky is striped by yellow and green strokes; the setting sun shrinks in a turquoise sky over navy water; lavender, fuchsia and peach gradations float above a dark purple sea. Each shot is startling for its difference from the others, and for the spectrum of coloration that’s so unlike the pared-down palettes of the day-time shots. The night tells secrets. The speakers tell secrets too—not so much to each other as to us—because they are neither meant for us nor for assembly alongside those of the other callers.
The secret is both that we’re all having versions of the same conversations and that culture provides few ways for us to know and encounter this fact. The secret is that we need transcripts from the stream of thought and from the flow of talk for our own experiences of health and communion. Sexuality is urgent and confused. Women speak of the workings of desire with certainty among themselves—and invoke knowing these things less surely with a male lover. We‘ve heard of these dilemmas before, but we don’t know them in this form, all at once and from the mouths of strangers.
Woman: People who are not God’s children are going to be blinded.
Man: But it’s also up to us to bring as many into the flock as we can. We have to listen to people. I pray that he gives me time to do that...
Woman: God is good—he answers prayers, but we have to really keep in touch with him; it’s a two-way street.
Man: I read the Bible everyday. I speak the Word every single day when I do have time. That’s kinda hard sometimes.
Woman: God doesn’t expect more than what you can do—he knows, but you can lift your thoughts up to him. Just your thoughts.
Man: I try to be still before the Lord and I try to tune into what he has to say...
Woman 1: I don’t want it to be like we’re gonna get together and go to bed...
Woman 2: You know what happens, when you have so little time together, that’s what ends up happening.
Woman 1: And I don’t like that. I want there to be some substance...quite frankly to me, that’s kind of boring...
Woman 2: When I was going out with Russell, I felt like I was fucking dessert at the end of every night...
Woman 1: I’m trying to learn you shouldn’t be insulted by that, but it’s like, I don’t want to be this object that gets fucked.... It’s like, hello? I’d rather just cuddle up with a guy...
Woman 2: Oh, I love to cuddle. For me that’s even better.
Woman 1: Oh yeah, I love that...
Woman 2: I just like guys that make me melt. Oh, God.
Woman 1: [X] made me very responsive to him because he was very caressing, and he wasn’t rough. It was like he cared about your body.
Daughter: Mama wants to know if it’s convenient for you to talk to him?
Father: Talk to
her?
Daughter: Yeah. Alright ‘cause there’s something she’s gotta tell you...
Father: Is it about you?
Daughter: Yeah.
Father: What is it now?
Daughter: You’re gonna be disappointed but it’s something.
Father: Don’t tell me you saw Billy again.
[...]
Father: I think there’s something radically wrong with her.
Mother: You don’t know the worst of it. She’s been sleeping with him. She slept with him last night.
Father: What do you mean she slept with him last night?
Mother: She’s not been using protection and mind you he’s been sleeping with every Tom, Dick and Harry.
[...]
Mother: I think you need to keep a tighter rein on her, Jack...
Father: I’m gonna beat the shit out of her if she lied to me. I’m just forewarning you. I don’t give a fuck how old she is. She’s gonna feel the back of my hand.
Mother: Don’t hit her on the face.
Woman: Think about this—my father supposedly according to Uncle Morgan was sexually abused more than anyone else.
Man: That’s what I understand as well.
Woman: What if my father did it to Garth and we don’t know?
Man: That somehow would not surprise me.
Woman: How do we find out?
[...]
Woman: How about masturbation?
Man: Masturbation is a big question. Lots of kids masturbate.
Woman: I know that, Philip, but they don’t do it in the TV room on 8th Avenue in front of Pat and my mother at 3 years old...
Man: Something is very, very, very wrong.
In
Voyage, Auder offers us rare samples from the chaos of spoken language. The video seems like a direct response to the question Wallace Stevens poses in the first stanza of “A Fading of the Sun”:
Who can think of the sun costuming clouds
When all people are shaken
Or of night endazzled, proud,
When people awaken
And cry and cry for help?
