“It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” This the opening line of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout, but isn’t it also the first line of all of our lives?

Walkabout, first published in 1959, is a petite book with a classic premise: two white children from Charleston, South Carolina are traveling when their plane crashes in the Australian outback. The only survivors, they set out to return to civilization, when they encounter a young Aboriginal boy who teaches them how to survive in the wild. A list of books with this essential set-up would take up the entire word count of this review, but suffice to say that Walkabout echoes Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, and A High Wind in Jamaica for starters. All books where people (often children) attempt to brave the world they originally, many moons ago, came from, a world they are now utterly lost in.

The two siblings are Mary, a teenage girl who hides her fear behind stern prudence, and her younger brother Peter, an amiable child who provides comic relief throughout the heavy tale. It’s clear early on that in order to survive they’re going to need saving. “Coddled in babyhood, psycho-analysed in childhood, nourished on predigested patent foods, provided with continuous push-button entertainment, the basic realities of life were something they’d never had to face.” Luckily for them the aboriginal boy is a god-send (perhaps literally?) who takes on the task of their survival. Despite not a single word of language in common, the aboriginal boy teaches Peter how to fish (see Bible) and provides the siblings with endless tips from where to find water to how to roast a wallaby.

On the first day of their meeting, the aboriginal boy inspects the two, sheerly out of curiosity. “He ended up with a detailed inspection of Peter’s sandals. Then he turned to Mary. It was the moment the girl had been dreading. Yet she didn’t draw back. She wanted to; God alone knew how she wanted to. Her nerves were strung taut. The idea of being manhandled by a naked black boy appalled her: struck at the root of one of the basic principles of her civilized code. It was terrifying; revolting; obscene. Back in Charleston it would have got the darkie lynched.” Of course, the unclothed boy is mostly curious as to why she’s wearing such a silly dress, but Mary sees it quite differently. She is so afraid of his blackness, of his nakedness, that it clouds her perspective. In fact, her main obsession throughout the book, is keeping her dress close to her body, her thinly veiled protective sheath.

The aboriginal boy is a clear Christ figure from the outset: pure of heart, generous, someone who lives only to help others. When Peter and Mary meet the boy, he is in the middle of a walkabout, a rite of passage in which young men set out on a six-to-eight month journey through the desert alone, yet he abandons his mission because the children are in need of his help. “Unless he looked after them, they would die. That was certain.” Some lines from Walkabout seem as though they’re lifted right from a passage in the Bible. “It was his people’s way to accept individuals as they were: to help, not to criticize, the sick, the blind, and the maimed.”

Yet despite the fact that the boy provides Peter and Mary with security, food, shelter, and sacrifices his spiritual journey for them, it does not succeed in quelling Mary’s institutionalized racism and fear. For the real fear does not rest with whether or not they will survive physically, but whether or not they can deal with their spiritual and psychological crises. For “…then, quite suddenly the children were walking into their shadow.” And what shadow is that?  The dark, deep-seated fear that the presence of the aboriginal boy draws forth from the reserved virginal Mary.

One day, her suspicions causes her to give him a look that “could only mean one thing: that she had seen in his eyes an image: the image of the Spirit of Death.” Apparently within Marshall’s rendering of Aboriginal culture, autosuggestion of death is enough to kill someone. The aboriginal boy ends up dying from catching the white girl’s fear (or perhaps more realistically the white boy’s cold), and in the moment of his death, he lays his head on Mary’s lap, a Christian echo of the mother Mary cradling Jesus’ dead body. “It was the smile that broke Mary’s heart: that last forgiving smile. Before, she had seen as through a glass darkly, but now she saw face to face. And in that moment of truth all her inbred fears and inhibitions were sponged away, and she saw that the world which she had thought was split in two was one.”

It’s a deep reversal. Mary’s fear and ignorance is so potent that it kills the boy, and yet in the moment of his death, its his fearlessness and Christ-like forgiveness that transforms her. Oddly, the book’s death scene doesn’t have an air of deep grief. In fact, it seems to be tinged with transcendence. As we know from Christ’s tale, death is only a mirage; life is always resurrecting.

For a book that’s only 120 pages, small pages at that, it’s so densely layered with symbolism as if to verge on being overwrought. Yet the book is saved by its focused narrative path, interior character portraits, and lush descriptions of the outback. In fact, the language is so rich with flora and fauna (the author’s pseudonym is borrowed from an Australian nature writer he admired) that I felt myself almost plucking the fauna off the page for a quick sniff.  In such a short space it asks some of the most profound questions. What is behind language? Who are we when we can’t rely on that limited form of communication? What will save us from the never-ending wild?

There’s an idea that there is something that touches the languageless place within us, outside of symbolic language and the imaginary, something known in psychoanalytic thought as “the real”. “The real” cannot be spoken or written. It’s the neo-natal, primal place we have been forever severed from through our inescapable introduction to language, that cornerstone of “civilization”. The aboriginal boy represents that place for Mary and Peter, a place they have long since lost access to. Lacan’s statement “What does not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real” is revealed in the brief moments between the three: laughter, eye contact, the embrace of another. These are moments when the “real” cuts through the symbolic, moments of pure existence. Perhaps, even when we are lost in the wild, whether it be in nature or the endless wilderness of the psyche, when we encounter another, we can always speak with them, one way or another.

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In 2009, Travis began a series of shorts titled In Their Room. These short documentaries feature gay men in their bedrooms talking about sexuality and intimacy. The first of them was filmed in San Francisco, and later ones will include Berlin, London, and other international cities. His first narrative feature, I Want Your Love, has its premiere at the London Fringe Festival this week. I caught up with Travis just as he was heading out for London for the premiere of his film.

