Presented on stage by Mike Hoolboom at Ryeberg Live Toronto (June 1st, 2010).

There was a course they offered in high school that was always full, year after year. I wanted to take it, my friends wanted to take it, but we could never get in. But I know that tonight, looking around the room tonight, I know that some of you took this course, some of you have been busy living this course ever since. I’m sure you remember it well. It was called: How to walk into a room.

You know sometimes you’re talking with a friend and you have a destination, you’re moving towards the event, the party, the thing itself. And you do that thing that you always do with the ones you love the best. You ask them questions they already know the answers to. Oh, that feels so good. And then they ask you a question that you know the answer to. Oh, that feels even better.

Please, could we do that again and again? Sometimes you think: this is why I have friends, or at the very least, this is why I love my friends. The old answers, the old questions, the old friends.

But sometimes they’ve taken the course, the special course that you didn’t get to take, so as you get closer to that front door, to that entrance hall, oh yes, you can already hear the familiar hum of genius conversation going on. There’s no doubt about it, they are obviously cracking the DNA code in there, and curing AIDS, and finding a way to criticize Israel’s occupation of Palestine without being called an anti-Semite, and as you get closer to the door you feel yourself shrinking, you watch your hands disappear beneath your coat.

For every step your companion takes you have to make five or six little wincing baby steps, and when you look over you can see that they’re not normal sized either, oh no, no, as the front door looms in front of you they have become a head in the clouds giant because the truth is: your friend took the course. Your friend knows how to walk into a room. Your friend knows how to make an entrance.

Call them specialists of the first impression.

But this video is not about your friend, or mine. It’s about Patti. Patti Smith. Watch Patti Smith walk into the room (0-3:02):

Patti Smith on “Kids are People Too” (circa 1979), interviewed by Michael Young

Who is the youngest person in this room? Is it one of those so-carefully permed child imposters that fill the audience? The ones who are so busy reading the “raise your hands now” signs that they can’t hear a word anyone is saying? Or what about the corporate teenager with the spray-on jeans, the one who lives for the moment when he can lay his hands onto the shoulders of all those almost-young girls, holding them close for the camera, where they can recite their lines. “Where were you born?” “Who is your favourite singer?”

Is that what you would ask Patti, Patti Smith, if you were thirteen, going on 130, and every important moment in your life had been scripted? Rehearsed. Again and again. So that when you finally fell in love you couldn’t help repeating, repeating, repeating the lie you practiced each day in front of the mirror. I love you. I really do.

Patti, it’s a set up, it’s a come-on, it’s a fake. But Patti doesn’t care. Look at her on the stool, kicking her legs out like she was a little girl. They are asking her, the little old girls, about her career, but Patti never had a career. She never filled out the forms, or schmoozed a party. She never did the right things with the right people.

I don’t know what punk rock is, I don’t come from that planet, but there’s a way she holds herself, even against the irresistible pressure… Can you feel that pressure in the room? Can you feel that pressure in this room, that current pushing up against your face? Call it common sense, call it everybody knows, but Patti looks like she doesn’t feel a bit of it. It’s like meeting someone who doesn’t pay any attention to gravity.

I think that’s what punk rock means. But it also means music, of course, making music out of your life, the small moments of your life, where you might refuse, for a moment, the comfort of the old answers and the old questions. Where you throw up a – what the hell is that exactly? – a grapefruit? A superball? -- in the middle of someone else’s prime time, just because you can’t help smelling like teen spirit.

And then you walk over to the piano, and start to sing a song you have no business singing. It wasn’t custom engineered for your voice, it’s a song made for the machine, for one of those factory products that can hit notes only bird dogs can hear. It’s been designed for game show winners that can spray their voice across music halls because they don’t feel a thing. That’s the deal they made, the necessary compromise. Yeah, yeah. You get to have the most perfect, most beautiful voice in the world, but you won’t be able to feel a thing. So tell me, where do I sign? (3:03-3:52)

Patti Smith on “Kids are People Too” (circa 1979), interviewed by Michael Young

Patti makes her way to the piano massacre without missing a beat. The keyboard player is in one time signature, while Patti is in another. I want to say that she’s singing from her heart, but she’s not. She’s singing from her whole body. The whole body at once is the teacher. Still that little girl from New Jersey playing in the patch. She forgets the words, she skips a verse. She holds the lines too long, she can’t hit the notes, and in her mistakes, in her necessary fragility and failures, she makes the song human again. She makes me human again.

