Tania Katan won me over forever when, after crushing her competition in round 1 of San Francisco’s Literary Death Match, she extended her hand to her squashed opponent and -just as he humbly reached toward her- she drew drew back in the Welcome Back, Kotter tough guy hair swipe. Humiliation for the guy! I was smitten! She’s an excellent writer, a stellar comedian, and a terrific performer. We’re excited to have her join us on the playa!
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RADAR Productions: Tania, what are you working on at the Lab?
Tania Katan: A book about a 16 year-old misfit whose ambition to become a famous stand-up comedian almost drives her passed the real comedy and tragedy in her life.
R: What are you reading these days?
TK: Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I HEART this book so much!
R: What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
TK: I didn’t know it was a queer retreat. Well, in that case…the queer part.
R: What’s harder: writing a book or the first time you did stand up?
TK: The initial process of writing involves vomiting up as many memories/ideas/themes as I can, then picking through the vomit to find chunks of clarity, stories, and threads that start to connect the pieces, make them part of a larger whole. Standing up in front of an audience involves vomiting before going on stage. So, I guess I’m really proficient in throwing up.
R: What’s amazing about Phoenix?
TK: The best thing about Arizona is that it invests no money in education. Na-da. That’s Spanish for Arrest me. This means that we get government officials who are uneducated, which means that we, the residents of Arizona, feel way smarter then we ever done!
R: Why are ex-Mormon girls hotter?
TK: I’m not a planner, so I love being with women who are serious about the future. Whether it’s a One-Year Supply of food, or prepping for the Celestial Kingdom, I like my ladies hungry and thinking ahead. Oh, and you should see what my Mormon lady can do with a bonnet; there is nothing sexier! Check it out:http://www.lisasettegallery.com/a-ellsworth.htm
I had the pleasure of meeting Andrea Lawlor in April 2011 during the Sister Spit national tour’s U Mass Amherst stop. Andrea read a poem she’d recently written in response to Ali Liebegott’s call-for-submissions for her upcoming “Faggot Dinosaur” journal. Andrea surprised us with the paleontological-correct poem and blew us away with the reading!
She is the creator of Pocket Myths, a series of zines based on mythology. This is a massive undertaking and the edition entitled “The Odyssey” is comprised of both an impressive art and print zine with an accompanying DVD featuring shorts by 24 filmmakers tackling Homer’s epic. WHOA, Mary.
I can’t wait to talk Modern Jackass astrology with her!
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What are you working on at the Lab?
I plan to work on my novel, which is about a young queer shapeshifter in the early 90s. My dream is to see the end of this novel, to write my way there. I’m also working on a series of poems (see here <http://mipoesias.com/2011/04/05/andrea-lawlor> and here <http://www.scribd.com/doc/53201841/OCHO-31>), a sort of busman’s holiday from the novel. I’m pretty excited about poetry right now, after taking workshops this year with Dara Weir and James Tate.
What are you reading these days?
I’m re-reading Siddhartha right now, out loud, which is such a good way to read it. I read it first when I was 30 and it had its trademark profound effect on me even then. But now! I am appreciating how carefully Hesse uses language, how he tells the story of a spiritual quest in a way that’s both gripping and true to its subject. I’m very interested in quests, and also in fiction that isn’t depressing or coming from a cynical worldview. Plus, Siddhartha and Govinda? Total boyfriends.
I’m also re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, which both address the question of how to be an artist in this world. I love this thing Thoreau says: ”It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.” So great, right? And Virginia Woolf, for all her blind spots, breaks down the economic conditions of possibility for art-making under capitalism.
Other books I’ve recently loved: Eileen Myles’ Inferno, Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees, Malinda Lo’s Huntress and Ash, China Mieville’s Embassytown, Ali Liebegott’s The IHOP Papers, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I got Just Kids for the plane. I could go on forever here, maybe a leftover from working at Dog Eared Books.
What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
I love being around queer people! It’s so relaxing. And of course I’m excited to talk about writing with queer writers. For instance, how are other people addressing issues of representation, gender, language? In a group of queer artists, there are higher odds of finding people who are facing similar challenges, who share culture and values.
How’s Western Mass’s writing community?
