* (restored)
‘Sadie Benning’s career in video began under less than ideal circumstances, in fact, quite traumatic ones. On New Year’s Eve 1988, her friend was hit by a car and there was a shooting in her neighborhood. Benning began to spend a lot of time alone in her bedroom, but wanted to talk to someone. So, she spoke to her toy Pixel Vision video camera, a gift from her father, the experimental filmmaker James Benning. As she recalls, Benning liked that the camera “wouldn’t talk back to me or judge me.”
‘Through her filmmaking in the safety of her bedroom, Benning would narrate her thoughts and reflect on the challenges of growing up, particularly as they relate to gender and sexual identity. She realized her identity as a lesbian. Now considered gender fluid, Benning has expanded her practice to include a range of media, such as sound, painting, drawing, photography, and found objects.
‘Born 1973 in Madison, Wisconsin, Benning was raised by her mother in Milwaukee and now lives and works in New York City. She has had a successful career since 1993, when she became the youngest artist ever featured in the Whitney Biennial at age nineteen. Since then she has had solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2004), Walker Art Center (2005), Dia Foundation for the Arts (2007), Whitney Museum of American Art (2009), and Renaissance Society (2016). At age forty, she entered the MFA program at Bard College, where she has been a faculty member, and graduated in 2015.
‘In Benning’s pixel-vision works of the 1990s, we observe extreme close-ups of Benning’s face as she speaks to her “camera diary.” The immediacy of her presence underscores a range of urgent themes she explores through voiced ruminations placed within montages of photographs, home movies, tv and film clips, and text written on paper. In A Place Called Lovely (1991), Benning references various forms of violence, both physical and emotional. Through the story of a love affair with a “bad girl,” she examines gendered stereotypes popularized by Hollywood in It Wasn’t Love (1992). As Benning has stated, “the images she saw on television and in movies are “totally fake…I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do it for me.”
‘Benning also has created experimental, live-action cartoons for Flat is Beautiful (1998), a narrative about the loneliness of an androgynous eleven-year-old girl. She used puppetry to illustrate the story of a teenage girl named Judy who “seems to experience the world from the outside, letting things happen to her” in Judy Spots (1995). And in 1998, Benning co-founded Le Tigre, a feminist post-punk bad with singer/guitarist Kathleen Hanna (formerly of Bikini Kill) and zinester Johanna Fateman.
‘Recent works have contemplated how God is imagined. In particular, Benning has wrestled with the meaning of the biblical passage Genesis 1:27, which states, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” In a 2016 exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery, Benning gave form to several types of gods—toys, idols, animals, and sports heroes—in works that incorporate found objects and photographs into the compositions. She also has meditated on the way in which we internalize structures of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and xenophobia in an installation mounted at Kunsthalle Basel in 2017. There she created a sculptural wall work of mixed-media panels that juxtaposed various images from digital snapshots, found photographs, and painted elements.
‘Girl Power (1992) shows Benning’s aim to reach a wider audience with her video works. Informed by the “riot grrl” movement of the 1990s, an aggressive underground movement led by young women who espoused female empowerment through art, music, zines, and activism. Girl Power is a collage of sound and black-and-white imagery. The work refuses to visualize female passivity and politeness in favor of a range of views of radicality and rebellion in an amalgam of footage from TV, film, commercials, security cameras, and home movies as well as disturbing scenes of racial violence and homophobic speeches.
‘The soundtrack is a range of musical styles and includes excerpts of songs by Sugar Hill Gang, Blondie, Grace Jones, and Nina Simone; however, the main soundtrack is supplied by the band Bikini Kill, largely seen as founders of the “riot grrl” movement. Their music accompanies several voice-overs by Benning and reinforces a sense of insistence in her narrative. Benning recounts how she could not escape the real world, so she created her own world in her mind, which she details. Evident throughout this video and indeed Benning’s career is a powerful sense of her resilience and self-determination. Benning’s art in many ways reflects her approach to life stated near the end of Girl Power: “I survived because I created my own heroes.”’ — Kanitra Fletcher
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Stills
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Further
Sadie Benning @ Video Data Bank
Sadie Benning @ VIELMETTER LOS ANGELES
Sadie Benning: War Credits
Sadie Benning @ New Media Art
SB @ IMBd
Sadie Benning @ Frieze
Audio: Sadie Benning in Conversation with Lynne Cooke
Sadie Benning’s Top Ten @ Artforum
Sadie Benning @ senses of cinema
Sadie Benning by Linda Yablonsky
Transgender Artist Sadie Benning Is Not Afraid
Sadie Benning: Play Pause
Sadie Benning @ MUBI
Psychic Portraits by Sadie Benning
Sadie Benning : mon esprit, mon œil!
