Reminders from an Undated Work Journal

1. It's not about me.
2. Respect people's time.
3. Everything relates to goals and values. Details reflect priorities.
4. Don't act when you are triggered.
5. Get over how you think things should be and work with how things are.
6. People are mobilized by feelings and relationships.

Generations

Generations. 2010. Barbara Hammer & Gina Carducci. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s film Bridges Go Round (1953), Hammer and Carducci use two Bolex cameras to capture the final days of Coney Island’s Astroland amusement park. Generations is playing at MIX 23 NY Queer Experimental Film Festival on November 12, 7 PM

The first time I met Barbara Hammer was at CUNY’s 2009-2010 Kessler Lecture. Sarah Schulman was delivering a talk as the recipient of the Kessler award for making a substantial contribution to the field of queer studies. I was attending by myself, and apparently so was Barbara. When she came in, I recognized her and smiled, so she came over and sat with me despite the fact we had never met. The lecture was fabulous, a mind-blowing break from conventional thinking about homophobia that was disorienting in its radical reframing of the meaning of queer community.

The first time I met Gina Carducci was a few years earlier on March 21, 2007 at the Nobody Passes book launch event at Bluestockings, a feminist lefty book store/info shop in the Lower East Side. I was reading an excerpt from “The End of Genderqueer,” something I wrote about the tension between social and revolutionary purposes in identity poltics and queer community building. The reading was my big atheist religious moment, to stand and read in the same very same place where so many of my personal heroes have stood and read. Though I’ve been told no one could tell, my knees were shaking so hard I feared I might fall over. I met Kate Bornstein after the Q&A, and got to tell her how profoundly her writing had affected me. Later that night I met Gina through the good graces of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

A film maker looks at a film maker looking through a camera at a spectator/subject...

Generations is a film about making a film.  Two queer film makers collaborate to create an experimental film that shows the process of them shooting and working with the film itself.  We see each filmmaker with her Bolex, and we see the equipment used in developing and printing. We see them filming each other on the subway, at Coney Island, and in the film lab; some images are beautifully saturated with color and manipulated into abstraction, some are relatively straightforward and contemplative. But images are only the beginning of the elaborate parallel meanings and connections in Generations.

When Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci agreed to make a film together, they planned for a highly structured creative process. They decided on Astro Land at Coney Island as their location and shot the footage together, each with her own 16mm camera. Each artist started with the complete footage but edited privately, neither seeing the other’s work until it was complete. The two complete works were joined into a single film, one after the other, and premiered at the MoMA Barbara Hammer retrospective.  Each of these facts about the process has a bearing on the final film and its meaning, as does the fact that Hammer’s retrospective opened with a screening that featured four films made in the spirit of learning and collaborating with other women. Hammer lives her feminism, so clearly that even her retrospective, traditionally a celebration of an individual artist, began by sharing the spotlight with other women.

Coney Island is in a beautiful state of disrepair that recalls its history as one of this country’s original sites of recreation when recreation was a new concept. Coney Island always seems to be in jeopardy of either destruction or renovation, either of which would signify an ending to what the place is and has been. Film itself is a medium that is used less and less. Both the subject matter and the medium speak to mortality, the passage of things we hold dear, their beauty is in jeopardy of being lost.

Barbara Hammer is the creator of over 80 films.  Her work has taught queer audiences about experimental film and experimental film audience about the politics of queer sexuality.  Not only have Hammer’s films captured lesbian feminism and culture from the 1970s to the present, in a very real way her films have contributed to the creation of that culture.  Gina Carducci is a radical queer filmmaker who hadn't made a film for five years when she met Barbara. Carducci works in a film lab but her own camera equipment was idly stored in various places at the time. Clearly this was not to be a collaboration of equals, but a mentor-student relationship. Mentoring is woefully absent in the queer community, perhaps because it is so perilous, perhaps because we have been too busy in the struggle to make its cultivation a priority. Mentoring between queer women needs to be handled carefully, since we sustain some wear and tear from constantly coming up against sexist and homophobic power dynamics. Our experiences with being excluded from power make it difficult for us to make the imbalance of a traditional mentor-student relationship work well. It is hard to receive guidance or worse yet, advice; it is also hard to take up our power and guide others without being stifled by self-doubt and second thoughts.

