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I wish I had something, anything, to write today. I don't. An article on Alice Notley should be appearing on the Boston Review site soon, an interview with John Cayley on the Iowa Review website, and my bit on Carol Mirakove is coming out in Quid, which won't be online but is elsewhere on this site, in part (and in ebonics). That's about it.
Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon noodling around with Final Cut Pro, the software that I thought I'd have down by now when I bought my iMac early 2002.
I basically took some footage I had shot of my friend Boaz Barkan, the Israeli butoh dancer, and a guy named Zack -- an actor but also a butoh dancer, I had first seen him perform on the roof of P.S. 1 with Min Tanaka, one of the greats of the genre -- doing an improv in a mah-jong park in Chinatown.
Zack, who is a ghostly looking guy with long stringy hair and would have fit in nicely in The Crow, was wearing a tux for the show; Boaz didn't realize there would be costumes, so he ended up with the role of the female -- no problem, of course, Boaz often dances in wedding dresses, flouncy summer hats, etc., and in fact androgyny is a key element in a lot of butoh (b-dancers often look like something out of Genet's The Maids).
Anyway, to make a short story yet longer, I had shot this performance on my sister's Sony Digital 8 cam, a piece of shit (don't tell her I said that), but only because it is not true dv -- the footage actually looks all right, but it was even better when I stretched it out to run half its speed, tinted it a ghoulish green and blurred it up so it looked like I had a vaselined lens.
Boaz and Zack then looked like figures out of some horrible phlegmy dream, the red of Boaz's jacket managing periodically to break through the green tint [note: must learn color theory], and Zack himself some long spindly thing in his tux like an Edward Gorey cartoon.
The soundtrack, also stretched out -- and did I mention that the footage was all reversed -- was quite beautiful as well, though I relish the day when I will get my hands on some sound editing software and learn to noodle with that as well.
But enough of that.
I've read three or four interesting books in the past month (I've been considering posting the names and covers of all the books I've been reading lately, but have been too lazy to do so):
Citizens, by Simon Schama, a "chronicle" of the French Revolution that I highly recommend for its portraits of cultural phenomena (such as the little Bastille castles carved from real Batille stone that were the hot item at the time); Science is Fiction, an MIT book on the films of Jean Painleve, who was the first to make scientific studies of underwater creatures such as seahorses and who was much lauded by the surrealists, especially Battaille; Sarah, by JT Leroy, a Junky-era Burroughs-ish tale about a boy prostitute in West Virginia who works with his mother at a truck stop
[sorry, someone walked into my office. By the way, I'm coming down with something nasty and am feeling a bit feverish, hence the chatty triviality of this entry, a sign of delirium when it's not in perfect iambs.]
...at a truck stop...
...at a truck stop...
...at a...
...Burroughs...
...b-b-b-.,...m,...,
Oh, forget it. I recommend Sarah though -- read a friend's copy, it's only 150 pages and can be lapped up in about 6 hours. I'll tell you about the other books some other time.
Meanwhile, I highy recommend you look at the site of the Language Removal Society, a group that takes recorded speeches -- or the recorded speech, rather -- of celebrities and removes all of the words, leaving behind only the sounds of inhalations, gurgling, sighs, etc. Some of it's pretty sexy, I much recommend the Marilyn Monroe one:
I also just read (about an hour ago -- my "at al" bit above reminds me of the Hollow Men) Louis Menand's essay on T.S. Eliot and anti-semitism in LM's new book American Studies. Not quite Charles Bernstein's "Pounding Fascism," which I think is a great essay, but some subtle distinctions made therein and useful history of TSE's relationship to such people as Charles Maurras -- I think less of TSE after reading it, though not of the poetry.
Did you know that Ezra Pound was from Idaho? I did, but never realized how f-ckin west that is. So to call Robert Duncan the west coast's answer to Ezra Pound almost doesn't mean anything (did it ever?). He's the west coast's answer to Idaho, which is like saying Joel Lewis is New Jersey's answer to the poets of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery gallery.
When do I start making money?
Posted by Brian Stefans at December 10, 2002 04:13 PM