ZeekFiction – Jewcy

Passover Art

ZeekFiction — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:20:00 +0000

“In an era with no shortage of newly invented Jewish ritual practices, Passover has inspired more innovation than just about any other holiday. This can be seen right on the seder plate, which has been serving up traditions, the old alongside the new, for generations. And if Passover innovators have been rabbis, scholars, poets, and everyday folks, they are also often artists, such as those who have created the seder plates commissioned for this Invitational exhibition. In this capacity, they respond to and catalyze a reinvented Judaism. Through their fresh visions, expressing beliefs and yearnings, memories and dreams, they keep us from observing Passover solely for the sake of nostalgia.”

— Prof. Vanessa L. Ochs, from her essay in the exhibition catalogue New Works/Old Story: 80 Artists at the Passover Table.

The following images are seder plates created for the Contemporary Jewish Museum‘s exhibition New Works/Old Story: 80 Artists at the Passover Table.

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Jewish American Princess (JAP)

ZeekFiction — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:00:00 +0000

What ever happened to the Jewish American Princess? Once—from the 1960s until at least the end of the 1980s—the icon of the JAP was all but ubiquitous in American Jewish culture. The girl (yes, she was always a girl, even when she was a woman) Jewish men loved to hate, she was unavoidable: loud-mouthed, aggressive, materialist, niggardly in how she dispensed sexual favors, always a daddy’s girl, and an important American pioneer in the use (and abuse) of cosmetic surgery. From a height of iconographic status in the American Jewish cultural economy—Philip Roth wrote about her; Frank Zappa famously sang about her—the JAP has faded, left to inhabit tired, old jokes. Even on google.com, a search yields little of interest, and certainly nothing of recent vintage about the JAP. To be sure, there have been sightings, and rumors abound that in the suburbs of Chicago or Detroit, let alone in the heimat of JAP-dom—Long Island outside of New York City—the JAP indeed survives and perhaps even thrives. Overheard recently on Long Island in the sanctum sanctorum of Jewish-American materialism, the changing room of Bloomingdale’s Department Store: “Oi hate huh. Oi hate huh haeuh.” Translated roughly into English: “I hate her. I hate her hair.” In print, despite the phonetic approximation, we cannot but fail to hear the inflection, the necessary lop-off of words in the monosyllabic JAP language, as if announcing that even the social effort of speaking and communicating is not worth the selfish reserves of the JAP’s energy. But there she is: focused on the exterior—she hates her for her hair. Content always follows form; or, in a postmodern turn truly prescient for when the JAP hit the scene: form is all that counts, especially in the look, shape, and surgical malleability of the body. If the JAP were not such an academic underachiever—content to reflect only on herself and her exterior appearance; content, too, to marry the wealthiest Jewish man who comes along (think of Private Benjamin)—she might understand how the metonymy of “hair” for “her” (the words phonetically so close in the nasal twang of the JAP dialect) speaks to a critical insight that might indeed be profound. That the JAP survives only in jokes, and perhaps never thrived but as the butt of jokes, speaks to the place of this phenomenon in Jewish-American culture and begins to outline how to understand the JAP within the wider context of American social transformation since the 1950s. The psychopathology of the JAP jokes reveals, ironically, a distinctly male anxiety: the loss of power over the domesticated woman. In the canon of jokes bandied about since the 1960s and 1970s, the JAP is typically inadequate in two fundamental arenas: the kitchen and the bedroom. In the kitchen, the JAP’s inadequacy is expressed by her refusal to cook: “What does a JAP make for dinner? Reservations.” In the bedroom, the JAP refuses to pleasure her partner unselfishly and abreacts to the very notion of oral sex: unfortunately, the visuality of the canonical joke cannot be rendered here in print. Most of the time, kitchen and bedroom intermingle and are inseparable in the criticism of the JAP, and the JAP’s inadequacy traverses and transgresses both realms in a purely masculine rage of unfilled desire in both the kitchen and the bedroom: “What is the JAP’s favorite wine/whine? ‘You want me to do WHAT?’” The “what” is shouted, nasalized, and inflected up to emphasize disgust in the suggestion that she pleasure another, either through his mouth or through hers. As Zappa sings in “Sheik Yerbouti” (an orientalizing of the slang “shake your booty”): “I want a hairy little Jewish princess/With a brand new nose, who knows where it goes/ . . . I want a darling little Jewish princess/Who don’t shit about cooking and is arrogant looking.” The JAP has always stood in the way of Jewish-American male desire, a New World Dora out of Freud’s imagination: the girl who denies the male sexual fantasy and refuses to collude with a sexual economy that is completely phallocentric. Like the agonistic Dora, the JAP is finally dismissed in her self-assertions as a “daddy’s girl”; she is never allowed her own will. That, of course, is not how Jewish men have seen it. Roth’s empowered, powerful Brenda Patimkin embodies all that is the JAP in a standard Jewish male reading: nouveau riche, cosmetically altered (her nose “bobbed”; the story predates the breast reduction craze among JAP’s in the late 1970s and early 1980s), and alluringly goyische (a Jewish shiksa). In this, the JAP represents a stage in the assimilation of the Jewish community in America. Women always could traverse ethnic boundaries in America more easily than men. As floating signifiers dependent on physical attraction and sexual allure, women in the American experience (from Pocahantas, to the African-American slave women in the manor house, to Brenda Patimkin herself) entered that uniquely American process of transformation and transgression earlier and more quickly than their men (because their selves and their bodies were more appropriable). For Roth’s Neil Klugman, the climb up the hill in New Jersey from Newark to Short Hills, where the Patimkin’s lived a sort of converso life among the goyim of the wealthy suburb, represented the physical and metaphoric climb into Americanness itself. That is why the JAP’s refusals—of food and sex—stung so harshly. So, has the JAP simply faded into the (white) American soup of assimilation? The trajectory of Jewish-American social standing since the second world war would seem to place the JAP as a way-station on the road to hegemonic American social embrace. The JAP, then, was the avant garde of a movement that began in the 1950s and came to completion, as some have recently argued, in the 1980s, when the American Jew lost all marks of otherness and melded into white society. But the assimilationist theory sells the JAP short, as she always has been when defined solely in male terms. The assimilationist theory does not explain, for instance, the recent resurgence of Jewish America and the JAP’s role as—perhaps—harbinger of a new American Jewish gestalt. From the U.S. Census Bureau, we know that today more Jews in America attend synagogue regularly than fifty years ago. Anecdotally, the signs of American Jewish secular resurgence are ubiquitous: the “Jewcy” hipster movement, the magazine Heeb, the comedy of Sarah Silverman and The Hebrew Hammer, Adam Sandler’s Hanukah Song trilogy, the explosion of Jewish music in popular and sacred form. Is this part of assimilation, of Jews swept up in broader religious trends in America? Maybe. Or does it define a particular Jewish identity? Now that differentiation no longer defines Jewishness, can one express Americanness through Jewish identity? Is not that the definition of the JAP: the original material girl who showed Madonna the ropes and who could—unwittingly and involuntarily—critique feminist independence with a crypto-postfeminist credo years, even decades, before Camille Paglia and reality TV cashed in on America’s obsession with the body, plastic surgery, and the sexual economy of fashion. Was it not the JAP who was the first—a true pioneer!—to proclaim content a dead notion and to celebrate cosmetic alterations of the self, years before Robert Venturi and Phillip Glass? Is the legacy of the JAP not precisely the postmodern condition? We only joke about her because we’re jealous: first, she’s a powerful woman (and girls cannot be taken seriously) and, second, because she found the postmodern path so early, before anyone else could see it coming.