Sadie Benning or the Secret Annex
Dumb Material and Animate Belief: Sadie Benning Plays (with) God
Audio: Sadie Benning and Kim McCarty
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Extras
Sadie Benning Artist Talk
A biographical video on Sadie Benning using her style and medium.
Sadie Benning on Sleep Rock, Camden Arts Centre, 2018
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Interview
Would you call your first works video diaries? They were, in a way, forerunners to YouTube videos.
I was young and aware of the diary as a format, but I was more conscious that the videos were experimental and performance based–my concern with the word diary is that it highlights the confessional and is less about the imaginative and abstract qualities that I associate with those videos.
Your early videos were a way for you to construct your identity. What was the environment you grew up in?
I grew up in Milwaukee with my mom in a working class and racially mixed neighborhood in the 1980’s. [Benning’s parents were divorced.] The neighborhood had problems with unemployment, drugs, gangs and police profiling, and yet it was also the place I grew up in, a place where you had friends and family. So I saw it not in terms of only the bad but in terms of its beauty, too. I remember kids in my neighborhood not being sure how to read my gender identity so they would tease me by calling me Michael Jackson, which was strange at the time, but also I loved Michael Jackson so I was cool with it, too.
In those pre-Internet days, you had to mail or hand-deliver your videos. Is there anything you miss about that mode of delivery?
All my videos were distributed through the mail and most of them still are, by the Video Data Bank at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was very analogue. In a way, I got to understand what audience means to me by having to be there physically at screenings. This is a very different mode of distribution than the internet, or say YouTube. But I still am so informed by this way of thinking that I don’t miss it yet. I can’t miss it because I’m still doing it.
In the 1990s, you joined forces with Bikini Kill’s Katheen Hanna to form Le Tigre.What was appealing to you about being part of a band?
I’m from a family where making music is part of one’s everyday experience, so it was natural to me to be in a band with friends. I think music is a place where you can challenge social conventions because rhythm is so personal. It makes you feel things. I think that musical influences and the experience of creating music is in everything I do. It’s like a heartbeat.
You’ve said that since you didn’t train as a painter, you feel more freedom about what you can and can’t put in a painting. How so?
I just feel less inhibited as to what is acceptable. The history of painting is heavy with arguments, and as much as I am interested in knowing about them conceptually, I don’t want to feel oppressed in the studio. I want to be free to try things that don’t make sense yet. I put materials together that maybe shouldn’t be and don’t follow hierarchies. I don’t privilege the painting over the drawing—the drawing is the painting and because I’m less versed on the history of painting, I’m less concerned with if it even is a painting.
What are you exploring in your new show, “Green God”? Green naturally has lots of associations as does that other word in your title.
I was interested in thinking associatively about inherited belief systems and contradictions, especially in relation to capitalism and religion. I was interested in what the contradictions are in the signifiers for the color green—green being the color of money in the U.S., the color of envy or jealousy, and also a symbol for nature while being used by a corporation like British Petroleum to convey a sense of being environmentally sound. And I also wanted to think about more diverse representations of what a god can be and look like. The wall of seven associative images at Mary Boone Gallery is a good example of this: Turquoise God, Worm God, Green God, Purple Hat God, Grey God. Spattered connectively throughout this train of images are two paintings “Coin” and “Mayflower Now,” which point to the pilgrims. These were religious separatists who fled England to find freedom, but then they also took freedom and land from the Native Americans who were already living here. I don’t know what to do with the reality of this history as a United States citizen except to see how wrong it is and bring voice to that because it remains politically relevant to me.
How do the two parts of the show—at Mary Boone and Calicoon Fine Arts—connect? Or do they?
