* (restored)

 

‘Originally published in 1992 by Carol/Citadel Press, Negrophobia was a wild romp through a racially charged dreamscape that zipped from one absurd scene to another so quickly, you didn’t have time to question the illogical logic as stereotypes Uncle Remus, metal lawn jockeys, African cannibals, and Little Black Sambo plowed through the pages. “Growing-up in the ’60s, I watched all of those cartoons, but I didn’t associate those images with me or any other black people,” James said to me last year from his home in New Haven, Connecticut a few days before Christmas. “Though I was aware that that was how white people might think of black people.”

‘At sixty-three years old, James is a divorced former expat who lived in Berlin for over a decade before returning to the states in 2007. With a wicked sense of humor, he chuckles often. Having read and performed his often brilliantly off-color material for years, his speaking voice is clear, though it sometimes reminds me of our shared hero, Richard Pryor. Raised by a mother who was a psychiatric nurse and a painter father whose abstract expressionist canvases hung throughout the house, James’ first artistic inkling when he was a boy was to become a visual artist.

‘“I did some painting, but my father’s criticism was so harsh that I started writing instead, because he didn’t know anything about that.” Reading widely from the time he was in fourth grade, James devoured his mom’s Freud and Jung textbooks as well as underground comics drawn by S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams, the novels and poems of Chester Himes and Ted Joans. “I also watched tons of television,” he said. “Children’s programs hosted by Sandy Becker and Soupy Sales were my favorites. It was like a pre-drug thing. Those shows prepared you for the reality of LSD.”

‘The avant-garde black power works of Amiri Baraka were also an inspiration, but years later the noted writer was far from impressed by the Negrophobia pages he read when teaching at Yale in the ’80s. “Baraka was running a writer’s workshop, but neither he nor any of the other students were very supportive. They basically told me not to publish it. To go away and don’t publish it.” In the final text of his debut, James got his revenge by referring to Baraka’s novel, The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), as “shit-stained pulp.”

‘In James’ black (face) comedy horror, written in the form of a screenplay, the anti-heroine protagonist was a racist white teenager named Bubbles Brazil, a spoiled little rich girl who was so badly behaved that she’d been kicked to the curb by every private academy in New York City and placed at Donald Goines Senior High School. “What’s a white girl to do in a school full of jigaboos?” Bubbles wondered.

‘Back home, after smart-mouthing her “kerchief-headed . . . meaty-arm” servant, a grits-cooking maid who resembled a 1950s tele-domestic, the woman put a serious mojo on the young girl that sends missy hurling into a hallucinogenic dark place, a voodoo so vexing that it is hard for her to get out. “The maid slithers into a convulsive snake dance, foams at the mouth, and tears off her clothes,” James wrote. “Fish-eyed pancakes are slung Frisbee-style across the kitchen. Bruce Lee’s kung-fu cat cries mingle with James Brown’s R&B funk shrieks.”

‘For the next hundred-fifty pages, Bubbles bounces like an ivory-hued pinball from one surreally racist scenario to another. In my mind, the words became pictures in the style of P-Funk cover artist Pedro Bell. In addition to the race issues, Negrophobia is sexually graphic and filled with enough free-flowing bodily fluids to gross out the strongest stomach.

‘The idea to write his wild styled book came to James when he was living in the West Village in the late ’70s. “It was just as simple as putting the words ‘Negro’ and ‘phobia’ together,” he said. “The Bubbles character was based on a few different women. There was this one white girl from West Virginia I knew who, after her parents split-up, was forced to go to Martin Luther King High School, because her father wouldn’t pay for private school anymore. She would tell me these crazy stories that I thought were so funny.” Originally written in traditional narrative form, after his friend and neighbor Michael O’Donoghue, the National Lampoon writer and Saturday Night Live original cast member, suggested he compose it as a screenplay, the ideas finally gelled.

‘“I knew it would be the best way to avoid a lot of psychological jabber about the characters,” James said. “I just wanted the reader to deal with the images and therefore confront those same images on their own terms.” Taking ten years to complete the manuscript, James worked as O’Donoghue’s researcher on various film projects, including Biker Heaven, the proposed sequel to Easy Rider that, according to Splitsider.com, “was set in 2068, a hundred years after the original, and saw the original movie’s main characters resurrected by ‘the Biker God’ to recover the original Gadsden flag in the wake of a nuclear war, as they encountered numerous biker gangs.”

‘Negrophobia has been championed and ridiculed by critics and readers alike, with a strange array of celebrity fans that includes actor Johnny Depp, members of Fishbone, and painter Kara Walker, whose use of slave imaginary in her famed silhouettes has been called “revolting and negative” by assemblage artist Betye Saar. “I read Negrophobia in 1994, when I was just about to graduate from the art school, and I’ve dealt with it intensively,” Walker said in db-art in 2004. “It was one of those rare soothing moments that I thought there could be another person in the world who understands what I do.”

‘The book’s biggest critic, however, was an employee of James’ publisher who believed the cover promoted the same stereotypes it purported to be combating and tried to have it squashed. Florence Washington, a black administrative assistant in Carol’s New Jersey offices, was offended by the image which showed, as The New York Times described in the June 17, 1992 Book Notes column, “a white girl, scantily dressed . . . over her shoulder is a shadow of an oversize Sambo-like caricature that resembles racist art from the 1930s and 40s.” Designed by art director Steve Brower, he and Darius, “saw the picture as a visual representation of the novel’s basic satirical line: What the teen-ager sees over her shoulder is not the shadow of a real man but of her deepest fears.”

‘Washington claimed she was going to report the incident to civil rights activist Sonny Carson. “The worst part was, she hadn’t even bothered to read the book,” James said. The protest didn’t trigger any bans or burnings, but it did generate the NYT piece. James told reporter Esther B. Fein, “These stereotypes have not died; they’ve just been transformed and modernized. The whole point is that I believe black people should start taking back these images from our iconography that have been stolen and corrupted through the years by racists. I understand that these images were once oppressive. But I think we are at the stage where we can look at these images and not feel threatened. All kinds of black artists have started to take control of these images, whether they realize it or not.”

‘Los Angeles Times book critic Dany Laferrière wrote in December 1992. “I opened James’ book only to topple into hell . . . Negrophobia remains the courageous effort of a young writer to understand his time, and a mad attempt to renew the genre of the novel.”

‘Kathy Acker was the first professional to encourage James after she read the first forty pages of Negrophobia in the mid-eighties. Acker constructed books, including Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978) and Blood and Guts in High School (1984) that were genre-breaking texts that combined word collages, plagiarized text, violence, and erotic (bordering on pornographic) imaginings designed to expand the possibilities of what the novel could be. It was that uncompromising attitude that Darius James applied to his own art that would become associated with the then creatively striving community of writers, painters, filmmakers, performance artists, and musicians who congregated on the Lower East Side.

