Laughlin's Inner World

Before being a photographer, Clarence John Laughlin was an urban explorer. He was a lover of ruins, the streets, and history. He would often ignore no trespassing signs, and sneak into off-limits locations to enjoy the beauty of something wasting away. A love for ruins has always been a part of the Romantic mindset, as can be seen in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin. But unlike his predecessors, who focused on the ruins of medieval castles, churches, and Roman cities, Laughlin looked to the plantations of the Old South, and the changing face of the American city, most notably New Orleans.

Laughlin’s New Orleans streetscapes and cemeteries, when at their strongest, resemble the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. Shadows become enigmatic. Pillars and archways, void of people, look like places you might have visited in a dream. Sometimes there is an ethereal vanishing point. At other times, the rough roads or elegant interiors take on a complexity that mixes branches and old wooden doors with spiral staircases and cast iron fences. Camera in hand, Laughlin passed inside broken houses and down dark alleyways, preserving in photographs the old world that modernism was trying to erase. But he also used the city as a source for interpretation. The camera became not just a tool to document, but a tool to view the world in new disorienting ways.

Outside of New Orleans, his favorite subjects were the dying plantation houses along the Mississippi. When it comes to death these photographs are twofold. They are images of old structures coming apart at the seams, but they double as symbols of a different kind of darkness. The plantations were once places where people were enslaved, tortured, and murdered. No matter how beautiful the buildings look, it’s a history that cannot be erased. The locations serve as markers of a repulsive past, but there is a unique beauty about the buildings that pulls the viewer in. The feelings are contradictory. When not shown as matter-of-fact photographs, Laughlin double exposed the plantation mansions with Oak trees covered in Spanish moss, as if to combat the history and decay with some kind of positive representation of growth. It’s what surrealists would identify as the unification of two opposing states. The resolution of life and death.

Laughlin considered himself a surrealist. It’s even written on his tombstone. Similar to Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, he often used double images to project his own inner world onto the outer world of appearances. When shot correctly, Laughlin could make a burnt melted object take on the characteristics of a human face, or transform a pineapple into a rocket ship. He disrupted the mundane ways of viewing the world and gave the viewer new eyes. When a heart-shaped wreath was placed just right on a tombstone, Laughlin showed that it might also be viewed as a strange living creature, such as in his photograph The Insect-Headed Tombstone. The viewer sees things that aren’t physically there but are still somehow captured through the camera lens.

The photographs of Laughlin’s that affect me most are his veiled women. Largely collected in his photographic group Poems from the Inner World, these women are a repetitive motif. He littered them throughout the ruins, mansions, cemeteries, and partially torn down buildings. They are hidden behind black veils and sheets or masked with mirrors. Some are even wrapped in plastic. They mimic classical statuary. Women frozen in time. Parallels can be made to Rene Magritte’s shrouded women, as seen in a painting like L’Invention de la vie. They are mysterious, dark, and unavailable. Sometimes they are the centerpiece of the composition, but they can also be hidden in the picture, mixed in with the surrounding environs.

The Repulsive Bed, 1941

The most haunting of these women is in Laughlin’s photograph The Repulsive Bed. A woman, dressed in black, sits on a collapsed piece of furniture. It is presumably a bed, although it’s impossible to tell due to its mangled condition. She is veiled, but she is also in the shadows. She sits in a spacious, yet destroyed room. Behind her is a burnt door with paint peeling off it, and to her right is a fireplace. Taken after one of Laughlin’s many divorces, the photograph can’t help but point to Laughlin’s own troubled relationship with the opposite sex. In his caption for the piece, he wrote that this is the image of a marriage without love. Usually, I find that what an artist has written about a piece only obfuscates the real meaning, but with this caption, I think Laughlin had an extraordinary moment of transparency.

It is photographs such as these mentioned that make Laughlin a paragon of sorts. He held the keys to a new field of vision. His entire body of work, which spans over 17,000 images, was a continuous exploration of what he called the enigma of reality. When I’m exploring New Orleans, whether in it’s famous cemeteries, the French Quarter, on levees, or even under freeways, I can’t help but wonder how Laughlin would have framed what I’m seeing today. New Orleans is a place where you surrender to the atmosphere. Hidden within it are doors to other worlds, and you only need to find the right way of looking to walk through them. Laughlin knew this. He opened the doors.

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You can browse many of Laughlin’s photographs online at The Clarence John Laughlin Photograph Collection courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.

Like Cattle Towards Glow

In May of this year I went to the United States premier of Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s film Like Cattle Towards Glow. The screening was held at San Francisco’s Alamo Theatre, which felt almost too posh for a movie by Cooper. Cooper has always been one of the few modern fiction writers that piques my interest. I must admit, what I like best about Cooper’s work is his dangerous approach to sexuality. His stories are known for their carnal violence, and the characters in his novels often do things that should nauseate me, but somehow I feel excited. More often, I feel conflicted.

I know nothing about Cooper’s co-director, Zac Farley. He didn’t speak much at the premier, either. But this is not the first time Cooper has collaborated on a film: 1995 saw the release of a film adaptation of Cooper’s novel Frisk, which stylistically comes off as a lo-fi copycat of a Gregg Araki movie. I’m not sure how much involvement Cooper had with the Frisk adaption, but it didn’t seem to stay true to the tempo or voice of his writing. With Like Cattle Towards Glow, Cooper and Farley are able to find that balance in the cinematic realm. Following in the footsteps of the French director Robert Bresson, they use untrained actors and capture performances that are often made up of just movement and words. By eliminating the contrivances of professional actors, the characters come off as very cerebral and earnest.

But the minimalism doesn't stop with the performances. Split into five unrelated scenes, the film starts out very simple and realistic but gets otherworldly as it progresses. In the first scene, a young man hires a male prostitute to play dead for him. The second has a punk noise band performing at an underground club, where the singer is gang-raped in front of the audience. In the third, a junkie rims and fists a suicidal male prostitute near some train tracks. And the fourth has a young blond raped and murdered in a dreamlike snowscape. The culprits are two delinquents dressed as demons.

