Screen Tests

by Kate Zambreno

  Gleaning

  I’ve been meditating, in a rather wandering way, on the history of art as a continuous act of copying. When I had previously watched Agnès Varda’s cinematic essay The Gleaners and I, I always moved quickly past her opening play with Jean-François Millet’s painting The Gleaners. I had only been marginally interested in Millet because of van Gogh’s yellow-hued copies of his work, the twenty-one canvases of homage painted while at the Saint-Paul asylum; he had no models in the winter, so he painted, after Millet, these studies of piety and light. Varda focuses on the painting for the first minute of her film: she narrates the opening, her cat stares at the camera and nuzzles her old encyclopedia, open to the letter G, illustrated with a black-and-white copy of The Gleaners—the reproduced, miniature image the filmmaker grew up seeing. “A gleaner is one who gleans,” she tells us. That in the past it was only women who gleaned (as in the Millet, whose original title is in the feminine, Des glaneuses), although the contemporary gleaners and collectors she focuses on in this film—this meditation on collecting and filmmaking—are both men and women. Pausing the Varda film streaming on my computer, I watch a cheesy online video of the painting in its gold frame, with the closed-captioning on. Piano Muzak. Two subdued radio voices. Millet’s painting was a scandal during the 1857 Salon. After the 1848 revolution, Parisians were fearful of the poverty of the countryside, of the peasants being radicalized. Man: “It’s an oddly soft painting.” Woman: “The colors are muted.” Man: “And the brush is not tight, right? There are no hard lines.” Woman: “That’s true.” I never would have looked at this painting more if Varda hadn’t made me see it. I return to Varda’s shot of the original hanging in the Musée d’Orsay: a man’s head in front of the painting, enclosed by the gilded frame. The camera stands still, time elapses: people are looking, pausing; a group, then only an individual; some take pictures in front with cameras (not yet iPhones), quickly snapping away yet refusing to look. We go from a close-up of the painting’s three women to the present-day French countryside, a woman in an apron in a harvested field being interviewed by Varda: she mimes how she and her family used to glean ears of wheat, gathering them up in her apron, before the efficiency of modern machines that leave almost nothing behind. Varda notes that the solitary reality of gleaners is in contrast to the collectivity often depicted in paintings of them. She finds one exception, Jules Breton’s Woman Gleaning, a woman posing with wheat across her shoulder. The filmmaker poses beside the painting with her own wheat, which she then playfully drops and replaces with her handheld camera. The metaphor of the film’s original title, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. “There’s another woman gleaning in this film, c’est moi.”

  Scream Tests

  Whenever I say “Screen Tests,” my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter thinks I’m saying “scream,” not “screen,” and proceeds to enact her best impression of Janet Leigh being stabbed to death in Psycho. After shooting the film, Janet Leigh only took baths, never showers.

  Essays

  (2012–2014)

  Sleepless Nights

  I have not been writing like I am supposed to, but I have been watching a lot of things on YouTube, which I tell myself counts as writing. I wander around on the Internet, mostly fixated on underground drag performers from the ’80s and ’90s who performed at places like the Pyramid Club. I like thinking of the small screen on my laptop like a kinetic Joseph Cornell shadow box that manages to contain the exquisite and absurd fury of Ethyl Eichelberger, pouring catharsis into her accordion as Clytemnestra: that red shock wig, the psychotic raccoon eyes, the almost ethereal lavender ball gown. There are only fragments of Ethyl performing online—glitches, moments—shot from the audience. This makes what you can view all the more poignant. The performances have not been archived, have been allowed to disappear—performance itself is so much about disappearance, about the urgency and ephemerality of the present tense, the scratchy video recording—if it exists—documenting a haunting.

  * * *

  As Ethyl too is gone. As so many of these performers are gone, so now much of that moment is gone. And it’s strange even having videos to watch now. When I first learned of that period of radical art making and living, of refusing to conform, of wild theatrical happenings—first read Cookie Mueller’s book and learned about David Wojnarowicz and Ethyl and Karen Finley in Cynthia Carr’s collected Village Voice columns—all I had were black-and-white pictures, Peter Hujar’s beautiful series of his friend Ethyl, leggy sexy Ethyl laughing as Minnie the Maid, Ethyl applying makeup, Ethyl as Nefertiti, Ethyl in a Fashion Pose, Ethyl without drag looking straight at the camera. I had to imagine the performances, the urgency issuing from an open mouth.

  * * *

  I had to imagine Anohni stomping around the Lower East Side in combat boots and a black slip, “FUCK YOU” scrawled on her forehead. There’s one photograph online of the gothy costumes from when the Blacklips Performance Cult put on Our Lady of the Flowers, which seems like everything I wanted experimental theater to be, art to be: psychotic, feral, everything I dreamed about when I was younger, and still dream about. I was doing an interview for a zine the other day, and we started rhapsodizing about Our Lady of the Flowers, how Genet wrote the book on scraps of paper that kept getting taken from him. He kept on, madly scrawling inscriptions against this disappearance. The torn-out pictures of his criminals he put on the wall—a model for obsession, everything I write to.

