Believe it or not, fewer and fewer people these days give a shit about 1991, the greatest year in rock-and-roll and probably the greatest year ever. Seriously, the next time I check Friendster and only four people have My Bloody Valentine as one of their favorite bands, I’m going to go apeshit. Coldplay? Guster? Give me a fucking break – neither of these bands recorded in 1991.
So Valentine’s Loveless is one watershed moment – and holy living shit, if you don’t know about this album go buy it immediately, put it on loud, and shoot yourself, you worthless asshole – and another 1991 masterpiece, the topos of the next however many words I can crank out without becoming a stodgy high-felutant Village-Voiced fuck off, is Spiderland, the dark and sparse and decade-ruining masterwork of Louisville’s Slint.
Its simplicity, its straightforward lyrical narrative, its emphasis on mood over actual song structure, its quiet/loud switcheroos was misleading, and an entire decade was wasted supporting post-rock bands that tried their best to approximate what made Spiderland so incredible, groups of songless, unskilled, LOUD, quiet, fucking waste of time jokes. When people say Spiderland ruined the 90s, they really are blaming Slint for the thousands of dollars they invested in CDs and tight cotton tees of bands who promised to have transcended the fundamentals of song structure by creating “moods”, who purportedly found the magical riff and were just going to play that for eighty minutes of post-rock prophecy. Yet here we are, not enlightened, and not listening to Mogwai.
Why did the Spiderland formula work for Slint but rarely for others? I don’t know, but let’s talk about “Good Morning, Captain” anyway. The closing track on Spiderland, “Captain” has the unfortunate reputation as American indie rock’s biggest cliché. Regardless of how great the song is (and I’m going to show you), there’s something dreadfully wrong about a song that makes its way onto every mixtape any indie girlfriend with fishnet for a bra has ever given to her non-hipster boyfriend (a rarity for indie girls but bear with me). “Good Morning, Captain” is a new generation’s “Marquee Moon.”
Musically speaking, this is simplicity and sparseness to the max – two chords, the chords themselves only two notes, no vocal melody, and the guitar part never plays during the narrative verses. Even for Spiderland, “Good Morning, Captain” lacks the syncopation of the A-side and linear complexities – the burden of the song, really, is on the narrative, and the music plays more of a theatrical role than a particularly active one.
So regarding the narrative: you motherfuckers ever heard of Samuel Coleridge? He wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” over several revisions, and for whatever reason, next to Christian rockers love for quoting the First Letter to the Corinthians, the poem is an unusual touchstone for a number of rock songs: recall how Iron Maiden has its own musical tribute to Coleridge, or earlier how Public Image Ltd. performs an eleven minute song about getting rid of the albatross, entitled “Albatross,” or how recently there’s a new band out from Philadelphia called An Albatross, who are fucking terrible. Anyway, “Good Morning, Captain” deals with the poem too. Not simply a musical tribute or adaptation, the song finds Slint going a step further, filling in the mythic fissures Coleridge etched into the poem, making visible the poem’s invisibiles Naturas that the poet mentions in his preface. I don’t plan on summarizing the Rime, but to me what is most strikingly absent from the poem is the Ancient Mariner absolutely fucking losing it – telling the Wedding Guest “I lost it” just doesn’t account for the utter amount of shit in this guy’s pants. He was terrified, he was a wreck, he was remorseful (I mean honest to God, why the fuck did he kill that bird?), and what “Good Morning, Captain” effectively does is make explicit the Captain’s fearful inner monologue that, as we have it, refuses to exhaust itself.
Maritime is more of a cop-out description of the song’s opening – melodrama aside, the guitars are practically crying, and the balls out sloppy swaggering militancy of the bass and drum backing conceals the song’s fundamental aporia. When the Mariner (heretofore referred to as the “Captain”) finally reaches the front door, we meet him in unusually broken form, a lame fuck and a long ways from the positively nagging, self-sure, been-there-done-that Coleridge original.
“Please, it’s cold.”
Listen, the Captain is afraid and a tragic figure, etc. etc. etc., and that’s all well and good – but he’s pretty good at being scary himself. Coleridge makes a point of pulling the Captain out of his own narrative when the wedding guest questions whether he himself is actually alive; Slint takes this one step further and blurs who says what. The effect is that as listeners we must account for a certain reciprocity of terror that comes from Slint vocalist Brian McMahon’s perfectly ambiguous lyrics. When “there appeared the delicate hand of a child,” whose “face was flush and timid”? The child’s, or the Captain’s? When the young boy “stared at the captain through frightened eyes,” are those simply the child’s, or in fact, is the child staring, in some sort of Platonic, evil eye, fascinare male lingua sense of it all, through the captain’s frightened eyes? It’s a brilliant conceit, as Coleridge himself certainly spends ample verbiage on the Captain’s ocular glitter – in fact, of all the Mariner’s features, his eyes are most often described.
Two-thirds into “Good Morning, Captain,” Slint has brought out most tellingly the Captain’s loneliness and the reciprocity of his fear. Musically we can sense that the first two stanzas are delivered outside this new roof of hospitality, and now inside the house, we approach the Captain’s attempt at sleep with increasingly off-kilter guitar lines. Supernatural seems a fair descriptive, but most particularly apt when the Captain feels “the creaking of the stairs beneath him.” As he is about to open the door to his chamber, Slint launch into guitar noise ebbing and flowing out of dynamics, and eventually sputtering out into ominous string percussives. The key to it all is Slint’s superior sense of space, time, and timing – the instrumental passage has but one idea, and amidst its gradual confusions, becomes a statement of enormous and terrifying potency. And the Captain hasn’t even opened the fucking door yet!
“I’m trying to find my way home.”
What follows are three of the most intense minutes of the American indie rock tradition. Call it melodrama, call it sublimity, call it emo and act like you’ve been there and done that, but the second half of “Good Morning, Captain” separates the song from the rest of the album, not to mention the collective wet fart that is the most post-rock. That is to say, the finale does transcend the lack of song structure and communicates some seriously passionate stuff – it fulfills the post-rock promise. As importantly, Slint touches upon the one aspect of the Captain that Coleridge perhaps intentionally leaves open-ended – the Captain’s remorse. In Slint’s version, the Captain knows he fucked up. The barrage of crunchy strings, the cymbal manslaughter, McMahon’s pathetic “I’ve grown taller now. I want to police to be notified” coupled with his pained scream “I miss you! Awwwwwwwww miss you!” are the album’s loudest, most self-interested moments, a torrent of emotion that extends painfully and indefinitely, and has no choice but to fill out and into the listener as well. These are, of course, the moments I fear most – the last thing an asshole like me wants to admit is that there’s something that, in one fell swoop, totally devastates him, let alone a stupid little rock song.