‘“The Lower East Side didn’t really start for me until I met Kathy,” James said. The two connected when James was thirty and, after living in the West Village for a few years, had returned to his native New Haven. Bored one afternoon, he looked up Acker’s phone number and cold-called her at home. “I just told her how much I enjoyed her writing and how she reminded me of a jazz musician in the way she handled language and story and identity.”

‘Instead of being creeped out, she invited him to come see her the next time he was in the city. The following week, he, Acker and writer Patrick McGrath had drinks in an East 5th Street bar downstairs from a police station. “I showed her those early pages and she read them right there. She told me she thought it was fantastic.” Although the recorded history of ’80s Lower East Side is often whitewashed, there was a thriving community of black artists as well, which essayist Jennifer Jazz described perfectly in her piece Black Like Basquiat: Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Black Kids in Downtown NYC.

‘James began hanging out at various spots on the Lower East Side including the performance space Neither/Nor where he befriended fellow black writers John Farris (The Asses Tale), Steve Cannon (Groove, Bang, and Jive Around), both who became mentors, and Norman Douglas. Junkie playwright/screenwriter Miguel Pinero also hung out there, shooting smack in the back with his Sing Sing buddies. A few blocks away, Jean-Michel Basquiat was painting, David Hammons was concepting, and Ornette Coleman was blowing his horn.

‘“Darius and I hit it off from when we first met,” Douglas said recently. “We read poetry at Life Café and drank at the Horseshoe Bar on 7th and Avenue B. Greg Tate was the big black culture writer at the time, but I thought Darius was always the more radical thinker and writer.” With Acker’s help, Darius first published in the scene’s infamous literary journal Between C & D, edited by former couple Joel Rose and Catherine Texier. Printed on dot-matrix paper and sold in ziplock plastic baggies, contributors included Acker, Bruce Benderson, Gary Indiana, Tama Janowitz, Patrick McGrath and Dennis Cooper.

*

‘While I imagined that James would’ve had a difficult time selling Negrophobia to an America publisher, the opposite was true. “I met a New Yorker writer at Michael’s house named George W. S. Trow, and we became friends,” James explained. “He introduced me to the editor at Carol, whose name I can’t remember, but I do recall he was a Deadhead.” In 1993, the book was published in paperback by St. Martin’s Press as part of a deal Darius worked out when selling his nonfiction That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ’Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury).

‘It would take me another twenty-five years to actually complete Negrophobia, and that was only after writer and Man Booker winner Paul Beatty (The Sellout) playfully shamed me after I confessed to only reading a quarter of the book when it was released. As we stood in the rain after John Farris’ memorial service in April 2016, Beatty shook his head as though disgusted. “Go back and read that book. You won’t regret it.” When I told James the story, he laughed. “It’s not an easy book to finish,” he told me. “Most people stop at the scene where Bubbles is puking up worms, so, I understand.”

‘Negrophobia has been out of print since the ’90s, but Beatty reprinted an excerpt in Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor in 2006. “I found the work of the novelist Darius James while passing through Cathy’s bookstore on Avenue B and at the Living Theater on Third Street, hearing him deliver voodoo shibboleths as unruly as his stringy dreadlocks,” Beatty wrote in the book’s introduction, which was reprinted in The New York Times in January 2006.

‘I finally dived knee-deep into the textual boogie of Negrophobia and was delighted that I did. As Richard Pryor once said, “The water’s cold . . . and it’s deep too.” Darius’ writing style was as vivid as it was precise as he piled crazed images on top of one another. After reading the first few chapters of Bubbles’ Adventures in Darkieland, I took a nap and had a multicolored nightmare of skyrockets blasting in the sky as Mickey Mouse’s dog Pluto bounced upside down, dragging his long tongue along the glittery ground. Seriously, it was as though the words worked a spell on my imagination, and even in sleep they wouldn’t let go.

‘After the release of Negrophobia, James hoped to begin working on his second novel The Last American Nigger, but life had other plans. “I think we all just assumed that when Negrophobia carried his work beyond Manhattan, Darius was going to be a star,” writer Dennis Cooper wrote in 2007, “an avant-garde superhero writer a la Burroughs and Acker. But his raucous style and subversive mode of confronting racist attitudes by embracing racist stereotypes were frequently misunderstood at the time. Despite the hubbub and some great reviews, the novel was not a big success.”

‘In 1998, Darius relocated to Berlin, which, in his words, was much like the Lower East Side in the ’80s. While Negrophobia didn’t get Darius’ face in any Dewars scotch ads, his dangerous visions expanded the limits of speculative fiction, and it took me back to the days when I was a teenage geek discovering the alternative new world universes of Harlan Ellison, Ishmael Reed, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, and Samuel R. Delany while simultaneously blaring the sounds of Prince, David Bowie, Grandmaster Flash, and Donna Summer in the background. An obvious literary pioneer in what the kids today call Afrofuturism, his work has inspired others, including the Ego Trip crew, writer/editor Bill Campbell (Koontown Killing Kaper), Hype Williams videos, and graphic artist Tim Fielder, who once did a comic strip insert with him for Between C & D.

‘Negrophobia remains the most blackadelic funk novel of late twentieth century that has much in common with the various generations of avant-gardists, free jazz cats on stage at Slug’s and doo-rag Dadaists as it does with James Brown’s brand new bag, Ralph Bakshi’s cartoons (especially the apt titled Coonskin) and George Clinton’s aural acid adventures in Chocolate City. Currently, Darius James is working on various projects, including editing a book project with photographer Gerald Jenkins, discussing a graphic novel with Casanova Frankenstein, composing a spoken word project with Haitian electronic voodoo musician Val Jeanty, and working on a new novel tentatively called Acid Fairies.

‘“I wanted to write about black women doing acid,” James said. Knowing his work, something tells me there’s more to it than that. For now, I’ll turntable scratch the words of Dennis Cooper, who wrote in a 2007 blog, “Darius may be a slowpoke, but he’s one of the most gifted contemporary American fiction writers in my opinion, and Negrophobia is a singular mindblower of a novel that I think you should do yourself the favor of reading.”’ — Michael Gonzales, Catapult

 

___
Etc.

* Buy ‘Negrophobia’
* Darius James reviews Saab Lofton’s Anarchist Democracy
* Oliver Hardt’s documentary BLACK DEUTSCHLAND is an intimate exploration of black life in Germany. It features Darius James, a.o. Read about it here.
* The Negrophobia Website
* Read about and buy Darius James’s nonfiction book That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury) (St. Martins Press, 1995)
The Zombie Monologues, by Darius James
The Evil Eyes, by Darius James
The Dark Side of the North Pole, an excerpt from the novel, “Froggy Chocolates” by Darius James
Anarchist Democracy by Darius James
Free Brother Bobby!