So great! Everyone should come here. I’ve heard people say Western Mass is a poet’s paradise–because of the UMass MFA Program, Flying Object <
http://www.flying-object.org>, the Smith Poetry Center, etc., etc.–but I have to say it’s a
writer’s paradise. It’s beautiful, fairly easy to live cheaply, and there are tons of writers of all sorts. And also queers! Northampton used to be called Lesbian-ville, USA, and you really can’t walk down the street without seeing a bazillion lesbians. But I think they might need to start calling it Translad-ville, USA now. What else? There are tons of local writers who aren’t part of the Five Colleges, like the novelist Susan Stinson, who organizes lots of literary events. There’s even an Experimental Queer Writing Workshop for undergrads at UMass. I’ve been lucky enough to co-teach that for two years, and those young writers are so ridiculously talented. Watch out, world!
What astrologically do you bring to a group?
I generally bring the fire (Aries Sun, Aries Rising, Leo Moon) but I’ve got Mars in Capricorn and Mercury in Taurus, so hopefully that will calm the fears of people who are scared of Rams. I also bring over 20 years of low-level exposure to astrology (part of my queer cultural heritage), so I’m always ready to chat about people’s charts with a knowing air and little actual information.
What art are you really into right now?
People around the Bay Area are OBSESSED with Dani Leone’s food column “Cheap Eats“ in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and with good reason. It’s smart, weird and unusual food writing that makes me feel listless and want to lay down on the grass and think about how food shapes my thought processes. I love that Dani said at a RADAR Reading that even though she is a longtime food writer, she never has any idea where to eat when she’s out with friends.
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RADAR: Dani! What are you working on at the Lab?
Dani Leone: I’m working on a series of short stories with one common tie: each features a positive, entirely likable male character who is lucky, tough, brilliant, badass, great at sports, or heroic in some way, and who — coincidental to the story of the story — just happens to love a trans woman.
R: What are you reading these days?
DL: Mark Twain. I grabbed “The Innocents Abroad” off a friend’s shelf almost literally on my way out of the country (I’m in France) and it’s been good to lose myself in some excellent English after a long hard day of understanding very little.
R: What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
DL: I haven’t moved much in queer communities, so this will be new to me. And new is always interesting. My writing — especially my fiction — has tended to be pretty straight-themed. Most of my friends, and all but one of my writer friends, identify as straight. So it will be good for me to be surrounded by queerness. Especially while working on these stories, which say less about trans women (who are in my experience marginalized even within the queer community) than the men who love us. If there is a name for them that isn’t derogatory (i.e. trannie chaser) I don’t know what it is. And this is probably a matter of demographics (I’m in my forties) but none of the cis-gendered men I’ve dated have even thought of themselves as queer. So they’re not — but I don’t care what they are or aren’t. What I wonder is why they are always (again, in my experience) so secretive about it. Well, prolly because outside of the queer community, as within, it’s simply not cool to date trans women. I’d like to see that perception change. Thus, these stories…
R: Do you like other food writers? If so, who? If not, why?
DL: I loved Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me with Apples, and I also like MFK Fisher, and Calvin Trillin sometimes. I like to read writers writing passionately about food, and I love food flicks. But I don’t read restaurant reviews, per se, except on Yelp. In terms of actually assessing a restaurant, I think all restaurant reviewers – myself of course included — have been made irrelevant by Yelp. And I love this. From an eater’s standpoint, 100 one-paragraph opinions are WAY more valuable than one writer’s (presumably) educated one; and from a writer’s standpo
R: Have you killed chickens before? How many? What was that like???
DL: Yes, but not that often. I have swung the ax maybe 10 times total. It’s not pleasant, but if you want to eat meat — and I do and do and do — then I think it’s good to find out you are capable of killing your own. After that, though, I don’t know.At four in the morning this morning my French chicken farmer friend and I rounded up about seven dozen of her biggest, and drove them to a place that butchers them assembly-line style. I didn’t feel good about this. The worst part was waking them up in the
middle of the night, taking them away from their home. After that, it doesn’t matter much is my guess. It may be wishful thinking, but I suspect the assembly-line way is a cleaner, quicker death than the tentative blows of a tearful backyard chicken farmer. By the way, both seem better — from a strictly chickenly perspective — than to fall prey to a raccoon, fox, hawk, or weasel. Which, of course, happens to small-farm free range chickens as well as backyard ones, and isn’t pretty.