-- Nick Sylvester
Friday
Speech is Free...but Only If You Buy Something, by Alex Pasternack
To: presentzine@yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 20:24:07 -0400
Dear Present,
Reverend Billy was arrested on 56th and 5th after he resisted a gang of policemen who started shoving him, and his old-fashioned cheerleader bullhorn, out of the Disney Store. He had led us in there with the zeal of a fervent multinational CEO conquering a ripe market, except this is exactly what he isn't. A wavy mane of blonde hair on top of a white suit and a pair of black sneaks that can't stop bouncing, he had already attracted a crowd in front of the Equestrian statue near the Plaza with his anti-consumerist entreaties. "Brothers and Sisters, We Will not go into STARBUCKS to buy a LA-TTE! What happens to your money when you hand it over to them? You cannot TRACK it! It goes to the pockets of Howard Schultz! It goes to Ariel Sharon! It stays far away from the hands of the coffee pickers of the Nicaraguas, of the South Americas! Can I get a WIT-ness!" Cheers, shouts of “A-MEN!” Next, fifty of us, the (wonderfully festive and harmonic) Stop Shopping Choir, and about the same number of policemen marched behind Billy as he led us across the street to FAO Schwartz, where he declaimed against "WAR TOYS!" Part political and social activists, part revelatory circus of performance art, the parish continued its procession past the overweight shoppers with bags dangling and mouths ajar, delivering the Good News to them as we passed. By the time I was standing outside of the Coca Cola building, listening to another preacher describe the "killer" practices of that company in its manufacturing and union-busting (this part was made less clear by lack of a bull-horn, and the din of traffic and shopping bag covered onlookers), I realized an eager tourist behind me was aiming his camcorder right at my mug. But this was not your average Midwestern gawker: upon closer inspection, he had an NYPD pin affixed to his jacket. Suddenly I felt daring, like a shirtless spring breaker in front of MTV producers: I put on my most concerned-looking face and delivered my own on-camera plea to "put down that camera, and live your own, real life!" Nevertheless, this surveillance persisted in the Disney Store by other "tourists"; there was much to capture. As the Reverened pulled out his megaphone near a large display of stuffed animals and shirts to proclaim the fact that "Your children wear these clothes--Other children make these clothes!", cops began to shove some of the assembled out of the store, their hands twitching over plastic cuffsand pepper spray holsters. It was understandable in some ways, but it was also infuriating: a policeman I and another fellow spoke with afterwards could give no explanation for Billy's arrest, though he did suggest that he had committed a crime of some sort. One charge I heard was "blocking the sidewalk".
As some of us later stood on the corner of 55th and 5th, a heavy-set man with a small face and a trench coat fixed his digital camera on our group. There was no badge but there was also no mistaking this man's familiarity with the words "perp" and "stake-out." Tell me, is anti-consumerist, anti-supercorporate activism really a threat in this day of international terrorism? Or perhaps the better question is, is there any longer a difference between a group of terrorists armed with guns and knives trying to destroy a government and a group of concerned people armed with flyers and songs hoping to make fun of (and, god, have fun, at the expense of) multinational corporations? Perhaps there’s not much of a difference so long as consumerism means being American, “free” speech refers more to dollars than to liberties, and every day our government looks a lot more like one of those big name-brand corporations
-A. Pasternack
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004 20:24:07 -0400
Dear Present,
Reverend Billy was arrested on 56th and 5th after he resisted a gang of policemen who started shoving him, and his old-fashioned cheerleader bullhorn, out of the Disney Store. He had led us in there with the zeal of a fervent multinational CEO conquering a ripe market, except this is exactly what he isn't. A wavy mane of blonde hair on top of a white suit and a pair of black sneaks that can't stop bouncing, he had already attracted a crowd in front of the Equestrian statue near the Plaza with his anti-consumerist entreaties. "Brothers and Sisters, We Will not go into STARBUCKS to buy a LA-TTE! What happens to your money when you hand it over to them? You cannot TRACK it! It goes to the pockets of Howard Schultz! It goes to Ariel Sharon! It stays far away from the hands of the coffee pickers of the Nicaraguas, of the South Americas! Can I get a WIT-ness!" Cheers, shouts of “A-MEN!” Next, fifty of us, the (wonderfully festive and harmonic) Stop Shopping Choir, and about the same number of policemen marched behind Billy as he led us across the street to FAO Schwartz, where he declaimed against "WAR TOYS!" Part political and social activists, part revelatory circus of performance art, the parish continued its procession past the overweight shoppers with bags dangling and mouths ajar, delivering the Good News to them as we passed. By the time I was standing outside of the Coca Cola building, listening to another preacher describe the "killer" practices of that company in its manufacturing and union-busting (this part was made less clear by lack of a bull-horn, and the din of traffic and shopping bag covered onlookers), I realized an eager tourist behind me was aiming his camcorder right at my mug. But this was not your average Midwestern gawker: upon closer inspection, he had an NYPD pin affixed to his jacket. Suddenly I felt daring, like a shirtless spring breaker in front of MTV producers: I put on my most concerned-looking face and delivered my own on-camera plea to "put down that camera, and live your own, real life!" Nevertheless, this surveillance persisted in the Disney Store by other "tourists"; there was much to capture. As the Reverened pulled out his megaphone near a large display of stuffed animals and shirts to proclaim the fact that "Your children wear these clothes--Other children make these clothes!", cops began to shove some of the assembled out of the store, their hands twitching over plastic cuffsand pepper spray holsters. It was understandable in some ways, but it was also infuriating: a policeman I and another fellow spoke with afterwards could give no explanation for Billy's arrest, though he did suggest that he had committed a crime of some sort. One charge I heard was "blocking the sidewalk".
As some of us later stood on the corner of 55th and 5th, a heavy-set man with a small face and a trench coat fixed his digital camera on our group. There was no badge but there was also no mistaking this man's familiarity with the words "perp" and "stake-out." Tell me, is anti-consumerist, anti-supercorporate activism really a threat in this day of international terrorism? Or perhaps the better question is, is there any longer a difference between a group of terrorists armed with guns and knives trying to destroy a government and a group of concerned people armed with flyers and songs hoping to make fun of (and, god, have fun, at the expense of) multinational corporations? Perhaps there’s not much of a difference so long as consumerism means being American, “free” speech refers more to dollars than to liberties, and every day our government looks a lot more like one of those big name-brand corporations
-A. Pasternack
Greater Mongolia, by Ross Perlin
By Ross Perlin
In a curious aside that still confounds the majority of scholars, Sima Ting, in his Universal History of the Barbarian Hordes, writes that Tamerlane the Great, just hours before his death from excessive alcoholism and untreated battle wounds, proclaimed the coming of a Universal Empire of Greater Mongolia, slated to make geopolitical history exactly 666 years from the date of his own demise. Von Klapnick takes this story as a sign that the great warrior was delusional at death and forgot his own carefully crafted identity as a civilized, albeit ruthless, Persian autocrat. De Lopez—who sees Timur as the history-unique synthesis of barbarism and civilization, doomed to the dusts of the steppe—doubts the passage’s validity entirely. “It is clearly an invention,” he writes. “It is unthinkable that Timur’s passion for synthesis could have given way, at the eleventh hour, to the sirens of crude Grossdeutschland-type reveries.”
