Since I am slightly behind in my journalism here, the next thing to talk about is the Analogous event with Jack Kimball, Brenda Iijima, and Christina Strong which took place on October 30. Brenda Iijima greeted Xtina, Jack, and me in the hallways of MIT that Saturday wearing a dashing Bogart-esque suit complete with tie and fedora hat: she had prepared a special 24-page chapbook for the occasion to commemorate her collaboration with Jack. The two of them went on stage first. They showed quicktime videos of Brenda interviewing Jack, in which her complex, sometimes challenging anti-Freudian questions ("What do you think of that phrase, 'a performing animal on top of another performing animal'?") provoked a wonderful range of at once poised and evasive responses from him against a changing set of different rooms, outfits, and backdrops in his Newton home. Their fleshly counterparts sat on stage reading from copies of the chapbook that contained a textual interview in which Jack interviewed Brenda (going the other direction). In performance, these textual snippets were from time to time spliced together with scenes from the video interview in a back-and-forth rhythm centered generally around the recurring theme of "the octopus," and the corresponding notion of "too many naves." It was a kind of (dare I say) mutual poetics statement arising in the really wonderful context of a conversation -- amazing to me that these two (very different) personalities could nonetheless exist in the same space and articulate their concerns in this cooperative way. Brenda seems to operate by a principal of accrual, saying a lot in a complex way that feels at times slightly impenetrable on purpose, wheras Jack tends to use evasion: humor, leaps in thought and context, appropriation, ridicule of the apparently self-evident, turning the question back on itself. I (and many others I spoke to after the event) was particularly struck by how much more intimate the presence of the giant video Jack Kimball up on the projector screen seemed than the one sitting there on the stage in front of us. The discussion of the evasive Octopus (spurting a cloud of ink that hides it from prey yet is toxic to the creature itself) culminated in a long poem compiled for the occasion by Jack. I'll quote two stanzas of this beautiful piece here:
Man, she is weird. Is there room in the room
For wood origins & cribbage boards? A fiend's
Umbrella? Let's rewrite Biotherm, she says.
I fear the sarcasm.
Sex is a sardonic comfort with a sober edge.
They leaked this against my wishes.
Smoke circles your face. Homonyms cleave.
Admit it, you miss smoking. You miss Bono.
He imagines you wearing his credentials.
You miss the first drag. The smoke takes you in its stride.
His eyes are all red. Yay.
I've just noticed you haven't said anything.
Gossipy with the odd moment of reverence or emotional connection, mercurial, moving in and out of other voices which it may or may not be parodying, this prickly cloud of utterances remains resolutely heterogeneous in the midst of its own impish deadpanning.
The second half of the program that evening was a performance by Christina Strong. Christina showed a number of poems she had written in Flash (most of them political and polemical in nature) while interacting with them and showing the audience how they worked. She also showed a video of the NY protests during the Republican national convention this year. But the highlight of her set for me was a performance in which she read a fast-moving (Kerouac-like) poem against the backdrop of a video she had shot out the window of a train. The correspondence of movement between the imagery in the poem and the imagery out the train window was quite exhilarating and moving. In retrospect I can see the roots of her interest in visual and kinetic digital media through her use of language in poetry (composition by field, vis-po, sometimes scattered meditations). However, in a question-and-answer session with the audience afterward, Christina proudly displayed her usual resistance to the theoretical, cheerfully beating back any hypothetical questions (one might say, questions of "meaning") with the self-evident, the reflexive, what's in front of your nose and "because I wanted that way." But good for her: someone with a political conscience who knows what she wants, at least in her art. I'm impressed by that momentum, all of us then still looking toward the soon-to-be-disaster election. Well, the night itself was fun; we had dinner with friends and fans, critiqued wardrobes, and discussed what a "nihilistic used-car salesman" would in fact entail. Later that evening (and inspired by Brenda's attire), Jack, Brenda, Christina and I went out to Jacques downtown (with appropriate Halloween accoutrements -- yours truly in a miniskirt, fishnets, drag boots etc) and danced all night.