Susan Hiller
Douglas Davis
Nam June Paik
Jimmy Kuehnle
Bruce Nauman
Darsha Hewitt
Jeff Wall
Gretchen Bender
Wojtek Ulrich
Dara Birnbaum
James Connolly and Kyle Evans
Joel Holmberg
Dyke TV
Paul Pfeiffer
Adrian Piper
Jan Bark & Erkki Kurenniemi
Hiwa K
Christo
Antonio Muntadas
Seo Young Chang
TVTV
Zhang Xiangxi
Leopold Kessler
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Susan Hiller Channels (2013)
‘Susan Hiller’s Channels is an audio-visual conglomeration of near death experience (NDE) narrations told through a full-scale installation of television monitors. Whether these monitors simply house these personal stories or act as a portal through which they emerge isn’t clear. It doesn’t need to be. Bathed in the glowing light of these numerous screens, numerous voices come forth with one eventually becoming the clearest. Hours of recantations are housed here, in these screens, in this room. It’s the near-ghost in the machine.’
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Douglas Davis Images from the Present Tense (1971)
‘Douglas Davis tackled video in a very thoughtful manner: both by questioning the medium and by a theoretical discourse on its possibilities. For Davis, the issue of the advantages of this new technology arose in view of his most important objective: to allow communication between people by bridging spatial and temporal distances. His encounters with Paik, Beuys, Acconci, Campus, Baldessari and concept artists were important for Davis. Like Paik and others, Douglas Davis was involved in the manipulation, refusal and rejection of television, as for example in his installation for Project ’74 in Cologne, Images for the Present Tense, in which he pointed the television set towards the wall, with a hissing, brightly flickering screen, and used it as a source of light or reflection.’
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Nam June Paik TV Crowns (1965)
‘The patterns were created using tone generators and an amplifier in conjunction with the televisions themselves.’
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Jimmy Kuehnle Loud and Clear (2006)
‘I constructed a pulpit like structure containing, sound amplification equipment, a video projection screen, hidden cameras, and two towers of televisions. Similar to previous performances, costume played a major role. My head was completely enclosed in a fabricated, opaque plastic box. In addition to my head and brain, the box housed cameras and microphones pointed towards my face. The signal from these cameras and microphones was delivered to the projection screen and sound amplification equipment on the pulpit. This was how I communicated with the audience without being able to see the audience directly.’ — JK
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Bruce Nauman Lip Sync (1969)
‘In Bruce Nauman’s Lip Sync, a video camera is turned upside down and held in a tight close–up on the filmmaker’s face as he speaks the words of the title. The words, which at first emerge in a low murmur, quickly grow louder and more distinct, overwhelming the sound track and creating a rhythmic beat. The sound and image fall in and out of synchronization as the viewer tries vainly to connect the movement of Nauman’s lips with his voice. This struggle intensifies as the work progresses, keeping the viewer in a state of nervous tension.’
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Darsha Hewitt The Electrostatic Bell Choir (2012)
‘Everyone is familiar with the curious effects of static electricity. Freshly laundered clothing clings together if one neglects to toss an anti-static sheet into the dryer, a balloon magically sticks to a wall after being rubbed over a head full of hair, an irritating shock transmits from one person to the next while shaking hands on a dry winter’s day. Inspired by this peculiar phenomenon The Electrostatic Bell Choir plays with static electricity in order to harvest its kinetic potential and use it as the driving force in the artwork.’
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Jeff Wall Boy on TV (1989)
Cibachrome print
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Gretchen Bender Reality Fever (1983)
‘An early, single-channel version of Bender’s video collages, one with found, created, and manipulated imagery, including a Folgers coffee commercial, a children’s superhero cartoon, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.’
