Showing posts with label Gabriel White. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gabriel White. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 02, 2023

The Road Not Taken


Richard von Sturmer: doppelgänger (9/12/2020)

The Interrupted Journey

Yesterday I packed up my office at the University of Waikato and am now back in Auckland. When I was passing the photo wall in the foyer of the Arts building, I saw you and wondered, “What is Jack doing here?” Looking closer, your hair was the wrong colour. But in the background there was the message “Ross the face of.” Sort of Yoda-speak. It left me rather confused. And why are you, if it is you, why are you holding up an illustrated map of the Central North Island? I’m still a bit perplexed.
- Richard von Sturmer, email to JR (9/12/2020)
When Richard sent me the image above with the query: ‘Is this you?’ I too felt quite perplexed. The photo does indeed look quite a lot like me. The words ROSS THE FACE OF are also unequivocal, but the Central North Island is certainly not a region with which I have any particular affinity. My roots lie more in Northland.

Another interesting thing about it is that it shows a middle-aged man with full cheeks, narrow-rimmed glasses and ruffled orange hair. I have the full cheeks and the glasses, but my hair is dark brown going on grey. I did once have it dyed, in a moment of feverish reinvention, during a trek in Thailand. The idea was to go blond, but unfortunately, due to the hairdresser’s unfamiliarity with European hair, it came out orange instead.

So, yes, I did once have hair to match that in the picture, but I was much thinner and younger-looking then – it was more than two decades ago – so while all those attributes have certainly belonged to me at one point or another, I never had them all at the same time: in this part of the multiverse, at any rate.


Gabriel White: Jack in Mumbai (15/1/2002)


Another perturbing recent event involved one of those late night searches to confirm your own existence, which in this case took the form of a series of clicks on the ISBN codes for my own books.

Most of them were fine – they duly led to the publication in question – but one of them came up with quite another book. Presumably the National Library had made a mistake, and confused one obscure small publication with another. I had a lot of problems with that book, in fact: it was an anthology of student life writing, and I decided to title it [your name here] in order to gesture (as I thought cleverly), at the essential interchangeability of all such human experiences.

Unfortunately the librarians took that title to be a mere stand-in for the actual title still to come, and refused to list it in their catalogue under that appellation. I had to explain to them again and again just what I had in mind before they would relent. Indexing a title which begins with a square bracket also offers some unique challenges for both human and machine intelligence.

I wonder if John Ashbery had the same problems with his own 1998 book of poems Your Name Here, which appeared a few years after my stroke of bravado? Whether he did or not, any merit there may have been in this jeu d’esprit has now been eclipsed by the so-many-times-brighter magnitude of his star.




All of which brings me to the principal pretext for this meditation. The other day I made a surprising find: a large grey volume of variations and additions to Georges Perec’s famed 1979 short story ‘Le Voyage d’hiver’ [The Winter Journey] by members of the European experimental literature club Oulipo [[OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle] = Workshop of Potential Literature].

Georges Perec / Oulipo. Le Voyage d’hiver & ses suites. Postface de Jacques Roubaud. La Librairie du XXIe Siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013.

The reason this seemed so strange is that I’m the only local Perec enthusiast I know of (despite all my best efforts to turn others onto his work), so it’s hard to see how this particular volume ended up, second-hand, in a vintage bookshop in Auckland.

What’s more, this particular story is probably my favourite among all of his fictions. It has a strange atmospheric charm to it which seems – to me at least – almost to outweigh its admittedly intriguing hypothesis.

The conceit of the story is that a single author, Hugo Vernier, wrote an obscure book in the mid-nineteenth century which anticipated not just the ideas but even the verbal substance of most of the greatest works of French poetry from Baudelaire onwards. Unfortunately the one copy of this work seen and scrutinised by the protagonist is torn from him by the fortunes of war. His Winterreise, winter journey, takes place in 1940, just before the fall of France, and he is never able to relocate the book subsequently.

The various members of Oulipo run with this basic idea of anticipation and turn it into an extraordinary farrago of counter-plots involving Hitler, J. Edgar Hoover, and a whole raft of Journeys here, there and everywhere.

A good deal of the merit of Perec’s story comes from its brevity. This book of sequels is over 400 pages long. So where did it come from? How did it end up on the neglected ‘foreign language’ shelf of a city bookshop? Did it belong to some visiting scholar, compelled to abandon their luggage by the demands of the coronavirus? Or a local experimental literature fanatic, who either read and forgot it, or else found the somewhat demanding idiom of some of the stories beyond their linguistic abilities?