It’s the fifth and final scene that is, for me, the money shot. A young man is stalked by a woman using a remote control drone. She follows him along a beach. He takes solace in some old graffiti-covered ruins. Inside the ruins, the woman has set up surveillance cameras. Despite their different languages, the two are able to share a conversation, albeit one mediated by technology. Like many of the young men in this film, he looks lost, or as if he is running from something. The two seem to be having a conciliatory talk until the woman says, “There is a tragedy to you. What the drugs have done to your looks, that's incredibly hot.” Despite her nurturing, motherly side, she can’t help but see him as a sexual thing. Even with the most righteous intentions, desire’s predatory head can emerge.

Not every scene in Like Cattle Towards Glow involves fucking, but in each one there is sexual tension. The desire for another’s body, the want to dominate them, is always present. But these interactions don’t mimic the fake pleasures of an X-rated film. When we do see them, the erections and assholes are handled imperfectly. The unsimulated sex doesn’t get you off. More importantly, in each scene there is an awkwardness in how the actors interact with one another. I’ve always felt it’s very difficult to truly know another person. Our words, touches, and expressions often fail us. There is always something in the way. In a world that sees desire as a sinister force, wholeheartedly connecting with someone seems impossible. Simply fucking can’t always shatter that estrangement. And I think Like Cattle Towards Glow touches on that failure.

Interview With Tiny Knives

Originally appeared in Maximum Rocknroll #397 (June 2016).

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Portland’s Tiny Knives are one of the last holdouts from a powerful period in the city’s recent punk past. For me, they symbolize a time when you could go to a house show almost seven days a week and never see the same band twice. Growing out of the now-defunct Cook Street punk house, a onetime hub for art punks and bike punks alike, Tiny Knives has remained resilient while much of the scene they emerged from has been forced out by the city’s greed. In spite of this, Tiny Knives continues to put out song after song of rage and frustration. Their music, violent and cleansing, is an attack on everything this shitty oppressive world does to tear people apart and shut people down. It’s an emotional purge of the toxicities of this modern hell we call culture. On a recent trip back to Portland I sat down for a few drinks with guitarist and vocalist Jai Milx, bassist Ursula Morton, and drummer Jamey Anderson, to discuss their history and their newest record, Black Haze.

What brought the three of you together?
Jai: Jamey and I played a little bit of music together in a group that was at Cook Street. The group was Soo Koelbli from Big Black Cloud, Kitty Celeste, Adriane Ackerman, and a bunch of female people. We all played music together a couple times, and then nothing came of it. Ursula and I had talked about playing music like a year before. We talked about jamming on some stuff. I was in Popitilopitilus, but I wanted to play my own songs.
Ursula: Bob Jones, who was playing in Popitilopitilus, kept saying, “You should start a band with Jai,” and then I’d go and watch her and I’d be like, “Yeah, I’d really be into that.”

And Jamey was in the Vonneguts around this time?
Jai: Popitilopitilus and the Vonneguts had played together, and Jamey moved in around the corner so we were getting to know each other.
Jamey: We started hanging out a bit. Then I quit the Vonneguts, and was bandless for a while.
Jai: We were playing music in the summer with that project at Cook Street, but then when it got to winter I said to Captain Shirt, my partner at the time, “I just really want to start a band with people,” and he was like, “What about Jamey and Ursula?”
Ursula: I think Shirt and I met through Bob Jones too.

Was there a conscious decision to make Tiny Knives an all female band?
Ursula: Nope.
Jai: It was pretty circumstantial.

That’s interesting because when I lived in Portland that was the impression I got, and that seemed to be the emphasis.
Jai: I think that emphasis is put on us. 
Jamey: For sure.
Jai: I understand that’s a point of interest and intersection with people who enjoy our music, and I enjoy seeing all female or queer bands. We actually were initially talking about adding other members, but it’s just that the three of us clicked so well, and we were making a full enough sound on our own.
Jamey: I had literally not met Ursula until the day we jammed.
Ursula: I had just seen Jamey play in the Vonneguts.

Is there a backstory to the name Tiny Knives?
Jamey: We were sitting at the Florida Room, trying our damnedest to come up with something. We came up with a few that were already taken. We were coming up with some that were terrible, like an-animal-plus-something-else bullshit.
Ursula: I was really into Hawk Moth. It ended up being a metal band from Australia or something.
Jamey: Yeah, we couldn’t do it. Any time we’d come up with something cool we’d Google it and find there’d already be a band named that. Like Mirror Mirror was probably my favorite band name. Eventually, I suggested Tiny Knives because I’m a knife nerd, and I’ve had a tiny knives collection for quite awhile. 
Jai: I think it was partially inspired by Jamey’s tattoo too. Because Jamey has a little knife tattooed behind her ear.
Ursula: Jamey has a stick and poke that she had long before we were a band. Now we all have tiny knife tattoos that are from a more detailed, ornate, drawing that Jai did with fancy jewels and everything. Jai and Jamey have it on their forearms and mine is on my foot.