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Jewish American Princess (JAP)

ZeekFiction — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:00:00 +0000

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From “The Dreyfus Book”

ZeekFiction — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:29:25 +0000

"The Dreyfus Book follows a group of characters indirectly involved in the Dreyfus trial and espionage case: petty forgers, photographers, cross-dressing generals, actors in early silent films, and film restorers who tried to save crumbling movies about the trial one hundred years after they were made. Even the satellite players who participated far from the main stage were deeply affected by the circumstances of a trial that was to split the French public sphere as no other event of the nineteenth century. The effects of its divisiveness would continue to be felt into the next. This excerpt is about a woman with little initial knowledge of the affair whose job it was to try to preserve Melies’ film about the trial–a film that caused riots when it was shown in 1899, and was banned in France until 1973."–Susan Daitch Inside were long shreds of film, glutinous and flaked. Single reels looked like hockey pucks, gummy sweat exuding along the edges.These were rare films whose footage was almost obliterated, yet they continued to cling to life. Old silent films are the most difficult to preserve or restore. They are brittle, shrunken; images are distorted as if burned, or figures appear drowned under a bubbled, warped surface. The films’ perforations, round or straight-edged with chamfered comers, won’t fit on theSteenbeck editing table whose teeth are designed to accommodate only film withthe standard square sprocket holes. Unless the teeth are filed down, the machine will only shred the film. Prints have to be matched to the original, if possible, but in the case of some very old prints, no original has survived.

"Be careful with these. Remove the film slowly, as if you’re moving through Jello." JuliusShute, director of Alphabet Film Conservation, took the can out of my hands and replaced the lid.

