Starting at noon today, we’re live streaming from New York’s legendary Harlem Arts Salon. We have a camera inside the salon, to observe a rare conversation between Nobel Laureate and novelist Toni Morrison (who just turned 82) and iconoclastic Bay Area novelist, poet, and MacArthur “genius award” recipient Ishmael Reed. Their conversation will be moderated by poet, and Miles Davis biographer, Quincy Troupe. The event promises to be an interesting gathering of some of the most intriguing American writers gathered in the living room of Margaret Porter Troupe and Quincy Troupe.  Also, one of the Bay Area’s best kept secrets is that Mildred Howard, known for her sculptural installations and mixed media assemblage work, is a fantastic cook! She has flown out specifically to make the meal for this talk.

The stream should start at about 11:30, talk begins at noon. Enjoy!

The “Zine World” subsection of the LA Art Book Fair.

The Art Book Fair is a free event. Both of the days I attended, I was drawn like a magnet to the “Zine World” subsection of the fair. There, I found former SF resident Edie Fake at one table, selling new self-published works such as Sweetmeats (issue #2 of which has witchy powers), as well as copies of her visionary graphic novel Gaylord Phoenix. When she isn’t creating revelatory works with a distinct, dynamic look, Edie works at Quimby’s, a Chicago zine and book emporium similar to SF’s Needles & Pens. The latter’s table at the fair was doing brisk business when I stopped by to pick up a new copy of Sy Wagon’s Those Fucking Unicorns, a diminutive comic that packs a potent sexual punch. Sy will be showing new paintings at an anti-Valentine’s Day show at Sub-Mission this Thursday.

Edie Fake at the LA Art Book Fair.

The main motivation for my visit to the fair was the publication of issue number four of Little Joe, London-based Sam Ashby’s handsomely-designed collection of words and images dedicated to “queers and cinema, mostly.” I interview Mike Kuchar within the issue, and Sam couples the text with stills from Mike’s “pictures,” as well as some awesomely lusty drawings and a comic book, also by Mike. Along with Bradford Nordeen of the New York screening series Dirty Looks, Little Joe presented a pair of screenings at the fair, including a bouquet of short videos by Mike. On the fair’s last day, one customer at the Little Joe table was Lena Dunham of Girls fame, so I had the wry pleasure of knowing that “the voice of her generation” (per the cover of Entertainment Weekly) would be reading my words.

Sam Ashby of Little Joe and Bradford Nordeen of Dirty Looks at the LA Art Book Fair.

Another reason for attending the Art Book Fair was to check on the progress of A Diva’s Lapdog, a zine I made in 1998 that I reprinted for Margaret Tedesco to sell at her [2nd floor projects] table. A Diva’s Lapdog is a biography of Maria Callas, penned or pawed by the poodle who knew her best, her pet dog, Toy. To quote from the book’s inner jacket copy: “Dynamically illustrated, A Diva’s Lapdog discusses the close bond between Callas, gay men, and poodles; Callas’s mistreatment by newspapers and wars with operatic patriarchs; and Callas’s unique philosophies regarding work and performance.” By the end of the fair, the zine had sold out, and Printed Matter in New York and Ooga Booga in Los Angeles had asked to carry it. Not bad for one little poodle.

The latest print edition of A Diva’s Lapdog in all of its glory.

While the LA Art Book Fair has come to an end, one local aftermath bonus is that it’s attracted Bradford Nordeen of Dirty Looks to California for an extended visit. This weekend, the Dirty Looks road show brings a pair of screenings to town. On Valentine’s night at SFMOMA, “Yesterday Once More” showcases work by Zackary Drucker, Mariah Garnett (whose Encounters I May or May Not Have Had with Peter Berlin I can’t wait to see), Chris E. Vargas, and Matt Wolf, the director of the tender Arthur Russell documentary Wild Combination, who’s sharing a short work devoted to Joe Brainard. The next evening brings “Pickle Surprise! The Films of Tom Rubnitz,” at Artist’s Television Access. Be my bloody valentine and make it to both events.

Lena Dunham clasps onto Little Joe for dear life at the LA Art Book Fair.

Still from Marker’s La Jetee

Ever since seeing Chris Marker’s La Jetee decades ago, I’ve loved movies about time travel. My addiction to Turner Classic Movies delivers a subtle kind of time travel movie every night. Take for example Van Dyke’s San Francisco, made in 1936 about an event in 1906. Seen from my position in 2012, the nuances of time echoes are enough to get my head spinning. The earthquake was for them a relatively recent phenomenon–thirty years previous. However, those thirty years were tumultuous–World War One, Prohibition, the Depression. Victorian San Francisco of 1906 must’ve seen very quaint to these hardened people. We are seventy-six years displaced from that Clark Gable film, more than double the time between the film and the earthquake. We could never know some of the ’06 details that they recalled in 1936–like the climactic scene when the quake strikes in the middle of a citywide talent show cum auction competition called a Chicken Ball, a social event unknown to us now. Thirty years ago for us was the surfacing of AIDS, for example; could a filmmaker in 2040 get those period details right, let alone in 2080?