Not that I found them particularly easy going either. The only way I got through them, in fact, was to ration myself to just one of the 26 voyages per diem (a device I’ve employed before to get through seemingly impossible reading tasks: the whole of Proust in French, for instance, or the multiple discursive volumes of Casanova’s memoirs).

Most of the stories in the Oulipo book are predictable enough: more-or-less ingenious variations on the forest of themes built up by their predecessors – since the concept of this group of stories as a ‘roman collectif’ appears to have arisen fairly early in the piece.

As I kept on reading, though, the conviction that they’d somehow missed the point of Perec’s story grew and grew. His protagonist’s fortuitous discovery of Vernier’s book is the central moment in his existence mainly because he allows it to be. The rest of his life is spent in a futile search for it as a way of recovering not so much the artefact itself as that lost moment.

It was, after all, the last instant at which France – or even European civilisation – could be said to have been truly itself, before the events of June 1940, the Nazis processing through Paris, the long inexorable ‘Night and Fog’ of the occupation.

Vernier’s book was an apport from an unknown, frankly impossible past. Its very existence adds to but does not cause the uncanny atmosphere of Perec’s story, one of the last he was to publish before his untimely death at the age of 45.

The photo of my double must surely be an apport, too. It exists because Richard snapped a picture of the picture and sent it to me. Even he, however, didn’t know of the coppery hair. Its true significance was hidden from him.

Is it a fetch, then, in the form of a doppelgänger? Or, that even more sinister portent, a Vardøger? The photo of me with red hair was taken on top of a building in Mumbai. I’ve never been back to India since then, so is this a reminder to resume my pilgrimage?

I have a strong sense of a fork in the path of my destiny back in the early 1990s, when I chose to return to Auckland instead of staying in Palmerston North. Is the face in Richard’s photo that of my might-have-been? He looks cheerful enough, but with something a little haunted about the eyes.

One thing is certain, this discovery sets up choices. One is to try to return to that moment, my own Morgenlandfahrt, my Journey to the East. Another is to ignore it totally, and hope it’s not the bad omen such sightings so often seem to be. The other – which I think I may now end up choosing – is to listen to the voice of the thunder, resume the interior journey, and reform my life.


[9/12/20-16/7/21]



The Road Not Taken: A Global Short Story Journey. Maurice A. Lee & Aaron Penn. USA: Lee and Penn Publishing, 2023.

That's not quite where the story ends, though. I sent the piece printed above to the editor of local literary journal brief shortly after finishing it, and it was accepted for issue 57, which was due to appear in 2021. I even received some proofs to correct, but it has (alas) never materialised.

Given the last issue of brief came out some four and a half years ago, in 2018, I suspect now (I hope I'm wrong) that it never will, and that brief must be added to that illustrious list of New Zealand alternative literary magazines which have now, unfortunately, departed the scene.

I felt that a year and a half was probably long enough to wait before sending it elsewhere. The trouble with that, though, it that it's such a "brief" piece of work, comprehensible within that setting, but a bit too allusive and offbeat for most other editors.

I was, therefore, a bit surprised to receive an email a few days ago informing me of the appearance of the anthology pictured above. I do remember sending them a story a year or so ago, but had no particular expectation of ever seeing it in print.




What really astonished me was the title, though. It's not that it's an unfamiliar one. Most people have at least heard of Robert Frost's poem, even if they haven't actually read it. If not, here it is to remind you:


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

David McCoy: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas (composite image)


The poem was, according to Frost, written about his friend, fellow-poet Edward Thomas, and his eccentric way of taking a walk.

Thomas chose to go off to war, to the Western Front, where he was killed by a shell on April 9th, 1917. Frost returned to America, where he became probably the most famous and honoured (though also, possibly, the most feared and hated) poet of his generation.

Which of them took the right path? We'll never know.





Thursday, July 04, 2013

The Mysteries of Albany: Gabriel White's Oracle Drive



Gabriel White: Oracle Drive (2013)


I'm very glad to report that my good friend Gabriel White's latest film will be included in the 2013 New Zealand International Film Festival, screening in the Academy Cinema on Monday 22nd July at 6.30 pm (or, alternatively, on Tuesday 23rd July at 1.00 pm). As well as having been in it - briefly, till the scenes I was in hit the cutting-room floor - I was also offered the privilege of a sneak preview. The piece I wrote in response (included below) might be interestingly contrasted with the more neutral prose of the festival programme. One thing we're all agreed on, though: "there’s beauty and eerie immanence lurking in the guarded blandness of Albany."