 

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Media

Negrophobia by Darius James (rerelease book trailer) Negrophobia Reborn

Showreel

Darius James – Sensitive Skin Magazine live @ Bowery Poetry Club 8-15-2010

Darius James at the Sensitive Skin reading, Cafe Amsterdam, 10/29/10

 

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Quotes

“In this social-media era, when we are more intent than ever on isolating things that offend and outrage, Negrophobia revels in its own outrageousness, and thus is more of a tonic now than it was almost three decades ago. It neither blinks nor recoils at the stereotypes, insults, and presumptions that have been used to cage and subdue African American self-esteem, but compels its readers to confront rather than retreat from or smooth over the retro Jim Crow imagery….American literature has seen the ascent of talented young black writers who aren’t willing to settle for parochial or hidebound conceptions of who they are and what they should say…and it’s a fine time to be reminded that crazy, willful acts of hoodoo storytelling such as Negrophobia helped make this renaissance possible.” — Gene Seymour, Bookforum

“Luridly funny and unsparingly smart, Negrophobia is American arcana of the highest order. And like all truly cool books, destined to forever be ahead of its time.” — Paul Beatty

“Darius James is a great writer.” — Kathy Acker

“I opened James’s book only to topple into hell. In fact, Negrophobia is the black version of American Psycho.” — Dany Laferrière

“I read Negrophobia when I was still in grad school. . . . It was one of those good but rare occasions when I thought there might be one other person in the world that would get what I was doing.” — Kara Walker

“Comic, manic, and amazing, [Negrophobia] tells more about American race relations than all of the walking dead suburban experts, academics, and think tank whores who tell their fellow suburbanites about how it feels to be black.” — Ishmael Reed

“This is a novel of exposure, not solution. Those willing to take the ride will find language and imagery that provide an understanding of everything offensive and American. To see Bubbles dragged through the mire of racial and sexual taboos is to experience the reclamation of the icons and stereotypes that are the signposts of relations among Americans. It’s not an altogether pleasant experience. No one who reads Negrophobia is playing in the dark — just lost in it. The novel, however, is no more unpleasant an experience than, say, having a police baton swung at your body, or having a steel-tipped boot kick you a few hundred times after you’ve been dragged out of your tractor-trailer. With its feet firmly planted in the satiric tradition of Voltaire Ishmael Reed, John Kennedy Toole, and Okot p’Bitek, James’s book is both timely and necessary.” — Christian Haye, The Village Voice

“Darius James is one of the funniest writers in America, and one of the most serious. His subject is the big one: slavery; his questions are the big ones: who is slave to what?” — George Trow

“I wanted to set up a situation where a reader had to confront his own racist thinking. And I wanted to talk about this in the book: that this culture – that popular culture – is predicted on the fact that it finds black people funny.” — Darius James

” …these cartoons in and of themselves aren’t intended to perpetuate racism. Rather, they were designed to subvert it(…) One of the ideas for me was that the reader himself, who might have a racist thought after reading Negrophobia, would become ill and throw up. But magically, I would like the reader to step back and look at the absurdity of these images and laugh: laugh at the images, laugh at their own racism and not feel cowed by it. And also, black people should laugh at these images and realize that these images are not reflection of black people but rather a reflection of some diseased mind, which is a real distinction. Because some people – and not a lot of them – became critical of the book because they confuse what I’m writing about with actual lives of black people. My book has nothing to do with the real live of black people. It has to do with mapping out the terrain of a racist psychology and making fun of that.” — Darius James

 

__________
I Hate Being Lion Fodder
A Conversation Between Darius James and Kara Walker

 

Darius James: The first thing that struck me in your work was that your use of paper cutout and silhouette has the feel of folk art, grounding the work in black storytelling traditions. I like how the frozen moments of the images narrate an entire tale, sung with the wit and cunning of the blues trickster. I say “sung,” because the stylistic execution is lyrical. Thus, your work simultaneously encompasses the visual, the narrative, and the musical.

I am also impressed by your satirical boldness. I don’t see much of that. And when it is attempted, it isn’t done well. It doesn’t go for the throat. It doesn’t smell blood. When “Negrophobia” was first published in hardback, the cover featured a white woman whose shadow was a thick-lipped, light bulb-headed coon. Some folks inside the publishing house were offended and threatened to sic the NAACP on me. Then, I kid you not, in some black bookstores, it was sold under counter in a plain brown wrapper. Now, the cover is hanging in the Smithsonian. Curiously, the people who seemed most offended by my work were middle to upper class blacks. Working class blacks, for the most part, see the humor and get the point. I tell you all this in order to ask how black people in the U.S. are reacting to your work.

Kara Walker: There have been letter-writing campaigns: once after being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, and once, at least so far, for the removal of one of my least offensive prints from a museum in Detroit. My work has also been lambasted in the International Review of African American Arts: 17 pages with no byline, mostly ribbing me for my hair, my white husband – nothing at all unique – too young, haven’t paid my dues, etc. It was quite embarrassing and strangely obtuse that two issues of a magazine supposedly devoted to unraveling the lure of stereotypical, racist imagery should rely so heavily on stereotypical racist imagery of the kind that blacks dole out among themselves. Harvard and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also put on a kind of niggerati circus in 1998 that I failed to attend – probably to my detriment, but I hate being lion fodder.

I read “Negrophobia” when I was still in grad school (I graduated in 1994) working out these notions. It was one of those good but rare occasions when I thought there might be one other person in the world that would get what I was doing. The only thing I didn’t like were the pictures in between. Sorry. We’re talking about a proud fine arts grad student here. I remember thinking, No, this is wrong. Those postcard coon images aren’t ugly because they’re ugly, they’re hateful because they’re cute, loveable, desirable. They feed on scatological, pedophiliac, incestuous, murderous longings and, like Jlo’s children’s line or ads for Babyphat, they do it in a nostalgic, seductive way.

Darius James: In your letter, you wrote that Henry Louis Gates Jr. ringmastered a niggerati circus at Harvard in 1998. What was that exactly? And why would you have been “lion fodder?”

Kara Walker: I was having a show there of a large suite of silhouette pieces. And Gates organized a weekend-long series of lectures and films around the slippery slope of race and representation. It included a panel with Betye Saar, who started a censorship/hatemail campaign against my work and against my positive reception by the art market/MacArthur Award folks, Howardina Pindell, and Michael Ray Charles (also much-hated for his pickaninny art). And from the reports of my disappointed friends, dissed because I wasn’t there, Mr. Charles couldn’t hold up his end of the argument – and he has an advertising background, for shame! Now, if I hadn’t been on a much-anticipated trip to the German Oma and Opa, they anticipating their first and only grandchild, I would have simply sat on the stage and nursed my Quadroon baby and said nothing. I mean, you know when it comes to our sordid racist past and our sordid racist relationship with Race, there is going to be some shouting. Much of it was cross-generational.

