BOMB 121

Number 121 / Fall 2012 EDITOR’S CHOICE

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BOMB SPECIFIC EJ Hauser

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ARTISTS ON ARTISTS Katie Bell by John O’Connor Catherine Howe by Madeline Weinrib Wendy White by EJ Hauser THE WICK Asaf Hanuka

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INTERVIEWS DANCE — MIGUEL GUTIERREZ 26

by Ishmael Houston-Jones Ishmael Houston-Jones performs in Gutierrez’s And lose the name of action—a work partly inspired by the Spiritualists that premieres at the Walker Art Center this fall and will be an offering of BAM’s Next Wave Festival. Gutierrez tells Houston-Jones why he prefers not to cast skinny dancers in their twenties. on the cover: Lucy Raven, still from The Second Eye , 2012–, HD video.

ART — HAIM STEINBACH 35

by Peter Schwenger By dedicating its fall season to Haim Steinbach, the Artist’s Institute of Hunter College offers a second look at the artist’s work and the opportunity to consider the relation of objects to human subjectivity, their arrangement as a language, and the physicality of text.

THEATER — AMY HERZOG 44

by Carolyn Cantor Cantor will be directing Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan at Playwrights Horizons this season and tells us how “Herzog draws you into the lives of people … who are passionate, interesting, and unfailingly honest.

Without any manipulation, Herzog’s characters tug at your heart. She writes lines that make you want to be an actor just for the opportunity to say them.”

MUSIC — SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE 58

by Sir Richard Bishop Drag City has just issued Ascent, the new Six Organs release. The band’s Ben Chasny has found inspiration in sci-fi, Bachelard’s concept of reverie, chapels to the Virgin Mary, and—why not—German gay porn films.

Here he talks shop with fellow member of the supergroup Rangda, whose Formerly Extinct is also just out from the Chicago-based label.

LITERATURE — SUSANNA MOORE

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by Kurt Andersen

Susanna Moore’s seventh novel, The Life of Objects, takes readers to Berlin during the Second World War. Fellow novelist Kurt Andersen writes, “Her fiction uniquely combines tart, unflinchingly clear-eyed social observation; a kind of dreamy second sight; and deep compassion.”

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CONTENTS

LITERATURE — JAIME MANRIQUE 92

by Edith Grossman One of the characters in Manrique’s new novel, Cervantes Street, is the man who despised Miguel de Cervantes and wrote a faux sequel of Don Quixote, part one, before the real part two was finished. Manrique talks about the entanglement of fact and fiction with Edith Grossman, Cervantes’s celebrated translator.

FIRST PROOF BOMB’S LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ANNE GILMAN PEDRO SERRANO LAURIE FOOS CHARLIE SMITH BARNEY KULOK DANIEL POPPICK SUZANNE SCANLON CALVIN BEDIENT BEN EHRENREICH

ART — LUCY RAVEN 124

by Jason Simon Following the technology and labor behind the moving image has taken Lucy Raven from copper mines in Nevada to ingot smelters in China, and, recently, to Mumbai, where 2-D Hollywood films are painstakingly converted to 3-D releases. With Jason Simon she discusses her new project for the Hammer Museum.

First Proof is sponsored in part by Amazon and the Thanksgiving Fund.

This issue is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

ART — JOSIAH McELHENY 134

by Gregg Bordowitz McElheny’s glass-based projects explore the unrealized potential of modernist and utopian visions through allusion and reconstruction. They resemble staged séances where the deceased converse with the living—one such dialogue with German expressionist writer Paul Scheerbart is at the core of McElheny’s forthcoming exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

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Editor’s Choice

Photo by Michael Schmelling.

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Infinite Jest HAU Theater BERLIN, JUNE 2012 If every part of this endeavor sounds absurd, that might be the point: A 24-hour theater performance of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest—in ten different Berlin locations, mostly in German. An audience of 150 is bused around the city, making stops for pieces of the book, each performed by a different theater company.

I don’t understand much German, but taking photos of the premiere sounded like a good dare to me. But how do you sum it all up—the legend of Infinite Jest being inseparable from the work itself? Here’s an attempt to condense the performance of a 1,079-page novel into a few words:

9:30 AM,copies of Unendlicher Spaß, backpacks, blankets. Sun is out, but cold for an early summer day.

START.

1. A tennis club. Actors in tennis outfits run around the grounds. First waves of a thought that oscillates throughout the day: This might be really awful; no wait, this is really great.

2. A weight room. Woman in cheerleader outfit plays John Cale song on bass.

3. Steffi Graf stadium, verbal tennis match, audience in the stands. Bratwurst lunch.

4. Bus ride to an abandoned American radio tower, a Cold War relic. Actor in drag, another in wheelchair, smoke and guns. Snack bags. Someone says the piece is costing 750,000 Euros to stage.

5. Hospital location. Audience behind glass partition; some falling asleep. Actors in wigs. Ex-cons.

6. Three women dancing. Cowboy hats, sailor outfits, dancing on window sills, tearing at blinds. Dinner and strong coffee in cafeteria.

7. Manic performance in another hospital building— audience wanders like in a haunted house. Roughly halfway point.

8. Fake David Foster Wallace study center. Portraits of him everywhere. Skype with German translator of IJ. Sleep on desk as if back in school.

9. Tiergarten building with a small canal inside (used to test effects of waves on boats). Actors appear, floating in kayaks. Another snack bag.

10. Midnight. Berlin Radio building, actor in sound booth. Pitch black. Everyone sleeps.

11. Two women on a yellow carpeted stage, whoopee cushions, video cameras. Audience shrinking.

12. Thankfully in a bar, a cabaretlike performance.

Coffee, beer, cigarettes. Girls asleep face down on carpet in hallway.

13. Note for note AA meeting. Oreos and coffee. Sun is coming up. Get to see people’s tired eyes.

14. Office building, a guy dressed in a Kleenex box and another as a donkey, yelling at everyone.

15. Poorly staged meeting scenario in a cafeteria.

16. Wheelchair terrorist scenario, smiley-face-bandana masks.

17. 7 AM. Feels like the end. Rousing lecture delivered from rooftop, audience down to maybe 40.

18. In an old theater, fresh-faced actors read the remainder of the book for two hours! Only a few in the audience stay awake. An actress on stage closes her eyes. Never wanted to boo a performance more than at this moment, fantasize about staging a violent walkout.

Enough with the tennis balls! The cheerleader is back, playing Stevie Wonder’s “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer,” brings a tear or two—of sadness, exhaustion, triumph, and relief.

— MICHAEL SCHMELLING is the author of four photo books: Shut Up Truth, The Week of No Computer, The Plan—and, most recently, Atlanta. He was also the principal photographer of The Wilco Book. A new book of photos will be published by J+L Books in 2013.

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EDITOR’S CHOICE

800 Views of Airports Peter Fischli and David Weiss WALTHER KÖNIG, 2012 The real problem with airports is that we tend to go there when we need to catch a plane—and because it’s so difficult to find the gate, because the crowds are so relentless, because there is inevitable anxiety at taking off into the celestial spheres, we don’t look around. Outside the window, a 777 lands from Colombo, approaches the terminal, disgorges its compliment of weary passengers for whom this morning will have a supernatural tinge, and opens a cargo hold containing the sides of tuna that only yesterday still swam through the warm Indian Ocean waters—and we assume that nothing is going on. We slide into the cynical assumption that we are in a boring and colorless place. We take up the airport’s own suggestion that we watch CNN to pass the time. We think that a truly beautiful landscape might involve a waterfall, some sheep or deer, and an old peasant cottage.

How wrong we are. Were we asked by a Martian to visit a single place on this earth that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through modern civilization—from our faith in technology to our destruction

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Performance view of Miguel Gutierrez in HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE , 2010.

Earl Dax’s Queer Conscience program at Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, NY, May 2010. Photo by Ian Douglas. Images courtesy of Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People.

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Miguel Gutierrez by Ishmael Houston-Jones Back in 1996, I was teaching at an improvisation festival in San Francisco. On my last night there, one of the organizers invited me to a going-away party for some dancer in Joe Goode’s company who was moving to New York. His name was Miguel Gutierrez—in the Bay Area he was somewhat legendary. I’d never met him or seen him perform, but I was lured by the prospect of a party and free beer. The atmosphere at the event itself was a mixture of a drunken Irish wake for a dearly departed and a shipside bon voyage. People were teary and I felt genuinely distraught because he was leaving them, but there was also a celebratory feeling that one of their own was moving onward. We must have exchanged numbers, because not long after he arrived in New York my friend Jennifer Lacey called me needing a man for her new project. Working with Jennifer led Miguel to work with John Jasperse for seven years. The rest, as the cliché goes, is downtown dance history.

Since leaving Jasperse’s company, Miguel has employed wide-ranging choreographic strategies to create a body of diverse and distinct works. freedom of information was originally performed in 2001, as Miguel’s response to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Miguel simply moved continuously for 24 hours from midnight to midnight on the last day of the year, in his Brooklyn studio, while blindfolded and ear-plugged, without eating or stopping. He had a jug into which to urinate in full view of the public and we were invited to come and go as we pleased. In his first evening-length piece, enter the seen (2002), he investigated the concept of personal territory and allowed the intimacies of the dancing

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ I’m not going to see you on Skype, I’m only going to hear you?

ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES Yeah. I can see you, though; that’s the important thing. Did you get my little intro?

body to be experienced at extremely close range. The piece was also performed in his Brooklyn loft and we in the audience sat on the floor around a mostly empty room. Miguel also creates more formal yet still boundary-pushing group works for his company Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People (MGPP). One of my favorites is 2005’s Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies, two works presented as a diptych.

In Retrospective Exhibitionist, a solo, Miguel shuttled through his own real and imagined performance history using a TV/VCR, boom box, mic and amp, video camera, and other simple props. He showed us footage of himself as a teenager, the only boy in his dance studio in New Jersey. He lip-synched to himself speaking at a post-performance Q & A. He performed a fierce dance of movement quotations from all the people who’d influenced him thus far. He wore a Boris Badenov T-shirt and a shaggy blond wig. In Difficult Bodies three women move together in a simple formal design that made the kinetic power of their bodies and their connection to each other unique and urgent. Miguel created the live music for the trio by looping sounds and words incessantly to create an almost classical, heroic euphoria.

Last year Miguel asked me to perform in And lose the name of action, which is still in progress. When I asked him why he wanted to work with me, he responded that he was tired of seeing older choreographers scoring for and dancing alongside “skinny white girls in their twenties.” Since I fit none of those criteria I guess I was a shoo-in.

— ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES

guest curator at that Mad Alex Presents series back in the ’90s; you did a reading of your San Francisco writing.

IHJ Back then you were also in a band called Princess that I was a big fan of.

MG Yes, I dropped out of it the moment that we got signed to a label.

MG I talked about being a sex worker.

IHJ Why was that?

MG I did! It’s great, although it makes me sound like an asshole.

IHJ I remember being really engrossed by what you were writing.

IHJ Well, you are.

MG It’s weird that I didn’t make myself more public as a writer then. I was just working out my craziness. I shared the bill with Don Shewey. I thought that his story was so much better than my writing that I got really insecure. I didn’t want to read anything in public. I have those stories somewhere.

MG That’s not true.

IHJ Don’t you have a book coming out?

MG No. I’m going to go work on a manuscript at a RADAR Lab residency in Akumal, Mexico, and then we’ll see if anyone wants to publish it.

MG Because I’m an exquisite selfsaboteur. At that moment I also realized that I wanted to make dance my primary focus. I freaked out because I didn’t think that I’d be able to do that and also be in a band and tour around. Perhaps I was under the misguided impression that to do both would be madness.

MG Yeah, I’m going to work on poems.

It’s like I’m coming out as a poet.

IHJ Well, weren’t we all?

IHJ But music and singing have figured in your dance work since then. You are very specific about how sound functions in your work, whether you create the sound score yourself, write songs, or collaborate with composers. You have a great voice, and you’re very musical, so that has remained in your work.

IHJ That’s cool. I remember when I was a

MG Weren’t we all . . .

MG Yeah. It’s funny though. It’s in the

IHJ So it’s poetry?

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DANCE — MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

IHJ They’ll come out posthumously.

MG Yeah, exactly: “I Was a Twentysomething Whore.”

Performance view of Tarek Halaby and Miguel Gutierrez in Last Meadow , 2009.

Performed during American Realness 2010 at Abrons Arts Center, NYC. Photo

by Ian Douglas.

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DANCE — MIGUEL GUTIERREZ

Haim Steinbach by Peter Schwenger I saw my first Haim Steinbach a few days after seeing Haim Steinbach. I interviewed the artist for BOMB in July, flying into New York City from a cabin in the Nova Scotia woods, and then shuttled back to the cabin long enough to do my laundry before flying to Minneapolis for a family gathering. But putting my family on hold for the moment, I went straight from the airport to the Walker Art Center, where a Steinbach piece was on view as part of the exhibit This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s. In a typical Steinbach format, it was called Untitled (cabbage, pumpkin, pitchers) #1. As it happens, I had talked about that very piece in my book The Tears of Things.

Steinbach’s title is misleading, I had observed, evoking as it does a rustic still life. The cabbage, however, is a ceramic soup tureen masquerading as a vegetable; the pumpkin is an orange velour Halloween decoration with a cartoony face in black; and the shiny black pitchers, rounder than the cabbage, are minimal and modern. My point at the time was the discrepancy between the names of objects and the multiple aspects of their actual presence. I had made this point, though, based on photographs of the installation rather than its actual objects, and now they took me by surprise. I was abashed to realize that I had misidentified the material of the pitchers, which were not

PETER SCHWENGER Do you remember what impelled you the very first time you put an object on a shelf, on any kind of shelf? Is that a moment in time that you can recall?

HAIM STEINBACH So many things led me to it. But, for one: In my parents’ home in upstate New York, there was a shelf about ten inches above the kitchen table, which was pushed against the wall.

On that shelf was everything from a small calendar to knickknacks and a flower vase. There were also other little objects there, like the figure of an Israeli boy wearing the typical Israeli hat—a kova tembel, which means “silly hat”—and a napkin holder with a lozenge-shaped piece of wood on it. Some things were exchanged for others from time to time.

Every time I sat at that kitchen table I would look at that shelf and I would ask, What are these objects doing here? I would question the decorative details, the cultural associations, the functional reasons for these things to be there.

And so in 1975, as I was turning from painting to sculpture, I made a simple shelf and put a few plastic miniature objects on it. In a way I was just doing what people ordinarily do with the objects that they like. But, at the same time, I was 34

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plastic but ceramic—this is something Steinbach has had to endure repeatedly from critics who write from reproductions. Also, the piece was larger than I had expected. Finally, its presence was vivid in a way that no photograph could have prepared me for. Even as the objects remained uncompromisingly themselves, connections, contrasts, and connotations seemed to buzz between them.

The ’80s show is intended to make us look again at what was happening at that time. And Steinbach’s work invites that second look, a long and lingering one—for the rise of object studies in the last decade has encouraged us to see this work with new eyes. Opening in September at the Artist’s Institute of Hunter College is a series of five exhibits devoted to Steinbach, running until the end of January 2013. Its purpose, as is always the case with the Artist’s Institute, is to raise wide-ranging questions about artistic practice. So the exhibits are centered around questions of display, the relation of objects to human subjectivity, arrangement as a language, the physicality of text, and Steinbach’s place within the larger group of thinkers about objects.

All of these topics are touched upon, if not exhausted, in the interview that follows.

— PETER SCHWENGER

asking myself, What am I doing? What does it mean to be doing this as an artist?

This eventually led to my first installations. By 1979, this practice became my work’s structuring device. I was placing objects on shelves, on prefabricated shelves or ones I made. Nothing was manipulated to interfere with the function of the shelf or the function of the objects. They sat the way you would normally see them on a table or any piece of furniture. Whatever the objects were—food containers, plastic or wooden figurines, etcetera—their design and form was inherent to them. I didn’t design that representation, I was just presenting.

PS But you do choose the objects, and you arrange them. You once said that the objects on a shelf are arranged the way words are arranged in a sentence.

HS We communicate through objects just as we communicate through language.

We see objects, we have feelings about them, and we feel them when we touch them. We know what material they’re made of. Sometimes we are not sure: Is this glass or plastic? We touch it, or even lick it. So when you arrange objects, you’re talking, you’re putting them in a certain way that’s part of a conversation.

And that’s a language; the ordering functions like language in that it allows us to communicate and to get things done.

The way I arrange objects in one line is like the way that we arrange words in a sentence.

PS If there’s a standard grammar of objects, of the way people usually see them, the way that you arrange them suggests a very different kind of grammar. You reinforce aspects of objects that are off to the side of the usual connotations, so that the sentence becomes an unexpected one.

You’re not “making a statement,” as they say of some art, but doing something more complex than that.

HS Complexity lies within simplicity; isn’t that what poetry is about? The idea is to find a way to get down to what is essential. If there is a vision in an artist’s work that has any kind of weight to it, it’s going to be complex. Are you suggesting that there is complexity in this kind of arrangement because there is a certain choice of objects that is not within a norm?

PS That’s right. There’s an accepted grammar of objects; we see objects in a certain context or in a certain way, and you displace that context.

creature , 2011, installation comprising (a) vinyl Creature of the Black Lagoon figure (b) metal, wood, wallboard beam (c) metal, wood, wallboard triangular incline (d) metal, wallboard oblique wall (e) painted metal gate valve, dimensions according to original installation.

Installation view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2011. Photo by Jean Vong. Images courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

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ART — HAIM STEINBACH

Amy Herzog by Carolyn Cantor When I first read Amy Herzog’s script for After the Revolution, I knew instantly that it was a play I wanted to direct. Herzog’s work grabs you from the first word. She draws you into the lives of people you will come to care deeply about. They are passionate, interesting, and unfailingly honest. Without any manipulation, Herzog’s characters tug at your heart. She writes lines that make you want to be an actor just for the opportunity to say them. Often very little happens by way of plot and yet you feel seismic shifts beneath the surface. While we were at work on After the Revolution, Amy gave me a draft of The Great God Pan. A thought-provoking, entertaining, beautifully written yet unproduced new play is an indescribable gift for a director. The characters in Pan instantly burrowed their way into me. I couldn’t stop thinking about them and wondering how they were getting on in their lives.

I am hardly the only person who has had such a strong and swift reaction to Amy Herzog’s writing.

The sublime production of 4000 Miles had a highly successful run at LCT3 before transferring to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater where its run was extended multiple times. Belleville was a hit at Yale Repertory Theater and is scheduled to transfer to the New York Theater Workshop this winter. Amy has had three major productions and all have been met with critical acclaim, garnering a Lilly Award and an Obie for Best New American Play among other distinctions. She is widely and rightfully regarded as a major new playwright to have emerged in recent years.

I have been spending a lot of time with Amy lately as we are in the midst of casting and designing The Great God Pan, which is opening at Playwrights Horizons this fall. We have had a constant stream of meetings and auditions, phone calls and text messages, so it was nice to have an excuse to get together in a non-work capacity. Amy and I met in her Park Slope apartment where she sat with her two-month old daughter Franny on her lap. Needless to say, it was difficult to concentrate with her beautiful baby staring up at us, but we did our best.

— CAROLYN CANTOR

BOMB’S THEATER INTERVIEWS ARE SPONSORED IN PART BY THE SELECT EQUITY GROUP FOUNDATION.

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Mary Louise Wilson as Vera and Gabriel Ebert as Leo in 4000 Miles , directed by Daniel Aukin, performed at The Duke Theater, 2011. Photo by Erin Baiano.

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THEATER — AMY HERZOG

CAROLYN CANTOR So in the past couple of days by way of preparation, I read 4000 Miles, which of course I also saw at Lincoln Center, and Belleville, which I didn’t get to see up at Yale. But as I was reading Belleville I had this feeling of familiarity. And then I remembered your play The Doctor’s Wife.

AMY HERZOG Which has not a single line of dialogue in common with Belleville but was its first incarnation.

CC You’d sent me The Doctor’s Wife in 2008 as a very early draft and it really does bear almost no resemblance to where you finally landed with that piece.

On the other hand, the two plays of yours that I’ve worked on—After the Revolution and The Great God Pan—appeared on my desk practically fully formed. I don’t know if there were early drafts of those plays that I didn’t get to see. But noting what an extensive rewriting process you evidently had with Belleville made me wonder how you begin writing a new play? Do you start from character or from plot? How do you come to know what you want to write?

AH Belleville is the play I started first and finished last. So I would have answered your questions differently when I started that play. The drafts between then and now reflect the difference in process that has arisen. Back then I started from an idea and a plot, whereas my journey over the last four years has been toward an emphasis on character.

