Music for Insomniacs

After an early life of online downloads and iPod compilations, The Goldberg Variations Variations or Music For Insomniacs is showing right now in a group exhibition at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City. It’s the first time I’ve shown the all thirty-two tracks of the thing, out loud, without headphones. You can listen to a sample track here.

Also, the latest issue of Frieze has a tiny piece I wrote for their 20th anniversary issue. The issue has great contributions by Bruce Sterling, Vivian Rehberg, TomMcCarthy, Michael Bracewell, and others.

Starring Sigmund Freud

David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method, due for release in late 2011 (Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud)

A new short essay on Sigmund Freud’s overlooked career as a feature film actor.

What I’ve been up to

Photo: Headbangers at El Chopo market. Source.

I look up and it’s three months later.

Some things happened in those three months — I’m sure of it. Some of those things involved words on paper, certainly.

Like there’s a new story coming out in the next issue of A Prior called “Consuelo’s Medusa.” It’s about art and Mexico and flying and someone named Consuelo. Medusa is in there, too. I’ll post it online as soon as the latest issue has aged a bit. The issue launches on March 22 at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. In case you’re like me and won’t be in Oslo, you can find the issue at these establishments worldwide or order it online.

Also, at the Oslo launch Raimundas Malasauskas will be reading my most recent monologue, An Address Concerning My Supposed Existence. I’ll post the monologue here one of these days; give me time. I’m slow.

Then there are two little op-ed-ish things I wrote. They are both for architecture journals, though I didn’t write about architecture for either. One of them is about the El Chopo goth market in Mexico City (see the headbanging sweetness above), and is for Domus, a fine architectural magazine publishing in Italy. The other is for an architecture journal in Mexico City called Tomo. The Domus piece is online at the link just mentioned. The Tomo is not online, though they have a very fancy website.

Finally, there is a tiny thing I did for my favorite bilingual literary-fashion-culture magazine in Mexico City, Celeste. Not worth getting the issue just for me — I have a short reading list, of sorts — but it is worth buying it for all the other great contributors like Alan Page, Superflex, Alexandre Guirkinger, and Walead Beshty. That one is available in DF only, so get on a flight and go find a copy now.

The Clifford Irving Show – Dec 4 – Antwerp

[L-R] Author Clifford Irving, his wife Edith, artist Elmyr de Hory (seated, R, in sports jacket), Gerry Albertini and Bob Kirsh (R) (source).

I have a new work, a monologue called An Address Concerning My Supposed Existence, in the latest iteration of The Clifford Irving Show. The one-day show is happening on December 4th at Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp. For more information, read below or you can download this highly informative PDF.

The Clifford Irving Show
Saturday December 4, 2010
A full night event from 6 to 11pm.
RESERVATION IS REQUIRED – send an email to info@objectif-exhibitions.org
Food and drink will be served. Doors close at 6.45!

Thank you for coming. I will try to keep the rant and rave tucked in and the available facts as lined up as possible. The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either. It’s a story about literature leaving the line and entering the plane, painting leaving the plane and entering space, sculpture stepping into the fourth dimension and finally proposing a ‘completely new art form’. Call these forms a secession of tricksters who violate the boundaries to keep them alacritous and productive, who view the walls not as a fence but a perch. For nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time.

Last seen in Paris, The Clifford Irving Show stays true to its founding principles: life-writing, truth-bending, stage-celebrating. An acclaimed theater director David Levine will present theatrical adaptations of “Manhattan’s Serenade” and “Neighbor’s Wife” – two brand new screenplays by Clifford Irving, in a gallery that will act as a backdrop and a character of the play. Interspersed with acts and artefacts by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Marco Belfiore, Elise Berkvens, Pierre Bismuth, Goda Budvytyte, Celine Butaye, Audrey Cottin, Chris Evans, Mario Garcia Torres, Malak Helmy, Will Holder, Clifford Irving, Kevin Killian, Gabriel Lester, David Marcel Levine, Nicholas Matranga, John Menick, Elena Narbutaite, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Michael Portnoy, Vivian Rehberg,Carson Salter, Aaron Schuster, Benjamin Seror, Snowden Snowden, Lauren von Gogh, Adva Zakai and more…

Curated by Raimundas Malasauskas

“Phantom Rosebuds”, an autobiography of Clifford Irving, as well as “The Autobiography of Any One Being Including Every One Before”, both designed by Dexter Sinister, will be available.