"In 1907 fifty negatives were stolen from the New York office of Star Films. They were never heard of again." Julius paused, bent his knees then straightened them quickly, in what seemed like a gesture copied from an introduction to a martial arts class, as if he were saying: beginners, stand like this. He often looked as if he were saluting another officer the way Erichvon Stroheim did in Grand Illusion. "What would thieves want with films of unassigned value?" He posed a question to which I had no answer.

"It’s easier to strip copper wires than to extract silver from film emulsion." I didn’t really know what I was saying, but I wanted to give the impression of participating in the conversation. Not unique paintings, Greek icons, or antiquities from the Aegean which could be held for ransom,these bits were considered the medium of cheap thrills, worthless multiples,and in 1907 no international black market existed for pirated silent films. Why would anyone bother?

"When the lock was picked, and the door to Star Films gave,the thief must have been surprised to find little more than chintzy office furniture."

"How do you know what was in there?"

"I’m guessing, Frances."

Like the thief who put a lot of effort into breaking into a bus locker only to find a chewed pencil, he must have wanted some kind of compensation for his work, and, just as the pencil was pocketed, so too, the films were probably stolen for the sake of taking something. Even negatives whose whereabouts are documented often disintegrate into chips of celluloid,shreds of landscapes, and chopped up figures, pratfalls and botched rescues.

I glanced at the newspaper Julius had tossed on my desk,comparing the language used to describe crude images fleeing across screens of security cameras to film molecules, particles of nothing eddying into the corners of drawers. Julius cleared his throat. I’m listening, I said. When a job arrived Julius often felt he needed to give the staff some history, some background tracing the provenance of the films. He had grown up in Los Angeles where his mother worked inthe costume department of Universal Studios. He stole costumes from time to time and once appeared at work in the suit worn by a stunt man who was doubling for Clint Eastwood in Hang’Em High. Julius had saved it all these years. It was a great cowboy suit with these Technicolor yellow suede chaps with green fringe, and he wore it all on the subway and walked around the city for a day like he was in the high chaparral. I can’t say my boss didn’t have a sense of humor.

"Leon Schlesinger, producer of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, managed to acquire many of Melies’ prints, believing they would some day be worth a fortune."

"When did he acquire them?"

"Probably in the late 1930s, after Melies himself died."

I imagined Schlesinger standing in a room with a view of the Pacific Ocean on a day so bright he pretends he can see Easter Island, the Bikini Atoll, Honolulu, but not Pearl Harbor, not quite yet. He has his back to Europe, but a flood of refugees are working for him, so many that he occasionally feels he’s working, not in Los Angeles, but strolling though the Babelberg studios just outside Berlin. Even the newly acquired Looney Tunes venture, even their comic castles were built on the pratfalls of the Melies’ canon so there’s no getting away from it, no one can have his feet as firmly planted in the New World as he thinks.

"When Schlesinger died, his widow kept these films locked up. For years she sat on the Dead Sea Scrolls of Cinema, allowing only limited access to Marionites in sunglasses, but finally the archive of prints was released." Julius waved at stacks of cans and boxes labeled in French and English. I’d seen Voyage to the Moon,but the others were new to me. He pointed to one box as if it contained a bomb.He held up a film labeled The Dreyfus Trial.

"The owners, Looney Tunes, were known as curators of the remains of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not of Alfred Dreyfus, or the spy, Esterhazy. They made films in which ducks and cats fall off cliffs, are smashed against doors, and bounce back completely." I imagined these cans of nineteenth century film stored in a safe, next to diamonds wrapped in flannel sleeves,securities, the deed to the house, and a will tucked in a manila envelope accumulating dust and controversy.

"They wouldn’t have been interested, but they had this," he spun the Dreyfus can on my editing table, and even I, uncertain of its value, flinched. "This film, I think, was the one the thief had been after," Juliussaid. "After the first showing of it there were riots in the streets; people were trampled to death. The film was banned until 1971."

I knew something of the story behind The Dreyfus Trial but didn’t really understand how this subject could turn what had previously been a form of cheap popular entertainment into something so incendiary. It was as if an invention associated with gumballs, pinballs, barkers, and shills traveled to the province of cluster bombs and Molotov cocktails and did so in little more than a wink.

Julius looked at his watch, but before he returned to his office he reminded me that the Melies archive needed to be cleaned and repaired quickly, shipped out, and the next job ushered in if we were to stay in business. Then he disappeared to meet with his accountant and the creditors who threatened to shut Alphabet down.