I LOVE LOVE LOVE listening to Danny's novel-in-progress of a busted kid's attempts to run away with the circus and, if you've heard him read from this work, you do too. He's one of 3 Danny/Dani writers coming but we were smart and split them up among the two retreat sessions. Anyway, Danny is also a hairdresser and using this insider knowledge to write something that promises to be brilliant AND scathing!
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RADAR: Hi Danny! What are you working on at the Lab?
Danny: "Hairdresser On Fire", a collection of stories that follow Francis, an oddball hairhopper of 20+years, through the trials and tribulations of working inside the "Beauty Industry"- two words that when put together make me want to slit my face. Beauty Industry? Gross. I've renamed it the Corporate Industrial Beauty Cult. The stories follow Francis as a young Charasmatic Christian Cult Kid, surrounded by faith healers- present but never saved, ya know? (He is finally saved at 9 years old by seven inch leather heels and The Book of Thoth). Progressing through Beauty College, odd salon jobs, talk therapy and life as an E ducator for a notorious Beauty Cult, we watch Francis slowly spiral into an anti-beauty culture madness. All is revealed in narrative and character study rather than essay; I don't want to beat people over the head with my ideas on this industry.
R: What are you reading these days?
DL: Psychodynamic Perspectives on Religion, Sect and Cult, edited by Dr David A. Halperin, has been a treasure trove for this project. I'm mostly doing a lot of "re-reading" to gear up for the Lab. Lots of character studies- bits and pieces of "A Confederacy of Dunces", "Cather in the Rye", "The Great Gatsby", all of those incredible character-driven classics. Also bits of Jim Carroll's "Downtown Diaries" and Kerouac's "Lonesome Traveler"....hmmm... I just re-read "Unplugging Philco" by Jim Knipfel. I love him. And Kristen Hersh's "Rat Girl" is wicked good. I don't know if "The New Yorker" counts. Of course it does. "The New Yorker".
R: What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
DL: I'm sure "safe space" comes into play a lot here, and that is part of it. But more than anything, it is the structure of community placed before me that has lovehearts popping all around my head. This retreat could be two doors down from my house in Oakland and it would be wonderful- having it in paradise is a tureen of bonus gravy. Mmmm. Also, keeping myself aligned with RADAR has a lot to do with my roots as a writer. Without Sister Spit, K'vetsh, and the queer artists who have been such cheerleaders for my work, I would probably not be writing. Probably be weaving baskets or trying to sell oregano to tourists. So, yeah. I love me some queer support.
R: What secrets does the hair industry try to keep that you want to reveal to us now?
DL: Ooooh. Good one. There's so many...The main thing I disagree with in the industry is the ancient adage that you have to "suffer for beauty." Bullshit. You do not, and should not. I don't even know where such ridiculous sentiment came from...I'd imagine some misogynist queen said that to a client with welts on her scalp once and it stuck and became law. It's always sounded so horrible to me. Suffer for art, suffer for love, for family, for your cat. But beauty? No. Not neccesary.
R: What astrologically do you bring to a group?
DL: I'm early Leo, and I feel more ready than ever to get very clear on what I want to recieve and what I'm willing/not willing to do for it. So much has fallen away in the past month; since Jupiter has settled nicely into my tenth house for a whole year, I find that many of the constructs I had previously allowed to define me have been broken apart, leaving me free to re-package myself as I wish. I have no more fear of proclaiming myself to be "a writer", and I want that for everybody. My want is for everyone to become more of what they are, to lose all the fear and allow themselves the freedom that is their birthright. I'm all fire and air. Crackle... crackle... crackle... BLAMMO. So I welcome this new earthiness, this grounding, "get-down-to-business viewpoint" I've been handed with open Leo arms.
R: How's the East Bay for writing community?
DL: I work in a very small set. Often one-on-one. It can be difficult to keep a solid group, but just like anywhere else you need to seek out the community you require and stick with it, making changes as you go. For regular, scheduled writing, I have always preferred a small group to a massive one. The smaller size allows for more in-depth critique and for the development of a loving trust and respect between the folks involved. So, for me, having one or two people checked-in with my work on a regular basis keeps me on my toes and makes it so that when the work is presented to a larger community I feel safer, as if I've already gotten a green light from my "micro-community." Does that even make sense? I hope so.
I am excited to meet Noel Alumit not only because his acting credits include Beverly Hills 90210 and The Young and the Restless though I am titillated in the purest sense by these facts. He’s also written great award-winning books including his debut Letters to Montgomery Clift which is such an outstanding title! We adored reading a sample from the work he’s bringing to the retreat! It doesn’t hurt he’s a Capricorn like yours truly.
