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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• Joshua Mohr Reads From Damascus
• Damascus Giveaway! (Is Now Over)
• The Rumpus Original Combo with Joshua Mohr
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• Josh Mohr Interview

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.

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To A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh character (affectionally called Edward, the original name of Milne’s bear): “Dearest Edward,  Have you gone mad, Bear?  I noticed that you’re wearing a shirt, not just into the pool anymore but all the time. You’ve changed. Are you embarrassed or something?”

To Ernest Heminway’s Brett from the Sun Also Rises:  ”Dear Brett, I find myself in the horrible position of telling you what a truly terrible human being you are. I know what you’re doing with Jake and Robert when you’re very much engaged to Michael.”

These are just some of the letters written by real people addressed to fictional characters, featured in the blog Letters With Character, a spin-off project from Ben Greenman‘s collection Correspondences, which included an incomplete story.  Greenman writes, “There was a seventh story printed directly on the outside of the box, and it was intentionally uncompleted: I left lacunae in the story in the form of unwritten postcards sent between the main characters, and I invited readers to imagine them and send them to me.  Early last year, Correspondences migrated over to Harper Perennial and evolved into a longer collection called What He’s Poised to Do, named for the intentionally uncompleted story. My editors and I briefly debated reviving the Postcard Project, but decided instead to come at the question of letters and readers and fiction, and how they collide and collude, from an entirely different direction. The result was Letters With Character, a blog that invites readers to write letters to fictional characters.”

Have you ever wanted to tell Toru-san from the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that you too have been down in that well?  Or maybe you wanted to stick it to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and let him know what he’s made of?

Now’s your chance.

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Polan: “I am trying to draw every person in New York. I will be drawing people everyday and posting as frequently as I can. It is possible that I will draw you without you knowing it. I draw in Subway stations and museums and restaurants and on street corners. I try not to be in the way when I am drawing or be too noticeable. If you would like to increase the chances of a portrait of YOU appearing on this blog please email me (art@jasonpolan.com).”

Then attesting to the endearing and absurd impossibility of the project he states, “When the project is completed we will all have a get together.”

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Littlerock works like Lost in Translation in reverse. The slight plot: two young Japanese adults, brother Rintaro and sister Atsuko, have come to America on vacation, and their car breaks down in Littlerock.  You’re expecting Arkansas, but oh no, this is Littlerock, California, a quintessential nowhere town, where it takes a lot of work to escape.  For most of the youth in the picture, that possibility seems more like a pipe dream. In the opening scene, as they’re walking along a little highway, Rintaro asks his sister, “Is this the right place?” But the right place for what? And what can be gleaned from a place like Littlerock?

Littlerock isn’t much more than some dusty streets lined with thirsty-looking trees, motels, and trailer homes. Ott captures the palette of the place with neutrals and vivid sunsets, generously painting what’s probably a fairly ugly town as somewhat beautiful, and the film’s quietude is accompanied perfectly by a soundtrack courtesy of The Cave Singers.  As soon as the two siblings get the ride situation figured out, Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto) wants to continue on to San Francisco as they had planned, but after a chance motel party, Atsuko wants to stay behind for a while and get to know (both intimately and casually) what this place is all about. So Rintaro continues on, and Atsuko stays behind to absorb America through one of its best lenses, the shithole nowhere town and the people who populate it.  Because what are we if not our nowheres, our left-behind scraggly towns, replete with potheads and rusted-out bikes, loans to repay and girls worth fighting for?

Atsuko befriends Cory (Cory Zacharia), a bizarre, almost unclassifiable person: his sexual identity is very much in flux (bringing out the homophobia in the small-town drug dealer), he’s as naive as he is cunning, generous yet totally self-absorbed, and his mercurial character dominates much of his screen time, such that he nearly steals every scene he graces. His character’s charm is largely due to his total lack of self-awareness — he has a habit of inviting himself along on dates where he’s clearly not welcome. But he’s so likeable because you don’t have much of a clue who he really is. And his magnetism is curiously astronomical.  Because Atsuko can’t decipher it any other way, she takes Cory at face value, based on his generosity: he gives her a place to stay and a job taking orders at a roadside burrito joint.