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Wojtek Ulrich TV Mirror (Irreversible) (2011)
‘2 tv screens and 2 mirrors, DVD movies: Irreversible by Gaspar Noe and Amores Peros by Alejandro Gonzalez Inaritu. ‘A movie being played, a document, a live coverage, anything on TV, shows, films, news, all the illusion and created vision that is reflected, the image in the mirror, becomes the truth in the mirror, “almost” without any “distance” for the maximum “fidelity to the events” and, as a matter of fact, due to the 1:1 fidelity, we get the truth, we get what said fidelity creates in a given situation.’ — WU
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Dara Birnbaum Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79)
‘Opening with a prolonged salvo of fiery explosions accompanied by the howl of a siren, Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman shows the secretary Diana Prince changing again and again into the superhero Wonder Woman. By isolating and repeating the moment of transformation – spinning figure, arms outstretched – this landmark work in the history of video and appropriation unmasks the language of television, the mechanisms of gender representation and the technology at the heart of the metamorphosis.’
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James Connolly and Kyle Evans Cracked Ray Tube (2012)
‘Cracked Ray Tube is a collaborative realtime installation and performance project with Kyle Evans that breaks and disrupts the interfaces of analog televisions and computer monitors through hybridized analog and digital systems to produce flashing, screeching, wobbulating, self-generated electronic noise and video. The project is heavily influenced by the Chicago Dirty New Media scene, and was created under the COPY-IT-RIGHT philosophy, with plans for all of our custom hardware shared online in PDFs and taught in workshops.’
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Joel Holmberg GOTcredits+expose (2014)
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Ana María Simo, Linda Chapman, Mary Patierno Dyke TV (1993-2005)
‘Dyke TV was founded and created by Ana María Simo, playwright and cofounder of Lesbian Avengers; Linda Chapman, theater director and producer; and Mary Patierno, independent film and video maker. The first episode aired on June 8, 1993, in New York City. The last episode aired in 2005. Dyke TV produced national documentary television programming. New episodes were produced weekly for the shows 12 years on air, and ran for a half hour. In January 2005, the last five episodes ran for an hour. It was broadcast on nationwide cable TV weekly from 1993 to 2005, reaching over 6.5 million households nationwide, as well as being screened at national and international film festivals. In 1994, Dyke TV was awarded a Hometown Video Festival Award.’
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Paul Pfeiffer Caryatids (2009)
‘Caryatids present video footage of solitary boxers being punched in slow motion. Intensive editing and computer manipulation has erased the opponent, focusing the viewer’s attention on the brutal impact inflicted by the invisible assailant.’
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Adrian Piper Mythic Being (1973)
‘Adrian Piper’s early performance and photography work is often referred to but rarely seen. For the ‘Mythic Being’ series (1972-75), shown complete here for the first time (and archived usefully on the website, www.thomaserben.com), Piper disguised herself as an androgynous, racially indeterminate young man, dressed in black T-shirt and flared jeans, big sunglasses, an Afro wig and a Zapata-ish moustache, often smoking a cigarette. She documented a series of public and private performances.’
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Jan Bark & Erkki Kurenniemi Spindrift (1966)
‘In 1965, Swedish composer/musician Jan Bark proposed an experiment for a new kind of ‘music for black-and-white TV’. Bark’s friend Erkki Kurenniemi programmed the animations.’
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Hiwa K My Father’s Color Periods (2012)
‘”Tonight the film will be broadcast in color” – a rumor spread in 1979 among people who believed that the state owned TV station would show the film in color despite of the fact that the TV´s were still black &white. Unlike in cities with Arab inhabitants the majority of the people in Kurdish area of Iraq still had no reach of color TV sets. So my father would cut and stick a sheet of cellophane on the screen of our TV at home. Some times it stayed one week until he switched to another color. We used to watch films, music videos and all other programs, once in blue, pink, green and yellow and so on. Later that he started also with dividing the screen into two, three or four squares with different color in each. Eventually he began with stripes and other possible forms. We were watching the figures walking from blue to green, though yellow, purple to pink. In a while the entire city employed it with their black and white TVs going through the blue, then to pink, yellow phases and so on.’ — HK
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Christo Wrapped Television Set (1996)
polythene, rope and TV set
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Antonio Muntadas Video is television? (1989)
‘Playing back “visual quotations” of everything from Poltergeist to Blade Runner, Muntadas rescans the surface of the monitor, questioning the “nature” of media—film, television, video, and image. Television emerges as the medium to eat all mediums, raising the question: Is it possible,within the context of television, to tell art from life or fact from fiction? An endless row of generic TV monitors visually evokes a hall of mirrors as the expression of the cultural homogeneity and bland abundance achieved through the dominant medium of the late 20th century. Music composed by Glenn Branca.’