I’ve always been a little hesitant about labeling Tiny Knives a riot grrl band. I feel like it’s really easy to label female punk bands that. How would you describe your band?
Jai: I’ve started to say we’re a heavy band. When we started I think punk and post-punk were both really comfortable labels for what we we’re doing, but as we’ve kept going we’ve incorporated more elements of metal, hardcore, and noise. I think Eolian, the label we’re on, inspired me to start using the word “heavy” because they’re self-described as heavy music. I’ve started to just say that too because I don’t want to say that we’re a “punk post-punk hardcore metal band.” (laughs)
Ursula: I actually like thrashy, sludgy punk. But not “punk metal.” (everyone laughs)

Can you list some of the music that has influenced you?
Jamey: I grew up on riot grrl and hip-hop in equal amounts. And soul.
Ursula: I’m from the Midwest, so I was really into Dow Jones and the Industrials, and 70s punk bands from the Midwest. But then one of my favorite bands has always been Mudhoney. When I was younger I was really into Slayer, Death, Cannibal Corpse, and all these heavy death metal bands.
Jai: I grew up really loving riot grrl. I discovered Kill Rock Stars when I was fifteen, and I was so pumped and ready to order stuff from them. That definitely was a huge early influence on me. I listen to soul, girl groups, and oldies. And I listen to a lot of R&B these days. But growing up I loved the 77 New York punk bands, the CBGB scene, Richard Hell, Television. Patti Smith was a huge influence. Those were some of the first punk bands that I got into. I loved them because they were so intelligent and irreverent at the same time. And a lot of the punk that was being made in the 90s when I was growing up, especially in upstate New York, was just bro-ey hardcore. I had no intersectionality with that whatsoever.
Ursula: I was also obsessed with a lot of Kill Rock Stars bands. Unwound was one of my favorite bands.
Jamey: Budgie from Siouxsie and the Banshees has always been an influence on me as a drummer. All of his tom work and other stuff that he does.

There’s been some talk about sexism within the Portland metal scene. Is that something you all have experienced?
Jamey: It’s in the music scene. It’s honestly probably less in the metal scene, especially as far as the folks from Eolian go. It’s just something you deal with.
Jai: We’ve been around long enough at this point that we’ve garnered a certain kind of respect. Sexism is definitely alive and well in this scene. It’s something you have to work at being comfortable and confident with because people are going to assume that you don’t know what you’re talking about. And that’s a real ass thing about being a female musician.
Jamey: It’s often sound guys. What the fuck is up with sound guys?
Jai: Sexism manifests itself in the fact that we are constantly being reminded about the reality of us being a female band.

Right, and that’s why I wasn’t sure about asking you a question like this.
Jai: It’s both positive and negative. People who are female, or queer, or trans, feel empowered and excited by us being an all female band, and empowered to make their own music. I feel so fortunate about that aspect of it. But the other side of it is that people come up to you after you perform and are like, “Whoa, you chicks rule. Like you totally slayed it.” Of course, in Portland we get that less. You can walk into a music store here and someone’s not going to treat you like an idiot. 
Jamey: After we get done playing there’s bewildered surprise from dudes that would have judged us.
Ursula: I tend to be kind of quiet and mysterious or something, and then after shows I get that, but I don’t think it has to do with my gender so much as just my personality. I always get people coming up to me after they saw us for the first time, and going “Wow! You guys shred.” 
Jai: I have to say, I don’t think male vocalists get bros coming up to them after a show and being like, “That was so raw and vulnerable!” I don’t think that happens to male front people. At our last show at the Kenton Club three different men came up to me and told me, with slight variations of the words, that I was raw and vulnerable. I don’t think that happens to “Vlad” from some black metal group. No one says to him, “Man, that was so deep and I just go this impression of you as a vulnerable human being,” and then hugs them. I don’t think that’s happens to male vocalists.

Why did it take four years to release this album?
Jai: Originally when we started the band I was bringing a lot of the material, and then we’d finish writing the songs together. I’d have the basic construct of the song. Usually, I’d write the words first, and because I was just getting started I’d write them on acoustic guitar, then transfer to electric. Over time, and throughout our album Static, Ursula started bringing more and more ideas, riffs, and concepts. With this album Ursula actually generated the bulk of two of the songs, “Winter” and “Dark History.”
Jamey: Those are songs that Ursula brought to the table.
Jai: And she created the framework and had them pretty much done as far as her part went. We barely tinkered with the structure of those, really.
Jamey: We didn’t have to because they were so awesome and complex already.
Ursula: We’d add parts to them. Jai would come up with like a shell of a song, and we’ll add a bunch of stuff to it. And Jamey’s really good with song structure. But mostly I add the weird parts to everything.
Jai: This album was like pulling teeth for me. I was having trouble coming up with words. I was feeling really creatively blocked immediately after Static came out. And so the progress was really slow. In fact, we finished recording this album a year and a half ago, and then there were a bunch of stumbling blocks.
Ursula: It took awhile just to get together the artwork. And I think a lot of it is we usually play so many shows. This is the longest we’ve gone without playing a show — this period right now. Usually, we’re playing so many shows. We’re practicing our songs for our shows, and then not having enough time to work on new songs.

Does it come with just being active in life?
Jamey: I think for Ursula and I maybe more so.
Ursula: We work a lot. And Jai travels a lot too.
Jai: I’m out of town for two or three months out of the year.
Ursula: We already do have like four new songs.
Jai: We have two new songs written, and two others that are well on their way.
Ursula: We have a new song that is kind of like, not a concept, but…
Jai: A medley. We’re trying to write a multipart song, that’s like a journey. 
Jamey: It’s going to be EP length.
Ursula: Like four songs that can stand alone, but that are all one song also.
Jai: And linked thematically. The theme is gentrification. 
Jamey: Which is appropriate for fucking Portland.

How did you get involved with Eolian?
Jai: Josh from Eolian came up to both Ursula and I separately. He talked to us about really liking our band, and that he was interested in putting out a record. This was very early in the days of him taking over Eolian. He hit the ground running. He’s put out several dozen releases in the recent past.

The way I see it, Eolian is taking on every Portland band I still like.
Jai: They get described a lot in reviews of the label and the bands and stuff, including in one of our reviews, as weird, heavy music.
Jamey: Which is appropriate.
Jai: They’re open to non-conforming heavy music.
Jamey: It’s nice to have someone with distribution and contacts with promotion.

Who recorded the album?
Jamey: Caravan Recording. It’s Andrew Grosse and Jose De Lara, but Andrew mostly did the recording, and Jose did the mastering and mixing.

