Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890)

In full.
Audiobook.

Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia - Julia Kristeva (1987)

Appears to be in full.

Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

Source.

The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley (1941)

Here. Subtitle: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality
Backgrounder on Wikipedia.

Studies On Hysteria - Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer

Source.

On the Sacred Disease

Source.
Wikipedia article for some context.

A document attributed apocryphally to Hippocrates, this is one of the earliest discussions of what is likely epilepsy, until then attributed to sacred possession.

On the Sublime by Friederich Schiller

Essay in full.

Beauty enslaves us, but the Sublime will set us free.

Scitzophrenia - Testimonials, etc.

List of characteristics on Wikipedia:
Hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking.

Testimonials 1.

Article Describing a Simulation

Aug. 29, 2002 -- The textbook description of schizophrenia is a listing of symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior. But what does schizophrenia really feel like? NPR's Joanne Silberner reports on a virtual reality experience that simulates common symptoms of the mental illness.

Janssen Pharmaceutica, a company that makes a drug treatment for schizophrenia, has created a multimedia simulation that it says lets a participant see the world through the eyes and ears of a person with schizophrenic illness. Janssen created the simulation as an education tool for doctors and others who want a more visceral understanding of the illness.

Silberner, who experienced the simulation, says it works this way: "For five to 10 minutes, someone wanting to know what it feels like to have untreated schizophrenia puts on goggles and headphones, and sees and hears a range of hallucinations. You can choose your virtual reality -- what happens on a trip to the doctor's office, or on a ride on a city bus." In the program she experienced, a caseworker takes the schizophrenia patient to a grocery store with a pharmacy in the back, to refill a prescription.

To create the virtual reality project, technical director Stephen Streibig consulted a group of people with schizophrenia, including Daniel Frey, 26. Frey describes what he and Silberner experienced in the program: "When you first walk into the pharmacy, you're walking through the aisles and there are people staring at you, just staring at you from every aisle. And there's one instance where there is a woman sort of protecting her children from you when you walk through the aisle.

"This, of course, is really a delusion, it's part of the schizophrenic thinking, that everyone is looking at you and paying attention to you and is afraid of you."

Silberner describes more of the simulated hallucinations: "People in the produce aisle disappear, and no one else notices -- were they ever really there? From a TV monitor, a man in a commercial yells directly at you. The label on a bottle of pills turns into a skull and crossbones."

Hearing voices is a nearly universal symptom of schizophrenia, and the simulation reproduces that in a way that Frey says is very authentic, and Silberner says is alarming: "The voices jump around you -- they're in front, now behind, now to your left, now on your right. They're persistent, impossible to ignore or filter out."

Dr. Sam Keith, medical advisor on the virtual reality project, is a veteran psychiatrist who's heard thousands of patients describe schizophrenic episodes. Still, after trying the simulation, Keith said, "When it's real, it's different -- it's very frightening, it's very scary."

Streibig said that's precisely the effect he hoped to achieve: After years of the illness being misdiagnosed, mismanaged and stigmatized, he says, "People should understand what it's like to go through this."

Even though schizophrenia patient Frey consulted on the project, he found the simulation too disturbing to sit all the way through. When Silberner tells him she was terrified by the experience, Frey responds, "Yeah, you ought to be. Imagine not being able to take off the goggles, the helmet."

Reefer Madness

Starting with the 19th Century, gaining speed into the 20th, one sees the merging of interest in an unlimited, visionary subjectivity (a la Romanticism) and the recreational use of perception-altering drugs. The ritual serves as a leisure-time equivalent of what is being said by an emergent psychology field: that subjectivity is a chemical, biological process, not a transcendent one.

A notable contribution from the 19th C is the European and North American para-literature on opium use and the confessional of addiction. Thomas DeQuincey establishes the genre. Charles Baudelaire adds to the correspondence between drugs and psychological states a hammy, character-actor's brogue. Writerly observations of opium dens become faddish.

Into the 20th, there is Celine whose take on hardboard realism is tantamount to hallucination (the subject of literal drug use is not explored). Aldous Huxley is perhaps the prominent idealist and optimist of drug use, holding it dear for tapping into hitherto under-experienced adventures in subjectivity, explorations aligned with mysticism. Shortly later, Timothy Leary follows his example. William Burroughs is less rosy: drug use being the commodification of subjectivity--subjectivity given an external, material form--turns subjectivity over to the laws of commodities: trade, regulation, policing, negotiable ownership.