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Seo young Chang The Well (2010)
‘When the sun set, the monster crawled out of the well and ate town people. …’
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TVTV (Top Value Television) Looks at the Oscars (1976)
‘TVTV (short for Top Value Television) was a San Francisco-based pioneering video collective founded in 1972 by Allen Rucker, Michael Shamberg, Tom Weinberg, Hudson Marquez and Megan Williams. Shamberg was author of the 1971 “do-it-yourself” video production manual Guerrilla Television. Over the years, more than thirty “guerrilla video” makers were participants in TVTV productions. They included members of the Ant Farm: Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Hudson Marquez and Curtis Schreier; the Videofreex, Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, Chuck Kennedy, and Parry Teasdale. TVTV pioneered the use of independent video based on wanting to change society and have a good time inventing new and then-revolutionary media, ½” Sony Portapak video equipment, and later embracing the ¾” video format.’
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Zhang Xiangxi Tubes (2013)
‘Chinese artist Zhang Xiangxi uses old television sets to create intricately sculpted rooms. The sculptor’s meticulous craftsmanship results in intriguing and unconventional dioramas with a wonderful sense of depth. He manages to not only recreate furniture like desks and beds, but Xiangxi also mirrors the genuine messiness of a real room. Whether the artist is replicating his parents’ living room, his own chaotic studio, the littered interior of a train car, or his dream home, Xiangxi manages to capture the ambience of each environment. His attention to detail is evident through his line of carefully crafted work, which even uses materials from the objects they are mimicking. The artist says, “I like to closely observe daily life and work out how to make things.”’
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Leopold Kessler Hit TV (2001)
T’elevision is switched on/off by hitting on top.’
*
p.s. Hey. ** Laura, Howdy! Yeah, I don’t think I was born yet when they were friends or colleagues or whatever they were. I’m not remembering what you mean by ‘George music’? Trip was very good. Jet lag is def. here but I’m not sure how determined it is yet. ** Carsten, Hey, man. It was good. Lots of freeways and skyscrapers at least where I was staying. Way too warm for mid-November. But, yeah, good, pleasant. Everyone, Carsten has a new poem available for your reading delectation curtesy of the The Closed Eye Open, page 11, here. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Trip was good. The screening went great. An old friend of mine lives there and showed Zac and me the sights (Menil Collection, Rothko Chapel, the Citadel, Mexican food, etc.). And how motivating was the German yaoi for love? Love typing and thinking blearily at least for the moment, G. ** Charalampos, Okay, I’ll do my best to get to it asap. I’m not the right person to ask which E. White book would make one love him. Hi back from fuzzy, cold Paris. ** Bill, Hi. B. I want to see that Hujar film. I think maybe the distributor of ‘RT’ is going to release it here, in which case it should be easy. Houston did he assigned trick. ** Dr. Kosten Koper, Hello, sir. Lovely to see you up (for me) in Ghent. Thanks for the Wain riffing. ** Brendan, Hi, man. I did see your email in my box. I’ve just been traveling and junk like that and even further behind than usual. But I’ll jump on it asap. December & LA, here I come. Take care, bud. ** Sypha, Thanks for talking with darbz. ** Hugo, Hi! The literary establishment powers-that-be designated him as the big gay writer dude for reasons both obvious and unexplained, I guess. You take care too. ** Eric C., Thanks for your wordage to darbz, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I don’t know about ‘the hell out of’ but I did enjoy it. Belated happy birthday, pal. I think I saw a pre-eaten festive b’day cake on Facebook or somewhere. What kind of flooring? Normal or eye-catching? ** Steeqhen, Hey. Rosalia remains a mystery to me, but for how long, I can not say. I saw the poster for that ‘Pillion’ film. And a thing about the one guy’s visible pierced dick. And that is all I know. A S/M-set rom-com is not an appealing idea, I must say. Your new story sounds good, and the title too. Did you finish it apropos the deadline? ** BTG, Hi. Interesting that it makes no sense. Why, if you can say? I guess for me after growing up in giant, messy Los Angeles, it seems very precise somehow. But I don’t speak French, so I’m missing probably everything deep and subtle. I find it immensely homey too. And I don’t think I’m particularly loved here even as far I can tell. ** jay, Hi, jay! Absurdly good! Congrats on the job. Is it interesting to describe or not? I’m good, the film stuff seems to be still going really well. But next week we have the release and all the reviews and all that stuff, so we’ll see if our luck hangs in here. Thanks, pal, great to see you. ** Steve, Hey. Yes, the festival and screening were very good. Cool