Atsuko (Atsuko Okaysuka) is one of the movie’s writers, and she has oddly and endearingly written herself into the script, not as an agent of speech to move the narrative along, but rather as a quiet observer, one who is relegated to being a mirror for the actions and scenery around her. Because she can’t understand a single word of English, she’s left to deduce the characters of Littlerock through their actions. Additionally, there are no subtitles in the film (except when Rintaro and Atsuko are speaking to one another), so the viewer never knows what Atsuko is saying, which results in these beautiful exchanges during which we too have to take Atsuko at her blinks and nods and the way she stares intensely ahead. We have to deduce how she feels as she rides her bike through town and listens to the mixtape a local hipster gives her. We read her through the economy of her body language. It isn’t hard— Atsuko Okaysuka is a natural on the screen, managing to captivate us for silent stretches of time without a single word. Her performance is reminiscent of Michelle Williams  in Wendy and Lucy, high praise indeed.

It’s worth mentioning that most of the characters in Ott’s film aren’t professional actors; for the most part they’ve been cast to play themselves. This choice might in part be due to financial strains, but it lends the film its verité quality, and also reveals Ott’s commitment to accurately representing this particular place and time.  And Ott has an affection for these characters that tends to rub off on you: those characters whose presence would normally be wearisome, ended up endearing themselves to me with their small-town eccentricities.

Atsuko ends up falling for the aforementioned local hipster, who’s slightly cringe-worthy in his Scwhinn-bike-mix-tape-you-don’t-speak-english seduction. Does she fall for him because of his hair? (He does have amazing hair, but that seems to be about it.) She thinks that her feelings for him are mutual, but how can she know? She sort of ends up knowing, when she catches a glimpse, through his curtains, of him making out with another partially undressed girl.

She leaves that scene without being able to confront him or express herself fully, and this is one of the moments that get at what this movie is really about. It’s about how language alienates us, and all the spaces that separate our attempts at communication, barriers between what we want to say and what we actually say. Atsuko is brimming with things she’s dying to express, but with very few outlets. Everyone’s trying to tell someone else who they are, but no one gets around to figuring out how to say it. In one scene, Cory, Atsuko, and the dishwasher, Francisco (Roberto Sanchez), are sitting outside the burrito joint where they work. It’s late, likely after closing, and they’re outside smoking. They’re having a semblance of a conversation, but none of them actually speak a common language. What could be more 2010 California than that?

When Rintaro finally returns from San Francisco, he and Atsuko leave together for their last stop on the trip: Manzanar, the site of an old WWII Japanese internment camp where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during the war.  The scene shows the brother and sister silently observing monuments and photos, absorbing the history of the place.  This sequence feels very much like an homage to, or an echo of, a similar sequence in Barry Jenkins’ film Medicine for Melancholy, in which the two characters, both African American, are looking at the works at MoAd (the Museum of the African Diaspora). As Rintaro and Atsuko take in the history of Manzanar, an internment camp in the middle of the California desert, you feel the experience of their alienation sidle up against a shared history. It’s a scene in which the brother and sister are able to place their identities, the continuity of their cultural heritage and history, in a world in which they are now outsiders. For a brief moment in the film, they are simultaneously both outsiders and at home.

Littlerock is understated without being underwhelming. It’s a quiet, atmospheric whiff of a narrative, and acts like a lyric documentary of a place in time.  And that place is Littlerock, which seems like nowhere you’d want to be from, or end up in, and yet people are from there and people end up there. It’s a portrait of what happens in a place like that. As it turns out:  a lot of pot smoking, hanging out, bike riding, rage, homophobia, and debt repayment.

While Littlerock isn’t a film for everyone (if you thought watching Wendy and Lucy was like watching paint dry then don’t bother) it’s a quiet — deliberately quiet — sleeper from Mike Ott, who is gifted at restraint. It’s also a quiet film because, well, why should a movie about the spaces in communication be loud?  Nothing in the film feels forced, and his directorial hand is modest and tempered. Although he’s in full control of the material, Ott manages to leave enough room for ambiguity – a sign that he’s a director with a bright future ahead.

The movie closes with a pay phone scene that tears at your littlerock heart — Atsuko is leaving without notice to return to Japan; she calls Cory to say goodbye but of course she can’t make herself understood over the phone. All he can understand are her sad inflections; ultimately he never knows what she’s actually saying.  There is so much that we are unable to express through language, a space we fill with gestures of longing, looks, glances. It’s a space that Mike Ott has opened a window onto, letting us observe people who are looking to be loved. Or, if that’s too much to ask, then to be partially understood.  And if that’s too much to ask, then to just hang out for a while together, perhaps under an overpass, or in a trailer, or on a pair of bikes listening to mix tapes. Because in a town like Littlerock, maybe anything is enough.

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