4000 Miles is very character-driven, with basically no plot. That wasn’t the case when I started Belleville, which was then called The Doctors Wife. I had to rewrite it four times, as I was becoming a different writer, learning where my process was potentially problematic.

CC What struck me while I was reading the 2008 draft of The Doctors Wife was how dramatically your life has changed in the past four years. Having three, going on four, major productions, getting married, and having a baby is pretty extraordinary in such a short time.

AH Yeah, it’s really wild. I’ve been thinking a lot about that with The Great God Pan, how I wrote that play before I was married. It’s a play largely about deciding whether to commit to a relationship and have a child. And it’s going to be interesting being in the rehearsal room revisiting those questions now.

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CC One thing that runs through all of your plays to varying degrees is the relationship between parents and children—mostly looking from the child’s point of view. In Belleville I love the line when Abby asks Alioune, “When you were little, did your parents constantly tell you: ‘It doesn’t matter what you do when you grow up as long as you’re happy?’” And then Abby says, “That is the worst thing you can say to a child.”

It jumped out at me because having children myself, I sometimes feel that the main thing I want is for them to be happy.

But what does that really mean? It’s interesting to be in a position to look at that question from both angles: the parent’s and the child’s.

incremental process. And that, I don’t think I’ve quite achieved yet.

AH Happiness is a subject I’ve thought about a lot. I went through a period in my twenties when I really resented the pressure to be happy that I felt from my parents and from the world at large, because aspiring to be happy doesn’t always lead to the most interesting life.

It’s an unfair pressure; it’s an ugly thing to feel that not being happy is a failure.

CC Part of what makes it successful is that the characters feel so multidimensional. By page three I felt like I knew these people—I believe that they exist in the world somewhere.

CC And what is happiness, really?

CC The challenge of character?

AH Yeah, what is it? Of course I want my daughter to be happy but I wonder if that is a selfish wish for a parent to have. You want your kid to be happy because it will give you peace of mind, but they may need to go through periods of suffering that’ll be hard for you but important for them. But I’m sure I’ll feel completely different about this once I have a sentient, cognizant child.

AH The challenge of character within a framework, where I knew the end. With some of these other plays, I did not know what was going to happen as I was writing them and I felt like I was able to honor the characters’ journeys a little more.

Whereas with Belleville, I knew what was going to happen in the climax, so I wrote characters in order to arrive there, which felt to me like a backward way of going about it.

CC Abby in Belleville articulates the problem with this desire so beautifully. She feels the pressure of needing to be happy for the people who are around her. And she just isn’t.

I think more so than any of your other plays, Belleville is kind of a genre play, a psychological thriller. I would call it “domestic horror.”

AH I love horror films, and I love domestic thrillers. But I was trying to honor character at the same time as I was trying to honor this genre, which has particular plot demands and devices. I found it so hard to write the end of that play, the penultimate scene is the climax and I’ve rewritten it so many times.

There’s this danger of writing a big hinge point—a gasp moment. I wanted it to be a gradual realization so there’s no single moment, or cheap turn; instead it’s this

CC It does have this slow, discomfiting burn. Like, Oh my God, what’s happening in this relationship? It’s very uncomfortable.

AH Anne Kauffman, the director, and I talked about that a lot—how intimate relationships can be scary in their totally false supposition that you know someone, when there are things that are really just unknowable. So we were discussing how this could become a completely realistic and detailed portrait of a relationship that everyone will recognize versus what you’re talking about—the genre play.

AH It was the hardest challenge I’ve set for myself as a writer in the last few years.

CC You write these well-drawn, beautiful characters that actors are drawn to and want to play—in part because they’re so complicated. But that could make the casting process really challenging—looking for actors who can embody all of the necessary nuances. Is that something you’ve found to be true?

AH I mean, yeah, you know that better than anyone else. We’re going through our second casting process together right now for The Great God Pan. I think about casting when I write—(baby crying) sorry baby!—but in general I don’t write for particular actors, which I know is something a lot of writers do. After I write the play the process of casting feels like a whole other but equally important creative step.

CC We did have a pretty exhaustive

BOMB SPECIFIC

by EJ Hauser

These photos were taken between 2008 and 2012.

I selected photos of paintings, of drawings, of notebooks—informal curations. Several of the artworks reproduced are now lost; sometimes it is difficult to slow down and stop, paintings are painted over and beginning ideas are sealed under new decisions of material.

Photos as bread crumbs, instantaneous documents of attraction.

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Six Organs of Admittance by Sir Richard Bishop Ben Chasny and I have known each other since before time began. Even back then, he never stayed put—he’s always on the move. Time eventually copied him. I have always been an ancient and ardent admirer of his six-string sorcery and his ability to shape-shift. I’ve followed him closely over the years but there are those instances in which his tracks vanish unexpectedly, leaving me to wonder where he will pop up next.

His main vehicle since 1998 is called Six Organs of Admittance, a moniker that most often represents him as a solo performer but can also involve any number of other musicians who happen to be in his live or studio orbit. The Drag City label in Chicago has just issued two new Six Organs releases, and this time around Ben is getting a little help from some old friends. But Six Organs of Admittance is just one ingredient in this potent Chasny cocktail. In 2003, he officially joined forces with psychedelic rockers Comets on Fire and a few years later he was writing guitar parts for and performing live with one of David Tibet’s Current 93 incarnations. Add in equal parts Badgerlore, August Born, and some unusual soundtrack projects, and you start to realize that this concoction is barely half full.

One of his recent non–Six Organs projects is Rangda, a little three-piece combo which I am fortunate enough

RICHARD BISHOP Where in California did you grow up?

BEN CHASNY I grew up in a small community called Elk River, which is outside of Eureka. It’s in Northern California, close to the Oregon border. It was an extremely rural area, with a redwood forest at our backdoor.

to be involved with, sharing guitar duties with Ben while legendary percussionist Chris Corsano pounds us in and out of time. Rangda’s second full-length record, entitled Formerly Extinct, has also just hit the streets. If that wasn’t enough, Ben has also been shacking up with Elisa Ambrogio, southpaw guitar slinger from the noisy rock outfit Magik Markers, for a slightly quieter project they are calling 200 Years.

All of this has been giving Chasny’s fingers quite a workout over the last several years, and I have been applying all of my orienteering skills with the hopes of keeping him in my sights. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with his numerous LP releases, whom he is working with at any given time, and what odd project he was asked to get involved with when I wasn’t looking. I was warned long ago to keep a safe distance due to the fact that he is armed, dangerous, and cultured. I knew that he could and would attack from any angle, but it’s that cultured bit that scared me. He once titled an album For Octavio Paz, dedicated to the Nobel Prize–winning Mexican poet, and then had the balls to make it an instrumental record.

Frightening.

— SIR RICHARD BISHOP

RB Seems like he could have stayed in Vietnam and had all of that at a fraction of the cost.

BC I should mention that he was drafted and was definitely not into the war, or any war whatsoever. In that way he was definitely a hippie.

the guitar glory to myself. Then you could stop making me look so bad.

BC Well, the only way I know how to play the bass is by slapping it. Do you think you guys would be into me slapping the shit out of the bass on our tunes?

You want some funk or what? You ever hear of Jaco Pastorius?

RB What does he think of your music?

RB Did either of your parents play a musical instrument?

BC No, but my dad has always been into stereos. He loved his JBL speakers and used to crank them really loud. I think that was one of the reasons he wanted to live in the sticks.

RB What kind of music did he like?

BC He jammed a lot of Neil Young and Band of Gypsys.

RB Were your parents hippies? Did you ever live in a commune?

BC They were more hippie than square but I never lived in a commune.

My dad is a Vietnam vet. He just wanted to get away from society, move to the country, and have a few chickens.

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BOMB 121

BC He’s a fan. He likes Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Leo Kottke, and similar stuff, so i t’s not too far of a stretch. He wasn’t in favor of me starting to play the guitar, though. He thought I’d end up a bum with no money or future. Looks like he was right.

RB When did you first start playing the guitar?

BC I started on the bass guitar when I was 14. I was trying to learn Dirty Rotten Imbeciles bass solos and stuff like that.

Then came acoustic guitar at age 18 and then electric after that.

RB You played bass? How come you never told me that? You know, Rangda could really use a bass player. Would you ever consider that? Come on, take one for the team. That way, I could have all

RB Funny you should ask. Jaco, along with the Brecker Brothers, came over to my brother Alan’s house in Tempe, Arizona, in 1982. He said they were all pompous pricks. They were playing a gig that night down the street and my brother’s roommate, who worked at the jazz club, brought them all by to show them her house. My brother hated Jaco and his music and didn’t care that he was a legend. When they were leaving Alan yelled, “There are three bass players in this town who blow your shit away.”

Jaco flipped my brother off and they all walked away.

BC Killer. That’s so funny. I wish I could have seen that.

RB So what songs did you slap away at on the bass?

BC I was just fronting. My slapping skills

but playing an acoustic guitar with just an SM57 microphone on it was pretty futile in the rock clubs that Comets would play in, so the band formed mostly for volume’s sake. We always had plans to do this record but it kind of got benched when I joined Comets. Since Comets aren’t really active right now, I thought it was the perfect time to get it together.

RB Do you think that having your old band mates on this record will do anything to get Comets on Fire back into the studio?

BC They’re probably closer to getting back together now than they were a few years ago, but who knows? It’s really up to whether the rest of the guys feel that it would be something they would like to do.

RB With Comets were you and Ethan [Miller] the main songwriters or was there a more diplomatic approach to the process, with everybody offering up ideas and suggestions?

BC It has always been pretty diplomatic.

Everyone contributes ideas and we would all come to an agreement about what sounded best and what to leave out or keep in.

RB Since Ascent is a Six Organs release, were the songs fully written before going into the studio?

Ben Chasny. Photo by Giorgia Mannavola. Courtesy of Pitch Perfect PR. are pretty lame. It sounds sort of like I am whacking the strings with a salmon.

The first songs I learned were more finger- groove style, like the theme to Peter Gunn, Toots and the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop,” and Black Uhuru’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” All of these songs have killer bass lines.

RB Your first album as Six Organs of Admittance came out in 1998. Were you in any bands before then?

BC I was in a few bands here and there.

One was called Plague Lounge and we released a record on Holy Mountain / New World Of Sound. That was my first glimpse into a world that I felt 59

comfortable in musically. It was a pretty heavy psych-noise type of band. I played through two distortion pedals at the same time.