In the dark, huddled over a light box holding a magnifying loupe, looking over a strip of film, I talk to myself. What happened to these actors? You’re supposed to be dead, I tell them, you came within an inch of being taken out with the trash years after being lost, stolen and forgotten, lying around in a warehouse or a Looney Tune archive. They were filmed in a glass house, a building whose interior I imagine as frozen yet full of potential for movement, a structure like the Visible Man who could be assembled and studied, organs glued together or snapped apart. Open jars of paint are blood cells, and Georges Melies himself is iris, retina, and cataract. Under his critical surveillance set designers who fabricated volcanoes, lunar surfaces, underwater wrecks react to criticism like nerve endings about to explode. I’ve had it, Georges!Piss off! The Oedipus of early cinema, Me1ies destroyed many of his films himself, behaving like those long flexible pencils you see in joke shops that can be bent around so you can leave a trail of erasure rather than a line of words.

I unwound carefully, set up the film: on the Steenbeck. Dreyfus has just been arrested. He is taken into a room which resembles an office. He writes as a man with a faintly obscene sounding name, General Patydu Clam, dictates. I know that the paper Clam holds in his hand is the letterthat Esterhazy, the real spy, actually wrote. It was delivered to him via the "Ordinary Track," a night cleaner at the German embassy. When the two letters are compared he will indicate that the handwriting is identical although the invisible lines weren’t the same at all. Dreyfus is handed a pistol. Go ahead,do it, kill yourself. He refuses and is taken away at gunpoint.

Sitting in the dark watching Dreyfus stand in a prison yard,I felt as if I were at the bottom of a tunnel, and somewhere at its end lay black and white figures, mute, moving stiffly, who didn’t know mustard gas, dynamite, and the airplane were about to be invented, then touching the negative by the edges I held the brittle film up to a light. Dreyfus’ face was faded to an almost featureless disk. The film, though once considered too explosive to be shown in France, was as sturdy as cigarette ash. I had nightmares about film breaking down here at a crucial scene, the rest of it disintegrating in the can. At the moment my hands weren’t the most steady they had ever been.

The Trial tugged at my shirtsleeves. I was afraid to spool too much of the film, yet while it was eating me up with curiosity, I ate up the idea of The Trial. What I remembered was the saying that some people, had they not been born what they were, might not be on their own side. The trial said, among other things, that you can try to hide a Shulevitz inside a Shute, but it might not work out. My parents didn’t really talk about other cities they’d lived, and I didn’t talk much about them either, but all those unspoken histories were packed away, little signifiers of identity ready to burst out uncontrollably, more embarrassing or painful for the fact that they had been hidden than for what they were. What if the end of the film was so badly damaged, and suppose there are no other copies extant, that this truncated version there can be no court martial, no scene of snapped swords, no degradation, no Devil’s Island? Dreyfus goes free, returns to his family, life goes on as if no fragments of letters pulled from the garbage by an illiterate char woman ever made their way to the French Section of Statistics.

By evening I needed to rest my eyes and took a walk down the hall. When work is slow Alphabet rents out some of the extra editing rooms.There are ten of them lined up on either side of a short corridor, each one behind a numbered door. They are rented out like any other kind of office space, but none of the doors are completely soundproof. Finding one’s way down the hall, listening as each soundtrack runs into the next, is like walking past a series of apartments whose doors have all been left open so that arguments, conversations, polemics, and shouting matches can be heard, one after the next.I used to walk to school past one house and then the next, and even if they were dark and locked up, as I walked past I knew what went on in a few of them.In this house a bully slept, a girl who picked her victims at random but with the finality of a court sentence. With the sound of gravel underfoot, breath misting in a cold early morning, I ran past hoping she wouldn’t be sitting on her screen porch or playing with her dog, an oversize highly strung Airedale named Teency. She didn’t use her fists like scrappy or tough girls, but was a master of the taunt delivered in private when no one else was listening; each one was something you could take home with you and worry about like a time bomb that would go off in bursts over and over.

You and your family are always right there where the money is.

I’m going to do an experiment. If I drop a quarter will you pick it up?

Next door was a man who shot deer and brought them home, strapped to the top of his car. We watched from across the lawn while he smiled and called out to us to take a look at this or that beauty. I imagined they bled all over his garage.

There is a basic confusion concerning the newsreel film. They said that Lumiere invented the newsreel – it was Melies.

I stopped and listened. The soundtrack was in French, but someone was translating the dialogue aloud into English.

Lumiere photographed train stations, horse races, families in the garden–the stuff of Impressionist painting. Melies filmed atrip to the moon, President Fallieres visiting Yugoslavia, the eruption of Mount Pelee, Dreyfus.

I knocked and opened the door. Someone froze the frame. On the screen a woman’s face peered out from behind stacks of Mao’s little red books. Two annoyed faces turned in my direction.

