Roundup of Recent Events

[Gabriel White: The World Blank]

I'm afraid this post is a bit of a grab-bag of unrelated matters. Still, no harm in that, I suppose.

First of all, I want to urge all of you who are loose in Central Auckland any time in the next couple of weeks to check out Gabriel White's retrospective show "The World Blank" at The Film Archive Level 1 / 300 Karangahape Rd (Just above Artspace on the right side of the road heading towards Queen Street). It runs till the 28th of April, so you should have plenty of time.

I was at the opening on Tuesday last week, and heard Gabriel read out the commentary track to his early piece Airpoints, filmed in Melbourne in (I think) 2001. The text is available for free, and is well worth having.

The other works, all in the video-diary form which Gabriel's been experimenting with for the past seven or eight years, include Journey to the West, El Arbol del Tule, Tongdo Fantasia and Aucklantis. All of these are on sale for very reasonable prices (ranging from $15 to $35). I took the opportunity to complete my collection of Gabrieliana to date.

*

[Matakana]

Secondly, here are some upcoming readings I'm booked in for in case anyone's curious to check them out:

Guest Reader (with Richard Wasley) at
St. Leonard's Church
Matakana Valley Rd
Friday, 1st May
Start 7.30

One of 10 Readers at the launch of
Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals
ed. Siobhan Harvey (Random House)
Artis Gallery
Parnell
Thursday, 7th May
5.30 - 7.30 pm

One of 8 readers at
LOUNGE #8
Old Government House
Auckland University
Wednesday, 27th May
5.30-7.00 pm

*

[The Hamilton Papers]

Finally, kudos to Scott Hamilton for knowing a rockstar when he sees one. In one of his most recent posts on Reading the Maps, he listed The Imaginary Museum as #5 in his top ten indie blogs:

... when the poets, short story writers, novelists, and essayists of twenty-first century New Zealand sit down at their desks and put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, who are they writing to? Who, I mean, is their ideal reader - the person who knows what they're getting at, wants them to get there, but won't tolerate any easy shortcuts or self-indulgent detours? I suspect I'm not the only Kiwi scribbler who would name Jack Ross as my ideal reader, and the assured, intelligent exercises in literary criticism on this blog will show you why.

Pretty good, eh? If you go to the comments after the post, you'll find me writing something almost equally fulsome about Scott's blog. There's a man with a lot of time on his hands who actually manages to spend it usefully by combing the net for bloody interesting stuff which I for one would never find out about otherwise ...

Of course, nobody's infallible.

Not that Jack's perfect - in his latest post he neglects to mention that he acquired his cat 'Zero' from me, and that shortly after doing so disposed of the perfectly good name I had given the creature.

"The creature," indeed! I ask you, does that cat look discontented to you? She loves her name, takes a fierce pride in it, actually. Trying calling her "Nui" and you'll find a set of razor-sharp claws flying in your direction ...

Frost / Nixon or Ross / White?

[Alas Smith & Jones]

Yes, well, maybe it is a bit vainglorious to compare me and Gabriel White filming some conversations in his living room in Freemans Bay with that epoch-making set of confrontations between David Frost at the apex of his (bizarre) media career and gloomy, half-mad, exiled ex-US President Richard Nixon. I shouldn't think Ron Howard will be rushing to acquire the rights for another Hollywood blockbuster, though of course you never know ...

Perhaps a more appropriate model would be Mel Smith and Griff Rhys-Jones's incarnations as "Scratch 'n' Sniff", those two bozos who used to conduct pretentiously inane dialogues in Alas Smith & Jones in the 80s and 90s. As Wikipedia so trenchantly puts it: "Smith was the idiot who knew everything, Jones the idiot who knew nothing."

Be that as it may, we remain undaunted. Gabriel has spent a lot of time over the years reading and annotating his copies of my REM trilogy: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus, 2006) and EMO (Titus, 2008), and he had quite a lot of questions to ask me about them. What harm, we thought, in sharing the results with an online audience?

Turnabout is fair play, though. Regular readers of this blog can hardly claim not to have noticed my admiration for Gabriel's films Aucklantis (2006) (reviewed here) and Tongdo Fantasia (2008) (launched earlier this year at OUi boutique in K Rd).

So we decided to do a double interview: I would quiz him on the inspirations and influences behind his Tongdo Fantasia, and then he would ask me questions about the REM novels.