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RADAR: Hi Noel, what are you working on at the Lab?
Noel: I’m working on my third novel, A Remarkable Boy. It’s a story about a spiritually gifted youth who disappeared in Los Angeles. I’m exploring themes like faith, dedication, and AIDS.
R: What are you reading these days?
NA: I’m reading books about atheism and humanism. A character in my book doesn’t beleive in God. I’m reading God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens and Good without God by Mark Epstein. They’re for research purposes, but they’re also fascinating conversations about morals, religion, the dangers of fundamentalism.
R: What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
NA: Well, I think some of the themes I’m exploring are important to the queer community. AIDS obviously devasted us, and it’s still on ongoing discussion. However, for alot of straight people, I think, it’s still a foreign conversation. When I tell queer people I work in AIDS, they’re like, Cool. When I tell straight people I work in AIDS, they look at me like: why?
I’m also looking at religion in my work. I encounter people of faith who honestly can’t see anything wrong with religion. Who think that religion has done no wrong. Queer people have been badly hurt by it. However, I also know queers who are uplifted by it. It’s a very complex issue, and I’m looking forward to exploring it.
R: What’s the LA writing community like?
NA: It’s large and vast like the city. I was in a writers group that had a hard time meeting because we were from all over the place (Culver City, Topanga Canyon, Echo Park, Silverlake). I now meet with a group where we’re more local. I have lots of writer friends. We have many voices and many genres. It’s kinda cool in a way.
NA: What’s your sign and what will you be contributing astrologically to RADAR’s retreat?
Funny you should ask! Both my Eastern and Western signs are similar. I’m a Capricorn (goat) and was born in the Year of the Ram. I’m a mountain animal all the way! I look at this as reinforcement that I’m constantly aspiring to new heights. This also means that I tend to head-butt with people. Not that I get into fights or anything, but I like conversations that challenge ways of thinking. I think head-butting made me a good AIDS activist. (Don’t worry, I won’t be menacing in Mexico)
I like to think that I’ll be adding lofty ideas to the retreat, and encouraging us to go higher, further.
Sarah Fran Wisby’s got a great voice in both her writing and her live readings. As you glean from her photo, she’s got a really tough, wry, seen-it-all-before-which-shaped-my-excellent-sense-of-humor style. She is sort of unflappable which I personally admire because I am so often flapped. Her first collection of work Viva Loss is -to quote one of Andy Warhol’s high school yearbook descriptions- genuine as a thumbprint.
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RADAR: Sarah Fran, what are you working on at the Lab?
Sarah Fran Wisby: I am working on short stories, a collection that has tried on a few different names: The Goner Party, Sympathy for the Details. I can’t seem to get away from puns and wordplay in my titles. The story I am working on now is about two people who live in a burning building–I am enjoying the pressures of verisimilitude in what is basically a fantastical scenario. What details can make this impossible world seem true? The story is about a relationship, which strikes me now as equally impossible and in need of supportive details…
R: What are you reading these days?
SFW: Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, Bluets by Maggie Nelson, Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, Stand-Up Tragedian by Chaim Bertman, and Speak, Memory by Nabokov are some of the books I’ve read or am reading this summer. The last book that changed my life was Sex At Dawn, a somewhat-cheesily written exploration of our hunter-gatherer past and what it means for contemporary human sexuality. Not that I necessarily know what to do with the information that the female sexual response cycle evolved to be satisfied by little less than a gang-bang!
R: What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
SFW: Well, first of all, I want to thank RADAR for its inclusive definition of queerness, which has room for hasbians like me. Secondly, the great thing about being marginalized as an artist is the freedom to create without the pressures of success! That’s a snide way of saying something that is both bitter and sweet: when who or what you are is not valued, propped up by society, you must carve your own path with others like you. There is certainly a lot of fun to be had in the margins, on and off the page.
R: What art have you recently fell in love with?
R: What was Valencia St like when you first moved to the Mission and how is it different?
SFW: Um, gosh. That’s a big question. I moved to Valencia Street in 1995. It was still common to hear Spanish spoken on the street, and coming from my neighbors’ apartments. There were lesbian-owned businesses like Old Wives Tales and Osento. My block was pretty quiet, mostly centered around New College, and next door to it, the Daniel Creamery, where I got to know the men who handled the early-morning milk deliveries, because I’d be walking my dog at five AM before heading off to my own early morning produce job. My memory of those times always includes the gutter streaming white from busted milk cartons and trying to keep my dog from drinking from the swill.