***

The Rumpus: Tell me about how you got the idea for your series of shorts, In Their Room, where you interview gay men in their bedrooms.

Travis Mathews: So much of how I started doing this came from a place of frustration. I was tired of not seeing representations of the particular gay world I was part of or witness to. It also felt like a natural bridging of my psychology background and interest in documenting my own community.

When I started the San Francisco episode it was one of those few times in my life that actually felt magical, like there was no doubt about what I was doing. Because I can generally be pretty hard on myself and my work, it was a great feeling to tap into. I felt like I was seeing all of these small, but fresh and modern, narratives that were peeking out from all the banal everyday stuff I was filming with these guys. It was from that that I got inspired to write I Want Your Love.

I also saw that the series had potential as a template to show different demographics or cultures. I filmed a couple of women, but I haven’t made the leap to do a straight, lesbian or trans episode. Instead, I’ve been focusing on different cities around the world. How cool would it be to see how gay men in disparate cities hunt for, find and lose connection with each other at this point in time. That’s my thinking behind it.

I did a Berlin episode in 2011 and now I’m going to London to do the next one. As the series continues I’m hoping to get funding in order to go to less western gay hubs, places that would take more time to gain trust and find the right people. Rio, Istanbul and Tokyo are on my list. I’m meeting with a producer while in London about going to Paris next.

Rumpus: In visiting people’s rooms for your documentary series, what have you learned that you didn’t expect?

Mathews: We’re all more similar than I ever realized and the world is shrinking fast. It’s comforting and a little disconcerting at the same time.

Rumpus: What first drew you to documentary work?

Mathews: With documentary there aren’t the long setups that go along with narrative work so things tend to move fast and be more spontaneous. I love that. I love following around the action and not being totally aware of what’s about to happen; it’s exciting. But I’ve always wanted to tell stories and help people to tell their stories -hence my short-lived stint as a psychotherapist. Ten years ago when I started making movies, documentaries also made better sense than fiction because the prosumer cameras weren’t quite up to speed for fiction. People are a lot more forgiving with documentary, and the run-and-gun style that I like worked well with these cameras.

Rumpus: You have a master’s degree in counseling psychology – how does that affect your documentary work, and how did you get into both fields?

Mathews: It affects it a lot. While I was graduating I thought I was going to be fulfilled doing private practice part-time while doing movie work part-time. It made sense on paper, and the stories I continue to want to tell are heavy on psychology, but I’m not a great therapist and I didn’t think I could handle it for the long term. I also felt compelled to double up on movie making even as I was getting a degree in something else and I’d never gone to film school. I’m self-taught and it’s been as much as blessing as a curse at times. But mostly I’m grateful for not having gone. I’ve seen people get out of film school and they’re a little paralyzed by the protocol that they’ve learned. I know that if you really want to make a movie there’s little reason not to anymore. You just work with what you have to work with and get good people around you. You just have to want to do it badly enough.

Rumpus: What’s your intentions for your work?  What kinds of stories do you hope to tell?

Mathews: The through-line with everything I’ve made is about gay male intimacy. Sometimes that’s sweet-hot-tender-playful and other times it’s plain messy. I like seeing and hearing someone going just that little bit further than you might expect. The therapist part of me thinks that there’s comfort and healing and community that comes from seeing depictions you can relate to. But it has to be entertaining and not too earnest or you just lose people.

Rumpus: If your next feature is a narrative, do you think you’ll ever return to documentary work, or move more towards narrative films?

Mathews: I think my work -and the same of a lot of other filmmakers right now- is pretty blurred on the narrative/doc spectrum. Maybe it’s just a trend, but it feels right to me and I don’t really think I need to choose one over the other. I definitely enjoy the run-and-gun style of documentary and after having done I Want Your Love, which was the opposite of that, I know I want to keep that alive. In an ideal world where I had the money to just do what I want to do I think I’d be working on In Their Room as a very long-term project that I return to between more narrative work.

Rumpus: Whose work do you admire in the film community?

Mathews: As someone who’s a contemporary and orbiting a similar gay community as me, I would say Andrew Haigh. I feel like I have a lot to learn from our friendship and the way he’s approaching his movies and career.

Rumpus: Is there anything you want to do in terms of representing gay men in film that you feel gets underrepresented or brushed over?

Mathews: I just feel like we’re in a place in time where the stories we’re telling about ourselves can be a bit more complicated and modern while relying less on tried and true tropes and stock characters. We’re strong enough as a community now to admit that we’re more than victims or superstars.

It’s also important for me to show “real” men as opposed to some Adonis ideal. Often the guys in my films are hot, but rarely because they’re married to the gym. It comes out more from seeing them be so candid.

Rumpus: How do you feel about the term “pornographic” when used in relationship to your work?

Mathews: I usually avoid calling it that or getting defensive about it. But honestly, I don’t think it’s porn. To me, porn has the single purpose of getting you off. And when I film that’s not the first, second or third thing I’m thinking of. There are so many ways to look at character and story through sex and sexual situations. I’m interested in that and so my movies often have sex in them. But if people call it porn, that’s fine too. I only care as much as it becomes an obstacle, but so far that hasn’t been the case.

Rumpus: Someone was talking about your new film, I Want Your Love, calling it the “gay Shortbus”. How do you feel about that?

Mathews: Well, I thought Shortbus was pretty gay! But anyway, I’m happy with any comparisons or to just be in such good company. I think Shortbus is very true to John’s community in New York and I think my film is like that for San Francisco.

Rumpus: Your first feature is about to premiere – what was the process like getting to the end?