RB That’s just wrong! Your latest fulllength album, Ascent, was just released

by Drag City. Your former band mates from Comets on Fire are backing you up on this one. What made you want to incorporate them here?

BC Part of it was that I moved to the East Coast, so I started to have romantic memories of California and how we all used to play together. About ten years ago this was the lineup for Six Organs before I joined Comets. We would tour together,

MUSIC — SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE

BC I wrote all of the songs; all of the riffs are mine. Everyone added ideas on top, though. Ethan had some great ideas for guitar parts and Utrillo [Kushner] added some piano chords. Everybody contributed and was creative. I didn’t say no to anyone’s ideas.

RB So you didn’t find yourself in the role of dictator at all?

BC It wasn’t so much being a dictator as just trying to stay focused and keeping everyone busy. I hate telling people what to do. I always think the biggest hurdle is finding people you trust. After that you don’t have to worry about anything. Don’t you agree?

RB I do. Once you have that trust and confidence in each other, all sorts of possibilities arise. That’s how it was with Sun City Girls and I feel the same playing with you and Chris [Corsano] in Rangda.

I wouldn’t want it any other way. There are some screaming guitar solos on the

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FIRST PROOF

BOMB’S LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

CONTENTS 68 A N NE GILMA N Portfolio 72 INTERVIEW SUSA N NA MOORE

by Kurt Andersen

90 DA NIEL POPPICK BOMB Poetry Contest Winner Four Poems 92 INTERVIEW JAIME MA NRIQUE

by Edith Grossman

78 PEDRO SERR A NO Three Poems

98 SUZA NNE SCA NLON All That You Aren’t but Might Possibly Be

80 LAURIE FOOS The Giant Baby

102 CALVIN BEDIENT Two Poems

84 CHARLIE SMITH Kixote Becomes Kixote

104 BEN EHRENREICH Boys

86 BAR NEY KULOK Portfolio

On the cover: Anne Gilman, detail from Desabotonar/deshacer (to undo), 2011, pencil, ink, paint, and graphite on paper, 96 × 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

This issue of First Proof is funded, in part, by Amazon and the Thanksgiving Fund.

Additional funding is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and readers like you.

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SUSA NNA MOORE

by Kurt Andersen

Susanna Moore. Photo by Denise Applewhite.

In 1967, I saw The Ambushers, one of the (terrible) Matt Helm secret-agent movies that starred Dean Martin and many, many young women. The whole point of the movie, at least for a 13-year-old boy, was ogling the super-sexy girls. I like to think that the bitpart actress who particularly caught my eye was the 22-year-old Susanna Moore.

Twenty-four years later, I met her. The investor/ photographer/collector Jean Pigozzi had (with Charles Saatchi) just bought Spy magazine, of which I was a cofounder and coeditor. One of the first things Pigozzi did was introduce me to Moore, whom he thought should contribute to Spy. I’m more grateful to Pigozzi for that matchmaking than anything else he did. I was charmed, fascinated, bedazzled. If she had never published a word, I would adore her. But she happens to be one of the American fiction writers whom I most admire. She is a gorgeous stylist and a remarkable chronicler of human desire and confusion and understanding. I think her fiction uniquely combines tart, unflinchingly clear-eyed social observation, a kind of dreamy second sight, and deep compassion and wisdom. And in her seven novels—My Old Sweetheart, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, In the Cut, One Last Look, The Big Girls, and now The Life of Objects—she has demonstrated staggeringly virtuosic range.

She is also a generous nurturer of other people’s writing, from students at Princeton to young residents of homeless shelters to prison inmates. She is, in short, a very good writer and a very good person but, because she’s as funny as she is serious, and as outrageous as she is ladylike, the farthest thing possible from being a goody-goody.

— KURT A N DERSEN 72

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KURT ANDERSEN I’m going to start with something a smart newspaper writer said to me the other day— she’d noticed that in my new novel, True Believers, I have a small thread involving the relatively littleknown Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich (who helped devise the plan for the Final Solution), and she wondered why Heydrich is everywhere lately. His assassination is the subject of Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH, and there’s a new biography, Hitler’s Hangman. I told her Heydrich also figures in your book, The Life of Objects. In your novel set in Nazi Germany during the war, I think he’s the only high-ranking Nazi who’s more than merely mentioned.

Why have we all suddenly discovered Heydrich?

And more generally, are we nearing the end of the era in which World War II fascinates writers and readers as much as it has for the last seven decades?

SUSA N NA MOOR E I don’t think that we are nearing the end of an era in which readers find the war fascinating, but rather a new stage. Thanks to writers like W. G. Sebald, the recently reissued books of Hans Fallada, and the extraordinary A Woman in Berlin, published anonymously (due to its controversial subject), it is now permissible, even desirable to examine aspects of the Second World War that were for a long time forbidden for reasons of guilt, shame, horror, political correctness, and simple ignorance. There is now fiction on this topic from a younger generation, although until fairly recently not a great deal of it was seen in the West, particularly not books about the suffering of ordinary people, as opposed to soldiers or prisoners. I was very happy to see that the great Russian novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman was recently reissued. The ongoing release of new

Although we had few customers, my mother did not let me read in the shop, lest it appear that I gave myself airs. To ease the tedium, I studied my father’s ledgers as if they held the answers to all that I longed to know.

They were narrow books with maroon board covers, and in them were kept the names of customers and their transactions. I conceived elaborate tales to match each entry. The notation Mrs. Dennis Gurney, doz. handkerchiefs, no monogram, one bolt pink tulle, three packets needles made me wonder what Mrs. Gurney possibly meant to do with so much tulle (as it was pink, it could not be for a bridal veil), and less interesting, why she had chosen plain handkerchiefs, as the monogramming was done to order by my mother and free of charge. That the Catholic priest, Father Timothy, fancied costly cashmere hose that had to be ordered from Dublin was, thanks to my youth, less compelling, although mildly titillating. [...]

It didn’t take long to exhaust the mysteries of the shop’s ledgers, and I began to teach myself to crochet, copying the patterns I found in the ladies’ magazines my father kept on behalf of his customers, studying them until the pages grew soft with use.

I stole lengths of thread from the shop, rolling them into a ball until I’d accumulated enough to make my first lace cuff (I unraveled it eight times before it was to my liking, and even then I didn’t think it good enough). Copying Mr. Knox’s notes had given me patience and an appreciation of tidy handiwork, and the hours I spent sewing seemed to pass in a dream. Silence had become natural to me, and a tendency to secrecy, if not dissimulation.

—S usanna Moore, from The Life of Objects (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

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LITERATURE — SUSANNA MOORE

PEDRO SERRANO Five Poems Translated from the Spanish

by Anna Crowe

Why are those two ladies laughing?

No fear of God, ah, shameless sinners!

One kisses him and the other strips off his clothes, This one watches while that one yokes herself to him.

It cannot be, good Lord, just look, they’re pleasuring!

The water’s gone murky, now you can’t see a thing.

But now water enters the ear, the lipped shell of longing taut, and laves with scents all that lingers in the kisses, light and slippery, wet with fingers.

THE DEATH OF NARCISSUS

Narcissus did not drown.

He crashed against the stone of his laughter, splintered his face, wrecked his soul, his belly, his gestures, fractured his glance and his ribs.

In their place all that is left is a cold scattering of material.

Narcissus, I must say, was not a face.

He was the reflection of love, he had neither body nor color, he could not stand up.

When he drowned the fish ate his sex as they did Shelley’s, when his cock drowned they put it in their mouths as they did with Jorge Cuesta’s.

Because Narcissus shattered inside and could no longer bear that image, because what remains of him has turned to mud, bloated and useless.

THE R ESCU I NG OF NARCISSUS

Among the stiff algae and the irises falls the heavy bundle of Narcissus; fate pushed him deep into himself till he drowned (oneself a mental potter’s wheel of anguish).

What then awaits those still lukewarm but useless scraps of offal in the slime?

Deaf oblivion rules this scenario: nothing more foolish than dying of hysteria.

But the stagnant water of this story swirls, becomes muddled and stirred; is it the quick fish who circle, eager and anxious, round this pool?

They are not fishes, those two shapes, they are two women who in the water play, one very pale, the other dark skinned: prying, green and black eyes.

What is happening? This is a betrayal of the story!

This is Narcissus, not Faust! Why cry?

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The sea offers the fruits, fresh and fickle, of oysters as a decanting, they cling with their lustful odor, briny and giddy and biting, he bites them, and in them he seethes.

One of them talks to him and the other only watches, both of them harass him, both of them corner him.

They are not mothers nor are they harpies, they are two women and they are jellyfish.

Bathed in sweat the body of one excites that which in the other lights up saliva and drenched till they can laugh no more, they sate the dazed one gazing at himself.

In memory of love the bodies toss around, each urges on and cheers the other, and in that shuddering of the soul to which they surrender flows the white light that quietens all three.

FOUR BIR DS

These four scribbles, torpid and porcine, flop down, shadows of thin wash against sea and gray sky, Prussian guards in uniform.

Bending over, with that spike on the helmet’s point, sluggish and squat, aimlessly veering at no given signal, sly, higgledy-piggledy, doubly obstructive.

Awkward in the hand of God, they collide with each other; trusting their fellows, they’re Rigolettos, stunned and erupting in confident laughter.

At times, a gust buffets them sideways, startling them, and their small wings whir, get into a flap, cross-patches, grazing each other in tit for tat.

Crests erect, cackling their ruffled dignity, their stiff, rust-colored wings, myriads in a plump display, dropping then folding curtsy after curtsy.

Foolish poets, pompous and fat.

Lazy at heart they try out a stiff rocking, coo to the tango of other behavior.

Live and let live, I tell myself, and noblesse oblige.

LAURIE FOOS The Giant Baby We should have known when we grew the baby that things would turn out the way they did. Earl and I, we never should have thought we could get away with having any kind of baby, never mind a giant baby like the one we grew out there in the garden. We never had any luck. Not in that garden of ours, at least. We planted tomatoes, and they turned into pomegranates. We planted corn, but the ears split and bloomed into cabbage leaves. And the carrots, oh, the carrots. Down in the ground we dug, and up came some of the longest and thickest cucumbers we’d ever seen.

Sometimes I forget that things aren’t the same for other people the way they are for Earl and me. Sometimes I even forget that there are other people out there, that they exist. People who don’t grow one thing and end with another.

People who have no interest in seeds or don’t even have a garden. I forget that there is anyone but Earl and me now that the giant baby is gone. He was the one thing we grew that we had hope for.