Hashish and Opium Literature

• Confessions of an Opium-Eater by Thomas DeQuincey.
• Artificial Paradises: on hashish and wine as means of expanding individuality by Charles Baudelaire.
• Protocol I. Highlights of the First Hashish Impression [by Walter Benjamin: 18.Dec.1927]
• Protocol II. Highlights of the Second Hashish Impression [by Walter Benjamin & Ernst Bloch:15.Jan. 1928]
• Protocol III. Walter Benjamin: Protocol of the Hashish Experiment of 11 May 1928.
• Protocol IV. Walter Benjamin: 29 September 1928. Saturday. Marseilles.
• Protocol V. Walter Benjamin: Hashish Beginning of March 1930
• Protocol VI. Walter Benjamin: On the Session of 7/8 June 1930
• Protocol VII. Egon Wissing: Protocol to the Experiment of 7 March 1931.
• Protocol VIII. Fritz Fränkel: Protocol of the Experiment of 12 April 1931 (Fragment.)
• Protocol IX. Fritz Fränkel: Protocol of 18 April 1931.
• Protocol X./ Crock Notes Walter Benjamin: 1932
• Protocol XI. Fritz Fränkel: Protocol to the Mescaline Experiment of 22 May, 1934.
• Protocol XII. Walter Benjamin: Undated Notes.

Other Narcotics Literature

• The Psychedelic Library
• Dr. Albert Hoffman: LSD: Completely Personal (1996).
• Dr. Albert Hoffman: Insight Outlook.
• Dr. Albert Hoffman: Excerpt from original diary of first self-administered LSD trip. 

Contemporary Resources

• NoSlang.com Drug Slang Translator "Learn the latest drug slang terms kids are using."
• Slang Drug Terms from Pride Prevention
• National Institute of Drug Abuse and Addiction, The Science of Drug Abuse and Addiction
• Acid/LSD
• Wikipedia entry on LSD.
• Alcohol
• Wikipedia entry on Alcohol.
• Club Drugs
• Wikipedia entry on Club Drugs.
• Cocaine
• Wikipedia entry on Cocaine.
• Ecstasy/MDMA
• Wikipedia entry on Ecstasy.
• Heroin
• Wikipedia entry on Heroin.
• Inhalants
• Wikipedia entry on Inhalants.
• Marijuana
• Wikipedia entry on Marijuana.
• Methamphetamine
• Wikipedia entry on Methamphetamine.
• PCP/Phencyclidine
• Wikipedia entry on PCP.
• Prescription Medications
• Steroids (Anabolic)
• Wikipedia entry on Steroids.
• Tobacco Addiction
• Wikipedia entry on Tobacco.
• Testimonial Community Board from Blue Light (may require registration).

In Film
 

Curious Alice - 1970s After School Special

Reefer Madness 

Script.

Hacks, Hustlers, Charlatans, Liars, Fiction Writers and Thieves

These writers, similar to Laura Albert, blur the line between hoax and reportage. They become actors, game players in their own fictions and grandiloquent memoirs, to a lesser or greater degree.

Laura Albert is more of an enigma, Warhol showman, that shoplifter of persona. The contours of opportunism, financial, careerist, are much more clear in these cases. In most cases because there's less art to the con.

This is reportage through the lens of resentment, coupled with a despairing fascination with the fleetingness of Truth, despite all the mass industries set up to present their spin on it.

Others seem to have worked out a sophisticated theory of how the sentimental potboiler intersects with a culture's trauma, with a view towards commercial success. In the cloyingly sentimental yet disquieted climate of an affluent post industrial landscape, impoverished, hopeless and/or abused youth began to suit the sentimental criteria for privileged subject.

This doomed urchin, upbraiding wealth and material accomplishment by her or his very existence, honour a latent but recurring Rousseau-like theme in America: the corruption of society by virtue of shattered innocence.

This newer genre, obeying the dictates of good showmanship, posits: always better if that abject youth is real than a story.

The prose can be titillating, sensational, excruciating, sadistic, erotic, repugnant, heart-tugging, with borrowed flourishes from the movies.

Certain motifs and conventions abound: Addiction then twelve step programs, unwholesome parents, sexual and physical abuse portrayed graphically, one might say luridly, punishment and enduring, a call for mass-cultural healing.

The redemption sought becomes not coincidentally an economic and professional boon for the writer.

Each of these authors understand journalistic realism with an eagle eye for convincing detail and colourful character. Embarked on a professional thrill ride where real money or status is at stake (one reality consistent to all these stories), charged with the gung-ho, high spirits of gamblers, they remain relatively unapologetic of their actions to the last, self-cast anti-heroes in a morally erratic capitalism gone off the rails.

Psychologically, they are often deferring, evasive, charming. In the last, they are an empty byline.

Often, the permission the author feels he or she needs to invoke begins with that convention, now invisible if  practically everywhere in our culture: I am a survivor. A noteworthy subject should also physically manifest symptoms of worrisome decline in puritanical or Utopian America: poverty, crushed egalitarianism, broken homes, suburban disillusionment, addiction, violence, moral squalor, sexual permissiveness, AIDS.