Yeah, I was also taken aback by an ad supposedly against child sexual exploitation, which really struck me as needlessly sexy, exploiting the notion of the Beautiful Black Child wearing her poor ragged shift. She is central to the image, totally exposed in all her shame-faced beauty. Her face is in profile and cast downward, toward her white Barbie doll, which she’s about to abandon. The unseen force of the image, the one we passersby are meant to identify with, is the faceless white man pulling her by the arm in the opposite direction. She’s nearly spread-eagled across the image and he’s shrouded in mystery, setting up the classic tension between illicit desire and access. The tagline, something like “she’s a child, not a sex object,” could just as easily read, “she’s a child, and a sex object.” It might also apply to the doll.

Darius James: When I began researching “Negrophobia”, along with turn-of-the-century coon images on postcards, pancake-mix boxes and tin toys, I also came across some Civil War-era editorial cartoons, some of which were as sexually explicit as your own, though without the graceful lines, of course. You seem to draw inspiration from these images, as well. I have one image in my collection of a Northern abolitionist on his knees with his tongue inserted into the rectum of a nappy-haired jungle Negress.

Race is not divorced from sexuality in the American imagination. Racism is rooted in the hypocrisy of puritanical sexuality. America’s first sex shows were plantation owners overseeing that their property bred right. Did you know Joel Chandler Harris would write his fiancée love letters in Uncle Remus dialect? It was how he showed his sexual side.

Kara Walker: Mostly I am influenced by literature, particularly bad romance novels and porno, because it’s a given that the reader should experience titillation. My experience also includes a heavy dose of shame, not just because maybe I should have been doing close readings of Black Feminist Theory, etc., instead of pursuing “The Master’s Revenge,” but also because so much of that base-level literature is so raw. So much irritating fucking truth about us and our reliance on the old master/slave dialectic to define and redefine our selves and our history. I really started working this way because I was so sick of that dialectic being the guarantor of my colored gal experience. Also, I began working this way because, conversely, so much of that paradigm became my experience, when I really wasn’t looking for it to do so.

Still, it feels a little bit strange to be here in cyberspace, spinning the all-too-familiar yarns on plantation imagery for a German audience that may be inclined to take that stuff at face value. I say this in a vain attempt to invite controversy. I like to think I know these Germans well. That advertisement for West cigarettes would never fly in the States – the one with the crazy disco Afro woman and the average white guy offering her his little ciggy. She’s all teeth and hot red Amazonian sex. The catch phrase is “Test it.”

Darius James: I’ve lived here for four years and, like yourself, I’m intimately involved with a German. I couldn’t say, however, “I know these Germans well.” But I also understand what you’re saying about taking your work at face value. I might walk into a record or comic book shop and the most ig’nint fool gangsta rap will be blasting out of the speakers. I’m not condemning gangsta rap, or rap in general, or sex and violence. I’m talking about some drunken and blunted fool spewing abusive and dysfunctional bullshit that’s not about anything at all, except being abusive and dysfunctional. And a lot of young Germans listen to this shit because it’s supposed to be hip, not really understanding what’s going on in the lyrics. If they knew, they would puke.

Going out for cigarettes this morning, I saw the specific West cigarette ad you were referring to in your letter. There are a few now. Around Christmas time, there was one featuring an Afro-haired woman in Santa’s helper suit complete with reindeer. This one you are concerned with I hadn’t seen until this morning. What I find interesting about the ad is this – the woman towers over the man offering her a cigarette, and she appears to be having a hearty laugh at the idea he is offering her such a small object. The image of the woman is clearly a projection of white male sexual fantasy, but white male sexual inadequacy is also implied by the image – desire and fear encompassed in a single image.

The image is not so much one of racism as it is one of exoticism. One of the things I find interesting about exoticism in the context of interracial sexual liaisons is that it is a kind of racism by mutual consent. Each party projects fantasies onto the other. If there is a solid basis to the attraction and a relationship is formed, the fantasy stage is transcended and one finds oneself dealing with the funky humanness of the other. Exotic differences are of no importance because one is dealing with the hard realities of another human being. Some people, of course, fetishize the idea of exoticism. I live in Europe. I have all manner of exotic masturbatory fantasies about women here, black, white, Middle Eastern, Asian, etc. Subverting gender/power sexual relations within a hetero context appeals to me.

Curiously, just like the stereotypes some like to believe about themselves attraction based on exoticism also occurs among exotics. For example, the fetishizing of black women as the Queen Mums of Africa within romantic black cultural nationalist thought. Or, like the East Indian and Bavarian German woman with whom I had an affair some years back, who complained about how she was being treated like an exotic by all the white boys she had been involved with. Yet, at the same time, as she had never been involved with a black man, she projected her particular fantasies onto me.

Kara Walker: I have a similar reading of the West ad, however, I was troubled by it just the same. One reason is because I’m a tall fancy-ass American black woman (“Are you a model?” or “Aren’t you that model in…?” have been asked of me more than I care to recall) who has always relished the idea that I could be an exoticized sexual predator. However, my internal reality is so altogether different, so 13-year old suburban sniperish. “She was always so quiet… I can’t believe she would do this.” I both relish and resent those crazy-sexy-cool attitudes that seamlessly conceal internal angst. In my premarital exploits I can safely say I had a few open wounds through which I let slip the unseemly, the ironic, and the paranoiac, which leads to another favorite stereotype, the crazy-ass nigra.

Personally, I found this situation Black Amazon meets sexually frustrated white agent, – face it, in the West ad he’s still doing all the offering, her laughter is passive, it’s a response – iconic for the immensity of the fabrications involved, and the impossibility of sustaining the illusion of race or gender roles.

You said: “If there is a solid basis to the attraction, and a relationship is formed, the fantasy stage is transcended and one finds oneself dealing with the funky humanness of the other. Exotic differences are of no importance because one is dealing with the hard realities of another human being.” But transcendence doesn’t always occur. I based many a notebook page on the idea of sustaining the tension that occurs when each party only partly reveals, does an elaborate striptease with their funky humanness. Seeking fetishized comfort in the fantasy version of one’s own body, in other words. Really, the ad for West cigarettes would be more to my liking if the funky chick had a revealing bulge in her pants.