Mathews: This depends on the day you’re asking me. There’s lots of peaks and valleys in making a movie and doing anything like this for the first time is going to involve a certain level of crazy. I learned quickly to leave my ego at the door and get the best people around me to help. You know, with my documentary work, I was used to doing most everything myself, but with a narrative you just can’t. It’s a good exercise in giving up some control and being flexible. You can’t be precious or rigid or it just falls apart. I’m excited to take everything I learned -which was a tremendous amount- on to the next project. I’ve written a feature for Brontez -who is in the feature- that I love and can’t wait to start planning for.

***

I Want Your Love opens the London Fringe Film Festival this Thursday, April 12th.

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Ah, the voyeur, literature’s most beloved creep. Voyeurism, now so inextricably written into our contemporary psychology, hardly needs an introduction. Usually driven by scopophilia (the love of looking), voyeurs fix their gaze on the unaware other, and their drive is typically sexual in nature.

So what happens when we are presented with a voyeur who trades looking for listening? What happens when we use our ears instead of our eyes to penetrate the other’s private realm? What is the aural version of a scopophile? Ellen Ullman’s latest novel, By Blood, offers us a voyeur who embodies this strange twist – he’s a peeping tom who can’t actually see the woman he’s watching.

A disgraced professor (we never learn exactly what he’s done, but does it really matter?) with a history of mental disturbance rents an office in downtown San Francisco and discovers that the neighboring office belongs to a psychoanalyst. Luckily for his obsessive tendencies, one of her patients despises the whirr of the white noise machine, and he’s gifted with hours and hours of pure overheard therapy. He quickly becomes obsessed with the patient, an adopted lesbian who is toying with the possibility of finding her birth parents. As he begins stalking her solely through auditory signals, we quickly find ourselves in the more covert realm of voyeurism, that of the eavesdropper. In between the private and the public there is a thin wall, and our narrator has his ear pressed right up against it.

Sitting in the dark, making himself invisible, he is reeled in by one of the most seductive and overlooked qualities of all: sound. “She had inherited the more profound interior configuration of the body: the subtle crenellations of lung and diaphragm and sinuses, the delicate architecture of the airways; all which combine to produce that aspect which is last noted but finally most determinant of one’s overall feelings about a person….that which can make the plainest woman magnetic, the most visually lovely one an irritant: the voice.”

Her voice carries him into her narrative, an analysis centering around her adoption, or as she likes to call it, her “mysterious origins.” The narrative becomes perfectly triangulated when the analyst’s past makes treating her patient almost impossible; the countertransference (the analyst’s emotional entanglement with her patient’s case) proves to be just one more snarl in this seductive web that Ullman spins.

Upon listening, his ears become such attuned little radios, attenuated to every small noise. He’s able to suss out the shift of pantyhose (“cicada-like”), the inhalations, the sighs, the lighting of the post-therapeutic cigarette. Ullman allows us to revel in the seductive pull of the audible, ramping up the sex of every sound.

Set in early 70’s San Francisco, Ullman’s highly stylized prose walks along the backbone of that heightened era, teasing out the center of binary opposites: liberation and capture, public and private, voyeur and exhibitionist.

The voyeur asks the exhibitionist: are we really that different? Aren’t we both, in essence, trying to be seen?

Ellen Ullman

Our narrator’s opening statement, the very first line of the book, “I did not cause her any harm. This was a great victory for me,” sets the creepy tone. Yet he’s not a convicted criminal (yet), and part of his trajectory is learning how to safely use the other. Our disgraced professor can only begin his path of self-discovery through safely using the patient’s narrative as an entry point for his own problems.

Ullman’s insight into character is astounding. She writes of the professor’s darkness: “It was a time of the truest of lonelinesses (since loneliness is plural various in its aspects and effects); and by this I mean not simply the absence of companionship but a complete estrangement from all feelings except self-loathing. The world tolerated me, I believed, only because of my subterfuge: the fraud I perpetrated which fooled them into thinking I was human.”

It’s so easy to write our protagonist off as a creep. In fact the novel hints that you should find him despicable. But isn’t more interesting to ask what drives his desire? Freud wrote that “analysis shows us in a shadowy way how the fact of a child at a very early age listening to his parents copulating may set up his first sexual excitation, and how that event may, owing to its after-effects, act as a starting-point for the child’s whole sexual development.” It could be that there are two camps of people: those whose sexual introduction comes first through the eyes, and the other, through the ears. When one overhears, there is much to be left to interpretation and fantasy. Perhaps our disgraced professor, like many of us, finds himself in murky sexual territory, because he is stuck in the realm of fantasy. He is unable to deal with his own psychological mire, and instead chooses to live vicariously through the other.

Our protagonist, who seems to be drawn in a way in which we are encouraged to find him odious, sits in the dark, sustaining his silence, in order to weave together not only the threads of the patient’s life, but also unknowingly, his own. So why was it so easy to relate to this “creep”? Because in his hushed state of hiding, we see ourselves. By choosing a voyeur as the narrator, Ullman allows us position ourselves at a safe distance from the act we readers are also engaged in: voyeurism.

What is reading if not the ultimate act of voyeurism? Who could be more “safely” situated than the reader? The act of reading is the greatest perversion; we readers are such creeps –yet it’s important to ask what is behind our literary perversion. What dark creature turns the wheel of that machine? Ultimately perversion is an attempt to get closer to something perceived unattainable. The other. The object of desire. How do we get close to all of the things that seem beyond us? Sometimes, we start by listening.

The etymology of the term eavesdrop comes from a literal spot, that of standing under the eave of a home, next to the tiny opening where private sounds from the house are audible. The physical positioning of the eavesdrop makes it so that the listener, should it rain, would likely get wet (erotic implied.) Our professor observes, “as always, we analysands dangle ourselves before the fire only when we know it is about to go out”. Similarly we readers hang out, under the eaves, ears peeled, where we’re sure to get wet. Ullman is a master of seduction, and By Blood is a glorious downpour.