In a curious aside that still confounds the majority of scholars, Sima Ting, in his Universal History of the Barbarian Hordes, writes that Tamerlane the Great, just hours before his death from excessive alcoholism and untreated battle wounds, proclaimed the coming of a Universal Empire of Greater Mongolia, slated to make geopolitical history exactly 666 years from the date of his own demise. Von Klapnick takes this story as a sign that the great warrior was delusional at death and forgot his own carefully crafted identity as a civilized, albeit ruthless, Persian autocrat. De Lopez—who sees Timur as the history-unique synthesis of barbarism and civilization, doomed to the dusts of the steppe—doubts the passage’s validity entirely. “It is clearly an invention,” he writes. “It is unthinkable that Timur’s passion for synthesis could have given way, at the eleventh hour, to the sirens of crude Grossdeutschland-type reveries.”
John C. believes, however. He was an acquaintance of mine in
It was John C. who first alerted me to the passage in the Universal History. Though John C.’s family was ultimately of ambiguous national origin, his friends called him “the Kazakh” and he would often be mistaken for a Central Asian by people on the streets of
In one sense, there is no reason not to believe in the possibility of a Greater Mongolia. Timur’s own military successes, indeed, are almost a footnote to that series of Khans who gave us, in pyrotechnic display, the word kamikaze, the patchy Altaic family of languages, a few well-turned lines by Shelley, the labyrinthine corridors of the Russian mind. It seems strange that the almost flower-petal-like fall of the Mongol hordes upon history—it’s nonsense to see such excursions as anything more than improbable, imaginative brushstrokes across Eurasia—has given us, almost more than Alexander, Caesar, Qin Shi Huang, Napoleon, or Hitler, our idea of Universal Empire. Some argue that, more than the
Then perhaps the dream of John C., or his belief in the Timur anecdote, was not so odd. Between puffs at the hookah, he would explain with hands stretched wide how—half T.E. Lawrence, half resurrected Genghis—he would rally a mob in the Soviet-style central
“The palace will be here,” said John C. unemphatically, pointing to the Ministry of Agriculture Center for Cattle Disease Control. The Yukos man explained: “It is thought by the historian Ivanov to be the spot of Kublai Khan’s famous speech on the virtues of Mongol power.” “We’re going by train to see it tomorrrow,” said John C., turning to me. “Come.”
Hohehot, not even true
When we arrived, belched out of the monolithic, awfully ugly train station, we were immediately swamped by the usual taxi drivers, pedicab drivers, rickshaw peddlars, panhandlers without pans, children without mothers, people without limbs. But for these lost ones, no one seemed to be about. It was snowing ever so gently, but the Yukos man, almost shrilly, insisted that we turn our feet directly towards the Ministry of Agriculture Center for Cattle Disease Control. The wind blew in rippling sheets against our faces.
As we walked, I remembered what John C. had said to me one time about his affinity for the great Tamerlane. “I think this great project will come to fruit only with my own death,” he said. “666 years after. A Nestorian influence, possibly—the number of the devil. All of today’s cataclysms can be traced to the disjunction of East and West. All great men dream of Universal Empire.
I was maneuvering my mind around this so obvious paradox, this fallacy of logic, at the moment when we arrived in front of the massive concrete structure, almost windowless but for notches halfway up that might have been for archers. A sort of hulking concrete tablet of Cuneiform. The Yukos man caughed and took out a pack of cigarettes. “My king,” he said in the Mongolian dialect John C. had deemed most archaic, the one most likely to resemble the speech of Genghis. Then we all smoked. Una humped John C.’s leg as he gazed at the structure, no doubt picturing its destruction by dynamite or Greek fire and its replacement by some ziggurat of the steppes, some monument to the dream of the Future. I asked a doctor on his way in if there had been any sort of Mad Cow Disease scare this year. It seemed the only thing to ask.
Osip Mandelstam, soon to be purged in the wave of attacks against Soviet poets in 1936-37, is reputed to have spoken of his poetry as expressing “nostalgia for world culture.” I like to think that John C., whose future is so much larger and happier than ours, sometimes experiences his dream in that same form, as some sort of sickness for home. How else could he understand the descent of Little Green Men (they say it’s coming any day) as nothing more worrisome than the landing of tiny, beautiful Mongolian yurts upon the landscape of our world, as if those hordes of Sima Ting had disappeared one day in 1405 with Timur’s extinguishing breath and were now, in a spirit half of reunion half of revenge, coming home to the Empire Without Meaning—the only eternal one—they’d meant to establish all along.
Futurefarming: An interview with Amy Franceschini
By Alex Pasternack
Amy Franceschini is a new media artist and the founder of Futurefarmers, a collective of futuristic artists and designers. Her work—ranging from online exhibits to installations and printed materials—has been shown at all sorts of awesome physical loci, like Deitch Projects and at the Whitney Biennial, as well as online at futurefarmers.com. The website mainly plays host to a variety of other artists’ interactive work, including Josh On’s award-winning They Rule, which allows users to create maps of the relationships between the executives of large corporations (theyrule.net). Aside from facilitating online work, Futurefarmers does real life exhibits and print work for a wide range of publications and companies.
Amy is currently teaching New Media classes @ the San Francisco Art Institute and
---
hi alex.
i think this was the longest interview ever.
i got really tired towards the end, so maybe the questions don't make any sense.
Ok. Here goes--perhaps you should read over all of them to get a sense
of the flow, and rearrange the order if necessary.
What does future farmers mean? Why and how did you start it, what's its
purpose now and in the future?
Futurefarmers means what ever you want it to mean. For me it is an autobiographical term which points towards my past and my future. Coming from a paradoxical background of organic farming mother and pesticide farming father, i grew up in a mix of conflicting ideologies. While both my parents were growing food in extremely different ways, their approaches equally had impact on my political and social views. When i started Futurefarmers in 1995, biotechnology was starting to boom and i was scared. I was deeply interested in food production at the time and i wanted to live and work on a Permaculture farm as soon as possible. so i named my company Futurefarmers in hopes that it would bring me closer to my dream. To this day, i am still interested in food production, distribution and consumption. I still do not live on a farm, but i believe that wherever i am must be that farm. It is a state of being rather than a physical place. It is a road to cultivating my consciousness and others.