 

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Book

Darius James Negrophobia: An Urban Parable
New York Review Books

‘Darius James’s scabrous, unapologetically raunchy, truly hilarious, and deeply scary Negrophobia is a wild-eyed reckoning with the mutating insanity of American racism. A screenplay for the mind, a performance on the page, a work of poetry, a mad mix of genres and styles, a novel in the tradition of William S. Burroughs and Ishmael Reed that is like no other novel, Negrophobia begins with the blonde bombshell Bubbles Brazil succumbing to a voodoo spell and entering the inner darkness of her own shiny being. Here crackheads parade in the guise of Muppets, Muslims beat conga drums, Negroes have numbers for names, and H. Rap Remus demands the total and instantaneous extermination of the white race through spontaneous combustion. By the end of it all, after going on a weird trip for the ages, Bubbles herself is strangely transformed.’ — NYRB

‘Negrophobia is written in the form of a screenplay, but no movie version of it exists so far. (There had been discussions about an animated movie version, and a live theatrical production has been long in the works.) The novel becomes a big screen on which Darius James projects reality and fiction, consciousness and sub-consciousness, dreams and fears of not just an American, but a whole western society where racism is in people’s conscience. The book is actually a journey inside this racism.

‘All the characters in this book are cartoon–like. James has created a pyramid of racist stereotypes with supernatural powers. Negrophobia describes the strange and hallucinating adventures of a white, drug-addled teenage girl called Bubbles Brazil, and she has all the typical racial stereotypes of African-American people in her head. She lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is a rich girl who hates going to school with “jigaboos” since they’ve turned the high school hallways into a mad spectacle of sex, drugs and violence.

‘Bubbles finds herself transported into a nightmare dreamscape, and she is taken there through the voodoo of a demonic Aunt Jemima called “the Maid”. This Voodoo spell throws Bubbles in a parallel world of grotesque visions of racism. She now experiences racism on her own, and suddenly every racial stereotype about black people comes to life.

‘Along the way she meets “a Negro cyborg”, Uncle H. Rap Remus (who rapes little children), Malcolm X, she gets beaten up by a group of Ninja-Queens in her schools bathroom, meets a bunch of cartoon savages with grass skirts, who dream of social welfare, crackhead homeboys fantasizing about Spike Lee, a zombie Elvis, and Walt Disney, who wants to take over America and establish a Gestapo state.’ — from the Negrophobia website

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Excerpts

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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi! Oh, ‘Edwin Mullhouse’. A great novel, one of my favorites. Millhauser is one of favorite American fiction writers. I think one of the most oppressive things about Moscow was that the Soviets deliberately made the public sidewalks very narrow so people couldn’t gather and I guess question their authority? The was years ago, and I’m guessing the sidewalks are widened now, although with Putin in place maybe not. I would imagine you could offload those musty Emo clothes on an escort site since guys there sell their clothes frequently, but you’d have to include photos of you, I guess, although, obviously, they could be fake pix, no seeming problem. Sorry about the delayed departure. Yikes about the possible porn thing, but obviously not your personal business. Well, unless you’re in the porn, I guess, haha. Stay inspired, and I hope you’ve gotten a release date now. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh good, they found a friend. The bigger festival never got back to us, so we’re in the German festival, which we’re perfectly happy about other than the sadness of our thwarted Halloween trip. Not sure when we’ll see the poster. The theater release is in late November, so there’s still some time. Dutch has a quite small vocabulary, and, unlike English for instance, they don’t add new words. People just swipe new words from other languages and slip them into their sentences. Ugh, about your needy friend. Maybe if you just keep giving the messages a ‘thumbs up’ they’ll get the message? Love about to head out to a store he just discovered that sells scale models and that is supposedly huge, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Well, thank you, satisfied customer Ben. Haha. ** Darby🧟, Hey! I’m definitely of the opinion that the best art leaves you tongue tied. My week has been kind of stressful, but it should start becoming more calm and dutiful now. Your face sounds great! I’m so in the mood. Yes, I did see the doll, and while I briefly mourned not having it in 3D, it’s pleasurable effect on the eyes and imagination more than made up for it. Thank you, my pal! Interesting, I often look at cashiers and feel a kind of envy. I think you laid out the reasons why. I don’t get all that many bugs, but I think that’s because the pigeons eat them? I really, really like that character you built and what you’re doing with it. Onwards, I say! Sure, I’d like to read it. I’m, as you know, very slow, but half a page shouldn’t take me long. Cool. Your weekend full of clown themed jeans making sounds like the perfect weekend if perfection can be said to exist. ** Måns BT, Hi, Måns! Great to see you! I’m happy you liked the show. I’ve been okay. Just film film film stuff as usual. It was hot, and now it’s not. That’s the best part. That class sounds ideal, yeah! Worth the stress hopefully. That’s really exciting. I wish I could teleport into your head for a moment. Why is it the last Bob hund concert. Wait, I’ll go find out. There must be a way. Have huge fun there. No, long story short, our producer got hellbent on us having a big ‘international premiere’ for the film which meant we couldn’t show it in Europe before that intended big event. So we’ve been stuck while waiting for said big event. But he finally gave up just yesterday, and now we’re free to set up screenings. So I’m going to finally write to the Stockholm people this weekend and see if they’d be down for a screening in December or January and ‘pray’ they’re still interested. This film festival rigamarole is so annoying. So hopefully that’ll finally get worked out really soon. Best of all the luck in the known world with the class and obviously with everything else! xoxoxoxoxoxo kerbang! ** Carsten, Wow, tomorrow. I hope all the stuff falls into place in its respective boxes or backpacks or whatever in time. I like Denis’s early and kind of mid-period work. I thought the last few films by her were really disappointing. Festival dilemma is solved, thanks! ** Steve, Hi. The festival didn’t get back to us, but that just solved the problem, so we’re good. Congrats to your friend. I hope to get to see the film at some point. I knew James Robert Baker a little but not very well. I saw him at events and things. We had a meal together once. Interesting guy but very dark and very embittered about what he perceived as his lack of success. ** HaRpEr //, I relate to your process and thinking about it, no surprise. You’re moving tomorrow too. So’s Carsten. Ugh, but it’ll be in your dust soon, keep remembering. Spacemen 3’s ‘Rollercoaster’, so great. I used to go on jags where I looped it and ‘OD Catastrophe’ a lot. Stay strong and future-riveted. ** Dev, Hi. Yeah, I think they might be the kind of artists who shot their wad pretty early and then kind of just fiddled around with their formula afterwards. China, of course, right. No, I mean the French drink tea but not in large quantities that I can tell. Odd, no? Strangely enough, I don’t seem to have ever done a full-on Peter Sotos post. Huh. I’ll put together at a least a spotlight post on one of his books. Great idea, thanks! ** Nicholas., See, I don’t like to cook. I have no patience or skill thereby, and sometimes I get tired of microwaved vegan junk, and getting actual real food and eating in the company of friends seems like a perfectly lovely thing to do. Have I ever actually read Alan Moore? I don’t think I have. Odd. That area he works in is an uncharted one for me for the most part. I don’t eat meat but your meal sounds colorful and theoretically sound nonetheless. I don’t know SSION or that song, but I will rather shortly. Thanks for clueing me in. I expect to learn a lot about you. Happy gays are great, but happy gay art is rarely so. In my experience. ** Right. Today I’m reviving the spotlight that fell here years ago on a really fantastic novel that I highly recommend you read if you haven’t. See you tomorrow.