An innovative idea to undermine this traditional power dynamic was to shoot the film together and edit separately. This idea doesn’t make the teacher and student equal, nor does it seek to.  But it does undermine the possibility of Hammer exercising undue influence while also creating the opportunity for Carducci to get back into film making, get creative, and essentially go to town stylistically while knowing her work would be seen by an experimental film audience at MoMA. The rules of their process freed Carducci from the potential perception that being mentored by Hammer made her work derivative, while simultaneously allowing Hammer to mentor somebody less than half her age without overshadowing and thereby authentically pass along some of her wisdom. This working agreement was still to be a mentor-student relationship, but not fall prey to the inherent inequity in that dynamic. The collaborative process they came up with subverts the traditional mentor-student relationship without denying that it exists, but rather by taking it consciously and deliberately into account.

Carducci edited her film on a flatbed editor, a mechanical process involving literally cutting and splicing film. Hammer opted to scan the film then edit on a computer. Here the elder shows us the potential of the new, and the younger remains loyal to the structures and demands of the old. Each works with the footage alone, on her own terms, in her own style, and with her own priorities present. The individual pieces were joined together to form one continuous whole, with one showing after the other. It is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Gina told me up front that her film was first, but I’m pretty sure I would have been able to tell that from the formal structure of Gina’s work and the playful tone of Barbara’s. And with a nod to Bridges Go Round, the soundtrack is very different in each part of the film.

The early portion of the film has a visual pattern of numbers from the carousel and repeated safety instructions in the soundtrack. There is a level of abstraction that seduces the viewer into a fascination with details, with close shots of Barbara’s hands winding the Bolex or repetitive images of the old signs that linger around the changing Coney Island. In her portion of the film, Gina includes Barbara voicing the advice to shoot more from the “emotional body” and less from the “measuring mind,” and she begins and ends with images of Barbara.

The latter portion of the film exhibits some of my favorite elements of lesbian culture with footage of the two filmmakers beneath the boardwalk, each hiding behind columns trying to sneak footage of the other. There is simply no pretense of coolness. There is Barbara Hammer sticking two fingers up behind Gina’s head just to make some careless mischief. I admire her consistent lack of irony and utter refusal to be detached or distant from her subject matter. In fact, I had the pleasure of admiring her joyful presence in her films through out the screenings I attended at the MoMA retrospective. At one of the Q&A sessions Barbara mentioned that the editor pleasures herself in what she chooses to include in her film. In her half of the film, the editor is surely full of pleasure with her love of the beach, the camera, and Gina.

In the pleasure and admiration each film maker shows in her choice of images of the other, Generations touches on the radical potential of queer love.  On screen, the filmmakers present as artists at large in the world, but also in their own smaller world of queer friendship. In my imagination of our community, “queer friends” are the opposite of “just friends.” Queer friends are not necessarily lovers yet they retain all their love and sexuality in relationship to one another. In queer frendship there is a grounding recognition of all that we share. It is moving to see a queer friendship across ages documented here, especially at a time when the only queer relationships that seem to reach the public eye are those that aspire to heteronormativity.  (Generations comes chronologically on the heels of a particularly vile mainstream movie about wealthy white married lesbians and their sperm donor, from a lesbian director who is so deluded about the meaning of representation that she claims this portrayal is apolitical.)

And finally as the title suggests, Generations is about generating culture: how we make a culture for ourselves, how we create a legacy and how we express our values.  How do queer people pass along our culture when it is never along bloodlines? The film literally shows its own creation, the filming, the work in the lab, the friendship. The making of this film is a political action in that it is preserving queer culture, in particular, our fabulously different friendships. I totally enjoyed witnessing this difference, this homo/mentor/student/friend relationship full of creativity and love. It reminded me of how much I appreciate the precious utopian moments of interconnection in my own life, like back at that lecture and at the bookstore. The Hammer retrospective at MoMA was overflowing with such moments, with utopian imaginings and deep connections between art, community and the emotional body. Generations invites us to pause and actually feel the meaning of our relationships and legacies.