It wasn’t that we didn’t love the giant baby or think of him as ours, as belonging to us. He didn’t grow inside me, the way most babies do, but this is a new world we live in. Some babies grow in dishes in labs, and some in the bellies of other women who then give the baby they’ve grown to its mother. There are all kinds of ways that babies grow, and so what if the way we grew ours wasn’t what you’d call “conventional?”

So what?

So what, we said, Earl and I. Who would possibly care that our baby was not grown inside a woman but in the garden where we had planted him?

He grew right out there in our yard near the raspberries that turned into radishes and the orange tree that collapsed under the weight of the pumpkins that sprouted among the leaves.

Who would possibly care what we did in the privacy of our own yard? Who was anyone to say that what we did was wrong?

We grew the baby in the yard. We grew him, Earl and I, out there in that garden of ours, and we loved him—I 80

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think we really did—like he was ours because he was ours.

Until he wasn’t anymore.

It all started with the toes.

But I should explain. I have some explaining to do, just like Ricky used to say to Lucy on the old I Love Lucy show when Lucy got busted, always, for trying to find a part in one of Ricky’s cabaret shows where he sang the Babalu.

That Lucy, always getting caught with fruit piled on her head or grapes between her toes trying to wind her way into being onstage with Ricky. And he caught her every time and would say in that accent of his that she had some “’splaining to do.” But I didn’t understand what there was to explain.

Why didn’t Ricky get it? All Lucy ever wanted was more time with Ricky.

Earl and I were like Lucy and Ricky in that way, I guess. We were always trying to be together more, or more together somehow. I’d fallen in love with Earl the minute I’d heard his name.

“The name’s Earl,” he’d said to me that day at the vegetable stand when he reached for a carton of cherry tomatoes at the same second I had. I’d looked down at his hand there on top of mine, our two hands both covering the redness of the cherry tomatoes, and I’d blushed in a way I hadn’t blushed for years.

“Earl,” I’d said. “Earl.”

I’d repeated the name to him as if I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. I remember I let the name rest in my mouth as if I were tasting it. You don’t meet many men named Earl anymore. I’d always wanted to meet a man named Earl, I realized, standing over those cherry tomatoes that were the only things redder than my face, though I hadn’t known it until the second he’d said the name. Earl, I’d thought, such a solid name. The kind of name you could count on. What had happened to all the solid names of the past? Short bursts of man’s names like Chuck or Ed or Burt. Or Earl.

I said to myself that day, as I took the little basket of cherry tomatoes he handed to me, I’m going to fall in love with a man named Earl and grow a whole life with him someday.

And that’s just how it happened. We

left that vegetable stand and have been together ever since. Even when Earl had to be away from me to work at the lumberyard, I could still feel him there inside of me. I thought of that feeling as the Essence of Earl, and it was that feeling we’d brought to this house we built and the garden we grew together.

Sometimes I thought that if I could open Earl up and climb my way inside of him and stay in there, in the innards of Earl, I would. I would have found a way to get inside. At night when we slept, I’d curl up next to Earl and press my face into his back and whisper to myself, Oh, sweet Essence of Earl, let me get inside.

A nd Earl would press his back harder against me, as if he could feel it, too, and wanted me in there, the two of us folded over each other, skin over skin and bone to bone, muscle and heart and blood that pumped.

But that was before everything happened, when we were just Earl and Linda and no one else.

Earl had gone out to the garden that day without me, the way he did sometimes after they’d fired him from the lumberyard. Poor Earl had sold the wrong kind of wood to a couple building a deck that collapsed after a party.

A highly intoxicated and obese man had done a cannonball into the pool that the deck surrounded. There had been a lawsuit. The obese man—they always said obese and not huge or fat the way they said intoxicated and not drunk—had splinters in places splinters are never meant to prick through, Earl said the day he was let go.

“The boss just looked at me and said, ‘Damn it, Earl, if you don’t know the dif ference between cedar and untreated pine by now, may God save your sorry soul,’” Earl said as we stood at the window that looked out over the backyard. We stared out at the tree that had broken in half from the weight of all the pumpkins it had sprouted instead of oranges.

I told him that, to my mind, no obese drunken man should attempt a cannonball without thinking of the consequences beforehand.

“Splinters or no splinters, that’s just downright irresponsible,” I said, and Earl pulled me closer and pressed his nose into my hair.

“Oh, Linda,” he said, “if only the whole world could see things the way

CHARLIE SMITH Kixote Becomes Kixote You might ask why did Jack turn his attention to killers? Some folks when asked why they do things say I’ve got my reasons, by which they mean they have reasons they don’t want to tell.

But Jack, if you asked, would say, I haven’t got a reason, and for all you know, he was telling the truth. A pain, a pang, a ladybug landing on his wrist, a song overheard on a summer morning on his way to the Venetian Pool. Or was it the day he saw an article in the paper? You might have seen it, everyone did. A man stuffed a child into a well. Modern wells are narrow pipes in the ground. The man, an orchard keeper from Poughkeepsie, stuffed the four-year-old daughter of a migrant worker into the nine-inch-diameter well behind his house. A pain, like a knife in Jack’s side, reading this.

Was that it, the knock that set him off, a collector of murderous facts?

If you asked he would say he didn’t know. He himself never broached the question.

“What makes you like this?” Pedro Gomez, his cabdriver friend said as they sat in the Orange Bowl parking lot eating boliche from paper plates.

“Like what?”

“Chaser of the public murderer.”

“I feel like I inherited the tendency.”

“Who from?”

“That—or why—I couldn’t say.”

A couple dressed in the two halves of an elephant costume crossed in front of the cab, the one guy carrying the head under his arm. Bedraggled, the outfits undone, one, the tail part, eating a red popsicle, they looked like ladrones de carnaval, he thought after a long night, only sweat stains and a slightly exhausted happiness to show for it “A thing of the blood,” Pedro said.

“Somebody’s,” he said.

Or maybe, like everything else, it had something to do with Randine.

He hangs around the library a lot 84

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during daylight hours—it’s like the old days when he was a kid, educating himself up in Hialeah, discovering murderers and their intrepid trackers—looking for a line on specialized killers, those who slice through the neighborhood—a big or little neighborhood—jacking homefolks out of the living world. Reading specialized authors mostly these days and looking up words. He’s read true crime and Juan Rulfo and Bruno Schulz and Jim Thompson and Beckett, Kaf ka, Söderberg, and Céline, and James T. Farrell and the Brontë sisters, and Dostoyevsky, whom everyone reads in prison, and more true crime. He gets into the OED. It’s a huge corpus, the English language. And truth is, even after all these years the language’s been in operation, many useful words haven’t made it into the dictionary.

That’s something to ponder. There’s family slang and kid nomenclature and sacramental blather and love’s lexemes. Battle cries and bloody shouts.

Mutterings of the desolate in their lonely beds. The usages of pointless entreaty. The cries of the murdered as the knife goes in—they’re missing.

And the ecstatics of the murderer.

Utterance that no one pays attention to. Ejaculations of the broken or limited minded, eloquent, but unfathomable, and unrepeatable, spoken by other parts of the body than the voice, also eloquent, but never written down.

Cries diviners use, infantile or sophisticated, the diviner, that is. Idioms slipped from one country to another as the cutthroat pauses at the border for a last look back. Blood feasts, jungle banquets, pirate talk. Confessories scratched in a dying throat. Syllables possibly never reaching the mouth.

Vocables spending their whole lives in the murks and mists of flesh, organic designatos, pancreatic, and respitorial, and les cris—ride ’em cowboy— de coeur. Everywhere you go, anything you do, there’s a word for it, or will be, or just was, to explain how your throat got cut, and a clue as to who did it. And somebody you know, friend or foe or neighbor gurgling blood and cyanide froth, is struggling to say it, or struggling to deny that he did.

He lays himself down to sleep beside these words. He gathers paragraphs of revelation into his arms. He rests beside the still waters of murder. In

the valley of the shadow of death traps he naps. And awakes with a chill.

He doesn’t tell anybody about this but he begins going out at night, injecting himself into scuffles. He peers from the windows of cabs searching faces for signs of miscreancy and murder.

Once in a while he comes on something scary. A man beating a boy at the entrance of an alley. He jumps from Willie Best’s cab and runs over there. A large aurelia bush half shades the affair. The man is beating the other fellow, the boy, with a switch. “Hey,” Jack says. “Hey.” “Hey yourself,” the man says, his voice friendly.

“You got to cut that out.”

“I got to do nothing of the sort.” The man, under a great shock of white hair like a clown wig, has not looked up at him. He goes on beating the boy—Jack is sure it is a boy—lying on the ground.

“I’ll have to make you stop,” Jack says.

“Do what you got to.”

Jack grabs the man by the shoulder and turns him, or thinks he does.

Actually the man catches the momentum of the pull and whirls on Jack, striking him across the face with the switch.

“Goddamn ! ” Jack cries, falling back.

He exits the alley and reenters the cab.

“You got some blood on your forehead,” Willie says.

“And shame in my heart,” says Jack.

He cuts back a little after that.

Goes back to writing letters. But still he steps out. On Compton Street just before dawn he thinks he sees a man fighting a woman and can’t keep from interfering, but the woman turns out to be a man who is holding his own.

She—he—is very pretty and has hard muscles in her—his—forearms. Jack writes threatening letters to gangsters and misbehaving politicians. A few write back saying he is terribly misinformed and a couple invite him for a drink. At Jud Going’s regular table at Shoddy’s he insults an associate and is escorted out back and beaten senseless.

He comes to lying in a plastic laundry basket behind the Sea Crest motel in Surfside. Pinned to his shirt is a note that says, “Please take me home and

BARNEY KULOK Portfolio

Untitled (Box) , 2011, gelatin silver print, 20 Ă— 27 1/2 inches.

Images courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York.

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DANIEL POPPICK Winner of BOMB’s 2012 Poetry Contest, Judged by Ben Lerner Daniel Poppick is “assisted by a radiance of bending.” Many of the most beautiful lines show grammar almost breaking up: “For you was sunburnt I are leaving we am buoyed by / Homages…” Bending, buoyancy—the poems have both delicacy and force.

“We am” might be a solecism, but it’s also an urgent dream. Reading, we am radiant. “Between us flows a school.”

