‘I think when we’re confronted with something colossal, intense, or uncanny, we instinctively retreat into the mundane—the little things—that seem private, perhaps even sheltering in their simplicity. We look down at our toenails and for a moment, we can forget about the rest of our bodies. We look down at those little donut holes and for moment, we can forget about the black holes in our hearts. But ultimately—as your question so beautifully insinuates—these little, mundane things are never really private, never truly escapes, because they’re all just extensions of the colossal, tiny tributaries of the infinite.

‘I think of this tension between the infinite and the (imagined, non-existent) private as a kind of subconscious pulse beneath our day-to-day lives. Like the way we treat our cell phones as these intimate appendages: reaching for them first thing in the morning, carrying them close to our bodies, using them to store our personal information and track our personal habits, collecting our sweat and skin cells all over their surfaces. We don’t really think about what they are or what they’re connected to. On some level, we understand that these devices are extensions of this vast (and kind of terrifyingly unknowable) network, but we’ve kind of inured ourselves to this understanding, numbed ourselves with our mundane rituals surrounding these little portals into the infinite. We treat them like small things, like private places.

‘I think the small things—the mundane—can reveal so much about our relationships with the infinite, the ways we process—or refuse to process—the immensities around and within us.’ — Meghan Lamb

 

Meghan Lamb Site
“The houses in the hills are bad at being real”: Meghan Lamb on Spaces, Liminality, and Bodies
IS IT STRANGE TO BE AN AMERICAN? AN INTERVIEW WITH MEGHAN LAMB
THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #91: MEGHAN LAMB
Buy ‘All Of Your Most Private Places’

 

Meghan Lamb All Of Your Most Private Places
Spork Press

‘This debut collection by Meghan Lamb opens with the demolition of a building called the “Hi-Point”: with the “destruction [and] construction of an empty space.” From an uncanny “Atomic Museum” in the desert to a dying-off peepshow to a far-flung, falling apart hoarder house, these stories examine a series of spaces wherein external strangeness mirrors internal conflict. With quietly charged, unflinching prose, Lamb observes our “most private places”: the elusive, often unnameable accumulations with which we fill our emptiness.’ — Spork Press

Excerpt
from ALWAYS CRASHING

As a child, his wife was frightened of discovery. She was a quiet girl. That’s what her mother said. She preferred empty spaces; after all, she lived within the desert. She should’ve been able to be happy where she was.

It doesn’t work like that, her mother said. She told her, in a perfect world. She sighed, of course, because the world wasn’t perfect. She felt her pocket with the lipstick and the box of cigarettes. She pulled two sticks of spearmint gum out of the other pocket. In a perfect world, we’d all get what we want, she said, but we don’t really even know exactly what we want, most of the time.

Her mother took her swimming. She’d swim while her mother lounged beside the pool. She crawled out of the pool whenever she felt hungry. Pool water seems to designed to make you hungry, she complained. Her mother told her to be patient. She was happy lying in the sun. She tried to lie there with her mother, but her body felt exposed, so she turned over on her stomach, spread a towel on her back. She felt her stomach pinched between the plastic chair slats. She looked through the space between the slats and watched a spider drowning in a puddle.

She went to slumber parties where they looked at magazines. The magazines asked questions about what they wanted, who they could become. Could you be a model? the magazine articles asked. Could I be a model? the girls at the parties would ask themselves. They didn’t know. It seemed like a good question.

They stashed the pizza boxes in a greasy corner by the trash. They dug around the junk drawer with this stupid urgency. They found the measuring tape tucked inside an old tin can of cookies from the days when cookies always came in old tin cans.

The girls lined up—they actually lined up—and a girl would measure ankles, wrists, waists, leg length, shoulder width, hips, height, and neck circumference, comparing their measurements to lists of model ranges in the magazines, the standard units used within the industry.

As it turned out, none of them could have been models. Some girls came close in some ways but fell short in others. They were tall enough, but their hips were too wide. Their waists were small enough, but they had scrawny calves or weird thick ankles. Their shoulder width, hips, waist, were all in perfect ratio, but for some reason, one leg was a little longer than the other.

*

While driving home, she thinks of how she hates her insecurities. They’re childish, of course. They haven’t changed since childhood. She contemplates this concept, childhood. When did it end? She looks out at the endless desert, thinking that it never did.

*

Meanwhile, something horrible is happening at the test site.

Extras

Meghan Lamb reads at Brain Frame 12

Meghan Lamb Book Launch at Malvern Books

Meghan Lamb performs at Multi-Kulti in Chicago

 

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‘Invisibility: A Manifesto seemed to establish itself as a Surrealist novel, or at least novella, quite early on – capitalised Surrealist as in Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and those guys as distinct from more lazy contemporary understandings of the term usually amounting to not much more than the juxtaposition of disparate images. Invisibility: A Manifesto seems to tap into something of the human subconscious and, as such, presents questions rather than the definitives one might expect from something calling itself a manifesto; and, for what it may be worth, there’s some fairly stark juxtaposition of disparate images going on, but clearly nothing arbitrary.

‘Principally we have the contrast of author as wholesome child detective in the general mode of an Enid Blyton character, although not clearly drawn, with atrocity, murder, fucking, and framing of victims, although thankfully rendered with a degree of honesty thus disassociating itself from low-calorie goth versions of the same contrast – all those wearyingly mental versions of Alice which have kept Tim Burton in Cure reissues over the years. The contrast drawn up by Szasz are genuinely affecting, and possibly a clue to the title: the victim abused as powerless, worthless, and yet whose victimhood constitutes both the real power and value in the equation; so we have elements which simply won’t be jammed together, and perhaps in the resulting interference pattern, the subject becomes invisible, blending in with the background from either angle.