“Big Mom sat in her rocking chair, measuring time with her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth there on the Spokane Indian Reservation. She sang a protection song, so none of the Indians, not one, would forget who they are.”
-- Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues

Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds: Who Loved You Before You Were Mine.  Five deviant queers, their mythical beast secret identities, and all of their ghosts walk into a cabaret. The result is a show about yearning for ancestors, the empty spaces left by the first generation of AIDS deaths in fag/queer communities and the way the next generation is called to fill those spaces. What is the relationship between the loss of a generation of queer men and queens and the next generation’s expanding possibilities for transmasculinity? What is the relationship between a generation of dykes woven fiercely and intimately into ACT UP and support circles for dying friends and a next generation of dykes woven into radical faerie and transfag communities? In a culture based on chosen families, which of our desires are inherited?

In this re-interpretation of Yiddish theater classic The Dybbuk, the consensual possession of a lover by the ghost of their beloved is a model for acknowledging the collective loss we hold and reflect in our queer bodies. The cabaret is a love letter to the ghosts among us.

With three good friends working on Between Two Worlds, I saw an irresistible opportunity to start a dialog about collaboration among queer artists and activists.  Not to mention I was completely blown away by the show.  Shared obsessions: the persistence and evolution of subcultures over time, relationships, ancestry, history, personal connection and more.  Since ours is not a community of blood relations, I find myself committed to searching for and creating mystical, sexual, historical and cultural connections with my people.  These connections are enumerated in both the queer and supernatural in Between Two Worlds, and these three artists are certainly my people.

Following is a conversation with Emily Nepon, J. Dellecave and Niknaz Tavakolian.  Nepon, J and I corresponded over e-mail and Niknaz responded to my questions with a hand-written letter.  Following are excerpts from our correspondence.

Images by Nogga Schwartz


What inspired you to work on this project, what about it appealed to you?

Nepon: Well, I've been daydreaming about this project for years. I think the first thing that inspired me was visiting Olympia in 2000 while friends there were creating Nomy Lamm's rock opera “The Transfused,” although I just figured that out this very moment! I had been creating and performing in Purimspiels with Daniel Lang/Levitsky (DLL) and others involved in Jews for Racial and Economic Justice since 2004 and putting on those shows was always my favorite thing in my whole year, so I wanted to make a full show that wasn't limited by the themes of Purim or the needs of the organizations that produce the Purimspiels. I also wanted to make a star vehicle for myself so I could let all my art hero(ine)s now that I'm a star of the stage and screen and I can sing!

            This particular script was inspired by my experiences in ACT UP Philly, radical faerie community, traveling in Eastern Europe, and a lot of research about Jewish art/literature, Yiddishkeit, and the art/literature of the 1st decade of the AIDS epidemic. It was also an attempt to heal some of the trauma of touring the disgusting commercialization of Jewish trauma in Eastern Europe. It was, literally, a love letter to the ghosts among us.

J. Dellecave: Inspiration: A grad school lecture devoted to discussing embodied street protest during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s, early 1990s.  Many younger generation classmates began debating in this dry academic manner, and I had to raise my hand and emote.  I was outraged, I was shocked, I felt like I was going to burst into tears or vomit or scream at the top of my lungs. Yes… I was very moved by the ignorance I was hearing from a group of incredibly bright, incredibly educated, and very queer young people. The conversation went something like this: (insert an overly-dramatized, academic voice, with faux British accent and a holier-than-though affect)  “I just don’t think shocking people by lying down in the middle of church during a religious ceremony like mass is an effective way to disseminate information about people dying of AIDS. I mean maybe that went too far. I don’t think that could have worked.” (Several students had made this comment or a comment similar to this and it just going around in a circle without anything new being said).