The villain in this story is unrepentant abuser (abuser both of people but also of substances, physical pleasures, sex, drugs). Heroes are the abused who have admitted their helplessness before destiny, renouncing decadent worldly pleasures, expressed in a way that touches the heart. The view is protestant, religious through and through.

In response to a hunger for such material, material that, in the words of Oprah has a "dramatic impact" on other morally sick, trembling lives, these writers inaugurate the new genre: poverty, abuse porn; tiny exploitation films cast as credible journalism, warbled or barked from the pulpit.

If one wishes to consider the contemporary lie as a naive art, here are some of its masters.

The Dubious Borderline Affair of Mr. Daisey Going to China
Transcript of the original This American Life episode: "Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory."
‘This American Life’ Retracts Episode on Apple’s Suppliers in China

Dave Pelzer
Excerpts from a Child Called It.

James Fray
Also: In the New York Times. 
Excerpts from A Million Little Pieces.

Stephen Glass
Also, in Vanity Fair.
Also, in Slate.
Also, the original article which caused the trouble.
Other amusing hatchetjobs:
 "A Day on the Streets", for The Daily Pennsylvanian, June 6, 1991
“Mrs. Colehill Thanks God For Private Social Security”, June 1997, for Policy Review magazine. PDF format.
“Probable Claus”, published January 6 & 13, 1997
"Holy Trinity", published January 27, 1997
“Don't You D.A.R.E.”, published March 3, 1997
“Writing on the Wall”, published March 24, 1997
"Slavery Chic", published July 14 & 21, 1997
“The Young and the Feckless”, published Sept. 15, 1997

Jayson Blair
(April 19, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: VETERANS; In Military Wards, Questions and Fears From the Wounded".
(April 7, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: THE FAMILIES; For One Pastor, the War Hits Home".
(April 3, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: THE HOMETOWN; Rescue in Iraq and a 'Big Stir' in West Virginia". 
(March 27, 2003). "A NATION AT WAR: MILITARY FAMILIES; Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse News"
(March 3, 2003). "Making Sniper Suspect Talk Puts Detective in Spotlight".  
(February 10, 2003). "Peace and Answers Eluding Victims of the Sniper Attacks".
(October 30, 2002). "Retracing A Trail: The Investigation; U.S. Sniper Case Seen As A Barrier To A Confession". 

Viki Johnson
Excerpts from a Rock and a Hard Place

Jonah Lehrer Charmed Me, Then Blatantly Lied to Me About Science

Shary Boyle: If I Had One Wish

Some Context:

Website

Why Feminist Art Still Matters | Hazlitt | Random House of Canada (Discussion with Shary Boyle, Vanessa Dunn, Aminah Sheikh)

Shary Boyle Represents Canada at 55th Venice Biennale

Everything under the Moon (with Christine Fellows) - A heartbreaking shadow play that achingly equates the show's illusory projections with vanishing peoples and species, the transitory symbols of art becoming the ghostly psychic debris of our terribly, evermore plausible extinction. And yet a children's story as well, a quest, a buddy movie, the story of friends around a campfire.

Canadian Artist Project (including commentary by Sholem Krishtalka).

New and Upcoming work.

Facebook (with art posts!).

One wishes, within the seemingly infinite crawl spaces and hobby-holes of the inter-web, that the site of a *lovvved* artist would represent all of their collected and studio work. The representative sample of Shary's work so inspires and gives voice to awkward, shapeless dodos of thought.

Below are a few of my own dodos.

- Sensitivity, skill in craft and imagination are pursued as peregrine themes in Shary Boyle's work. These three motivations are rarely pursued as separate from one another. Imagination is allowed a mischievous tentacle, transforming reality, not retreating from it.

- Sensitivity is sometimes a shying quality in the purveyor of commodities, as making commodities is a repetitive activity. In an artist, this often seems to lead to a heightened valuation of craft. The other route (not always exclusive, sometimes complimentary) is to become more machine-like. One could (arbitrarily) set up two default positions to illustrate the range of attitudes towards the art object and the commodity: the 19th Century Arts and Craft movement, at one pole, and Warhol, at the other.

- Shary's production schedule is regularly machine-like (Warhol). Each individual piece of work, however, has a great deal of particular patience and care put into it (Arts and Crafts).

- Art objects, knickknacks that demonstrate sensitivity in craft, now a rarer sight for a modern, resist the habitual quick scan of the senses. Such work is to involve one, imaginatively, sinuously, in the presented vignette. 

- Shary spends much effort digging up techniques of undervalued, outmoded (by the ever-efficient machines), excluded or forgotten artisanal practices. Among practices, thoughtfulness, sensibilities renewed in the twining, fluffy, shying-then-emboldening, leaky, leafy-lined aesthetic of Boyle's work is a generous array of stylistic preciousness.