It’s not OK to make a mistake, it’s necessary. It’s the least we can do. At the beginning, as a way to begin with each other. As old Brecht would say, let’s begin not with the good old things, but the bad new ones. So many days sitting at my window, waiting for someone to sing me his song. (3:53-end)

- Mike Hoolboom

Jean-Luc Godard, “Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo” (1993)

Here is a two minute movie by Jean Luc Godard called “Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo.” It consists of a single photograph, shattered into fragments, which the Swiss-French maestro summons in a gathering dread.

How can he make this picture visible? How can he show this moment, return us to this moment, rescue it from the too many others which bury its difficulty, its outrage and injustice? Godard hurls it against his plasma screen and breaks it into bits, and then offers it up to us piece by piece. Each frame is a kind of footfall for the eye, this operation might be named: how to make an approach. The unbearable war, the unspeakable act, the impossible gesture. One step at a time.

A friend told me last night that she once marched with the others against the bathhouse raids, worked at the women’s shelter, warmed herself with the necessary certainties of the young as she kicked against the machine, shook her fist against the big picture.

She’s a mother now, and has offered more recently to look after a friend’s daughter once a week. It is not the march on the capital, it is not tearing the system down one brick at a time, but still she is standing on the front line of her life. And while she used to embrace the war, the us and themness of the struggle, today she works for peace.

No, her babysitting efforts will not feed another child from Gaza, but even so, she is opening her arms to the here and now of her neighborhood. She is working for peace with her partner, her own children, and the children who have come to take the place of the life she used to have.

The adventure of peace has begun again at home, where no one will notice except the lives she is busy changing with every breath, one kindness at a time.

Here is how Mary Gaitskill puts it, running the same lines through her Veronica hair as if they belong there. I am in the midst of her language thickets now, wishing I could understand how she manages to lay it down so cleanly.

“The place Joanne is building inside has rooms for all of this… In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put on the wall. Not because it is good but because it is trying to understand something. In these rooms, there will be understanding. In these rooms, each madness and stupidity will be unfolded from its knot and smoothed with loving hands until the true thing inside it lies revealed.”

- Mike Hoolboom

The voice-over text of Je Vous Salue, Saravejo, cribbed and rehatched and breathed out of the old man’s mouth, goes like this:

“In a sense, fear is the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday night. She’s not beautiful, mocked, cursed and disowned by all. But don’t get it wrong: she watches over all mortal agony, she intercedes for mankind.

For there’s a rule and an exception. Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. Everybody speaks the rule: cigarette, computer, t-shirt, television, tourism, war.

Nobody speaks the exception. It isn’t spoken, it’s written: Flaubert, Dostoyevsky. It’s composed: Gershwin, Mozart. It’s painted: Cezanne, Vermeer. It’s filmed: Antonioni, Vigo. Or it’s lived, and then it’s the art of living: Srebenica, Mostar, Sarajevo.

The rule is to want the death of the exception. So the rule for Cultural Europe is to organize the death of the art of living, which still flourishes.

When it’s time to close the book, I’ll have no regrets.

I’ve seen so many people live so badly, and so many die so well.”

END

Richard Pryor (1964, 1979)

John and I spent our nineteenth summer slipping into the Cineplex on weekdays. Monday was a favourite ‘cause we both had heavy weekend duties which alternated between our living pharmacy acts and the low-rent hires we took to pay for what had not yet become habits.

Mondays we liked to crawl into the Eaton Centre Cineplex where the theatres were so small we felt we were back in our basement freezone, and the staff was about as chronic and regular as we were so no one dropped a notice about our shuffling between theatres six and seven and twelve and fourteen. In general we tried to push off before the show closed so we wouldn’t draw unwanted attentions, and besides we were too young to be interested in endings, we only wanted to watch the beginnings of things.

Until Richard Pryor. I can’t remember what movie it was, though it was hardly that, I think they stuck a camera up into his face and let him ramble for an hour and we were glued. We let the three other passengers up and out and sat right there waiting for the next turn to come round.

Even when Richard Pryor’s face is smooth and untouched he looks like he can chew off a bit of wall and spit it into new storm troopered life. There is anger written all over him, the kind that would like to do bad things to good people and instead of being afraid we are crying with laughter from every unexpected place.