The show came about through conversations between myself, [curator] Piper Marshall, Mary Boone and Photi Giovannis. I dealt with the Mary Boone uptown space differently because it has a different aura; her space is particular to her. Mary is a mythic figure—she has a long history and has her own notoriety as a figure so I was well aware of this when imagining showing with her. And I was aware that her space would imbue some of these historic narratives and myths as well. So I wanted to work with the found objects and photographs within that context because they too have had their own lives and aura, a kind of known and unknown presence. At Callicoon Fine Arts on the Lower East Side, I wanted to deal less with the associative links inside each painting and more with the associations between the works themselves.
Tell me about the works combining photography and painting.
I wanted to deal with my own unease about the separateness of medium specificity. The invention of photography was something that was literally a threat to painting as a medium, and it feels unnerving to me somehow to insert one into the other—like a bad idea, or like sitting the wrong people next to one another at dinner. But I like challenging myself to solve a problem and to deal with the uncomfortable.
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Sadie Benning’s Videos
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Living Inside (1989)
‘When she was 16, Benning stopped going to high school for three weeks and stayed inside with her camera, her TV set, and a pile of dirty laundry. This tape mirrors her psyche during this time. With the image breaking up between edits, the rough quality of this early tape captures Benning’s sense of isolation and sadness, her retreat from the world. As such, Living Inside is the confession of a chronic outsider.’ –– Quentin Roosevelt
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A New Year (1989)
‘In a version of the “teenage diary,” Benning places her feelings of confusion and depression alongside grisly tales from tabloid headlines and brutal events in her neighborhood. The difficulty of finding a positive identity for oneself in a world filled with violence is starkly revealed by Benning’s youthful but already despairing voice.’ — vdb
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If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990)
‘Setting her pixelvision camera on herself and her room, Benning searches for a sense of identity and respect as a woman and a lesbian. Acting alternately as confessor and accuser, the camera captures Benning’s anger and frustration at feeling trapped by social prejudices.’ — vdb
the entirety
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Me and Rubyfruit (1990)
‘Based on a novel by Rita Mae Brown, Me and Rubyfruit chronicles the enchantment of teenage lesbian love against a backdrop of pornographic images and phone sex ads. Benning portrays the innocence of female romance and the taboo prospect of female marriage.’ — vdb
the entirety
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Jollies (1990)
‘Jollies relates one-by-one the episodes in Sadie Benning’s love life that led her to suspect and then realise that she was homosexual. The film begins with a picture of two Barbie dolls, side by side, intersected by a large close-up of an open mouth with teeth clamped in a brace. This is a child’s mouth, that of the producer who begins to tell the story of her first sexual experience at the age of 12 with a 16-year old boy; she touched his private parts to win a bet. Photographs of twin girls and shots of Sadie Benning, turned at an angle of 90 degrees, alternate with fragments of texts written on sheets of paper and filmed at very close range. When the story of Sadie Benning touching the boy’s private parts is being related, we see a shot of her hands holding a baseball bat with a threatening gesture. The second experience at the age of 15 was to fall in love with a girl. The difficulty of this situation is evidenced by pictures of Sadie covering her face with shaving cream, then pretending to have a shave, as if she had to change into a man in order to be able to love girls. The voice off the screen, however, is lucid, “I’m not a man”. As the story unfolds and the older Sadie becomes, the more she becomes aware of the social and political stakes linked to sexuality and the symbol of this awareness is the sequence where the text is written on bank notes. The story ends with an observation pitched somewhere between bitterness and irony, “I found I was as queer as can be”.’ — LLH
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A Place Called Lovely (1991)
