Some of you may know that I’m currently up to my ears in grad school applications. Luckily, posting on The Millions has a salutary effect on me, and also, I just finished a book, so I need to write about it. Jamesland opens with Alice, great-granddaughter of philosopher William James, having an odd waking dream of a deer in her house. Alice fixates on the deer as a portent of a coming change in her life, and the very next day her life begins to change slowly and inexorably. The book does not dwell on the supernatural, though it does have a bemused dialogue with the otherworldly throughout. Mostly it is about three forty-somethings whose social and professional lives are deteriorating and reconfiguring. I’d call it a mid-life crisis, but these characters have that quality, peculiar to Californians, of being youthful, unserious adults. The book is mostly set on the East Side of Los Angeles in neighborhoods that I know well. It was great to read a book that addresses a somewhat larger Los Angeles than usual. Movie stars are around, and Hollywood is nearby, but they are just parts of the great stew of the city, things that are noticed but after a while not accorded any greater importance than things like Griffith Park or the LA River. The only other book that I have read that successfully turns LA’s flashy side into just another bit of peripheral scenery is T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain. Huneven is well-known in Los Angeles as the food critic for the LA Weekly, and the way she writes about food in this book is magnificent. Pete (who along with Helen, a modern sort of minister, are the other two wayward adults) is a former near-celebrity chef who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, suicide attempt combo. His character is both abrasive and charming, the type of person who makes you nervous the moment he steps into the room. As he coaxes himself back into the functioning world, he takes up cooking again, and this is the venue for Huneven’s descriptions of foods. It was nice to see that Huneven did not place this book firmly in the world of food and restaurants in the way that many writers tend to crib from their day jobs. Instead, Huneven manages to weave her knowledge skillfully into the larger narrative. The book itself is a rather satisfying meal, best taken over a few languorous days on a sunny balcony or sitting on a park bench.
My review of Jamesland by Michelle Huneven
Unlikely Connections: Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs
If judging a book by its title, a reader might opine that Where Art Belongs, the eighth volume in Semiotext(e)’s “intervention series” would include: a consideration of spaces and contexts conducive to creativity and also art making, a list of places that inhibit art appreciation or stifle creativity, as well as, a discussion of the aforementioned spaces, places, and contexts, that leads to a conclusion of where, in fact art belongs.
However, Chris Kraus’s book by this very-same title does not offer manifestos, sweeping judgments, prescriptions, nor proscriptions. Kraus’s nuanced approach is more akin to a cultural anthropologist who considers creativity in its natural habitats, the spaces where art comes into being; where collaborative and destructive energies merge to mount momentary feats of brilliance; where repetitive, nearly obsessive photographs of landscapes shot through windshields of moving cars, or within New York apartments (dust bunnies included) form an oeuvre; where absence lends presence; where words equal art, and art envelops all.
It seems that Kraus believes no space is entirely barren, or incapable of sparking inspiration. For example, she examines the creativity of American Apparel founder Dov Charney, and aligns his creative corporate vision with the 1960’s artists collective Chia Jen, or The Family, as described by member (and choreographer) Simone Forti: “The life we lived in common provided a matrix for the profuse visions we lived out in various twilights.” Kraus posits that in contemporary culture, corporations like Charney’s may channel creative energy that once resided solely within art’s realm, and in doing so become a kind of art. She goes on to say:
From its manufacturing philosophy of vertical integration to its marketing and the deliberate location of its gallery-esque stores in urban neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification, American Apparel resonates against the economic and psychogeographic state of the culture like a gigantic work of conceptual art. As an artwork, it is breathtakingly brilliant in ambition and scope.
Kraus shows that the contemporary world is linked by unlikely connections–a world where prison laborers make computer keyboards that generate profits for a corporation that funds a foundation, a foundation which, in turn, supplies mosquito-netting to an African country to prevent malaria on a grand scale. Tracing such disparate connections is an art unto itself. With technology, distance has collapsed, and with physical distance, other barriers and demarcations, too. Commercial products now mimic conceptual art, in that “far more creativity goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves.”
This diminishment of the object as a commercial product parallels the disappearance of the object from the work of art, as Kraus states: “all art is now conceptual, deriving value through context, at a second remove.” Disappearance also figures significantly in Kraus’s essay “No More Utopias,” which examines the work of performance artists Bas Jan Ader and Elke Krystufek. In 1975, Jan Ader disappeared while crossing the Atlantic on a solo voyage to Europe–he was completing the third and final act of his performance piece, In Search of the Miraculous. The grand myth of Ader’s disappearance has informed Krystufek’s work, and provided her with inspiration. From the beginning, Krystufek’s artwork has been marked by her excessive and extravagant appearance, in countless self-portraits, and later in hybrid portraits/self portraits of figures like Lenny Bruce and Katherine Mansfield, whose physiognomy blends with Krystufek’s. However, Kraus notes that in some of Kryustefk’s most recent work, she does not appear. Instead she follows a man with her camera, and chooses to document decorative style over human figures. Kraus doesn’t state this outright, but by drawing the comparison she leads the reader to consider how Krystufek’s identification with Ader may have influenced her withdrawal from her own work.
