I just returned to the city from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shanendoah Valley. We celebrated my Dad’s 60th there. Our cabin had a wood burning stove and a porch with a view of the violet highs. We hiked bits of the AT and made fires in the stove with old wood and pistachio shells. My mother brought us a series of brightly colored bandanas. Above is a short selection from a series I took of an abandoned farm house and a few items I found in a vintage shop.
The Believer just ran a great interview with Agnes Varda in their latest Issue. The kicker? It’s invented. Varda refused to conduct individual meetings with reporters. Hence, BLVR interviewer Sheila Heti transcribed bits of dialogue captured in Varda’s hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival and penned interview questions to match after the fact.
Key topics covered: Gleaning, rosemary, the “after-night pill” and being called the “Grandmother of the Nouvelle Vague.”
I wrote a short post a few months back after I’d seen Varda’s latest film, Les Plages D’Agnes, an autobiographical documentary about her life, her life’s work, and her loves. I was interested in the way the film relied on images as a mode of narrative removed from literal time and space. In a list of the many great things about the recent Believer interview, one of the greats is the following exchange:
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BLVR: The way you made Les plages d’Agnès can be seen as a kind of gleaning—you found material that already existed to put in your film. It is almost like you were looking into the ground, bringing up images from the past, from old films you had made, and photographs, and scenes from the films of your late husband, Jacques Demy.
AV: But gleaning is getting things that are abandoned. I did not abandon my early pictures, my photos, my early films. It’s just going through my body of work as something I can pick from—I pick this and that and that. It’s like I had a collection of my work and I could choose this one or this one. With Jane Birkin, we had a scene from a film called Jane B. by Agnès V.—a portrait I made in ’87. We had a casino scene, surrealistic, in which we had some naked people gambling. Jane Birkin was the card dealer and I was the player. I had beautiful jewelery around me, and when I lost I would take the jewelery and say, Service—being very generous, because it was very expensive jewelery. I would say, Tip.
Now, I just take this piece of film, and I make a narration in Les plages where I say I’m losing. I say that I lost my father. We are watching the roulette ball, and the ball stops and I say, That is where it fell—and he died. He lost, he fell, he died. Which is a totally different use of the same images. That was my game. And it works. You can have seen Jane B. or not.
***
Check out the interview for yourself in full, here.
Tokyo may not have won the upcoming Olympics, but thanks to a trio of legendary filmmakers - French Directors Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and Leos Carax (“The Lovers on the Bridge”), as well as the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (“The Host”) - this city claims inspiration rights to some of the most innovative cinema I’ve seen in a long time.
“Tokyo!” as a whole functions less as a portrait of a city then as a stack of three lenses, short jaunts into the minds of each of the directors. This is precisely what I enjoyed about it: the blind hilarity that accompanies watching a tryptic created out of three disparate units that have been billed as one. It embodies a kind of chanciness that undid all the falseness I find myself reacting against when I encounter so many museum retrospectives where pieces are curated in some bizarre narrative authored by someone I usually find myself disagreeing with.
For me, the most provocative of the three films was the least stylistically flashy. Mr. Bong’s “Shaking Tokyo,” the last in the series, is a portrait of a hikimori, a loner who – thanks to the detachment of his father’s stipend and the reliability of a local pizza delivery girl – has managed to hibernate inside his apartment for ten years without having to establish human eye contact. So much of what I loved about the film was its gentle nod toward realism. It reminded me of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s novella Sputnik Sweetheart. The best of Murakami’s work produces that moment of embodied magic which penetrates the controlled transparency of his prose producing an effect that is not so much surreal as it is a product of realization, some otherworldly, and in some cases disjointed, fragment of the narrator’s emotional core. In a sense it is merely an altered portrait of the interior sublime.
The trailer above hardly does the gravity of these films due justice. Not only visually stunning, all three function as highly articulate films both formally and emotionally. For those of you who, like me, missed these in the theatres, check them out on Netflix when you get a chance. That’s what I did.
In celebration of their Fifth Anniversary, The Perry Rubenstein Gallery just launched a fantastic new group exhibition, The Law of Fives. I first heard about this show while traveling the Metro North back to the city with their bright-eyed Director, Caroline, the two of us taking back bottles of train station Merlot which we’d poured into large paper pizzaria cups, watching a movie about doomsday. ”Do you think its coming?” I said. ”Sure,” she said.
I found this part of the release particularly captivating:
Check it out here. Then pop by the gallery.
I first heard about Electric Literature’s new Single Sentence Animation project from a post created by my friend over at The Books section of The Faster Times, Lincoln Michel. Lincoln and I often gchat from our respective publishing cubicles across town. You can imagine my excitement when I returned to my desk from my fourth trip to the instant coffee machine – they now have Pumpkin Spice, a seasonal feature – and came back to find a new gchat with a link to a live SSA, a single sentence animation of one of Lydia Millet’s sentences du jour.
The first Issue of the SSA project features animation by Luca Diperro and Jonathan Ashley and sentences by Millet and Michael Cunningham.
Lydia Millet (”Sometimes he wished he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them.”) and Michael Cunningham (”Peter tried to murder his brother only once…”).
Check it out here.
For subscriptions to Electric Literature go be bedazzled at their homepage.
One of my, many, favorite Millet sentence comes from the opening chapter of My Happy Life:
Or if the door melted, white steel turning to liquid, and flowed out between its own edges, bending like a spoon and spreading out across the floor in a lake of metal, I would also walk out in that case.
If only I could animate!
I’ll say it for them:
This tough-minded blitz of a ‘zine can call me of one of its captives. Sharp. Satirical. Unflinchingly honest. Unsaid rides a hard edge. I just keep wanting to praise it. Issue three has already stapled itself inside that soft spot above my lungs. The place where everyone keeps telling me the heart is.