— BEN LER N ER

THE M A IL

I would like to be arrested with you under the bank thermometer in protracted

strobe, greeting my instruments in

N ET

We wring the museum a diary rain & in its sheet shake unfastened the January Entertainments an indoor century with wax Fixed in its gold disc’s glare a plate with one face Punched in & beaming at the string of beads Made blades with which I slash the painted Monster’s chin a beard of eyes this weather Slips indoors & we continue sleeping off the diary Of wax by gulping water you say you saw The clouds wring rain of its museum & glasses arrive brimming with wax entrainments Joining webs of bone bleached in a horse’s Throat her slashed-off horn pasted to the day In the diary regarding sleepers & a lidless snow

depositions, whittling

minutes off the rosary into

a blue bag I steal

away with, blood tweeted into re: the smear the light

bears off repeating my friend rides waving by & she denies it

in some thunder, the anthem droning for

one demanding access to the marquee

we confetti off

the bloom from

she rides home with matches dripping from jeans & I follow reserving

fire less for wishing blink than noon’s serial punctuation

flipping through flame’s Post-it without reading empty hives, deployed

in parachutes embraces if

sanctioned I swear by

night to purchase notes

for those embers, to continue singing in subtraction

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JAIME MANRIQUE

by Edith Grossman

Jaime Manrique. Photo by Raúl Jalube.

I first met Jaime Manrique roughly 30 years ago, and we’ve been friends ever since. I’m not sure I remember the precise circumstances. I think we both attended a poetry workshop run by Enrique Lihn, the late Chilean poet, at the Americas Society, though Jaime remembers our meeting as we danced to salsa at somebody’s party. Regardless, I was attracted by Jaime’s goodnatured charm, sharp intelligence, and poetic talent, and after all these years, I still find those qualities extremely appealing.

He was always very kind to my son, Matt, who was a little boy when Jaime and I became friends and has always adored him. As a matter of fact, Matt met Terry Marks, the woman he eventually married, at a party given for Jaime by his late partner, Bill Sullivan.

I’ve always cherished that connection between my son and a dear friend.

Our friendship has not been exclusively sentimental. I’ve also had the professional pleasure of translating a good number of his poems. An aspect of his poetic writing that I admire very much is his use of ordinary, colloquial language to create images of great beauty. An example is his short memory poem called “Mambo,” in which he remembers his aunts dancing the mambo “wearing their spike-heeled shoes, / lowcut dresses and wide swirling skirts; / their long obsidian hairdos / in the style of the time.” I’d venture to say 92

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that this quality may well be the effect of a profound and on-going North American influence on his poetry.

One thinks immediately of William Carlos Williams, for example, or even Jaime’s beloved Emily Dickinson.

Of course there are colloquial, imagistic poets in Spanish—Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda immediately come to mind—but it occurs to me that this may be an area that reveals the significant effect of the English language on Jaime’s work, even though he normally composes his poems in Spanish.

His novels, however, are written in English, and tend to have a larger historical focus, while his poetry narrows the point of view to a deeply personal one.

Jaime’s fiction is meticulously researched and wonderfully revelatory of persons and events. His latest, Cervantes Street, explores the world of the man who despised Miguel de Cervantes and wrote a “continuation” of part one of Don Quixote before Cervantes could publish part two. A lucky misfortune, since the existence of what is known as “the false Quixote” allows Cervantes to explore the relationship between fiction and reality in the authentic part two in a way that is positively mind-boggling.

I enjoyed the interview with my old friend, especially the chance to talk to him at length about literature in general and his writing in particular.

— EDITH GROSSM A N

I began to conceive of a novel, not a pastoral or chivalric or picaresque novel, but a new kind of novel, about a man who in many ways was like Alonso Quijano, like my father, like myself; a man who per­sonified the age in which I lived; someone like Columbus, a man of humble origins, who dared to be an individual at a time when men like him were only allowed to have small aspirations. My hero would be a man who believed he was as deserving of human dignity as any nobleman; a man who would break away from all the others who had come before him, just as Columbus had, as all dreamers had from the beginning of history; a man who dared to be different; who, like Alonso Quijano, lived his life out­side the imprisoning conventions created by society; who would not be afraid to be considered mad; a man who em­bodied the qualities of a new kind of gentleman; who was as much a soldier as a man of letters; who understood that the ancient relationship between the common man and the prince was obsolete; a man, a true gentleman, who could relate to the suffering of other human beings; who would help create new ideals to aspire to; who knew that good deeds and admirable actions, a kind heart and fairness for all, were more important than privilege and birth.

— Jaime Manrique, Cervantes Street (Akashic Books, 2012)

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LITERATURE — JAIME MANRIQUE

SUZANNE SCANLON All That You Aren’t but Might Possibly Be You’ve been out two weeks when you audition for a revival of A Hatful of Rain. One of those cloudy late fall afternoons. You come from the Lower East Side in a royal blue blouse with large lapels, the top three buttons undone. From a flea market: five dollars. A slinky black skirt. Your sister says you look like a bruise, all black and blue. The skirt falls below your knees, slit on one side, high up a thigh.

Cranberry-colored tights with black platform pumps. A black 1960s-era sweater—again from a street fair. It is deliberately tight fitting, with delicate pearl buttons and a sequined f lower design on the chest.

You look like you’re playing dress up.

You feel like that. You have nice cheekbones, big eyes—but you are not pretty so much as odd looking. Strange. You are young enough that it’s attractive.

Something about the deadly expression, almost always there: your face, large eyes, a small mouth. No upper lip. Often comical.

“You have a Swoosie Kurtz quality,” a director remarks, “there’s definitely something off-balance about you.”

It’s too much to be spoken of this way. How hungry you are to be seen, to be spoken of.

Your hair: long and straight, never pulled back with a barrette. In your face. Bright red lipstick but no other makeup. Almost always a small patch of acne on your chin, around your mouth.

BE PATIENT It is standard: long hours waiting in predesignated waiting spaces—say, a stairwell.

An open call listed in Back Stage.

You sit for what feels like hours in the lobby of the small theater, the Samuel Beckett. Forty-Second Street between 10th and 11th. It isn’t a part of town 98

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you visit often, though later you date a man who lives in a co-op around the block, next door to Angela Lansbury.

One day, visiting the man, you see someone delivering a balloon bouquet to Angela Lansbury. You are living on 53rd then, just ten blocks up from the man—your lover, your teacher. Acting Chekhov. You played Masha. What you will remember of the affair: those walks up and down Ninth Avenue. That empty feeling. The way men would look at you and you learned something about yourself.

The man tells you that you wear the wrong expression on your face as you walk: you are too open, too vulnerable, he will say. It will get you in trouble— that look with the big eyes and the sad mouth.

The man will eventually disappoint you, in that way that men do.

You will come to hate it, to f ind this habit of yours grotesque: that you expect them to be something else. How your head fills up. Those prosy dreams.

You read for the lead. Celia Pope.

The director likes you. Maybe. The way he smiles—you can’t tell if he is laughing at you or with you. You’ll get used to it.

REHEARSE In one of your first acting classes you play a woman who puts her head in the oven. When her sister finds her there and asks, “Why did you do it?” she answers, “I was just having a bad day.”

It got a big laugh, that line.

“I was just having a bad day.”

You don’t really understand why it is so funny but you like it. The laughter.

Maybe later you’ll understand.

A bad day is surely reason enough, you might think.

HAVE A CLEAR OBJECTIVE Dy mph na wi l l tel l you to f ind meaning.

She talks about a man named Viktor Frankl who wrote about concentration camp survivors: disillusioned and bitter, looking for a reason to live. You can’t imagine this sort of despair.

“Is it meant to comfort me?”

“Frankl’s meaning in life became about helping others find theirs.”

“I can’t help anyone.”

Dymphna’s talk of concentration camp survivors reminds you that you are super privileged and self-absorbed and that really your suffering doesn’t mean much by comparison.

“You have to choose how you respond to your own suffering. Everyone has to find meaning.”

“Everyone is full of shit,” you want to say, but you don’t. You are learning not to say such things. This is what is meant by well-adjusted.

SELL IT TO THE PEANUTCRUNCHING CROWD It is on your way to this first, postdischarge audition, in that tight blue blouse with the black skirt, the black sweater buttoned up (because it is fall now and chilly in the evening), with the pumps, that it happens. The platform pumps you wore to your cousin’s wedding, downtown Chicago. You got a long pass. You remember the cold and the way your relatives looked at you, at your body, your chest in particular— sizing you up, considering the freak you’d become—and saying things like: “You look just like your mother!” with a certain restrained but happy twist to their mouths.

Which you don’t know if you did but they all have a way of looking at your breasts, and then making the pronouncement: “Just like your mother.”

So you guessed it was probably true but still the linking seemed pretty morbid. You took a lot of Mellaril the night of the wedding, slurred your speech and possibly drooled. Everyone greeted you but mostly tried very hard to keep a distance, which you found amusing.

That you’d become scary. That what was broken inside of you had rendered you an outsider.

These memories are alive in each step you take with a platform pump, steps through this city of great promise and great disappointment, this city that was meant to welcome young women like you. Though it never did, or would. You are in costume. Your costume in the hospital had been a variation of your costume in college: big T-shirts, sweatshirts torn at the neck Flashdance-style, ripped jeans, Doc Martens. Your long reddish-brown hair was the same then as now, cut bluntly, falling around your un-made-up face.

CALVIN BEDIENT Two Poems

WHOSE DAY?

My morrow died in (my (shotgun; my tongue when it (stepped (mock-gingerly like a (hen secretly resigned to the shit it’s in. Hola, whose day is this, its new-washed khakis smothered in mother-dust?

Swing your machetes, angels, against our weedy parts (show a little love. Here! keep back from the inner organs, they’re not lunchbox oranges or a young girl’s tits budding on the day, they (and their worms (are hiding . . .

there is no deception here, “day” as in— but what I began to explain (and only to you, my friends, (has to do with . . . might be termed (the unexperienced: “un” as in alt-, haloed in oddity, mystagogy contrary to the Cartwheel, the Atom for Peace, all that great trashy scatter overhead.

The soul in its recombinant function is what I mean, I mean working the room of the dark, despite melancholy with its (plate of doubt and (side of grief, whose days are (slow Asias of time, their seconds jacked—days

Word is out!

Day has lost her Ovidian ovaries.

Quick, in what stone-carrying carts (on what rocky roads (under what splatter-gas galaxies

whose table is quitted sooner than is polite by the hombres of perfume and the fillies of cigars (peppy folk whose day must have been

(will you find them? Already they’re on their way, pickups loaded with solvents, prods, voicetackles, grafters hidden from those whose days

a hoot, for how they laughed and laughed (they conversed like mules that stomp death into the ground.

