BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SPRING 2001

38 :: benjamin smoke :: 4/23/01

It's Saturday morning and Freya and Jakob sit in the Music Box, watching Jem Cohen's new documentary, Benjamin Smoke. It had been a few weeks since they'd last gotten together— he'd warned her that he might temporarily "vanish," citing an end-of-semester wall of student papers to grade and a project of his own that he needs to complete. I'm going to hermit for a while.

She can respect that. When she heard about Benjamin Smoke, though, she decided to ring him up. She's seen an earlier documentary by Cohen, a documentary on Fugazi entitled Instrument, and she remembered that it was full of shots of urban and suburban landscapes, an American wasteland of parking lots and freeway underpasses and bridges, and she figured this new film would share some of that vision. Jakob studies cities ("social space," as he puts it sometimes), and so she guessed that he'd pick up on whatever it was that Cohen was doing in these films, and find it interesting. (Plus: they may have been only seeing one another once a week— usually during her lunch break on days he wasn't teaching — but she has to admit that she'd come to like that time. A comfortable type of being had begun to emerge from the awkwardness of their early times together, and when those small comforts went absent she missed them.)

—I know you're busy but you should come out for this. Getting out of the house would do you good. He decided that she was right. He's working on a paper and he's so deep into it that he can no longer tell if his argument makes sense at all. It's become a kind of climate: he inhabits it, can move about in it, but he's no longer sure what its outline looks like. Getting out of the house for something besides teaching and seminar would do him good. Hopefully he'll be able to return with some perspective. (Plus: in the background of his mental channel there had been a thin strand of panic about Freya; he's still interested in her romantically, and he had worried that revising her out of his field of attention for a time would blow his chances: he has to admit that he was thrilled when she called.)

Now he's here in this theater watching dirty go-karting kids in Cabbagetown, Georgia, the home of this character, Benjamin, a drag chanteuse. The film is a memorial for Benjamin, undoubtedly, an archive of his extinct tales and mannerisms, but the film is also about Cabbagetown. If anything Jakob would say that the film is about how a certain place can produce a certain person. A map of the complex interrelationships between place and identity. Cabbagetown was formerly a milltown, and the partial demolition of the mill left a vacuum in the town, a vacuum felt throughout the film, defining the town through its absence, the same way a dead person defines their empty home. The ruin of the mill haunts the film, appearing over and over again, an empty center.

Towards the end of the film, as Benjamin wanes, Cabbagetown begins to show signs of gentrification: its ruination suddenly appealing to yuppies seeking marks of authenticity, of the unspoiled, or simply seeking a bargain. Estate agents appear; the advance guard of a generically cheerful soulless sprawl to come. The film seems to ask: what kinds of people will this new landscape produce? Will this new landscape produce a new Benjamin?

In the distance there is Atlanta: the new Atlanta: gleaming corporate towers.

Jakob's arm touches Freya's.

Afterwards, walking back towards the L, warm weather, birds: —I'd be interested in seeing that other movie he did, the one you mentioned, Instrument? —Yeah, Freya says. —I've got a copy of it at my place, do you want to come over and watch it, maybe once your semester finishes up?

—Yeah, he says. He's never been over to her place before. —Yeah, that sounds great.