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

BUTCH Voices

The mission of BUTCH Voices is to enhance and sustain the well-being of all women, female-bodied, and trans-identified individuals who are masculine of center.  We achieve this by providing programs that build community, positive visibility and empower us to advocate for our whole selves inclusive of and beyond our gender identity and sexual orientation.

BUTCH Voices held a one-day regional conference here in NYC on September 25, 2010 and I made it for part of the day and was glad I did. With consideration to the masculine-of-center theme, this was one of the most successfully diverse queer conferences I have ever been to, particularly in terms of age and race. It was totally heartening to see young and old queers of various races coming together to talk about some deep concerns about our own survival, existence, well-being and flourishing. It was set up as a healing space, less about our gender and sexual politics and more about coming forward with the fullness of all we have learned... and acknowledging all of our injuries and really communing with others. Being seen and seeing other butches.

The climate of the conference was one of thoughtfulness, consideration and care. Clearly a lot of planning went into every little thing! From hosting the conference in a physical space that belongs to queer community advocacy groups to taking steps to make it affordable to the idea of a collective keynote. Even the home-made snacks that were on hand all contributed to a sense of welcome. I think it’s safe to say that feeling welcome is one of our community’s heavy trigger issues and has been the demise of other conferences. Not this one. The organizers made sure and the warmth was undeniable.

One of the workshops I attended was entitled Doing Relationships with Emotional Armor: For Stones and our Partners.  We sat in a circle and facilitator Corey Alexander led us through a bunch of increasingly challenging introspective exercises, including a list of common and all-too-familiar ways emotional armor can manifest. Here were people who wanted to walk the complicated and challenging line where we do not pathologize emotional hardness but we simultaneously recognize how this hardness, this armor, gets in the way of the intimacy we need. It was refreshing that the workshop was designed to respect where each of us was at, rather than move us someplace else. It was really about self awareness. Corey took some time to acknowledge how and why we create emotional hardness and distance in the first place. Dismantling my junky old personal armor has been a personal project of mine for a good 7 years or so, back from the time when it started to outlive its usefulness. It was good to remember the usefulness, to remember something cool about this thing I usually consider at best suffocating and more often soul crushing. It got there for a reason, now it's getting taken apart for a reason too.

A spontaneous group discussion was an exciting break with my prior experience of genderqueer spaces: Responsible Masculinity. This was not on the original program but the programmers wisely left space for people to create the conversations that mattered most to them, knowing some topics are always unforeseen. A few folks simply announced they were adding this topic. When the time came, we overflowed the room that had been reserved for spontaneous conversation. We moved to another open area, sat in a circle, and I counted 42 people who were eager to discuss misogyny, sexism and competition among masculine of center queers. I have been waiting a very very very very long time to sit in such a group and it felt so satisfying just to look at peoples’ faces. Some great insights were voiced about the damage caused by rigidity in our gender expectations of ourselves and others, and the perils of trying to enforce our own ideas of what butch is onto other butches.

A few folks in the Responsible Masculinity conversation got in to talking about their mistakes and it seemed very cathartic for them. At times I felt ill at ease with the comfort with which people expressed their previous misconceptions. There is a place for confessions, but I am not sure the conference was it. This was where the therapeutic atmosphere crossed a line for me, I didn’t actually want it to be a safe space for somebody to say they used to hate femmes or note how they used to believe femmes were not legitimately queerly gendered. Putting it in the past tense doesn’t make it less painful for others to hear about, and as cathartic as it might have felt to confess, I don’t want that stinky turd on my floor. Maybe the person who confessed that they used to hate femmes is reading this right now. Maybe they are thinking they were owning up to their mistakes, not just dumping them. Maybe it was a little bit of both. But if it was painful for me to hear I don’t imagine it was a high point of the conference for the femmes in the room. Community building is messy, messy work and you need to make room for mistakes. Sometimes we mirror the sexism we intend to take up. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like we can have a masculinity conversation without awkward and strained references to opening doors and picking up checks, either. Just got to make some more room, make some room for this messy work.

At the end of the discussion there were some deep conclusions about the need for mentoring in our community, the need to respect each other and not assess each other, and the impact that our all-too-frequent failure to love each other has on our own psyches. One of my favorite comments was that we need to recognize and greet each other, even on the street and subway, rather than looking away like we often do. The fact that this conversation happened at all was a breath of fresh air and I am grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of it.