Nostalgia’s a tricky business though. Sometimes I look around at Valencia Street now with its four dollar lattes and its gourmet pizza and elegant bicycle parking structures and I know I’ll be nostalgic for this too someday.
I need Leopoldine Core to finish the book that she submitted as her work sample in her Lab retreat application so I can BUY IT AND READ IT MANY TIMES. While I inhaled her 25 page work sample, I felt deeply understood and connected with her writing in a manner that made me feel like she were writing my brain down for me so I could know myself better. Such is her ability to capture the complex subtle weirdnesses of relationships and our awful human psyches.
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RADAR: Hi Leopoldine, what are you working on at the Lab?
Leopoldine Core: I’ll be working on my collection of stories. I have this big crazy file of fragments. Just bits of dialogue, descriptions of rooms and bodies. So I’ll be bringing a big santa sack of tiny papers to arrange.
R: What are you reading these days?
LC: Generally I’m more of an obsessive than a carnivore when it comes to reading. So I’m not hungry for the next book, I’m hungry for the same books over and over. Right now I’m re-reading Let It Come Down by Paul Bowles. It’s a masterpiece. He’s a looser miniaturist than Jane Bowles, so there’s a speed to his delivery I really enjoy. And there’s
a character in this book who is obviously based on Jane, so I feel I’m entering the private life they shared. Someone should really write a book about how their work overlaps.
R: What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
LC: I don’t know. It makes me kind of nervous and uncomfortable. But I’m sure I’ll have a really good time.
R: What art (any media or form) are you really obsessed with and want the world to know about?
LC: There’s a great street artist in my neighborhood who signs their work: Bortusk Leer. The work doesn’t look very good online (I just googled “Bortusk Leer”) but live its gorgeous, all these ghoulish sea creatures. On 10th street between avenue B and C, there’s an especially striking lobster, pink with blue eyes and a yellow smile. Also, someone is walking around writing YOU WOULD in really smart places. I think this is old news. But who is this person? You are so
cool, whoever you are. My friend Miranda found YOU WOULD written on a square white plank leaning against a trashcan. So she took it home and tacked it to her wall. It looks really great.
R: What astrologically do you bring to a group?
LC: I’m a Capricorn so supposedly I’m some really organized workaholic. It doesn’t feel that way. I’m more of a creature of leisure. I make a lot of time for work but often just wind up listening to records and masturbating. Then I’ll write a little. Make a sandwich. I like to feel free. Probably because I’ve had all these shitty jobs. So I’m sure I’ll be really happy in Mexico. I’ve never been there. I’ll probably look like someone who just got out of prison.
R: What are you listening to with abandon?
LC: The Monks, Useless Eaters, Dinosaur Jr, Gram Parsons. Thurston Moore’s new album Demolished Thoughts is really beautiful. And I love Jay Reatard, every stage of his music. What a fucking genius. His melodies are so good that I can sit listening to all the crackly live shows on youtube for hours. I have a little bit of a crush on him actually. His hair. And his life. He was poor growing up so he used a pickle bucket as a drum, obsessively recording songs in some little
shack instead of going to school.
Lastly, I love the new album Bones by Fenster. Until very recently, I was proofreading at an office and of course hated it but they let us listen to music and that was nice. I listened to Bones on repeat for DAYS and haven’t been the same since. It’s such a transporting set of songs. You can listen here: http://fenster.bandcamp.com/album/bones
I buy copies of Beth Lisick’s Everybody Into The Pool as a standard gift for those I love because I had read it SEVEN TIMES, no lie, and will continue to read it again. I used to tutor a middle-school drop out girl and was trying to peak her interest in reading so we read Monkey Girl together and she was surprised that a book could be funny! (Not a big reader, that girl.) This is all to say that I love Beth Lisick as a human, as a good-natured traveler in a tour van and a fucking amazing writer.
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RADAR: Dear Beth Lisick, what are you working on at the Lab?
