‘Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric  is a book-length prose poem filled with photographs and a few non-photographic images. It toggles between meditation and anger on a wide range of subjects, including death, cancer, depression (and anti-depressants), suicide, rape, 9/11, racism, history, politics, and literature, but the central trope is the ubiquitous television set. A repeated image of a static-filled television screen serves to separate the segments of the poem, signalling that Rankine is about to change the channel on us. The book’s epigraph from Aime Cesaire is an admonition to not be a spectator: “And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator,for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear…” In Rankine’s poem, the television is so much a symbol for the media, it’s simply the biggest source of bad news and despair. In one section, with the controversial vote count over the reelection of George W. Bush as the backdrop, Rankine writes: “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.”

‘As the title implies, this is a very personal poem sequence, with a narrator who faces family deaths, takes an ever-changing menu of anti-depressants, and speaks directly to the reader. Whether this narrator bears any relationship to Rankine, though, is both unclear and irrelevant, because, in a very real sense, this narrator is narrating our own lives back to us. At first, I thought Rankine’s rather routine mixture of snapshots and media images imagery was rather mundane. But on closer inspection, it strikes me that her choice and use of imagery is crucial to the book’s tone. She often encloses photographs within her standard frame of a television set, which, in an odd way, makes them feel more familiar. Televised images are immediately, even if inadequately, contextualized. Collectively, the images tilt the book toward an informality, as if someone were talking to us while the television set drones in the background and we flip the pages of a newspaper. These are the images we are confronted with daily – images of politicians, press conferences, crime victims, celebrities – a relentless tide of insults and tragedies and deaths that threatens to benumb us. But however much the narrator might like to turn off the television and shut out the world, much of the impact of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely comes from the way in which we come to understand the persistent underlying interconnection of the personal, the social, the civic, and the economic.

‘One of these images, however, has haunted me for days. It’s one of the most arresting and enigmatic uses of embedded imagery that I’ve yet to run across. The image is located in the midst of a brief reference to the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., an African American man who was beaten by three white men in Jasper, Texas, chained to the back of a pickup truck, and then dragged for miles until his body was literally torn to pieces. The narrator notes that President George W. Bush could not correctly recall the facts of the story. “You don’t remember because you don’t care,” the narrator pointedly tells Bush via the television screen. The unidentified image may or may not have anything to do with the murder or with Bush, it simply shows four sets of legs (from the knees down) standing around a shiny spot on a hard, paved surface of some kind. It’s not clear who the people represent, although a woman wearing a skirt either has black skin or very dark stockings. Does the shiny surface represent blood? Are the four figures all looking at the ground or is only the photographer fixated on the spot surrounded by their feet where the reflected heads of the figures seem to blend into each other? Are we to think of these people as connected with President Bush or with the victim or with one of his murderers? Each of these little puzzles and possibilities passed through my mind more or less simultaneously, making each of them equally plausible. It’s an inspired choice of image.

‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely feels more like a dirge than a lyric. It is a powerful book about the struggle to find and maintain a moral position, to stave off loneliness and hopelessness, to not fall prey to the blind and blinding “American optimism” (she’s quoting Cornel West here). Only at the very end does Rankine’s narrator begin to address the ability of poetry to bridge the chasm between one person and another. On the penultimate page, Rankine writes this:

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem – is how Rosemary Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handshaking over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that – Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.

‘The poem then ends with these lines:

In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.

— Vertigo

 

___
Further

Claudia Rankine Site
Claudia Rankine @ Poetry Foundation
Claudia Rankine, The Art of Poetry No. 102 @ The Paris Review
Podcast: How Can I Say This So We Can Stay in This Car Together?
‘We Have No Practice Talking About Race in This Country.’
Claudia Rankine @ goodreads
Podcast: Understand Systems Of Oppression By Interrogating Whiteness
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE FEELING: A CONVERSATION WITH CLAUDIA RANKINE
“I Think We Need to Be Frightened”
Black Bodies In White Words, Or: Why We Need Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine on using art to see bias in the arts
INTERVIEW WITH CLAUDIA RANKINE @ The White Review
Racism’s Metre and Rhyme: Kayombo Chingonyi on Claudia Rankine
Podcast: What Happened When Claudia Rankine Talked to White Men About Privilege
Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
HOW TO WRITE LIKE CLAUDIA RANKINE
Claudia Rankine’s poetic reflections on “invisible racism”
One side or the other of that ‘you’
A Conversation With Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine on Black Glamour
Claudia Rankine by ​Lauren Berlant​