Installation of When Attitude Becomes Form 1969

The current show at the Wattis Institute is a recapitulation of the seminal Harald Szeeman show When Attitude Becomes Form which took place in Switzerland in 1969. Curator Jens Hoffman has asked dozens of international artists to make work in response to the original exhibition. The simultaneous telescoping and collapse of our lived experience of time is one of the essences of contemporary life, and conceptual practice as well, and this project flips me around in exactly that way. That is, the organization that I was first associated with, 80 Langton Street/New Langton Arts, was in large part founded in 1975 (37 years ago)  in the wave that Szeeman began six years earlier and half a world away.

Hoffman synthesizes in his wall text seven themes of this kind of art making: 1. use of research; 2. interest in process as much as product; 3. attention to the minutia of objects and gestures; 4. attention to the complexity of the world; 5. interest in time; 6. interest in art history; and 7. interest in cultural and political shifts. I would add to that list the following: 8. interest in language; 9. work that documents art actions, especially ones that critically engage commerce; 9. use of found objects; 10. assigning oneself tasks, often repetitive, laborious and absurd; 11. use of jokes; 12. use of electronic and digital media; 13. interventions in architecture and everyday life; 14. international point of view; 15. use of opaque content; 16. interest in science and measurement; 17. use of correspondence; 18. defeating or engaging sensory information other than the visual; 19. playing with communication systems; 20. taking oblique stances on politics; 21. making drawings without the use of the hand; 22. do-it-yourself strategies; 23. use of real risk and danger; 24. embrace of theatricality.

Jane Farver, who curated the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Politics of Origin 1950s to 1980s, in 1999, made the argument that conceptual practice was neither a Western European nor a New York invention, but rather that the “moments of rupture” from object-based to idea-based art were neither sudden nor geographically confined and happened on every continent starting some fifteen years before Szeeman’s show. When I entered the art world in the mid-seventies such practices were already common among many local artists, many of whom who had been my teachers, and their first major public expression was at SF MOMA in 1981, when curator Suzanne Foley organized the landmark exhibition Space Time Sound, conceptual work by 21 Bay Area artists and teams. Eight years later Nayland Blake curated a show titled Bay Area Conceptualism: Two Generations [!] for Hallwalls, an alternative space in Buffalo, NY.  This show took place twenty years after Szeeman’s show, and twenty-three years ago.

Here’s what Blake had to say, in part: “This exhibition was conceived as a way of commemorating two moments, the first in the beginning of the 1970s, and the second beginning in 1985. While most of the artists in this exhibition have produced bodies of work that span the last two decades, there have been certain points at which their work has reached critical mass–when their varied practices have come together to enter into discourse and to have an impact beyond their immediate environment….They participate in the reformulation and expansion of the parameters of the legacy of conceptual art practice…the dissemination, in the late 1970s, of a variety of theories engaging issues of textuality, sexual politics and psychology.” I wrote in that same catalog: “The earliest works of Paul Kos, Tom Marioni and Terry Fox in the late sixties was contemporaneous with the explosion of work being done in Europe and New York….What was being discussed on the East Coast and in Europe then had substantial impact here, but was also ameliorated by distance and inclination…and by Bay Area influences as diverse as the radicalism associated with resistance to the Vietnam War, The Beat era and its subsequent Hippie and drug cultures, Bay Area Funk school attitudes, Fluxus West, and Asian influences, among others.”

Martin Myers skyscraper sculpture/painting 1975 in storage at Oakland Museum

Conceptual practice was established enough at this time for there to be notions of generational change, and specific language embedded in how we thought about work. And it is amazing how these texts and exhibitions and influences leapfrog around through recent art history. In conclusion, I’ll mention a few examples of the language used in documentation of 80 Langton’s first year, published in 1976 as a collection of postcards. The cover image of the space says on the back: “Events and exhibits focus on time- and non-object-oriented art forms such as performance, video, music, dance and film, as well as other experimental and multidisciplinary situations. [italics mine].” Linda Montano says of her performance (with Nina Wise): “[we] played drums for six hours a day for six days in order to change, transform our minds….” Ina Evans said, “I am exploring the ability of a photograph to isolate an image and transform it into a ritual object.” Martin Myers said of his painted sculptures, “To diminish the importance of the image, I have chosen images that are visual cliches without inherent meaning or value….” John Gillen wrote, “My film image writes incomplete letters on the wall. My real image completes the letters. At the conclusion of the performance, a ‘hieroglyphic’ text remains on the wall.”