I could almost wish them back again, swelling

are different from ours, days (so they say (never punk’d, whose hi has somebody in it, whose arm (pits are washed by the jet stream, whose zeros

the room like day amid the minutes (but it was careless of them to caress once or twice (the chef of my contagions, whose

are frauds, whose love’s not a (blonde whose child is called utterly (impossible, whose screws are not the ejecta of a mad machine.

meringue is the melancholy of my hands.

Right here, under heavenly showpieces of dust, the Black Eye, the Red Spider, the Bubble, the Exclamation Mark, the Lost (whose days are a gas hustle display (mocked at by dark matter’s (smoked glasses, you will find our day, or call it whose day (“whose” as in “whose,”

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BEN EHRENREICH Boys Two little boys become friends.

Good friends, if not best friends, though at various times over the course of their acquaintance each might be ready to use that appellation, to call the other his best friend. At other times, which sometimes overlap with those times, each might deny that he is the other’s friend at all. This, of course, is what we call friendship, a measured trust which by the same mechanism that it distributes affection also apportions mistrust, rejection, fear.

It begins at recess one day, when the first little boy, whom we’ll call Stephen, lies sprawled on the ground near the entrance to their school, on the far side of the building, away from the playground and from the other children.

He lies there on his belly for three reasons. The first is that he has found an anthill, and wants his face to be as close as possible to the ants so that he might better study them. The second, which is related to the first, is that he wonders what it’s like to be an ant and is certain that he will gain no insights to their experience of the world while standing on two feet. Since he does not have six feet, as ants do, he figures the best approximation available to him is to lie horizontally, which allows him to see the grass and the sand and the cement of the sidewalk as he imagines ants might: the grass as a severe and imposing forest, the sloped patches of pebbled sand as desert badlands of boulders scattered along parched bajadas, the sidewalk as a high and treacherous bluff. The third reason that the boy is lying down, and perhaps the most forceful of the three, is that he would badly like to disappear.

But he is unable to, and not only because the other little boy, whom we’ll call Bolt, finds him there lying on his belly—in his long, bipedal softness more like a worm than an ant.

(In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates imagines ants, like wasps and bees, to be 104

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the reincarnations of just and virtuous men. He does not mention worms, or, in this context, little boys.) Stephen looks up and sees Bolt walking by. Bolt looks puzzled by Stephen’s posture but displays neither suspicion nor scorn, the emotions Stephen is most accustomed to observing on the faces of his peers. Stephen senses an opening, and takes a chance. “Hey kid,” he says.

“C’mere.”

Bolt comes closer and kneels in the grass beside him, his bare knees just inches from Stephen’s ear. “What is it?” Bolt asks.

“An anthill,” Stephen says.

“I know that.”

“But you don’t know what I saw.”

“What did you see?” asks Bolt.

“The ants just carried a tongue into their hole.”

“A tongue?”

“It looked like it was human.”

“No way they could do that,” says Bolt. “The hole’s too small.”

“They widened it. Then once they got the tongue in, they dug it back closed real fast.”

“For real?”

“For real.”

Those two words settle the matter like an agreement sealed with spit. Bolt asks Stephen whose tongue he thinks it was and Stephen answers that he does not know, but that it looked fresh. “It was still pink,” he says, adding that it appeared to have been sliced cleanly off, as if with a straight razor, a paring knife or perhaps some sort of dirk.

“I don’t think the ants could do that by themselves.”

Bolt agrees, and the boys spend the remainder of recess on their bellies, side by side, wondering what the ants will do next, speculating about the origin of the tongue. They watch the janitor trim the bushes outside the principal’s office window. They squint their eyes and look for signs of blood on the hedge clippers’ blades. “If only,” says Bolt, “the ants could talk.”

But save the inaudible tread of their many feet and the soft crunching and clicking of their mandibles, the ants are silent. Their muteness creates, for Stephen and Bolt, a world of possibility. For the following week and most of the week that follows it, until they have exhausted the potential of the tongue narrative and moved on to another, brighter entertainment, the boys do

their best to peer into the mouths of everyone they meet. Closed-mouthed people arouse their suspicions, allowing the story to spiral onward. From across the schoolyard and across the classroom and from one end of the schoolbus to the other, the two little boys stick out their tongues at one another. It becomes, for them, a secret form of salutation and even of primitive speech, allowing them to say, with various shades of meaning and emotion according to the context and the moment, “I have a tongue and you have a tongue—everyone else we can’t be sure of.” Their tonguedness, for now, cements them to a mystery, and with that, to one another.

So it is that during their first fight, which occurs three and a half weeks later and becomes the prelude to a fortnight-long freeze in relations between them, Stephen confesses to Bolt that there was never a tongue in the anthill. “You were stupid enough to believe me,” he says.

“You were stupid enough to lie,” Bolt responds.

But even if he had, technically, lied, Bolt’s riposte makes little sense to Stephen. Their young friendship is built upon lies, though it never would have occurred to Stephen to choose that word. They share spangled and beribboned half-truths, wishes, fantasies, fragments of dreams, alluring impossibilities that allow them not to escape or deny the world, but to consent on the existence of another one, one that they both find more interesting and ultimately more truthful than the drab galaxy of gerunds, state capitals, and polygons that their teachers conjure up each day in class, one that they can share.

By the second week of animosities, neither boy is able to remember the original cause of their squabble.

For the record, though, Stephen had stretched the fabric of their friendship, the cocoon of stories in which they agreed to wrap themselves, farther than even Bolt was willing to let himself be taken. He had suggested to Bolt that all the other children, the teachers and school secretaries, the principal, the janitor, the nurse, the man behind the counter at the pizza shop, the muttering drunk they passed every

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Katie Bell by John O’Connor For the past year I’ve worked in a studio adjacent to Katie Bell’s, at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation.

It’s been thrilling for me to watch her work evolve over this period of time. The following piece is my attempt to illuminate Bell’s current processes through a collage of texts that are pertinent to her work.

— JOHN O’CONNOR is an artist in New York City.

Delayed reactions allow for the Fermentation theory Delayed reactions thrive in a warm Fermentation theory In hot tubs reactions thrive in a warm Fermentation theory In hot tubs reactions thrive in a warm wet environment In hot tubs many organisms thrive in a warm wet environment In hot tubs many in the gap thrive in a warm wet environment In hot tubs many in the gap thrive in a warm wet life I try tubs many in the gap thrive between art and life I try to act in the gap between art and life I try to act in a transparent lid between art and life I try to act in a transparent lid between art and lingerie The cabinet act in a transparent lid between each shelf and lingerie The cabinet with a transparent lid between each shelf and lingerie The cabinet with a transparent lid for each shelf is excellent for lingerie The cabinet with a transparent artist for each shelf is excellent for lingerie The cabinet with a transparent artist for each shelf is excellent of courage I try to be a transparent artist for each show is excellent of courage I try to be a truthful artist for each show is excellent of courage I try to be a truthful artist and show a level of courage I try to be a truthful limestone and show a level of courage I try to be a truthful limestone and show a level of the pyramid A higher to be a truthful limestone and show the outer level of the pyramid A higher-quality limestone was used as the outer level of the pyramid A higher-quality limestone was used as the outer casing of the pyramid A higher-quality limestone was crucial as the outer casing of the pyramid We assert quality limestone was crucial as the outer casing is valid We assert quality the subject was crucial as that subject casing is valid We assert that the subject was crucial as that subject matter is valid We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid We assert that the subject is not contradictory and only that subject matter is valid We position that the subject is not contradictory and only that subject matter is valid The position that the subject is not contradictory and a capitalist system is valid The position that the subject is not contradictory in a capitalist system is valid The position of core capitalists is not contradictory in a capitalist system The position of core capitalists in the painter’s contradictory in a capitalist system Supreme artifice of core capitalists in the painter’s contradictory in a capitalist system Supreme artifice of core capitalists in the painter’s contradictory in deliberate misappropriation Supreme artifice of core capitalists comes in the painter’s love of deliberate misappropriation Supreme artifice comes in the painter’s love of deliberate misappropriation Supreme artifice comes to the simplicity love of deliberate misappropriation People are also artifice comes to the simplicity love of deliberate faux finish People are also artifice comes to the simplicity of changing a faux finish People are also attracted to the simplicity of changing a faux finish

115

ARTISTS ON ARTISTS — KATIE BELL

A Night’s Mission , 2012, wood, foam, plastic, carpet, paper, glue, rope, drywall spray, linoleum, and acrylic on wall, 14 × 12 × 2 feet. Photos by Carly Gaebe. Images courtesy of the artist.

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Catherine Howe by Madeline Weinrib

Proserpina (Frenchie) , 2012, oil and beeswax on linen, 40 Ă— 30 inches.

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Wendy White by EJ Hauser

Fin , 2012, acrylic on canvas and PVC, 24 Ă— 32 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Leo Koenig Inc., New York.

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Lucy Raven by Jason Simon

Lucy Raven and I both favor the more social impulses of image making. In the following conversation, which took place over the phone in July, we loosely follow the results of her recent investigations. Her movie China Town (2009), an animation of the production of copper from an open-pit mine in Nevada to the ingot smelters of China, is comprised of thousands of still photos.

RPx (2012) is an ongoing collection of projection-calibration film and video loops. While an earlier version of RPx was shown at the Whitney Biennial, its most recent iteration opens in September at the Hammer Museum. In between talking about these projects, we also revisit sites which I coproduced at one time in one form or another: Orchard, the cooperative gallery that ran from 2005 to 2008; the One-Minute Film Festival, an annual barn party held from 2003 to 2012; and the Wexner Center’s Art & Technology lab.

Moving-image technology and culture are ever changing, and, consequently, its artists are ever recovering fast-disappearing tools and languages (and recovering from their disappearances too).

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Stills from RPx , 2012–, projection from scans of 8 mm, 16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm film and digital cinema files, including captured formats in standard spherical 35 mm, anamorphic 35 mm, Super-35 mm, and VistaVision, and stereoscopic processes in Marks 3Depix, Space-Vision, and StereoVision, and from the Fastax rotating prism system, length variable. Images courtesy of the artist.