 

___
Facsimile pages

 

____
Extras

Claudia Rankine with Saskia Hamilton, Conversation, 6 May 2015

Claudia Rankine: The Blaney Lecture, 2017

Claudia Rankine: On Whiteness—Friday, March 24, 2017

Claudia Rankine at The Poetry Project, 2014

 

____
Interview
from Poets.org

 

Although you identify more or less as a poet, your work is notorious for its tackling of multiple genres—I’m thinking of the way you incorporate photography in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, or, more recently, with the genre-bending work of The Provenance of Beauty. A guided bus tour through the Bronx, combining pre-recorded and live elements, this piece is presented as a “poetic travelogue,” though it also seems part-radioplay, part-happening, part-sightseeing tour. How does one genre inform another in your work?

Claudia Rankine: I’m beginning to think less in terms of genre and just in terms of writing in general. My background, my education, has been in poetry, so I feel that many of the layers in whatever I’m doing are coming out of a world of allusions that are located in poets. So, no matter what I’m working on, I like to call it poetic in some way, because the poets that I’ve read and that I love, their work tends to infuse it.

For instance, we had a line in the play that referred to “getting and spending,” (it was in an earlier draft of the play—it’s no longer there). I wanted it there because it sort of worked against the industrialization of the landscape, and for me, it was a sort of private joke, to throw in that phrase. The director, Melanie Joseph, said, “What is reminding me of college from this?” I said, it must be “getting and spending.” And it was; she remembered the Wordsworth. For me, that is sort of my private cache. But when I’m writing, I just feel like I’m writing. I don’t really think that I’m writing in this genre or that genre. That might be a problem, but it seems very integrated to me.

Very early in the play, the narrator says: “Are you wondering why we’re here? Where we’re going? When we get there will you think, This is nice. This is new. This is old. This is urban. These are the real people. These are the other people.” What is your relationship with the South Bronx, and, more generally, how do you feel geography, setting, space informs your writing?

Rankine: I grew up in the Bronx, so [the director and I] went and checked out different neighborhoods in the Bronx, and we ended up, for many reasons, in the south Bronx.

I believe that where we are, how we are allowed to live, is determined by the politics of the land—the big politics and the little politics. And it varies depending on where you’re located. I’m very interested in the landscape in general as the site of living, of a place created out of lives, and those lives having a kind of politics and a kind of being that is consciously and unconsciously shaped. Decisions are made that allow us to do certain things, that give us certain freedoms and ‘unfreedoms.’

Another statement early in the play: “Identity is time passing. Every moment of what we call life is life in the shadow of choice.” Do you consciously resist assumed notions of identity and identity politics? If so, what value is gained or lost in such resistance?

Rankine: Well, I don’t know if it’s resistance, but I do think that the more we are conscious of the limits that are put on us or that we put on each other and the ways in which we try to code the existence of others—the more we understand that—the more we are able to work with it, to make conscious choices about how we live.

You know—I do it, you do it, I’m sure we all do it, and it’s a kind of shortcut to living. And I think if we can sort of back up from that at least and begin to see people as individuals and to not take the mechanisms that society has handed us to get past people very quickly. If we can just slow down a bit, I think we would begin to treat each other a little better. I really feel that way.

What do you consider the role of collaboration in poetry? Particularly in theatre, this is often an obligatory part of the medium. To what extent do you consider a completely singular work possible or attractive? What does the collaborator gain or lose in that sort of a project?

Rankine: I know that the making of the play is tremendously collaborative, and I have been living it for the past two years. But still, in the end, the writing you do on your own. You still are writing at your desk by yourself. What is more collaborative, perhaps, is the editing process. In some ways, things can go faster, because you have many eyes responding and looking and feeling, and the actress being in the language, and if it doesn’t hold, everybody sees that very quickly.