Vandy Rattana, Bomb Ponds, 2009

Moira Roth, email; Saturday, September 21, 2012; Berkeley, California

After the pleasure of spending time with you recently in the Bay Area, while you were visiting here, I love it that we will conduct this exchange as you move around the world, from San Francisco to Berlin to Japan and finally back to Vietnam.

By the way, I imagine that you often travel internationally — yes?

May we, while you are in Berlin, briefly begin our exchange about Poetic Politic, the Kadist Art Foundation exhibition that you are curating in San Francisco about Vietnamese and Cambodian artists?

When did you come up with the idea for the exhibition, and what were the circumstances?

How did you choose the artists, and are there certain underlying themes/subjects that run through the exhibition?

Zoe Butt, email; Sunday, September 23, 2012; Berlin, Germany

Hello from a very chilly and windy Berlin. My skin is crying out for the warmth and humidity of Vietnam!

Yes, I do travel internationally quite a lot, particularly this year, as it seems that there is a growing interest in the contemporary art and curatorial dilemmas of Southeast Asia.

I look forward to our exchange, as I hope it will help to offer awareness of the various issues artists face today in this region.

I came up for the idea of the exhibition Poetic Politic in May 2012 in response to the Kadist Art Foundation’s invitation for me to curate an exhibition for their San Francisco space (the Kadist Art Foundation operates between Paris and San Francisco). They had a particular interest in the socio-political context of Vietnam and asked if I would be interested in putting a show together that engaged relevant issues.

They knew that I had a personal interest in this subject, as I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. They also knew that the artist-initiated, nonprofit contemporary art space and reading room called Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City (previously and still fondly referred to by locals as “Saigon”) had numerous times in the past faced difficult circumstances with exhibition license restrictions imposed by the Vietnamese Government’s Ministry of Culture. For example, our Vandy Rattana show, Bomb Ponds, in 2011 (co-organized with Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh) was not granted a license for complicated reasons concerning content; and our educational programming during Open Edit: Mobile Library in 2011 was also met with significant resistance by the local authorities. In this latter project we had wanted to engage a particular poet of the war period to address his unique writing techniques, but cultural officials misunderstood our intentions, thinking we wanted to discuss his previous anti-government stance.

On Sàn Art: http://www.san-art.org
On Sa Sa Bassac: http://sasabassac.com/
On Bomb Ponds: http://www.san-art.org/exhibitions/Bomb Ponds/BombPonds-index.html
On Mobile Library: http://www.san-art.org/exhibitions/AAA-MOBILE-LIBRARY/AAA-MOBILE-LIBRARY.html

The idea behind Poetic Politic engages the way socio-political messages are embedded in image-making in Vietnam and Cambodia, particularly within two media that are popularly perceived and circulated, namely video and photography.

As a curator, I am continually challenged in my reading of art in these two incredible countries where artists face enormous obstacles in the realization of their practice due to resource limitations and limits on freedom of expression.

In some cases artists are possessed by a fear of authority, and thus their art is not a space in which they consider themselves safe and could be honest with their views — or perhaps it is rather that they do not see their art or themselves as possible political agents (such attitudes are respected, of course!).

Meanwhile there are others who in times of great frustration, anger, or inner turmoil use the space of art as an abstract tool — rich in metaphor with symbolic references that carefully address issues they consider important to their communities.

This Poetic Politic exhibition engages the latter voice and consists of two interweaving artistic approaches.

Firstly, there is a group of artists (NGÔ Đình Trúc, Phunam, Dinh Q. LÊ, KVAY Samnang, and TRẦN Minh Đức) who refer to particular social narratives, be they advertising trends, tourism, or mythological tales, through which to cunningly insinuate a critique of contemporary Vietnam.

Secondly, there is another group of artists (PHAN Quang, UuDam Tran NGUYEN, An-My LÊ, VÕ An Khánh, and VANDY Rattana) who speak directly to the theatre of “war,” be it in process, in aftermath, or in our rehearsed imaginations that marry military surreality with humanitarian mission.

I chose these artists for the ways in which their practice consistently challenges the order of their social fabric.

And now all the best from Berlin’s Mitte area, as I must go off to find that bowl of ramen that I am craving.

Moira Roth, email; Sunday, September 21, 2012; Berkeley, California

I know the Mitte area well (having stayed there several times, beginning in 1981), so I can imagine you wandering through its streets, searching for ramen while you reflect on your fascinating exhibition that will open next month in San Francisco.