By Blood takes place on a single inhale. Ullman allows us to inhale, and makes us hold that uncomfortable, oxygen-draining pose, for the entire novel, as she winds us through the knotted, anxious web between voyeur, patient, and analyst. The eavesdropper inhabits a liminal border space, a wall, straddling the private and the public. Ullman makes her readers take the same stance, and the constant threat of danger gives the entire novel a charged unrequited sexual state of agitation. She allows us to exhale literally on the last page, in a type of exhaustion, rather than jouissance. I closed the last page, breathless and wiped out. By Blood is an affirmation that not only is the novel nowhere near dead, it’s panting breathlessly in the next room.

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Our pale subject is Lucy (Emily Browning), a college student working multiple underpaid jobs, each as meaningless and empty as the next: office drone, lonely waitress, research rat. It’s clear she needs the money but there’s something more that propels her to compulsively work all the time. She seems to be empty, looking for something to fill the void. This leads her to answer an unusual ad in the paper, propelling her into a world of unusual sex work.

What do I mean by unusual sex work?  Well, at first it seems fairly innocuous. She arrives at a mansion run by a classy madam named Clara (Rachel Blake). There she dresses up as the fair virgin, in shell-colored lingerie, and is required to wear a lipstick shade that, wait for it, matches the color of her labia. Inside the mansion is a dinner party for a select group of older clientele, who dine while Lucy pours brandies, and taller, older Robert Palmeresque women in sexy black outfits act as human props for the guests to grab at and prod. Then things take a turn – Lucy gets “promoted” to a higher-paying role that involves the utmost discretion. In this case promotion requires that Lucy drink a narcotic tea that makes her unconscious. Naked, she is placed in a stylized bedroom, where clients who are promised full privacy are allowed to do anything they want to the unconscious “sleeping beauty” with one caveat: no penetration.

That exception seems like a joke, as if to intimate that the only sexual violation a woman can experience is that of unwanted penetration. There are so many more ways to violate a person as we learn by witnessing a series of older men exercise not only their deepest desires upon the coma-induced child-like “woman”, but also lament their loss of youth. One man takes his sadism out, burning a cigarette behind her ear. The sleeping beauty doesn’t even feel her skin burn as she slumbers away peacefully. Another man merely cuddles and sleeps next to her.  Another throws her around, eventually too saddened by her unwilling state to do anything to her. Each of these men stand in stark opposition to her tiny nubile, almost ageless figure. The exposed milkiness of her fair skin, her hair that seems spun from gold make her almost an unreal figure. She becomes a symbol, allowing the viewer to also indulge in pure voyeurism with no consequence. When Clara reassures the men, “You’ll be safe here. There’s no shame. No one can see you,” she’s also talking to us. We’re safe in our film-going seats. No one can see us.  Which leaves me to wonder about the ramifications of being a voyeur in a film where a young woman is forced into a situation where she is unable to know what is being done to her body, and has landed there potentially because of her financial situation and the implied neglect she suffered as a child.

While “no penetration” is the rule for the clients, it also seems to be a possible thematic framework with which to analyze this film. There seems to be no penetration of any kind. We don’t get to see much of Lucy’s inner life. We hear briefly that her mother is an alcoholic, and we see Lucy mete out her limited affections for her troubled, literary addict friend Birdman. Yet the film doesn’t draw these threads out far enough to get us close enough to Lucy to understand or make meaning. I couldn’t help but draw the conclusion that her willingness to do anything for anyone stemmed from always being the caretaker to an adult parent unable to do so themselves. Without penetration we are unable to see inside our protagonist. Instead we are left on the surface, with no answer, and not even any probing questions to answer for ourselves. Rather, while the film shows the desires of various men nearing their deathbeds, it fails to show us any of Lucy’s desire, inevitably giving us an uneven playing field, where all the power is left to the rich, old, white guys. Additionally, as Lucy sleeps and is prodded, we too know more about her than she does, lumping us in with the creepy clientele.

Luckily the film is evocative and a promising first effort; it’s a sign that both director Leigh and actress Browning have bright futures ahead. The film is visually stunning; the collaboration between cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson, production designer Annie Beauchamp and director Leigh render many of the shots to look like living Manets. The long, uninterrupted takes, perhaps a nod to Kubrick, show Leigh’s gifts as a director in focusing our attention instead of allowing us escape.

Ultimately, the film feels like a pretty face with not much to say. It raises issues of sex work as empowerment versus enslavement, the idea of defiling the pure youthful virgin, the way desire can devour ethics, and yet those issues seem to be drowned out by the soft-core hyper-stylized seduction of it all. While the film leaves its troubling premise largely unanswered for, it does try to probe the fascinating question that dominates most current psychoanalytic thought: what are we beyond our desires? Maybe, as the film suggests, nothing.

***

Sleeping Beauty is playing at San Francisco Film Society Cinema (1746 Post Street) through February 2.

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So much of our lives disappear. The small things like flakes of skin, the funny lines we’ve said, our “profound” drunken ramblings, kisses, breaths – where do they go? Lost, it seems forever. That’s until someone like Joshua Mohr comes along to sweep the streets of our days. In his third novel, Damascus, Mohr acts as part author, part alcoholic anthropologist, combing the hidden places to gather all that we’ve left behind.

He picks up the fragments of our lives and ferrets out our true desires.