‘Hopefully that makes sense to someone. At least that’s how Invisibility: A Manifesto reads to me. I’m sometimes a little uncomfortable with the idea of the victim as the one with the power because while it may be philosophically useful, I’m not convinced it works in real life, which is why, I would suggest, Pauline Réage’s Story of O is honestly just a massive pile of wank (and not even good for that); although this, much shorter work does some of the same thing, but succeeds simply through an elevated self-awareness, meaning it knows what it’s doing, even if I don’t. I think what this amounts to is another Amphetamine Sulphate title mapping the disparity between the real and its interpretation, which is always welcome, not least because this one takes a quite different narrative approach to others I’ve read.’ — Pamphlets of Destiny

 

~~ z u t k a ~~
Plan for the Abduction of J.G. Ballard by Jeremy Reed & Audrey Szasz
DOOM ANNEX YOUTH, Poems by Audrey Szasz
Audrey Szasz @ goodreads
Buy ‘Invisibility: A Manifesto’

 

Audrey Szasz Invisibility: A Manifesto
Amphetamine Sulphate

‘’Shut your mouth,’ Mother tells me. I shut my mouth. ‘Wipe that idiotic grin off your face,’ she says. I wipe the idiotic grin off my face. And as I emerge from diazepam slumber I realize that our train has pulled into the station. Pain, invisible, but etched within me like crystal. Welcome to London St. Pancras International, where this journey terminates.’ — A.S.

 

Excerpt

Extras

Plan for the Abduction of J G Ballard: Jeremy Reed & Audrey Szasz

Audrey Szasz // Under The Stars // Doom Annex Youth

Audrey Szasz // Have You Seen This Girl? // Doom Annex Youth

 

________________

 

anon I’m us = a posthuman artist whose work spans + often collages diverse mediums + hybrid forms, from text/image to the confluence of music + noise. As founding publisher of Calamari Archive, our target medium has been the book object + most of the writing + visual art/design we have done over the past 15+ years has been to this end. In a professional “day job” capacity we have 10+ years of experience working in new media as web producer + information architect.

a.I.’s punk/DiY ethos was seeded by the ‘80s home-recording + cassette culture on which we cut our teeth, starting our own label (Tapestry Tapes) + releasing 3 of our own cassettes (re-released as the unheard tapes). Initial academic studies focused on music (particularly Indonesian—we played in a gamelan orchestra for 2 years) + sound engineering, then biology + we eventually took degrees in computational mathematics + then did our graduate work in physics + philosophy. In tandem we always aspired to be a literary writer so worked as a coder + then technical writer to bridge our interests + experience (+ pay the bills). This led us to eventually work in web production + information architecture, the field of which also summarizes our personal artistic ambitions—the economical + entropic efficiency of densely packing as much information onto a blank canvas, tape or page (web or print) is our primary concern, often at the expense of aesthetics.

Given our technical background in math, science + engineering, anon I’m us can amalgamate + communicate complex subject matter… when we need to. If we had our druthers tho—in our own art—we’d rather let free association + stream of sub-consciousness dictate the course. Readability + “making sense” (or ¢ents) is not as interesting to us as the unintended epiphanies that may arise from random chaos, or “randumb K-OS” as we might be “inklined” to call her. Ménière’s “d-zzz” + clanging disorder inevitably influenzes our landgauge + muzic output + the natural decay (DK) process is also vital to our personal work—finding beauty in breakdown + ruin, choosing confusion over coherency, lo-fi rather than hi-brow, old school as opposed to newfangled flash, steampunk vs. air-brushed gloss, etc. But we’re not above retooling digital technologies to skeuomorph retro analog FX + are schooled in Edward Tufte’s theories of information design + data visualizations.

a.I.’s “reel-whirled” experience derives from many years spent living in Mexico, Italy + Kenya + travelling extensively to all corners of the globe, often disappearing off the map for extended stretches. We’ve worked as a deckhand on a ship Xing the South Pacific, as a farmhand in New Zealand, doing research in solar physics in Arizona, as a cook in South Dakota, a carpenter in Patagonia, field documentarian throughout rural Africa + Asia, stunt double in a b-grade sci-film in France + as a geophysicist as far north as the Arctic Circle. Our love of hiking + climbing + the outdoors led us to work as a field geologist in the 1st few years out of college. This bipedal zeal naturally evolved into flâneuring once we took to living in cities, systematically walking every street of Manhattan w/ our “bedder-½” in our time spent in NYC + then we did the same in Rome, documenting our walks as we went (on maphattanproject.com + romerioni.com respectively). We’re also an avid runner + life-long journal keeper, obsessively chronicling our entire life on The Daily Noose blog (formerly known as 5cense). Since 2008, anon I’m us has renounced all social media + our work has been anonymous/ pseudonymous + uncopyrighted + our whereabouts are typically at large.

 

Anon I’m us @ Calamari Press
the unheard tapes
The Manhattan Project
The Daily Noose
Buy ‘Textiloma; or, The Postmodern Epimetheus’

 

anon I’m us Textiloma or, The Postmodern Epimetheus
Calamari Press

‘At the end of volume I of ‘SSES” ‘SSES” “SSEY’ the author has the corpse of his dead dad surgically removed from his Deleuzian BwO but then O.D.s (dying in a parked car, like his father) post-op, before the scar heals, becoming Ulysses in a father-figurative sense. In Textiloma (vol II), the medical transcript of “the making of” (a prescription of sorts) is figuratively transplanted into the BwO of the surviving brother (now Telemachus) who adopts a patient/ghost-writer (anon I’m us) to adapt the script since he’s too close to the material + deathly afraid of needles + ‘sirjury,’ reverse engineering this contextual operation to bring both brother + father home for a proper burial.