I started "Futurefarmers" because i wanted to work with people and use this platform of collaboration to learn and foster relationships.
How do you define digital art?
I think a good way to answer this is first with the definition of analog: The principal feature of analog representations is that they are continuous. In contrast, digital representations consist of values measured at discrete intervals.
Digital watches are called digital because they go from one value to the next without displaying all intermediate values. Consequently, they can display only a finite number of times of the day. In contrast, watches with hands are analog, because the hands move continuously around the clock face. As the minute hand goes around, it not only touches the numbers 1 through 12, but also the infinite number of points in between.
and then secondly with a definition of digitial: Describes any system based on discontinuous data or events. Computers are digital machines because at their most basic level they can distinguish between just two values, 0 and 1, or off and on. There is no simple way to represent all the values in between, such as 0.25. All data that a computer processes must be encoded digitally, as a series of zeroes and ones.
A lot of digital art on your site emphasizes interaction and contingency--is this typical for interactive art? How much control do you think the spectator of the artwork ought to have?
I think this is completely dependant on the project or concept. I love the idea that the user has complete control over a piece or space, so much so that he/she becomes the author, and that the artist is more of a facilitator.
One aspect of "digital" art that i enjoy is the notion of dispersed authorship. Roy Ascott said, "Partners in systems of dispersed authorship do not have to be artists". Mail art was much the same.
And how does digital art change--how will it change--that level of interaction?
For instance, wireless networks and the internet connected to databases can facilitate immediate information distribution to a large number of people and this information can change rapidly. This can potentially be very powerful to activist groups, parents and any organization who needs to have a flexible information flow.
I think it is important to use technology to connect people. I think communiculture.org is a good example of a tool which allows people to interact and have impact on each other's opinion due to visualizing the patterns of opinion and giving users the ability to annotate their opinions. I
How do you see the connection between interactive digital art and identity formation? On community building? On political awareness?
i think i answered this question above, but i still thinking cooking a good meal with others is the highest form of interaction. The interface of food offers a low threshold for people to cross in order to become part of a community. I think part of a potluck is the best form of this analog happening which is a good model for online communities or any community.
Does the computer make art more accessible?
Maybe...I ask myself this question this quite often. But if think about how little people still have access to a computer, i would answer no. As technology gets cheaper and more accessible, yes i think the possibility of artists using this channel to reach a broader audience will be achieved.
I just saw the Whitney Biennale, where everything seemed either digitally conscious, digitally made, or digitally influenced?
I don't think you can really look at art these days without projecting "digitally conscious, digitally made, or digitally influenced" into it. These descriptions are part of our psyche and are embedded in our cultural looking glasses. If anything, i think a higher appreciation for craft has evolved out of the machine made precision objects that we interface with due to technological innovation.
I saw the whitney show as well and i felt the "craft" was what i came away with.
Are computers a complete blessing for future art? Is there any going back to the paintbrush, the canvas, the sculptor's hand, the photograph? What's the place of traditional art forms in your vision of the future? Following your shows/events like Playshop, what role do you envision future art playing in museums? Or: what role will the museum play in the future?
I think the museum will always serve a certain audience. I think many different types of "museums" will form. I think the type of artwork many digital artists are doing don't need a physical home, but they do need support. My utopian vision is that museums will start to collaborate and co-present works. I think the "museum" is at the top of the food chain. It is time it realizes that its artists actually spawn from non-profit, artist run spaces. The sweat and blood of these spaces is the foundation for large museums. I think an interface between these spaces needs to be created.
What other types of media/forms are being used/will be used besides the computer to make art and to look at and interact with art? (I notice a lot of the video game in your site for instance) Do you see other senses being appealed to in the future besides the visual and audio?
I think many artists and myself are using sensors and networked objects to reveal social patterns in public spaces and in networks.
How does print work fit into the future?
I still enjoy print work. I love the nature of the medium. I feel that printed matter is an essential bridge to artwork and its audience. I think the extended presence of a book on a shelf is invaluable.
Who are your favorite artists, digital and otherwise? Or: what's excited
you in the art/computer world recently?
Hans haacke, Simon Starling, Carston Holler, Jorgen Leth
What sort of projects are you guys working on now?
At the moment we are working on several projects among ourselves. Josh is working on They Rule V.2, I am working on the Fingerprint Maze Game and a wireless Workshop here in Gent Belgium as well as developing a curriculum for my classes next year at Stanford and
San Francisco Art Institute.
What is your current involvement in the site/projects/artworks? What else are you up to?
I am very interested at the moment in Physical Computing and learning some basic electronics. I have been spending a lot of time thinking about how we use technology and how we can use it to create community and connect people. I feel highly critical of its use at the moment. I am working on a project with David Lu at the moment which scans peoples fingerprints and turns them into a 3d environment/labyrinth/maze which they can wander through. It is sort of a personalized 3d environment.
I have also been working with a biologist, Jonathan Meuser from UC Davis to learn about Algae/Hydrogen production. Jonathan built a working model of the system at a show we recently had in
Are we living in the future now?
It is April 27,
So what excites you most about the future?
The possibility of alternative energy sources. The fact that our fossil fuel supply is diminshing more rapidly than we expected is both scary and exciting. I hope it will force us to be creative in finding new ways to harvest energy from wind and sun and ALGAE!!
-- Amy Franceschini, Founder
Futurefarmers: Cultivating Your Consciousness
-----------------------------------------------------------------
499 Alabama Street, #114 San Francisco CA 94110
http://www.futurefarmers.com/
http://www.antiwargame.org
http://www.atlasmagazine.com/
http://www.theyrule.net
.................................................................
ph/ fx 415.552.2124
Barber Story
By Colin Jost
“I usually go to
“That’s really fucking crazy.”
Interview with a Rapper: Eyedea
I had the nerve to walk up to one of the greatest rappers ever and ask him for an interview. He turned out to be a really nice guy. He took all of my questions seriously, and didn’t try to make me feel stupid. So I ended up not feeling stupid, just kind of lame and passionless in comparison. This rapper is a little younger than I am, and I’m no fogy, but he has already done what most will never do: 1) found something he loves doing, 2) found other people who love doing the same thing, and 3) kicked all their asses at it. Anyway, this rapper’s name is Eyedea, and with his friend and musical cohort DJ Abilities, he has made quite a stir in the so-called “underground hip-hop scene,” and is beginning to poke through to the more luminous mainstream. Eyedea is maybe best known for his massive freestyle skills, and having won several national competitions (Abilities is also heavily medalled in the DJing arena), has helped his march into the spotlight. I caught him after Game Night, a weekly event he organized with some friends at a record store in the Twin Cities to have fun, show off, and work on their verbal improvisational skillz in front of a hometown audience. I had never seen anything like it –most freestyle events are either competitive or unstructured, but this was more like witnessing soccer practice for MCs. After the fun and games were over, Eyedea had the generosity to talk to me about what’s most important to him in the world.