Go on, treat yourself! I think this film is at risk of becoming as defining for the far reaches of the haut North Shore as The Third Man was for post-war Vienna ...




Oracle Drive (NZ, 2013)

Filmed in 2012, North Shore Auckland
Length: 62 min
Director: Gabriel White
Producer: Amelia Harris
Post-production, art and effects: Markus Hofko
Music: Chris O’Connor
Oracle Drive Song: lyrics by Richard von Sturmer
Performers: Gabriel White, Richard von Sturmer, Alexa Wilson, Tessa Mitchell,
Nicholas Butler, Karin Hofko, John Radford

Funded in part by Creative New Zealand, Media Arts, Quick Response


“Is everything left to the imagination, or is nothing left to the imagination?” muses the protagonist of Gabriel White’s new film, as he claws his way up a grassy knoll towards a huge concrete bunker labelled sexyland.

At first sight, nothing could look less sexy: the windswept industrial wasteland, the brute force of the cyclopean walls … and yet, as we continue to watch this small, black-clad figure wander through the strange suburbs and subdivisions of Auckland’s North Shore, the essentially mystical nature of his quest comes more and more into focus.

There are the same images of ubiquitous traffic, tawdry signage, and twee, half-hearted, corporate ornamentation familiar to viewers of Gabriel’s previous cityscapes: Tongdo Fantasia, Aucklantis, The Unplanned Masterpiece. This time, however, a new element has entered the picture: the oracular.

This is, in a sense, if not a religious movie, at least a movie about faith. The strange, brightly clad dancers emerging from portaloos, the hands groping from culverts, the levitating cars and ghostly buses seem entirely in keeping with the network of streetnames he has discovered: Atlantis, Isis, Oak, Nile, Tempo Place – Oracle Drive itself.

I must have driven past some of these spaces a thousand times, and yet Gabriel’s camera has found details that almost make sense of the sheer weirdness of this globalised Edge City, this suburbanised Industrial Area from hell. It isn’t hell, says Gabriel – rather, a new type of purgatory: a testing-ground for the spirit.

As his car glides on, with the droning monotony of the “Drive, Drive, Drive, down Oracle Drive” song insinuating itself ever deeper into our neural pathways, I think we start to realise this is where we live. We’d better start taking Gabriel’s tree-alphabets and Honda pyramids more seriously – like his Phoenix Palm mobile-network towers, it won’t be long before they’re the only vestige of the numinous remaining to us.

“God created Arrakis to train the faithful,” say the desert Fremen in Frank Herbert’s Dune. The same, it is now apparent, must be said of the marshy fields and desert wastes of Albany’s Megacentre.


[8/6/13]




See me there on the left of the shot? No? Well, to hell with you then ...





[Updates]

There have now been quite a few reactions in the press to Gabriel's film (mostly extremely positive):



Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Three September Launches:


[Paula Green & Harry Ricketts, 99 Ways into NZ Poetry]


TALKING POETRY:


Launch Event for
99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry

Auckland Central Public Library
Friday, 17th September
5.30-7.00 pm


Introduced by Paula Green & Harry Ricketts,
the book's authors,
ten poets will each have 3 to 5 minutes to chat informally
on the subject of poetry.

Here is the list:

Sarah Broom
Janet Charman
Murray Edmond
Anna Jackson
Michele Leggott
Selina Tusitala Marsh
Jack Ross
Robert Sullivan
Albert Wendt
Sonya Yelich








[Jack Ross, Kingdom of Alt]


Titus Books


DUAL BOOKLAUNCH

Thursday, September 23rd
at Alleluya Cafe, Karangahape Rd, Auckland.
6pm start


Alex Wild Jespersen
The Constant Losers


A novel of text-talk, musomania, mix tapes, student bars and library intrigues, The Constant Losers starts with a google search for 'boykrew fan club' and ends in a 'zine war'. The book's heroes are two students whose strange relationship begins in print and develops through a series of chaotic encounters.

Jack Ross
Kingdom of Alt


Is writing about staying on the sidelines, or getting involved - marginal observation, or "skyline operations" (Auden)? This book of short stories (plus one novella) offers a series of takes on the possibility of a truly engaged literature. Not all the conclusions it comes to are entirely pessimistic.