MICHEL AUDER's Life on Video - FLYPMichel Auder, excerpt from 28 minute biographyMichael Auder, My Last Bag of Heroin (For Real), 1986________________
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'When I was young I had an imaginary friend who went everywhere with me. Harry Northup’s book turns us all into his imaginary friends. We get to be with Harry as he grows up in Nebraska at the Sioux Ordnance Depot, where he says that his father’s “hand was a nest and that he held it for me.” We are with him in Kearney, Nebraska where he rekindles his love for the theater and for acting, and when he quits college to pursue this calling. We are with him when he goes to New York and studies with Frank Corsaro, reading plays at the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue, and watching movies at the Thalia and Little Carnegie movie theaters.
'In 1968, Harry arrived in Santa Monica and started attending the Wednesday night workshop at Beyond Baroque on Feb. 26, 1969.
'It is a privilege to accompany Harry on his journey, and to read his poems, which are joyful, rigorous, adventurous and redemptive. Harry finds solace in his city, with his friends, poets and community. He finds solace in his love for Holly, and his love for home and cats. He finds solace in his walks through the streets of his neighborhood. Lewis MacAdams has called Harry “the poet laureate of East Hollywood,” and we are with him in his travels down Mariposa to Sunset, to Vermont, to the Post Office, the House of Pies and Skylight Books. This is a book of places, beautifully observed.
It is also a book of vision. We are with Harry in the middle of the night when he gets up and writes, often tracking the extraordinary visions which rise from his unconscious. Harry’s language is dazzling: brilliant, vigorous and original. There is redemption here in words, a lostness answered by words.
'Here are a few of my favorite lines:
“the poet is the most thrilling thing/ever created except for a cow, a/ tree, a mother”'Speaking of the muse:
“what you have given me/I have recorded/ most mercilessly, patiently, loyally …. what strength I had/what music you gave,/ I listened” 'And this:
“That’s the secret: light / Jump to be near, to clean/ That’s the secret: home/ To listen that’s the secret”'We are blessed by this magnificent book.'
-- Phoebe MacAdamsHarry E Northup
East Hollywood: Memorial to ReasonCahuenga Press'Harry E. Northup has had eleven books of poetry published: Amarillo Born, the jon voight poems, Eros Ash, Enough the Great Running Chapel, the images we possess kill the capturing, THE RAGGED VERTICAL, REUNIONS, Greatest Hits, 1996-2001, RED SNOW FENCE, WHERE BODIES AGAIN RECLINE, and EAST HOLLYWOOD: MEMORIAL TO REASON. He received his B.A. in English from C.S.U.N. where he studied verse with Ann Stanford. New Alliance Records has released his Personal Crime, new and selected poems from 1966-1991, on CD and cassette audio recording, and Homes on CD. Northup has made a living as an actor for thirty years, acting in thirty-seven films, including
Taxi Driver (1976 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes),
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Over the Edge, and
The Silence of the Lambs (1991 Oscar winner for Best Picture). Harry is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Lewis MacAdams, in the LA Weekly, wrote, "Northup is the poet laureate of east Hollywood."'
-- Cahuenga Press ExcerptsMoon's IntersectionThe moon has no
expectancy
When you do the math
Three ladies like horses
stepping up Vine toward
the starting gate
My friend Jay dead, Al,
Conrad, now my sibling
Still no kindness
from the dead spirit
within
Within me, within U-Haul
A man, a wife, child & dog
It has been a time of
eclipse
Believe blindly describes
hope
Hope for eternity
resides at Sunset & Vine
To provide a place
Intersects light &
memory
I scribble those who
taught me, hired me,
loved me
Saw me for who I am
A man going into the
evening
To find hope in darkness
To find light within
story, memory, breath
A heart a way
Make a poemMake a poem from pavement, fragmented & black, uneven,
broken.
Make a poem from an experience, memory, grief.
Make an email a poem.
Make a poem from tweets, write it at intervals,
over a day.
Make a poem from death & hunger.
Make a poem out of embracing a fear.
Make a poem out of wanting to tell someone something.
Make a poem out of fear, vulnerability, poverty of spirit.
Make a poem from poems that you’ve read.
Poems come from poems.
Read the language school poets as well as the romantic poets.