I have learned to be very clear about what’s not ‘just language,’—things that I am very committed to and that cannot be edited out just because somebody doesn’t like the feel of that. I’d be willing to revise maybe syntactically the way something happens, but I’m not willing to cut certain things that are part of what I feel is the meaning of the piece. And so the process is a good one in that you have to lay claim to your commitments early on, or else somebody else’s view gets laid over yours. And, you know, that might be okay. But for me, it’s not okay most of the time. And so you have to be very willing to articulate why things are necessary and to convince a number of people that that’s the case. And that’s been a great process to be involved in. It’s like the ideal marriage—where you’re constantly negotiating, but you win many of the battles.

With Juliana Spahr, you co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Can you tell us how the two of you worked together? Did you struggle with the idea of defining a contemporary moment in American poetry? And how did disagreements and compromise shape the collection?

Rankine: The reason I wanted to work with Juliana on that was: her training was very different from mine. She had studied with a lot of the language poets and what is in a sense the next generation. And I had worked more with lyric-based poets—people like Louise Glück and Bob Hass. And I admired Juliana’s work so much. I love her work. And I also loved her vision—sort of the politics of her work, the connectedness that she advocates in her critical work and that is demonstrated in her creative work. And so I wanted that approach to help shape the book. So I don’t think there was any conflict per se in the collaboration with the collection, because I so admired what she had done both critically and poetically that I could stay hungry for her point of view.

What about conflicts with yourself?

Rankine: In terms of deciding on the poets—that’s tough. Because for everyone you include, there’s another you’re not including who you should be including. So in a way you come up with these rules, and you make rules only to narrow the field, not to judge, not to create a hierarchical structure at all, only because you have to narrow the field, so you do that. But luckily we are now in the process of making volume two, so a lot of the people who should’ve been in volume one, like C. D. Wright, Leslie Scalapino, Laura Mullen—many, many people are now going to be in volume two, so that is incredibly satisfying. And this volume I’m co-editing with Lisa Sewell. She’s writing the introduction as we speak.

Glancing quickly at the extensive notes for Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the sources include Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear, the television show Murder, She Wrote, and pharmaceutical pamphlets, to name a few. What is your process for collecting and seeking out these materials—were they gathered over the years and selected when the writing called for them, or did you actively seek them out for the book?

Rankine: They’re not even gathered, they’re just lived, and when you need them they come to you. But I think somebody like John Ashbery gives you permission to pull from everywhere. From all the bits of your life, when you need it—and before him Eliot, obviously, and the Modernists. But there’s no conscious sense that I’m engaging in this because I will use it later. You’re just living it. You just happened to see it on television, you just happened to see it in the paper, and you just happened to have read that book and loved it. And I think, on some level, all of those things must have touched me in some way, because they did come back to me. So, on some level, I connect with everything that I end up using.

Are certain subjects more conducive to poetry than others?

Rankine: One way of thinking about it is—something like ecopoetics. When somebody like Gary Snyder is very interested in engagement with the landscape as it exists rather than in a romantic way, that speaks to me. That’s a sensibility that I understand. At a certain level, all poetry seeks something, is looking, is in conversation with something. I just think there are certain poets that speak to me more because they are engaged in the world in a way that I am engaged in the world.

But it’s not even a linguistic thing, it’s a bodily thing. And so I feel very close to Yeats, partly because I think Yeats—even though I don’t agree with his politics—was very interested in the politics of the world he was living in. He was affected by it; he had to address it. And that’s something I feel like I understand. I also feel very moved by the work of Emily Dickinson, for the same reason, though the work is very different.

Can you give us any insight into the notion of a book as unit of writing, as opposed to a collection of singular poems?

Rankine: Somebody once said to me: you’re not a magazine poet, because you don’t write single poems, you write in whole books. I think it was Richard Howard who told me that actually—after he rejected one of my poems from the Paris Review. But I think he’s right. I tend to be interested in a subject and the world around that, so once I get started on something, I can go years circling it.

I definitely start with the idea of something, and then I begin to investigate it. I really see it as an investigation, an interrogation that goes on on the page for me, for a long time, until something gets resolved. Not that questions get answers. I think that after a while, I come to an end, because I come to an end. I’ve always admired, but never understood, the ability to write a single poem and then be done with it.

Your collections Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Plot feature personae that are at once intensely personal and noticeably distanced. More recently, in The Provenance of Beauty, there is an insistent, though disembodied, first-person speaker, that guides the trip. In what ways do you identify with these voices? What is your relationship to autobiography in your writing?