Set in a dive bar aptly named Damascus (etymology: “a well-watered place”) the story revolves around a motley crew. There’s Owen, the owner of Damascus, whose life is summed up by his unfortunate Hilter-mustache birthmark. He’s got a well-meaning lesbian poet niece, Daphne, her best friend, rebel-artist Syl, and what would a bar be without its cast of regular drunks? There’s Shambles, a part-time prostitute, No Eyebrows, a stage-four cancer patient who ran away from his wife and daughter, and Byron Settles, an unsettled veteran back from Iraq. As we all know, a book set in a dive bar can’t end well, and from the get-go we’re aware this tale will end in tears. When you put cancer, Iraq, alcoholism and self-loathing together and shake, everyone knows that cocktail is called a suicide, and it’s served on the rocks. Somehow, though, Mohr manages to make that drink taste life-affirming.

There’s two main narrative threads; the first is a pro-protest story that revolves around Syl’s art show at Damascus in which she hangs twelve paintings of dead soldiers, and then during a live performance nails live fish to the paintings, letting them wriggle until they die. The brouhaha over the art show spirals out of control when a group of war veterans, fueled by Byron Settles, bring their own interpretation to the artwork, along with some tear gas. Mohr makes a political statement by asking, what are the consequences of saying nothing? What is worse – to speak out or to cower in silence? Both options, as we see elucidated in the pages of the book, have their price.

The other, more powerful thread, is the love story between Shambles and No Eyebrows. Both estranged from love, they find one another behind the pretense of peppermint schnapps and prostitution, and it’s one of the most sincere human exchanges I’ve read in a while. They build a relationship that investigates the spaces in which they’ve been hiding from the world. There’s a breathtaking scene in a cab that is a deftly rendered metaphor for the difficult stages of early love. Inside the taxi, No Eyebrows begs Shambles to spend the night with him (an exception she makes for no one). He’s on his deathbed, and she’s debating whether or not to go through with it. “Shambles drew a curlicue on the glass, a claustrophobic shape closing in on itself…Her finger reached the center of the curlicue. Trapped. She pulled it off the glass at the center of the shape because there was nowhere else to go. He wasn’t asking her to sleep in his bed. He was asking for a miracle.” Their conversation is stunted with silence until the cab driver interrupts them, “We’ll have to go back the way we came.” And back the way we came is where we go, as Damascus trudges through the characters’ pasts, attempting to make sense of their mistakes.

Joshua Mohr

Their love story is so moving in part because you expect so little between two people with nothing left to live for. Yet there’s so much tenderness between the ravaged duo. In a painfully sweet moment, Shambles says to No Eyebrows, “I like the way your hands shake….I love the portacath in your shoulder. It’s the secret way into you….” There is no greater achievement than being able to locate the sacred in the profane, to raise the light out of the dark, to find the sage in the alcoholic. As Mohr makes sense of our illogical drunken ramblings, he also finds the human element in characters most often overlooked. We’re used to keeping our waywards inside. What happens when they stand in the light?

Throughout Damascus, Mohr uses the power of fictive omniscience in its most glorious role. While often times the authorial stance of omniscience creates a sense of remove and is taken for granted by authors, Mohr employs it to bring us closer to people, to rest our ears against the tick-tick of their hearts. He treats the characters as though they’re real and cautiously reveals their innermost secrets.

On top of the hefty dose of empathy, Damascus is a page-turner. Mohr’s got an inherent ability to spin a yarn; it’s as if he’s standing over your shoulder lighting each page with a match as you read. Not to mention the book is funny, despite the heightened, depressing state of affairs. As the book aptly notes, “Humor was weird like that, triggered in all kinds of tactless ways.”

One of the book’s only faults is akin to the decision of whether or not to have that next drink. Mohr makes the mistake of getting too word-drunk, and at times the writing borders on prolix. But after all, the book is set in a dive bar, which makes me prone to forgive Mohr for his occasional excess. When an author has been so generous with their characters, so unflinching in allowing them to be human, as a reader, the least I can do is buy the next round.

Ultimately the book is about sacrifice, about the price of things. It’s about what happens when we leave our partners and try to come home like stray dogs; when we give up our dignity and threaten to burn someone alive; when we try to take a stand against war. As the reckless veteran Sam in Mohr’s novel says, “Most of life is no-win situations, kid.” Yet in the midst of not winning, we can claim our small victories. We can redeem ourselves and sober up for a moment enough to tell someone we love them.

In the end we disappear too, but if we’re lucky, someone has been gathering all of the things strewn behind us. Damascus is a scrapbook of all the things from our lives we worried would get lost in the wind.

And for the artists out there, the ones of us who are afraid and hiding, shy of ever finishing our own books, Mohr has a love letter for us too: “The show must go on, folks, so it might as well go on with you. It ain’t as easy as it looks, that I can guarantee, but trust me on this: it’s better to be heckled than be invisible, better to spin the wheel and play the game than watch from the sidelines. So carpe diem and all that other rah-rah shit…..any courageous souls out there want to get up and give it a shot?”

I can drink to that.

**

Read the Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr here!

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• SF Demographics
• Night of the Lilies

Additionally, the issue includes a poster of James getting the word “BRAD” carved into his arm by tattooer Mark Mahoney. This is a not to be missed issue. You can purchase this issue individually, but you should just become a subscriber and receive four issues of THE THING in the mail. There’s nothing like opening the mailbox and anticipating the suprise of what the next THING will be! This year’s upcoming issues are desinged by: MacFadden & Thorpe, Dave Eggers, and Shannon Ebner!

Here’s a link to THE THING and a video of James signing away his love for Renfro.

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I basically hurt myself with excitement when I read that the San Francisco Film Society was presenting Mauritz Stiller’s 1919 silent film classic Sir Arne’s Treasure with live musical accompaniment by indie rock icon John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, because you should absolutely do everything in your power to make it this Tuesday night to the Castro Theatre, but all you really need to know is that it’s set in the 16th century, and it’s basically rife with murder and snow. What better backdrop to unleash John Darnielle’s unforgiving, relentless poetry against? John Darnielle was busy, probably rehearsing til his fingers bled, but I had the chance to catch up with Sean Uyehara, programmer at the San Francisco Film Society, and with musician John Vanderslice, to ask them about the upcoming collaboration.