For my money, that's better than either Frost / Nixon or Smith & Jones. I mean, didn't you ever long to see Nixon asking Frost some tough questions about just who precisely he thought he was to be so up on his high horse? And why didn't Smith ever swap places with Jones? That's what I want to know. With us, on the other hand, you get to see us on opposite sides of the table - in itself well worth the price of admission, I'd have thought ...

But seriously, folks, here's a breakdown of both interviews, now up for viewing on Gabriel's website (the clips take a little while to download, but at least that gives you time to mull over the info contained in each). They've also been indexed with themes and topics for your viewing convenience:

Jack Ross interviews Gabriel White on Tongdo Fantasia. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:

• [1/5] Buddhism / the ‘pedestrian filmmaker.’
• [2/5] The 3-fold approach / photographs / editing.
• [3/5] Themes – natural and unnatural.
• [4/5] The verbal approach / cinematic landscape.
• [5/5] Bashō’s travel diaries.

[Matsuo Bashō]

Gabriel White interviews Jack Ross on his REM trilogy. (Sunday, November 30, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 9 video clips:

• [1/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
• [2/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy.
• [3/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno – layout.
• [4/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy – the fictional creator/s.
• [5/9] General ideas and themes of the trilogy / Nights with Giordano Bruno / psychoanalysis.
• [6/9] Nights with Giordano Bruno – Lullism / the Magus / Bruno’s Cena de le ceneri.
• [7/9] Apuleius – influence on Bruno and Jack Ross.
• [8/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – amnesia / narrative approach / Atlantis.
• [9/9] The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis – two ways of approaching amnesia: cuttings and automatic writing.

[Apuleius: The Golden Ass (as illustrated by Milo Manara)]

Depending on the response to these, there may well be more to come. We didn't have enough time to talk about either Gabriel's Aucklantis or my novel EMO, but there are number of interesting points still to be thrashed out about both, I'd have thought.

Watch this space ...


[Postscript - 10th December]:

There's now a new interview up on Gabriel's site:

John Radford interviews Gabriel White on Aucklantis. (Sunday, December 7, 2008). Gabriel White – artist website. 5 video clips:

John Radford: "It's like a child's view, or someone from another reality arriving here and looking at this thing which we call a city and the way this thing works and making assumptions ... that are very reasonable assumptions to make ..."

• [1/5] Sleepyhead / stream-of-consciousness city / wandering rocks / the epic.
• [2/5] Mayoral Drive / Atlantis / North pole theory / sacred isles.
• [3/5] The shadow / confusions / characters.
• [4/5] Groundhog Day / references / the car.
• [5/5] En plein air / counterworlds.

[sacred isle]

Gabriel's Groundhog Day

“I’m both! I’m a celebrity in an emergency …”

This is my launch speech for the screening of Gabriel White's new film (see further details here):

There’s a scene in the movie Groundhog Day where the cameraman Larry is trying to pick up a girl at a party. “People think that I just point my camera at stuff, but there’s a heck of a lot more to it than that!” She’s clearly unimpressed, and makes a hasty excuse to get away before he even gets to show her the inside of his van.

I guess the first point to make about Gabriel’s work generally, but especially his new film Aucklantis, is that there’s a heck of a lot more to it than meets the eye. Yes, on the surface it’s all very simple. He walks along the street, filming himself, and talking. Sometimes he does the washing-up while he’s talking. Sometimes he discusses where he’s going to put the camera.

This conciseness and economy of means is a mask, though. Gabriel has understood that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The remorselessly quotidian and ordinary nature of the things he films is designed to wake us up to the myriad strangenesses in the ways we react to the world around us.

I guess the most obvious analogy is with Joyce’s Ulysses (which he actually invokes at one point in the film you’re about to see). Again, the concept is simple: the events of one day in Dublin, seen through the eyes of a number of different characters, but patterned on the events and people of the Odyssey.

Joyce undercuts the bourgeois complacencies of provincial Dublin by setting them against the heroic intensity of Homer. Or does he? Perhaps he means to say that Leopold Bloom really is as much of a hero as his original, Odysseus.

Gabriel’s own model is Plato’s Atlantis – does he mean to satirise our lifestyle or simply examine it? That’s for you to decide. He certainly succeeds in making provincial Auckland seem as much of a battleground for the gods as Plato’s lost continent ever did.