See you there

or

Order the books here



[Alex Wild Jespersen, The Constant Losers]





[Gabriel White & David Simmons, Stories of Tāmaki]


Wednesday 29 September
6:30pm

FREE Public Event

The premiere screening of
Gabriel White's new film
Stories of Tāmaki
with David Simmons


Academy Cinema
44 Lorne Street
city centre
(below Central City Library)
Auckland


This 50 minute film testifies to rich ancestral heritage of Tāmaki Makaurau, a landscape many take for granted.

NB: Stories of Tāmaki was funded by The Screen Innovation Fund and supported by The Auckland Heritage Festival 2010.



[Gabriel White]

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Some Ads:


[Rubble Emits Light]

RUBBLE EMITS LIGHT
The Film Archive presents films by Richard von Sturmer

Where:
The Film Archive, Auckland
When:
Wednesday 14th July 2010 - Friday 13th August 2010


I went to the opening of this limited season of Richard von Sturmer films (curated by Gabriel White) the other night, and I definitely think it's worth making the effort to check it out when you're next on K Rd. There are three films, The Search for Otto (1985), Aquavera (1988) and 26 Tanka Films (2007), all on continuous loop. There are also a lot of other bits and pieces of footage taken at various times to sample.

Von Sturmer is (I think) one of our most interesting poets, and these films form an essential part of his work to date. Gabriel's essay in the exhibition catalogue is also well worth reading.





[John Dickson & Ted Jenner, “After Hours Return"]

brief the fortieth
Editor: Ted Jenner
Number 40 (July 2010)


The latest issue of New Zealand's longest-running avant-garde literary magazine (1995-2010) is now out, and can be ordered from the Titus Books website here.

Guest editor Ted Jenner has assembled a rather modified assemblage of whacked-out freaks for this special anniversary issue - not just your old favourites but some newcomers too ...





[bravado 19 (July, 2010)]


The latest issue of Tauranga's literary magazine bravado is also now out, with the fiction guest-selected by yours truly, and the poetry chosen by Majella Cullinane.

I would have liked to include quite a few more of the stories which were sent in, I must admit, but the ones that did make the cut certainly constitute a pretty strong group, I reckon.





[Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt]

This is Brett Cross's rather elegant ad for my forthcoming book of short stories, Kingdom of Alt. The image comes from Bronwyn Lloyd's pop-up version of the Wolfman story "Notes found inside a text of Bisclavret". The basic idea of the collection is storytelling through unusual means: notes written in the margins of other texts, in course journals and private diaries and even email exchanges ...

Just to give you an idea of what to expect, here are some of the reactions I got to my previous collection of short fiction, Monkey Miss Her Now, in 2004:

Original, dense, musical; and … erm … confusing. … Reading this book is like a wild lunge in the dark – you just never know what you’re going to find.
– Sue Emms, Bravado

As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.
– Scott Hamilton, brief

Woody Allen sometimes springs to mind, but so equally do the Surrealists.
– Roger Horrocks

Nobody else in New Zealand writes quite like Ross …
– Mark Houlahan, NZ Books

Outside of literati farm, this sort of thing has a very limited life expectancy.
– Joe Wylie, Takahe




Oh, and last but definitely not least, Mike Johnson's eagerly-awaited new graphic novel Travesty is due out from Titus Books next month. The book will be launched by Dylan Horrocks at the AUT Centre for Creative Writing on Thursday August 5, at 6.00pm:

"Mike's thirteenth published book, it's also a graphic novel in several senses of the word - including more than 30 striking panels drawn by comics artist Darren Sheehan.

To attend Thurs August 5 @ 6.00pm please RSVP Helen HuiQun Xue - HXue@aut.ac.nz - by Friday 30 July."






Friday, November 27, 2009

Flying Blind next Thursday



A panel presentation on the cultural and artistic impact of new media technologies.

Panel:
- Writer Jack Ross will draw on his web-based projects including the REM trilogy.
- Filmmaker Gabriel White will discuss the question of a "minor" cinema.
- Filmmaker David Blyth will discuss the internet and desire though his recent film Transfigured Nights.
- Film Archive curator Amelia Harris will examine the similar presence of amateurism in early cinema and contemporary media.

When: Thursday Dec 3
7.30 pm

Where: Auckland Film Archive
Level 1, 300 K Rd
Koha entry
complimentary beer!