While you struggle with learning the many forms,
learn the tradition of poetry, especially the epics.
Make a poem from tennis, sweet potatoes & ruin.
Make a poem from beauty & disgrace.
Make a poem from bowing down to a greater craftsman.
Make a poem out of women & men & trees
with jacaranda blossoms fallen on the sidewalk.
Make a poem from hills & viaduct & sod houses &
country roads & a 2 story red brick schoolhouse.
Out of pride & discounted emotions, make a poem at evening.
A Name Is A RoseWe move our names from right to
left
Names: Amarillo, Denver, Mountain
Home, Spencer Park, Sioux Ordnance
Depot, Manzanola, Sidney
My name was one name
Her name joined my name
Name holds up an overpass
Flame of togetherness
To write within syntax
Two hands at a door
Flowers running beside
Bequeath herald compose deny
Breath mystery
Ladder like military backpacks
Apple cut in half falls back
like a tombstone
What's in a name that cannot be
restored?
Light comes from within the eye
surrounded by fire lines
Golden road through village
Light shines upward from darkest red rose
Beyond Baroque by Harry E. NorthupTraffic Both Ways on Prospect - by Harry E. NorthupThe Study - a poem by Harry E. Northup*
p.s. Hey. ** Liquoredgoat, Hey. Right? That ordering button was like a trigger. Oh, the thing with me is that I actually have never been interested in perfumes and colognes. I don't think I've ever worn any manufactured scent. That know-nothingness was the challenge I gave myself in doing the post. So thinking up a scent I'd make is difficult. Uh, okay, dumb, predictable first half-thought: a bottle shaped like a haunted house attraction whose scent smells like chemical fog, the wooden structure, and a bunch of people. Not that I'd wear that or recommend that anyone does. What scent would you make if Chanel or someone gave you carte blanche? ** Michael_karo, My perfume? Other than that silly, tossed-out idea I just cyber-hurled at Lg, I wouldn't know where to start. Yeah, I've never smelled a celebrity scent, but I imagine them being the perfume equivalent of candy corn. It's honestly shocking that Warhol didn't do a perfume. Mm, my dad had simple tastes, and he only wore Old Spice when I was a kid, and I did give him a bottle of that on a Xmas for birthday or two. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha ha. Thank you, sir!
Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has solved the problem of my having no clue what scent I would make should someone ask me to bottle something up in my name, or solved the advertising campaign issue and bottle's appearance at least, thusly. Thank you, man. xxx, Dennis ** Etc etc etc, Hi. Well, wait until I see if I can manage to do it before you thank me, but a college-try is firmly on the agenda. I'm curious about the TV thing too. It'll totally be in Gisele's hands. Zac and I will have no say in how it looks, etc., I don't think, although I guess she'll probably seek our second opinions. I sure hope a NYC screening of 'LCTG' works out so you can see it. We're trying. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Well, maybe needless to say, Tom's novel sounds awfully cool to me. Your 'hellish', ha ha, description is a 'heavenly' blurb in my book. Exciting! I hope he finishes it. Dude, I just knew you'd be back at 'Harlem Smoke'. Good. ** Bill, Me neither. Wow, I didn't get that ad. I got some French ad for bread. Very yay about the impending demo video! Dark fabric ... ooh, mysterioso. Hm, cool, I bookmarked that Night Shift song/file/etc., and I'll get on that. Thank you, Bill! Weirdly, I've never read 'Perfume' nor seen the movie. I assume that you recommend I do the former at the very least? How's tricks today? ** H, Hi. No, I've never had a business card. I've designed one in my head a few times. Schuyler perfume! Now that's an inspired idea! I would buy that. Maybe even wear it. Once. Maybe. My week ahead is busy busy busy. ** Tomkendall, Hi, Tom! Awesome to see you, man! No, I don't think I've heard from you since you moved to Peru. Wow, what a mental image -- you there -- a nice one. Oh, very good. I mean about the launching of The Quipu Project. That looks extremely interesting and important. I will investigate the site asap.