In Where Art Belongs Kraus performs a parallel disappearing act. She has played prominent roles in both her fiction and in Video Green, her first book of essays on art, which also chronicles her California life, her dominant/submissive practices with various boyfriends and lovers, her housekeeper’s incapacitation from AIDS, and even ties in details about tenants. And in her first novel, I Love Dick, Kraus’s namesake, Chris, is the lead character, who develops an obsession with a prominent art school theorist, an obsession which she channels into letter writing and collaboration with her husband on how to best seduce Dick, which in turn becomes a kind of performance art. Kraus often creates intimacy through self-revelation and prostration on the page, and part of her genius resides in masking where reality cedes to fiction.
However, in Where Art Belongs, Kraus stands back from the narrative. Her opinions, personal interjections, and asides pepper the essays, and she appears in an essay about the Sex Workers Art Show, but she allows for distance. It seems that she riffs off Ader’s disappearance, Krystufek’s transformation, and also the subtlety of photographer Moyra Davey’s self revelations. Kraus admires the way Davey reveals herself, specifically the way she deals with her chronic illness. Kraus compares this to how Walter Benjamin writes grief: “ Davey’s writing is informed by illness, but it isn’t about illness. Life, as Deleuze once observed, isn’t personal. Davey offers herself as a protagonist to lead us towards recognitions that arise in a heightened intellectual/emotional state through correspondence.”
In Davey’s essay, “Notes on Photography and Accident,” Davey claims her writing process is like a photographer’s: “I go out into the world of other people’s writing and take snapshots. These ‘word-pictures,’ like Benjamin’s ‘pearls’ and ‘corals,’ have Sontag’s ‘talismanic’ quality, and from them I can make something.” If there is one guiding force in the art Kraus examines–whether it’s Davey’s gathering of fragments, or the collaborative elements of collectives like Bernadette Corporation and Tiny Creatures, or even American Apparel–it’s the emergence of an organic creativity, of collaborative generation, of making art from the unexpected and improvising, of reveling in the chaos of art, of life.
Kraus opens Where Art Belongs with an essay on the Tiny Creatures Gallery in Los Angeles, and this essay begins with founder Janet Kim‘s Tiny Creatures Manifesto: “Tiny Creatures is not a gallery. It is Tiny Creatures. / Tiny Creatures is not a venue. It is Tiny Creatures.” Art is one grand experiment; it is generative, not sterile, forced, or overly refined. In this aspect, Kraus aligns Tiny Creatures with bohemias of generations past, from the East Village of the ’80s to other earlier “artistic experiments of the last half century.” The spirit remains the same, it’s only the spaces and contexts that change. Kraus mentioned that she began to write about Tiny Creatures after the gallery closed, but says it was significant that she spoke to the members while their stories were still “unsanitized.” And while institutions, art museums, and corporations may be easy stand-ins for sterility, Kraus’s investigation also demonstrates how creativity will resurge in unlikely spaces, how it will burrow in and burgeon wonderfully, like brilliant flowers growing between sidewalk cracks.
Without Feathers by Woody Allen: An Appreciation
When was the last time you read something from the humor section? It’s probably been a while. If memory serves, that particular bookstore ghetto is filled with quickly dated political humor, books of redneck jokes, and similar diversions: Books some people might buy as gifts for non-readers, but never for themselves. Others wisely steer clear of the section altogether. As such, it’s possible that people have gone through their reading lives without happening upon a book like Woody Allen’s Without Feathers.Though Woody Allen, of course, remains a household name because of his films, readers of my generation may not be aware that he is an equally accomplished humorist and his work was collected in a trio of books in the 1970s. Without Feathers was published in 1972, but 34 years later it remains hilarious.The book contains an assortment of sketches, often take-offs of scholarly writings, like “Early Essays” which references Francis Bacon’s Essays, in which Allen observes that “The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there is no afterlife – a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave.” Allen also returns again and again to words and phrases that he finds funny for whatever reason, like “chives,” “herring,” “smelts,” and having a hat “blocked.” The book also includes a pair of manic, absurd plays, “Death” and “God.”It’s hard for me to describe how funny this book was except to say that it may be one of the funniest books I have ever read. I kept Mrs. Millions awake because I kept guffawing as I read it. Instead of taking my word for it, though, here’s a particularly funny tidbit from the first chapter, “Selections from Mr. Allen’s Notebook”:Play idea: a character based on my father, but without quite so prominent a big toe. He is sent to the Sorbonne to study the harmonica. In the end he dies, never realizing his one dream — to sit up to his waist in gravy. (I see a brilliant second-act curtain, where two midgets come upon a severed head in a shipment of volleyballs.)Bonus Link: Millions contributor Andrew’s look at Without Feathers and Allen’s other two collections, Getting Even and Side Effects.