people, cool scene. I had only been driven through Houston once as a kid. It does seem to have an LA-like sprawl so there was a kind of comfort to it for me. And no gun-toting MAGA people that I could see, but I stuck to the bohemian-ish parts. But I guess it’s a blue city. The third bluest city in Texas after Austin and Dallas, I was told. I suppose I could imagine a reason to see John Fogerty if I gave it some thought maybe. New episode! Everyone, Steve’s excellent radio show/podcast has a new episode up and incorporable. In his words, ‘My latest “Radio Not Radio” show is linked here. This one features Jon Camp, Fred Frith, Gwenifer Raymond, Sir Richard Bishop, Elizabeth Cotten, Steve Tibbetts, Muscle, Ameretat, Dick Move, The Urinals, Emily’s Sassy Lime, Lambrini Girls, Citric Dummies, Hüsker Dü, Squirrel Bait, Rosalia, Lea Bertucci, La Tene, Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra, Yara Asmar, Necrophorus, Patricia Brennan, Vi, Soft Pink Truth and Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke. ** Nicholas., *Shatter*: hope you’re okay. Well, it sounds like ‘Wicked’ was very inspiring, I must say. I’m just bleary over here. ** darbbzz⋆｡°✩🎃✩°｡⋆, No, no, thank you, maestro! It went great, I think. A major hit! Glad you got a rest from the job but just as glad that it’s being enjoyable. Me? I always get big time jet lag, so I’m just kind of out of it this morning, but it’s almost freezing cold here, which is great after way too warm/humid Houston. Friendship can be so great for one’s art making, for sure. You sound excellent, and at least you’re eating tofu. Houston does have a giant mouth, it’s true, it’s weird. ** Philip, Hi, Philip! Really good to meet you. Excuse my fogginess because I’m quite jet lagged this morning, but I guess I would say that being around fellow creatives involves a combo of IRL and online presences these days wherever you are. I grew up in LA, and, from what I can tell, there’s a very good scene there at the moment of writers and other sorts of artists with an energised scene of readings, bookstore events, writers groups, etc. There’s this young/new experimental theater scene going on, which is very odd, but that’s where a lot of energy seems to be. The thing with LA though is that it’s not as social a place as, say, NYC or even San Francisco. I personally like that because you also have a lot of alone time to write/work, but you do have to kind of organise your writer-fraternising time or center it around events, at least until you have a group of artist pals. It can feel a bit isolating there even if you do have good comrades. NYC is still an obvious place, and, sure, it’s not like it was, and everybody lives across the rivers rather than in Manhattan, but it’s still very alive. The scene around the Poetry Project is in a particularly vital stage these days, it seems to me, for instance. Otherwise, I don’t really know. When I was on Baltimore and Chicago recently to show our film, the scene in those places seemed pretty lively and exciting. Where do you live? Do you have a kind of ideal location in mind at all? ** HaRpEr //, Productive but forgettable: I don’t know why that sounds so appealing. Yeah, no interest in ‘Frankenstein’ on my end. I only watched plane films. ‘Ballerina’ was kind of fun after the first sort of boring half-hour or so. ** Uday, Hi. If that’s true try to prepare your life so the first couple of weeks of December are protected against stressfulness because that’s the next blog vacation. Your day certainly does sound most unpleasant, I’m so sorry, my friend. Kindness is the best. Kindness will save all of us. ** Okay. I’m restarting the blog by letting you ‘watch TV’ for a day. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Hey Dennis,
I’m not special in this, but I do love the look of a CRT tv. I love the glow, the hum, the hiss, and especially the fuzz against your skin, though that’s probably not healthy in the longterm. I watched a few videos that talked about older games, specifically the NES/SNES/64 era of games and how a lot of them were designed around the blur of the photons, and that’s why a lot of those games like Mario look so different and arguably worse nowadays, as the screens themselves show the pixels which were never meant to be so visible. I was supposed to do a photoshoot with one this time last year for a magazine I was creative director of, and have it display the feed from my camcorder, but the TV was way too heavy to lug to my college, and my mother said that it doesnt even work anymore. A shame as it would have really added to the shoot, but it came together nonetheless. I loved Videodrome and that one scene of him entering the tv displaying Debbie Harry’s lips bulging out. I’m looking at the tv in my house now and it’s interesting how TVs are made to look like frames; how even Chromecasts and Amazon Firesticks will display artwork when in standby. I’ve seen people online cover their tvs with openings to make it look like moving pictures in frames. Though I think I will always have a fondness for the big carcinogenic box sat on a floor in a dark room, illuminating with a haunting hissing glow.