But the best thing about BUTCH Voices was the incredible potential and palpable excitement in the air. The organizers actualized their vision of a safe, inclusive community where masculine types with divergent identities could feel welcome and give voice to the issues that matter to us, and this was hopefully just the first of these conferences to be held in NYC. What was most encouraging was the clarity of the feminist frame surrounding the day. We were there to support, encourage, affirm and heal. We all spend enough time fighting the good fight, it was really powerful to regroup and gather some energy.

Number 19

One evening I started to develop intense pain on the left side of my jaw. I went to bed hoping I could sleep it off and woke up needing to see the dentist immediately. He took some x-rays and could not find anything wrong. He tapped on individual teeth with various instruments but everything hurt. He asked me if anything happened, if I fell or anything hit me in the face. Nothing like that happened. The dentist thought maybe it was just an infection so I got some antibiotics and hoped for the best.

A couple days later, I was back. Still no sign of tooth decay, and nothing wrong on the x-ray. My dentist sent me for a second opinion, to a specialist. I went to the specialist's office by the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge and she took an x-ray and examined my mouth. She said #19 was cracked and asked me if anything happened, if I got hit in the mouth or got into an accident or anything. I said no. She said, "Even a long time ago? Even when you were a little kid?"

Well, yeah, when I was little, my brother punched me in the face. But that must have been something like 25 years ago at this point. Was it on the left side? Fortunately fist fighting was not a regular occurrence, so I remember it clearly. I had my back against the inside of the front door of the house. My brother is left-handed, and I blocked 3 predictable lefts in a row, but he surprised me with a right to the jaw. That would be my left side. He is seven years older than me. I must have been around 10 or 12 years old at the most. I remember not feeling anything. My mom was there. She took me for a walk. She didn't prevent it from happening and she didn't discuss it with me afterward. We left my brother at home and went for a walk.

At some point during that walk I realized my mouth was throbbing. I didn't say anything. There was no doctor or dentist visit. My mom, brother and I acted as if it never happened. The privacy of the patriarchal household allows for an infinite number of atrocious events to go unseen and unregulated. Often I am sincerely grateful that things never got worse than they were, because there was absolutely nothing stopping them from escalating. The possibility was always there.

The second opinion dentist said I needed a root canal and more likely an extraction. She said some other things that didn’t register after the word "extraction," and put an x-ray into an envelope for me to bring back to my dentist. So I wandered out of her office back into Chinatown, thinking about all this personal history.  My own dentist couldn’t see me immediately, so I had some time to spare for walking and thinking. I walked further downtown to my dentist, whose office is near City Hall, and he still felt reluctant to drill because the x-ray didn't actually show anything. He said once we open the tooth, there is no turning back, and he couldn’t live with himself if he opened a live tooth. (Really, Dr. Chen is a great dentist and quite a perfectionist.) But after some consideration, we it was root canal time.

Drilling down, he found that the tooth was completely dead inside and had been for a very long time. When I got punched, #19 cracked down the center from front to back, which is why the crack didn't show on the x-ray. My dentist explained that when we are young, the body is very resilient. "Your tooth was broken, and your body created a seal around it. First the damage was contained and then the tooth died. It was still functional until getting this infection." I am convinced the infection happened now because at age 36 I finally have sufficient strength to allow this injury to see the light of day. The tooth had to be literally opened up and exposed in order to be repaired. So I have to open up too and acknowledge what happened. Christopher punched me in the face hard enough to break a tooth.

I learned that a root canal is a process and not a single procedure, so I was walking around for about a month with this old injury opened wide.  The dentist would check about once a week for whether the infection had cleared, each time putting some antibiotic powder into the drilled out tooth and covering it up with a bitter wax barrier.  Finally when the infection was gone, he sealed up the roots and the top of the tooth with care that the seal hold the two halves together. I’m almost grateful that I had to go around for a while, conscious of this opening, part of a history that needs to see the light of day in order to heal properly.  It’s still in question as to whether this tooth will last long enough to get a crown or whether it will eventually need to be extracted, but knock on wood, it’s doing pretty well right now.

When I told this story to my team at work, somebody asked light-heartedly if I was going to call my brother. I responded that he is in a residential mental institution. This is accurate but not a response to her question. The real response is that I won’t call because I no longer have a relationship with him. If he were out in the world today, I would similarly choose not to have any relationship with him, and in fact take measures to prevent him from getting my contact information. It was only when I was younger and living with my parents that I had no choice in the matter.  When I was in my early teens, him being institutionalized relieved me of the burden of having any relationship with my brother. I could attribute the lack of relationship to being institutionalized. But at this point it is my decision and I know it is the right one. I don’t need the mental institution as an excuse, and I don’t constantly worry about him potentially being released the way I did during his early years there.