            I responded by saying something to the extend of “I am appalled that we are even talking about the AIDS epidemic protests this way.” I remember my voice got all quivery and vulnerable – if I get that voice when I’m having an argument with a lover or friend, that is the signal to me that I need to take a break, and go take a walk, take a few breaths and come back to the conversation. “AIDS activists were struck with an urgency that I don’t think you are comprehending. Like if you took a group of ten gay male friends from that era, two of that ten are still living today.” Big pause. “It is not possible to debate whether or not these protests were effective, because today medication is available (at least here in the United States) that significantly prolongs the life of people who are HIV positive.  We can talk about it as a performance, but we cannot talk about this in terms of whether the performance was good or bad. It was effective, beyond debate, because people aren’t dying like they were in the late 80s and early 90s.” And as I stated before, this comes with the caveat, of at least not here.

            For a minute there, I totally lost faith in academia to actually grasp reality, but soon was reaffirmed that people like us need to be in academic dialogues to voice how things were, perhaps even with a lot of emotion and outrage. Coming of age and coming out temporally close to loss and death in the queer community profoundly shaped the way that I relate to issues of social justice. And then there is my one friend who is twenty years my senior who lived through the epidemic as a young person. I should have ten friends his age and instead there is the painful gap of missing elders. He and the ghosts that are always with him were the inspiration to be a part of Between Two Worlds.

            More Inspiration: Multiple frameworks, seemingly incongruent inspirations, the idea of weaving, embodied ghosts, consensual possession, the Dybbuk, gossip, showtunes, glitter, productive rants, queers of the moment. The chance for Killer (a.k.a. Nepon) and I to collaborate creatively – we have a ten-year history of collaborating on productions and events, and this was the first time both of us focused on the creation. BTW was the first time we both filled the role of artist.

What role did you play in the production? How many people contributed to this work? 

Nepon: I originated the project, produced it, wrote most of it, and brought together the performers and crew. I moved to NYC with the intention of making theater with Daniel Lang-Levitsky, and a lot of the pieces of this show were part of my initial fantasy. Daniel and J were both powerful creative partners from early on. There were four other performers, Niknaz on the film projection, and Patrick on the accordion plus Casey was stage-manager, so all together there were 10 people involved.

           

J. Dellecave: Collaborator, director, co-writer, choreographer. We were very specific about how we delineated our contributions in the program, and for some reason now I just want to say I did a lot of work. Often I donned a timeline engine, always saying “we have to get blah, blah, blah done by blah, blah, blah time”…and I think my role was also partly to become hyper-excited about every detail.

Niknaz: My role in Between Two Worlds was the projection maker.  Killer, J and Daniel described what they were looking for as far as backdrops and I went off and designed and built what was projected behind the action. 

How was the labor divided, and how did you deal with any conflict or disagreement?

Nepon: The division of labor was initially imagined as me and DLL co-directing, with J as choreographer and part of the creative team. Then I got pneumonia and J's other show got canceled (sort of) by HOTFEST, so the division of labor shifted without much chance to discuss it and J took on a really strong directorial role. That caused some conflict near the performance date as we all were getting stressed out, because I hadn't given up creative control on purpose (too sick to leave the house!) but she had put so much work into the show that a re-negotiation should have been more explicit earlier on. There were some hard moments but I have to say that we all loved the show, loved working with each other, and really believed in the project in a way that carried us through with very loving and generous behaviors. We made space, at least on the “crew” level, for people to vocalize their frustrations and that helped us all to just say it and move on. In the end, we all understood that Daniel was the main designer, I was the main writer, and J was the main director – though we did all three of those things very collaboratively. I guess the main thing I noticed is that this collaboration wasn't exactly easy or uncomplicated, but it was way more fun, supportive, exciting, inspiring than challenging.