"We were told we’d have complete privacy and quiet here. This is the third time we’ve been disturbed," a woman in black glasses snapped at me. "I paid good money to rent this space. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry seems to have a question to ask or something to announce as soon as they get to this door."

"I was walking by, and I wondered who was talking about newsreels and Lumiere."

"Jean-Pierre Leaud in Godard’s La Chinoise." She pushed her glasses up on her head in exasperation at my stupidity and pointed to the screen.

Before I could thank her for the information and apologize for the interruption, I was pushed aside by a delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant down the street. He expressed frustration and in his agitation had nothing but blind disinterest in the image on the screen which held us transfixed. He had gotten lost and was sure food in the bags he carried had gone cold.

"We ordered Mexican!" The Godard people rolled their eyes in disgust at collective ignorance then slammed the door in our faces.

We stood side by side in the hall. He was silent, holding the cold food by the edges of the bag as if it contained a dinner he would spend the rest of the night trying to deliver. I walked back down the hall with him, noticing he’d left his bicycle leaning against the front desk and showed him the phone where he could call the restaurant. It turned out the delivery was for Alphabet City Typeface. We looked it up, and I directed him a few blocks away. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to work and watched him until the elevator came.

Walking back down the hall the soundtrack of La Chinoise was followed by sounds of gunshots in dry air — a western, I think, and then from the next door came rainfall and English accent simplying a jungle or a London street, it was hard to tell what the situation was. A faucet dripped somewhere, a real drip, not a recorded one, and out a comer window, as I turned down the hall I could see lights begin to come on as night fell. Again I was reminded of walking down the middle of a silent, empty road when it began to grow dark early and just when there seemed to be no one in any of the houses for miles in any direction, I would hear a dog bark and a girl’s voice ring out.

Susan Daitch is the author of two novels, L.C. (Lannan Foundation Selection and NEA Heritage Award) and The Colorist; and a collection of short stories, Storytown. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Brooklyn Rail, Bomb, Ploughshares, Failbetter.com, Tinhouse,McSweeney’s, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. Her work, along with that of William Vollman and David Foster Wallace, was featured in The Review of Contemporary Fiction. She teaches at Hunter College.

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TWO POEMS by Yehoshua November

ZeekFiction — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:08:41 +0000

An Opening It is said that if a Jew makes an opening in his heart for G-d to enter, even if it is as small as the eye of a needle, a g-dly energy will flood through, as though the hole were as wide as a road many caravans travel. And perhaps the riders of the caravans will also be Jews, who have come from very far, hauling their belongings from one exile to another, always anticipating the final sweet message: The redemption is upon us. Tangerine for my grandmother I know you only as a small boy knows an old woman, peeling a tangerine for his small mouth and from the inscription in the Yevtishenko book you gave my father when he was a boy: May you never be afraid of your Russian sensitivity. But as I read your notebooks I see that we share the same fear of science, and a distrust for all the gifts we believe we have not earned. And on the Sabbath before my wedding–
a day after my father and I had visited the cemetery to invite you and Zada to the ceremony– a stranger in a shul I had never been to asked me my name and if I knew you. Ma Shissel, I know you are watching over me, peeling the hardships from my days, allowing me to live as a boy who has never put the hard skin of the world to his lips.

Yehoshua November?s poetry has appeared in Provincetown Arts, New Works Review, The Forward, and Midstream, as well as in other publications. Last year, Prairie Schooner nominated one of his poems for a Pushcart Prize and selected his work as the winner of the Bernice Slote Award for emerging writers. He has poems forthcoming in The Sun and Poetica. November can be reached at yehoshuanovember@yahoo.com.

All images by Michele Feder-Nadoff.

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Captives

ZeekFiction — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:56:00 +0000

Todd Hasak-Lowy’s first novel will be published in October. Its title is Captives and its hero is Daniel Bloom, a family man and screenwriter for Hollywood. Lately, Daniel’s become disenchanted by a world, or just a country, of contemptible materialism, of institutionalized greed. Politics, political rage, soon infringe on his work. Daniel’s new screenplay emerges as a revenge fantasy. A sniper runs amok, assassinating everything, or everyone, wrong: “bad guys,” CEOs, lobbyists, flacks. But, as the trailers say, “this time it’s personal.” The reader begins to believe that Daniel truly wants these people dead. Then Daniel believes that he does. Then Hasak-Lowy’s Captives darkens — like the theater before the feature begins. Todd Hasak-Lowy teaches Hebrew language and literature at the University of Florida. His previous book, of stories, was The Task of this Translator. He lives in Gainesville, Florida. Zeek will publish an excerpt from Captives in two parts. What follows is the first. — Joshua Cohen, Fiction Editor