Rankine: I think a lot of people assume that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was autobiographical because of the “I,” the use of the first-person. It’s not—and it is. I feel that when I’m working on something, I will take from anywhere I know to get at the place that I’m going. Anything I know about you is mine now. And everything I know about me is also mine now. And I will use whatever I can to investigate whatever it is that I’m investigating.

Should I be worried?

Rankine: No, you shouldn’t be worried—you’d never notice. For me, those lines are not hard and fast. But I’m not writing nonfiction. Until I say I’m writing nonfiction, I’m not writing nonfiction. I feel like I should be responsible textually. And I am. That’s why notes are in the back of Lonely and will be in the back of any other text that I write, but I don’t feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth. And I do really feel like what I know through living is material for the making of whatever it is that I’m making.

How do you think one project leads into the next? Can you tell us, are there connections between your play and what you’ve previously published—and to what you’ll publish next?

Rankine: Definitely. I think it’s organic. I think life’s organic. And I don’t think I would have been commissioned to do the play had I not written Lonely. And I don’t think I would have been prepared for the play had I not done the films that I had been doing, with my husband, John Lucas, recently. I definitely see my life unfolding in a very organic fashion. Each time it’s a little more difficult, it’s a little bit more collaborative, because it becomes a little bit more unbanded, but I do feel that I’m being prepared each time for the next thing.

You should feel lucky.

Rankine: I do.

 

___
Book

Claudia Rankine Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Graywolf Press

‘Award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multi-genre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while always arguing that complex thinking is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.

‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture right now, with a voice at its heart bewildered by the anxieties of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won’t leave us alone.’ — Graywolf Press

______
Excerpts

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Every movie I saw while in the third grade compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead? Because the characters often live against all odds it is the actors whose mortality concerned me. If it were an old, black-and-white film, whoever was around would answer yes. Months later the actor would show up on some latenight talk show to promote his latest efforts. I would turn and say—one always turns to say—You said he was dead. And the misinformed would claim, I never said he was dead. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Inevitably we get older; whoever is still with us says, Stop asking me that.

Or one begins asking oneself that same question differently. Am I dead? Though this question at no time explicitly translates into Should I be dead, eventually the suicide hotline is called. You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o’clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: I-800-SUICIDE. You dial the number. Do you feel like killing yourself? the man on the other end of the receiver asks. You tell him, I feel like I am already dead. When he makes no response you add, I am in death’s position. He finally says, Don’t believe what you are thinking and feeling. Then he asks, Where do you live?

Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rings. You explain to the ambulance attendant that you had a momentary lapse of happily. The noun, happiness, is a static state of some Platonic ideal you know better than to pursue. Your modifying process had happily or unhappily experienced a momentary pause. This kind of thing happens, perhaps is still happening. He shrugs and in turn explains that you need to come quietly or he will have to restrain you. If he is forced to restrain you, he will have to report that he is forced to restrain you. It is this simple: Resistance will only make matters more difficult. Any resistance will only make matters worse. By law, I will have to restrain you. His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. This is further disorienting. I am fine! Can’t you see that! You climb into the ambulance unassisted.

 

*

On the bus two women argue about whether Rudy Giuliani had to kneel before the Queen of England when he was knighted. One says she is sure he had to. They all had to, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Mick Jagger. They all had to. The other one says that if Giuliani did they would have seen it on television. We would have seen him do it. I am telling you we would have seen it happen.

When my stop arrives I am still considering Giuliani as nobility. It is difficult to separate him out from the extremes connected to the city over the years of his mayorship. Still, a day after the attack on the World Trade Center a reporter asked him to estimate the number of dead. His reply—More than we can bear—caused me to turn and look at him as if for the first time. It is true that we carry the idea of us along with us. And then there are three thousand of us dead and it is incomprehensible and ungraspable. Physically and emotionally we cannot bear it, should in fact never have this capacity. So when the number is released it is a sieve that cannot hold the loss of us, the loss Giuliani recognized and answered for.

Wallace Stevens wrote that “the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility . . . nobility which is our spiritual height and depth; and while I know how difficult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presentation a horror of it. But there it is.”

Sir Giuliani kneeling. It was apparently not something to be seen on television, but rather a moment to be heard and experienced; a moment that allowed his imagination’s encounter with death to kneel under the weight of the real.