I caught up first with Sean Uyehara over at the SF Film Society.

The Rumpus: What’s the process for picking the silent film each year and how’d you end up selecting the Mountain Goats to do the scoring for this film event?

Uyehara: The process is different every year, but basically involves contacting different musicians about the possibility of scoring films. Sir Arne’s Treasure is a film that I have been hoping to present in this way for a few years now, and it has been among the titles that I offer to musicians that agree to consider doing this with us. There are many factors that go into the list of films that I offer to different musicians, but I think this particular film would work well with a number of different soundtrack styles. Although it was made in 1919, it feels quite timely. I guess it might be because it’s set amidst war, and it seems like wartime is no longer exceptional today. The Mountain Goats came to me. I was speaking with someone who manages musicians, and she informed me that the Mountain Goats would be interested in doing this. I jumped at the chance.

Rumpus: It’s a pretty intense film – did you feel like it might be too challenging for a musician to score?

Uyehara: I didn’t, and I hope I was correct. Audiences can likely appreciate how difficult this process can be, as musicians are asked to create soundtracks for films that sometimes last longer than those musician’s typical live sets — and this is without stops, and more or less according to a script. I can’t think of many other films where this would be less challenging. I’m not a musician, so I am not sure how the different artists approach this, but I fantasize that when faced with the film without sound they feel excitement, then trepidation, then despair and finally they discover the musical equivalent of a keystone that the artist pulls from, allowing the whole score to magically fall into place. Sorry, what were we talking about?

Rumpus: Every year’s pairing seems so genius – is there a secret behind creating these perfect pairings?

Uyehara: That’s nice of you to say. No secrets. It probably happens in the ways that you might imagine. You know, with the whole magic keystone, animal sacrifice and lawyers.

Rumpus: Do you feel like events such as these are a way to revitalize interest in films for people who are less cinematically inclined, and also vice versa bring film buffs into contact with a musical collaboration, perhaps exposing them to artists they haven’t heard of?

Uyehara: Both. That’s one of the main points of the program. There’s a huge cache of amazing films from the history of cinema that many people would be surprised to find extremely engaging. And, there’s also an unfortunate canonization process for older films that tends to cut them off from their potential to reach general audiences. So, it’s intended that these pairings respectfully reinvest these films with the energy that they should and do have.

Another idea here is that this should present a risky and charged forum for popular musicians to present a program that is outside of their typical comfort zone. Hopefully fans of the musicians come away with a a new facet for appreciation of the performers they have come to know as well.

Rumpus: Great, thanks so much. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this event. See you then.

***

Then I asked local musician John Vanderslice, who we profiled a while back, a few questions about the show.

Rumpus: How’d you first got involved with this project and what’s been your role in the process?

Vanderslice: John Darnielle called me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d like to play with him at the Castro to accompany the film. It was an easy sell! We wrangled in Jason Slota on drums and Jamie Riotto on upright bass and then started the email thread. John has been working so hard on this and I can’t wait to start rehearsals.

Rumpus: So I’m assuming you’ve watched the film. What’s your take on it?

Vanderslice: I love it!!! It’s beautifully shot. I’m a film fanatic. On that note, I’d love to recommend to readers Peter Watkins’ 1974 movie Edvard Munch. My wife and I watched it last night, it’s wonderful.

Rumpus: Have you had the chance to see any of the past years’ collaborations? Last year I was bummed to miss Stephen Merritt scoring 20,000 leagues under the sea.

Vanderslice: I haven’t seen any of them, I agree that one would’ve been fantastic. The past pairings all look interesting to me.

Rumpus: Man – I’ve missed them all too, so my excitement level for this is high and the Castro is the greatest movie theatre ever. Seeing as you’re a film buff – could you share your top films with Rumpus readers?

Vanderslice: Here are some movies I’ve recently seen that I liked (most available from netflix):

Human Resources (dir. Laurent Cantet)
A Prophet
Synechdoche, New York
Chop Shop
The Tree Of The Wooden Clogs (amazing Italian Neo-Realist film from 70s)
In a Year with 13 Moons (Fassbinder)
A Serious Man
Timecrimes
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Europa (Lars Von Trier)
Japon
Sawdust and Tinsel (one of my favorite movies of all time)
Memories of Murder
The Class
The Child (Dardenne Brothers, I would recommend everything they’ve made)

At this point our email-exchange interview ended with JV writing that rehearsals had begun and were “long and detailed but serious fun.” If you’re in San Francisco Tuesday night and you’re not here, aw man, I don’t even know what to tell you. It’s never going to happen again. It’s going to be like a shooting star that lands like an ice pick, just hopefully not in the tenth row center, where I hope to be sitting.

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After you’re done laughing, why not purchase a Rumpus Women Literary Calender?

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The Bots

I caught up with The Bots on the Internet and we conducted the following interview over email.

***

The Rumpus: How did you guys first decide to be a band?

The Bots: The Bots originally had other members in 2006 but we as brothers decided to continue the band with just us two in 2007.

Rumpus: What do the kids you know think about you being in a band?

Anaiah: A lot of kids think it is pretty cool that we are doing  something like this.

Mikaiah: My friends support me in what we are doing. Kids think its pretty cool.

Rumpus: Did the song “We Are Not Kids Anymore” come out of being sick and tired of being called a kid band?

Anaiah: No it’s just a song, but on the subject we don’t want to be considered a kid band.