J. Dellecave: The labor was divided based on individual availability. Meaning if someone was out of town or busy with their other life or sick with swine flu (!), others picked up the slack or picked up where they left off. Unemployed and then having my Hot Festival performance cancelled at the last minute, I found myself extremely time available last summer. I am pleased to have been able to offer a lot, labor/time-wise, to the process and production. Amazingly the collaborators had very few conflicts. In fact, I would say we had only one conflict that had to be processed. (I am intentionally separating this from the small, simple gripes or functional bemoaning that didn’t warrant more attention than a few snide comments here and there). We did what all good queers do to process our conflict – we went to a coffee shop, and talked out our feelings. We even did it in the midst of a day that was filled with hours of rehearsals and meetings! We were very committed; in my opinion we worked exceptionally well together! Conflicts or disagreement amidst the cast, or amidst the collaborators and the cast also occurred only rarely or in a minor way. We were all very entangled in interpersonal ways (and the scary ways – like you’re best friends with the ex I don’t talk to anymore, or your housemate used to date my new lover) and I was surprised and relieved there wasn’t more drama.

What about the content demanded collaboration?

Niknaz: First of all, I love working in collaboration.  To me, it’s like having a visual art conversation- a back and forth so to speak.  A call and response that leads to a collective idea (of sorts) so I was happy to be invited to play for this show.  At first I wasn’t sure what my contribution could be since the play was about a community I’m not a part of.  And while I did some activism around HIV/AIDS in the 90’s - it was nothing like what some of my friends were doing.  So I started the project in a place of “not knowing” which is a great place to start creatively.

            The aesthetical launching point for some of the projections was- well- it was an homage to Wojnarowicz.  One of the first inspirations they brought into the mix was Wojnarowicz’s sex series where solarized black and white images of buildings and structures are juxtaposed with circles of men having sex.  What we wanted to do was use this series as a springboard for contemplating poly, post-gender musings.  I don’t remember how the idea of having a wrestling scene play in one of the Wojnarowicz circles came about-- but it sounded beautiful and exciting and potentially political given the ghost of the past theme we were going for.  We set aside a day and invited some friends and videotaped the wrestling.  We kept the wrestling pairings random, which I think invited may possible representations in the queer community.

            One of the beautiful things about this play is that it really was a process from beginning to end that invited feedback and ideas.  There were writing sessions and idea sessions and of course rehearsals with tons of feedback.  I feel like we all felt some ownership over the process.

How do you feel the work is specifically located in NYC... this endlessly romantic and punishing city?

Nepon: Well, I was especially obsessed with locating the show partly at Coney Island because a) I'm obsessed with it and b) it used to be called “Sodom by the Sea” and was a site of sleazy underworld sexuality and queerness.  After the holocaust, Coney Island housed the largest community of survivors in the world. I personally think it's also full of ghosts of people who didn't survive but wanted to get the hell out of Europe and stay near their former community.

J. Dellecave: This work did a really funny thing. The work created (if only for a few months) a very strong community in the present by working through the past. The content of the work when viewed by the audience reflected the now NYC ‘community’. (Yet for anyone who lives in NYC, we know that really isn’t the truth or doesn’t represent the truth, and even some idea that there is some universalized truth is problematic). But it does represent some kind of utopian ideal or positivist slant on what our community can be. Since the production, I am beginning to formulate community as a transient and unfixed entity. 

            I know BTW was critiqued as valorizing a specific experience which inherently left out representations of certain voices. I am aware that this community we represented is not for everyone and cannot represent everyone. I think this it something we all grapple with and should continue to grapple with. NYC itself has this kind of build-in longing for betterment. You race, yet you never reach the better place. Part of living in New York seems to be that constant striving for something else. That is what is so great about NYC, and as you said Rocko, so punishing.

            Also, (and perhaps even off topic) making a work that talks about the ghosts of AIDS hedges on implying that the AIDS epidemic is over. All of us were very adamant about not wanting the idea of ghosting to represent that the plight of AIDS has in any way ended. Theoretically, ghosting functions to haunt unjust situations that deserve more attention and often go unrecognized. Perhaps AIDS not being over is what the ghosts of generation past are trying to illuminate.  