Present: First I wanted to ask about what you were saying earlier on stage—that the energy changes, everything changes when people are watching…
Eyedea: You always have this thing in the back of your head when there’s people there that you need to entertain people. Sometimes it’s hard to find the balance between being like, entertaining to outside people and also climaxing as an artist. I think good jazz musicians always could do it…That’s what I really want rap to be, like a freestyle—I want it to be like a jazz jam session. I just don’t think that anybody I know is even good enough to really do it that way – there’s little glimpses of it…but you look at like John Coltrane who could just pick up the horn and play, and it’d be amazing no matter what the circumstances.
Present: So it’s like no one’s really mastered the instrument of the voice?
Eyedea: I don’t really think so. I think the difference between playing notes – a C is a C – but I can’t just go “blah” – I have to make the word make sense with the structure and it’s very similar to making a chord progression make sense, but it’s almost – it’s just different, you know –
Present: And each time you say a word it’s different…
Eyedea: …it has different meanings. But we fall into the same shit, everybody that freestyles falls into these same patterns. That’s what this night is about—is about getting away from all that and trying to really expand.
N: So when you impose the structure, how does that change it?
E: The easiest way to fall into the pattern is when you’re trying to impress somebody, right, because you’re just like, okay ‘my main goal is, I’m going there’ and then when you start going in that same place that you’ve been, if it’s working you’re like, ‘oh this is working,’ but tonight it doesn’t matter if it’s working or not because the goal is not to ‘work’ – the goal is to get it up –
Present asks a long-winded, awkward question about battling:
Yeah, sometimes they get ‘shook.’ That’s the best part about a battle. Last week we did a lot of battles, and my thing was, I’m not going to say anything about like what I can see on you, but I’m going to tell a story about making you sit in the corner and watching you pout all night, and you really start to see how that can get under someone’s skin in a serious way, not because you’re making fun of their teeth but because you’re like breaking down their confidence. You’re basically saying…I started saying shit like, ‘What, did you take testosterone pills? Why you so excited?” You know, shit like that. And that’s how like, out of L.A., a lot of people I respect that’s how they battle, they don’t do punch lines, that’s not even accepted, it’s overlooked like that, but motherfuckers will tell a story about how they’re the teacher and you’re the student and you were late to class and they’re going to beat the shit out of you for it.
Present: And then when they rap, you can tell they’ve been shaken—I mean shook…
Eyedea: Yeah…That’s the biggest thing about winning a battle—you want to make the person beat them self before they even get to you. If you can go first and make them feel like they’re not as much of a man as they were before, even if you’re not rapping about them, even if you just come off so nice that they go, ‘fuck I can’t do that’ – I’ve had people just hand me the mic – a couple different times.
Present: Do you think that being able to freestyle gives you more credibility as a rapper? Could you be a good rapper who writes but who can’t freestyle?
Eyedea: I mean, yeah you definitely could be, because it’s all about the end result, if you are a good rapper you’re good, if you’re a good musician you’re good. It’s like, are you a good musician if you can’t play?
Present: Right, but some musicians can’t improvise, but they can still play…
Eyedea: But if they could write…Naw, but I don’t believe that. I believe if you can write then you can improvise – cause how do you write? …. A chord change is very simple, physically, on a piano for instance – anybody who can play piano can make a chord change, and that’s freestyling, that’s improvising. Now, is Paul McCartney Herbie Hancock? No. Not everyone can master it at that level. It’s intertwined—I think the reason why rappers that are really good at writing can’t freestyle is just because they don’t try. They could—I guarantee any single rapper that I think is a good writer, they can pull shit out of their brain, and pull patterns out of their head, it’s just some people don’t care enough about it. And that’s cool, go do what you do.
Present: When you’re putting stuff on record, do you just come up with it off the top?
Eyedea: If I’m writing music—like right now I’m writing music—I’m writing it all from scratch, and as I’m writing it, I’m writing the words. Right now I’m writing pretty much everything from scratch on the piano, everything’s live. But that’s a record that’ going to come out probably next year. The shit that me and Abilities got coming out though there’s a lot of improv on it, a lot of rapping back and forth, a lot of shit that’s never been done with scratching.
Present: When’s that coming out?
Eyedea: We’re looking at late March, like March 23rd (2004). On another note though, if I don’t know exactly where to go, I play the beat and I freestyle to it for two hours – and I pick out the patterns, I pick out the words, I pick out the feelings – I always record it.
Present: Do you rap everyday?
Eyedea: I pretty much do music every day. My studio’s right across from my room, I wake up and I’m in there usually. Otherwise I’m dealing with rap shit – you gotta do a lot of other shit if you want to be “self-made” and successful and shit.
Present: You’ve seen a lot of different places; do you think
Eyedea: I really do—there’s an ethic about independent music here that was stronger in other cities earlier—but right here we’ve got some special shit going on. I don’t even think it’s just hip-hop—indie rock, art, even film—we just have a cool thing going on here.
Present: So you’re not leaving anytime soon…
Eyedea: I’m not leaving. But see, the reason I’m not going to leave is because like I said, I wake up, my studio’s across my thing. No matter where I am, that’s the goal, with a studio across the thing. Whether I’m in
Present: What do you think of people who call your music “emo rap”?
Eyedea: I don’t make the names. I make the music; it’s their job to put it into a category. None of that shit is my job—it’s not even my job when they start saying this isn’t even rap music. It’s still not my job to name it. None of that shit really matters.
One record that I make very soon, people will be like, “That’s not rap,” but for me, I still try to make rap music, and I try to make really good rap music, that sounds like, wow, “This is the Beatles”
To me hip hop is a bangin-ass beat and hard-ass rhymes. I don’t care what you’re talking about, I don’t care what you’re doing, just hard rhymes.
That’s not to say that a group like Anticon [a hip hop crew based out of the Bay Area that some claim is not true hip hop] is at fault for all the wack shit that tries to be like them—because there’s really wack shit that tries to. But I meet people who tell me that I’m their favorite, and when I hear what they’re doing, I’m like damn, what am I inspiring? But that’s not my job. Making rap like the Beatles, that’s my job.
Present: So inspiring people is not something you try to do?