Reading at the Carrillo Gil Nov. 12, 7:30pm

Still from Paris Syndrome, 2010.

As part of my show at the Carrillo Gil in Mexico City I’ll be giving a reading of some new texts this Friday, November 12 at 7:30pm at the museum. Please stop by.

“A Report on the City” in Celeste

I have a short story, “A Report on the City,” in the latest issue of Celeste magazine, a bilingual arts and fashion journal in Mexico City. You can read the full story here.

Félix Fénéon and a List of Unusual Deaths

Portrait of Félix Fénéon by Paul Signac, 1891.

Félix Fénéon — fin de siècle French journalist, art critic, and anarchist — never intended to write a novel. In fact, he never published one during his lifetime. As he said, “I inspire only to silence.” What he did write was fragmentary and often done out of monetary necessity. The apparent low point in his career involved writing a series of short, anonymous blurbs for the newspaper Le Matin. As Julian Barnes explains:

… For some months [Fénéon] was assigned to compose the faits divers column – known in hackdom as chiens écrasés (‘run-over dogs’). He had at his disposal the wire services, local and provincial newspapers, and communications from readers. He composed up to twenty of these three-line fillers in the course of his evening shift. They were printed – unsigned, of course – and read for a quick smile or breath-intake or head-shake, and then forgotten.

Most of the blurbs concerned violent, ironic, and morbid everyday encounters: citizens run over by trains, strikes where no one showed up, household murders. Fénéon — and the rest of France it seems — saw the short writings as worthless ephemera. It was Fénéon’s mistress who collected, without the author’s knowledge, 1220 of these contributions. They were later published as the posthumous book we know today in English as Novels in Three Lines.

Recently, I remembered Fénéon’s story when reading Wikipedia’s entry titled “List of unusual deaths.” The Wikipedia article contains the same morbidity, the same fidelity to odd details, the same impossible situations and not-so-subtle social commentary as Fénéon’s “little novels.” And, perhaps most importantly, like Novels in Three Lines, the list was written anonymously.

What follows are some selections from the article, each condensed and corrected slightly. The full list makes for great reading.

***

1958: Gareth Jones, actor, collapsed and died while in make-up between scenes of a live television play, Underground, at the studios of Associated British Corporation in Manchester. Director Ted Kotcheff continued the play to its conclusion, improvising around Jones’ absence.

1974: Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, drank himself to death with carrot juice.

1978: Kurt Gödel, the Austrian/American mathematician, died of starvation when his wife was hospitalized. Gödel suffered from extreme paranoia and refused to eat food prepared by anyone else other than his wife. He was 65 pounds (approx. 30 kg) when he died.

1979: Robert Williams, a worker at a Ford Motor Co. plant, was the first known human to be killed by a robot, after the arm of a one-ton factory robot hit him in the head.

1981: Jeff Dailey, a 19-year-old gamer, became the first known person to die while playing video games. After achieving a score of 16,660 in the arcade game Berzerk, he succumbed to a massive heart attack. A year later, an 18-year-old gamer died after achieving high scores in the same game.

1983: American author Tennessee Williams died when he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his hotel room in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. Williams’ lack of gag response may have been due to the effects of drugs and alcohol abuse. There is speculation that he committed suicide or was murdered, but nothing has been conclusively proven.

1983: Jimmy Lee Gray, a man executed in Mississippi’s gas chamber, died bashing his head against a metal pole behind the chair that he was strapped into. The poisonous gas had failed to kill him but left him in agony and gasping for eight minutes. It was later determined that the executioner was drunk.