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POEM: Between Thursday and Friday

ZeekFiction — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 01:38:19 +0000

All night I dreamed of the border regions of being. When I awoke, I remembered only something between water and land, silence and speech, sleep and waking, and thought: “Here it is, the esthetics of indeterminacy. And here it is again…”

________________________________________________________________________

I dreamed that he whose footprint had seemingly faded long ago, suddenly appeared and looked at me so attentively that I awoke with a pounding heart…

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Profile: Adam Berg

ZeekFiction — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 11:31:45 +0000

Visual artist Adam Berg considers himself a double-agent. An artist today, he says, ends up doing double-duty — not only making the work, but also showing it off. Yet the artist must be careful to remain a creator and not merely become a producer.

“You have to subvert yourself as a practitioner of art and be a practitioner of creativity. Otherwise, you become a complicit part of the trans-globalization process.”

Berg is talking about a world-process that has transcended the realm of society and economy and is now as much an ecological as a human concern. His most recent exhibition, “Archipelago,” curated by Mordechai Omer and showing at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, deals with the physical human stamp on the world, as well as our attempts to recreate history and redefine the future.

The drawings on exhibit, dating back to 1987, are the understated focus of the show. “Drawing is the web that I weave between my work in other media — video, sculpture, painting.” His scrawls are like artifacts, unearthed images of a process we may not fully know, blueprints for another form of reality.

At the center of the large exhibition hall is a sculpture of bulbous, dark, metallic moulds hanging on threads from the ceiling. “Sculpture is a question of fragility,” he says about the piece. “Not something to regard as an object, but a state in which we find ourselves — a certain pose, a kind of expression, a frozen moment.” Though they look like random growths of some diseased organism, on the wall across the hall hangs a drawing describing their form. It follows, then, that every one of the hundreds of drawings has the potential to be a real object.

Though the show’s focus is on Berg’s drawings, the exhibit includes a life-sized billboard mounted on a metal frame, projected onto which is a video-work titled “Entropic Islands.”

The video shows a series of locales in which natural landscapes — small islands just off an ocean coast, or nearby cliffs and quarries — have been violated and defiled by industrial activity from oil speculating to chemical runoff. Digitally rendered seagulls fly across the screen, giving off unnatural chirps, and as they disappear out of view we hear an explosion, after which flames rise and block our view. But these bird-bombs don’t actually destroy anything, and after the flames recede, we see the same polluted, unpeopled scene.

Berg doesn’t expect his ideas to “translate” correctly to one audience or another. “Here,” says Berg, “rather than responding to this piece with a notion that pollution and the green movement are like Siamese Twins — for example — someone might see a sort of dystopia, the ongoing process in Israel of construction, destruction, reconstruction.” He calls this recoding, a process in which an audience is not interpreting the piece, but mis-translating it by applying its local meaning to the visual cues.

Berg has been using a variety of media since 1989, when he started showing video and paintings together. “Juxtaposition was the point,” he says. “I was interested in the discrepancy that resulted from different mediation — how does the same image look as a drawing, a painting, a video.”

Berg is a draftsman, painter, sculptor, and video-artist who studied architecture and holds a PhD in Philosophy. He is also a father and husband, and regularly traverses the cross-demands of family life, university teaching, and art practice. Still, this delicate balancing act seems to be integral.

“Can you be creative when something is a practice,” he asks, “when it’s habitual?”

The exhibit is less a single installation than a collection of fragments. It is accompanied by a monograph from the art publisher Charta Edizioni, incorporating past and present drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures, video-stills, as well as Berg’s original theoretical texts with such titles as “Beckett,” “Exiled,” and “Video.” They are difficult, dense texts that integrate existential concerns with ruminations on art practice.

“Boundaries between philosophy, architecture, art — they’re artificial. You have artists as media-makers, architects as designers. The challenge is to preserve and develop creativity itself.”

This creativity is not limited to the life or work of an artist. “Art is about its own afterlife,” says Berg. “It’s not about you, the attention you get, the money you generate. It’s about art’s possibility to project itself into the future.”