- Here is a scrapbook note of what I imagine to be preciousness in her work: fairy tale or folklore sources; imaginative landscapes; animals and animal-people; fantastical flights of fancy; elfin and prepubescent bodies; daffy costumes; detailed depictions of cloth, material; gilt, decorative, flowery, ornate flourishes; a respect for field observation as in naturalism; brittle, dainty, breakable materials for the sculpture; delicate, complimentary colour palette for the paintings; drawer-ly pencil strokes and pencil textures for the drawings; arcane technologies (minded mostly in the service of creating wonder) for the projections (slide projectors, magic lanterns, manipulated, theatrically and moodily, in real time).

- The porcelain figurines also point to a further back historical source, in European rococo (I imagine the first originators of stylistic preciousness also sensed this continuity between the two practices, the delicate, aristocratically-refined rococo collectible on the one hand and the imaginative, industrial-democratic object of preciousness, on the other).

- No doubt the general dis-inclusion of preciousness from canonical museum art has--at least--socially patriarchal roots. Noting its remarkable influence on every nick and cranny of twentieth century creative output, glaring is the lopsided gender participation in either milieu's practitioners/members (museum=boys, preciousness=girls). Common from the Victorian era on, transmitted broadly via the pulp children's industries through the 20th then into our century, under Boyle's deft touch, preciousness has almost the appearance of a polemic; it also tests the redemptive quality of historically excluded material.

- I say "almost polemic" because so often the polemical tone in art leads to a certain brashness in presentation, broad strokes, blunted figurations, rhetorical outwardness. Again, sensitivity, the value which Boyle seems to place in preciousness, remains ice-cream-serene, supreme.

- However, Boyle's adoption of preciousness, is not in itself precious (if one is to mean by precious to be cloyingly taken with the sentimental, obsessively self-protected by the pretty and the quaint). Darkness, unsentimental frankness appears in this mythic retelling of the modern situation often, with a certain grounded literalness. And with humour.

- Darkness often comes in the form of a stylistic intrusion: the gothic, the grotesque, the violently flattened.

- Relatedly, despite the luster of pretty inherent in the materials and certain of the techniques (porcelain, ornament, floral patterning etc.), forms are often knotty, gnarled, organic in the way of old dead trees or mud.

- A lot of her illustrative qualities so reminiscent of children's picture story books, it is hard not to feel one is in the midst of a story. So, one makes up a story. Her figurines, also calling up qualities of toys (especially the off-limits-to-children toys of impeccable enchantment collected by grandparents) put one solidly over to a place of meaningful, fantastical, sentimental play.

- The stage is mythic, her girl children the heroes. Her girl children or also highly androgynous or effeminate boys; also near-hermaphrodites.

- Proportions or features of profiles, torsos, limbs, erogenous chassis, blemishes, blotches that lack ideal ratio or poise by corroboration of the beauty industries are studiously, lovingly attended to.

 - Departing from a gloomy Dickinsian suburbs of dingy interiors, looming, impersonal adults, coercive bullies, her heroes flee to take up residence in a savage and wonderful Never-Never Land. This land is frequently a woods or savanna-like. All of these locales possess an Edenic, private quality.

- Modern heroes, their adventures are complicated by embarrassment, awkwardness, genital compulsion, clumsiness.

- Heroes nonetheless, they are embarked upon a journey where they encounter as trials the strangeness of their bodies; evolving amorousness and/or self-pleasure; the compulsion of rituals; a battle with shyness and boldness before an implicit, all-present gaze (the gaze, in my mind, is a camera lens, the pose perhaps the remembered gesture of confinement during a vacation snapshot); a fight for equilibrium and fair footing within the catastrophes, excesses, self-sacrifice of desire; and the ever-present, lurking monsters of past trauma.

- Violence to the psyche is portrayed bodily (a severed head, a discombobulated anatomy).

- One suspects that the kaleidoscopes of fantasy start as nascent buds within the skin. Like leaves growing then falling from branches, these buds elaborate then self-shatter before the force and processes of the world. Responsible for these strange flowers and twirling vines, the literal crisis--its hard contours kept slightly off-frame-- is pictured in a transformed manner. The vignette is more bodily and remembered than based in the hard light of present perception.

 - Fate, the trans-formative point in stories, intervenes at moments of charged physicality, when a body seems in revolt against both environment and itself. The resulting, intimate metamorphoses convolute the flesh into endless, strange contusions and conjurations, often involving the return of spring-time or the appearance of animals. In these instances, the body can be like a disguise, an erratic shrub or sometimes a fountain.

- Otherworld Uprising (the title of Boyle's *really* good art book) is a designation which seems to refer to the condition of a literal spirit world. In the revolt, spirits, nature, body overlap one anothers' conventionally separate outlines.