He is not doing a shtick, that’s one thing. He is talking about his life, the one he is actually living, and about his relationship, the very closest and most personal and hurtful thing of all, and there, where it matters most, he is acting like an asshole, showing himself not as some shining love machine, but instead as a dangerously manic alcoholic who probably shouldn’t even be allowed outside his own house. And he is making all that shit funny, he is finding some way to make an approach to it, and turning it all around the way the old Cubists did, so that I can hear it from every side at the same time, though the truth is when most angry people start to talk I can’t hear a thing. All I can hear is the high frequency sounds of all that bad feeling.

But Pryor turns his anger into something soft and easy so it goes down, so I can listen up close. And behind every angry spit and outrage there is this sentiment, lurking and waiting: I am a black man, and I have been fucked around for being black. You hurt me but I’m not giving in, I’m standing up and giving it all back. And sometimes his beautiful black princess takes the brunt or one of his co-workers or god forbid a boss.

Can anyone be a boss of a mountain? But he is up there on a black power, civil rights, equality now stand, no question, and he is angry it hasn’t happened yet, so angry he’s willing to make it funny so that I can choke it down with all the other white food I don’t even notice I’m busy throwing up over everything.

- Mike Hoolboom

Guy Debord, “Critique of Separation” (1961) -- Part One (subtitles begin at 2 minutes)

Guy Debord, how I wish I hadn’t read the book where you rattle on as a bitter old drunk. Sure, it must have been painful to know so much so early, and not die with all that fine understanding passing between those perfect lips. What is left to do after the world ends, and you’re not yet forty, and history makes a prophet out of you but not a martyr, and you survive your fifteen minutes and become a legend who only wants to drink it all away?

He was born in 1931 and made six movies, this one when he was only 30. He is best known, of course, for his landmark Situationist text “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), where he laid down the rules, as he saw them, for the new capitalism, which had swapped being for having, and floated all of us newly reborn consumers inside a never-ending playground of pictures.

Here is a summary riff from R.D. Crano: “The mediator of social relations and guarantor of model subjectivity, spectacle functionally conditions our very being-in-the-world-with-others, whose distinctive ontological mark in a capitalist society is separation.”

What I love most of all about this movie is how ordinary it is, and even though he’s trying not to care, the camera loaders he’s employed are still inside their habits of seeking out the light on her face, and the glint off the napkins, and so everywhere there are moments of unexpected, even unwanted and intrusive, beauty.

His mouth seems trained on these ordinary moments between ordinary people, and he aims to carve them up with his fine French words, fresh from his own academy and served cold and drawn from the furthest megaphone of the furthest tower.

Why is it I can still feel the heat of the young man who would like to reach into every picture and wrestle it to the ground. Why do those pointed shoes hurt him? The way he looks into her face? The streetcar ferrying its passengers home, all this is somehow outrageous and unbearable. I can feel him jumping up and down at whatever passes by his widow, and his genius is that he can turn his tantrum into something that pulls away at the masks we are busy wearing, and substituting another mask, one which he has made himself, with a little help from his dead writer friends. “The official language of universal separation.”

What looks like the far shore or the impossible frontier flashes by the windscreen in an instant and then it’s behind us, already gone. Part of a brilliant past we can’t help returning to when the nights are grey.

Guy Debord, “Critique of Separation” (1961) -- Part Two

The complete script of “Critique de la séparation” with illustrations, detailed descriptions of the images, and extensive annotations, is included in “Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works” (AK Press, 2003). For further information, see Guy Debord’s Films.

- Mike Hoolbloom

Here is a new translation by Ken Knabb of the complete voice-over soundtrack of the film:

“We don’t know what to say. Sequences of words are repeated; gestures are recognized. Outside us. Of course some methods are mastered, some results are verified. Often it’s amusing. But so many things we wanted have not been attained, or only partially and not like we imagined. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only simulated? What real project has been lost?

The cinematic spectacle has its rules, its reliable methods for producing satisfactory products. But the reality that must be taken as a point of departure is dissatisfaction. The function of the cinema, whether dramatic or documentary, is to present a false and isolated coherence as a substitute for a communication and activity that are absent. To demystify documentary cinema it is necessary to dissolve its “subject matter.”

A well-established rule is that any statement in a film that is not illustrated by images must be repeated or else the spectators will miss it. That may be true. But this same type of miscommunication constantly occurs in everyday encounters. Something must be specified but there’s not enough time, and you are not sure you have been understood. Before you have said or done what was necessary, the other person has already gone. Across the street. Overseas. Too late for any rectification.