‘… this is the story below the surface. Above ground, the 2 brothers work on a film together in France, entitled: Or, A Postmodern Epimetheus, a remake of Frankenstein featuring Prometheus’s lesser-known brother, Epimetheus (literally ‘afterthought,’ as opposed to his brother, ‘forethought’). In this script within the transplanted transcript (that draws analogy to René Daumal’s Mount Analogue), the 2 brothers climb an unnameable mountain in the ‘Himalayus’ to retrieve the corpse of their father (who by now is Sisyphus, Ulysses’s true father) who died (by ‘sewerside’) attempting to scale the same ‘peek’. At the end of the day, the semaphorical summit remains unclimbed (at least not by any 1 that lives to tell the tale). The script is never made into a film. The cathartic operation only takes place in ‘spearit’. Textiloma (from Greek textile + Swahili boma = hiding place) becomes the very textile/ gauze that is accidentally left behind during the imagined operation on their brother/father. By ‘pro-ssesing’ the texts, script, art + rehab ‘journulls’ of the metaphorical ‘gourney’ we become them, anon-ymously, as with the persona assumed by recover-ing addicts/ substance abusers. “The ½ of U in US is the 2nd chants U get,” we read/write, in finishing this suicide note/love letter to y/ourself that U never had a chance to leave behind (but now get to read).’ — Calamari Press

Excerpt

Extras

Sound ƒuries—LL re:/cursive surf

Sick-aid-aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh

Swann st 1st + 2nd stories

 

________________

Dennis Callaci was born in Corona, California and has bounced around Southern California his entire life. He runs the record label Shrimper, noted for bringing forth the earliest recordings from Amps For Christ, Woods, Franklin Bruno, Lou Barlow’s Sentridoh, The Mountain Goats, Dump, Kevin Morby, The Secret Stars and a few hundred other releases over the course of the last thirty years. He is also in the band Refrigerator who have released twelve records over those thirty years, as well as solo records by Callaci & collaborations with John Davis, The Debts, and Simon Joyner. A former KSPC DJ, booker of shows around Southern California, and GM of two record stores of note, music has eaten up the majority of his life.

‘Callaci conjures a mix of fiction and trivia and memoir and secret code, and when I say ‘I wish I’d written it myself’ I mean that I wish I thought I could have, or even knew exactly how it works.’ — Jonathan Lethem

‘This book could be your life.’ — Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo

‘This collection conjures up times and places that are achingly personal and bends them towards the universal.’ — Allen Callaci

‘In 100 CASSETTES, music and whatever else there is to life try to drive through Dennis Callaci’s brain, and continually get stuck in its fascinating detours and rest stops. Who knows which parts are fact and which are fiction, but it’s definitely all true.’ — Marc Masters

 

‘100 Cassettes @ Pelekinesis Press
Dennis Callaci Discog
Shrimper Records Discog
DENNIS CALLACI, A BED OF LIGHT
Buy ‘100 Cassettes’

 

Dennis Callaci 100 Cassettes
Pelekinesis Press

‘100 CASSETTES started life as 100 hand drawn/painted cassette covers for an installation at the dA Center for The Arts in Pomona, California. Six months after that installation, the book 100 CASSETTES started being written in earnest. The book’s ninety nine chapters (two of the cassettes make up one chapter) delve into the possibility of each imagined release by a wealth of artists spanning over fifty years. Find early entries of abstraction on Ida Cox, Alice Cooper, Talk Talk, Earl Sweatshirt and Lord Invader to nonfiction-based entries on Tony Conrad, Korla Pandit, Jackie Moore and Black Sabbath. Featuring a foreword by Jonathan Lethem and an afterword by Allen Callaci, the book winds around autobiographical information, the rich culture of Southern California from 1969 to the present day, and all musical points in between.’ — Pelekinesis Press

Excerpts

 

*

Extras

Dennis Callaci “Houdini”

Refrigerator – Bicycle (1995)

Dennis Callaci ‘No Music Tonight’

 

________________

 

Chelsea Hodson: I’m curious about the “theatrical violence” you mentioned that you’re drawn to. What is it about certain horror movies, black metal, and pessimistic philosophy that resonate with you as a writer?

Christopher Zeischegg: As a kid, I was most into and influenced by aggressive music. The focus of my middle school and high school years was playing in metal bands and going to as many shows as possible. When I think about those years, I think about the energetic sound, the cathartic performance, and the audience participation inherent in the live shows; the community of subculture. But also, the biting and often devastating poetry imbedded in the lyrical content.

Some of the more sophisticated bands seem to engage in a play between emotional turmoil and mythology. For example, when I was in high school, my favorite band was Converge. They’re not black metal. More of a hybrid between hardcore and other forms of aggressive metal. Their lyrics have to do with loneliness, longing, depression, anger, suicide, and so on. All of the stuff that’s extra relevant as a teenager, because it feels so new and all-encompassing (at least, it did for me). The way the band expresses those emotions, though, are through violent metaphor.

If I look at early Norwegian black metal bands, it’s the same thing: young people making music about feeling isolated, angry, and suicidal. But it’s encased in Norse mythology mixed with a kind of fictional Satanism, gleaned from horror films.

This music probably informed the way I express myself in writing, music, and whatever else. It makes sense for me to write about depression as bodily trauma or demonic intervention, because I grew up watching other people do it. It’s a language I understand.

CH: Auto-fiction seems somewhat performative in the sense of having to decide which parts of your life to pull from and put on display. Do you see your writing as a performative act, or is it something else?

CZ: Auto-fiction is definitely performative. But so is straightforward memoir. I think it’s funny when people talk about authenticity in art, as if anything so carefully crafted doesn’t sift through a thousand personal filters. The older I get, the less I care about performing authenticity. For one, my life is objectively more boring: I no longer fuck for a living; I’m no longer a hooker; and I no longer have such a romantic relationship with death and depression. Not in real life, anyway. — from Bomb Magazine

 

Christopher Zeischegg Site
Podcast: Chris Zeischegg reads from The Magician
Spell, by Christopher Zeischegg
Podcast: Interview with Chris Zeischegg
Buy ‘The Magician’

 

Christopher Zeischegg The Magician
Amphetamine Sulphate

‘“Andrea’s gore was dark red, nearly brown, and smelled of meat and piss. She must have wet herself on account of all the drugs…”

‘California brings out the fucking worst in people. Makes them junkies, whores, killers – failed saints, predatory sinners. Must be something in the land or maybe the water. Something old and evil. Waiting. The Magician is an incantatory trip to this cursed heart of darkness. A modern horror tale of sexual violence and deep psychological harm. Unflinchingly narrated in spare, economic prose climaxing in hallucinatory brutality, Christopher Zeischegg has conjured a dark fable of the American dream as it slides into unending nightmare.