Eyedea: I want to inspire people, I want my music to be inspiring, but I don’t want it to necessarily be inspiring them to make music. I could really give a shit what it makes people do. But I want it to move something, because when I make it, it moves me. No matter what you’re always subconsciously searching for acceptance, and if somebody’s like, you know, “I listen to your thing while I paint my picture, I listen to your thing and I’m fucking depressed, I listen to your thing and I’m fucking excited,” cause that’s it, that’s me painting my picture, being depressed and excited, you know. So I’m just like oh, okay, you are a person who can feel, you’re not as robotic as other people, word. And you’re with me. It’s basically—for lack of a better term, it’s like when you’re in high school, and your like, ‘I want people to think I’m cool.’ Why do you really want that? It’s really because you have this weird hollowness, and you’re unsure of so many things that if people are on your side about things, you’ll be like, “Yeah, maybe I got it together.” That’s what all art stems from, though.
Present: I like that. It seems like there are some people who think, “I’m this isolated genius creating art for its own sake…”
Eyedea: That is so bullshit, it’s always bullshit. Everybody that says that, I’m like, cool, go be John Coltrane but don’t tell me about it. Stay in your basement. Nobody does that. There are people who do that—I know artists who paint strictly for themselves. It’s like me boxing or something, having a boxing bag in my basement. I hit the motherfucker. I don’t go and claim I’m a boxer or even tell people about it, but when I’m frustrated, I hit the shit. I know people who when they’re frustrated, write poetry. They never read it, they never tell me about it, and that helps them. That’s cool, I’m in to that.
But when people say “for art’s sake” they act like it’s this thing, but it’s not. It’s your motivation to become greater than you are. Whether you’re painting, whether you’re writing speeches or climbing the political ladder…motivation. That ambition and that motivation stems from the discontentment you have with yourself. Because if you were content why are you motivated?
So that’s the thing is that (the background music suddenly cuts off, and Eyedea’s voice is now inappropriately loud)...yeah…that’s the way I feel about that shit.
Present: How do you feel about Anticon stuff?
Eyedea: I don’t like—I don’t think it’s—I think there’s this long problem that people have with each other on a personal level—but besides that, I just don’t feel like in general it’s artistically next-level. But that’s not to say that most motherfuckers aren’t.
Note: While rumors about Eyedea having beaten Eminem in a freestyle battle may be unfounded, if you put an Eyedea record on one set of speakers facing another set that is playing Eminem, or any other MC for that matter, the latter set of speakers will explode, and then the shrapnel will melt.
Eyedea Fun Facts :
“Real” name: Mike Averill
Age: 21
Stuff he’s done at a younger age than me: A lot
Hometown: St. Paul, Minnesota
Incomplete Discography: First Born 2001, The Many Faces of Oliver Hart 2002, E&A 2004, as well as numerous underground collections and mix-tapes that you’ll never find because you’re not that cool.
Graduation Speech, by P.T. La Ronde
GRADUATION SPEECH
By P.T. La Ronde
O classmates, classmates.
As we leap toward the future, will we abandon the past? Will we remember these years for the rest of our lives? We lived it up; now will we ever live it down! Ha-ha, I don’t care. I write to you from bed, where I lie recovering from some disease.
I keep slipping in and out of a delirium, and I am having trouble with this speech:
Graduation: you got what you wanted, didn’t you.
Didn’t you? And now there you are: sitting in the shade under a great white tent.
The grass has never looked greener. And there you are on the other side!
Welcome to this ceremony, friends. This is a special time for all of us.
For them and for us: for we’re all here, we’re in it together,
and that’s no coincidence.
This event is about the past, and the future.
That’s what the man said: an ending, but also a beginning:
Well, bullshit. It’s nothing special. Just another day in June. There will be a day like this down the street tomorrow.
So first of all: stop planning things. Consider how dreadful they can be.
In a few years I will blame you for that, but first let’s see if we agree.
I hate the government. I won’t get into specifics, just to say they took away
my scissors at the airport. Without just cause, that’s how I feel about it.
And speaking more broadly,
I just don’t know anymore.
I would betray my education, my ambitions, my class—of 2004—in a heart
for a little boredom, a little peace of mind. Do you feel the same?
Or is that disingenuous.
OK, I will be honest.
It is hard to imagine liking you, 20 years from now. I already don’t like you then,
and I don’t see how that will change.
You must understand: at 32, some with jobs, some between jobs,
now you think it’s OK to think/say things you wouldn’t have said. “Honestly…”
I don’t want to hear it.
You will have the rotund ease of living you anticipated, that’s obvious.
You are married to yourselves, you look like each other, but it’s not that I mind.
It’s not the complacency—oh no: it’s the sinking feeling.
Now you are being too honest.
Slipping away… always already slipping away…
We all should have read some more philosophy, that would have saved us.
Read it sophomore year, later is too late.
But really, predicting, forestalling the apocalypse tuckers me out.
Why bother with that way of thinking?
My speculative imagination wants something to make it feel important, but that’s hard.
And who cares what ends up taking place when we’ll have stopped paying attention.
At least I know that age will improve me:
not wiser, but more vital. More exercise.
Better sex, better reflexes. Age can have that effect.
I may never read as much philosophy… or understand it as well…
I might lose my sensibilities. At least I know it won’t be a care to me then!
And at 45, you will be winking at each other. It is repulsive now,
but it will be a comfort then.
I guess that’s all.
I’d like to express-mail you my box of maudlin experiences, but I’m not sure they would arrive in time, or if the box would make it through inspection.So I’d like to close with something that one of our friends wrote before she disappeared: a love letter.
Here’s to things I can’t understand.
Dear Silly Philosophy,
Embrace me, you warm thing.
Feed me, my soul is growling.
I’ll swallow you and you
Better swallow me whole.
Everything!
Take me somewhere, take the whole thing,
endlessly lead me on.
You are the best-looking chance I have got.
20. The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing
other than the essence consummating itself
through its development.
--G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
So much of this is beyond me:
the light, the dogma, everything.
Still, I want to end my days writhing breathlessly in your grasp.
Please respond soon—
I am growing impatient with you.
Passionately,
Yours.
-- Madeline Elfenbein
When You Move Into Focus
when you move into focus
toward the thing there
all sight is opened in this way:
inside the room with one small hole
there is light that folds light on itself
like pages rocking in the arms of a book.
and here you see why they retreat from the rain:
it is not the fear of water,
it is simply the need to wait.
Interview with Gary Christmas, by Irin Carmon
Gary Christmas may have lost his twin, but at least he has the keys to every house in the neighborhood. Seventy-two years old, with a shaved white Mohawk and a penchant for yellow sweaters and late night partying, the American-born ex-showbiz star spends most of his days chilling outside his store Backstage in
And Christmas was not your real name.
Christmas is our real name. And I was born on New Year’s Eve, right before 12. And my mother kept her pace, and at
Your mother’s name was Mary.