‘“Nicky is seven. His parents are older and meaner.” A Place Called Lovely references the types of violence individuals find in life, from actual beatings, accidents and murders, to the more insidious violence of lies, social expectations, and betrayed faith. Benning collects images of this socially-pervasive violence from a variety of sources, tracing events from childhood: movies, tabloids, children’s games (like mumbledy-peg), personal experiences, and those of others. Throughout, Benning uses small toys as props and examples—handling and controlling them the way we are, in turn, controlled by larger violent forces.’ — vdb
the entirety
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It Wasn’t Love (1992)
‘This is a fractured tale of a love affair that is both heartfelt and tongue in cheek funny. Sadie Benning herself poses as various types of stereotypical masculinity and femininity: the rebel, the vamp, the biker, the bimbo. She also reveals the frustration of her position as a teenage lesbian growing up in Middle America.’ — MELLART
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Girl Power (1992)
‘Girl Power shows Benning’s aim to reach a wider audience with her video works. Informed by the “riot grrl” movement of the 1990s, an aggressive underground movement led by young women who espoused female empowerment through art, music, zines, and activism. Girl Power is a collage of sound and black-and-white imagery. The work refuses to visualize female passivity and politeness in favor of a range of views of radicality and rebellion in an amalgam of footage from TV, film, commercials, security cameras, and home movies as well as disturbing scenes of racial violence and homophobic speeches.’ — Landmarks
the entirety
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COME “German Song” (1995)
‘Shot in black and white Super 8, this lyrical short follows a wandering, disengaged youth through grey afternoons. German Song features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston.’ — vdb
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The Judy Spots (1995)
‘Comprised of five short vignettes about Judy, a troubled teenager made of paper-maché, “The Judy Spots”, were originally brief video ‘spots’ shown on MTV in 1998. When Judy (voiced by Benning) gets depressed she cries, and the sky rains tears, sharing her brief outburst. Judy’s alienation is further experienced at her drive-thru fast food job where she convinces herself she really is a ‘people person’. If she’s such a ‘people person’, why is her fragile psychic state threatening to eclipse her cardboard cut-out milieu? When Judy later has a nightmare, a series of surreal images pass through her head, spill out into her bedroom and eventually seem to pre-empt an argument she has later with her band mate (voiced by Kathleen Hanna best known from the grunge grrrl band Bikini Kill). They fight on the phone and Judy quits the band. In the next ‘spot’ Judy returns to band practice and sings her new song. The band is joined by Barbie groupies who thrash their synthetic hair around. Judy, it seems, triumphs on stage and screen.’ — showpony
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Flat is Beautiful (1998)
‘While developing his ideas around typage and non-actors, Eisenstein often looked back to earlier theatrical traditions, and in particular to the use of masks, performances based “not on the revelation of character but on the treatment of it, because a person comes on with a defined character passport.” Sadie Benning’s Flat Is Beautiful centers on a melancholy tween tomboy grappling with their gender identity in working-class Milwaukee. Rendered in Super-8 and Pixelvision, Benning’s oneirically lo-fi featurette plays like the strangest after-school special ever made, a brilliant exploration of the ways inner life can—or cannot—be read across a frozen face, in which every member of the cast sports a different paper, hand-drawn visage.’ — Filmlinc
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Julie Ruin “Aerobicide” (1998)
‘This music video for the band Julie Ruin, fronted by Kathleen Hanna, formerly of Bikini Kill, critiques the cynical music marketeers of corporate America. Criticism particularly targets campaigns aimed at women, which Benning and Hanna refer to here as the “Girls Rule (kind of) Strategy.”‘ — vdb
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Play Pause (2006)
‘Play Pause differs in many ways from Benning’s well-known single-channel videos from the 1990s. Departing from her intensely personal, coming-of-age teenage works, this two-screen projected video installation, directed in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, comprises hundreds of drawings that weave in and out of public and private urban spaces. In the post-9/11 world depicted here, wars rage in the headlines and malfunctioning Diebold ATMs fail to provide receipts.