After all the empty time, all the lost moments, there remain these endlessly traversed postcard landscapes; this distance organized between each and everyone. Childhood? Why, it’s right here — we have never emerged from it.

Our era accumulates powers and imagines itself as rational. But no one recognizes these powers as their own. Nowhere is there any entry to adulthood. The only thing that happens is that this long restlessness sometimes eventually evolves into a routinized sleep. Because no one ceases to be kept under guardianship. The point is not to recognize that some people live more or less poorly than others, but that we all live in ways that are out of our control.

At the same time, it is a world that has taught us how things change. Nothing stays the same. The world changes more rapidly every day; and I have no doubt that those who day after day produce it against themselves can appropriate it for themselves.

The only adventure, we said, is to contest the totality, whose center is this way of living, where we can test our strength but never use it. No adventure is directly created for us. The adventures that are presented to us form part of the mass of legends transmitted by the cinema or in other ways; part of the whole spectacular sham of history.

Until the environment is collectively dominated, there will be no real individuals — only specters haunting the objects anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated people moving randomly. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and reinforce their solid environment of boredom. As long as we are unable to make our own history, to freely create situations, our striving toward unity will give rise to other separations. The quest for a unified activity leads to the formation of new specializations.

And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life that has not really been found.

What cannot be forgotten reappears in dreams. At the end of this type of dream, half asleep, the events are still for a brief moment taken as real. Then the reactions they give rise to become clearer, more distinct, more reasonable; like on so many mornings the memory of what you drank the night before. Then comes the awareness that it’s all false, that “it was only a dream,” that the new realities were illusory and you can’t get back into them. Nothing you can hold on to. These dreams are flashes from the unresolved past, flashes that illuminate moments previously lived in confusion and doubt. They provide a blunt revelation of our unfulfilled needs.

Here we see daylight, and perspectives that now no longer have any meaning. The sectors of a city are to some extent decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.

Official news is elsewhere. Society broadcasts to itself its own image of its own history, a history reduced to a superficial and static pageant of its rulers — the persons who embody the apparent inevitability of whatever happens. The world of the rulers is the world of the spectacle. The cinema suits them well. Regardless of its subject matter, the cinema presents heroes and exemplary conduct modeled on the same old pattern as the rulers.

This dominant equilibrium is brought back into question each time unknown people try to live differently. But it was always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, relating to it as just another spectacle. We are separated from it by our own nonintervention. And end up being rather disappointed in ourselves. At what moment was choice postponed? When did we miss our chance? We haven’t found the arms we needed. We’ve let things slip away.

I have let time slip away. I have lost what I should have defended.

This general critique of separation obviously contains, and conceals, some particular memories. A less recognized pain, a less explicable feeling of shame. Just what separation was it? How quickly we have lived! It is to this point in our haphazard story that we now return.

Everything involving the sphere of loss — that is, what I have lost of myself, the time that has gone; and disappearance, flight; and the general evanescence of things, and even what in the prevalent and therefore most vulgar social sense of time is called wasted time — all this finds in that strangely apt old military term, lost children, its intersection with the sphere of discovery, of the exploration of unknown terrains, and with all the forms of quest, adventure, avant-garde. This is the crossroads where we have found ourselves and lost our way.

It must be admitted that none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.

The poverty of means is intended to reveal the scandalous poverty of the subject matter.
The events that occur in our individual existence as it is now organized, the events that really concern us and require our participation, generally merit nothing more than our indifference as distant and bored spectators. In contrast, the situations presented in artistic works are often attractive, situations that would merit our active participation. This is a paradox to reverse, to put back on its feet. This is what must be realized in practice. As for this idiotic spectacle of the filtered and fragmented past, full of sound and fury, it is not a question now of transforming or “adapting” it into another neatly ordered spectacle that would play the game of neatly ordered comprehension and participation. No. A coherent artistic expression expresses nothing but the coherence of the past, nothing but passivity.

It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To undermine the conventions of its communication. To demoralize its fans. What a task! As in a blurry drunken vision, the memory and language of the film fade out simultaneously. At the extreme, miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objectivity: a documentation of the conditions of noncommunication.

For example, I don’t talk about her. False face. False relation. A real person is separated from the interpreter of that person, if only by the time passed between the event and its evocation, by a distance that continually increases, a distance that is increasing at this very moment. Just as a conserved expression remains separate from those who hear it abstractly and without any power over it.