‘Christopher Zeischegg is a writer, musician, and filmmaker who spent eight years working in the adult industry as performer Danny Wylde. His other books include The Wolves That Live in Skin and Space and Body to Job. He lives in Los Angeles.’ — A.S.

Excerpt

Extras

‘The Magician’ promo

CHIILDREN – ‘Girl in the Dirt’

THE WOLVES THAT LIVE IN SKIN AND SPACE (BOOK TRAILER)

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, It’s true, I agree. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, suckage about ‘TIHYWD’. Ha ha, about the MCR tie in. The title is actually a slight reinvention of the first line/lyric of a Scott Walker song, ‘Rawhide’, which might be where MCR got the title too? Yeah, I think the plan to go on with the pro writer is doomed from the outset, but it’s not my decision. Well, first our producer has to find a co-producer to sign on to the project for reasons I don’t completely understand, so I guess that’s in-process, and, if that happens, then they’ll hire a pro writer, and then the pro writer will turn the script into a conventional TV series script, and then Zac and I read it and probably go, ‘No, bye’, but who knows. You’re my CoronaHero. I’m chasing your vibes. My day … Zac and I need to shoot the video thing for the film grant this afternoon, so we talked that over. I can’t believe I’m actually going to see Zac in the flesh. Or see anyone I know. Went for a walk and bought some food and cigarettes. Uh, oh, my friend the French film director Christophe Honore was asked to make a short film in quarantine for the French culture magazine Inrockuptibles, and he made a very strange little film about my novel ‘Closer’, and he sent it to me, and that was very cool and trippy. I guess it’ll go online soon. Not much else, but today I get to get out the apartment and actually do something outside of my apartment for the first time in over a month assuming the police don’t stop me, so that should make today count. Oh, no, I don’t expect to hear back from the Twisted Experiential guys for a while, but I’ll let you know when I do. Did you continue your great creative exploitation of your imprisonment today? Love like an open Indian restaurant in Paris (what I’m craving), Dennis. ** Bill, Hi. Her early stuff is very ‘No Wave’ or ‘proto-No Wave’ really since she was pretty much the inventor of ‘No Wave’ filmmaking. Yeah, you were at the Avignon premiere of ‘TIHYWD’. Crazy. A million years ago. Wow. Great about your gig being out and about. I need it. Okay, it sounds like I’ll be able to figure it out. Let me tell the others. Everyone, Bill Hsu (and compadres) did a live-streamed music gig last Sunday from his headquarters San Francisco, and this is the program, and you can join me in attending this gig through your ears and eyes by following the instructions that Bill will now give you/us. Take it away, Bill: ‘The recording of my live-streamed gig last Sunday is up at https://www.soundcrack.net. You have to select “4.12.20 PONIIA #2 (Principles of Non-isolation In Audio)”, then hit play. (The playback controls are tiny and wonky, sorry.) Sharkiface/Marlo Eggplant start off from 00:00 to about 00:30. Then we have a few “dj-ed” pieces (including Paul Bley playing Annette Peacock’s “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway” on Moog, one of my favorite songs!). Peter J. Woods and I play from about 00:37 to 01:00. A few more dj-ed pieces, then all four of us play from about 01:07 to 01:33.’ Thanks, man. Looking forward to it! ** john christopher, Hello, john christopher! A very hearty welcome to you! Lucky you saw that exhibition, obviously. I don’t know if I know that short film in question. The ‘… skeleton … ‘ quote is killer. I promise not to steal it. Anyway, thanks for coming in here. You’re always welcome, it goes without saying. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool. I think I should have some time free enough to listen to a Jeremy Deller interview of that nature, yes. Thank you, Ben. ** Misanthrope, I do vaguely remember you mentioning that MCR song at that time now that you mention it. Well, it’s up to Gisele. If we even get as far as having a pro writer remake the script, Zac and I can quit at any time if Gisele decides to go forward with a script we hate, although I don’t think she would. Who knows. Fucking bullshit. I don’t know how the testing thing will work here. I guess at some point I’ll be told to get tested somewhere somehow if they test people who have been totally healthy this whole time. Very confusing. I thought Stephen Fry was an actor, but I think I’m mixed up. They have so many Stephens over there, Or so many Frys, maybe. ** Steve Erickson, Fake New Wave. Curious thematic. Interesting. Happy you’ve got some gigs lined up. I still don’t get the Perfume Genius love. It/he doesn’t do a thing for me. But I’ll try the new one. I’ve tried to do a Beth B Day a couple of times, but there was very little online to use, so I gave up. It’s been a while, so I’ll see if there’s more in store now. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey! Thanks. I’m holding up reasonably well, I believe, and counting the minutes until my door reopens. You? I think it’s worth doing, but I love that kind of stuff. Okay, all hopes that your dad’s chemo does what it needs to do. It does seem like being outgoing and charming will lead you to something interesting and lucrative enough. It does seem to work that way. ‘The Man Without Qualities’ is insanely great, yeah. Musil is major. If you haven’t read it, ‘Young Törless’, the ‘sadistic boarding school’ thing you mentioned, is a lot less complex and demanding than ‘TMWQ’, but it’s also really great. ** Okay. Today I present to you five books I’ve read recently and can recomend to you with bells on and all of that. Give them a shot at your reading list, won’t you? See you tomorrow.