Founded in 2003 by David McLendon – whose facebook picture alone would do Martin Parr proud – the welcome mat on the Unsaid homepage reads:
Most likely you found us by losing your way. Good for you. One needs to become lost from time to time, especially when seeking what can only be found in one’s inmost hidden room. Look around in the rooms in here. Maybe you’ll find something both strange and familiar. Touch it. Smell it. Taste it. Then take what you see and take it apart. Smash it. Crush it. Then scatter the pieces. Now follow each scattered piece. You will lose your way again. And again. But keep following the scattered pieces. After some time you will see them for what they are. You will follow what is yours and you will learn to call it home.
I always have been a sucker for putting broken things in mouth and examining them.
Check it out here.
Photo by David Sacks
Friend and writer, Sara Goudarzi, recently launched her maiden voyage into webspace with the creation of /ONE/ the journal of literature, art and ideas. Check it out here. The debut features work by Arienne Rich, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Hillary Kaylor, David Sacks, Laila Lalami, and Marc Trujillo.
Partners in crime in her mission are coeditors Joshua Korenblat, Lisa Preston, and photographer Anthony Rhodes.
Congrats!
I just caught wind of an innovative new opportunity for writers to become share holders in a whole new kind of market. [Insert: Yes. We Can Afford It.]
The good people over at Flatmancrooked have crafted a wildly attractive new model for launching novel(las) by new voices. The principle is simple. They nominate an author they want to “launch” – someone chosen from the annals of their previous publications – and we, the readers, get to buy “shares” in the publication of the author’s book.
Says Flatmancrooked: ” Funds raised from selling “shares” will alleviate front-end production costs and help build the author’s monetary advance. Each “share” will cost $10, and for every one you hold, you get a signed and numbered copy of the new story when it comes out in print. If you buy five “shares,” you get five signed copies. If you buy ten, ten. These slim books will be on the counters of bookstores across the country, but if you wait till then to get one, you won’t be able to say you helped launch a career.”
Bravo.
Currently on the docket: Emma Straub’s Fly-Over State.
Next thing you know they will launch a reality television show that outsmarts even The Donald. Till then, I want in. Buy your share here.
Thanks to the efforts of the ever talented artist and designer, Joanna Neborsky, Gigantic is excited to be celebrating the birth of our own portal into the blinding world of webspace. Check out our new website!
In addition to highlights from Issue I, including three stories by Giganticauthor Shane Jones and “On Meat Over Meat” with Gary Shteyngart, featured in this debut is the unveiling of Shya Scanlon’s latest chapter of Forecast, a momentous occasion we are tickled to be hosting. For a full list of Forecast 42’s schedule, check Shya’s site. Or, drop-in to literary hotspot, Spork , to read the previous chapter.
We are also thrilled to feature Clearing (UXO), artwork from Thomas Doyle’s Reclamations Series. For more on Doyle’s Reclamation Series check out his interview in Art Nouveau magazine. Here’s a snippet: “The Reclamations series deals with the idea of romantic love – in all of its chaos, bliss, and pain. The figures in this series are isolated or reunited, in danger or recently saved. They’re also often in liminal states – which is the way most human relationships evolve and change.”
In addition, we have the honor of publishing a new story by J.A. Tyler. I have been eagerly following the launch of Tyler’s novel, The Zoo, A Going here since its September 1st debut. 76 installments in 24 hour cycles. Don’t miss Day 14!
* Photo by Thomas Doyle
You Don’t Know Me!
Gigantic/Opium/Bomb Benefit Bash
Wednesday, Aug. 26th
Bowery Electric, 327 Bowery (at 2nd St.)
7:00pm – 12am
An End of Summer Extravaganza Benefit Party presented by Gigantic/Opium/BOMB Magazines
Hosted by Bowery Electric
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Join some of New York’s most innovative artists and creative minds in celebrating a joint end summer lit mag benefit party!
The event will feature multiple short programs — performances, microreadings and video installations — to be performed variety style throughout the night as curated by the joint efforts of the three magazines.
Come party with artists, writers, magazine editors, agents, book publishers, bloggers, and new media types!
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NEW AND EXCITING DISCOUNT DEVELOPMENTS!
* * * 1. ALL PRESALES GET FREE VIP ACCESS! * VIP Cocktail Hour 7-8pm
Featuring:
-a special guest performance by award winning performance artist Kalup
Linzy! (http://www.kaluplinzy.net/.)
Purchase $10 presale tickets here:
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/77929.
* * * 2. SPECIAL GENERAL ADMISSION DISCOUNT TICKETS ONLY $6! * * *
General Admission 8pm-midnight
Featuring:
-Short plays directed by Ben Greenman and Bob Powers!
-The Dog House Band, featuring bluegrass musician/writers David Gates
and Sven Birkerts and special guest John Wesley Harding!
(http://thedoghouseband.blogspot.com)
- performance by Joseph Keckler! (http://www.myspace.com/josephkeckler)
- performance by James J. Williams III!
(http://envoyenterprises.com/artists_pages/williams.html)
- NEW! – Featured band: The Library Is On Fire!
(http://www.myspace.com/thelibraryisonfire)
Upstairs: an all-night DJ set by Catherine Pierce of the Pierces!
* * * 3. AS ALWAYS THANK YOU FOR YOUR FRIENDSHIP AND SUPPORT!
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All donations and ticket sales from the night are considered tax-deductible contributions.
By purchasing a ticket, you will be directly supporting these independent magazines’ mission of furthering the dialogue about literature, film, music, and the visual and performing arts.