  * * *

  The person who cuts my hair now is a former drag queen who, the other day, told me he was reading Our Lady of the Flowers. I don’t love how he cuts my hair, but I have to keep going to him. He has a deep love and understanding of old Hollywood and glamour. And he’s reading Genet. How could I stop going to him?

  * * *

  There is an eight-minute film on YouTube that I keep on watching. The film called Last Address, directed by Ira Sachs, is mostly silent except for birds chirping, atmospheric street sounds. Steady shot of a New York City building for a few moments, then we are told the name of the downtown artist who died of AIDS who had that as their last address, and what the address was, and then the camera lingers longer on the building. Cookie Mueller, Ethyl Eichelberger, Keith Haring. My eyes fill up at Arthur Russell’s address. The other day I was telling John that to me the most beautiful writing would feel like Russell’s World of Echo, that I want to write how World of Echo makes me feel: kind of full and shattered at the same time. The intimacy of this recording. That captures the sound of a body in a room (his voice, his cello) and distorts it with echo, with melancholy.

  * * *

  When I moved here, I wandered over to Shulamith Firestone’s last address, and looked up to the fifth floor, and stood there for what felt like forever.

  * * *

  I told myself that I was going to write about rage today, but instead, I’m writing about elegy. Can one write both with rage and elegy?

  * * *

  What I want to write are portraits of my obsessions. But they exist as portraits in my head. Can I focus on each portrait and ask you to meditate upon each one, on the heartache of their disappearance? The glittering elegy to Billie Holiday that Elizabeth Hardwick writes in Sleepless Nights, a section that I both love and am deeply ambivalent about. How she appropriates this tortured genius as a deity, not a person. In the same section she documents her friendship with the jazz-obsessed now-dead gay boy, also from Kentucky, a friendship as violent as a love affair—their haunting the jazz clubs. Her remembrances of living at the Hotel Schuyler for transients, drifters, performers. Hardwick, when crafting the novel, studied not only Renata Adler’s Speedboat but also Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and a similar decreation occurs in the work—going away from the self, preferring to tell other stories, of the washerwomen of her youth, of the denizens of the hotel, as opposed to telling her own. An elegy to youth, to a time in New York.

  * * *

  For some reason, now I’m thinking about this beautiful cabar
et singer I knew during my Time magazine internship, my Bell Jar days, the prodrome. She had OCD, diagnosed by psychiatrist parents. She gave me advice for battling disturbing thoughts—if you keep on thinking a man is going to come out around the corner and rape and murder you, make it a hundred men. Make it more and more, until it becomes absurd. She also taught me how to take the subway, and the perfect shade of drugstore red. I think she wanted our red lips pressed up against each other’s, but it never happened. I really loved being around her. I tried to look her up several years ago, but I couldn’t remember her last name.

  * * *

  I thought about the play I was trying to write then, when I was exiting the subway at Times Square the other day. I don’t know why that memory was triggered, if it’s because I used to wander around Times Square at night during that first stint in New York. But I felt very humane and affectionate to this former self. I thought to myself: Perhaps it’s our failures, not our successes, that make us artists.

  * * *

  I look at Ethyl Eichelberger’s Wiki page, and see that Ethyl grew up in a shit town in Illinois, like I grew up in a shit town in Illinois. And that Ethyl went to Knox College (I can even see in my head: the brochure for Knox College) before getting a scholarship to study performing arts in New York. I think one of the reasons I’m so drawn to these queer and radical artists is that so many came from rather dreary and even abusive backgrounds (the kinship between Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz), from split-level shit homes in some suburb, from lower-middle-class or working-class backgrounds where nothing was expected of them, who didn’t eat at restaurants growing up. Since I moved to New York, I have felt like an outsider among most of the writers I’ve met here, even the ones I teach. They grew up in families that expected them to do things; they grew up with art and assurances of their creativity. I needed to find artists who were escaping their backgrounds, like I felt I’ve always been escaping mine—those who have had to work shit jobs, who have hustled too. Who created art against—not art for.

  * * *

  For a while I wanted to be a mime. My first trip to Europe was at twenty-one, the metallic living statues at Sacré-Coeur. The year everything began to crack. I would look at photographs I took of those street performers, and thinking about them would make me feel like something broke open. There was something so beautiful about them, how they would be still and mocking for tourists. I wondered what it would be like to make a life out of a theatrical silence. Puppets and mimes and avant-garde theater. Those were my passion. After another pitch to the arts editor at the paper about a local mime troupe, he said to me, amused, Why are you so enthralled by loathed and vanishing art forms?

  Of course, now I attempt to write literature.