Beth Lisick: My tan. Does everybody immediately say that? I’m actually too tan and will try to work on not coming home like a fine piece of hand-tooled leather. I am going to be working on a novel, my first novel. It’s sort of a midlife crisis story about what would happen if you realized that you have been doing basically nothing for the past twenty years. You were tricked into thinking you were doing something because people around you were doing something, but in fact you were just hanging around interesting people. Their energy was so big that you mistook it for your own. It’s fun so far because I get to write about Oakland/SF in the 90s and I’m planning on setting a big chunk of it in San Jose, where I grew up. I can’t get enough of a strip mall that has a knife shop, an Afghan restaurant, a dog groomer called Fur Benders, a shoe store called The Instep, and a bar called Final Score. Anything can happen there. I am just now realizing I should set the whole book at the strip mall.
R: What are you reading these days?
BL: I am just finishing up a novel called Lola, California by Edie Meidav. She is one of those writers where I am bowled over by the scope of her thought and her knowledge about people and relationships. It’s got a lot of great stuff about Berkeley, Mendocino, New Age retreats. I love reading about California. She also goes so deep into the sheer power of girl/girl teen relationships and what can become of them. An excellent book, though I did have to break out the dictionary a few times. Also, I am reading Keith Richards’ autobiography. Now I’m excited thinking about which books to bring to Mexico!
R: As a Sister Spit veteran, what would you tell a new writer who is about to embark on their first literary tour?
BL: Well, if they’re lucky enough to go on a Sister Spit tour then they’ve got nothing to worry about. All the tarot, coffee, and moral support you’ll need is right there in the van. If you’re venturing off on your own or with a few pals, I would say that you just need to remain open to the possibilities the road can bring you. Don’t expect it to be a certain way. Like audiences. You may drive seven hours from Atlanta, GA to Roanoke, VA and when you get to the coffee shop called From the Grounds Up or Bean There Done That or McJitterz, there could be no one inside who even knows you are supposed to be giving a reading. Then after you sit around for an hour, you go out in the parking lot and it turns out the three goth kids were there for the reading, but they didn’t think you had showed up so they were just playing hackey sack in the parking lot to kill time. Just agree to meet them at Tudor’s Biscuit World the next morning for breakfast before you drive to New York and everything is cool.
R: What music are you obsessed with right now?
BL: My husband is a musician and recording engineer/producer so there is a constant influx of interesting music in the car and in the house. Some of the great stuff I’ve been listening to lately includes Tune-Yards, Religious Girls, Thao & Mirah, and Beep. I’m always interested in what Aaron Novik, Mark Eitzel, and Sonny Smith are up to. I flip on KALX when I’m in the car and love DJ Sex 14s, as much for the music he plays as for his mellow but passion-filled vocal stylings.
R: Highlights and lowlights of being a traveling writer abroad?
I find that I get highlights and lowlights confused all the time. Over time, I’ve noticed that the lowlights inevitably turn into highlights. When I’ve traveled abroad to do readings, I always feel lucky that I’ve been able to get myself across an ocean because of an idea I had that I wrote down or took action on. One thing that remains a lowlight is my inability to speak any other language with confidence. Insert mandatory sentence about how I’ve studied at one time Spanish, Italian, French. Fact remains: I really only speak English. For hands-down highlight reel, see answer to your next question.
R: How was Porchlight in Paris?
Last summer we got to do our storytelling show in Paris for this festival that Shakespeare & Co. was putting on and it was the most glamorous trip I have ever taken. I am not a very glamorous person, but I feel like I really rose to the occasion. IF YOU WILL: international authors, perfect duck confit, vintage shopping in the Marais, parties in private homes where the antique tapestries on the walls are worth more than the real estate on the whole block, oh hello Kristin Scott Thomas, are you going to the Beth Orton concert in the Refectoire de Cordeliers? The one with the giant wooden tables laden with figs and cheese and olives and lit by candles everywhere. Why, I’m just standing on a vast green lawn next to this poet from Botswana drinking a glass of Roederer which I can refill a billion times because the president of the company is over there on the couch, or I can go back to my room next to the Pantheon and pop open the bottle of complimentary champagne they gave us earlier and maybe eat the chocolates before riding a bicycle all throughout the city streets with a professional model/skateboarder I just met who lives here and knows just where to go during the Fete de la Musique, the night where bands play music in the street until dawn. Let’s never go to sleep tonight, let’s climb up on this statue, look down at the Seine, and weep because this is so beautiful, until it’s time to go to the airport where your friend gives you an Ambien.