Berlin must be an interesting city — it is now almost 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — for you to reflect on these Poetic Politic artists from Vietnam and Cambodia.

As you have been living in Ho Chi Minh City since 2009 (and before that you were the director of international programs for the Long March Project in Beijing for two years (www.longmarchproject.com) I imagine that you met all or most of the eight Poetic Politic Vietnamese artists in person, either in Vietnam or abroad (I note that only two of the exhibition’s artists, Vandy Rattana and Kvay Samnang, are Cambodian).

These fierce vogue dancers performed dips, spins, duckwalking, hand movements, and death drops—in accordance with the tenets of vogue femme—all the while shaking and flicking their glimmering blue, pink and orange bobs like mesmerizing fembots. This was Rashaad Newsome’s Hair Affair & Five (2011).

Much has been said of Newsome’s fusion of high and low art; he takes cultural practices and expressions that have traditionally been marginalized and stigmatized (vogueing, hip hop, African-American vernacular) and combines them with elements of high art and culture (opera, chamber music, historical English heraldry). These cultural collages—which come in the form of object-based works and video, as well as performance—are not forced marriages of different samples and disciplines, but seamless unions in which something alluring and new is created.

Through his own appropriation of cultures, Newsome presents the prismatic nature of cultural identity—its malleability, its performativity, its ability to transcend borders, race, and gender. He often notes that over the course of his career he has found gestures and body languages typically considered black in Latino and white communities—and beyond the United States. Newsome’s performances are site-specific; musicians and performers are, for the most part, sourced locally, so that each performance iteration communicates something of the local idiom.

Like a modern-day Henry Higgins (and a self-described ethnographic researcher), Newsome started collecting a library of African-American vernacular in 2005, recording screen tests of individuals performing gestures and expressions. These studies evolved to become Shade Compositions, a performance in which Newsome conducts an orchestra of black women (in more recent iterations he has included black gay men, who Newsome claims share the vernacular of the women) whose instruments are their voices and bodies.

Rashaad Newsome, Shade Compositions, 2009; Courtesy of the artist.

Newsome takes his cue from classical music structures to form the components of his orchestra. Performers, who bring a repertoire of abstracted gestures, vocal expressions and attitude to the stage, are waved in by Newsome in his role as conductor. Sounds are pared down and repeated rhythmically, constituting a sort of minimalism of form that contrasts with the opulence and bling that Newsome’s images are known for. Watching Shade Compositions unfold, viewers may find themselves lulled into a trance-like state—one that recalls Newsome’s interest in ritual and ceremony. (His film Pursuivant documents the artist’s exploration of heraldry at the Royal College of Arms in London and ends in a ceremonial process in which he is knighted in a Harlem church)

One paradox at the heart of his performances is that Newsome veils and seduces (what, after all, are vogueing and black vernacular about if not play-acting, aspiration, and self-preservation?), while also revealing these cultural forms and capturing their nuances. But it is to this, I think, that his performances owe their success—he accentuates and reduces down the languages he plays with, while also complicating and bringing depth to them.

I sat down with Newsome on October 3, 2012, during rehearsals for his performance of Shade Compositions at SFMOMA the following day.

Tess Thackara: You began collecting a library of African-American vernacular years ago. How did that become an ensemble piece with multiple different musical parts, rather than individual studies?

Rashaad Newsome: The first time I performed it was actually in Paris at a space called Glassbox Gallery and I was in Europe at the time doing a residency and doing my own ethnographic research of this vernacular. I would go to a place, find local women, and a white wall would become my satellite studio. They would lean against a wall and perform the staple gestures. From that library I pieced together a choreographed work which was then performed at Glassbox by women from continental Africa but who had grown up in France. What was interesting for me was how those women from continental Africa performed these gestures that were very similar to those of African-American women— but it’s perceived to be something owned by African-American women.

In the beginning each woman would do the gesture consecutively. Then when I got back to New York there was sort of a loose rhythm happening in the rehearsal footage, so I edited [the footage] into a music composition. But I wasn’t really happy with the video quartet strategy; I really liked the idea of it being a live performance art piece. There’s something really powerful about them on the stage, you know?

At the time I was studying a programming language called Max MSP Jitter and then the Wii came out. And, in a lot of ways, I was functioning as a composer or conductor in the performance, if you will, but I wasn’t really seen. I was seen in the live performance but in the video documentation you didn’t really see me. So, using the Wii, which is aesthetically sort of like a conductor’s baton and it’s also a Bluetooth device, I could connect it to the computer via Bluetooth and then use the programming language to reprogram it to work sort of like a guitar effects pedal. This allowed me to do what I was doing in post-production, but live. From that change, I started to expand my ideas around classical music structures like string and brass with wind and percussion sections. It allowed me to manipulate the audio in ways that I couldn’t before because it was all acoustic. The Jitter component of the program allowed me to go into the material that I was shooting as research and attach that to audio that could then be manipulated in the performance again.