Is this Andrew and Jose’s portable recording service?
Jai: Yeah, but we did it in a space that Andrew had at the time. 
Ursula: The idea of the portable recording is that they can go anywhere. For example, they recorded Oro Azoro in a church. The idea is that they can be mobile if you want to record in your bathroom or your practice space or whatever. But they also have a studio.
Jai: With isolation.
Jamey: Which they have for bands that just want to come to them, like us. And it was awesome. I mean we’ve worked with Jose on every single album we’ve put out, and have been happy every time. 
Jai: He mastered the first album and was instrumental in recording the other two.
Jamey: Jose paired with Andrew was really amazing, because Andrew had some really good ideas about how to mic the drums.

The first song on the album, “Dark History,” is very guttural. It has an almost metal sound to it. The vocals are like something you’d hear on a grindcore record. Is this a new direction for Tiny Knives?
Jamey: It’s a progression.
Jai: I feel in some ways we have gotten heavier. For me, it’s in experimenting with singing, and with delivering in a guttural, intensely unpretty way. I laughingly call it my Cookie Monster vocals. I think a lot of my interests in the beginning laid with the rock ’n’ roll side of punk, and I didn’t know how to play metal, or grindcore, or other things, but as my musicality has improved I want to experiment. And I think that was intentionally a direction I went in with my vocals, and I’m not even sure that I’ll continue. I want to keep doing different things, and constantly be incorporating different kinds of music. That’s just how I am. I like to write in a lot of different veins.
Jamey: One of the things I love about this band is it’s always progressing, and changing in the best possible way. I’m never bored when we’re writing songs.

The cover of Black Haze is really strikingly different from the other covers. I mean, it’s really intense. You have these huge swords.
Ursula: The great sword was a Christmas present from me to Jose, and the short sword was a birthday present to me from Jose. The other sword we borrowed from our friend Arolia’s son, Dagon. 
Jai: Eolian offered us the services of their photographer, James Rexroad. He’s a photojournalist. He took amazing pictures of when the conflict in Serbia was happening. He’s actually notorious, and bankrolled his life for a long time because he took a picture of Kurt Cobain’s dead body in Seattle. It was iconic and printed all over the place. So, we had the opportunity to take these pictures. The whole thing was my idea. I wanted to make a departure, something that was very much about us, and where we are at right now. I wanted to concretely tell someone this is who we are before they even listened to the music.

The previous albums, while they had their heavy moments, always had their lighter rock moments. Was there a conscious intent to make this album more cohesive in its sound?
Jai: No, but I’m glad to hear it.
Ursula: “The Fuck” is kind of like a more experimental, noisy song.
Jamey: I don’t know, “Silk In The Water” is pretty rock.
Ursula: “Past Tense” is a little more punk than the other songs.
Jai: Well, it’s got a post-punk feel to it.
Ursula: I mean, we can do that, where it kind of depends on who we are playing with. If we’re playing with a bunch of heavy bands, we can just play a bunch of heavy songs. And if we are playing with more punk bands we can play our less heavy songs.
Jai: I think that people expect that we are going to continually jump around with styles, but we are constantly working towards making a sound. One thing is that my gear has gotten a lot better. Ursula and Jamey’s gear has always been great, but I finally could afford to get a decent amp and some good pedals, instead of like the shitty $30 Metal Zone pedal I was using when we started. So I think as my gear has improved as well as all of our musicality has improved, we’re probably going to be more cohesive in our sound, but I think we’re never going to stop trying to branch out and do different things. I think this is a dark album though, largely because I was feeling really harsh, and really dark when we were writing it.

My favorite song on the new album is “Cowschwitz,” which has a kind of monologue in it that reminds me of something Crass would do. Can you talk a little bit about what inspired this song?
Jai: That’s actually the only song on the album where all the words were written before we wrote the song. We were on tour and in the van driving through that area that’s in-between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and there’s about two miles where there’s a bunch of beef lots. I’ve heard that they are for McDonald’s. But they’re terrible conditions. It’s just shit and mud. Before you get there you can smell it. You can smell it miles before. And every time you’re in a car, even if you roll up the windows and turn off the fan and— 
Jamey: Roll up the windows!
Ursula: And in like 90 degree weather. 
Jai: Yeah, in the summer time. That was the hottest tour ever. And we were driving through it, and I just got my notebook and I wrote every word of that song. No other song on the album came out that way.

The name “Cowschwitz” comes from a certain ranch, right?
Jai: See, “Cowschwitz” was something I’ve heard musicians in our scene in Portland refer to that area as. I was a vegetarian for thirteen years of my life. I eat meat now and I eat it regularly. But the idea of just creating such a shitty world for those animals and then putting it into your body is what inspired the song. At one point in the song I say, “humans create their own pain” and that’s like we are making this ugly fucking world and we are making it a part of ourselves, and that’s disgusting.
Jamey: I just learned this today, but schwitzen is “to sweat” in German, so it’s like cow sweat.

I thought it was in reference to Auschwitz.
Ursula: Yeah, that’s the idea.
Jai: I was a little concerned about naming it that, because I didn’t want it to be triggering to people in regards to the Holocaust. But it’s so much what that place is, and it’s such an iconic name for that terrible place. That’s what it’s called and I couldn’t change it.
Ursula: I mean, we all eat meat, and we try to eat conscientiously. I was vegetarian for ten years mainly because places like this exist.