Why was it important for you to relate the queer community in the present to the peak of the AIDS outbreak and the Holocaust?

Nepon: Growing up strongly Jewish-identified and queer while AIDS appeared and decimated queer communities, AIDS and the Holocaust were the formative calamities that destroyed the cultures, queer and Yiddishkeit, that I come from. Jewish and Gay cultures have both moved towards (as you put it) valorization of the masculine out of fear for the vulnerability of “weak”, feminine, “sissy” images of our cultures. In the case of Jewish community it's a move towards idealizing the IDF soldier and away from the sissy scholar (“we fight back now”). In gay culture it's a move towards the butch gym queen and away from the femme (receptive, gets fucked, gets AIDS, dies). Both cultures have historical qualities that make me swoon, and PTSD responses to recent trauma that makes me miserable.

            The Holocaust is used frequently by Jewish queers writing about the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, for example Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust, Sarah Schulman's Rat Bohemia, and Eric Rofes' Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men’s Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic.

            It was important for me to link these stories to my own generation's struggles because I really believe there are deep cultural and spiritual shifts and struggles under the surface of the tensions we are dealing with. Why are there so many trans men in this generation? Why is transmasculinity so exciting for some communities, especially those that have been so brutally resistant to transwomen? When trans men start taking up space in fag cultures, who left those spaces empty? What's the history of queer women in these same spaces?

Niknaz: While I was doing research I was reminded over and over that Reagan sat back and wanted to watch the gay community disappear.  Whatever his impetus was, Larry Kramer’s response was one of the most important actions for our community. ACT UP and GMHC.  Thanks to both of those organizations, we have drugs that keep people alive.  I mean, for a certain demographic anyway.  I would love to see the queer community get back involved with the present state of the pandemic with the same fervor, join forces with communities that are also being devastated by HIV/AIDS with 25+ years of wisdom and experience.  But I guess it’s easy to speak on that podium from the safety of my apartment, behind the computer, and a bit disengaged from all of those communities.  It totally inspired me to think about where I am when it comes to the queer community and activism.  I think what inspired me the most was doing research on ACT UP and reliving some of those actions and the fervor of the activism then.  I could talk about this for much longer.  But I won’t.

For me, there was a lot about this sense of possibility in the work, the possibility that we are closer than ever to the inclusive community we have always wanted, the possibility that identity will stop being such a pain in the ass... what about the present moment gives you a sense of possibility?

J. Dellecave: That distinct sense of the generational or temporal gap that I experienced so strongly in the class I wrote of above. These gaps create spaces for us to interject utopian imaginings and endless possibilities.

Niknaz: I hope our issues of identity will be resolved soon, although I’m not so hopeful for myself.  My identity is so deeply tied with longing and home that I can’t imagine how it can possibly resolve.  Gender aside, queer aside, my Iranian identity creates such a disjointedness for me that it feels finding a community that encompasses all of this challenging.

Nepon: In some ways, I was writing these interwoven characters as a representation of our real community, and in some ways it was a wish. I wish we could all be lovers across bodies and sexualities and identities in the way that these characters are. It happens sometimes, but it still feels rare to me.

            On the other hand, we did this whole show about HIV/AIDS and gender identity and sexuality and it turned out that people were really not able to make assumptions about who in the show had what serostatus, body parts, or desires. It was excitingly surprising.

            It gave me a feeling of possibility that people responded to so strongly to the idea that our generation of queers is interwoven with the ghosts of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. I was especially moved by presenting the show at Short Mountain sanctuary to a group that was probably 85% people who lived through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, ACT UP members, people with HIV/AIDS who have lost so many of their loved ones. I think my generation of queers has really suffered from a lack of elders and the perspective of intergenerational relationships – because our elders were in large part murdered by the epidemic. Doing the show at Short Mountain seemed like the beginning of opening a conversation.