Mary. Yeah. We had quite an exciting life. Of course, my father didn’t approve of the type of life we were going to go into, but after that we got permission to go into show business.
How old were you?
Oh, twelve, thirteen, fourteen.
Why did you want to go into show business?
I thought it would be nice. I thought we had talent. And being twins, we had the most successful chance of being well-known, with a name like that. My brother had a great voice, I was a better dancer, so it was great. He could appeal to one side of the audience and I could appeal to the other side. I was funny, he was dramatic. We made South Pacific, a couple of Calypso movies in
Indian movies?
You know, subjects like that. And we were horrible.
What do you mean, you were horrible?
Well, I couldn’t ride a horse. We had the Indian look, but I was scared of horses. But to get a long story short, what was interesting was that we were twins, we had a little bit of talent, and we got along. We did a lot of things theatrically. Everybody recognized us with a name like that.
So what would you do in your act?
We would do a duet. If you hit them hard [sings] “Christmas twins
We would put wigs on, pull people onstage, jump on the girls, jump on the guys. And then we would say, “Oh shit, that’s our freak show.” And everybody would come onstage and dance. People like to be included. Being artists, we had to smell our audiences and say, this evening we do this number, that number.
We did movies. We did a movie in
Yeah, you showed me the Playboy. Let’s do it in order. We’ll get there.
So we worked all around the world. But our biggest dream was to have a shop somewhere in the world. So we came to
What day was this?
We left
And then we got off at Tangiers. And the whole tour was picked from people all across the
Can you imagine two Americans getting off at Tangiers at
During this interview, my girlfriend, which is Cindy here, which is my lifesaver, my soul keeper, my thing—I’ll tell you a little bit more information about her later. She just walked in with two scoops of strawberry ice cream, and we’re sitting here eating like pigs. And I really appreciate it. Where’s my spoon?
Let me get to the point. We were very talented and very commercial, and we were very lucky and blessed to be able to work in those countries around the world. But I don’t want to sit here and say, Oh, we knew this one when we knew that one. We knew Johnny Mathis, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder – all those people we’ve known in our show business, you know? But I don’t want to sit here and list people, because that sounds so “ego tripper.” We’ve met friends in show business, okay?
If I sit here and jump to the end of the story, I enjoyed my life. I missed the passing of my brother, because we were very close.
Why did you choose
You’re free here. There’s no segregation. They’re tolerant. You can be yourself. You can be whoever you want to do. If you’re a little clever, you can have a nice life here. And we have a nice life here, living over the shop, designing dresses and making clothes. Doing interviews and being in different magazines. Doing shows ourselves. We’re doing a small film on the life of my brother and I [with Dutch filmmaker Hugo Metsers].
If you look at my fingers, I lost this finger when I was playing football when I was very young. But I had crocheted before then, and I said, “Oh, what am I going to do? My finger’s missing. Can I actually start again?” Well, I got the operation, I picked my needles up, and I could crochet better.
I like to express myself with dresses with wires in them and big hats. You know, then I started doing clothes for the people here, for people in show business. And I’m sort of like a guru. Because I’m a little spiritual, a little psychic. I don’t know if you’re religious or not, whatever is going through your mind, but God has put me in here, in this shop, to help people. I do little healings with people. I sit here day after day helping people and I’m loving doing it, and it gives me satisfaction that I’m here for a reason. It’s a lot of responsibility, takes a lot of energy from me, but the result I get is that people say, “Hey Gary, man, thank you very much.”
So when did you start to have this sort of guru power?
I had it for awhile when I was younger, then it passed away. Then my brother had it quite good. And then back and forth. I always call myself a witch, you know? Witch. And then my brother had it and gave it to me, gave me part of it, then I developed it. [Tries to quiet noise outside.] Hey guys! Hey guys!
Cindy: Oh, shut up.
At least we have fun here. I had to tell my friends outside to keep their goddamn mouths shut, I’m doing an interview. You should see me when I’m angry. I throw things. But this is serious business, and I want to give a good impression …. This can’t be a shit thing. Ask me some more questions.
Anyway, people have troubles in their life. If I look at you, I see the name Martha.
Do you know Martha?
Um… I know one.
You see! You’re not sure about her friendship, at all, because of some sort of problem you had with her. And you should apologize, or she should apologize. But the situation is like this, and I think when you do go back, make an effort to make friends with her again. Because you have it on your conscience. And she has it on her conscience. So just go out for a drink and tell her.
In the Dutch article you showed me, they called you the Indian Healer. Is that because you have Indian blood, or is that just something they…
I sort of heal people. I hate the word … I hate to even be considered a spiritualist or a healer. I’m just someone there who tries to help people. I’m a guy who sits around and like talking to people, and I like to help them, I like to give them something…
I don’t want to be god or anything like that. I just want to inspire people to live their dreams. People don’t live their dreams.
Tell me about how you were in Dutch Playboy.
We had the Ex-Porno Star show. This photo here was from last year. So I made very good friends, because all of the girls in the show—you know, I’m a slut.
What does that mean, you’re a slut?
Well, I mean, I play around, you know. And all these girls were little friends of mine. We used to do bad little kinky things. We used to have fun….I just told you I sleep around! I sleep around.
Even today? At your age?
People ask, “
I’ve had boyfriends, I’ve had girlfriends—I like life. And I’m not ashamed to say I do what I want to do and I have friends and mess around! … I don’t think I could be with one person, girl or boy, for a long time. I get bored too quickly.
Have you ever been in love?
Every day! I’m in love with love. I think that everybody needs a certain kind of love. And I try to give them the kind they need.
How did it get from Ex Porno Star to Playboy?
Because I’m talented. No, really, I’m funny. And I like screwing around. How can I say it without sounding – people love me. I dress crazy. They always want to invite me to the party because I’m a good dancer. I’m special. I’m a character who does a lot of things. I dress very weird. And when my brother was here, there where so many interviews with us where they said, “Well, finally we have some glamour in
Because we wore gold. My brother wore headpieces. We gave
You seem to have a lot of friends who are younger than you.
That’s what keeps me young. But I’m a good dancer, that’s why the girls love me. They say, “Come on,
I just had a desa-view. Do you know what that is?
No.
Yes, you do. Desa view, when you see something that already happened.
Oh, déjà vu!
I dreamt this scene. It came back.
Tell me about the sandwiches.
I came up with all the names for the menu. The Gang Bang Sandwich, see that? “Meat, meat and more meat.” Big Bertha is named after the nurse we had. She had tits out to here. She nursed me and Greg at the same time, and I turned to Greg and said, “If I had teeth, I would bite that bitch’s breasts.” Because she wasn’t nice at all! I named the sandwich Big Bertha because she had two big tits. Hi, Edward.