‘The video spans a day in an anonymous city suggestive of Chicago. Commuters on the train, workers digging up the street and a game of soccer give way to drinking, dancing and sex. The video’s cycle slows to an end at dawn in an airport: a figure, neither distinctly male nor female, approaches the washrooms and hesitates before the two doors; security guards scan bags and faces; and a couple has sex on the wing of a plane as it takes off. Here, in this leaping between anonymous figures in the cityscape, the characters in Play Pause are not unlike those in Benning’s earlier videos – isolated, lonely and wandering through the world as they explore and come to terms with their queer identities.’ — The Power Plant
*
p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, I don’t know of Luz Verde. Zac might. I’ll ask. Enjoy home. And no sweat and cheers on the Roubaud intro. ** Sarah Palmer, Hi. I’ll look for the FranceTV La Horde thing. Thanks. If you can’t find ‘Jerk’, let me know and I can pass along a link to the screener. It’s rare for me that being in Palais de Tokyo isn’t mostly about wandering around that great, malleable space and lucking into finding maybe a handful of artworks I like. My favorite show there was some years ago when they flooded the ground floor, painted it black, and provided you with a row boat so you could row yourself around the space listening to an eerie soundscape. The diorama show was really good, yeah. The fairly recent Rammellzee retrospective was really great. I’m interested in Imhoff’s performance work, but I don’t like her static work at all. It just seems like faux-Gothic product for rich people to me, but obviously many, many disagree.I’ll check out that Galerie Gallimard show, thanks. I’ m hoping to hit the Marais galleries later this week. Happy Wednesday! ** Carsten, Exciting to get into the editing, finalising phase. Enjoy! And thanks for the link to the Denis film. I’ll use it! I’m hoping we’ll have the deck finished in the next day or so. Then the scary part begins. ** Steeqhen, When my mom died in LA, I think it was about two weeks until the funeral/burial. I’m not sure about my dad’s because it was in Hawaii, and I was stuck way over and couldn’t attend. I hope the funereal event was meaningful. Death definitely has a weird power to equalize everything in its wake. When I try out Lana Del Rey in bulk, I’ll make sure to start with ‘Ultraviolence’ or ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’, thank you. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Haha, I like the mental image of tough American boys and guys casually referring to each other as Muki. I think love is/was allergic to cats, but since there was six feet of dirt between him and them, no problem. My version of love always thinks things will happen in a flash only to end up maxing out his patience. Interesting. Love forcing Christopher Nolan to make his next movie using a plastic Pixelvision camcorder, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Evil and magnetism do often go together like soup and sandwich. In my experience. ** laura w., How interesting that ‘A Man Asleep’ was your first Perec. Nice way in. The second person is very neglected, which I assume is due to its being pretty difficult to maintain at novel length. Hm, that’s a challenge if there ever was one. Shall we both try? No, I don’t decorate. Or not in Paris where I have nothing to decorate that anyone else would be able to see. When I was a kid and I lived in a big kind of mansion of a house, you bet. They do sell Halloween decorations here increasingly since the French are finally waking up to Halloween’s greatness. But they’re pretty standard fare. There’s this amazing, gigantic store in LA called The Best Halloween Store Ever, and it truly is, and it spoiled me forever. ** HaRpEr //, Yes, it was our back and forth about Roubaud that inspired the post, so thank you. I quite like Calvino, although I haven’t read him in ages. I remember especially liking ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ and ‘Mr. Palomar’. Congrats on scoring ‘Numero Deux’! I can’t really explain why that Destroyer album is my all-time fave. I just feel unprecedentedly admiring/awestruck and full of joy when I listen to it. ** Uday, It was just the phrasing of the speech that seemed a little too composed to me. Stupid guys have short shelf lives on the crush front, I think? Oh, I don’t know. Never mind. Well, better to find camp interest in Dan Quayle than in Liberace. That does surprise me though. ** Right. I decided to restore the blog’s old post about Sadie Benning because … well, why in the world not? See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Hi!!
I remember this post—it was my introduction to Sadie Benning, and I fell in love with her work instantly. So thank you for this resurrection! (Also, Sadie is such a great name!)
That’s interesting—that you tend to anticipate the opposite, that things will happen a lot faster than they actually do. Whenever I have any plans for a day, even the most mundane ones, I find it hard to set up a schedule because I always think whatever it is I have to do will take ages. And then it rarely does.
His movies would be more interesting that way for sure. I can’t say anything about The Odyssey because I haven’t seen it and am not planning to either, but I couldn’t even finish Oppenheimer.
Love getting canceled because people found out that his memoir is largely fiction, Od.
Hi!
Here’s the link to the video: https://www.france.tv/spectacles-et-culture/musique-pop-rock-electro/2524915-room-with-a-view.html. There are also some short documentaries about the company’s work and life on the same website.
I’m sure I’ll manage to find a copy. I see that the film is available from Potemkine, so that will be one of the things on my to-do list when I get back to Paris.
Yes! The Palais de Tokyo’s space is incredible; every time I visit, I discover new areas! They even launched a fun “controlled vandalism” programme, where certain spaces are tagged but are absolutely not accessible to the public. It’s called the “Lasco Project.” I also really like Salle 37 as a space — it looks like an abandoned theatre.
Yes, I’ve already seen photographs of that exhibition with the rowboats! It must have been quite an experience!