 

‘At the beginning of the 1980s the Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick was perhaps the most celebrated figure in New York’s ‘No Wave’ or Punk cinema. She had produced a series of Super-8 film narratives, which were ‘hailed as contemporary underground classics’ and her work featured prominently in a special 1982 issue of the journal October, focusing on contemporary developments in avant-garde film. It included an interview, by Scott MacDonald, and an article by Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, dealing with the development of No Wave cinema since its emergence in 1978. Yet, as the above quote suggests, the focus of Vivienne Dick’s work was already shifting towards Ireland and in the same year she left New York for Dublin.

Another journey is also signalled by this special issue of October; the migration of No Wave cinema from its birthplace in the bars and rock clubs of the East Village, towards the established institutions of avant-garde film. No Wave cinema did not retain its position at the critical edge of avant-garde practice for very long. By 1984, the movement (if it ever had any such coherency) had dissipated and its history was being re-written by formerly supportive critics such as Hoberman. In an overview of developments in American filmaking, entitled ‘After Avant-garde Film’, Hoberman dismissed No Wave cinema as a ‘postmodernist repetition’ of an earlier cultural moment, associated with pop art and underground film and compared this repetition to the nostalgic ‘genre pastiches’, such as American Graffiti, Star Wars and Body Heat, produced by Hollywood during the same period.

The No Wave movement retains a place within American film history, however, and in recent years a number of major retrospective exhibitions have been staged. Vivienne Dick’s work has featured in two: No Wave Cinema,1978-87 at the Whitney Museum (1996) and Big as Life: An American History of 8mm films (1999), at the Museum of Modern Art. Even though she has not lived in the US since 1982, these events have confirmed her status as an important ‘American’ filmmaker. But Dick’s prominence within the No Wave has also worked to limit analysis of her work in the US and in Ireland. For the most part, American curators and critics have paid little attention to her later films, made in Ireland and in London.

No Wave cinema has always been theorized in terms of a definitively American tradition, not least because of the fact that Vivienne Dick and her contemporaries Beth and Scott B, James Nares and Eric Mitchell were all based in New York during the late 1970s and early 1980s. J. Hoberman was also instrumental in shaping the processes of reception and historicization, through his articles in the Village Voice and an influential programme of screenings at Anthology Archives in I981. He consistently situated the movement in relation to a specifically American tradition of narrow-gauge filmmaking, an approach that did not allow for an extended analysis of either Dick’s feminism or issues of cultural specificity.

It was only when Vivienne Dick began to focus on overtly ‘Irish’ themes, in Visibility: Moderate – A Tourist Film (1981), that critics such as Hoberman began to emphasize the fact that she was Irish. Her association with No Wave cinema has also presented problems of categorization for Irish curators and critics, particularly in relation to the dominant practices in Irish cinema or visual art. Until relatively recently, her work was outside the canon in its most literal sense: the national film archive. This is despite the fact that she has made a large number of films in Ireland since the early 1980s and has represented Ireland in a small number of international exhibitions and festivals.’ — Maeve Connolly

 

___
Stills

 

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Further

Vivienne Dick @ LUX
Vivienne Dick @ The Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Vivienne Dick @ IMDb
Book: Afterimages 4: Vivienne Dick
DVD: Between Truth and Fiction: The Films of Vivienne Dick
Vivienne Dick: Excluded by the Nature of Things
DICK FLICKS
Films by Vivienne Dick
Vivienne Dick’s Film Portraits
Vivienne Dick @ MUBI
A particular incoherence: some films of Vivienne Dick
Vivienne Dick: Still noisy after all these years
Vivienne Dick at IMMA – stardust memories from a No Wave icon
“Punk Was a Great Liberating Thing for Women”: Filmmaker Vivienne Dick on No Wave and Making Art in ’70s New York
INTERVIEW WITH VIVIENNE DICK: PUNK, ART, POLITICS AND FEMINISM
Vivienne Dick: ‘Experimentation becomes an important way to resist’
RE-WRITTEN IN THE FEMININE: THE FILMS OF VIVIENNE DICK, OR: JUSTIFIABLE MATRICIDE, THE CONTEMPORARILY UNSPEAKABLE AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

 

____
Extras

Vivienne Dick – ‘93% STARDUST’ – Interview

What do you love about your life, Vivienne Dick?

Trailer: Delirious Rhythm, 1936-2017: Films selected by Vivienne Dick

 

____
Interview
from The Tangerine Magazine

 

You grew up in Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. What kind of film did you engage with at that time?

I was a student at UCD between 1967 and 1970, and was a member of the Film Club there. In that film club we saw more alternative type of work, selected by whoever was running the club. I remember seeing films by Bergman and Godard: Weekend, for example. I remember quirky films from the sixties like Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush. In Killybegs, where I grew up, there was an independent cinema which showed quite an eclectic bunch of films, like Suspiria by Argento, films selected by the cinema owner.

Did censorship have much of an impact on film at that time in Ireland?

We were all aware of censorship in literature and film. There was not much world cinema or independent cinema. I remember when Antonioni’s Blow-Up turned up in Dublin. I lived in Paris for a bit after that—the city of cinema. I remember being very impressed with Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul, that had just come out. And I saw Warhol films in London around that time.

You’ve lived in Paris, England, Germany, India—

Yeah, I lived in Aix-en-Provence after I left college for a year, and then I was in Paris, I lived in Germany for a year—I moved around a bit. And then I decided to go to New York, to America.

What influence did that travel have?

Basically, there wasn’t much happening here for me, being a woman. The only career open to me would have been teaching at a secondary school or something, and I just didn’t feel quite up to that. Although I did end up teaching film eventually, and teaching English as a second language was always a fall-back job for me. I did many, many jobs just to get by. Aix-en-Provence was full of international students and so I was introduced to all sorts of stuff that I hadn’t known about in Ireland: music-wise, drug-wise (laughs). And then I met somebody in France who was into contemporary art. We went to visit art galleries together, and hitchhiked to Berlin. And he was very interested in music also. I am a big fan of Robert Wyatt. It was around this time I began to listen to a lot of experimental music—Steve Reich, for example, and jazz.