Edward: Oh, I see this is a very serious interview we’re having.
[takes me through the store, from the fractured plastic skyline of
In our act, we did Ike and Tina Turner. See my brother? My brother’s right there. And I’m Ike with the mustache.
How come he got to be Tina?
My brother? Cause he had better legs than I did. And he looked good in that dress.
-- Irin Carmon
How To Amputate A Leg, by Clifton
From A System of Practical Surgery, Fifth Edition by Sir. W. Fergusson, M.D. (1870)
“Open the footlocker. Brett, are you still with us? Brett.”
“Uhn. Yeah.”
“Hang in there. We’re going to do something about your leg.”
“Deke. Deke, I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Talk.”
“No, I mean, over here.”
“What do we have in that locker, Hem?”
“Come over here, Deke, will you?” Deke walks over to where Hem is crouched by the footlocker.
“What’s in here? We need to work fast. He looks like he’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Deke.”
“We’ll need lots of bandages, good. Maybe sutures—”
“Deke. You can’t sew that leg up.”
“What.”
“You can’t sew that leg up.”
“We can’t do nothing, Hem.”
“No. Not nothing. We’ve got to take it off.”
“What?”
“Look, the guy’s leg is torn to bits. It’s not going to heal like that. The only way we can keep him from bleeding to death is to amputate it.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Is he still awake? Brett. Brett. Give him some water.”
Deke goes around the table to face Brett, avoiding looking at his right leg. Brett looks up at him blankly. Deke unscrews his canteen and pours water in Brett’s mouth. He tightens the tourniquet on Brett’s thigh. Hem stands up from the footlocker, reading from a green book. The book’s pages look brittle and brown. The book’s cover is falling off. He holds the book out to Deke, open to the page he had been reading.
“Read this out loud, and I’ll follow your instructions.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Brett,” Hem says. “Brett, can you hear me? We’re going to have to take the leg. Brett? Do you understand?” Brett nods, closing his eyes. He lays his head back on the table.
Hem walks back to the footlocker, taking out a bottle of morphine and syringe. He hands these to Deke. He then takes out bandages, a long knife, and a saw.
“Give him some morphine.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Some.”
Deke injects Brett’s arm with the morphine. Brett has already gone slack.
Hem lays the instruments next to Brett on the table.
“Start reading.”
“You’re really going to do this?”
“Our truck is down by the roadblock, burning. Even if we had another way out, the rebels would stop us outside of town. And even if we fast-talked the rebels into letting us through, it’d be four hours to the nearest doctor. On foot. No, this leg isn’t going to get him there. He’d die before nightfall. Start reading.”
“‘Much has been said about the necessity of the surgeon’s standing on a certain side of the limb in these operations. Some of the highest authorities have contended for the one side; others, equally good, have asserted that the opposite is better.’ Christ, who wrote this book? Dr. Livingstone?”
“Another legacy of colonialism.”
“Like this war.”
“Just be thankful it’s in English. Read the part about actually doing the thing.”
“‘Amputation at the knee may be done in the following manner: The circulation being arrested as usual—”
“Tourniquet.”
“Yeah. ‘The circulation being arrested as usual, the surgeon, standing on the outer or inner side of the limb as he may feel disposed, should lay the heel of an ordinary amputating knife—’ is that what that is?”
“I think so.”
“‘The heel of an ordinary amputating knife over one condoyle of the femur, draw the blade to the other condoyle across the front of the joint in a lunated course, on a level with the middle of the patella, and divide the tissues down to the bones; the little flap—”
“Ok, wait. Let me do this.”
Hem grasps the handle of the long knife and lays his other hand on Brett’s shin. He’s sweating but his hands are steady.
“All right, so what the hell am I supposed to do with my hands?” Hem shouts over his shoulder.
“Cut!” says Hans, the director. “What?”
“What is this supposed to look like, with my hands?”
“We’re not shooting your hands. We’re going to be seeing your face. Your hard, beautiful face, twisted in disgust and determination.”
“But I have to be doing something with my hands.”
“Just make a cutting motion. I don’t know. We’ll edit it.”
“Fine.”
“Take it from ‘the heel of an ordinary.’”
“‘The heel of an ordinary amputating knife over one condoyle of the femur, draw the blade to the other condoyle across the front of the joint in a lunated course, on a level with the middle of the patella, and divide the tissues down to the bones; the little flap—”
“Ok, wait. Let me do this.” Hem makes a cutting motion with his hands, holding the long knife above Brett’s knee.
“Cut! Look, Brett, you’re not unconscious, you’ve just been sedated. We need you writhing in unimaginable pain and making noises of unintelligible horror. This is pathos.”
“Ok, boss. Writhing and horror, got it.” Brett winks at Hans.
“From ‘Ok, wait.’”
“Ok, wait, let me do this.” Hem makes a cutting motion with his hands. Brett writhes in unimaginable pain, emitting short guttural noises of unintelligible horror. “What’s next?”
“‘The little flap should then be pulled upwards, and the knife should again be applied so as to cut the quadriceps extensor immediately above the patella.”
“Ok.” In Hem’s face, stolid determination forces down evident nausea. His arms continue their cutting motion.
“No, Hem. The quadriceps extensor.”
“Oh. Oh, right.”
“Stop! Not that way!” says the medical consultant, Dr. Frank Levine.
“Cut! What is it?”
“You’re not sawing at this point, you’re just cutting with the knife. Flesh, not bone. You shouldn’t be jerking back and forth like that with your arms.”
“Ok, fine. Cutting, not sawing.”
Brett props himself up on one elbow. “Can I have a Pepsi?”
“No, you can’t have a Pepsi. We’re finishing this fucking take first.”
Brett lies back down.
“From ‘the quadriceps extensor.’ Cutting, not sawing.”
“No, Hem. The quadriceps extensor.”
“Oh. Oh, right.”
Hem moves his arms to the left of where they had been and continues his cutting motion. “Ok, keep reading.”
“‘The point of the blade should then be pushed in at one end of the wound, thrust behind the femur, and made to appear at the other end, when it should be carried downwards in the line indicated on drawing 277—’”
“Let me see.”
Deke holds the book out to Hem, to show him the illustration. A second camera gets a tight shot of this page, on which an engraving depicts a leg being grasped at the shin by a hand with its surgeon’s cuffs turned up to the wrist and dotted lines describing arcs around the knee. The artist took particular care with the draping of the dressings rolled up at the thigh.
“Ok, got it.” Hem continues his cutting motion, moving further down Brett’s leg. On his face is a look of detached revulsion. Deke glances down at what Hem is doing and turns to retch in the corner. Brett amplifies his noises of unintelligible horror. Hem lays down the knife and picks up the saw.