Author: Nada Gordon

Sitting in a Greyhound bus station in Medford, Oregon, otherwise known as Methford, surrounded by human beings in various stages of damage. So far the trip has been blessed with poetic and familial convergences, first in Portland in its floral glory. I talked submarines with Auden Andrew Koeneke, explored Powell’s and the Japanese garden with Rodney and Gary, plotted a trip to Egypt with Leslie and Rodney, shopped for the BBQ with Rodney and Julian, sunbathed with Julian and Tracy, and just generally had a convivial time in what I understand is the rare Portland sun. It’s a groovy city, to be sure, but how long before I might get bored there, I wonder. Two weeks? Or would I adopt the local hobbies of gardening and cycling and tattouage? One wonders. Of course,I don’t remember the last time I lived anywhere sedate, so there’s no telling.

Still, how very pleasant to read to assembled guests and friends on Rodney and Leslie’s lawn in the blinding sun (now I’m burnt) while gleeful kids gamboled about in the hamburger-redolent afternoon air.

Then last night an absolute hootenany reading at Bohemia Gallery in Ashland with Gary and Kasey and Mel and Rod. We drenched the place in hilarity, I believe. I’d give more details but iphone typing sucks. Now back to Corvallis where we spend a night with Gary’s folks…

From tomorrow, May 14 (which day, it occurs to me, is our fifth wedding anniversary: details here) Gary and I are off to Portland, Corvallis, Ashland, and Oakland for two weeks to see family and friends.

If you are in San Francisco on Sunday, May 24, please come to our intermedia extravaganza:

kino21 presents NY Poets Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan

Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan lead an evening of poly-vocal poetics, neo-benshi film narration, and mangled imagery.

Visiting the Bay Area live for one night only, the latter-day vaudeville team of Gordon and Sullivan will present their most recent poetry, performance and video work showcased last month (fresh!) at The Whitney Museum and Dixon Place in New York. Gordon and Sullivan are founding members of the notorious and irreverent Flarf Collective. They have been committed. To hilarious and unsettling entertainment. Throughout this millenium. Together, they authored the non-fiction e-pistolary techno-romantic novel Swoon.

Local poet-provocateur Erika Staiti will perform her live film renarration of a short scene from “Woman Under the Influence,” which premiered last month in the Los Angeles underground venue, Machine Project.

New York visual artist, montagist and poet Brandon Downing will premiere several disturbingly funny new video collages.

Sunday, May 24, 2009. 8PM $8

Artists’ Television Access
992 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 824-3890
ata@atasite.org

what do you aspire to?

Constant creativity, and more time for it. A life surrounded by people with the same aspirations. I aspire to better management of my own wild energies and their attendant fatigue in the service of that creativity. More practically, I want to keep exploring new techniques in a variety of media, whether fabric words food sounds movements images, or other media I have not yet explored.

what is your ultimate fantasy?

I have no ultimate fantasy, because I always want there to be more fantasies. Let there be nothing ultimate, save death. When my fantasies dry up, just kill me.

what does the word ‘success’ mean to you?

It’s a little plateau from which one leaps towards the next fantasy or the next creation.

under what circumstances would you tell a lie?

Almost no circumstances. I am not interested in lying. I would likely do so to protect someone, though. I might also lie as a kind of theatre, in an art context. OK, now that I think about it, I lie in art all the time, but maybe that’s not exactly “lying.”

what qualities attract you to someone?

The ability to connect deeply in conversation. Novel syntax. Wit and humor. Shared references. Of course, creativity. I also tend to like people who are analytical, but not drily analytical. Maybe a better word is “probing.” There is some attraction to people who are very emotionally available, and also to people who are frustratingly enigmatic. Retinally, I am attracted to people whose DNA is similar to mine, and who have sartorial flair, but that doesn’t play out in terms of deeper attractions.

when you were growing up what did you want to be?

A botanist, a photographer, a rock singer, a fiction writer, a fashion designer, a teacher, and, of course, a poet.

what is your political affiliation?

I vote pragmatically, with a sigh.

has anyone ever said something about you to you that shocked you?

Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t like this question at all.

do you like talking on the phone?

It depends who I am talking to, but sometimes, yes, I can be like a teenager that way. It can also feel like a terrible intrusion. I don’t like hierarchical phone menus. Who does?

did either of your parents ever talk to you about sex when you were growing up?

Yes. I wasn’t really sheltered from anything. I remember being physically innocent, but I don’t remember ever really being innocent.

what do you think happens to us after we die?

I think we disintegrate and become like compost (if we are not too pumped with embalming chemicals), which makes more energy for things to grow and then life continues, but not with us as “individuals.” I think this is a beautiful and mysterious phenomenon. What happens to us is not important, but I think that the people around us feel awful after we die.

do you like where you live?

Hmm. I need more closet space. I like the Moorish archways and my DIY custom paint job (which looks a little like something you would see in an Italian restaurant, or a Starbucks). I like the art deco detailing: coved ceilings, original flooring, etc. Many people say I live in the sort of building their grandparents lived in, and I like that “Brooklynness” about it. I like how the peoples of the world converge in Brooklyn and in my neighborhood. I like it in spring and summer and autumn and not at all in winter. I do not like it as much as other places I have been, or have lived.

what sort of things would cause you to lose your temper?

Being lied to. Not being listened to. I get angry also when I know I am right and someone keeps telling me I am not right. I sometimes lose my temper when I feel I am being condescended to, as well.

what do you want your last meal to be?