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An Old Story

ZeekFiction — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 09:17:09 +0000

The story below is a better introduction to Daniel Elkind than even I, a friend of years, could provide. Also, he's asked me to keep it short. Born in Moscow, raised in Philadelphia and suburban New Jersey, living in Brooklyn. A novel and more stories are forthcoming, for our gratitude. – Joshua Cohen, Fiction Editor

It's an old story: a father brings his son to the Land, as promised, and the son – though far from prodigal – repays his father with shame, becoming American. Like most immigrant kids, I, too, at one time, was ashamed; though it was not his accent or the way he smelled, but the coins my father made me use – coins disfigured and torn, warped, "But not void," he said; "legal tender." Coins scarred and tarnished he brought home in his hands, sympathetically cracked and dirty, and gave them to us to use at school and in rollerskate rinks, mostly nickels and quarters salvaged from old Chevrolets and Toyotas and Buicks he had put through the shredder at the scrapyard where he worked – nickels and quarters forgotten amid the fluff that was once the gaps between seats or the glove compartment. After school I'd load them into slots and get change, less but shiny, to avoid having to convince the ladies at lunch that my money was good even though there had been a pogrom: Jefferson had only one eye, and Monticello was razed down to one story. When we'd go over the bridge he'd roll down the window and hand the indifferent toll booth blacks his corrugated metal chips as I looked at the city beyond and the grey water below, feeling touched and embarrassed, hoping my son's love would show through the gaps in my ingratitude and trying to understand that this was his acceptance, his assimilation, just as I was his accomplice in survival, and that in his eyes he was only the picture of a decent father: he didn't smoke, didn't drink, and never let the four of us go a day without enough to eat, which only added to the burden – the unforgivable debt that was not his fault either. My acceptance lay in my embarrassment; my shame sustained me. I remember not knowing what the bent coins said about what my father looked like inside. Falling asleep, I drew pictures of the world in which change came from old cars and was further recycled by the children of immigrants who didn't have time to understand that money has to look like money, too. I dreamed of some kind of respect, some kind of stability and esteem, which exceeded me in the daytime and wanted different preoccupations, different worries, and an attention that focused on different aspects of the same basic doubt whereas my father was the right hand of God's own optimism. After several hundred dollars in mangled coins he proved something to himself about a childhood I only vaguely knew had been unfair and insulting. He left the scrapyard after six or seven years. That spring an immigrant with the same name killed himself and his wife and her friend in our old neighborhood, a woman we happened to know, and for a day or two our phone rang with voices asking if what was true was true. My father – I remember – was shocked, incredulous, sad, and relieved. His hands got cleaner as he got older and a hole grew at the top of his head. As for me, I got older, too, squandering some of the years and managing to save not a single crushed coin though the money looks like money now and his house will always be my house, still I live with surreal pride and some esteem under a pseudonym: I rent an apartment of refuge in his name.