TT: Have you studied conducting as a formal practice or do you improvise?

RN: Yea, just improvised, not formally. I hope to connect with some conductors. I’ve reached out to some people that I know about potentially collaborating. But I’ve never studied it formally.

TT: How do you find a common language between you and a large cohort of performers? How does that evolve in practice?

RN: It evolves because the gestures that I’m using are those that all of the performers use and a lot of people use, specifically in America. What’s particularly interesting for me is when I’m able to go abroad and do it and it somehow mirrors the one here—then it reveals this truth that this vernacular is globalized and being appropriated. For instance I did it in Moscow and it was eerily similar to the New York performance. And they were all Russian girls. One would think that there would be a disconnect, but there was really no disconnect. Also, it’s a site-specific piece, so I have the staple gestures that I use, but the screen test process is a way for me to see how they’ll be on stage and one of the questions I ask is to give me gestures that they do, that their family members do, etcetera. That process allows me to mine the gestural language of where I’m at and then incorporate that into the piece. So this performance [at SFMOMA] will have some gestures particular to San Francisco.

TT: What has your experience of working with San Francisco performers been like?

RN: I have found that a lot of people have come from other parts of the Bay Area. Maybe it has something to do with how expensive it is to live in San Francisco. But a lot of people have come from Oakland. I’ve been really happy; they took to the choreography really quickly. Also it’s the most diverse cast I’ve worked with.

TT: Right, and you’re including drag performers in this performance?

RN: Not necessarily drag—I mean, in the world that I create in my work, there’s no gender. Everybody is how they are, and I like it that way because it opens up a larger conversation. There are people in the performance who perform drag but I don’t know if they would say they’re drag queens. They’re performance artists.

TT: Have you found any particular differences in the San Francisco vernacular, compared with other places that you’ve performed the piece?

RN: There are new words or phrases that I haven’t used before that are specific to here. So I decided to make a sixth movement for the piece.

TT: You’ve said in the past that you invite an element of chance into the performances. How choreographed are the performances when you’re up on stage?

RN: There are six movements and four sections. Each section has a collective part in each movement. So they know that part, but as to how I’m going to conduct them—that happens on the spot. So that’s where the rehearsal comes in; it’s a very process-driven piece. A lot of the work happens when I touch down and we start working and then the performance is a product of that but, for me personally, it’s not just a live performance, it’s what happens up until that point. It’s like studio practice—someone will make a mistake or do something out of turn and then that will become part of the piece. That’s the most exciting part.

But to get back to your question—they know they’re parts, and there are all these solos that happen. I know there will be solos, but it depends on how I feel and how the beat is going because it’s all being built live. It’s sort of like being at a station with Logic and you’re making a beat—like I’m in the studio myself but the audience gets to witness it. And all the performers are essentially my samples.

TT: So there is a lot of room for experimentation and improvisation..

RN: I don’t tell the performers they have to perform it a specific way. It’s sort of like they’re repeating it over and over so they have this small window around a gesture to create a narrative. So what I tell them to do is to try to create as many narratives as they can. So they have a lot of freedom in terms of how they’re going to bring the sound to life.

TT: Thinking about the length, pace and rhythm of your performances, these elements seem to resonate with your explorations into ceremony and ritual in other branches of your work. Do you think of a performance like Shade Compositions in terms of ritual and ceremony?

RN: Well, performing is like a ceremony so I think that’s something that is subconsciously in the work. I’m honestly not setting out for that [effect], but it’s not the first time that someone has said that. So it’s definitely something that I’m starting to think about and ask myself questions about. Now that I’m conscious of it, it’s making me want to play with that. I think the process of making music can be quite boring for someone who doesn’t make music—it’s a lot like boom boom, boom boom.. you’ll be playing with something for hours to get it right. And it can be very meditative so I think that is inherently part of the process.

TT: Where do you see this research going next?

RN: I want to perform it in as many places as possible, because one of the most interesting things for me is taking it to other places. The Moscow experience was really great because it introduced new words in another language. Being here has been really great too because you have a large Filipino community and a Korean community, so some of those languages have been brought into the piece. Depending on where I’m at, the culture of that place will change the composition sonically and I’m excited about what will result from somewhere like China or Tokyo or Germany, Italy, England… My hopes are that when I quit the piece it will function as an archive of this gestural language and how it was appropriated and how it evolved. It’s almost like an anthropological study of this vernacular and I look at it as something that anthropologists could study later.