*

[postscript: 4/12/09]

Well, the event went off very well, I thought.

You can read more about the details of my presentation here, and no doubt there'll be further follow-ups on the Floating Cinemas website and blog.

[Photograph by Mary Paul (4/9/09)]

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The Unplanned Masterpiece


[Gabriel White, dir.: The Unplanned Masterpiece.
Produced by Amelia Harris.
Graphics by Marcus Hofko.
Music by James McCarthy
(Auckland: Film Archive / ACC, 2009)]


So I went to see a preview of Gabriel White's new film about Auckland, The Unplanned Masterpiece, last Saturday.

I suppose you could say I'm prejudiced. After all, I am in the film - albeit very briefly, as one of the more than thirty talking heads delivering views on various aspects of the city's history, life and culture - and of course Gabriel and I are old friends and collaborators. But you know, even despite all that, I was worried that he wouldn't be able to pull it off - that the film would come across as quirky or incoherent, or just insufficiently representative.

But it didn't (or didn't in my view, at any rate). I found the film continuously fascinating throughout. I'd actually thought I knew something about Auckland before watching it, but I have to say that there was a great deal there which was news to me. I find it hard to imagine the person who could say that they were already au fait with all the vital, strange pieces of information Gabriel's interlocutors unearth. Their very shrugs and gestures become laden with implication at times as they stare down helplessly at Spaghetti Junction, the Harbour Bridge, or the Ports of Auckland wasteland.

Gabriel allows his thirty-odd speakers to speak for themselves. At times one will supplement or contradict the one directly before them - it's not that the editing isn't artful; just that it doesn't seem intrusive. From the opening description of Auckland as a endlessly fought-over, contended-for space (Tamaki-desired-by-many) to the closing description of its curiously temporary (time-bound - literally) architectural spaces, what comes across most strongly is passion: love for a city which at times can seem anything but loveable.

Balzac's famous story Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, the unknown masterpiece, tells of a painter who so elaborated his work that it finally dissolved into incoherence, an immense blur with nothing discernible in it but a single foot. Gabriel's title subtly puns on that. If Auckland is a masterpiece, it must be because there was something at work there beyond the makers' intentions (as in the final passages of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, where Charles Ryder concludes that the "fierce little human drama" he had participated in might have been justified simply by the fact that it left behind a consecrated chapel for his soldiers to use ...).

Like any city, it is - or should be - the sum of the aspirations of its inhabitants. That's an easy thing to say, but until you hear Gabriel's chosen speakers talk, it's easy to forget or overlook the richness and strange beauty of our own "wasp-waisted isthmus."

Gabriel comments in his work journal that "it was a little deflating to hear the film described by one member of the audience as 'left wing'", going on to say that "one political agenda of the film is to render such Jurassic categories obsolete." It's a punchy film, certainly - one designed (as he himself said at the launch) to get people talking and disputing - but I also think he's right that it eschews any particular rigid reading of the city's history in favour of a kaleidoscopic (but never incoherent) vision of promises broken and betrayed which ended up (perhaps), somehow, with some of them being kept after all.

So, in any case, the main purpose of this post is to advertise the fact that:

Free Screenings
of Gabriel White's new film about Auckland

The Unplanned Masterpiece

are on in Auckland Art Gallery's Art Lounge
(on the corner of Lorne St & Wellesley St)
on Sunday 4th October
at 11 am & 2 pm.


It really is worth a look if you have the slightest curiosity about this city.

And if you haven't, and you live here, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Roundup of Recent Events


[Gabriel White: The World Blank]

I'm afraid this post is a bit of a grab-bag of unrelated matters. Still, no harm in that, I suppose.

First of all, I want to urge all of you who are loose in Central Auckland any time in the next couple of weeks to check out Gabriel White's retrospective show "The World Blank" at The Film Archive Level 1 / 300 Karangahape Rd (Just above Artspace on the right side of the road heading towards Queen Street). It runs till the 28th of April, so you should have plenty of time.

I was at the opening on Tuesday last week, and heard Gabriel read out the commentary track to his early piece Airpoints, filmed in Melbourne in (I think) 2001. The text is available for free, and is well worth having.

The other works, all in the video-diary form which Gabriel's been experimenting with for the past seven or eight years, include Journey to the West, El Arbol del Tule, Tongdo Fantasia and Aucklantis. All of these are on sale for very reasonable prices (ranging from $15 to $35). I took the opportunity to complete my collection of Gabrieliana to date.