I’d prefer to posit a connection with Groundhog Day, which is (I have to admit) one of my favourite films of all time. Phil (or Bill Murray) is forced to repeat the same day over and over again until he exhausts every possible way of living it. He ends up becoming a better person through sheer boredom and failure to discover anything else to do with his time.

“One of these days someone’s going to see me interviewing a groundhog and decide I don’t have a future …”

Gabriel, too, is bound to the beat between Freemans Bay and the City Centre. He, too, resolves to get all he can from it. But is it Gabriel the character or Gabriel the filmmaker I’m talking about? Is there a difference? In Groundhog Day the weatherman Phil is constantly paralleled with the groundhog Phil. Every day the groundhog is frightened by his own shadow, and so the endless winter goes on. Phil the character tries kidnapping his alter ego, singing its praises, abusing it – nothing works. When he stops acting like a kind of human groundhog himself, though, the enchantment is broken.

At one point in his own film Gabriel speculates that his shadow is spying on him through stealth technology. He’s getting the better of it, though, by watching it spy on him, and thus getting an angle on how he appears to it. He even acts up to it at times to give it interesting things to watch …

Groundhog Day required a cast of hundreds, a set of Hollywood Stars, finding a more photogenic small town to stand in for Punxsutawney, Philadelphia, and a few million dollars. Aucklantis succeeds in covering substantially more territory at a fraction of the cost by the simple application of wit and ingenuity.

It came as a great surprise to the makers of Groundhog Day when they started to get letters from rabbis and monks and religious leaders praising them for the wisdom of their film. It was, after all, just supposed to be another frothy Hollywood comedy. Gabriel’s film is funny, too, and one can read it on that level with no problems at all. Go deeper, though, and it’ll repay your scrutiny.

Screening on Saturday

Well, there are a couple of reasons for putting up this post.

The first is to publicise the screening, on Saturday 2nd December, of Gabriel White's new film Aucklantis (you can read my review of the parts I'd then seen here.) Full details of the screening can be found on his website here, but I'll just mention that it's at 3 pm, in lecture theatre WE240, AUT, Auckland (signs around St. Paul Street will direct you).

The second is to mention Gabriel's set of digital essays "The ABC of XY and Z," which are also now available on his website. Modesty forbids me from saying too much about these pieces, since the first, "Planet Atlantis" is an analysis of my novel The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis. The second, however, "Music Word Fire" (much longer) concerns the work of the composer Robert Ashley, and the third, "The Avoriginal" gives an account of Gabriel's own practice as a filmmaker. I'd certainly recommend giving them a look, especially (but certainly not exclusively) if you're thinking of coming along to the screening.

Further reports on that later ...

Aucklantis

[Gabriel White - photo by Lies Vandesande]

I remember back in the late seventies there was a lot of controversy because Richard Ellmann’s edition of the Selected Letters of James Joyce made public a few of the rather frank epistles he’d written to his wife Nora. I seem to recall a passage along the lines of how much he wanted to “fuck his little fuckbird’s cunt,” but it’s been a while since I checked them out.

An article I read at the time by some American smartarse began by debating the matter fairly solemnly before concluding that all obligations of decency and respect to the departed had to bow down before the sacred duty of giving the rest of us a good laugh. The author then went on to fabricate a series of similar letters by similarly grand men and women of letters (Hemingway, Faulkner, Gertrude Stein etc.)

Gabriel White’s latest video project Aucklantis is a fucking good laugh. That’s not all it is, of course, but isn’t that enough to be going along with? I mean, how many successful pisstakes are there out there that one can afford to neglect one?

If you don’t believe me, check out the sample here.

Gabriel’s been back in Auckland now for almost a year. He brought back a lot of video footage and a lot of interesting ideas. Some of those ideas will see solid form soon (hopefully) in a DVD / book called Tongdo Fantasia, part of which is already available on his new trial website. It takes the form of a talking-head travelogue filmed in Korea, but the setting could really be anywhere. Gabriel’s method is to weave strange thoughts and associations around everyday objects as he talks to camera – banality is his domain, unexpectedness his stock-in-trade. He stalks the city like a latter-day Baudelairean flâneur, weaving a complex meditation on the bizarrerie of the ordinary lives and landscapes we take for granted.