Ancient Kingdom by Oluyemi Thomas

Duane Deterville: Creating music using the process that you just described to me, is there a ritual aspect to it?

Oluyemi Thomas: Well we could say “ritual” but I don’t want to confine it to being something special, special…you know, I mean…

Deterville: The question is wide open. I want you to elaborate on what that means for you.

Thomas: Yeah. Right. There is a discipline to it. But I don’t want to make it be something so grand. It’s just something that I do. I try to keep it simple. It’s something that I do but I’ve got a system for how I do it. You know, I’ve got certain music systems that I’m working out of that are a framework for certain pieces. You know I’ve got certain ones. I’ve got different titles for certain music systems that I’m working on that enable me to launch into the musical piece and launch out of the piece.

Deterville: Different titles for the music systems? Can you give me examples of that?

Thomas: Yes, well one of them is the Victory System. One is the Abolaeton System.

Deterville: Abolaeton System?

Thomas: Yeah, those are the first parts of my two daughter’s names. That’s the name of this horn. This bass clarinet is named Abolaeton. Abolade is my firstborn and Etonde is my second. Abolade means a child that has come with honor and Etonde means a person of wisdom so I abbreviated it to mean ‘honor wisdom’. When I go to the horn I try to go with reverence and to try to honor the wisdom that will come through if I can get myself out of the way.

Deterville: Can you describe the differences between the two systems? What is implied by a system is that there is a recognizably different structure between the two systems that you mentioned.

Thomas: Right. There are other systems too but I’ll just deal with those two.

Deterville: Just for a record then, how many systems do you work with?

Thomas: [Laughs] I’m not sure. I’m not trying to compile a library shelf of what I’m doing from an analytical point of view. Some are untitled systems, I just know them from different registers that can be played on the horn. A whole system of other things can potentially take course from that. Being in this upper register, moving at a certain velocity and with tonal centers, mobile tonal centers and so forth. But anyway, the Victory System, that came first. Really that’s probably the axis of all of the systems. There are four Victory Systems for any system that I’m working with. But these other systems they differentiate out of that. That’s the axis. That is the axis out of which the other systems rotate. I guess you could call it the collective center. It is the collective tonal center.

Deterville: Did you create it sequentially first. Was that the first one or did it come later on and you decided or understood it as being the first?

Thomas: I was operating out of it. I just didn’t title it. I didn’t think of it as a system or a type. You know I was just moving towards the best way I can get to some information, process it and move it forward. These things happen organically. Its not like I sit down in a think tank where I say I want to create a system. Once I became aware that what I was doing was systematic then I began to take it all more seriously.

Deterville: Certain processes and when you’re practicing or when you pick up the instrument. There are certain processes that you already had as a practice.

Thomas: That’s right. Everyone has some kind of system that they’re working with. Things that give them a safe approach to disembark. Bringing those hemispheres together and disengaging those hemispheres. Creating some discontinuation. I want to create a big discontinuation but as it is organized it is continuation. It is the continuation of discontinuation. I plan in an organized way. You’ve got to have something as an allegory or a metaphor, because now we’re talking about communicating. See, now you’re systematizing it. You’ve gotta’ have a systematization.

Deterville: So the Victory system is the central system and the others, would it be proper to say that they orbit the Victory System?

Thomas: Yeah, Yeah. For now I could say that. (Laughing) Some years from now I could be totally wrong about what I said. (Laughs)

Deterville: You have a title for each composition. Also, you were talking about some narrative stuff. Does that mean that since you’ve constructed the symbols in a certain way and it evolves out of your engineering practice that you could show someone how to read the same thing and improvise over it?

Thomas: Oh yeah.

Deterville: And would we be feeling a narrative sequence in doing that?

Thomas: If the narrative is not there I’m not going to work the piece. Because there is no reason to it. The creator don’t play that, man. You have to come up here and tell me something. It has to be the truth. We’re living a truthful life. There is nothing here that is counterfeit. Humans can counterfeit it, but that truth says ‘I don’t counterfeit.’

Deterville: Describe one of the compositions?

Make Me Ready Abha Beauty by Oluyemi Thomas

Thomas: This one is entitled – they both are the same- there’s part one and part two. This is entitled “Make Me Ready Abha Beauty.” The composition “make me ready…” is about people preparing themselves to live inside of themselves so that they can live outside themselves, which is manifested in our actions. And then “…abha beauty” means, Baha’u'llah. He’s the promised one of the Bahai faith. And “…beauty” represents his teachings. His teachings give us a beautiful way to look at everything. Yeah, so that’s the name of this score. It has different cities of the heart that we visit.

Deterville: I can see in the lower right hand corner that it says ‘yellow low.’ And ‘A-flat.’