*


Secondly, here are some upcoming readings I'm booked in for in case anyone's curious to check them out:


Guest Reader (with Richard Wasley) at
St. Leonard's Church
Matakana Valley Rd

Friday, 1st May
Start 7.30


One of 10 Readers at the launch of
Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals
ed. Siobhan Harvey (Random House)
Artis Gallery
Parnell

Thursday, 7th May
5.30 - 7.30 pm


One of 8 readers at
LOUNGE #8
Old Government House
Auckland University

Wednesday, 27th May
5.30-7.00 pm



*


Finally, kudos to Scott Hamilton for knowing a rockstar when he sees one. In one of his most recent posts on Reading the Maps, he listed The Imaginary Museum as #5 in his top ten indie blogs:

... when the poets, short story writers, novelists, and essayists of twenty-first century New Zealand sit down at their desks and put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, who are they writing to? Who, I mean, is their ideal reader - the person who knows what they're getting at, wants them to get there, but won't tolerate any easy shortcuts or self-indulgent detours? I suspect I'm not the only Kiwi scribbler who would name Jack Ross as my ideal reader, and the assured, intelligent exercises in literary criticism on this blog will show you why.

Pretty good, eh? If you go to the comments after the post, you'll find me writing something almost equally fulsome about Scott's blog. There's a man with a lot of time on his hands who actually manages to spend it usefully by combing the net for bloody interesting stuff which I for one would never find out about otherwise ...

Of course, nobody's infallible.

Not that Jack's perfect - in his latest post he neglects to mention that he acquired his cat 'Zero' from me, and that shortly after doing so disposed of the perfectly good name I had given the creature.

"The creature," indeed! I ask you, does that cat look discontented to you? She loves her name, takes a fierce pride in it, actually. Trying calling her "Nui" and you'll find a set of razor-sharp claws flying in your direction ...

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

The EMO Interview


[Jack Ross: "Hotel, Frankfurt" (2005)]


Well, you'll recall about a month ago I put up a post with links to my interview with Gabriel White about his film Tongdo Fantasia and his interview with me about the REM trilogy.

Well, since then there have been two further developments. John Radford has done an interview with Gabriel about his film Aucklantis, and Gabriel has posted a second and final part of the interview with me (we only managed to get through two volumes of the trilogy in the first conversation).

So here goes:

The REM trilogy interview part two, focusing on the final volume EMO. (Sunday, December 21, 2008). Gabriel White – The World Blank and Other Projects. 8 video clips:
  • [1/8] What is ‘Emo’?
  • [2/8] 3’s / Eva Ave / Althusser.
  • [3/8] Eva Braun’s Diary / vivisection / cloning.
  • [4/8] Story frames – The Arabian Nights / Moons of Mars / characters / genre fictions / Bataille.
  • [5/8] Movements and motivations – Perec / patterns / surrealism / settings.
  • [6/8] Settings / images, words and sounds.
  • [7/8] The blind creator / textual processes – the internet.
  • [8/8] Ovid in Otherworld / the nurse / Ovid / otherness.


[Ivan Corsa: Lafayette Street Girl (2005)]


Come on, you know you're dying to have a listen! Who knows, it might change your life ...

Anyway, there it all is. The only thing is that you'll probably have to download the latest version of Quicktime in order to see and hear us properly. Free, though, and the gateway to lots of other exciting stuff on Gabriel's website.

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Frost / Nixon or Ross / White?


Yes, well, maybe it is a bit vainglorious to compare me and Gabriel White filming some conversations in his living room in Freemans Bay with that epoch-making set of confrontations between David Frost at the apex of his (bizarre) media career and gloomy, half-mad, exiled ex-US President Richard Nixon. I shouldn't think Ron Howard will be rushing to acquire the rights for another Hollywood blockbuster, though of course you never know ...

Perhaps a more appropriate model would be Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones's incarnations as "Scratch 'n' Sniff", those two bozos who used to conduct pretentiously inane dialogues in Alas Smith & Jones in the 80s and 90s. As Wikipedia so trenchantly puts it: "Smith was the idiot who knew everything, Jones the idiot who knew nothing."

Be that as it may, we remain undaunted. Gabriel has spent a lot of time over the years reading and annotating his copies of my REM trilogy: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus, 2006) and EMO (Titus, 2008), and he had quite a lot of questions to ask me about them. What harm, we thought, in sharing the results with an online audience?