I agree with you about Imhoff’s sculptures and installations (although I do like her paintings of explosions). It’s a shame, because I don’t get the impression that she is still pursuing her performance work, or at least not very regularly. Sometimes I feel that visual art is somewhat stagnating at the moment, or that the constraints and dynamics imposed on museums, art centres, and the art market are preventing certain artists from emerging. I’m looking forward to seeing what is presented at the Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale. The section dedicated to “young artists” at the IAC in Villeurbanne is clearly the most interesting part of the event!
It’s a small but lovely exhibition that gives you the opportunity to read letters by Nadja. I became very interested in the early years of Surrealism during my studies, so I’m always on the lookout whenever there’s an exhibition about it, particularly exhibitions featuring women Surrealist artists (I’ve spotted an upcoming exhibition at the Musée d’arts de Nantes).
I wrote my university dissertation on the figure of Kiki de Montparnasse, and it opened up a whole artistic milieu for me, as well as leading me to Freud’s writings on sexuality.
Enjoy your “pérégrinations” through the galleries of the Marais, and have a lovely day!
There’s surely a bumper history of Riot Grrl waiting to be written by some likely person. I do know that Lucy McKenzie was heavily involved with this movement back in the day. Here in the UK, our music scene was really thriving before Britpop came along and ruined everything imo.
Hi Dennis ^_^. Hope you have been well. Finally got myself a huge dictionary as a treat, because I don’t like having my phone near me when I’m reading to Google words. It made me remember doing the same as a child when learning English, and generally treating the dictionary as a learning tool at random, which was fun. I’d just come back from a run in the rain too, so the combo of the sweat/mud smell with the turning of thin pages and gentle rain was really Proustian… <- sole reference I’ll make to him today.
Work has been weirdly annoying. My boss is in a weirdly bad mood all the time, and generally just sort of activates childhood anxieties in me… it feels very embarrassing to me in my 20s and still feel like I’m in danger when I'm getting berated, but it’s good exposure therapy.
Oh, and I’m seeing a really cute guy… we’re doing a duet at the moment, but he’s sort of charmingly out-of-time with the piano, so I have to match his rhythm on the fly. It’s really cute. I have to avoid talking about him too much to my friends, because hearing about how nice someone’s laugh must be as boring as hearing about their dreams. Hope you’re well…! Love from here.
Christopher Nolan comes up here and there in Dennis’s blog, mostly, if not always, from people who write in, but what is fascinating is the rumor of Nolan’s older brother Matthew, who was accused of being a hitman. The charges didn’t stick, but he was in jail, and he tried to escape from his cell or prison. Chris and his younger brother never mention the older brother. I only bring this up because it’s gossip, but if true, it gives some weight to Nolan’s filmography. Personally, I like some of his films, but not all. I haven’t seen the new one yet, and I likely won’t, because the subject matter isn’t that interesting to me. But who knows, I can become his biggest fan.
ULTRAVIOLENCE sold me on Lana del Rey. BORN TO DIE has never really clicked with me, apart from a few songs, but her mixture of theatricality, pop culture references and lyrics about self-destructive desire felt very fresh, amidst so much empty 2010s “empowerment pop”. (Rather than romanticizing abuse, it seemed like she was speaking about how hard it is for women to be genuinely empowered, just not from a conventional feminist perspective.) To go with consensus, NORMAN FUCKING ROCKWELL is my other favorite Lana album. I haven’t heard any of her unreleased/pre-Interscope songs, but I think she has an album on the way this fall.
What if Nolan made a documentary about his brother on Pixelvision! He’s very good at keeping his private life to himself, even with so many weird bros who love his films.
Nolan’s brother was a hitman? Let’s spread that far & wide. Who cares if true or not, that’s far more interesting than any film he’s ever made.
So far I have nothing but good to say about my editor. The guy seems an ace at this. Very fast but thorough & meticulous. And wants my input on every aspect, which is great as I know it’s not the norm. His name’s Henry Stanton & he’s a writer himself.