- The just-below-the-surface, (half) presence of this Otherworld, its portals and rabbitholes located in bodily orifices, throws subjective turmoil and psychical discomfort in ribbons of stress against a semi-solid yet also fugitive, fleeing screen. This screen, made up of dreams and of shadows, often stands as a protective shield between two figures encountering one another, forestalling or warning off their first meeting. This outcome of these meetings is often either reconciliation/camaraderie or assault-dismemberment.

- I suspect the ectoplasm of this spirit world is made up of bodily juices.

- Poised together on a small pedestal of turf, possible murderers, potential companions, yet many times the figures stay half disinterested in one another, with the retiring tendency of shy but busily assessing, curious children.

- The contrast or collusion of gender roles (the same, different) is helpful in drawing out possible secretive meanings lodged in these frozen confrontations. Meaning plays out many ways: as fantasy fulfillment; as revenge; as appreciation and gauge of difference; as fetishistic worship; as friendship, fulfilling, joyful and intimate, but also brutal or conspiratorial; as wistful compensation; as jokey-making-fun; as critique; as ceremonial renewal; as violence. But, also, sometimes, inscrutably.

In the prolific stories of her art, Boyle seems attracted to rituals of visionary questing more usual to those swept aside, the misfits, the crackpots, the obsessive hobbyists, the shut ins (i.e. Blake, Darger). The import managed within each strange vacation slide or cameo often gives the sense of secrets within secrets, fleshed out in private and in locations of quiet, a remembrance of a remembrance (possibly dangerous), gaining not just velocity over time but also structure and a skeleton.

- Ever so often, with the kind of concentrated, slow pacing capable of affecting a shift in scene without hemorrhaging continuity or narrative sweep, Boyle's turbulent frame switches to almost-fulfillment and near-certitude in the sublime. The characters are alone, holding hands, with a planet to themselves, a planet worthy of the naturalistic raptures on the pages of a speculative edition of National Geographic. Within the context of Boyle's art, this is sublime in a heroic, personal sense, haunting one with the juxtaposition of the human with inhuman, and, in a sense, the unrepresentable landscape: Nature. It is not the sublime of the modern architect for whom the sublime is the habitat-equivalent of military shock and awe (Derived from Fredrick Jameson, the more habitual invocation of the word).

Organs of Computation - A Talk with Steven Pinker

Source.

An article that first came to me via Misha Glouberman and his School of Learning (-esque) lay-course in Happiness, this is an informal discussion on a lot of juicy subjects dear to the thought of Steven Pinker.

Themes include how biological organisms look to repeat themselves, how our thinking on thought may be misrepresented by our desire for aesthetics, how robots fail to advance to the computational elegance of a four year old girl, how the Internet can be construed as basically an evolution in language, Rube Goldberg machines, complexity, the sometimes unfortunate plight of happiness within equilibrium-based decision-making, why magical thinking is not illogical but perhaps an evolutionarily vestige system, and why a mind is more like a computer than a toilet.

What I want to be an intentional joke is, perhaps, not. On the introductory page the article repeats its first several paragraphs, underlining the point that processing is often inelegant, and complex systems the work of machines within machines.

Laura Albert

From New York magazine: Who is the Real JT LeRoy? A search for the true identity of a great literary hustler.

 

When I first read J. T. LeRoy, for whatever reason, I plain didn't buy it.
 

Then, when the news broke that J. T. Leroy was the persona and deftly crafted literary hoax by one Laura Albert, I was hooked on the para-literature that emerged devoted to unmasking the jig.

 
Here is a writer whose relationship to reality was specifically that of a liar, hustler and thief.

DSM-IV list of symptoms for autism

Source.
Wikipedia's main entry on autism.

In the diagnostic manual used to classify disabilities, the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), “autistic disorder” is listed as a category under the heading of “Pervasive Developmental Disorders.” A diagnosis of autistic disorder is made when an individual displays 6 or more of 12 symptoms listed across three major areas: social interaction, communication, and behavior. Examples below.

Problems in social relatedness and communication.

Difficulty in mixing with other children; prefers to be alone; aloof, regal manner; difficulty in expressing needs; uses gestures or pointing instead of words.

Abnormal responses to one or a combination of senses; such as sight, hearing, touch, balance, smell, taste, reaction to pain.

Sustained odd play.

Have odd mannerisms such as rocking back and forth, hand flapping, walking on tip-toes or head banging.

Uneven gross/fine motor skills.

Not responsive to verbal cues, acts as deaf.

Little or no eye contact.

Insistence on sameness; resist changes in routine.

Noticeable physical over-activity or extreme under-activity.

Tantrums; displays extreme distress for no apparent reason.

Speech and language absence or delays. Inappropriate laughing and giggling.

Echolalia (repeating words or phrases in place of normal language).

Abnormal ways of relating to people, objects and events.