Rumpus: Some of your lyrics seem very mature, is that just because I forget what it’s like to have the wisdom of youth, or do you feel mature for your age?

Bots: We don’t feel like we are mature for our ages. We just write what sounds and feels good.

Rumpus: In the song “I Like Your Style” you write about this feeling that everyone has a certain amount of envy over someone else and their abilities. “I want to be like you / You want to be like me” are the end lyrics – can you elaborate on this?

Bots: The song is a mockery of people that think pretentious things like style and fashion are important in life.

Rumpus: I can’t find your music on iTunes – what’s up with that?

Bots: It is coming at the end of October. Both the self titled album and our new EP Black and White Lights will be on iTunes.

Rumpus: Also, why don’t you print your lyrics on your website?

Bots: We just been too lazy, but we will be moving forward.

Rumpus: A lot of your songs are fairly rock and roll and then you bust out a slow song like “Old Days.”  Do you think every band needs to get a little melancholy and reflective once in a while?

Bots: Yes, absolutely; we have loads more to come.

Rumpus: Speaking of “Old Days” that’s one song in particular where the lyrics seem very impressive – not to sound like an old person, but the lyrics seem very mature. How do you write a song about the old days when you’re only sixteen, or however old you were when you wrote it? Lines like “Hiding your shame beneath your health / People walk in different ways / This ain’t like the old days” give me pause — are you writing from personal experience, or do you write as a character?

Mikaiah: I wrote the song when I was only 13; I am 17 now.  Mostly I write as a character; the words comes with the music in my head.

Rumpus: Is it hard balancing school and trying to pursue a musical career?

Bots: No. Music never seems to get in the way of school.

Rumpus: Besides being in a band, or school, how do you spend your days?

Anaiah: Writing music for the band and doing parkour. I also enjoy spending time with some friends.

Mikaiah: Listening to my vinyl, writing music, bike riding, drinking tea, and flying my kite.

Rumpus: Can you list one or several albums you think are perfect?

Ananiah: Little dragon’s album Self Titled, A7X’s Nightmare, Catch 22′s Keaseby Nights.

Mikaiah: Villagers’ Becoming a Jackal, Funeral by Arcade Fire, Feist’s Let It Die.

Rumpus: Can you remember the first thing that made you want to be a musician?

Anaiah: It was early in elementary school and listening to music and playing music in school that inspired me to want to be musician.

Miakaih: Watching musicians on MTV.

Rumpus: What was being on tour like?

Anaiah: It was an amazing feeling! I really loved it and it was just so great to travel.

Mikaiah: It was brilliant, I loved meeting all the great people and getting to see so many beautiful sights.

Rumpus: What’s the worst part about being in a band?

Anaiah: Having to sweat our butts off in a hot room rehearsing for hours. But it’s all in the experience.

Mikaiah: Carrying all of our equipment to all our shows.

Rumpus: What’s your dream for this musical journey you’re on?

Anaiah: To show people our music all around the world and hopefully to inspire them to follow in our foot steps.

MIkaiah: To get everyone from ages 1 to 100 to like our music and tap their toes at least.

Rumpus: Speaking of music you like, if you had to pick the musician whose career you most admire, who would it be and why?

Anaiah: I’d probably want to be Andrew W.K.  I mean, he’s a legend that everyone wants to be, hahahaha. And he wears all white all the time. Too classic.

Mikaiah: I would like like to be Arcade Fire. The whole band because they are amazing. I love all that they do, and how they get into their music. I love the musical trance that they put me into.

Rumpus: What would be your fantasy job other than musician?

Anaiah: Maybe a professional walker.

Mikaiah: Vanna White, because I think she has the easiest job in the world.

Rumpus: Most prized possession?

Anaiah: My most prized possession is and always is going to be my drum set!

Mikaiah: I personally have a few. Not in any specific order:  My vinyls, bike, and maybe one of my guitars.

Rumpus: What’s your favorite souvenir from touring?

Anaiah: One of the picks and set list of one of the guitarist of Dropkick Murphy’s! But I gave it to my aunt who is a pretty big fan.

Mikaiah: The super soaker I took from Bring Me the Horizon and some other stuff from them.

Rumpus: Are your parents really big into music — did they have a role in your development as musicians?

Anaiah: They are really big, I’m telling you. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t even know what type of music I’d be listening to now-a-days.

Mikaiah: They are really into music, but not really what I listen to. And yes my dad bought all the instruments for us but we taught ourselves how to play.

Rumpus: Do you have a favorite movie?

Anaiah: Yes! A couple actually: the entire Star Wars Saga, all of the Back to The Future movies, and The Outsiders.

Mikaiah: I really enjoyed the film Paper Heart. I have not fallen in love yet, but I would like to.

Rumpus: Do you have a favorite book?

Anaiah: Also The Outsiders.

Mikaiah: I don’t really have one but I really did like the book my teacher showed us in my class of 2010. The teacher, Mr. Livingstone, the book was Of Mice and Men.

Rumpus: Does being a rock star get you extra cool points with girls, or do you even care about that?

Anaiah: Ahahahaha! Well I’m NOOOwhere close to getting in with the girls, and right now isn’t too good to focus on any of that stuff, so I’m just gonna give it some time.

Mikaiah: No, girls do not like me… as much as I like them. Plus I don’t even tell girls that I am in a band so I guess I don’t care either.

Rumpus: I know one of you is home-schooled — what’s that like?

Anaiah: Well I’ll answer for Mikaiah.  He stopped being home-schooled and joined me at our high school one month ago when I started the 9th and he is in the 12th! He claims that the experience was very boring and depressing.

Rumpus: I know you went to New York for a show — what’s your take on that city?