My brother was hospitalized a number of times through out my childhood. Each time he was discharged from the mental hospital after a short stay, we didn’t talk about it.  He would be gone for maybe one or two weeks and my mom and dad and I acted as if nothing had happened when he got back.  I didn't get any explanation for why he was there and I didn't know what treatment he was getting and I didn't know what was expected to change as a result of the hospitalization. I heard terms like “brain damage, learning disability, manic depression.” Somehow I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask. There were always some topics that were taboo.

After these periodic hospitalizations, no one asked my brother what it was like and no one said welcome back. Nothing marked the event or encouraged any improvements in his mental health, nothing acknowledged what he experienced or ostensibly got out of the psychiatric care he was getting, nothing changed in anyone’s behavior or relationship to him. So surprise, his mental health did not improve. I only remember a sense of relief when he was gone. Years later, after he was gone and my mother was herself hospitalized for depression it was the same pattern again, no welcome home, nothing discussed.  But this time we met with the doctor and he said we should be “supportive.” I don’t think we knew what that word meant.  I was a teenager and honestly did not know what it looked, felt or smelled like to be supportive. I was literally puzzled over that word.

It’s not that I think talking about my brother or mom’s mental health would have made them better or would have made my life better. But I do believe banning talk of them made things worse. As a kid, I wanted to bring stuff up all the time but was threatened with trips to the psychiatrist myself whenever I tried. So I became very adverse to bringing up problems directly or asking for what I need in relationships, and this aversion kept me out of the psychiatrist’s office and kept me on the self-styled “sane” side of the family with my father.  This so-called sanity was characterized by silence, isolation and rugged individualism, all qualities associated with conventional masculinity. I became the strong/silent type, an unhealthy archetype if there ever was one.

The reluctance to speak came with me when I moved away from my parents.  And it became a strong contributing factor in two subsequent relational train wrecks: First when my ex-girlfriend brought a straight white monogamous male into our queer poly household and I did not take up the fact that his values and behavior were totally out of sync with the vision for our house. Second when she started to demonstrate values and behaviors herself that were in direct conflict with what was once our shared vision of queer utopian kindness, honesty and responsibility. Both times I waited until the situation was a total crisis to clearly and directly set limits and expectations for how I want my life to run, specifically for the way people can and cannot behave towards me. Since I grew up with somebody whose behavior was profoundly unacceptable, and my desire for things to be different was pathologized, it is no surprise that part of me believed I should just tough out other people’s mendacity. This undercurrent of silence is still present, but now a bigger and louder part of me is committed to dealing explicitly, even strategically, with the unacceptable shit in all areas of my life. Mendacity!

My brother was a minor the first time he was arrested.  He and my mom and I were eating at Burger King in the mall. The two of them were fighting and he flung everything off the table on to the floor and stormed out. I can't remember or imagine what I thought of the whole thing, but remembering this incident makes me also think about how the two of them fought constantly.  Something happened with the security guards and the police were called, the mall being outside the privacy of the patriarchal family home.  He spent the night in jail, and I don’t know exactly what happened but I know “resisting arrest” was one of the charges.  Within a few days he was briefly hospitalized and then released.

One event that stands out in my mind was a time he came home with broken glasses and a bloody broken nose. No explanation given. It turned out he had been to see a girl that night. What registered for me immediately was that a girl had prevailed in fight with him. Only on second thought did I consider the reason she resorted to hitting him that hard or more likely with some object. He often talked about what he wanted to do to girls. I cannot think of any other time in my life I have been so happy to see a person physically injured.

When my brother turned 18, my father kicked him out of the house.  My father had been very vocal about counting down the days and when it finally happened, I was so relieved. Shortly after my brother got his own place, he was arrested again.  He had some kind of fight with his landlady, a fight that resulted in her son calling the police on him. This time the court system did not release him and he was hospitalized instead. As far as I know, he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Eventually he went to the institution where he resides to this day.  I don't know the name of it and I have never visited him and I do not plan to visit him. For years I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about this decision because they would think I was heartless, or maybe because I believed that I was heartless. The broken tooth gave me a reason to look back through adult eyes and really understand for the first time the reasons for my decision to end my sibling relationship entirely.