Inappropriate attachment to objects.

Don't seek cuddling.

Spins objects.

Not fully knowing how to hold a conversation, thinking about what the other person in a conversation understands and believes, and tuning in to the meta-linguistic signals of the other person, such as facial expression, tone of voice and body language.

The Art Fag on Ryan Trecartin

For further (or, perhaps, less) edification on the subject of video-maker Ryan Trecartin, here is hands down my favourite reaction to his work, in essay form. With apologies to Sholem Krishtalka who has since gone on, I believe, to have entirely comprehensive, multi-tiered, professionally-paying and loquacious views on the subject, this represents something like Mr. Krishtalka's first then second stab at coming to terms with Mr. Trecartin. And in my mind, something like the perfect critical first response to Mr. Trecartin.

Sholem Krishtalka is Toronto-based.

"Providing a detailed summary of I-Be Area is much like providing a detailed summary of the rest of Mr. Trecartin’s oeuvre; certainly possible, but one runs the risk of sounding like someone given abrupt leave of their senses (“so there was a guy with a yellow face, and then he became a girl with a yellow face, but with long hair and gym shorts…”). By now, darlings, we have watched I-Be Area two and half times, and while we do feel like we’ve just been run over by about five rollercoasters, we are no nearer to providing a cogent synopsis."

Taken from Art Fag 17 and Art Fag 23.

from Art Fag 17

A QUICK NOTE FROM THE UNDERGROUND.

Thus far, we have only been detailing our daylight viewing habits. Some of our evenings (the ones we see fit to narrate, that is) were spent in the arms of the New York Underground Film Festival. We shall not bother to detail every program consumed, but end our travelogue by sharing an epiphany.

It concerns one Mr. Ryan Trecartin. We have been eyeing him with intense suspicion ever since we came across his name in the pages of Artforum, where his singular genius was extolled by none other than that perpetual coddler of damaged fags, Mr. Dennis Cooper. Mr. Cooper was working himself into a hyperventilating frenzy over Mr. Trecartin's epic "A Family Finds Entertainment," which largely defies description, but has loosely to do with the adoption of a runaway hit-and-run victim by a houseful of hard-partying cartoon psychotics, and is ladled with heavy doses of camp. We had seen snippets at the Whitney Biennial (and what a dog's breakfast that was, ladies and gentlemen), and seen it in full at Pleasure Dome's recent "Bad Boys" program, where it was the star attraction. Even after the full 40 sensory-assaultive minute running time, we could not come to a firm opinion of Mr. Trecartin's work; there were moments of starlit genius, where the lunacy of his cast and their improvisatory abilities made for utter brilliance. And there were just as many moments that came off as mannered and irritating, like the grating antics of an overindulged and understimulated child.

We met with one of Mr. Trecartin's shorts at an Underground Film Fest program, and we have been further edified. In fact, we are currently happy to hop on his bandwagon (even if we are a little leery of how crowded it is, and how fast it's going). The short, entitled "(Tommy Chat Just Emailed Me)," concerns the perils of internet dating, single motherhood and constipation, and involves many of the same characters that populate "Family...". As you might be able to glean from our description, it involves the same general tenor of "Family...", but this time, the brief running time has reined in Mr. Trecartin's more indulgent sensibilities. Despite its apparent insanity and the ludicrous behavioural tics of its characters (at one point, the single mother, cruising the web for a lover, locks her baby in the shower to get some alone-time), the durational brevity forced a more stringent structure on the proceedings; the video, in all its antic absurdity, came off like a Bach fugue; the unfolding of motifs was made transparent, its progress made clear while still maintaining its anarchic tone. Consider the final moments of the video: throughout, Catherine Pimples (the heroine of the constipation storyline) holds court from the toilet in a lake-house. The final moments of the video finds all the characters in the bathroom with her. Mr. Trecartin (in character as Tammy) raises his hand like an orchestra conductor and leads his introverted, self-referential characters, all still trapped in the bathroom, in a slow, rhythmic chorus of "What's outside? Oh my God!" as the camera makes a slow pan of the surrounding environs. This single moment casts an illuminating pall over the entire video, revealing its parallel strands of containment and sequestration (both social and intestinal).