I think I might not want to know it was my last meal. If I absolutely did have to know that, I might ask for some really beautiful kaiseki ryori… onsen cuisine: a poached egg in dashi, some fresh-caught grilled fish, selected local sashimi, yudofu, mountain vegetables, etc., all surrounded by lovely little edible flowers.

how do you feel about this interview?

Self-reflexive and a little lazy.

Allen Bramhall writes:

Maoist rubber pants protect, as do Stalinist rubber pants.

I really love this interview Ryan Manning did with Anne Boyer. I will give him 24 hours to ask me for an interview, and if he does not I will interview myself.

I also started poking around at the other interviews on the site, and humbly suggest you do, too, because they are great.

I went last night with Abby Child to the wonderfully rough space at Light Industry* in Sunset Park to see Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, a film by Kazuo Hara, and hear a Q and A with him on the occasion of the publication of his new book, Camera Obtrusa (how much do you love that title?). The Village Voice summarizes the film thusly:

the filmmaker’s stalker-cam tendencies go back at least as far as his second film, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), which centers on his ex-girlfriend Miyuki Takeda, not long after their breakup. By following her around with his 16mm rig, Hara explains in voiceover, he’ll be able to continue the relationship. At first portending a sadistic macho trip, Extreme Private Eros proves to be an unexpectedly humanist, even feminist film as it chronicles Takeda’s later relationships with other women and black American GIs in the low-rent, gutter-tough world of Okinawa go-go bars. Hara himself never appears in frame, but remains present as a self-deprecating voyeur to his former lover’s ongoing life. He depicts not one but two births in real time; by film’s end, the screen is stuffed with the toddling babies of Takeda’s communal residence.

In fact, Hara does appear in the frame once, weeping, suddenly overwhelmed by jealousy around Takeda’s three-week affair with a black GI (he addressed this difficult moment in the Q and A). Her affair resulted in the pregnancy that resulted in one of the real-time births we see onscreen, and is surely one of the most memorable film sequences I have ever witnessed. She delivers the baby (her second: the first was Hara’s) entirely unaided, although surrounded by Hara and his camera, Sachiko Kobayashi (Hara’s girlfriend and co-producer) and the microphone, and Rei, the child of Hara and Takeda, still a toddler.

She squats in effort, dripping a trail of fluid, and later leans back to deliver the baby. It happens very quickly. It’s not icky, really, as it is (to me) in the Brakhage film. No one catches the baby; she just comes out. No one cuts the cord or puts her on her mother. They just sit there filming, taking sound. When the baby starts to cry, the toddler does, too. It’s excruciating. They wait for the placenta. The baby wriggles. After a while it is a relief to see the cord cut, the drops put in the baby’s eyes, the baby bathed… but I could only admire Takeda’s tough animal resourcefulness. I’ve never seen anything like it, except of course by animals.

Other extraordinary visual moments include the black power poses and amazing 70s outfits of the black GIs in Okinawa, a tough-talking bar girl from Kyushu with a face and voice like a frog, the 14-year-old prostitute in a giant ‘fro wig and Mary Quant lashes with her lover, the butoh-like strippers, and the street scenes of the red light district in Okinawa, where Takeda set up a solo protest, complete with pamphlets, against the exploitation of the women who worked there.

I bought the book and Hara signed it for me, although I clearly wrote NA DA (in katakana!) for him, NA TA RI. He thinks I am Natalie. That, I guess, is the dilemma of the “documentarian”: how one’s own subjectivity always interpolates (c.f. the fit of jealous weeping).

*Note to Light Industry: the fumes (paint? other construction?) in the place are terrible. I’m congested and achy from them today still. Please ventilate!

read this

the problem with the “new feminist videos” at the brooklyn museum was that the medium was not important.

essentially these were just video-ed performance art. visually, they were not really intriguing, or inventive.

to think about the pieces as performance art is another matter.

it’s true that I did not watch all of them.

there was one thing I loved, in the “history” room:

the painterliness of those explosions!

Mel Nichols, Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon

Lots of air and space and unexpected good intrusions in these poems. There’s something beautiful and innocent about them, maybe faux innocent?: anyway wide-eyed. Receptive. Little aerated slices of time; the space in them relaxes me a little.

“somehow we all expected to be exasperated little gods”

“The deep blue velvet suit lady telling/ the deep blue velvet suit man/ where he cannot pee”

Alan Davies, Odes

I feel mixed about these poems but there are two I love unreservedly: “Slooping Down the Long Slope Towards” and “As If It Were Not Always Otherwise Or So.”

They are lush, their lines capacious enough to hold phrases that flutter up to me like these:

“ringlets of spruced time”
“mantles of curling spice”
“baskets full of air, and bully for them”
“slim slick crimp taken in time by one who dies”

Julian T. Brolaski, A Buck in a Corridor

Intense and dense: flavor-packed. Absolutely attentive to each word’s materiality. The queerness that emerges as theatric struggle, the deliberate archaisms:

“the fish begin to speak queerly”

“melodious offal”

“ersatz chaleur”

“to each thir blasphemy”

Notes on Conceptualisms, Rob Fitterman & Vanessa Place

I have only just begun to think about this book. I think it needs a discussion group. I love aphorisms. They make me ask myself, what’s true? Sometimes aphorisms seem true because they sound true:

“The Sobject is the properly melancholic contemporary entity.”
“Note that the absence of mastery is old hat for females and other others.”
“When is a critique not a critique?”

(at the Brooklyn Museum): Jonas Mekas

(and I was only saying the day before to G. that he would have been an ideal blogger)