Interviews With Artists

Interviews in the Early Twentieth Century

When I saw Midnight in Paris, the lead character was dancing with one of the American Artists in Paris in the 1920s, and he was complaining about her insistence on leading. The Leading Lady was Djuna Barnes. I was doing some reading and research about that time and those artists and I had never heard of the Lady so I added her to the syllabus.

Interviews by Djuna Barnes was an good read not only for the American personalities of the 1910-1930s, but Miss Barnes was a breezy and inventive interviewer. She might put her subject in a one act play for the interview or she might take the interview and make the subject answer any of her questions with the platitudes and cliches and turns of phrase that the subject was known for. She could be as whimsical and as playful as Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.

Now I know where the style and form of those short interviews at the beginning of The New Yorker's On The Town come from. Miss Barnes was doing it and doing it well before The New Yorker.


Performance Art in the Early Twenty First Century

I never thought that a novel about some Performance Artists would be very interesting to me. The main theme of a Performance Artist is Herself. And Most of them are just not as fascinating as they appear to be to themselves. A variety show or book about Performance Artists is much like Vaudeville. You have to sit through some boring and strange abusive acts to get to the headliner. And the headliner just might not be to your taste.

I Am Trying to Reach You by Barbara Browning is a novel about an academic who unartfully (have you ever read some of their papers on art and their "theories" of art? Nope, and there is a good reason for that. Most of them are incomprehensible even to other academics. Hmmm, there must be some Performance Art Academic Critics who can't even recognize their own Acts or Art to Criticize. But that way lies Madness and a Grant) criticizes Performance Artists and even some of his own Academic Scholars.

If this is getting too convoluted and circumlocutory like a Hexagon Mobius Strip for you, just ignore the previous paragraph because the narrator is likable and doesn't quite understand any of the Performance Artist's Performances himself. But like a Good Academic, he keeps up the effort to find some cosmic or even some neighborly meaning thereof.

While the Narrator muddles through his Art Theories, he does live life and that is where the crux of the novel lies. The Narrator attempts gallantry and just human concern for the Old Lady in a Walker who lives down his hallway. He deals with his lover who is a continent away and learning to live with and medicate a possibly fatal illness.

He follows a You Tube Video Dancer named falserebelmoth who makes dance videos that the Narrator is sure have some sub textual meaning to them. The video dances are just like life. They are there, and we are here and there, and meaning is stuck in the background or off to the side of the video, cut off by the video frame or in the shadows. If we could just see it or get it into focus. If we could just add some more pixels and make it sharper.

I actually went on You Tube to see if there were any videos by falserebelmoth and to see if I could see them through my own eyes and not the Narrator's eyes, but Miss Browning did not go that far.

She should have.

Domestic Terror

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami

In March of 1995, the Tokyo subway system was poisoned with a Nerve Gas Attack (Sarin) by a domestic Buddhist Yoga Doomsday Cult named Aum Shinrikyo. Twelve people died of Sarin Poisoning and five to six thousand commuters were affected and/or hospitalized by exposure to the nerve gas. The year before in 1994, there was another incident at one of the Aum Shinrikyo offices and retreats, where sarin gas was detected in the vicinity of the Aum offices. So someone in one of the Japanese ministries must have known that Aum was manufacturing and had access to the nerve gas. But the attack in 1995 was a surprise, not only for its victims but for the Japanese Homeland Ministries and the Emergency Services.

I am interested in the Anthrax Attack in the US and the incompetent investigation done by the US Government. It is obvious to me that someone in the US Government at the time made the Weaponized Anthrax and distributed it and killed five Americans and sickened seventeen other Americans. And no, I do not believe that it was Dr. Ivins. He was just the convenient dead scapegoat to distract the public from US Government malefeasance. Who was responsible is lost along with the second or third shooter at the Kennedy assassination and the dead Lee Harvey Oswald and the dead Jack Ruby.

Mr. Murakami is a prominent and popular Japanese novelist who interviewed victims of the Tokyo Subwary Nerve Gas Attack and followers of the Aum Cult (not the ones who actually made and planted the Sarin Gas, they were in the Japanese Criminal System and not available to interviews) to attempt to determine what happened and why it happened in Japan. Mr. Murakami thought that the attack was integral to the Japanese psyche, but in the years since the attack, I think that we can all conclude that Terrorism is about the Human Psyche and very often it is Government Sponsored either directly or indirectly. There are no great particular conclusions about National Psyches that can be reached or revealed in any contemplation of it.

Mr. Murakami followed the Studs Terkel method of interviewing the participants and with a few well placed questions, allowing the people who were affected and involved to tell their own stories from their own view points. Each individual interview builds a more human and compelling whole for the Reader to contemplate.

I've read some of Mr. Murakami's fiction and the one story that I recall is about a lady in Tokyo who has a green monster in her backyard, the short story is from The Elephant Vanishes. The monster or leprechaun (as I deduced from its description) has sprung up from a hole that it dug in the backyard and pops up now and then like a "whack a mole" to bedevil and tease the lady. Mr. Murakami has an affinity for underground monsters so it is no surprise that he should find the Tokyo Subway attack to be so compelling as to write a non-fiction account of it.

Conspiracy Theories: Yeah, I Got'em

The Anthrax Letters: A Bioterrorism Expert Investigates the Attacks That Shocked America

by Leonard A. Cole

After 9/11/2001, according to Bush Administrators, there were no more terrorism attacks on the US due to the vigilance of said Bush Administrators (they conveniently do not acknowledge Bush's Laissez Faire attitude preceding that 9/11 attack). But there was another terrorist attack on the US and it was after 9/11 and it used Anthrax in the US Mail to kill its victims. Bush and his Administrators attempted to lay the Anthrax blame on Saddam Hussein and Al Queda; that blame made the invasion of Iraq mandatory and took the focus off the oil in Iraq.

When it became apparent that oil was the cause of the Iraq invasion, the blame was shifted to Steven Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert employed by the US Defense Department with some false education credentials. When the Anthrax Attack blame wouldn't stick to Mr. Hatfill, the blame wafted in the air (like the Anthrax weapons grade spores) to Dr. Bruce Ivins.

The FBI claimed with both suspects that they had the Anthrax goods on each of them. The FBI didn't. Mr. Hatfill was cleared and given a $250,000 annuity from the US government for the next 20 years, because he was innocent but unemployable because of the FBI's accusations. Dr. Ivins did the FBI the favor of committing suicide instead of fighting the investigation as Mr. Hatfill had. The FBI convicted Dr. Ivins with circumstantial evidence, as they did with Mr. Hatfill. The circumstantial evidence on Dr. Ivins looks no better on him than it did on Mr. Hatfill.

And there is another thing to consider, all the FBI and US Defense department experts who claim Dr. Ivins did it, are perfectly capable of being convicted themselves of the Anthrax Attacks on that same circumstantial evidence. There are a lot of possibly guilty dogs in the Anthrax Attack fight.

Mr. Cole gives a good presentation of the Anthrax Attacks, most of the still living victims were willing to speak with him, but Mr. Cole seems a little too inclined to believe all the other suspects (the experts) in the case. Mr. Cole's conclusions are a trifle naive.

As to whom I think did it? This current kerfuffle about Cheney and the CIA and the executive assassination squad makes me think that perhaps the executive assassination squads were using Anthrax to target with extreme prejudice their victims. And it all got a little out of hand, as when Cheney shot a guy in the face during a duck hunt. Remember the Ukrainian or the Belarus prime minister who was plutonium poisoned by the KBG? As we have learned lately, the CIA tortures and they may get a little more artful than assassination drones.