The spectacle as a whole is nothing other than this era, an era in which a certain youth has recognized itself. It is the gap between that image and its consequences; the gap between the visions, tastes, refusals and projects that previously characterized this youth and the way it has advanced into ordinary life.

We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network of possible itineraries. We get used to it, it seems.

No one returns from an enterprise with the ardor they had upon setting out. Fair companions, adventure is dead.

Who will resist? It is necessary to go beyond this partial defeat. Of course. And how to do it?

This is a film that interrupts itself and does not come to an end.

All conclusions remain to be drawn; everything has to be recalculated.

The problem continues to be posed — in continually more complicated terms. We have to resort to other measures.

Just as there was no profound reason to begin this formless message, so there is none for concluding it.

I have scarcely begun to make you understand that I don’t intend to play the game.”

END

Translation copyright 2003 by Ken Knabb. (This copyright will not be enforced against personal or noncommercial use.)

Miranda July, “How To Make A Button” (2008)

It’s not just her face, is it? This is what I have to ask myself. Her perfect and always opening face, as if the world was busy being born every time she looked at it. What if she was a burn victim, what if the cancer which was threatening my dear Matthias’s face had found her too, in our culture which believes in hiding only the most pure and functional and beautiful parts of the body (the genitals), while staging in demonstration, again and again, the most obscene and difficult and unbearable moment of the body: the face. What if she didn’t have that face, the one that invites me to share her look and looking, that promises an easy landing? Would she still have the endless charm of July?

Wherever I look there is always the irresistible tyranny of the face. I return to it again and again, the open wound of the eyes, the mouth issuing words I have already heard, but now in new combinations, salted with a personal touch. As I get older I have stopped trying to impose my face on all those who stand around me, and instead I am opening to them; it began as a kind of party game and turned quickly enough into habit. I stand in front of him and her and let their faces enter me, and always their solitude hurts me, no matter how often it happens, it takes me by surprise. The loneliness and pain. The childhood misunderstandings which refuse to heal. The old loops, worn into the ovoid mask of the face. Look at me. Listen to me. And then leave me alone in my loneliness.

Miranda appears in front of her camera like she’s been sunning herself there all day -- her greeting is bright and casual and without effort. It comes from a place, or at least this is the promise, where all the dark things can be held, and turned over, and made light again and then blown off the end of your fingertips. That’s how she appears to me, with her almost studied clumsiness and her invitations to step right in alongside. The quick smile flashing across her face like a secret she can’t keep to herself. Her shy narcissism.

I try not to let her American drawl remind me of the secret torture prisons scattered around the world. “Were you ever a member of…” voices just like this one are busy drawling right now as they maim and drown and electrify their charge. She sounds like them but she’s not one of them, that’s what I want to believe, that’s what this face wants to make me believe. And more than that. I want to believe that even if all of my best friends were busy doing it, even if it was the only way to feed my family, even if I enjoyed it, even if my every cell sang with happiness at the pleasure of watching flesh separating from bone, I wouldn’t torture the man my boss refers to only as a number in a log book.

This July face offers permission to think past the worst thoughts. To pick up that darkness and keep right on moving. It is a face busy with its own transformations, unafraid of getting older. She is ready to observe that change too. And how easily and lightly she changes the ordinary things around her into something extraordinary. The darkness, the unwanted touch, the sad descent we called love, this is all called up from ordinary things. It rests in mustard jars and table cloths and denim jeans. The covers of unread books. A pencil not yet sharpened, pregnant with unwritten words.

In this video she shakes her head no, again and again, as if she were refusing the world she is inviting. Wearing her best Patti Smith Horses shirt and tie, is there anything here, even the sunlight, that has not been plotted in advance? But it is her voice that holds a secret. Something has happened to this voice, it should lie inside her just a little deeper, it should call out from the knot of her guts but instead it lies ever so slightly pinched at the top end of her rib cage, and along with a sing-song quality it grants her speech at once an airy lightness -- oh, it’s nothing -- and more than a hint that something has happened to her, that in fact her lightness is a way of coping with the too much that has already happened. Her voice is the reaction shot, it bears the wound, and how very well, even easily she seems to wear it. Like every artist I admire, she has turned her wound into something beautiful, and with typical generosity she offers her gift to everyone. Look, you can do it too! C’mon in!

- Mike Hoolboom