Turnabout is fair play, though. Regular readers of this blog can hardly claim not to have noticed my admiration for Gabriel's films Aucklantis (2006) (reviewed here) and Tongdo Fantasia (2008) (launched earlier this year at OUi boutique in K Rd).

So we decided to do a double interview: I would quiz him on the inspirations and influences behind his Tongdo Fantasia, and then he would ask me questions about the REM novels.

For my money, that's better than either Frost / Nixon or Smith & Jones. I mean, didn't you ever long to see Nixon asking Frost some tough questions about just who precisely he thought he was to be so up on his high horse? And why didn't Smith ever swap places with Jones? That's what I want to know. With us, on the other hand, you get to see us on opposite sides of the table - in itself well worth the price of admission, I'd have thought ...

But seriously, folks, here's a breakdown of both interviews, now up for viewing on Gabriel's website (the clips take a little while to download, but at least that gives you time to mull over the info contained in each). They've also been indexed with themes and topics for your viewing convenience:

Jack Ross interviews Gabriel White on Tongdo Fantasia. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:
  • [1/5] Buddhism / the ‘pedestrian filmmaker.’
  • [2/5] The 3-fold approach / photographs / editing.
  • [3/5] Themes – natural and unnatural.
  • [4/5] The verbal approach / cinematic landscape.
  • [5/5] Bashō’s travel diaries.


Gabriel White interviews Jack Ross on his REM trilogy. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 9 video clips:
  • [1/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
  • [2/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
  • [3/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno – layout.
  • [4/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy – the fictional creator/s.
  • [5/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno / psychoanalysis.
  • [6/9] Nights with Giordano Bruno – Lullism / the Magus / Bruno’s Cena de le ceneri.
  • [7/9] Apuleius – influence on Bruno and Jack Ross.
  • [8/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – amnesia / narrative approach / Atlantis.
  • [9/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – two ways of approaching amnesia: cuttings and automatic writing.


[Apuleius: The Golden Ass (as illustrated by Milo Manara)]


Depending on the response to these, there may well be more to come. We didn't have enough time to talk about either Gabriel's Aucklantis or my novel EMO, but there are number of interesting points still to be thrashed out about both, I'd have thought.

Watch this space ...


[Postscript - 10th December]:

There's now a new interview up on Gabriel's site:

John Radford interviews Gabriel White on Aucklantis. (Sunday, December 7, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:
John Radford: "It's like a child's view, or someone from another reality arriving here and looking at this thing which we call a city and the way this thing works and making assumptions ... that are very reasonable assumptions to make ..."

  • [1/5] Sleepyhead / stream-of-consciousness city / wandering rocks / the epic.
  • [2/5] Mayoral Drive / Atlantis / North pole theory / sacred isles.
  • [3/5] The shadow / confusions / characters.
  • [4/5] Groundhog Day / references / the car.
  • [5/5] En plein air / counterworlds.


Friday, October 10, 2008

A Town Like Parataxis




Back in 2000, Gabriel White and I collaborated on a book of poems and photographs called:

I guess the idea of the title was to elide Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice (1950) with Wim Wender's Paris Texas (1984), but the real subject matter of the book was Auckland: the "parataxis" of its monotonously repetitive vistas and locales.

It was subtitled "a colouring-in book" because, I suppose, it was up to the reader to bring some colour to it.

We had a big launch at Gabriel's flat in Westmere, and promptly sold out of all the copies we'd laboriously assembled out of crudely-copied xeroxed pages (Gabriel had a very art-brut aesthetic at the time, which meant no frills and no smoothing out of the results of the raw democracy of the photocopy machine).

I too was keen on the idea of a kind of samizdat A4-sized poetry chapbook. Readers seemed to grasp the point of it at once ("Some of them have even said they liked the poems," as Gabriel remarked to me a couple of weeks later).

The main problem is that the book has been pretty much unavailable ever since. I'm not sure we could quite reproduce the spirit in which we made that first collaborative text, so I've decided to compromise by putting the whole text up here online, with all of the images included. You'll have to click on them if you want to see them at anything resembling their proper size, though.




And here we both are in 2000, photographed by one of those odd photo-booths (beloved of adolescent schoolgirls) which add hearts and flowers and comic characters to your strips of passport photos. Don't we look sweet?