 

*

Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can’t remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.

You don’t remember because you don’t care. Sometimes my mother’s voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush’s case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don’t remember because you don’t care.

Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don’t know because you don’t fucking care. Fuck you.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive inside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I don’t know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. The writer Chris Kelso whose ‘Dregs Trilogy’ triple novel was featured here in the most recent ‘4 books I read & …’ post has written a beautiful piece about Diarmuid Hester’s WRONG if you’re interested. Here ** David Ehrenstein, Jean-Pierre. As always, what films get in the Days depends on what films have clips online. I’ll hunt hard for signs of the early ones you mentioned. Okay, your list of things you have available to sell is too massive to cut and paste here so I’ll direct people to yesterday’s comments. That ManWhore thing can’t not be a parody, and yet, yeah, nothing seems too extremely far fetched to become believable in the US of A. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has created a humongous list of books, CDs, etc. that he has on offer in his ever more legendary house/yard fire sale. Lots of primo stuff at bargain prices. The list is far too gigantic to paste here, but go back a day, i.e. here and you’ll see it in the comments. Then, if you see a goodie you need, whether you’re near to David’s locale or far, contact him at [email protected], ideally this weekend. Thank you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Nice album cover there, obviously. I look forward to my audio introduction via you next week! ** G, Hi, G! Relaxation is kind of like a golden treasure these days, so it’s cool the post pried open that aspect of you. Chris’s piece is really nice, yeah. I’m honoured by it. I’m happy you’re going to start getting out to exhibitions. Having them up and running here is a huge help to the mind and even kind of the soul. Nothing like a heavy rain. Well, heavy snowfall is pretty ace too, but that phenom seems to be going the way of the dinosaur sadly. A Friday of total excellence to you! ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Welcome back to unciviliation and to my blog little portion of it too. That residency sounds so, so nice. If I was less curious/ stressed I would black out every form of media until after your election. Obviously I’m thrilled you made productive headway on the novel and feel that great combo of jazzed and level headed about it. Yeah, I was happy to finally be able to do a Pat O’Neill Day after years of wanting to. I haven’t seen the Other Music doc yet. It’s high on my agenda though. My ears will be trained on your bandcamp tomorrow, or, wait, today? Great! I’m good. Glad August is over. It was kind of boring. I’m mainly working on the reinvention of the TV series script into a film script, and I’m actually quite excited by how that’s going, and I’m off to Rennes tomorrow for a day to help Gisele with her Robert Walser theater piece. And some prose fiddling. Not bad. Again, excellent to see you! ** JM, Hi. Thanks for the happiness about my related stuff. I do know the Dead C, yes. Sweet spot. Oh, wow, very soon for ‘Circles’. I understand about the one-man operation. Little Caesar was a solo act too. I’ll be patient for the package and just hope the US’s and Frances’s P.O.s cooperate with one another. You aren’t going to do a Zoom launch thing or anything like that, I guess? Thanks for feeding here with you, much appreciated. And carry on, sir. ** Bill, Thanks, B. Me too, re: the Marseilles event. Marseilles, like Paris, is a ‘red zone’ meaning where the cases are especially up. But the French are hugely dutiful about the protocols, so I think it’ll be fine, socially distanced, the usual. I’m so looking forward to just the travelling/getting out of town aspect. Very tired of being stuck here. Zac’s and my plans to go to Germany any minute to hit our favourite theme park Phantasialand just got trounced because Germany just decided that travellers from Paris to their country require a two week quarantine. Ugh. Did I turn you on to Sauna Youth? Quite possible. I didn’t know they have a newbie, so thanks a lot for that tip. Fun day? Fun day! ** Okay. Before Claudia Rankine’s work went viral with her book ‘Citizen’, she wrote a few books that are more adventurous formally and visually and that I like even more, and the book I’ve spotlit today is my favourite of all of hers. Know it? Get to know it? See you tomorrow.