* * *

from Art Fag 23 

Providing a detailed summary of I-Be Area is much like providing a detailed summary of the rest of Mr. Trecartin’s oeuvre; certainly possible, but one runs the risk of sounding like someone given abrupt leave of their senses (“so there was a guy with a yellow face, and then he became a girl with a yellow face, but with long hair and gym shorts…”). By now, darlings, we have watched I-Be Area two and half times, and while we do feel like we’ve just been run over by about five rollercoasters, we are no nearer to providing a cogent synopsis. To say that the plot is loose is akin to saying that the Eiffel Tower is tallish. Still, there are threads and themes, the grandest of which is Command-C and -V (or Control-C and -V for those who are not goose-stepping along with the Apple army): the copy and paste functions; in other words, cloning, replication, avatars, multiple selves. It has also to do with the exercise and application of these themes: adoption, the internet, on-line profiles, and chatrooms. These latter two are especially important, as they provide what could loosely be described as the setting for I-Be Area. As near as we can make out, this is to what the title specifically refers. Each character in the video has their own allotted space, or Area, and much of the vertiginous atmosphere that engulfs the viewer like a fever dream comes from the representation of these spaces: at once claustrophobic and cluttered; tight, cramped little spaces, gaudily painted and garishly lit, each populated, if not by one or two people, then a single minded collective.

Mr. Trecartin’s 100-odd minute opus jetés manically from room to room. The main narrative arc concerns the identity dilemma (or, in Trecartin’s southern-fag drawl, “diii-layeh-maauuh”) of I-Be 2 (Mr. Trecartin), the second in a series of clones named I-Be. He finds no affinity with his previous incarnation (who has become a woman, and rechristened herself You Me Me You), and his on-line avatar has taken on a life of his own. Although this distinction between what goes on in front of the screen and on the screen is virtually moot in I-Be Area. Thus, he embarks on a quest for identity. At its core, I-Be Area is a picaresque tale of self-discovery and self-creation, and bears a striking structural resemblance to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I-Be 2 cycles through identity after identity, and like Huck down the Mississippi, wanders from Area to Area, and so we meet a slew of characters: the den mother of the I-Bes (who, by the by, is the best actress of her generation – she is the only performer who does not attempt to mimic Trecartin’s über-queeny-sassy-fag-on-speed delivery; she translates the idiosyncrasies of his script into a kind of Tennessee Williams heroine performing beat poetry, and all we can say is that Meryl Streep has nothing on her), the I-Be Adoption Agency staff, Cheetah and Jammie (I-Be 2’s entourage), a young boy named Django (who grows up to become a clone named Pasta, also played by Mr. Trecartin, who looks like Linda Blair in a blonde page-boy wig), a preternaturally dramatically gifted baby named Polly, The Everymom (a troupe of adoption-crazy lesbians), a grating creature in pink gym shorts and six-inch platform heels named Ramada Omar, Jamie the pregnant drama teacher/goth band frontwoman who isn’t really pregnant, and on and on and on.

The introduction and subsequent disposal of these characters follows the narrative logic of channel surfing; they appear (or, more aptly, flounce) on screen suddenly, and disappear without warning. But we always see them in their Area, and as the film wears on, the Areas, and the boundaries between them, are violently destroyed: rooms are painted black, windows are smashed, objects thrown in and out, walls torn down in a grinning, laughing, wide-eyed orgy of hopped-up unleashing of frantic energy.

Trecartin’s pacing only goes at one speed: faster. Like a freight train chugging to life at the top of a steep decline, I-Be Area is languid at first; whole minutes go by without a cut. But as the movie progresses, scenes are choppier and choppier, dialogue (whose pitch is sped up and slowed down at will) overlaps more and more, until the final scenes end up as an anarchic riot of cuts and cacophony, a screaming blur of relentlessly jumping images, a Babel of crashes and shrieks and maniacal giggles. It’s exhausting.

So what is to be made of the hour and forty-eight minute stretch of I-Be Area? When we attempt to illuminate the vast and varied thematic territory that he traverses, one might easily be led to believe that Mr. Trecartin’s candied hysteria operates in the service of some sort of commentary. After all, the thematic core of his work is always tight as a drum; adoption, cloning, identity, the internet, profile pages: these are by no means wildly disparate subjects. Indeed, if Mr. Trecartin’s grasp of the conceptual map of his universe were not iron-clad, his videos would be unwatchable. Zany is as good a performative mode as any, but it is a poor organizational method. No: we the viewer are taken on a very carefully controlled path. Its iconography might be the nth degree of a highly individualized eccentricity, but it follows an internal logic. The one thing this is not, and must not be confused for, however, is a critical statement, and Mr. Trecartin is not a polemicist.

It is a mistake to ascribe politics, critical or otherwise, to Mr. Trecartin. If his characters flip in and out of identities (and baroque make-up jobs and dollar-store wigs and Salvation Army get-ups) with the ease of shuffling playing cards, zigging into another gender or zagging out of gender altogether, it is not because Mr. Trecartin is championing a kind of political consciousness. He is merely displaying his inner reality, where outer Reality (or, as Huck might have put it, “sivilization”) has no bearing. In the video-space he creates, there is no consequence to these characters’ queer transgressions; no one argues with them, no one questions them, no one even comments upon them. The people in his videos barely even talk to each other; they talk only to the camera and are subsequently reacted to. There is no outside world and so its conventions of time, space, narrative, and identity have no need to apply; Reality has been abandoned for the funhouse of Trecartin-land, where only the rule is the anarchic Wonderland logic of his internal universe.