Make Me Ready Abha Beauty (detail) ‘Ancient Tunes’

Thomas: Yeah, that’s A-flat. This is E-flat, 9/36^th tone. The words ‘Ancient tunes.’ That’s about a brotha’ in New York that walked up to me in the street and asked me if I could play some ‘ancient tunes.’ He asked me, “do you know the ancient tunes?” And I was workin’ on the street! He got real close up on me man. So I said, ‘what’s happenin’ with this cat man?’ He said, “do you know the ancient tunes man? You know, cuz I’m trying to find someone that knows the ancient tunes.” So I just kept working and I looked at him like, OK man you close enough.

[He turns and picks up the second composition/drawing.]

Make Me Ready Abha Beauty 2 by Oluyemi Thomas

This is part two to “Make me Ready…” I just finished this today. I’ve been working on them for three months now. And when I looked at it today I said man this is a continuation of this other composition. The second part was in my horn case with some other scores. I just hadn’t put it together. I’ve been working this piece. I worked it this morning. So when I heard the piece this morning again, I realized that this is part two. I’ve been working on part two but I just hadn’t scored it. I take the piece like I said and I invert it, reinterpret it and so forth. I got this out of my horn case so that I can have it when I’m ready to work. Then when I looked at this piece while the other one was over on the drawing pad. I said to myself, ‘man this looks similar.’ I realized that this is part two and I just didn’t know it. So I put the title in there and declared that I was finished. I put a couple of other things that I just added to it today. I heard these things, because I practiced earlier this morning. I heard something and so I scored it.

Deterville: What did you add today?

Make Me Ready Abha Beauty 2 (detail) ‘triple e-flat, vertical pitch’

Thomas: I added these notes. That, triple e-flat, vertical pitch, head of the hidden, 1.8 (one point eight), 1/72 (one seventy second), horizontal beat, center tone, point. And then there was a couple of other things that I added. Some colors that I laid in here too. 19 (nineteen). Some other encounters on the journey. These are unknowable realities. Unexplainable realities that are part of the journey. You will hit these unexplainable realities as you go on. G-sharp. I put the words ‘center tone’ because you’ve got to be centered. And being centered has a tone to it. Everything that has a center has a tone. You see, each one of these colors has a sound. Colors all of them have sounds. Kandinsky talked about that. He says, all of the colors have a sound you dig. See, cats be tryin’ to nail it down. They ask, ‘how is this and music the same?’ I say, there’s no divide. At least the way I’m taking it in. Now, they can see it differently. Fine, that’s cool, but this is my score and this is my instrument. So when I manifest, I manifest. When I share it with some other musicians, they hear something off of this.  I set a thrust and they hear something that might be perpendicular to where I’m going. I play this parallel (He is pointing to a spot on his score) and they play the perpendicular. What makes it work is that we agree to systematically do it at the same time. See? I might play an E-flat and their response is silence. They hear a silent tone. How about if I do a triple silent tone? I’m going to do three counts of this silent moment. They can be at different velocities. They can be at…(demonstrates with hand movements silently the velocity of the silent ‘tones.’) or they can be at…(demonstrates with rapid hand movements the more rapid ‘silent tones.’). I can change the velocity of it.

Make Me Ready Abha Beauty 2 (detail) ‘center tone’

You see these compositions. These lines. There’s a systematization to the journey. You dig? I could take this section here and play it a good two hours alone.  Or, I could play a whole week on just this section. See, because I can take this front view, I can take this side view and all of that. See?

Deterville: You know on this two-part piece that you just showed me I was noticing this violet colored area right here. It looks similar to the violet area that starts on part two of “Make Me Ready Abha Beauty.” Is that partly what gave you the idea that these are two parts of the same composition?

Thomas: Yeah, that’s what I was looking at. I used the same pen to create the thickest lines on the space. So I said, ‘you know what these pieces are connected, I just didn’t know it. I put the title on it and made it official. (laughs) I asked the piece ‘are these two parts the same?’ The piece answered, ‘you already know that.’

Deterville: And you can ask it because it’s a living entity.

Thomas: It’s living. It’s like Thelonious Monk told one of his musicians, ‘its on the horn, you’ve just got to find it.’ So the composition said, ’make me ready. I’m on the score, you’ve just got to find me.’ I just had the revelation and started scoring the piece.

Deterville: How would you describe your compositions?

Thomas: The visual as a quickening sound vibration. Or tone vibration. Sound-tone vibration. Yeah, yeah. I like that, sound-tone vibration.