______________
Tamar Harpaz Crazy Delay, 2018
‘The thought that every object is a potential black box is both thrilling and threatening. When sound hits an object, it causes that object to vibrate. Its motion is invisible to the human eye. The object becomes like a diaphragm in a loudspeaker, a witness capturing the latent vibrations of a crime. Everyday objects become potential storytellers of a past that has moved them. A voice’s echoes, distortions, delays, vibrations and tremulous are all a means of detecting their origin – to hear the place they came from. Tamar Harpaz manipulates perception using optical devices and cinematic mechanisms. Bringing ageing technologies to the point of malfunction, she uses their failure as a driving force in her work.’

 

______________
Nobuko Tsuchiya Brief History of Time, 2015
‘Tsuchiya’s precise, poetic works reflect her instincts as an artist and convey a sense of longing for the future that almost resembles a scene from a sci-fi novel. Her eccentric work not only seeks freedom from any rationale, but also rebels against restrictions that the world puts in front of her.’

 

_________________
Christoph De Boeck timecodematter, 2009
‘In the interactive installation timecodematter the visitor enters an arena that is bordered with vibrating sheets of massive steel. The steel objects are pulsating with low frequencies and they react to the approach of persons. The acoustic energy in this installation is both penetrating and intangible: the resonant properties of twelve different steel sheets respond to the low frequencies and produce a conjuring effect.’

 

_______________
Aernoudt Jacobs PHOTOPHON, 2014
‘PHOTOPHON is based on the photoacoustic principle that was discovered at the end of the 19th century by Alexander Graham Bell. According to this principle, a strong light source can be converted into an acoustic wave due to absorption and thermal excitation. Bell’s research shows that any material comes with a sonority that will be revealed by hitting it with a strong beam of light. The installation consists of different photophonic objects playing tones created by strong light beams through a rotating disc. With PHOTOPHON Jacobs intends to provide a certain kind of musicality, though in the form of an installation, not of a playable instrument.’

 

_______________
Alona Rodeh Neither Day nor Night, 2013
‘Moving lights, synchronized with an adaptation of Erik Satie’s 1888 “Gymnopédie #1,” reveal a wooden stage and a gleaming curtain, resembling an old-fashioned dance hall or a deserted theater out of a David Lynch film. The conscious amalgamation of cinematic influences leaves the room laden with expectation. The viewer will decide how the scene unravels: Will the stage be left untouched, as an autonomous work, or will it become a platform for self-display?’

 

_______________
Cinthia Marcelle TO COME TO, 2009
‘One JCB machine goes through the form of an infinite symbol transporting dirt from one side to the other and then repeats the movement from that side back to the other, like a kind of enlarged sand filled hour glass that never stops rotating.’

 

_______________
Anne-F Jacques FLUID STATES, 2016
“Fluid States” is composed of a small population of contraptions and devices, put in motion by motors and interacting with one another. The said contraptions generate sound through friction, bouncing, acceleration and electrical vibrations. Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal, Canada. She is interested in amplification, erratic sound reproduction devices and construction of various contraptions and idiosyncratic systems. Her particular focus is on low technology, trivial objects and unpolished sounds. She is also involved with Crustacés Tapes, a postal sound distribution project.’

 

________________
Yann Leguay Test Tone, 2013
‘Brussels based sound artist. Yann Leguay is a true media saboteur. He seeks to turn reality in on itself using basic means in the form of objects, videos or during installations and performances involving the materiality of sound and data storage. His flagrant disregard for the accepted norms of audio behaviour appropriates industrial machinery and other DIY tools for the playback of audio media: using an angle grinder to perform the live destruction of an audio signal or to playback a CD at dizzying speed. His release activity is equally deviant, releasing a 7” single without a central hole and a record composed from recordings of vinyl being scratched by scalpel. His Phonotopy label proposes a conceptual approach to recording media and he curates the DRIFT series on the Artkillart label which overlays several grooves onto a single record, causing randomised playback.’

 

________________
Rolf Julius why pink, why yellow, 2001
‘why pink, why yellow is the installation of a five-channel music composition emitted from a floor arrangement of speakers, Japanese tea bowls, digital prints and small panes of glass. The speakers are placed under the glass and within the bowls, making their contents, red and black powder pigments and viscous pink hand soap, jump and shift with the vibrations. The music is comprised mostly of computer altered natural sounds played via an array of portable CD players, left exposed as part of the installation.’