 

‘First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Arzamasova, Evzovich, and Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture.

‘AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations of striking originality that have come to define both the AES+F aesthetic and the cutting edge of the medium’s capacities. The second of the series, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009), appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra (2011), debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. United as The Liminal Space Trilogy, this tour-de-force series was premiered in September 2012 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Manege, the central exhibition hall of the artists’ home city, and has since been shown on many occasions at various museums and festivals. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Inverso Mundus was later shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals all over the world.

‘Between 2016 and 2019, AES+F have also worked in set design for theater and opera. The artists created their first video set design for Psychosis, a reinterpretation of Sarah Kane’s famous play, 4:48 Psychosis, directed together with Alexander Zeldovich. Psychosis premiered at Electrotheater Stanislavsky in Moscow in June 2016. In 2019, the group premiered their first opera together with the Italian opera director Fabio Cherstich, a reimagined Turandot acclaimed by critics as audacious and visionary. Turandot was created as an international co-production at the initiative of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, together with Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and Lakhta Center in St. Petersburg.

‘For over two decades, works by AES+F have been showcased in signature festivals and biennial exhibitions of contemporary art around the world, including — in addition to Moscow and Venice — those of Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and many others. Their work has also been featured in influential events devoted to new media — such as ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv) — and photography — such as FotoFest (Houston), Les Rencontres d’Arles and Moscow’s Photo Biennial.’

 

Further

AES+F Site
AES+F @ Instagram
Book: ‘AES+F’
AES+F: Social Psychoanalysis
AES+F: Surreal Visions
AES+F, Inverso Mundus
Turning the World Upside Down
In the Studio: AES+F

 

Exhibitions

Выставка AES+F в Манеже (2019)

The Liminal Space Trilogy at Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires

Eha Komissarov: AES+F. Viimane ülestõus

 

Interview

NM: In your interviews you comment that contemporaneity and capturing it in digital format is of an enduring interest to you and is important your practice. What are the main characteristics of the contemporaneity in 2022 that you will focus on in the next projects?

AES+F: We are planning a major new project in 2022 that will interpret contemporaneity through the Odyssey, one of the most famous and important literary works of Western civilization. Our main concept was to research a literal coincidence of the basic myth with urgent contemporary issues, such as ecological, social, political, etc. We conceptualized the project before the pandemic, but as it turns out it deals with many themes that define our post-pandemic reality.

NM: As for pioneers in digital art it is probably interesting for you to see the ongoing explosion in this field. How do you feel about it and where do you see it going? Do you feel yourself challenged to reinvent yourself once more?

AES+F: We are of course very interested and follow the developments of the field. You could say we are even a bit neurotic about constantly reinventing ourselves, but it is important to us that technology follows concepts, not vice versa. We feel that the explosion of the digital is not accompanied by an equally explosive reinterpretation of reality at the moment.

NM: Nature of your work and its medium makes your digital artworks global. What role does a local and historical context play for you? Did the fact that you met and started working shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union influence your early works? Do the historical shifts find their ways into your digital pannos through allegories, metaphors, archetypes, or human faces and figures you select?

AES+F: The fact that we started working after the collapse of the Soviet Union is determinant of our worldview. Everything that seems unchangeable in fact changes very quickly, and observing the changes in society and culture produces the main content of our work. In terms of the local and global, Russia doesn’t fall out of the global processes, but is in fact a place where some of the global conflicts and changes are felt much more sharply. In regard to your last question about historical shifts finding their way into our work through allegories and archetypes, the answer is of course they do.

NM: Your works are full of people of idealized proportions with glowing faces, pictures of health and tranquility. In a way these attributes provide the people you portray a connection to XIX century European classicism. Do you specifically choose these types of glamorous, idealized Renaissance-like archetypes? And why?

AES+F: We work with people who exemplify social and cultural archetypes or cliches – a “poor old man,” a “wealthy young woman,” a “corporate board member,” etc. This is the “raw material” of our work. What you describe about people with idealized proportions relates not to the external features of the models, who are very diverse, but to their internal state, their calm expressions and alienation from one another. The feeling of metaphysical isolation from reality is what positions these in relation to classical European painting.

NM: Violence looks monotonous and routine in your works. Is this an ironic way to see how low human beings could stoop? How desensitized we are to the pain of others or there is a more positive message to this?

AES+F: It’s not about how low humanity can stoop, it’s more about reflecting the glamourization of violence in the media, which is also its routinization. We deconstruct the way the media portrays violence in its attempt to make it beautiful and entertaining, although repetitive, and in that sense it is not about human nature but the nature of media. Now, whether the media portrays human nature or not, we couldn’t say.

NM: Finally, I wanted to touch on Witnesses of the Future. Islamic Project from 1996-2003, when you sent out postcards across the world as your way of responding to globalization and illustrating how open borders could create new striking realities. If you were to revisit this project today, in our post-pandemic reality how would you have changed it? Not necessarily in terms of the Islamic imagery, but in terms of your view of the interconnected world and its visual cliches.

AES+F: We would say that Allegoria Sacra, Inverso Mundus, and Turandot 2070 in a lot of ways illustrate the post-pandemic reality, sometimes literally. A great example in Allegoria Sacra (2011) is the setting of the suspended airport where all flights are grounded. Another example is the micro-world made disproportionately large in Inverso Mundus (2015), rendered as giant pulsating microorganisms descending from the sky. In Turandot 2070 (2020) the masses worship Turandot’s virtual avatars, in a surprising way coming ahead of the hysteria over NFTs and the global acceleration of the adoption of virtuality.

 

Works

The King of the Forest (2001)

‘The King of the Forest consists of large-scale photographic and Betacam video works, seeking to deconstruct the influence of culture and mass media’s exploitation of children as commodities available to a consumerist gaze, using childhood as a medium to examine cross-cultural fallacies. Set in three architecturally notable locations and featuring white-clad children aged 3 to 11, the works in this cycle address the status of childhood within a global, media-saturated environment, typified by the use of nubile, underage youth in fashion campaigns and propaganda. To the same degree that contemporary media find these children captivating, they are also captives of respective forms of power, ideology, or exploitation, and are often victims of an overtly pedophilic visuality. The work borrows its title from the eponymous Michel Tournier novel that reinterprets the Erlkönig myth in terms of a figure who recruits children to Nazism. It is set in the huge ballroom of Catherine’s Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg. In a series of 15 photographs and one video, children from the nearby ballet and sports schools are depicted detained within this gilded, mirrored hall, whose structure evokes an overwhelming opulence, order, and grandeur.’