Was it around this time that you decided to move to New York?

I’m not really sure why I decided to go to New York. Certainly, there was no point in staying here, anyway. It was kind of like, wanting to stretch your wings, wanting to see other places. I remember meeting an Irish gallery owner in London, and I remember him saying to me that [New York] was a great city for women, which confirmed what I had anticipated, and I was not disappointed.

Can you speak a little about how you started making films there?

Well, I was interested in photography, and I had a camera. Before going to New York, I’d worked on a boat between Sweden and Germany, selling duty-free butter, and with the money I bought the camera. In New York I met a photographer who’d been to a school for visual arts, and I was looking at what he was doing, school-trained work. He taught me how to use the darkroom correctly. And then I gravitated towards the Lower East Side. It was a cheap place to live, and it was a very interesting time back then. It was the end of the hippy era, there were a lot of—there still are a lot of—Ukrainians and Poles there. And then it was the beginning of the punk thing as well. I found Millennium Film Workshop by chance on 4th Street and that was the first time I used a Super 8 camera. This was around 1976. But then a short time after that, I met a bunch of people—Scott and Beth B, Eric Mitchell, James Nares—at some gathering in someone’s apartment, who were talking about making Super 8 films, and using their friends as actors. This was the moment I decided I wanted to make films. I remember it really well. It was my birthday. At that time, I was hanging out in CBGB and listening to all this music; something really interesting was happening with the music and this energy became part of the filmmaking.

Did you sense a kind of conflict between the ethos of places like Millennium and Anthology [Film Archives], and the kind of film you were interested in, were interested in making?

Well, I certainly used to go to Anthology to view films. I’d never seen all this experimental American cinema before. It was quite an eye-opener because I realised, ‘God, I could make films too!’ They weren’t big budget productions, they were actually kind of domestic. That was the stuff I was interested in. There was not a big difference in the ethos of places like Millennium and Anthology really. Although I enjoyed seeing the work there at that time, I felt apart from both places. I was not trying to fit into this world.

You started off screening your films in bars and clubs, is that right? Places like Max’s Kansas City?

Yes, because those were the places we frequented. We thought maybe we could show our films in between bands. Anyway, many of the people in the films were in bands: were musicians, or singers, or whatever. So there was an interest for them in seeing those films.

How did it effect viewers’ engagement with the films, showing them in bars instead of galleries?

It was a much livelier audience. We kind of turned our noses up a bit at places like Anthology, which were very purist in a way, in terms of: no smoking, no talking, hard seats, respect for the film. That’s fine, but it was a bit over the top. So music venues were much more fun; you could just go and get a drink in the middle of a film. It was more relaxed.

In terms of the intersection between music and film, as you say, your films are peopled with a cast of musicians, and you played music for a while?

In Lydia Lunch’s band, yeah. I played the keyboard. I played violin as well, on The Contortions’ album. I loved The Contortions, so I was thrilled to be on their album.

Yes, I was interested to hear you talking about them in conversation last month at IMMA, about the ‘release’ of hearing their music for the first time. What were the aesthetic points of connection between the music and film of the time?

I always see my films as connected to music in relation to rhythm and pacing. Perhaps, like, if you think about The Contortions, and other bands who were around, they were quite dissonant in the way they organised their sound; there’s a rhythm there but it’s another kind of rhythm. In some ways I think this carries over into the way I edit film, or conceive of time, moving from one reality to another in an abrupt way. As I said earlier, the energy of the music was important as well.

How do you feel now about the various labels that have been applied to your early work: avant-garde, punk, no wave, etc.?

It’s just a label. It’s no big deal. I suppose when you say ‘no wave’, it does refer to a certain time period, an association with music. The ‘no wave’ do have certain things in common—working mostly with non-actors, for example, who happen to be musicians, and using Super 8 as a medium. In my work, there are elements of documentary, and there are elements of fiction as well as performance, and, along with that, there is also a kind of dream-world—an imaginary world, or even a surrealist world perhaps.

It’s such a well-documented period in New York, in literature. In Kim Gordon’s biography, she speaks about New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s as being ‘in crumbling shape […] before Soho and the art scene exploded, and [it] turned itself into a kind of moated kingdom’. Were you conscious, at the time, of the ephemerality of New York as a kind of artistic haven?

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting because people gravitate to New York from all classes, and from all parts of America: the Midwest, Detroit. James Chance from The Contortions was from the Midwest somewhere. Also, a lot of students turned up from art colleges who wanted to be artists but ended up turning to making music. People were making films, playing in bands, writing for magazines, painting. For example, James Nares was in a band, he was a filmmaker and a painter.

So it was a ‘melting pot’ so to speak?

Yeah, it was a melting pot—apart from there not being many black people on the scene, something which changed somewhat when hip hop appeared downtown in the early eighties. People felt emboldened to try their hands at whatever. Everyone influenced and supported each other. I found it amazing, because in Ireland, I was used to hearing people say, ‘Who do you think you are? What qualifies you for this position?’ None of that was ever said to anybody [in New York]. You just presented whatever you were doing. I never felt so liberated as I did there. I was very aware that I wasn’t trained as a filmmaker. And I didn’t give a damn! The musicians weren’t trained either. And they were making fantastic music. I think I found my own voice, in my own way. Had I gone to film school, and been taught the ‘right’ way to make a film, it would have squashed anything that was there. I don’t think I would have made the same films somehow.

Was your early work a conscious reaction against a more structural school of film?

Yeah well, I mean, structural film was the dominant independent work at that time. And our work was completely opposite. We were interested in working with elements of narrative and with people. I have great respect for structuralist work but at the time a number of us were not interested in making such films—it was not consciously a reaction—it was more being interested in something else and not being concerned if it was ‘acceptable’ or not. It was exactly the same with the music of the time. Film critics picked up on our work very early on—people like Amy Taubin and Jim Hoberman. Later Scott MacDonald interviewed me and wrote an article in October which caused some mutterings: ‘What’s she doing in that magazine?’ (Laughs).