Contents:

  1. FRONT COVER

  2. TITLE-PAGE

  3. CONTENTS

  4. Swallows and Amazons

  5. Cheating Heart

  6. A Town Like Parataxis

  7. At the Warhol Look Exhibition

  8. Stories We Tell Ourselves: At the Richard Killeen Retrospective

  9. DICTIONARY DEFINITION

  10. BACK COVER & LAUNCH ADVERTISEMENT

© Text: Jack Ross (2000) / Images: Gabriel White (2000)

Oh, and if you're curious to see more in the same vein, I've also posted the entire text of a proposed book version of The Britney Suite which Gabriel and I put together a couple of years later, in 2003, but which never actually ended up seeing the light of day until now.

A Town Like Parataxis (1)




A TOWN LIKE
PARATAXIS

A COLOURING-IN BOOK


Text by Jack Ross

Images by Gabriel White




A TOWN LIKE PARATAXIS

A Town Like Parataxis (2)






A TOWN LIKE
PARATAXIS

A COLOURING-IN BOOK


Text by Jack Ross

Images by Gabriel White


Took a walk around the old neighbourhood
– Margaret Urlich


Auckland: Perdrix Press
2000

A Town Like Parataxis (3)






Contents


Swallows and Amazons

Cheating Heart

A Town Like Parataxis:
1 – Winter’s Tale
2 – Walking Home on a Clear Evening
3 – Wysiwyg

At the Warhol Look Exhibition

Stories We Tell Ourselves:
At the Richard Killeen Retrospective

A Town Like Parataxis (4)






Swallows and Amazons



Man is a printing animal
born of opposableto study collagen
typecull phrases – cerebralGreen-backdon’t drop those
excesseggs (I’ve used that phrase
before
That was your truest voice
you never saw yourselfA Hitchcock hero
in ermine – TsarWar is badStop biting them
of all the rushesWar is bad becauseadminister a
swimming Nor’-nor’-westWar is bad because itslapStop touching it
kills the innocentadminister a
totStop
Forget
sequencesis
rememberasratfaced
nothingnothingcloud
doesabove
the
motorboat

A Town Like Parataxis (5)






Cheating Heart
(Between Greymouth and Westport, February ’99)


BUS-DRIVERGIRLRADIO


D’you remember the Kobe earthquake?
Your cheatin’ heart
You must sleep soundly
You must have been really tired
will make you weep
D’you wave to each other in Japan?
You’ll cry and cry
D’you drink green tea?
and try to sleep
Does the gold-mine sign say “Open”?
but sleep won’t come
If they want a day off, they take it
the whole night through
You can go in there and watch them
If you want to
Your cheatin’ heart
I’ve been to Australia six times
will tell on you
We keep them in a cage up there
in Auckland

A Town Like Parataxis (6)




MIRACLE OF LIFE





A Town Like Parataxis


ChristI – WINTER’S
perfumeTALE
headturn
hurry to the escalator
stop

I don’t have much
have much of a sense
of a sense of direction

Blue scarf
side glance
umbrella
point back
necklace

go home & come back
yeah
have something to eat
go home & come back
yeah



A creaking signII – WALKING
& wind-chimesHOME
& OrionON A
CLEAR
shoes impactstaccatoEVENING

I remember they drove us
crazy, summer nights

got them … fifteen years ago?

what’s with them?
never used to
twinkle

kept now for tango

wood, with dates of
services, the daily vigil
no wonder neighbours curse
every light



Louise SwarbrickIII – WYSIWYG
the senior
flight attendant

LIFE VEST UNDER
YOUR SEAT

It’s grey outside

a pearl-grey day
Who ordered
dates for lunch?

Time for a change

A Town Like Parataxis (7)






At the Warhol Look Exhibition


According to … legend, Andy’s first words were
‘Look at the sunlight! Look at the sun! Look at the light!’
– Victor Bockris, Warhol (1989)


Does it interest me? Does anything
interest anyone, in the
abstract? Meeting Vanessa there (turning
to finish her conversation), and to Chantal:
“Will you give me a mustardy
kiss?” “Not
in front of people.”


Around me images of thirty years:
Marilyn pouting, Liz, Yves
Saint-Laurent – garish flocks of
red (something rather sad
in aping such profusion),
the ‘compilator’
– finally, who’s fooled?


Not ‘fooled,’ exactly … fiddled?
“His great, great flower paintings
of the seventies”“Controversial
popCelebrated decade’s
glamour, style and fashion
ability
It includes 500”

icon out of time