 

The Last Riot (2005)

‘The Last Riot project began in 2005 as a thematic successor to Action Half-Life, with digital collages depicting a bloodless battle royale among young adults, adolescents, and children set in a hellish virtual landscape spanning from a desert beach to a snow-capped volcano, populated by scattered structures and machinery from disparate time periods. The project first consisted of just two panoramic pigment prints that were shown at Invasion, a special project of the First Moscow Biennale in 2005, and at ARS 06. Sense of the Real at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki in 2006. Then they were completely reworked and became part of a single ultra-wide digital collage consisting of four individual panoramas, exhibited at the 10th Istanbul Biennial in 2007. From 2005 to 2007, a total of 26 prints of different sizes and formats were created under the title Last Riot 2, analogous to the reversed sequential logic of Action Half-Life and George Lucas’s Star Wars, which served as the original inspiration for the former. The prints of Last Riot 2 were followed by a video installation, Last Riot, which premiered at the Russian Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale, completing the first part of The Liminal Space Trilogy, and subsequently appearing in the group’s 2007 retrospective in St. Petersburg and the survey exhibition of the Trilogy at Moscow’s Central Exhibition Hall “Manege” and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2012.’

 

Trailer

 

The Feast of Trimalchio (2009)

‘As the second part of The Liminal Space Trilogy, The Feast of Trimalchio is an ironic allegory of Heaven, taking its title from an eponymous fragment of Gaius Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon. Situated at an impossibly luxurious island resort that miraculously combines a tropical coastline with a ski slope, the work explores geopolitical, cultural, racial, and gender issues, weaving them into a single complex narrative that surveys the contemporary relationships between two key global socioeconomic classes: masters and servants. The masters are represented as the white-clad guests of the resort, their demographics reflecting more or less the distribution of global wealth. The servants are predominantly young and attractive representatives of the global South working in the vast hospitality industry, dressed in traditional uniforms with an ethnic twist. As the leisure time of the masters drags on, strict social roles slowly melt into ambiguity until they are fully reversed in the tradition of the Roman saturnalia. While many cataclysmic events take place in this Paradise, from a tsunami to an invasion by aliens, everything always reverts to an endless ritual of leisure and pleasure, in which the servants and the served alternate in perpetuity.

‘The Feast of Trimalchio was originally composed of a video installation in 9-channel, 3-channel, and single-channel versions, as well as a series of Allegories as large digital collages and 9 Panoramas that fit together into a single ultra-wide digital collage. Later the project also came to include a series of oil paintings, printed stills from the video, and portfolios of photographic source material. Visually referencing Mannerism, ancient Roman frescoes, and tourism advertisements, the video is accompanied by a classical soundtrack featuring Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, with contemporary interludes commissioned from Pavel Karmanov.’

 

Trailer

 

Allegoria Sacra (2011)

‘Allegoria Sacra is the third and final part of The Liminal Space Trilogy, taking its inspiration from Giovanni Bellini’s eponymous painting hanging in the Uffizi of Florence, which, according to a nineteenth-century interpretation, depicts Purgatory. Much as in The Feast of Trimalchio, the setting of the archetype is transposed to a contemporary analog, in this case an architecturally futuristic international airport — a nonplace par excellence — populated by diverse passengers awaiting flights to their destinations. The setting evolves from snow dunes to desert and to jungle as it plays temporary host to refugees fleeing ethnic conflict in the Middle East, a group of transit passengers in traditional garb from Darfur or Peshawar, the cannibals of Papua New Guinea, a delegation of Chinese executives, Western same-sex multiracial family units, a missionary priest, and a neo-Nazi, among others. They are joined by those who represent more overt references to mythical personas in Bellini’s painting, such as Job as an elderly man in a high-tech life-support bed, St. Sebastian as a young nomad returning from the exotic South, St. Paul as a member of the tactical police yet brandishing a sword, a centaur, and the stewardesses from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as stand-ins for angels and the Madonna. Threading together complex sociopolitical issues — from identity and Otherness to shifting economic hegemonies and regional conflicts, from transhumanism to climate change—Allegoria Sacra is a meditation on the wholesale transformation of post-colonial civilization instigated by Western globalist fantasies.

‘The entire work is composed of a video installation in 5-channel, 3-channel, and single-channel versions, a series of 14 digital collages as grand tableaux, oil paintings, and series of printed stills from the video, with a number of other components projected yet unrealized. Aesthetically as close to early Renaissance art as to the TV series Lost, the video component of Allegoria Sacra is accompanied by a classical soundtrack composed almost entirely of excerpts from eighteenth-century funeral marches: Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater, Händel’s The Ways of Zion Do Mourn, Chopin’s Marche funèbre: Lento, Schubert’s Der Leiermann as arranged by Liszt, and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, with the only contemporary exception being samples of Ryoji Ikeda’s Opus 1.’

 

Trailer

 

Inverso Mundus (2015)

‘Inverso Mundus takes as its initial reference point the sixteenth-century carnivalesque engravings in the genre of “world upside down,” an early form of populist social critique that emerged with the advent of the Gutenberg press. The project’s title intermingles ancient Italian and Latin, based on a century-old layering of meaning, combining inverso, the Italian “reverse” and old Italian “poetry,” with Latin mundus, meaning “world.” Inverso Mundus reinterprets contemporary life through the tradition of engraving, depicting a contemporary world consumed by a tragicomic apocalypse whereby social conventions are inverted to highlight the underlying premises that we always take for granted. Metrosexual garbage collectors douse the streets in sewage and refuse. An international board of directors is usurped by their impoverished doppelgangers. The poor give alms to the rich. Chimeras descend from the sky to be caressed like domestic pets. A pig guts a butcher. Women clad in cocktail dresses sensually torture men in cages and on devices styled after IKEA furniture in an ironic reversal of the Inquisition. Preteens and octogenarians fight a kickboxing match. Riot police embrace protesters in an orgy on a massive luxurious bed. Men and women carry donkeys on their backs, and virus-like Radiolaria from Haeckel’s illustrations loom over and settle on oblivious people occupied with taking selfies.

‘The soundtrack of the video is an amalgamation of Léon Boëllmann’s 1895 Suite Gothique, an original piece by contemporary composer and media-artist Dmitry Morozov (aka VTOL), along with excerpts from Ravel, Liszt, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, with a particular emphasis on “Casta Diva” from Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma.’