Brian Bauman is adorable as evidenced by above and he’s a playwright which gives further context to this photo. Gives it depth and meaning and writes its own story about where he is, why that chair, what is that book or card sitting in front of him, what is that expression on his face, and why that smart jacket with those smartly ripped jeans, am I right? It’s true, maybe I overly fetishize playwrights but I think they deserve it because a genius piece of theater makes me feel like I cannot understand the possibilities of the human brain, despite my many years of therapy. Here’s what Brian tells RADAR.
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RADAR: What are you working on at the Lab?
BB: I am revising a draft of a play called A CRUCIBLE. It’s an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and takes place at a Catholic high school outside of Salem, MA set in contemporary times. The drama teacher is a closeted homosexual priest who is haunted and sometimes embodies the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. The young actor cast as John Proctor gets gay-bashed in the parking lot before the first rehearsal and is in a coma much of the play. The young women cast as the “witches” fight for crossed-gender casting and also sign a pregnancy pact amongst themselves. The whole thing is a tabloid take on contemporary american puritanism, the quasi-fascist culture we’re living in where authorized/broadcast roles can be reduced to such limited choices.
The Crucible is one of the most widely produced plays in American high schools because the cast size can accommodate a large number of students (mostly female) and because the play itself is considered a classic due to its historical relevance, it is often easily tied in to social studies units on McCarthyism, etc. What does it mean that generation after generation of young men and women are “cultivated” through the experience of representing this particular story? How does playing a “witch” shape a young person’s identity, particularly one sensitive or creative enough to be drawn to the arts in the first place? I first developed the play in a writing workshop last fall/winter but am really excited to dive into a new draft in Mexico!
R: What are you reading these days?
BB: I have been carrying around Tim Dlugos’ A Fast Life, which is a volume of his collected poems, for the past few weeks. I find his writing to be all over the map, its exciting to read poems from different eras of his life and see how his relationship to language evolves. Though sometimes precious, I find a complicated, exciting magic in his work…plus its really sexy. I just read Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder, which I thought was incredible, morose, gorgeous and so sad. I’m a fan of her essays so it was cool to get to know her more poetic side. Definitely recommend it. I’ve recently read Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure by Sara Jane Bailes and it really knocked my socks off. The introductory essays about the artistic potential of “failure” and its relationship to representation, and a long riff on slapstick, Marx, and punk rock, are really provocative and make me feel like being a theater artist can actually be cool and truly fucking subversive and relevant again.R: What’s interesting about a queer artists retreat?
BB: I’m so grateful for the Radar folks creating this opportunity for us! I’m looking forward to being around other creative people and sharing my work and not having to worry about “oh fuck, will they get this? will they be offended? will the understand the critical shit I’m doing?” etc. Knowing that the other artists already have a queer sensibility is a huge relief… I feel like I’m often asked to bend toward the center in writing groups… I am certain that will not be the case in Akumal, and I am soooo thankful for it.
R: Typecasting-wise, novelists are gloomy alcoholics, dancers are megalomaniacs, slam poets are narcissists, painters are antisocial. What are the stereotypes about playwrights?
BB: Have you ever seen TOOTSIE? Bill Murray nails it.
R: What do you love about New York and where else in the world would you find it acceptable to live?
BB: New York is a challenge. I’m not sure if its “acceptable” for me to live here, but I live here now so I’m doing my best. It’s so crazy expensive here and I have a rigorous full-time job in non-profit development that seriously cuts into my creative output. I love how hard everyone works here and that there’s this sense of “all in it together”-ness that is at once dirty and cruel and sexy and totally alive. I first lived here in the mid-nineties and its like a totally different city now. I like that I can produce myself here and people actually show up to the performances. It was harder to find an audience for my work when I was living in Boulder, Colorado. I also like the density… I can see someone who used to beat me up in high school, performance artist Penny Arcade, and an ex-boyfriend from college just walking down the street… all on the same day and without invitation. There’s something exhilarating about swimming in the soup of all these people. It’s like living in the internet.
As far as other places to live, I spent many years in Los Angeles, and despite its bad reputation, I kind of loved it. Overseas would be great – can Sallie Mae find me if become an ex-pat?
Meet Nicole (on left.)