“Cowschwitz” is kind of about suffering and pain but it’s a political song. A lot of your earlier songs are about personal suffering. Is there much of a difference for you between writing political or personal material?
Jai: Well, going back to the new stuff we’re working on about gentrification, I realized conversations I was having were about this issue daily. I went to Oakland for nine days, and every time I’d go to a party that’s the conversation I’d be having. I need to be putting this into my art. I need to be channeling this, because it’s destroying me. It’s paining me to watch other people’s struggles, and to experience my community being dispersed, and to be consistently affected by this menacing yuppie monstrosity. I identify as an anarchist and for me isolating the personal from the political experience is a very foolish road. My intersectionality with radicalism is about empathy. About being like: oh my god, these people are oppressed every day of their lives! People of color and queers, on a daily basis these people struggle in a very real way. Anyone who is like “I’m an oppressed person, I’m a woman, I’m queer, I’m a person of color, and I go out there on the street and I experience that every time I leave my house in some way.” To me that’s one of the most important things to the pathos of that, and trying to have relationships with other people in the face of that, both romantic and friendly and just in the world. It’s so difficult, and it carries so much weight. And to me there really is no separating the two.

When I listen to other bands who are political, and when I listen to musicians who are personal, they are usually one or the other, and there’s really few who can get that right in the middle, and I think you do that very well.
Jai: I think that holding an immense amount of anger over the world that we live in being so fucked is a giant driving force in why I make my music. It took me years to isolate and appreciate that anger, to actually acknowledge it for what it is. I didn’t want to be an angry mad person and, because I had a lot of self-esteem and depression issues, I was suppressing it and turning it against myself. Playing this music is incredibly cathartic to me because it allows me to channel other people’s and my own feelings of dysphoria and frustration with being in this world. It allows me to get it outside of my body in a very primal way. One of my new friends told me when he saw our band play this summer it was like watching an exorcism, and I was really flattered by that. In some ways I’m trying to make the space as safe as possible, and just clear that out of my system, and out of anyone’s system that wants to feel that and is listening.

Can you talk about “Silk In The Water”?
Jai: A lot of people don’t know this, but I also play pretty, acoustic music. And as we’ve been writing more guttural songs, to use your word from earlier, it’s been really challenging for me to play those songs, because my voice is gone half the time. “Silk In The Water” is a song that I wrote when I was maybe twenty-two years old. It was years and years ago. I wrote the basis of it, but it was a totally different song, and then Ursula and I went to work on it, hacked it into pieces, and then put it back together. That song was our albatross. 
Jamey: We reworked it and reworked it and reworked it.
Jai: It was the hardest song on the album for us. We’ve done a lot of down tempo, prettier songs. “Ocean of Static Sky” on Static is a good example. That’s a very personal song, but “Silk In The Water” is more intentionally generalized. One of the central themes of that song is “I’m eating myself from the inside, and I’m corroding myself from inside” and the “Silk In The Water” name comes from a line that goes “silk in the water, dreams cannot keep their color.” There’s this idea that over time the world just wears people down and ruins them, and dissipates their most central identity and force. That’s loosely what I was talking about, but the lyrics are pretty oblique. But that’s personally where I was coming from when I originally wrote that song. And as we re-worked it, at the end I tried to make it a little more triumphant. The last words of the song are “decimate, let it rise.” It’s just trying to clear that and then allow health to come up from a ruined place.

I think culturally we usually don’t associate healing with violent, abrasive music.
Jai: We need to tear down innumerable things in our world to create a world where anyone can be a healthy person. And what I mean by healthy isn’t about eating kale everyday, but it’s about being a well-balanced person who isn’t carrying the ills of society as a sickness in their body. We have so much work to do as individuals and as a culture to even create a world where people can grow up and not be ruined by our culture. Everyone that I’m close with has suffered from being a person in this world in a very real and primal way.
Jamey: I think thinking about the way you’re interacting with the world, and how the world affects you, is fucking healthy. And Jai’s lyrics are helping people think about that.
Jai: I don’t know if they can hear them though. (laughs)

You also include two songs on Black Haze from your first album: “Magic Christians” and “Lights in the Sky.” Why re-record songs from four or five years ago?
Jai: I was the one who wanted to rewrite those songs. I had always felt like those two songs got the shaft in our first recording because “Magic Christians” was so guttural and predated our sound being dialed in, as far as being heavy goes. Our first album was a lot airier than this one. 
Ursula: Also, I was going to say that we changed both of those songs. We revamped them. 
Jai: And for “Magic Christians,” I just felt that song deserved a spotlight, because it’s a song that’s always been in our sets. We may not play it all the time, but we’ve revisited it and come back to it. And I felt that song needed some tweaking. I felt like it fit in with the other stuff we were playing, and we revamped it and reworked it and changed the middle pretty significantly. And I changed some of the things I was doing. As far as “Lights In The Sky” goes though, that was a song that dissatisfied me the most of all the songs we ever recorded. It was a slightly flubby recording. We went with the take even though it wasn’t the best. It was when we were first getting started.
Jamey: Was it the second song we ever recorded?
Jai: I wrote it years before I moved to Cook Street. It was the second song I brought to the band. The reason I wanted to revisit “Lights In The Sky” was because that song was about an experience I had being in an emotionally abusive relationship. It’s about being in Belgium and having an incredibly bad time, and being shouted at out on the street by this person. I wanted to revisit it because I thought that it was obvious to some extent from the lyrics what was going on, but I wanted to make it incredibly obvious, because I don’t think when people see me, or talk to me, or know me, they would expect I would have been in that kind of situation. I ended up writing this song and using it as a way to get past that experience and the trauma surrounding that. I was so dissatisfied with the recording, and I saw an opportunity to tweak the lyrics a little bit and make them more obvious. I added a number of lyrics but one of them that I added was “I know you’ve been abused, but it isn’t an excuse, you don’t know the way to break the cycle and change.” And so I wanted to revamp that song, and because I thought it was worthy of a better recording. I wanted to revisit that because I think abuse is a very real thing that a lot of people survive and struggle with. I experience PTSD from that relationship, and I wanted to make that incredibly obvious, and make it clear that is what the anger in the song is generating from, and what the desire for moving past and healing was generating from.