1987: Franco Brun, a 22-year-old prisoner at Toronto East Detention Centre, Ontario, died after attempting to swallow and choking on a small Gideon’s Bible. Brun reportedly had mental deficiencies, and as such, the coroner did not label his death as suicide, believing that “the swallowing of the Bible to him was some form of symbolism or allegory as though he was trying to purge himself of the devil by consuming religion”. He was only serving a 15-day sentence.

1998: Every player on the Basanga soccer team at a game in the Congo was killed instantly when a bolt of fork lightning struck the field. Nobody on the opposing team was struck by the bolt.

2001: Gregory Biggs, a homeless American man in Fort Worth, Texas, was struck by a car being driven by Chante Jawan Mallard, who had been drinking and taking drugs that night. Biggs’ torso became lodged in Mallard’s windshield with severe but not immediately fatal injuries. Mallard drove home and left the car in her garage with Biggs still lodged in her car’s windshield. She repeatedly visited Biggs and even apologized for hitting him. Biggs died of his injuries several hours later. Chante Mallard was tried and convicted for murder in this case and received a 50-year prison sentence.

2004: An unidentified Taiwanese woman died of alcohol intoxication after immersion for 12 hours in a bathtub filled with 40% ethanol. Her blood alcohol content was 1.35%. It was believed that she immersed herself as a response to the ongoing SARS epidemic.

2005: Lee Seung Seop, a 28-year-old South Korean, collapsed of fatigue and died after playing the videogame StarCraft online for almost 50 consecutive hours in an Internet cafe.

2008: David Phyall, 58, the last resident in a building due to be demolished in Bishopstoke, England, cut his own head off with a chainsaw to highlight the injustice of being forced to move out.

2008: James Mason, 73, of Chardon, Ohio, died of heart failure after his wife exercised him to death in a public swimming pool. Christine Newton-John, 41, was seen on videotape pulling Mason around the pool and preventing him from getting out of the water 43 times.

2009: Sergey Tuganov, a 28-year-old Russian, bet two women that he could continuously have sex with them both for twelve hours. Several minutes after winning the $4,300 bet, he suffered a heart attack and died, apparently because of having ingested an entire bottle of Viagra just after accepting the bet.

2009: Kim Sa-rang, a 3-month-old Korean girl, died from malnutrition after both her parents spent hours each day in an internet cafe raising a virtual child on an online game, Prius Online.

Presentation at SOMA, Wednesday, September 22, 9pm

How to Tell a Story, 2009, series of eight drawings, graphite on paper, 18″ x 24″. (View series)

I’m giving a talk about my work tomorrow, Wednesday, September 22, at 9pm at SOMA in Mexico City. Please stop by.

Short Story: “Diptych”

As I’m slowly learning, fiction publishing has its own strange timeline. You write something one year, send it out, maybe hand it to a friend, and then — if you’re lucky — years later it finds itself in print. There are usually no deadlines with this sort of material, but the time between writing and publishing is so great that pieces come back to you as if someone else wrote them. I wrote this story, “Diptych,” two years ago at the request of the art journal “Trouble,” and it appeared in print just a few months ago. It involves a photograph by artist Eric Baudelaire (above) and something called “pink noise.” It’s always nice to see a piece resurface.

An Obituary for Mardi

Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, Experimental Psychologist and “Psychic Explorer”, Dies at 99

Constantin “Mardi” Mardisen, an experimental psychologist who studied the dream life of the Yanomami and wrote the best-selling book Repetitions, died Tuesday at his home in North Haven, Conn. He was 99.

His family did not give a cause of death, but according to articles published by Mr. Mardisen, in recent years he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Mardisen gained prominence as a psychologist, but in his long and extravagant career his controversial research embraced disciplines as far-flung as anthropology, parapsychology, pre-Columbian history, sexology, chemistry and poetry. His often bizarre and academically marginal research took him to every continent and to the floors of several seas. Although his non-poetic work was written in dense academic prose, Mr. Mardisen insisted his work was best understood as autobiography, stating in a 1972 interview with Michel Leiris, “Everything I have written is, ultimately, memoir.”