Anaiah: Yes we did! It was so fun, New York was extremely hot, but the people there were amazing, very nice.

Mikaiah: I liked it, brilliant place… sadly it did not feel like I was in New York;  it was just like LA. But the people were very bold.

Rumpus: What’s your idea of a perfect day?

Anaiah: A day were just everything runs smoothly, and when I’m not being really clumsy!

Mikaiah: All goes well at school, maybe I hangout with a friend or two. Come home after a nice bike ride, listen to some of my records on my portable turntable and drink a cup of tea. And a bath.

Rumpus: Lastly, do you have any general life advice for our readers?

Anaiah: Just live life to it’s fullest. That’s all I could pretty much say!

Mikaiah: You only live once so go out and do stuff. Get risky. But make sure you don’t do something so hardcore you kill yourself or ruin your life. Stay safe.

***

Photos by Walter Einenkel.

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***

The Rumpus: I was thinking about something Hegel wrote about truth and the way truth impresses itself upon our consciousness and that it can’t happen unless it’s through an emotive or sensory experience.  I think that in your art there’s a deeply emotive place, and yet it walks a fine line, because some of your machines will have this tiny literal narrative but then it’s really just suggestive of this larger bigger mystery.  How do you walk that line and prevent your work from just becoming just a visual pun?

Arthur Ganson: Well, I feel very rooted in wanting to make work that exists purely in the physical realm but I see the physical object as a kind of a conduit, and this whole question of truth and what’s true. I can’t prevent anything and I don’t want to try to, so to whatever degree someone were to look at anything and have the sense that it was for them a visual pun and if that’s where it resided then that’s the truth of it.  And I feel very comfortable with any and all interpretations because I know that they are all personal.  I think when we talk about the truth I feel that whatever that truth is it has to be personal.  And there’s no right or wrongness to it.  There can’t be a right or wrongness to it, because the object itself is both clear and ambiguous.  I think that’s an interesting place, a catalyst, enough information to go from but not so much that it could define it.  I think it really depends on any person’s capacity to dream.  Because really it’s about dreaming.

Rumpus: Someone this morning asked me what I was doing.  I told them I was going to interview you and they had never heard of you so I showed them a video of your work, Machine with Wishbone and they said “well I don’t get it, it’s just a toy”, and I had such a strange reaction; it never occurred to me that someone could see your work and not experience wonder.  I guess it is just the place in which you come from, how much wonder you have in you, where you are standing.  It was sad to me to think that someone in their private space is not accessing that wonder.

Ganson: Yes, yes how much wonder you have in you.  I had a very sobering and a very important experience once.   I had an opening at the Berkshire museum, and during the opening there were all these people coming up to me; they were really excited telling me how much they loved the work, my little kid ego was like wow that’s so cool ….and then this guy came up to me and said, “Is that your stuff up there?  I don’t get it at all.  It doesn’t mean anything to me”, and he kind of walked away and I thought, you know, thank you, because that moment really cemented the truth of the fact that the meaning is brought to the piece and as much as I want to feel that there’s something more there, it’s totally in the viewer.

Rumpus: My friend’s reaction to watching that just change my whole orientation to what people are like in their quiet space, that not everyone is activated by the same things.  I know that sounds obvious, but it really struck me this morning.

Ganson: I know from my own experience that there are pieces of art and other aspects of the world where I can be completely amazed and transformed by something or not, and there’s a lot of work that I know is transformative for others that I’m not getting.

Rumpus: When I saw the wishbone, I saw it pulling the machine, and then someone else told me, it’s obviously not pulling it.

Ganson: No, it is pulling the machine.  It’s not obvious.

Rumpus: Oh really!  My god!

Ganson: The machine is making the wishbone walk like this, it’s rocking the wishbone back and forth and twisting it left and right, but the machine itself is just on two wheels and there’s enough weight on the wishbone that that action means that the wishbone is pulling the machine behind it.  You can tell your friend she’s wrong.

Rumpus: I love being right.

Ganson: This is interesting for me because I’m always amazed the level at which people think it’s pushing the wishbone.

Rumpus: I felt so stupid because my very smart friend insisted it was pushing it.  There was no way that wasn’t possible.

Ganson: This is to Anisse’s friend:  The wishbone is pulling the machine!  She was right!

Rumpus: Besides these machines that investigate larger ideas and feelings, there are simpler machines, like Machine with Chinese Fan; that is a very simple gesture.

Ganson: Yes, that piece isn’t asking any big questions.  It’s about the wonderment of every moment.  Yesterday I was at the Long Now Foundation in Fort Mason, and I looked out at the end of the pier, at this bank of fog out there, and thought, wow that’s beautiful.

Rumpus: When you started making these machines was there ever a point where you didn’t think it would be something you’d spend your whole life doing?

Ganson: I never knew.  I’ve never had the feeling like ‘oh I want to do this for the rest of my life’.  I’ve never really known.  I feel like I’ve always been doing the most natural next step.  I’ve never had a sense that I want my career to go in a certain direction, because I don’t know.

Rumpus: Has it been a surprise to you?

Ganson: Yeah.  When I look back on it I’m kind of amazed, when I got up on the stage there last night (referring to a lecture at the Long Now Foundation) part of me was thinking this is so weird.  It really came from a place of solitude and of really wanting to make things just by myself but it’s joyful to share it.

Rumpus: Anonymity has its own kind of glory.  There’s just something so nice about being obscure in the world and it has its kind of freedom.  No one expects anything of you because no one knows who you are.  Then you have this fame and I would think that it would be two different worlds meeting – you’re alone most of the time, and then you have this other kind of public experience bringing it out into the world.

Related Posts:

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• Machine with Wishbone
• Machine with Abandoned Doll