What’s the future for Tiny Knives?
Jamey: It’s kind of up to Jai. She’s threatening to move away.
Jai: I want to move somewhere I can buy a house, and that place is not Portland, Oregon. But I’m really stoked about writing this new cycle of songs. I keep joking about Abbey Road and the Paul McCartney songs, but I want to combine a bunch of songs into one sonic piece that are all really different and represent all of the different styles we have, but that are all recognizing oppression, and the way that is playing out around us. Calling out yuppies, of course, but also recognizing your own place in the web of gentrification.
Jamey: Yep.
Jai: And I feel incredibly passionate about that as a human being, and I feel really excited about working on that as a band.
Jamey: Me too.
Jai: That’s the immediate future, but long term future: we’re family, and I hope we play music together until we die.

Notes After Revisiting Nadja

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I read Nadja for the first time in 1995. I was nineteen and in community college. I found my way to Nadja through punk rock and dada, but in Breton and surrealism I found something very different. Mad love, convulsive beauty, objective chance, surrealist objects. Breton’s ideas reinforced my own developing views about the world. Thinking of the fiftieth anniversary of Breton’s death, I decided to revisit Nadja. It had been over fifteen years since I last read the book, but when reading Nadja today, what I found interesting was the everyday and personal Breton, which really is the one hidden in plain sight.

Much of what is written about Breton revolves around his excommunications and disagreements, but the younger Breton was very community-oriented. Like all of us, he needed like-minded people around him. Nadja is an unusual book because of the way Breton used it to promote the people he believed in. He saw the future in his friends. Benjamin Péret, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, Fanny Beznos, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, poets, outcasts, unknowns, people from the underground, all played their part in Breton’s image of Paris. Nadja functioned as a scrapbook of this hidden circle. It’s almost melancholic in how it documented a group of artists and writers as they grew together.

Among those people of the underground was Nadja. She was a damaged person. Breton saw “some obscure distress” in her eyes. She was a person of the streets. She was a mother alienated from her child. She sold cocaine, and maybe her body. She had vague relationships with multiple men, or as Breton wrote, she had “a certain power” over them. And, while Breton seemed to separate himself from the men she was involved with, to me it looks as if he was just another one of those men. Nadja seduced Breton with her helplessness. She was a waif. She made Breton feel powerful and respected, and in return he gave her money and attention. Although his intentions were good, Breton enabled her lifestyle and her problems. Of all the criticisms I’ve read of Nadja, I don’t ever recall anyone labeling their relationship for what it was: codependent.

Toward the end of the book, Breton identified two Nadja’s: the inspirational Nadja, and the troubled, toxic one. He asked himself which one was the real Nadja. I’d like to believe there was room inside of Nadja for both, but due to my own experiences in life, my intuition is at odds with this. The optimist in me wants to believe in the magical Nadja, the one who can predict which windows will light up red. The optimist wants to believe in the wild reckless Nadja, pressing her foot on the accelerator while blindfolding the driver. But the pessimist in me reluctantly believes that Nadja was simply giving Breton what she thought he wanted. The pessimist in me sees Nadja manipulating Breton, like some kind of poor man’s femme fatale. I can’t help but wonder if Nadja even cared for Breton at all, and I’m sure Breton wondered this as well.

In 1999, when reading Nadja in a class on surrealism at Portland State, my classmates were quick to condemn Breton for not visiting Nadja at the asylum. This sort of criticism could only come from those who have never had the weight of loving someone with a mental illness. What more could Breton have done to help Nadja? And, more importantly, how close can someone get to the chaos before they are permanently damaged by it? In this case, Breton did what was right for himself. Sometimes, those like Nadja truly cannot be reached. They get locked up, or maybe they kill themselves, or more often they hurt those around them. Nadja is not a surrealist romance. There is no happy ending where Breton saves Nadja from the asylum. He is not some knight in shining armor, and Nadja is not a damsel in distress.

Thinking of Nadja now, I am reminded of Cass from Charles Bukowski’s story “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town.” Cass was determined to destroy herself. She self-mutilated, sticking needles through her face, and tried to slit her own throat with a broken bottle. Bukowski's compassion was meaningless to her. He couldn’t stop her from self-destructing. It's hard to believe these two men, Bukowski and Breton, could have had anything in common. What they did have in common was their compassion for those shattered and damaged by the world. The official image of Breton is of a stern upholder of “Surrealist Law,” but I think the real world Breton, which has always been right there in front of the reader’s eyes, is the one that gets forgotten in the history books. And I think it’s the Breton I identify with most.

Vernacular Visions: An Interview With Justin Clifford Rhody

This interview originally appeared at The Conversant (September 2015) but the website has disappeared so I’m reposting it here.

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I first saw Justin Clifford Rhody’s monthly slideshow Vernacular Visions at Huffin House, a live-in warehouse space in East Oakland. The lights were turned off, and a large crowd of intoxicated partygoers huddled on couches, chairs, and on the carpet as Rhody projected a series of random, unrelated images onto a blank wall. Underneath the hum of the slide projector and a mixtape soundtrack, Rhody provided a tongue-in-cheek voiceover to the slides, something akin to a DVD commentary track but one that welcomed and interacted with the viewer. As I returned each month to see Vernacular Visions at it’s various locations, but most prominently at Lake Merritt in Oakland, I saw that each slide, taken out of its cultural, historical, and personal context, could be seen in a new association. Images that were originally disregarded as having no value suddenly had opportunities to be re-interpreted, and re-valued, often on artistic grounds. It’s what the surrealists might refer to as poetry made by all. Earlier this year, I sat down with Rhody at his East Oakland apartment for a question and answer session about Vernacular Visions and the ideas behind the project.

B: Where did you live before the Bay Area?

J: I was born and raised in Flint, Michigan. I grew up there, but then after high school I’ve just kind of lived in a lot of different places: Indiana, North Carolina, Maine, Seattle for two months.

B: Have you always been interested in photography?