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These Hollows, and Suchlike

ZeekFiction — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:55:30 +0000

Donari Braxton has written brave quantities of fiction, poetry, theater, and "cross-genre work," and has also translated. His writing has been widely anthologized in the UK and the United States, and his first collection of stories, I, will be succeeded in 2008 by a second. Presently he lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is at work on a novel. Here are my favorite lines of this story – "These Hollows, and Suchlike" – which is funning on both us and itself, anything but "hollow" and yet, full of holes: "Jewish humor, I supposed. Choggys liked Jewish humor. And so I asked him flat-out: ‘Jewish humor, my nigga?'" Dr. Choggys West has appeared in Braxton's fiction before. One hopes he will have the occasion to consult with us again. – Joshua Cohen, Fiction Editor "I want you to tell me your favorite word in 1994." "My favorite word." "In 1994, yes." "No." "Be a sport," said Choggys real rationally-like. But I was being a sport, I insisted to Choggys, who scowled and added: "Be an art then," he added, so to that I quickly stammered off: "Ask me again?" "1994 please, your favorite word." "Hiccups." Choggys hesitated before asking, "And presently?" "Yes." † Dr. Choggys West had one rule. Don't be a push-over, and the vowel, always, is the tonic syllable. I didn't see how the second rule related to helping me grow as an individual, so I said that to Choggys, and asked him what kind of therapy he practiced. "Hula-hoop." "The fuck outta here," I told him. So vaguely twinkling like a loose basement tug-incandescent he added, "And if I keep it up, I may even get my degree." Jewish humor, I supposed. Choggys liked Jewish humor. And so I asked him flat-out: "Jewish humor, my nigga?" And Choggys sniggered and uttered nonchalantly: "Why, are you Jewish?" "Would that premise my question?" I asked. "Would that pr'e'mise my q'ues'tion?" "Would that pr'e'mise my q'ues'tion?" "Would that pr'E'mise my q'ues'tion?" "Would that pr'E'mise my q'ues'tion?" "Better, Donari, better." † "I want you to tell me about your very first memory." "I was a hole." "You were a hole." "Correct." "Do you mean you were a sperm?" "No, I do not." "Were you referring to your mother's vagina then, Donari?" "I certainly was not." "Tell me about it then," pronounced Choggys in a very phony Arabic with a fake German accent-Freud, I suppose, was the idea-that didn't entirely crucify the vowels; diphthongs, ablauts, even emoticons over obscure lower-case i's reeked of discriminate meaning when he vomited them up, so that if he were in the midst of confessing his sins, on the brinks of orgasm, making pp's or war-talking the enemy, each word made a kind of finger-print in the ear of the listener, not one identical to another and so on. Choggys was actually a Russian and in reality one-half-parts Jewish but three-parts water, like a woman. He wasn't listening and I wasn't listening and at some point Choggys was saying the following:
"My motto, prior to playing Rasputin under the Saudi Prince, is to always make of the vowel the tonic syllable." "I know that already, doc," I told Dr. Choggys. "Subsequ'ently, for example." "Subsequ'ently, for e'xample." "Wiederholen Sie bitte." D'i'nosaur, l'it're'ture, e'xtra'o'dinar'y, supercalafragel'i'sticexpialadocious. Sophistication will saturate you over motherfucker, he reassured me. MEINE Raffinesse is sehr, sehr gut, he reassured me. † Our sessions took to the street when the traveling Russian circus came to make its three-day festival of our tiny, unpronounceable village, and Choggys, parading through it, exuded confidence for everyone's benefit, making small talk with peasant folk, women and Africans in the Russian language. Had they been Arabic speakers like myself, he'd never have acknowledged their existence. If I'd asked him: ‘What did that one just say, Dr. Choggys?' then Choggys would not translate their words, but rather summarize for them their words, and usually proceed by briefly psychoanalyzing them, too. I offer an example: This one says that he wonders what I am doing in this country, and if I am a diplomat. I told him that he should be careful to ask only questions that require definite answers, the Maoist. Dr. Choggys had pushed a young Slav into the mud who had stepped on Dr. Choggys' shoes. He tiptoed over the man and sniggered. "In a mud-puddle, I am the absence of mud-puddle," Choggys recited above the filthy young Slav, temporarily blinded and very, very sad. But then, just beyond the mud-puddle where the Slav had once been standing, some form of gambling slot-machine in fact was what was missing, and I said Look! and Choggys, half-embarrassed, turned and made to walk away. But I insisted for health reasons. I said: After all, Dr. Choggys, I'm paying for this! Choggys had no choice but to walk back and pull down on the machine's ruby-knobbed lever. First its currency detector declined Choggys' money, but secondly I put in a coin and the six reels started spinning patterns of symbols that couldn't have belonged to a rainbow, as if six-thousand eyeballs were rolling back in its head. Choggys would have glanced over to shit on my superstition, but he couldn't look away either, and soon the reels began to accelerate exponentially, and the ready symbols of colors bled into a canon, whipping around snow-gloss that gleamed like diamonds, then vacuumed itself up again suction-cup-like. Through the loud, schlocky humming of the machine, the young Slav had risen to his feet and came to stand beside us. Choggys told me, "Put another coin back in, stupid Fuck!" And Choggys screamed to the Slav in Russian, "You, clean yourself up!" But the machine was at rest, and the symbols were letters, and the letters, we couldn't help but notice, almost certainly spelled hollow.
"Us holes," I began to tell Choggys, who I'm sure was piqued by the sight of an irrepressible smile bubbling under my lips, "us holes just have nothing to lose." "Oh shut the fuck up," replied Dr. Choggys. I guess he thought I was only I-told-you-so'ing, but smugly, having figured him out long before, I wasn't. † "There's more to a hole than the gravity," I began to answer his question. "More than the plummet, there are also the feelings, like the feeling of passing from one thing to the next, hibernation…" "Oh go fuck yourse-" "Wonderland rabbits, for instance, will come and go through a half-sister of mine, and another one, my grandfather's brother, was the barrel through which Kennedy got slugged." "Ja ja ja ja ja ja!" He exclaimed his disinterest. "Friends of mine are just about everything imaginable, from trenches so-to-speak where tyrants pigeonholed, to Manhattan manholes, puncture wounds and wormholes, chimneys on anthills and assholes, et cetera." And finally, I noticed, Dr. Choggys was beginning to listen. "Believe me, Dr. Choggys, well-born parents will mobilize and leave eyelets for blue blood, exhaust-pipes on Benzes, famous popstars' gold pie-holes and other such things, though all prearranged, these hollows and suchlike, just as everywhere across the board in existing." "You," diagnosed Choggys West, "are a dirty, dirty man." Was. I was a great gaping hole. Succussing the shit left from passers-by by gurgling it right into the soil. Ingesting it straight into the soul of the earth. Speaking to myself quite often. But by then, however, Dr. Choggys was hup! so sorry, afraid that our time was up.

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