How has your process changed over time? How has your sensibility developed in terms of the visual element of your films, your use of sound?

The sound has got much more complex. I’m using better technology. I tend to move the camera less, and that’s a technical thing as well, because these new digital cameras, you can’t move them so easily—especially DSLR. But I do much prefer a small camera. I really like the everyday.

That reminds me, I wanted to ask you about something you’d spoken about in that early interview you mentioned, the one with Scott MacDonald: the economic imperative of filming on Super 8, its accessibility. How do you think filmmaking has been affected by the advent of the smartphone? (I’m thinking of films like Sean Baker’s 2015 Tangerine, shot entirely on iPhones).

I haven’t seen enough of these films, I have to catch up. In a way, anyone can make a film, in terms of the money. It’s so easy now, the recordings are so good. At the same time though, you have to know what you’re doing. It’s really about being discriminate with what you see, and being discriminate with what you hear. There are all kinds of sounds there, but, you know, you have to select, you have to edit. But anyone with any desire to do it can surely do it, the technology is absolutely there. It’s all open. It’s like painting. Above all you have to have a passion to say something as well—that is the most important of all.

In terms of the composition of your films, is the work primarily scripted or improvised? Has that changed over time?

I don’t work with a traditional script. I do a lot of research and I am very selective with text usually. I tend to get nervous when I see a film that’s just a lot of dialogue. Some people like it, but it can make me want to sleep. Too much text can weigh the whole thing down. It is a question of balance.

 

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12 of Vivienne Dick’s 19 films

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She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978)
‘This noir psychodrama follows the relationship between two characters, played by Pat Place and Lydia Lunch. Set in the Lower East Side in New York, the film revolves around the power relations between two friends where one is in thrall to the other. The relationship dynamic shifts halfway through the film after a long mirror scene, after which the ‘victim’ begins to stalk her aggressor.’ — LUX

the entirety

 

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Staten Island (1978)
‘A low budget sci-fi short, where an androgynous alien, played by Pat Place, emerges from the sea to sift through rubbish on a beach. This film was originally intended to be part of a longer collaborative work to be made by a group of women called Les Guérilléres – after the radical feminist book of the same name by Monique Wittig.’ — VD

the entirety

 

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Guerillere Talks (1978)
‘Guérillère Talks, comprising seven rolls of Super-8 film, is a series of portraits of women, all of whom are associated with the No Wave music and art scene. The film features Beate Nilsen, Ikue Mori, Lydia Lunch, Pat Place, Adele Bertei, and Anya Philips. In Guérillère Talks the filmmaker’s presence is felt through the expressive camera movements which contribute an energy and intensity to this exploration into notions of identity, as performers perform themselves.’ — LUX

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979)
‘Lydia Lunch is the protagonist of Beauty Becomes The Beast, where she appears alternately as a five-year-old child and a tough teenager. Dick’s densest and most associative film, Beauty Becomes The Beast is a virtual catalogue of female media images, ranging from Patty Hearst to ‘I Love Lucy.’ Switching scenes and modes like a bored TV watcher idly spinning the dial, the film depicts a world of women where mother and daughter are reciprocal roles in an ongoing chain of victimization…. Extremely effective, [this super 8 film] derives its considerable power mainly from the graphic regression of Lunch’s persona and from an undercurrent of sexual rage that courses throughout.’ — J. Hoberman

the entirety

 

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Liberty’s Booty (1980)
‘Watching Liberty’s Booty is to share the fascinated, yet non-judgemental gaze of the filmmaker herself, as if you were seeing the world anew. The camera circles textures and light, pausing as it meanders along on characters and objects that take its fancy. The film’s prologue gives the flavour. There’s a hermaphrodite doll in a black bin bag and a woman in a room surrounded by Christmas chintz who acts as a midwife as the doll gives birth. We cut to a shot to a woman riding in the sidecar of a motorbike down a street. She arrives at a doorway and gets out. There follows a title sequence which consists of an animation of the Statue of Liberty transforming from statuesque woman to striptease artiste to gun-toting militant; from goddess to whore to activist in three moves!’ — Bev Zalcock

Excerpt

 

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Visibility: Moderate (1981)
‘Vivienne Dick’s first film after the New York series takes her back to her native Ireland. Using Super-8 film as a parody of the ‘travelogue’ or home-movie style film, Dick takes a expatriate, tourist look at her homeland. The narrative follows Margaret Ann Irinsky as the American tourist trekking from a Dublin populated by Hare Krishnas and rock music, to the horse-drawn carriages in the west of Ireland and the kissing of the Blarney stone. The quaint perception of Ireland and the Americanization of the native culture are contrasted with interviews from sectarian prisoners and footage of political marches. As in all her work, Dick uses a mixture of verité shots which capture the essence of the locality and intersperses them with images which have a totally different feel. This method is used to highlight issues in a subtle way wherein the camera takes an active rather than a voyeuristic role.’ — LUX

Stream online at LUX

 

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Like Dawn to Dust (1983)
‘Lydia Lunch laments the difficulty of relationships in the wilds of Connemara, Ireland.’ — LUX

Stream online at LUX

 

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London Suite (Getting Sucked In) (1990)
‘Hovering between fact and fiction the film depicts a slacker existence in London. London’s cultural diversity unfolds as Vivenne Dick portrays her friends, their lifestyles, what they talk about and how they talk. In this kaleidoscopic arrangement of encounters and re-enactments, equal weight is given to the passionate and the banal.’ — The Film-makers Coop

Stream online at LUX

 

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A Skinny Little Man Attacked Daddy (1994)
‘The films I make are about my life and the people around me. I want to awaken the fearless self. A Skinny Man Attacked Daddy takes a look at the family and the place where I grew up. So much of what is ‘me’ comes from attitudes, expectations, fears, habits, beliefs that I inherited from my parents (and they in turn from theirs). The video is about separation form the family. My work is to try to know myself – the only way to change inherited patterns.’ — Vivienne Dick