 

______________
Gaëtan Rusquet Back and forth, 2018
‘At first Back And Forth appears to approach the balloon in all of its innocence as a game develops between Rusquet and the increasing number of squeaking, twisting and floating forms. Soon a suggestion of the human body, of limbs and organs, of the inside popping out, shapes the performance and something altogether more unsettling is achieved.’

 

______________
Lawrence Malstaf Nemo Observatorium, 2015
‘Styrofoam particles are blown around in a big transparent PVC cylinder by five strong fans. Visitors can take place on the armchair in the middle of the whirlpool or observe from the outside one at a time. On the chair, in the eye of the storm it is calm and safe. Spectacular at first sight, this installation turns out to mesmerise like a kind of meditation machine. One can follow the seemingly cyclic patterns, focus on the different layers of 3D pixels or listen to its waterfall sound. One could call it a training device, challenging the visitor to stay centred and find peace in a fast changing environment. After a while the space seems to expand and one’s sense of time deludes.’

 

________________
Dominique Petitgand Quelqu’un est tombé, 1993
‘Inside the abbey, Petitgand layers a collection of sounds across three rooms for Quelqu’un est tombé, 1993/2009. Four speakers in the first and largest room play an irregular progression of short, loud noises, while the second, much smaller room echoes with long phrases of music. In the third room, the only one that is fully soundproofed, five different voices are heard. “Je marche, je trébuche, je tombe” (I walk, I trip, I fall), one of the young voices repeats. Another calls out, “Quelqu’un est tombé.” The narrative, like the melodies elsewhere in Petitgand’s work, is unresolved but rich with allusions to shared expressions, emotions, and actions.’

 

________________
Davide Tidoni EXAGGERATED FOOTSTEPS, 2015
‘This is me walking through different rooms of the same building. I compare the acoustic response of each room by means of a pair of metal plates that I attached to the sole of my shoes.’

 

_______________
Katerina Undo Creatures Cluster, 2014
‘Creatures Cluster  is an endless combination of living members, composed by miniature robots that live autonomously, receiving their energy from solar cells and generating a variety of soft sounds and tiny movements. The Creatures are developed with two simple analogue oscillator circuits, inspired from the nervous system of organisms. Every module is special and unique and it is impossible to build exact equal. According to the interaction that occurs between them, clusters/systems are developed that organically interact with each other in a reciprocal way. The sculptural and auditory nature of the synthesis — radiation of the chaotic — refers to the functioning of a nervous system, as well as to systems of social cooperation and alliances.’

 

____________
Christian Skjødt The Receiver, 2019
‘Functioning as a live observatory, The Receiver is a new site-specific sound installation situated in an abandoned silo at the harbour front of Struer. The installed radio telescope (Ø:3m) consists of a specialised antenna and receiver, operating in the microwave region of the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The telescope follows the Sun, as Earth rotates around it, and receives electromagnetic radiation that has traveled the 150 million km from the Sun to planet Earth. This energy is the source material of the immersive sonic environment created in the silo. Herein the frequency spectrum of the sound can be experienced when travelling upwards in the 45 meter tall building, moving from low to high frequency, as crossover filters split up the sounds, covering and slightly exceeding the lower and upper limit of the hearing capacities of humans. Ranging from infra- to ultrasound, the material is conveyed by custom made loudspeakers optimised for the specific frequency range.’

 

______________
Lyota Yagi Vinyl, 2020
‘Lyota Yagi produces music records out of ice to be played on a turntable, allowing the audience to experience the transformations of sound and shape as they melt.’

 

______________
Haroon Mirza reality is somehow what we expect it to be, 2018
‘Involving smart sampling, sometimes through collaboration with other artists, Mirza’s practice overall is characterised by a knowing eclecticism and sheer physical impact. His (mis)understanding of the nature of human perception – of what and how we see and hear – is demonstrated and combined with countless possibilities of meaning, and so his aesthetic proposition is more to do with messages received than those transmitted, circumscribed by our constitutions, testing the limits of what we can experience and what we think we know.’

 

_______________
Stephen Cornford Binatone Galaxy, 2011
‘An installation for used cassette players which looks on their obsolescence not as an ending, but as an opportunity to reconsider their functional potential. Superseded as playback devices, they become instruments in their own right. Replacing the prerecorded content of each tape with a microphone gives us the chance to listen instead to the rhythmic and resonant properties of these once ubiquitous plastic shells. Binatone Galaxy brings the framework within which a generation purchased their favourite records to the centre of attention, revealing the acoustics of the cassette and the voices of the machines themselves.’