The packaging and the ideas have evolved somewhat, but one can still see a definite continuity with the two projects we worked on together:

A Town like Parataxis: A Colouring-in Book (Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000)

was a collection of poems by me with photos by Gabriel. It’s now almost unobtainable, as we only banged out a hundred or so copies on some institutional xerox machine before we got caught. The pictures, though, are still a miracle. Gabriel had a theory at the time that simple colour snapshots blown up to A4-sized black-and-white would show strange complexities of texture and design. The results certainly bear him out. That carwash looks like the gates of hell to me.

The Perfect Storm (Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000)

was an extension of the method to video. [That one I do have some copies of, if anyone’s interested (price $NZ10 plus $5 postage & packing)]. The Public Library catalogue described it as “poems read by Jack Ross set against Auckland landscapes” which about sums it up. I remember viewers tended to spend their time speculating where we’d shot particular bits of film, rather than noticing the strange dance of the cars around the roundabout, or the peculiar costumes of the boys crossing the street outside McDonalds. In a sense it was too obvious for anyone to see it. Once they’d worked out that there was no real continuity between the text and the pictures, they lost the ability to see what we wanted to point out: the hauntedness of the everyday.

Aucklantis seems to me a step beyond anything Gabriel has done before because the tone has shifted just a notch. His decision to look at Auckland as a tabula rasa, a blank slate literally anything can be written on, works because it’s so hysterically funny. It’s hard to imagine anyone taking seriously Gabriel’s descriptions of how to paint a rock grey or how to open a blank account, and yet – like the best stand-up – they make you see things, all of a sudden, in a new light.

Gabriel’s work is reactive, in the best sense. He takes the place he lives in and interrogates its peculiarities. His formidable erudition comes down, in these latest works, to one man talking on a moving screen – somehow he succeeds in making this the Platonic essence of cinema.

Of course I can’t help but see some connections between these ideas and my amnesia-novel The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis, which Gabriel helped launch earlier this year (I’m actually a bit peeved at not having thought of that “Aucklantis” portmanteau-word myself). What mainly strikes me about it, though, is the elegant simplicity of Gabriel’s solution to problems I could only approach by wrapping them in layers of crabbed discordant text. (For a video-clip of part of Gabriel's launch-speech -- filmed by my friend Rowan McCormick -- click here).

His latest work is so brilliant it can’t help but make the rest of us feel a little jealous. I take some pride, though, in having had some part in stimulating him to make this quantum leap. I think anyone who watches the finished work will see just what I mean.

Happy Birthday, Gabriel!


Gabriel White: Select CV

Shows and Performances:

· Sep 5, 2006: Video work “Aucklantis” included in Lazy Susan and Smelly John (St Paul St Gallery, AUT, Auckland). Curator: Mark Harvey. Artists: Sean Curham, Alex Monteith, Tessa Laird, Brydee Rood, Cat Gwynne, Linda T, Susie Pratt, Cushla Donaldson, Ben Holmes, Melissa Durbin, Aaron Hurley, Gabriel White, Mark Harvey.
· Aug-Sep, 2001: Video work for Adrift – Nomadic Art from New Zealand (Conical Gallery Fitzroy, Melbourne). Curator: Emily Cormack. Artists: Richard Lewer, Caroline Rothwell, Patrick Pound, John Pule, Mark Braunias, Brielle Hansen and Anushka Akel.
· Feb-Nov, 2000: Senior Tutor, Studio One Elam School of Fine Art.
· 1999-2000: Member of Rotaction, sound performance group, directed by James McCarthy. Performances at Lopdell House Gallery, La Mata theatre and the Adam Gallery. Awarded best multimedia performance at the Wellington Fringe Festival 2000.
· 1998-2000: Stop Gap, Auckland based poster installation project. Curator and artist.

Published Work:

· “I for an I,” Landfall 200 (2000): 187 [article]
· Review of Tessa Mitchell and Ben Holmes, "I am a Dark River." Pander 9 (1999): 40
· Review of Ronnie van Hout and Mike Stevenson, "Premillennial: Signs of the Soon Coming Storm." Pander 8 (1999): 36-37
· Review of Ross T. Smith, "Hokianga." Pander 6/7 (1999): 54-55
· Forgiven by the Moon, CD with Steve Abel, (self-released, 1998)
· Spacesuit, self-titled CD (released nationally, 1997)