Nicole J. Georges has lots of Capricorn in her chart which makes her a workaholic. This is not why she was selected for the RADAR Lab – TWICE – but it sure helps. Even if you think you are not familiar with Nicole’s work, we bet you’ve seen it because she’s all over the place! She’s toured twice with Sister Spit, writes and illustrates an autobiographical comic Invincible Summer that’s over 14 years old(!), and her work has appeared in tons of magazines, websites, your friends’ houses and venues around Portland, OR where she lives.
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RADAR Productions: Nicole, tell us about what you’re working on at the Lab.
Nicole J. Georges: I will be working on the final final FINAL touches of my yet-untitled graphic memoir about the year when I called the Dr. Laura Show. The book started as a short story, which I read on the Sister Spit Tour in 2007. I met an agent on that tour who encouraged me to adapt the story into a graphic memoir, and now four years later I have 240 fully illustrated pages of family secrets, dogs, chickens, palm readings, romance, and right wing talk show hosts.
The book is coming out in 2012 with Mariner Books.
RP: What phrases make you want to vomit blood? (For me “the new normal” makes me homicidal.)
NJG: “Nobody’s Perfect” really chafes my hide and is a giant blanket for people to throw over any kind of conversation
about accountability. Is there not a more nuanced way to discuss bad behavior or the gray areas of humanity than to say “Nobody’s Perfect” ? God, what if that’s how J.K. Rowling discussed Voldemort? “He broke his soul into seven pieces by killing other people and oppressed muggles and half bloods in the name of forming a pure wizard race, but you know what? NOBODY’S PERFECT.”
RP: What are you reading these days? What are you listening to?
NJG: Great question! (Also, I want you to know that every time I listen to Fresh Air, I count the number of times the subject respondsto Terry by saying “Great Question”). I am currently reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. I just finished listening to the Hunger Games trilogy, which I HIGHLY recommend. And I look forward to my copy of Paying For It by Chester Brown to come in at the library. Hopefully before the Lab!
Right now my musical brain has been overtaken by the band YACHT, whom I was just traveling with for a week.
I wake up and go to sleep with Psychic City playing over and over in my head. AND the most popular dance song in the world right now- Papa Americano (not by YACHT) ,is on a continuous loop. When I am unbound by the YACHT chains I have been listening to old Tina Turner and to Key Losers.
RP: What kinds of artistic projects are you working on these days besides finishing your book?
NJG: I am illustrating a comic about the great Vanport Flood for a group called the Dill Pickle Club. They write historical comics and hire local cartoonists to draw them. Vanport was a city made up of workers right outside of Portland until it was decimated by a horrible flood in the 1940s that bears a striking resemblance to Katrina in its handling.
I am putting together a zine about bad roommates called The Bad Roommate Zine, I’ve been doing a weekly comic for an online magazine called Good Dog, and I just finished my yearly Invincible Summer diary comic with Clutch.
RP: What’s so great about living as an artist in Portland? How about living as a vegan in PDX?
NJG: Portland is an inexpensive place to live. It is easy to live here. There is a lot of great coffee, you are surrounded by beautiful beautiful mountains and trees, and you can party or not party as much as you’d like. If you can’t be vegan in Portland then you can’t be vegan anywhere. It is a land of abundance, with fake cheese pizzas falling from the heavens. Seriously! I grew up feasting on french fries as a vegan in Kansas. This is the first place I’ve ever been able to order a dessert with dinner. Eleven years later, that is the least of my options.
I just co-hosted Vegan Iron Chef here with Isa Moskowitz. Just like regular Iron Chef, but live and all vegan.
There were 300 attendees, and over 2000 live streaming viewers online.
RP: You attended the inaugural Lab retreat in 2009. Why did you want to come back?
NJG: The Radar Lab is like a dream for a workaholic like myself. I get the joy of going on vacation to a place with sunlight, and the satisfaction of being able to work everyday during the vacation without being a drag.
Highlights of 2009 included:
Beth Pickens’ guacamole every night, snorkeling with Michelle Tea at the Yal-Ku lagoon & seeing cool schools of blue fish, getting bitten by a tiny fish at Yal Ku, seeing baby sea turtles hatch and walk to the sea , Kirk Read’s unfortunate nude meeting with a sea urchin, finishing ten pages of my book, and being inspired by talking to and seeing the process of other writers, including (but not limited to) Lucy Corin and Ali Liebegott.
Drawing comics is a very solitary process, so coming into the sunlight and being immersed in writer-land is enlightening and nutritious to say the least .
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