I haven’t gone back and listened to Rosalia’s first two albums, though her second album being her college thesis and winning a Grammy is a feat that is impressive. I enjoyed Motomami, not as much as others, but enough that I will come back to it every so often. I saw this throwaway tweet from someone joking that they haven’t listened to Lux since that Twigs album came out (it being only out for a weekend), but I am also in the same boat. I like to gauge how famous someone is based on my mom’s knowledge of them (although when it comes to the 80s-early 00s she has a pretty good knowledge of some random people), and she said she knows the name but couldn’t place her, which is fitting for Twigs. The Pitchfork reviews came out for Afterglow and the reissue of Eusexua: Eusexua back in Jan got a 9.1 or 9.0, which I felt was way too high, and the reissue got an 8.0, which offended a lot of people online though I completely understand that the reasoning is that it makes it seem like she doesn’t have faith in her artwork to be revising it after others’ criticism. In saying all this, I’m not someone who thinks of critics as either complete idiots who don’t know anything, or as the gods who decide what I should think, but I find it slightly frustrating and mostly entertaining at how so many people online treat reviews of art that isn’t even theirs as offensive or an attack on them. I guess it’s an affect of the parasocial nature of celebrity worship? That people see liking a musician less as a hobby or interest and more as a reflection of themselves and who they are as a person?
From reading your takes on films here over the past few months, I’d agree that Pillion wouldn’t be for you haha. Visually the film wasn’t interesting, bar a few POV shots from nighttime motorbike rides (and the amount of ass, erection outlines and Skarsgård body if you’re into that).
The deadline is at 5pm Irish time (or 6pm Paris time) and I’m not going to finish it before then, but I think I accepted on Saturday/Sunday that I wouldn’t get it done for the deadline as it’s becoming something I actually want to put effort into now and not something to just meet a deadline. Thanks for the ‘good’ness, I may send bits on in the future if you’re interested. My main issue right now is trying to form it into something that would be interesting from an outside perspective and not just wholly a reflection of my internal turmoil. And I find that I’ve unconsciously made it follow a Wizard of Oz/Mulholland Drive narrative of bit of story, long dream element that reflects the issues of the character, ending in the real world. Though I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, just that it’s funny and a bit frustrating that theyve seeped into something that was never about that. I’ve been having a lot of wild dreams that I’m taking elements from for the dream bit; one dream was me trying to teach a yoga class for my old secondary school class, with my first big crush being some broody guy who I hate but also want to impress (true to life, except for the broodiness, he was a lot more of a jock ass), and then some other dream about attending some circuit party orgy and me wanting it to be like how it is in porn, except porn never focuses on the real stuff like body hair and the internal rumblings of your digestive system. Plus this fear of being filmed whilst it’s happening… there’s a lot about trying to impress people or wanting to be perfect, which in my present life I’m not dealing with, but definitely in how I think of my future… I’m rambling a lot more than I intended, but aside from the dream bits I really want to combine multiple narrative forms but still make it relatively easy to follow as one voice, which is one of the main reasons I’ve skipped on this deadline as that is something that will need work and refining.