After China Town was complete, Raven headed to Mumbai to see the animators transform American 2-D features into 3-D releases. The point was not to chase down her materials but to understand our current landscape: mined, migrated, and represented. In an age of visual “extinction” (her term), in which digital excesses form layers of sediment over what was previously projected and now lies buried beneath, Lucy is an intrepid explorer. In India, she saw bas-reliefs such as those at Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, but nowhere is dimensional depth put to better use than in the frame-by-frame shading for Hollywood’s latest rereleases carried out just down the road. We didn’t get to talk about the reliefs; she has done so elsewhere already and is preparing to do so again in one of her illustrated lecture-performances as part of her show at the Hammer. Raven links the reliefs to 3-D movies in this form: produced, experienced, and given their meaning en masse, they are also a craft’s handwork.

Looking past the temples of cinema and the gods, she attends to the effect of this gesture by human hands, the only part of us that can represent itself, whether in stone or pixels.

— JASON SIMON

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ART — LUCY RAVEN

JASON SIMON We met when I was gallery sitting at Orchard and you came in when you were about to start a residency at the Wexner Center.

LUCY RAVEN You had curated the show; it was called Having Been Described in Words and was about the Wexner Center’s curator Bill Horrigan. You had this booklet with his collected writings available for free—they were the organizing principle of the show. I didn’t know who you were or that you had started the Art & Tech program at the Wexner. I wandered to the back and you asked, “Do you have any questions?” and I said, “Yeah, do you have a bathroom?”

JS Then we talked for a while. And we made a follow-up date to watch your rough cut of China Town, about global copper. I’d never seen anything quite like it: rapid stills with live-action sound. I had no clue that your technique evolved from hand-drawn animations. I was looking at it as a decomposition of video rather than as an extension of animation. It wasn’t until one of your animations ended up in the One-Minute Film Festival that I saw your previous work.

LR You were probably like, What!?

JS (laughter) Yeah, I didn’t expect a 30-second pencil portrait of Jimmy Stewart.

LR That was Or Was It the Other Way Around?—the title actually comes from a line in Sans Soleil, where Chris Marker revisits locations in San Francisco that were obsessions of Jimmy Stewart’s in Vertigo.

Between 2006 and 2009, while working on China Town, when I wasn’t in Nevada or in China or in Columbus, Ohio, editing at the Wexner, I explored tangents that had come up in the making of the piece— one of them was this ongoing theme of vertigo. That was the sensation of looking into a giant open-pit copper mine, which looked like a Dantean corkscrew being twisted into the center of the earth, and thinking about the different sorts of time exposed: the geologic time for the rock to form; the 100 plus years since the mine opened, and its tremendous history of booms and busts; the current 24-7 work cycle, which is divided into 12-hour shifts; and all this in service of the constantly fluctuating price of copper, which is based on futures. The animation that I sent to you is the moment in Vertigo when Scottie realizes that Judy is really Madeleine. In the film, she escapes death 126

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only to die again. Marker calls this the inability to escape time.

JS Hand-drawn animation reads now as a very personal way to get drawing onto film and onto the screen, but it also has this connection to a bigger set of questions around 3-D movies that you’re working on: depersonalized and digital labor.

LR Well, that certainly wasn’t something I was thinking about at the time I made that piece, but these underlying concerns kept arising in different ways. Converting films shot in 2-D to stereoscopic 3-D, which is the process I’ve been researching, is very much about using drawing techniques to animate photographic images and put them into a virtual threedimensional space.

JS My understanding is that you are looking at two tracks. One is about a new round of industry investment in 3-D, with a globalized labor pool of animators filling in or shading or multiplying Hollywood images. And the other involves looking at 3-D as a history of perceptual investigations, from early studio directors to more experimental cinemas to contemporary ideas about how our brains work.

LR That’s right. Today, 3-D films are made two ways. One is the old-fashioned way: shooting with two cameras. The other is to shoot normally, with one camera, and convert the film to stereoscopic 3-D in postproduction. The process happens in a global pipeline that utilizes animators and technicians from around the world, all of them working on fragments of the same film. The workflow is a painstaking frame-by-frame process—it’s digital, but also quite artisanal in that the work is done by hand, a pixel at a time. I’ve been focusing on a studio in LA that works with an outpost in Mumbai. They’ll often work together on just one part of a particular film’s conversion to 3-D; the rest is outsourced to other postproduction studios. From opposite sides of the world, an illusion of depth is created.

JS As a side question: Did you ever find that studios were investing in 3-D movies because they are less pirateable?

Poster for Or Was It the Other Way Around? (2007), 2012.

Bromberg, a historian who runs Lobster Films?

LR No, I don’t know him.

JS He restores Georges Méliès films, which, it turns out, were massively pirated in the American market. As soon as Méliès released a film in France it would get pirated and released in the US. So, in order to fight the pirates, Méliès filmed with two cameras side-by-side.

LR Oh, I have heard about this. Keep going.

JS That way he could print from a negative in France and in the US at the same time. So Bromberg has been able to match up the negatives for a couple of Méliès films and do 3-D screenings.

LR That’s amazing. Basically every time we’ve seen a 3-D craze, it’s been during a decline in box office sales: first around the invention of TV in ’53, then with VHS in the ’80s, and today with Internet streaming. It’s a way of getting people into theaters since, so far, homeentertainment systems can’t replicate the 3-D, though that seems on the brink of changing.

LR That’s part of it, I think. The conversion processes themselves are quite closely guarded as well. Each company has its own secret sauce.

JS What was the sequence for you between the research into 3-D and the research into the projection-system test patterns, which seems to have been a concurrent project? Did one find you tripping over the other?

JS Have you come across Serge

LR They were different tangents that

Josiah McElheny by Gregg Bordowitz

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ART — JOSIAH McELHENY

Josiah McElheny creates astonishing installations out of many materials, frequently collaborating with any number of experts. His projects have often begun with handmade pieces of glass, crafted in his own studio.

In addition, he creates films and performances that are important features of his exhibitions. Catalogue design, new translations of historical texts, and book publishing are also crucial parts of his work. It is difficult to sum up the artist’s practice in a sentence or two, but one can fairly say that altogether his art is motivated by an intense curiosity about the unrealized potential of utopian projects captured in the forms of objects.

Described this way there is something potentially morbid about McElheny’s projects. He collaborates with the dead. With each new effort, he summons longgone artists and the fallen artistic movements they founded. Through allusion, appropriation, and reconstruction, McElheny stages séances where deceased designers, artists, architects, crafts people, and writers hold court with living contemporary counterparts.

Mixing together in the gallery, the dead and the living constitute an intentional community of participants spanning generations, standing outside of time.

As a way of starting our conversation, the day that we were scheduled to meet, I emailed Josiah a quotation from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power.

The essence of this fight between the living and the dead is that it is intermittent. One can never know when something is going to happen. Nothing may happen for a long time, but one cannot count on this; each new blow comes suddenly out of the

JOSIAH McELHENY The first moment I experienced an extremely deep connection to art was in Rome, where one cannot help observe the layering of history that you find there on any one street.

Somehow that layering also makes historical artworks feel as if they are more connected to the present. Specifically I am remembering the intensity of seeing the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez for the first time. I was amazed by the way the cloth of his gown was painted! As artists, we feel inherently connected to history because we all begin our understanding of art through the notion of its being a long trajectory.

At some level, we’re all part of this, connected to it, even to things that might seem completely culturally divorced from our present day experiences.

I’m learning about history in my own blind way. There’s a certain modernist aesthetic that I find viscerally, bodily attractive. I understand that these kinds of aesthetics that physically attract me come from a certain place and from a limited set of ideas. And that’s what makes them powerful. A lot of those ideas, in terms of modernist aesthetics, come from an ideal of universalism. History has 136

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dark. There is no declaration of war; after a single death everything may be over, or it may go on for a long time as in plagues and epidemics. The living are always on the retreat. Nothing is ever really over.

I have been thinking about the role of the dead in current artistic production for some time. I was eager to discuss this with Josiah because he is intensely preoccupied with the fate of modernism’s failed attempts and dead ends. Here, I understand modernism as the period of history—roughly from the mid-19th century to the present—in which artists made and make conscious attempts to directly encounter and alter aspects of technology and industrialization. McElheny continues the modernist project by catalyzing persistent (nagging) questions about art’s potential to counteract unjust social hierarchies. He seems to still believe that by changing the actual shapes of material forms—objects we can touch, hold, weigh, see, and see through—people can make a more tolerant society in which the bargain between laborer and industry is fair and honest. His method is retrospective. He tries to discover a novel way forward by casting backward to reconsider unfulfilled expectations of the past. This approach is very hopeful. In fact, I never experience his installations as macabre encounters with the dead.

McElheny’s exhibitions are delightful and rich. But there’s something threatening below the shiny surfaces. One gets lost in a detail only to take a step back and become overwhelmed by an excess of possibilities.

— GREGG BORDOWITZ

shown that universalism is a step away from totalitarianism—a deadly kind of erasure that I find horrifying. The fear of fascism undermines my sensuous relationship to those things. I often wonder, are there any other alternative aesthetics?

GREGG BORDOWITZ Your investigation into alternatives often leads you to reinvent old objects, or reenact past events.

Thinking about your work, and especially the new work that you’re doing on Paul Scheerbart and The Light Club of Batavia, I thought about the ghostly nature of the characters, specifically in the screenplay for a new film you are working on.

JM Yeah, Paul Scheerbart was a high school dropout who moved back and forth between Dresden and Berlin. He became part of café culture, a feuilleton writer. He wrote reviews on architecture and fine art, as well as some very strange short fiction in a format called the German Novelle. It is a short, schematic story that ends in an ironic twist.

I’d seen Scheerbart’s aphoristic book Glass Architecture, but I hadn’t had such a strong connection to it until I read the first English translation of a novel of his,

The Gray Cloth, published in 2001. And in it, there’s a footnote to another very obscure story of his—one that’s not usually included in his bibliography—titled The Light Club of Batavia. It describes the interactions of a group of socialites who meet at a hotel in Jakarta to build a spa at the bottom of a mine shaft and bathe in electric light. This story has led me to a whole series of explorations: performances, books, collaborations, and now this new film, called The Light Club of Vizcaya.

Discovering Scheerbart has been very important for my work. His thinking about the future wasn’t totalitarian.

He placed an emphasis on reimagination and failure. Scheerbart’s description of a future world was always a strange combination of, let’s say, Babylonian times and a science fiction future. He died in 1915, so all of his works are from the late 19th century and before World War I. You talk about ghosts—the more I learn about World War I, the more it seems to be the moment where history made this huge shift. What was possible to imagine before the Great War was no longer possible to imagine for a hundred years.

It is my hope that, maybe in a small way,

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