 

______________
Bram Vreven Shape(less)?, 2018
‘As a former jazz musician, Bram Vreven has been making sound installations since 1998. His installations contrast acoustic and electronic sounds in a refined way. Silence has gradually been gaining an important role in his work. A number of his installations make forceful movements, but hardly produce any sound or no sound at all. This silent movement has become one of Vreven’s leitmotivs.’

 

______________
Chelpa Ferro Totoro, 2008-09
‘In this installation, the group, formed by Barrão, Luiz Zerbini and Sergio Mekler presents a musical programme in big sound speakers that go up and down, in a continuous movement, during 8 hours, provoking different hearings in each level.’

 

______________
Muku Kobayashi Take no Hikui-Ki no Take wa Hikui, 2016
‘The sound installation is wooden-crafted with polished elements. The devices move with smooth mechanical movements to look almost unreal, creating a cinematic sound. They generate various types of sounds, and possibly noise, transmitted to horn speakers. They are operated automatically and perfectly integrated, both in aesthetics and design, with old analogue equipment such as VU meters or audio oscillators.’

 

______________
Tristan Perich 1-Bit Symphony, 2010
‘Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case like his first circuit album (1-Bit Music 2004-05), 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally “performs” its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit—programmed by the artist and assembled by hand—plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Shane Jesse Christmass, Hey, man. Me either. Have I done a Melville Day? Maybe not. I’ll look into that. Thanks for the link. I’m on it. Everyone, A new slice of writing by the mighty Shane Jesse Christmass is yours to read on the recently highlighted site Selffuck, and that’s your cue to click this. Thanks too for the direct route to Dale’s book. I don’t know what the ’50th anniversary of Eden Eden Eden thing’ is, so I guess not? ** G, Howdy, G. I’m happy his films look tasty. They are, I say. How’s stuff? My toe is being very stubbornly irksome, but it’s doable in a pinch. Bon day! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. That’s a good one, for sure: ‘BtK’. ** _Black_Acrylic, Uh, hm, family viewing … well, your family is not the typical family, so … possibly? Very stylish. Do your parents appreciate high stylishness? Your excitement is most highly justified, sir. ** Tosh Berman, Hey, T. Oh, for a European outlet of The Criterion Channel, sigh. Hope you’re in tip-top shape. ** Misanthrope, Check ’em out. Actually, and granted I’m a revising/ rewriting/ polishing / typo-hunting nerd, but you don’t need to convince me of the funness. I’m already there. ** Kristopher, Hi, Kristopher. Very nice to meet you, and thank you entering this place. Yeah, I’m in agreement with you on Suzuki, no surprise. I actually haven’t seen any of the three films you recommend, so my day’s internet hunting trip is preordained. Thanks a lot. And I hope this goes without saying: please hang out in here anytime you like. What are you up to? ** wolf, Wowie Zowie Wolf! I’ve been thinking about you over there, buddy. Things are pretty okay. Quiet, kind of a lonely August, but it’s toast now. I think your bet that I would like that kimchi is well placed. Kimchi Day, hm, that would be an interesting challenge. I’ll endeavour to be up to it. The ‘thing’, if you meant the pandemic-related stuff, isn’t really boring me, no. My pragmatism is doing its job, and, you know, we’re still pretty free over here for the moment. I got very bored of everyone I know having vacated Paris for most of August. That got really old. But most of the buds are back or close to, so I’m all right. I am dying to travel. I am happy that Z. and I get to go to Marseilles for a few days at least. Maybe France will be easily enterable again soon. ‘Praying’ for that on my end. Your pandemic stuff is still very messy isn’t it? I don’t even know anymore. Okay, yeah, I guess it is getting very boring, you’re right. Big, big love! ** Steve Erickson, I liked your new track. I agree about ‘Pistol Opera’. It’s great. And what a good title. I liked ‘Drive’ too. And only ‘Drive’. It was efficient. An interest/gift he seems to have lost. ** Right. Should you so choose, you will have a lot of fun and inspiration-related kind of pleasure vis-a-vis your eyes and ears if you give the array I present to you today a decent going over. Up to you, though. See you tomorrow.