Donal Mosher, Michael Palmieri, Kevin Killian

This week Off Label, the second feature-length documentary of former homeboys Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri, had its West Coast premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The film’s title refers to the legal practice of prescribing pharmaceuticals for a use not approved by the FDA, such as prescribing antidepressants that cause drowsiness for insomnia. Off Label tracks eight individuals as they move through medicalized America — a young medic who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, a woman whose son experienced a psychotic break and committed a violent suicide in an antidepressant marketing study, a bipolar woman who takes eighteen different prescription drugs a day, a man irremediably damaged by experiments conducted on him in prison, a medical anthropologist, and a variety of individuals who make their livings as human guinea pigs in drug test trials.

I’ve known Mosher and Palmieri forever, so nothing written here is “objective.” When they moved from San Francisco to Portland in 2007, it was a big loss for me. But they return to the Bay Area often, and during the four years making Off Label, their trips were usually in conjunction with interviews they were conducting in Santa Cruz. At parties, openings, over dinner they told me heart-wrenching, gruesome stories. At that point, the material was so fresh, they were pulsing with it, still in shock. Editing and shaping brings distance, but this was way before that stage. Wednesday night as I drove over to the Kabuki Theater, I was filled with trepidation. I don’t want to look at this, I thought. How are they going to make such material bearable, I thought.

I needn’t have worried. Not only is Off Label bearable, it’s a sensitive, poetic portrayal whose very existence sheds hope onto a pretty hopeless situation. The cinematography is gorgeous, punctuated with languorous shots of nature and of urban minutiae. For what seems like minutes, the camera seems to forget the interviewees as it drinks in the landscapes and interiors that frame them. The care and affection Mosher and Palmieri have for their subjects is evident in every scene. The subjects give themselves over to the camera with the uncomplicated trust of a child or lover. And the camera never betrays them. We see poor people, homeless people, damaged people, but they all look good, without being glamorized. People who are not beautiful in ordinary life look beautiful in this film. And that’s not just about lighting and camera angles; it’s about attention. The camera keeps returning to the corroded fingernails of the victim of prison experiments. At one point the nails fill the entire screen, as if the filmmakers were saying, in case you missed this before, look, really look, and the nails do look terrible, all painful and swollen, but the camera spends so much time on them, they eventually turn sculptural, as if we were being invited to accept, not reject, this part of this man’s being. Even the stills of carnage in Iraq, in the context of the rest of the film, have a cruel beauty. The camera lingers with an almost tender curiosity on exploded body parts. Moving into intimate spaces, the film never feels voyeuristic, but generous. The willingness to see is a form of love. All of us long for such a compassionate eye. But few of us ever find it.

GI Andrew Duffy

During the Q&A Mosher and Palmieri introduced Andrew Duffy, the medic stationed in Abu Ghraib, once an Iowa farmboy, now a veterans’ activist who attends college in San Diego. A pair of redheaded young women behind me said, “Isn’t he adorable with his little glasses.” He looks younger than his 26 years.  At one point in the film, to demonstrate the torturous effect of the huge 14 gauge needles that Duffy was ordered to use on people, such a needle is jabbed into the vein of an unidentified arm, and the camera focuses on the arm’s flinching muscles and the ensuing blood that floods out from the needle’s insertion point. I remembered a still of that scene from Donal’s blog. It was his own arm. Here’s how he described it:

Andy holds my arm down and places the 14-gauge needle against the vein. He explains in a clinical voice that this large sized needle was used to inflict extra pain [on] prisoners at Abu Ghraib — whether administering insulin to diabetics or water to those who were on hunger strike, the idea was to break resistance even during treatment. To show this on film, I’ve volunteered my arm. The needle slides in, feeling like a leather worker’s awl in my vein. It’s painful, yes, but I’m relaxed. Andy says, “The prisoners would be fighting, tensed all up, clenched — not understanding what you were saying — imagine how this would feel then.” He removes the needle and lifts my arm over my head. With our faces close, I ask him how he feels doing this. He joined the national guard all gung-ho, but became a medic hoping he could be in the war and do no harm. He says, “A lot of bad memories are happening right now, there is no good reason to use a needle like this on anyone.”

From Donal Mosher's blog

During the Q&A Donal said that America is a lonely place, that the film was about forces that isolate people. If we need a cure for anything, he said, we need a cure for American loneliness. This loneliness was poignant as some of the audience attempted to turn the Q&A session into group therapy. “I’m on all these medications,” said one woman, “and I don’t know how to get off of them. What do you suggest I do?” I left the theater overcome with sadness that humanity has come to this, that there are so many broken people, people taken advantage of, people destroyed by virulent capitalist systems, and for so many there is no safety net. But I also felt I’d taken part in a testament, that watching the film with this room full of strangers and friends was a form of community embrace.

Donal Mosher, Andy Duffy, Michael Palmieri