J: No, music was my major focus before. I always played in bands and for thirteen years I ran a record label called Friends & Relatives. 2006 was when I became more serious about photography, as in doing it all the time, and less randomly.

B: Do you have a formal art background? Are you self-taught?

J: I don’t have any background. I didn’t go to school at all. I got out of high school early and really hated it. But, as I’m saying this, coincidentally, I started going to college this year for the first time. I’m thirty.

B: What are you studying?

J: Photography. I don’t know if school will be my favorite thing, and I don’t know how much I’ll get out of it, but it’s better than working for a living. And I get some grant because I’m older. I have access to all of these resources, and it’s been fun. It’s much more relaxing than customer service. I don’t think that the good Lord designed me to a help people along in their purchases [laughs].

B: It’s strange hearing that you’re going back to school, because you’re already a respected photographer. Do you notices a difference between how you approach photography and how other students approach photography?

J: Most people are concerned with making a living, especially at the community college level. You get people from a different spectrum than if it was at the Art Institute. People are interested in commercial interests, and they just don’t believe you if you’re like, “I don’t want to do that.” I couldn’t imagine going and photographing weddings, or like, babies [laughs].

B: How would you describe Vernacular Visions?

J: I would say it’s a slideshow of found 35mm photo slides, which happens monthly in the East Bay, mostly. It’s comprised of photo slides that I gather by the thousands from flea markets, and junk stores, and I then edit together an entertaining, or at least interesting, show. I make a unique soundtrack from records for each show, and it’s been a big hit. And every other month there is a guest presenter, usually a photographer or a filmmaker.

B: How did you first get interested in found slides?

J: I always enjoyed collecting found photos. When I was in high school I remember I used to collect them from the dumpster behind a photo lab. But at flea markets here in the Bay Area I had been coming across these slides, and originally I had been doing slideshows of my own photos and traveling with that. So, it was fun just to buy them, and at home go through them. We don’t have a television, so showing slides was kind of like our entertainment. That’s all we’d do all night. Then we just started keeping the best of, and when people would come over that’s what we’d show them for fun. People seemed to like it a lot. Initially, it was going to be a one-off thing, and then it just snowballed into something much larger.

B: You get your slides primarily from flea markets?

J: Yeah, and junk stores. I’ve never bought them online. I wonder when the supply is going to run dry?

B: What makes a slide worth being shown?

J: That’s the part that’s the most fun, organizing it. Because initially it was more or less just a visual exercise, like looking through them, thinking about why this photograph works, and why this photograph doesn’t work. Sometimes you can witness the photographer’s intention, like if they used a point-and-shoot camera with the viewfinder slightly off. They’re just an inch off of what they thought they were photographing. A pole or a hand interjects, and cuts the composition. It’s kind of like the cut-up method of Brion Gysin, and the stuff Burroughs did with audiotape and text. It’s kind of like a photo book, because the sequence of images, what comes before and after, affects the way that they’re each viewed. It’s like a mixtape. Sometimes there are images of iconic landmarks that every tourist photographs, and when you have a bunch of them together it really changes the meaning of the individual images.

B: Is there a reason why you chose 35mm slides as opposed to just curating found photos?

J: Largely, it’s a spatial issue. I do have boxes of found print photos, but to display them I’d have to have the physical space. And it also requires a different amount of time, like all this time being in a gallery space.

It’s also fun the way that slides are just naturally set up for projection, and blend themselves easily to video projection. You know, it’s a show, it’s a slideshow. I’m doing it in this public way without the context of who took the photos, but the people who took the photos showed them in a similar way, just to their bored family members instead.

B: I always thought of it like, you can find photographs anywhere, but with slides people took an extra step to make an image a slide. There is something more unique about them.

J: Like all the Kodachrome slides. These were made from topnotch color film that was supposed to last for at least fifty years. Whereas the other color negatives, they would partially fade. So, just that intention, these people seem more serious about it, because they were paying extra for a special type of film.

B: When you’re looking through the slides, can you recognize what photos are domestic versus photos that are made for artistic reasons? Do you make a distinction between these types?

J: I suppose there are different forms of artistic intention. Everyone is trying to make a good photo, but there are some that scream “art school,” and you can see it right away. Maybe I’ll throw a few in for fun, but by and large they feel a little vapid.

B: Some of the photos you show do seem to have an artistic purpose, like maybe this person is trying to do some kind of composition.

J: That’s something that goes through my head a lot. Imagining what the person had intended. But the art stuff is different than the general attitudes that come out of these vernacular photographs. The art stuff is more like, “This is an assignment. I’m photographing this fence with a polarizing filter at 3pm.” But the stuff we are really working with here, these common photos, they share the same aesthetic you see in some of the finest photographer’s work, like Walker Evans. You have to sift through a lot of fat to get to the bone though.

B: How do you feel about people who think that are being wronged or defamed by the showing of this found material?

J: There have been a few times when there have been slides where people are naked. I don’t show the pornographic stuff. There was one that was a side view of a pregnant mother. It’s not erotic. It’s not pornography. But it is a nude, and that’s an issue I can imagine someone might really care about. I try to consider where I’ll be showing the image. If it’s at Lake Merritt to a small crowd of people who are there with photographic, artistic intentions, than I’m less concerned about the work being viewed in a perverse light.

B: Many of the Vernacular Visions are held in DIY spaces (Black Hole Cinematheque, the basement of Vacation, Huffin House), but most of them are at Lake Merritt. What’s the appeal of using a public space to show these slides?

J: I would like more things to be happening in these public spheres. I live near Lake Merritt, and it’s really beautiful. In Oakland there are a lot of street corners and parking lots you might not want to set up your stuff at and start doing a show. There are some rougher areas. But Lake Merritt is really beautiful. I saw there was an electrical outlet, brought something to test it out, and it had power. It’s also a centralized location, so people can come from all over Oakland.

B: What is that structure you set up by, a gazebo?