The surest signal of this lack of polemic drive and political intent is the kind of dialogue that Mr. Trecartin, in the span of two feature videos and one short, has made utterly his own, to the extent that we find it hard to accurately describe. It is a goulash of slangs and affectations: campy gay, Valley-girl, southern belle (and southern redneck), urban black. It is a babble dialect consisting entirely of abbreviations, shorthands, in-jokes, punchlines, soundbytes and song lyrics, whose syntax is mannerism, and whose grammar is artifice. It even has registers, like Cantonese, only its registers are the gradient between the highest and lowest limits of a pitch controller. Every utterance of every character in Mr. Trecartin’s videos is in this mode. Seriousness, drama, import: these are, if not anathema, then certainly alien to Mr. Trecartin’s language. His dialogue clips along like a series of rapid-fire text messages; there is no time, but more importantly, there is no space for genuineness of affect, or meaning, or any kind. There is only a back-and-forth of one-liners, whose inanity slowly vanishes as it becomes familiar, and habitual.

The result of the anarchic logic and flip, mannered dialogue that are the principal components of Mr. Trecartin’s universe is that any meaning is delivered as if it were meaningless. Thus, because of this misfire, this gap between the spoken word and the substance it purports to communicate, there seems to be a yawning void that lurks behind the colour and the shrieking and the mania. But Mr. Trecartin is not a nihilist: one does not create these varied sets, establish these elaborate narratives that branch and twist and lurch, assemble a vast troupe of people, have them perform like an overloaded synapse, and edit the entire lunatic happening into an hour and forty-eight minute feature for nothing. Things of import do happen in I-Be Area, and in Trecartin-land. Concepts are, if not elucidated, then fenced around, poked at, pulled like taffy, and turned inside out. In short, politics, thematics, concepts: they are all subject to the same gravity as Mr. Trecartin’s dialogue, and the same physical laws as his characters – that is to say, none. They might be meaningful, but they are also infinitely malleable.

I-Be Area is not uniformly engaging, nor consistently good. Mr. Trecartin has yet to master the pacing of a feature-length video; there are parts that lag, parts that are flabby, parts that pedal as fast as they can but go nowhere. This is in some respect due to his performers. He himself is a captivating and energetic presence, but in a style this mannered and manic, one bleary routine can ruin a scene. Mr. Trecartin’s videos are ensemble pieces, after all, and thus, he is heavily dependent on his actors, and not all of them operate or captivate at the same level. There are those who can meet the demands of his dialogue and his situations, and there are those who simply can’t, who do not have the force of personality to play to the camera at a fevered pitch that is difficult to sustain. Rapid cuts and a twitchy finger on the pitch control can only compensate for so much. But this is only his second feature, and it already marks an evolutionary step beyond A Family Finds Entertainment; his universe is being further fleshed out, and one is beginning to get the hang of Trecartin-land. The subtleties of his dialogue are beginning to emerge. A Family Finds Entertainment was basically an elaboration of a simple set-up; I-Be Area does far more daring and complex things with narrative than its predecessor; a storyline that branches and re-branches and circles back on itself, lurching forward and backward in time. The reaction to Mr. Trecartin via A Family Finds Entertainment was fuelled by the shock of its discovery; here was something startling, something dazzling and effervescent that issued forth like the shrill screech of a banshee from a hitherto-unknown; here was some dizzy child of Jack Smith spewing out his frenzied choreographies out into the maw of the internet. But shock and novelty cannot sustain careers. If anything, I-Be Area is a profoundly encouraging sophomore move from Mr. Trecartin, for not only does it signal that his principles – the insistence on his sprawling cast of friends, on a dumpster-drag aesthetic – have thus far survived his art world translation from nowhere to epicentre; in its honeycombed conceptual structure, its narrative sprawl, it signals that his vision and his ambitions have expanded, and it signals that he has yet greater, yet more hectic things in store for us.

Ryan Trecartin's YouTube channel

Ryan Trecartin's YouTube Channel.

Ryan Trecartin is infinitely fun to watch. I think these moments are a joyful parody of the leaden "smart" art film. I also think Ryan Trecartin understands persona in the age of social media more naturally than most cultural producers, perhaps due to his comparative youth, where the game is: be interesting or dry up. A massive exercise in video improvisation, through each new staging, his camera-centric dialogues of a sprawling patois sweetly devour.

Flat, externalized "subjectivity" is treated to endless diversions and revisions. Adoption is as immortality for the Facebook crowd.

I sense the secretary for an arts organization hovers behind many the hero of his gender ambivalent serials. Art-work lackeys dressing themselves up in the toys of perpetual fascination: His family.