Born in 1911 to a wealthy Danish family, Mr. Mardisen, or “Mardi” as his friends and colleagues called him, was a precocious student and a gifted child. After his family immigrated to the US in 1915, he attended Harvard University at age 16, eventually majoring in psychology. During his studies, Mr. Mardisen began a letter correspondence with fellow Harvard graduate Alfred Kinsey. The letters, later published by Harvard University Press, show the two men’s interest in biology and contain hints of their future researches in sexology. Mr. Mardisen went on to receive his doctorate from Harvard, and his unorthodox and groundbreaking thesis, The Dream Life of the Yanomami, transformed multiple disciplines, including anthropology and psychoanalysis. The following year Harvard hired him as an Assistant Professor of Psychology.

During his brief time in Harvard’s Department of Psychology, Mr. Mardisen began using himself as a research subject to a greater and greater degree. He began studying esoteric and occult practices globally, which resulted in a series of articles on bilocation, or the supposed ability some mystics have of being in more than one place at a time. The research also led to his first volume of poetry, Divided Songs, a slim volume containing verses dictated by bilocating shamans.

Mr. Mardisen’s use of himself as a test subject divided his field as well, causing fierce debates concerning his research’s objectivity. His 1947 book on addiction, Routine Pleasures, was based on Mr. Mardisen’s addictions to heroin and cocaine, dependencies he created for the sole purposes of writing the book. A reviewer from the New York Times called the book “a work of monumental irresponsibility and self-loathing,” and called for the revocation of Mr. Mardisen’s tenure. Scandalized by the book’s frank admissions of drug use, Harvard University dismissed Mr. Mardisen, a move some would say foreshadowed Timothy Leary’s dismissal almost two decades later.

Leaving academia, Mr. Mardisen adopted the moniker “psychic explorer” and set about, as he put it to Mr. Leiris, “spelunking the caverns of human desire.” His rhetoric was often grandiose, and many psychologists accused Mr. Mardisen of writing books that were little more than sensationalist pornography. His 37 books published in the next half-century explored fetishism, addiction, violence, primitivism, and perversion – subjects that brought Mr. Mardisen an improbably large audience.

Many times over Mr. Mardisen’s career, he claimed all his books were variations on one theme: repetition as the fundamental quality of life. As he wrote in his introduction to Repetitions: Fetishism and Desire, “The pleasure of life is its repetition. Repetition gives life its form and its dependability. The problem is, of course, that repetition is also the source of life’s terror.”

Mr. Mardisen’s personal life was extremely eccentric. According to his first wife, Elizabeth Doren, he kept a record of every orgasm he experienced, noting both the orgasm’s qualities and intensity. After divorcing Ms. Doren, he lived ménage à trios with the modern dancers Karen Hildengaard and Doris Haalen, both of whom later left Mr. Mardisen. They claimed that his personality “befitted more a cult leader than a husband.” In her memoir, Living with Mardi, Ms. Haalen described that everything he did was “a kind of experiment,” and that he kept notebooks detailing everything he ate, thought and encountered.

During the last decade of his life, Mr. Mardisen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. As he did throughout his career, he took his illness as an opportunity to continue his research. He immediately left his home in Connecticut for Robison Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. He lived with a nurse and kept notes on his approaching forgetfulness. Excerpts of these writings were published in both academic journals and online in Mr. Mardisen’s blog. When he was too sick to continue writing, his family had him moved to his former home in Connecticut. His final blog entry states, “Forgetting is not death. It is the beginning of life.”

The collected writings from Robison Crusoe Island will be published in the fall by the University of Chicago Press.

For more contributions to Raimundas MalasauskasPompidou exhibition, Repetition Island, click here. – JM

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John Menick is an artist and writer.
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