Other than that, been preoccupied with sorting out my room, and trying to fit everything from my rented place into my childhood bedroom. I’ve realized I have some hoarding tendencies as I couldn’t bring myself to throw out old cinema tickets, even ones faded beyond recognition. I have so many books, much more than I can fit in my room, and I’m finding clothes from when I was 16 that will neither fit me nor would I want to wear, yet I keep thinking “what if I want this?”
Think anyone still watches TV these days? Would seem that streaming is now de rigueur.
One thing I will defo be streaming tonight is the Scotland v Denmark World Cup qualifier. If Scotland can somehow win this then they go through to the 2026 World Cup, despite playing like a bunch of rank amateurs for most of the tournament thus far. Told Mum that Scotland would be independent by how if they weren’t saddled with such a shite football team and I stand by that belief. It would be their first World Cup since 1998. Chance would be a fine thing.
Dennnizen — Paik rawks! GLad to hear Houston had not a problem and screening was good. Went to opening of Brendan Lott’s crazy new photos at Walter Maciel gallery. Good shit!!! An hour later I joined Amy G and David T at BB fundraser reading thing. xox Jackness…
Hey Dennis! Cool TVs today. No, my job isn’t interesting enough to get into lol, although that’s kind of appealing to me, given that I’ve been working on enjoying less intense/exciting things over the past few months. So cool about your film, I can’t wait. Best of luck w the jetlag!
P.S. darbbzz, I’m weirdly going to a Louis Wain exhibition later this week, I’ll put some pics up when I do!
Hi DC, long time fan of the blog. You might like Eva and Franco Mattes’ work, esp their installations with TVs… https://erandyvergara.art/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/befnoed-exhib-fondation-phi-8916-1280×767-1.jpg
Hi!!
Welcome back, Dennis! Sounds like it was a rich trip – a great screening, some sightseeing, plus great food! And, if I’m not mistaken, the next screenings will all be in Paris, so maybe you’ll have a bit of time to settle in and recover from your jet lag (which love will, as always, do his best to help you with).
I can definitely say that yaoi is far more motivating than traditional German textbooks, though the vocabulary it offers isn’t always the most practical, haha.
So: love eating your jet lag for dinner, Od.
Hi
One of the things I thought when I was exploring this post was the cover of Try that is not the main cover of Try, with the television
Good luck with the forthcoming screenings, I really like the alternate Room Temperature posters I see on Instagram with each of the characters highlighted
Hi
Glad to hear you had another good trip & screening combo. Is your system getting used to fighting off jet lags by now? I hope you beat this one quickly.
And yeah, wow, I just looked up Houston’s temperature & it’s warmer than here in southern Spain. The climate’s going wild…
Did you get a chance to read “These Words Are a Knife”? I was delighted that The Closed Eye Open picked that one up, cause it’s kind of a key poem of mine.
I did give in to the itch to watch “One Battle After Another” again. Once you come to it clean, without all that anticipatory build-up, & roll with it, it’s a hell of a ride. What stands out on a rewatch is the sheer drive of the film—despite being overlong like most movies these days it’s still remarkably propulsive & rhythmically balanced. And Penn is surely the great Trumpian movie villain of our time. He somehow condensed everything that is most disgusting about the current ruling class into one performance. But I think Benicio remains the key to the film’s spirit—in a way he’s the personification of what the film’s all about (“We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years” etc.)
I kinda get the hype now, it’s a surprisingly wise ode to resilience.
oi! i read your poem, mate, v cool. the ending was great and, uh, ‘that’s steel you’re tasting, and if it makes tour head spin, let it.’, i liked that bit a lot. ^_^
i once wrote a thing where i just list like the entire contents of a diy toolkit then go ‘but i think i am the knife guy’ and rip off Frank Zappa a bit lol. maybe i should try to submit a little poetry sometime, worth it you think? also, did you find me on Insta? it’s getting so enshittified. x
Hey there Dennis, greetings from Brooklyn. It was sunny earlier today but the clouds have swept in, now it’s all gloomy and gray. Not so different from Paris huh. I’m just about to cook myself a chicken breast…”adulting” if you will.