 

Trailer

Excerpt

 

Turandot 2070 (2020)

‘Turandot is an early “globalized” fable, in which, however, ethnicities and nationalities have relatively little bearing on the presentation of a fantastic, abstractly far-away world. Originally depicted as a Slavic princess by twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in his Haft Peykar (1197), Turandot became Chinese in a later manifestation of the story in 18th Century by the Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi. When in 2019 the Teatro Massimo in Palermo staged a new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot*, the libretto for which was closely based on Gozzi’s Orientalist play, they commissioned AES+F to do the art direction for the performance. The result was an opera that kept the Chinese setting but boldly shed its Orientalist past, transporting the viewer into a dystopian high-tech future where Beijing is the capital of a global totalitarian empire ruled by a techno-feminist matriarchy with princess Turandot at the helm. Directed by Fabio Cherstich, Turandot was subsequently performed in Bologna’s Teatro Comunale and at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe. The set design that the artists created then became the basis for Turandot 2070, the video installations and prints that followed, with a contemporary soundtrack composed by Vladimir Rannev which distantly echoes Puccini.

‘The work highlights a myriad of today’s most pressing issues by exploring a possible future dominated by a grotesque totalitarian social system, whose rise is attributed directly to contemporary events, and which in itself constitutes an analysis of Western society’s fear for the rapid advance and expanding influence of China. The final scene in the video, titled “Paradise,” depicts a utopian and equally hyperbolized transformation of this futuristic society where everyone, stripped to nothing but pastel-colored underwear, cannot but engage in acts of tenderness toward one another with no regard for physical differences.’

 

Trailer

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Thanks for the hook up. Everyone, jay found Unica Zurn’s great novel ‘Dark Spring’ on Internet Archive, so you can read it  gratis if you want. Here. ‘Diary of […], aged 12’ doesn’t ring a bell. Unless you mean ‘Taylor Mead on Amphetamine and in Europe: Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth’, which I doubt you do. I’ll think further though. A practical visit, gotcha. Soviet Tower Blocks, okay. The only place I’ve been where that was the layout was Moscow, and I found it highly interesting but really oppressive. Oh, I don’t know, super musty emo clothes might add value? I spend too much time on perv sites, clearly. Good luck getting everything sorted by tomorrow. See you on that side or on the other side, whichever comes first. ** _Black_Acrylic, I would love to read your Zurn writings, so I hope the YnY site comes back, well, for lots of reasons obviously. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Great, yeah, she’s amazing. The big festival said we’d be informed after 5:30 pm today, but, if they don’t, we’ll just say yes to the German festival, which would be nothing but a relief at this point. News tomorrow. Our French distributors want to push our film as a weird comedy, which it is in many respects, but a ‘Beetlejuice’-like poster is going way, way too far in theory. We’ll see. No, I ate a too hard caramel chip cookie from the mini-mart near me, but I suppose it warded off love’s cravings for a short time at least. German seems like it must be so hard. Which seems strange because Dutch, which is somewhat close to it relatively speaking, is fairly easy. Love telling the first mouse to have appeared in his apartment in well over a year to kindly set down stakes elsewhere ASAP for its own sake, G. ** Tyler Ookami, Oh, wow, you know that ‘Lonesome Cowboys’ locale. Now I really want to go. Spahn Ranch, where the Manson crew famously squatted, was kind of the same re: LA when I was a kid. I think it finally burned down. Anyway that’s so cool about the ‘LC’ site. I feel a bit starstruck. Yes, very much what you said about 60s/early 70s experimental film. Apart from remote experimental film venues in a handful of big cities, that work is now pretty much relegated to galleries and museums. But the problem, and it’s kind of a big problem, is that galleries and museums are geared towards people on the move, to quickly absorbing a work of art and moving on, so experimental films are generally just briefly noted in those contexts as opposed to taking the time and concentration they ask for, which theaters provide(d). It’s a conundrum. ** Carsten, Hey. I sort of like when low budget art films employ CGI as best they can, but I’m very fond of failed, bridge-too-far ambitions in work, as you probably know. The Denis film will probably get around and get shown, given her currently good rep, luckily for presumably us. ** Dev, Her work is really special. That tea garden sounds really lovely indeed, wow. I didn’t know such places existed. Tea isn’t a huge thing here in France, so I’m probably out of luck. ** Bill, Cool. Yeah, she’s incredible, right? And her writing is equally fantastic, especially ‘Dark Spring’. I don’t remember the music in ‘The Roe’s Room’, which I guess says something. Interesting film in and of itself, though. ** Mari, Hello to you! Are the classes starting well? Seems so? Actual dolls. Her bf of the time, the artist Hans Bellmer, is best known for the very strange dolls he made, If you search his name, you’ll see. When you interview someone at, say, a restaurant or bar or cafe, the magazine or whoever commissioned the interview foots the bill, yes. Yes, in almost all cases you finish the interview, say goodbye, and that’s it. It’s very rare for anything to come of it. You mention Christian Bale: that’s a rare case where he and I subsequently became friends. There were two interviewers for him because the other interviewer, a friend, knew CB’s work better than I did at that point, so that helped. Thank you so kindly. Hopefully I’ll write another book one of these days. Gosh, I wouldn’t know what to suggest as per starting to read my work. Maybe the GM Cycle. Not ‘The Sluts’, although that seems to be what 90% of people read first. Two hour round trip is a lot. Do you drive or use public transport? Yes, it’s raining here and even kind of chilly. It feels sort of almost like god outside. I hope you got some sleep. ** HaRpEr //, Hey, hey. Exciting: your novel thoughts. As much as I hate having to describe something I’m writing, it can weirdly help a lot when you have to reduce something complex into a palatable sentence or four. Strange. ‘Dark Spring’ is great. It’s on Internet Archive, as jay pointed out, but that’s the opposite of physical. ‘Progress of Stories’ is very worth reading, of course. I don’t know about that ‘Didion/Babitz’ book. How very curious. I’ll look into it. ** Nicholas., I can imagine you getting tired once in a while. Gosh, thank you. Oh, uh, the spark just stayed alive, I don’t know why. Why wouldn’t it, I guess? I’m fundamentally no different now than when I was young and wanted to know everything and knew very little. If I come across any happy gay books, I’ll pass them on. Kind of a tall order though, haha. Wait, I just recommended ‘I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear’ to someone here the other day. It’s happy and very pleasurable. Dinner tonight? Not sure yet. I’d like to eat out in a restaurant because I rarely do, so maybe I’ll do that, and maybe it’ll be Ethiopian. You? ** Corey, I remember liking that John Huston film too. It’s been ages. Festivals sure should, but they sure almost never do. ** Okay. I’m not even sure what I think about the work of the oddball Russian artist collective AES+F, but I decided to give them a show in my galerie and see what happened. See you tomorrow.