BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SUMMER 2001

Thomas looks around at the space of the Chopin Theatre. The screening he is here for, a screening of video art experiments from the 1970's, has not yet begun. He looks at the chairs and the gathering crowd. Thinks: being a crowd in the dark is a way to disappear. This is part of the appeal of the movies. He doesn't really go to movies very much: he's glad that Lydia suggested attending this screening. He has his Sony Cassette-corder in his bag, and he momentarily thinks about pulling it out and recording his observation about crowds, but then he realizes that he would look weird in front of Lydia, murmuring into a device. In order to explain what he was doing, he would need to explain his project, and he doesn't yet feel ready to do that.

He looks over at Lydia, smiles. —I'm looking forward to this, he says.

—Yeah, she says. She smiles. —Me too.

He finds himself with nothing left to say, so he says nothing more. He meant what he said genuinely. He is having a good time, just sitting here in the theatre with her. The conversations between the two of them still tend to grow stilted and awkward— if he was to draw their shape he would draw an organism that was all corners, sparse, slightly malformed —but he has been learning that this is not necessarily cause for panic, that a silence between two people can be enjoyable. He has been learning. Janine once encouraged him to pursue Lydia by saying: relationships teach you how to be in relationships. He has begun to understand what she meant. He has begun to learn how to be in the world with another person.

He looks out at the front of the room again and sees Freya and some guy he doesn't know, getting seats.

—Hey, Thomas says to Lydia, —I know her.

—Oh yeah? says Lydia.

—Yeah, she works at Tympanum, the record store? We kind of became friends just from me going in there so much. She calls me up when stuff comes in that I might like.

—Cool, says Lydia. —You going to go say 'hi'?

—Yeah, Thomas says. But then it looks like the films are about to get started. —After, he says.

Steina :: Violin Power (1970)

This film features a series of shots of a woman playing a violin. She has created some kind of apparatus— Lydia can't imagine exactly how the hardware would be set up, but somehow the violin tones are translated into visual distortion. As the frequency of the notes change, the distortion patterns affecting the videotaped image of the woman also change. Lydia is completely engrossed: she has been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between humans and electricity, and here is a film in which a woman modulates uses sound to modulate her electronic image. Lydia never responded particularly strongly to the few feminist texts that she read at Indiana University, but she recognizes that this film features a woman seizing a type of power: the power to guide her own mutation.

Ghost: in one shot the woman's image has completely disappeared, but a form, sawing away at the violin, remains apparent, as a moving outline in a shimmering field of electronic distortion. To put your form into the noise of the age. Power.

Vito Acconci :: Theme Song (1973)

Freya snickers. This film features a vaguely homely guy lying down on the floor of an apartment, with his face only inches away from the camera. He is smoking cigarettes and playing tapes of romantic rock songs— the Velvet's "Pale Blue Eyes" is on right now —but mostly he is addressing one fucking long monologue of a seduction speech to the camera. To the audience. It's hilarious. Freya has inadvertantly laughed out loud a half-dozen times now. It reminds her of every lame-ass guy who's ever tried to pick her up. Come on, baby. I'm a body and you're a body. You need it just as much as I do. It's also a little bit painful— Freya estimates that the film has been going on for nearly twenty minutes, and there has been no relief from the endless earnest pleading of this figure, who's right there smack dab in the middle of her visual field. Just come in here. See how I can wrap my body around you.

She leans over to Jakob. —At least in real life this guy would be buying me drinks, she says.

—Heh, Jakob says.

Steina & Woody Vasulka :: Don Cherry (1971)

This film is less experimental than the other ones, and (so far) Jakob likes it the best. It's a video portrait of Don Cherry, a jazz player. Jakob is vaguely familiar with Cherry, mainly from looking at Fletcher's CDs.

The film starts out with Cherry climbing to the top of a crumbling industrial building via the fire escape. He stands there at the edge of the building, looking out at the urban landscape around him, and then he puts his horn up to his lips and plays, plays gorgeously, reaches into apparent nothing and produces a message of utter clarity and intention. The camera pans as he is playing, revealing nothing but more gray world, dingy windows and ghostsigned brick, but the message spills over it, threads through it, delivers grace as it resounds off of the surfaces of the city.

He hopes, one day, to write a novel about a city of signals. He realizes, now, that others before him have explored that secret territory. Thirty years ago, a jazz player stands on the roof of a building, and, using his voice and his horn, he produces a map—

Further Reading ::
Information Prose : A Manifesto In 47 Points ::

A manifesto, outlining some of the aesthetic goals behind Imaginary Year, can now be read here.