Stream online at LUX

 

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The Irreducible Difference of the Other (2013)
‘The Irreducible Difference of the Other questions what it means to be human in a world orientated towards war, terror, and consumption with Franco-Irish actress Olwen Fouéré inhabiting the two personas of Antonin Artaud and Russian poet Anna Akhmatova . Key historical moments are referenced, including opposition to the Iraq war, the Arab Spring and recent anti- austerity protests, proclaiming the desire for a world which is more balanced, and which focuses less on exploitation and destruction. An implicit critique of the male paradigm is embodied by the structure of the film – a richly textured weaving of sound and images – which posits the need for a renewal of relationship on both a personal and global level.’ — LUX

Vivienne Dick + Discussion (The Irreducible Difference of the Other)

 

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Red Moon Rising (2015)
‘A celebration of the carnivalesque, through dance, performance and the spoken word.The film reaches towards a renewal of our embodiment with the Earth as a response to a belief in invincibility, and the desire of Man to dominate the planets. A red moon is both a beacon, and a warning.’ — VD

Stream the film online at LUX

 

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Augenblick (2017)
‘Augenblick reflects on what it means to be human in a post human world. | | A giant rock morphs into a mountain in a frozen landscape. In a formal garden, Jean Jacques Rousseau speaks about man and his relationship to society. In a theatrically lit room, three women of various ages announce a range of human beliefs from animism to our present accelerated digital world. Next the women are having tea in a sunny room and conversing about aging, diet and cannibalism. Rousseau reappears briefly and the film returns to the opening shot of a reptilian-like rock floating into space.’ — LUX

Stream the film online at LUX

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** JM, Hi, Josiah. Thanks. Luck of the draw, as always. Good luck with your lockdown deadline thing. I guess it’ll be a gamble whatever gets decided. Which is stressful. Here too. Oh, wow, ‘Flesh and the Word’, I do remember that. I think I must have it amongst my stuff in LA. I can’t remember exactly what it was, though. I’ll do the googling thing. I like your idea about the film entry. Abstract is the tea in my cup these days. Nice project. I wish I had one of them. A bit of force would be useful. I can feel a de-clunking out there in the semi-near distance, but it’s still just flirting, or maybe it’s just minding its own business and I’m projecting onto it, who can tell anymore. We’re only allowed to walk for an hour here and not very far, not that people here are following the rules that tightly. I hope Thursday was your buddy. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I think the quarantining thing is having an adverse effect on escorts’ normal sociopathic behavioural outlay. Well, of course, the masks already are fetish items, or used as punchlines in not very clever erotic jokes, at least. Mm, in my experience, publishers/editors can be massively slow and neglectful even when they’re into something, and the current situation certainly isn’t helping, so I say don’t despair yet. You would need to ask Mark about Soho. It’s certainly a very good press. But I only know the fiction books they publish, yet I’m guessing they publish non-fiction books too? Surely. ** Dominik, Greetings!!! Thank you about my publisher score and about my title. Our quarantine started on March 16. Same as you guys! Yeah, it sucks for the Gisele work. We were reviving this older piece, ‘This Is How You Will Disappear’, which is our hugest, most elaborate work with an entire forest onstage, and a 40 minute fog invasion/sculpture, and live performing birds and owls, and holograms, and so on, for a short tour in Paris and London. But the Paris engagement at the end of May is now cancelled, and setting up and restoring the work is very time-consuming, and the London theater doesn’t have the time and space to allow us to do that, so the London shows have to be cancelled too. Very disappointing. We don’t know about the pro writer thing re: the TV project. The pro writer is supposed to turn it into a ‘normal’ TV series since we refuse to do that, and then Zac and I would work with him or her or them, whatever that means. The project has seemed like a dead horse we’re flogging for quite a while now, but it’s Gisele’s decision, not ours, so onwards we go, however futile that is. Wow, the cut-up project. That’s very exciting! You’re being a total hero and role model about how to stay fired up under these dire circumstances. I’m going to try to absorb some of your vibes. My day was blah-ish, I guess. Another one of those. Emails, a couple of phone calls, went down some pleasurable YouTube black holes re: this or that — killed a couple of hours chasing every video by/about one of my all time favorite bands, The Move. Started answering questions for an interview for a magazine or journal or something. Not much. I hope the creative roll that you’re on continued today. Did it? How were these 24 hours? Love that turns me into a human firework, Dennis. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks. The pub date isn’t set yet because there is uncertainty around whether books already scheduled for publication will get delayed or not, which would delay everything, but I was told that late 2021 is the likely time. I’ve heard of ‘The Nest’, but that’s about all. Will check out Manzi and Black Dresses, thank you. Good luck with the revisions. Later von Trier has so swamped the virtues of his early work that I can imagine it would be hard to properly distinguish the two. ** Nick Toti, Thanks, Nick. There is an early version of a piece of ‘I Wished’ in that anthology, yeah. Got your email, thank you! I’ll get back to you very shortly. And I’m happy BS Johnson struck a nerve. Yeah, he’s very good. Cool. ** Bill, Thank you, Bill! Wait’ll you see the slaves this month. They and their suitors have been quarantined into a state of relative madness. It’s still kind of vague on the May 11 reopening. No one really seems to understand the guidelines. It does seem possible that cafes could open with strict distancing rules, but, as cafes are all about socialising, that might be the reason they’re on the ‘no’ list. But will art galleries reopen, for instance? One would think so since they’re hardly swamped with people. It’s confusing. Bon day. ** liquoredgoat, Hey, pal! Good to see you! Thanks about the novel, and I hope you can sort out how to write during this. I’m still trying to get there myself. ** Right. Today the blog is handed over to one of the pioneers of the so-called ‘No Wave’ cinema scene/movement of the 80s/90s, the honorable Vivenne Dick. Have fun. I think you will if you let yourselves. See you tomorrow.