I saw on instagram that you’ll be in New York soon, you’re giving a reading with David velasco and Mary gaitskill. That’s a killer lineup. it’ll be great to have you back in the city. I got some tickets, I just have to rearrange my travel plans–was planning to be at my mom’s house for Thanksgiving next week, my return flight is supposed to be Tuesday the 2nd. But I’m sure I can change the flight, I just gotta do so before it’s too late. (I’ll be damned if I miss this event! Once in a lifetime man…)
I trust you’ve been doing well these days, looks like you’ve been doing lots of film promo. Hope it hasn’t been too soul-crushing? As for me I’ve been busy–I’m modeling quite a lot, I just wrapped a big project with Ryan McGinley. He has been very encouraging of my artistry and we’ve become good buddies. He’s like you, very down-to-earth, no airs, no posturing. And makes a genuine effort to be nice to everyone he meets. Are you into his work at all? Otherwise I’m still working at the bar (my bread & butter), still doing my daily writing practice, and also volunteering as a peer facilitator at my support group. That’s been a cool experience too, my verbal skills really come into play here. I led group last week and I’ll be doing it again tomorrow night….So yes, busy busy busy. I am burned out to tell you the truth. And craving more time to work on fiction. Not to mention my love life/personal life is kind of a mess. Not beyond the pale just yet….But I need to meet some new guys and make some new friends. And stop with the overthinking/torch-bearing.
Looking forward to seeing you stateside. Am curious to hear what you’ll bring to read….
Writing over everything man! It’s the raison d’être.
-Q
P.S. While I have your attention, I would like to plug my friend’s book. He’s a friend from around town, his name is Henry Belden and he’s a writer and a fine artist. Risd-educated. The book is titled Failson and he released it via Seven Press. I know you’re always eager to support indie fiction. Plus the book is definitely in your niche, very indebted to your style and also Tao lin’s. Lots of formal innovation, metatextual elements, black humor….all stuff you and I both dig.
Reportedly, Texas gets very MAGA as soon as you hit the outskirts of its big cities.
When the waitress mentioned the Fogerty concert, I was surprised he’s still touring.
Back when I moved to New York in 1993, I watched a lot of public access. There were so many eccentrics on it showing old film and music clips or speaking to callers, and the fact that you couldn’t really build a career off it, unlike YouTube, kept the weirdos there. I discovered Manhattan public access’ YT channel a few days ago, where the news show “Gay USA” is still broadcast weekly.
I love TV art. In grad school I did a piece with 3 CRTs side by side where I played Fritz Lang’s M on two of the TVs (upside down) and played Story of O on the middle one and called it “WOW” and people were either mildly annoyed or outright angry with me.
Anyway, I had my show opening of those new prints on Saturday. It was good, I think. Joel came and we had a good talk about AI art stuff. I hope you and Zac can see the show!
B
Hey Dennis, thanks for your response–yeah, you’re right, I just need to get out more and start going to things more, I just get stuck in that cycle where you can’t write and then you get mad at yourself for not writing and force yourself to stay at home to try to write and get even more mad, etc., and feel like you’re getting set back on time by going out for recreational purposes instead of working. I’m not sure where I’d want to live, I’m sort of like a thomas bernhard narrator at the moment, I usually fantasize about moving out to rural kansas with the totally empty desolate plains, or working up the courage to just renounce everything and go off and live an adventurous life regardless of whether or not you end up as a failure in the end, but I imagine the social scene out in Kansas would be pretty heinous–I live in Chicago right now though, I’m bummed that I didn’t see you guys would be around in time, that would’ve been so cool to go to–hope you enjoyed it! I guess it’s just a general kind of alienation from all this stuff since I switched back to a flip phone a while back and got rid of the wifi at my apartment and the two of those combined does to a certain extent entail social suicide at least among young people nowadays, or it puts you out of the loop a little.
Hey. I think the idea of constantly flicking through channels until you get to the good one probably had an effect on the western subconscious for a good while until now where people can watch what they want. I’ll watch a tv show every now and again but I’d rather just watch a movie most of the time. There are very few tv shows that do something genuinely interesting, almost zilch. We should all be thanking God every day that by some miraculous turning of the fates, ‘Twin Peaks’ was made.