J: Yeah, a weird gazebo; really tall. We’ve had issues when thinking of where to hold shows, because even though it might be a great space, I want as many different types of people to feel comfortable as possible. The basement of a dirty punk warehouse is like a dungeon. It could be really great, but certain people may not come. And galleries are kind of like the polar opposite of that. Sometimes I imagine that would be so ideal and perfect, except for the general vibe of the place. It’s a little bleached or something. Galleries are generally not a space where creativity is occurring. Instead, it’s the space in which its being documented, stamped, pressed, and showcased.

B: When you’re doing a slideshow, you supplement it with a rather flippant and casual commentary, and you always seem to play a mixtape. How did you come to this approach?

J: I came to that approach because humor and casualness are good tools if you’re uncomfortable and nervous. Before showing found slides, I had begun traveling like a band would on tour, but with a slideshow set up showing my own photos.

And it was also that I don’t really like the experience of performing, especially if I was just going to hold a guitar and sing. The slideshow just seemed like the best option. No one is staring at me. I’m behind the projector. I’m getting to show my photos. I don’t have to work very hard, and it’s still a traveling show, which is fun.

B: Sometimes at Vernacular Visions it almost feels like people are just hanging out. You have the tape going, you’re talking, and I think people feel really comfortable with that.

J: I’ve tried to encourage that. And the thing I often say is that, unlike a movie where you have to follow the storyline, at the slideshows you should feel comfortable to talk out loud. Maybe it’s too much of a Fifties vibe, but I’d love it if there were teenagers in the back making out \[laughs]. I don’t think teenagers come, but that would be wonderful. That would be great!

B: When I was looking at your photography the first thing I asked myself was how your photography related to these found slides. Do you see a connection?

J: Yeah, I think there’s a connection. Not just by organizing the Vernacular Visions series, but even before that as I was just viewing images. I had this veracious appetite for imagery and for photography, and thinking about the still image. It wasn’t particularly easy growing up to find interesting art photography. The type of stuff that I was coming across was more like William Wegman. You know, with the two dogs. He dresses his dogs up \[laughs]. I’m not moved by it.

You know with the found slides, and my own work too, the reason they seem to work is because of that implied narrative. What exists outside of the frame. Not necessarily trying to tell a story, because they can’t, but it’s more exciting for a still image to feel larger, rather than something constructed, where there’s nothing beyond it.

B: At the last Vernacular Visions I attended at Artists’ Television Access, I felt like at times you were juxtaposing things in both cultural and historical ways.

J: It’s intentional. But it’s almost like you’re riding some weird line sometimes. I don’t want the intentionality to be too obvious, as if I’m just trying to illustrate a point. There’s something about vagueness that leaves it open for interpretation. That seems to be one of the strong points, especially with photographic images, because it doesn’t clearly illustrate something. Photography is different from painting or drawing, because in those mediums you begin with nothing, and you make something out of it. In photography you begin with everything, and you’re trying to whittle it into one thing. The cacophony and chaos of the world makes it difficult.

B: By stripping away the identity of the photographer, and the context of the work, is something new being brought to these images? What is it?

J: The anonymity of the image lends itself to a more steadied focus. You have to look and think about it. If the photograph was by a celebrated artist, people often know about the artist’s life more so than they even understand the work. And sometimes that psychoanalyzing is a little unwarranted. For example, some images, taken outside of the context of a “family vacation” being presented to the extended family, and then being put in the environment of these people at Vernacular Visions who aren’t just concerned with base facts, hopefully that encourages more thought from the viewer.

B: And I think that by stripping away the identity of the photographer, people can more easily approach the images as potential works of art, rather than some picture their mother, uncle or some other family member took.

J: When I was younger I was really averse to being spoken of as an artist, because I thought that it inherently implied pretension. And I think photography is the perfect medium for that aversion, because it’s so democratic. In other mediums it often feels like someone has invented their own world, and it’s being presented to me, but photography feels like the opposite of that. We see the world that we share from a different perspective.

B: As a photographer, how do you feel about transforming your role? I mean, with Vernacular Visions you’re basically a curator.

J: I’m comfortable with it. I guess my overall game plan in life is to teach. With an upbringing in punk and DIY culture, I can imagine being an educator in some sort of alternative setting. I try to keep Vernacular Visions kind of loose, but it is presented in this way, and people have spoken about it to me in this sort of manner. You’re not going to a lecture, but it encourages thought, to present something in a way in which people hadn’t previously seen it.

B: I kind of see Vernacular Visions as parallel to the zine you do, Slo-Mo, where you just photocopy found object and odd things, a sort of collecting and documenting process.

J: Well, I love collections. I lived in Bloomington, Indiana for five years, and on the University campus there’s a place called the Lilly Library. They would create exhibits of odd books, tiny Bibles, a lock of Sylvia Plath’s hair, and that place kind of got me thinking about how when I was a kid I was really into collecting stuff. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I had these action figures, and I would just set them up neatly on a shelf more than I would ever play with them. I never hammered them together to act like they were fighting. It was just about collecting. I never followed baseball, but I wanted all the baseball cards, and I’d keep them neat in the sleeves. Part of it is the collecting and searching, but the other key aspect is the presentation and display.

B: Are there any particular slides that stand out for you as personal favorites?

J: The recent program that was screened at Artists’ Television Access was an assemblage of the “greatest hits.” My number one favorite seems to have been taken from the perspective of a woman who has just given birth, and is on her back in the hospital bed. A doctor is handing the baby toward her, toward the camera. The umbilical cord is still there. I would love to see a huge print of that one on a wall.

B: Besides a good time, what should viewers get out of attending a Vernacular Visions?

J: I hope that people will see it as a low stress environment to encourage thought, which I think could range from discussions of socio-political theory to talk of composition and form. That’s what I’d like to imagine is happening, and I think that’s what people have been getting out of it in various ways. No one’s ever complained!