Everyone, Tomkendall passes along the news that the website for The Quipiu Project has launched. It's an important project, and the site is very interesting. I very highly recommend that you click this at some point today and get to know it. Here's a description from the site: '272,000 women and 21,000 men were sterilised in the 90’s in Peru. Thousands have claimed this happened without their consent, but until now they have been repeatedly silenced and denied justice. After almost 20 years their voices can finally be heard through this interactive documentary, which connects a free telephone line in Peru to this website.' Man, it makes me really sad to read you talking so sadly and negatively about your novel. Rejections are really hard, especially one after another. You probably don't want to say, but where did you submit it? I might have ideas of other places to send it. It can be good or healthy or something to take a break from the taxing energy and grueling effect of submitting a manuscript, and maybe doing that will bring you perspective on the totally subjective nature of publishers' tastes and preferences and might allow you to regain some confidence. I don't know. Don't give up, man. Don't believe so hard in the opinions of a small group of individual opinions of people that run book publishing businesses, okay? ** Steevee, I have heard the Arca album, and I like it quite a bit, yes. That's an excellent description of it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I remember that you're a fan and connoisseur of perfumes now. I even remember your fondness for L'Anarchiste. I should have thought to include it. And your artwork.
Everyone, please follow the blue portal inside this lovely quote from _B_A: 'Meanwhile back in 2011 in 2011 I made this perfume-based artwork, one that I'm still proud of - Maquette for a Memorial (Silk Forget-Me-Nots with Comme des Garçons 2 Man Eau de Toilette). It was my scent for ages but lately I've been wearing Comme des Garçons 2, initially bought for me as a present by mistake but one I've grown very fond of. Scott says that it smells of drugs and photocopier, and ink is one of the notes so he's actually not too far off.' ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Yeah, curious as hell about what that would be. There's a lot of ongoing work with 'LCTG'. Due to [censored] by the people in charge of getting the film out there, we're having to greatly supplement their 'efforts' by seeking screening opportunities ourselves, which is a lot of work. My thought/plan is to dive back into my novel when Zac and I finish the TV series script. I think I'll have a stretch of daylight there. We'll likely be prepping for our new film, but that script is finished except for tweaking, so I might just have a month or three without some huge writing assignment 'on my desk'. Yeah, I had a bit of breakthrough in my brain about the novel just the other day, or I hope so, but it's a bit too complicated to explain. Close to being done? Man, that's some sweet possible news. *cheerleading* ** Kyler, Hi, K. No, I didn't know that. Makes sense, though. Oh, geez, taxes, geez, stress city. Glad it's not too harsh, obvs. ** Misanthrope, G-string! Cool whoo-hoo! Undertaker forever! Yeah, apart from vaguely knowing Roman Reigns, I have no clue who any of those guys are. I've heard about Joop and Curve somewhere. Joop is a funny name. Unless it's a Dutch product or something, 'cos then it would be pronounced 'Yope', which is a little less funny. ** Mark Gluth, Hi there, Mr. Gluth! A fine morning to you, sir! Oh, so very happy that the post was relevant to your novel work! Wow! Highest compliment possible that any post of mine could possibly receive. I only just skimmed the first bit of the perfume blog post, but, yeah, it should have been in my post. I'm happy to have that site in my radar now, thank you!
Everyone, the honorable Mark Gluth recommends that, before the topic of perfume leaves your frontal lobes entirely, if it will, you read a very interesting looking essay/post called 'Womanity (Thierry Mugler)', and I concur. Easy peasy. Things are normalizing here, yeah. The surface of here is starting to look pretty normal. The insides of here are still rattled, but I think it takes a Parisian to get the ongoing nervousness. Yeah, I know at least quite a bit about the right wing's exploiting of what happened, and ... what can one even say? It's so disturbing, it's kind of beyond belief. You take care too, big time! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. No, like I said up above, I've never been interested in perfumes at all. No reason, really. They/it have just never found their way into the area where I think dwellingly about things. I know that Sparks song. Yeah, it's a goodie. Nice to see the lyrics in black and white. How are you? What's up and happening? ** Okay. Four more books that I read in recent times and felt strongly enough about to offer as reading suggestions to you. Think about it. See you tomorrow.