Productive but forgetful probably meant that I’m sort of immersed in my writing and everything else feels like the real fiction when I try to remember it.
Yeah, I’m just sort of out of it because I saw this guy I was really good friends with until we fell out dramatically years ago but left a really big effect on me to the extent where he’s made it inadvertently into several things I’ve written in one way or another, even a part in the book I’m writing now (which is fiction).
Essentially I kind of loved him but he became a total fascist suddenly which made him impossible to be around, which coalesced when he found out I was queer and eventually I told him to go fuck himself and after that people stopped talking to me and so on. Someone told me that he’s luckily outgrown all the extremism now. I passed him on the street because I’m staying in the place I grew up and I would have thought that he would have left by now and since he’s still here I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I don’t even know if he would recognise me since I transitioned shortly after the time we last spoke.
The thing is that I wish I could just forget about him and move on which is obviously the healthy thing, so I guess that’s why I’m drawn to write about him, so I have an excuse to do something with the things I can’t stop thinking about but which nobody wants to hear me talk about. Anyway, sorry for the spiel. I know a lot of what I’ve described probably sounds inconsequential, but I’m really just scratching the surface.
Welcome back Dennis. Hope your jetlag works itself out soon. Mine is just starting! What movies did you watch on the flight? I picked Superman (mostly to see Nicholas Hoult), and part of a Iggy Pop live set from ’23.
I love analog TV artifacts (though I see some of the work today may not be analog). Back in the 90s, Scott Arford made some really nice audiovisual pieces using analog TV signals. Something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alZbKoUqtio
Saw him again in the last year or two. His recent work is very different, quite disappointing.
Bill
hey Dennis!
tvs are such tender things really. like not quite extinct obvi but almost always on the verge, and what makes a tv not just a monitor anyway… it’s almost like they want to be curated and have personalities and be interacted with and stuff. they’re a bit liminal too, bc they’re needy as far as inanimate objects go, which is sweet. and sad.
how was your trip? you were missed! hope the jet lag is not super bad. me i reread Try bc it had been a long time and omg Ziggy that beautiful little skunk. i don’t think there’s anything really very wrong w him? like, he wants to say i love you a lot and hear it back, which is a good thing. he gets panic attacks and hits himself, has whopping ptsd which anyone would considering, but otherwise he’s very… lucid, morally independent and generous, like. also, and i think that’s the litmus test or whatever, not once but twice does his Calhoun ask him to blow off his dad and come on over to safety, but even tho it must have maimed, Ziggy is like “i’ll be over after, I made a promise etc.’ that was a promise anyone should be allowed to break obvi, but he doesn’t, which basically makes him a hero. sort of a Catherine Sloper but like woooorlds better? i tend to think if Calhoun doesn’t go and O.D. the very next morning or smth, they’re gonna be ok. make me happy and say they will be! you did so well w them and i love them v much lol.
also, you sort of write like i talk and that’s so fab and weird. this book especially, i might as well have been listening to myself like 70% of the time? and then that poor Robin, ‘world almost completely erased’ or smth… beautiful. your kid victims are just massively poetic.
anyway, i’ll be keeping this book close for a while. major re-discovery. kudo!
now, George music as in music he was into so i may listen in his honour and have him extra remembered and stuff. you remember him obvi, which is the main thing.
i’m about to send you stuff btw. let’s see, yikes!
<3
helllo!! I am working on these baggy pants of mine yes. Trying to handsew a bunch of different accent patches. frustration ensues on hour two but the end result…might…be worth it. Oh its 2am. I’ll have to rework my sleeping schedule. My goal is to one day buy myself a VCR box tv and then play ps2 games on it.
Oh you used to be a dj? Do you think it possible to have a playlist consisting of both slow-tempo jazz and fast-tempo?
Im making this mixtape based of my current fixation on the tv show “the Bear”
So its going to have acid jazz + experimental jazz+ hip-hop+ trip hop+ other stuff
Definitely putting soul coughing it.
Not much to say. Reading clockwork orange, book borrowed from friend. Oh, what is this giant penis that you see in Paris? Looked it up and oddly got nothing.