Considering the cover image right now. Originally I wanted to use an old photo I took of Eagle Rock, from an angle that makes it appear very skull-like (to go with the book’s title “Skull Music”). But it’s a wide shot & might not work on a book cover. Then I considered an alternative from the Musée d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amérindiens in Marseille. A photo I took of an adorned skull from Oceania. That led to some research about French law regarding human remains & trying to use them for commercial purposes, under which book publishing falls. Seems like an absolute no-go. I completely understand that in principle, but somehow naively thought that if something’s in a museum it’s practically in public domain.
Hope the deck does the trick it’s supposed to. When you say the “scary part” comes next, does that mean meetings with investors?
Oh, did you get my email?
wait that store looks so fun! thank you for the link to lurk. i imagine la must have some pretty great costume and prop stores that make spirit halloween look even lamer than it already kind of does in comparison. though spirit halloween is fun for the vibes. in the us the big trendy halloween decoration last year was the 12 ft skeleton you can find at home depot, but i prefer the human sized skeletons. the 12 ft skeleton detaches skeletons too much from their dead human context without adding anything interesting, more of the “thing scary so big thing even more scary” variety. i could also be overthinking it, of course.
now that you’ve got me thinking… there really aren’t many examples of a novel-length second person, well, novel. off the top of my head: if on a winter’s night a traveler, suicide, and bright lights, big city (one of those books where i like the title more than the novel itself). hm. the other interesting thing is that most second person novels describe the “you” as a straight male and it does make me want to write something in which the “you” in question is female. i’ve also wanted to write something first person omniscent since reading the george miles cycle but haven’t figured out how or what. me nerding out about technique- the first person omniscent perspective is arguably my favorite part of frisk, it’s such a smart detail. i’ve never seen it done that way, i usually just see it in the garden-variety 4th wall breaking metafiction type novels.
i suppose most people do start with life: a user’s manual but, uh, that book scares me. also a man asleep felt more relevant to me, for whatever reason. today i learned that the bell jar is getting an adaptation starring billie eilish. the bell jar is one of those books i don’t really care about but it feels strange to adapt, i don’t know. any novels you have that relationship with? how’s the deck coming?
I love the first Le Tigre album a lot but I’d never taken a deep dive into Benning’s video work, so thank you!
I do think that Dan Bejar has one of the most beautiful voices on the planet, and he sure as shit knows how to bend it around in idiosyncratic ways. I once heard someone describe ‘Your Blues’ as a theatre piece being constructed as the album progresses, and whether you agree or not, I think that’s why I love that album in particular.
I feel so worn down by being on the internet at the moment (except for this place of course). I go online and it’s just people screaming about shit they hate and I just wish for five minutes that everyone could stop having opinions, and then I obviously think that’s a stupid thing to think and that if anyone acted in public like they did online they’d be arrested. Maybe I just had a weird day. The changing of the seasons can always be loaded with strangeness for me.
This is a delicious post; really liked A Place Called Lovely. I was making some concert t shirts for myself and the friend I’m going to see Charli XCX with this weekend and something about the drawing reminded me of a post on this blog from the venerable Chris Dankland (?) where he paired text with images? I tried looking for it but couldn’t find it at all. Do you know the one I’m talking about? I believe it was relatively recent. A screenshot I’d taken at the time yielded the caption, ‘Jill sat behind her sunglasses, silently dripping.’ It seems to have disappeared from the blog, or is at least no longer searchable.
Hey Dennis, very compelling stuff, glad to see this. Anything I was doing as a kid with toy video cameras didnt even approach profundity or anything like that haha, so its really cool to see, especially since it was appproached as an experimental piece from the ground up seemingly. A pleasure!
I’ve been thinking about why artists make things, and I was curious if you had any thoughts on this. Like some people have a vision or a message that they feel the world needs to see/hear, others create beauty for beauty sake, they love the proccess, etc. In a highly politicized time like now, I see young artists saying things like “how can you make beautiful, nonpolitical art in a time like THIS?” or “pursuit of beauty is a fascist cause” or whatever. Like theres so many reasons an individual has for creation I guess… I remember Panda Bear saying that if he stopped making music he feels like he would die haha, and that weirdly resonated with me. Obviously there can still be a message shared etc. but I think I would be constantly making projects whether or not anyone was watching. If theres a short version… do you have a motivator in any of those kinds of ways?
Always lurkin the blog, but I was especially curious if you had any thoughts given the highly niche/personal nature of your work… hope all is good, K, bye!!