  * * *

  The girl I dragged with me to Paris, on our newly opened credit cards. The second time I had ever flown on a plane. Cheery, Irish-Catholic, South Side. A compulsive liar. Father was a con artist and gambler. She followed me everywhere for a while; we lived together in the city; we waited tables together at the chain pizza restaurant, the one where you had to mention two appetizers by name upon greeting. I still remember the computer codes. Spinach Artichoke Dip: 212. Sesame Ginger Chicken Dumplings: 202.

  She’s dead now. Suicide at twenty-five. She signed her suicide note with a smiley face. That’s the kind of girl she was. She wanted to make sure everyone else was okay. For a while she had it figured out whatever disorder they decided—the meds, the therapy. I was the one who was worried over when we knew each other, which hadn’t been for a while. At her wake all these whispers about how she got into the bad drugs. How she slept on the streets. How she supported her addiction. In the coffin, her family dressed her in a long flowery dress, like Laura Ashley. There were all of those horrible posters of photographs of her smiling. But she was always smiling, didn’t they realize that, she was always smiling. Her ex-boyfriend, who used to be a jungle DJ, asked after my welfare. I’m a writer now, I told him. I’m fine. I’m still not sure, thinking back, whether I was lying.

  * * *

  She was a psychology major. Aren’t they always? I was so depressed the whole time in Paris, feeling so vulgar and American—I wanted to wander around the streets and the museums, smoking and feeling alternatively hostile and melancholy. She wanted to drink and go to clubs. But we were still friends, weren’t we, we lived together afterwards. And what did we have in common? I don’t know.

  She was the one who would swoop down and save all of us, the one who seemed to have everything together. The mom type. She would drive us everywhere. When I sublet that place, with all of the heavy furniture, and I would leave the bowls of dried ramen piled up for weeks, and I would sit in that chair and drink whisky and smoke cigarettes, and still refuse to sleep, she was the only one who checked in on me, who took care of me. She would do my laundry with such cheerful briskness.

  * * *

  I feel so sure I’m over this—over her death. We both came from the lower-middle-class Chicago suburbs; we were both, despite everything, good Midwestern girls. It took me so long to cure myself of that.

  For there is almost no logic, that I survived and she did not. But, also, it seems so strange that I was ever that person. But there must be some connection. But also, sometimes, strange, that I am apparently the person I am now.

  * * *

  I could say: she became darker. But I don’t know if that’s true. She kept doing drugs, and then I stopped. Maybe it’s that she buried the darkness underneath so much artificial light. Even those who loved her, they never felt they knew her; there was always something about her, where you didn’t even know if she told the truth to herself.

  * * *

  The skinny artist boy whose apartment I sublet in my senior year, upon returning from New York, above the buffalo chicken place. He collected boxes of tinfoil; they were in every drawer of the kitchen, the living room. I think he did something with the tinfoil, but I didn’t ask what. I kept them there the entire year—I didn’t know what you put in drawers, why not tinfoil? When I came over to sign the sublease, we made out on the leather sofa—how did he have such expensive things? They must have been from his parents. I liked his jumpy energy. I think we argued with each other and wrestled around, and no one got off, because for me, it was never about getting off, but about the electricity of the strange collision. I don’t think we were even attracted to each other. It was just something to do. The temporary clanging together of two fucked-up people. Most of my intense interactions in the past were like the camaraderie between mental patients. The camaraderie between people who drifted in and out, because that’s what people like us did.

  * * *

  Also on that leather couch, the closeted avant-garde composer. It was the ’90s: all the work was about failure, about glitchy tape recordings. He would leave me long, whining messages on my voicemail, about everything he did and ate that day. He never asked about me, even though I was falling apart. I was the girl who listened—although I didn’t really listen, I just didn’t say anything back. I was working three jobs—at the Cajun place, at the more run-down pizza joint, at the arts camp during the day. He took me to see post-rock shows in the city, right near where I would later live, was dismayed I was unimpressed. I think I once let him climb on top of me, rather sloppily and disappointingly. I think we kept our clothes on. It didn’t matter to me. I was in love with someone else; I think he was too.

  * * *

  The essay I’ve been promising a journal I’d write is on David Wojnarowicz’s photographic series of Rimbaud in New York, where he had friends pose in front of the piers, other haunts, wearing a Rimbaud mask. I have been reading biographies for this essay I can’t write: C. Carr’s new biography, many Rimbaud biographies. Do you have any idea how many biographies of Rimbaud there are, how many biographies of Rimbaud in Africa? Chris Kraus had told me to read this biography about Rimbaud in Africa for the book I wrote for her, and I never did, but I read a couple afterwards, and I think I
read the wrong ones.

  * * *

  Facts I seize from the biography: That David Wojnarowicz worked at a Pottery Barn. That he died at thirty-seven like Rimbaud. That they were born a century apart. Why Rimbaud? Why always Rimbaud? I don’t know. But maybe this: that Rimbaud was allowed to escape his lower-middle-class drudgery, his fate as the perfect schoolboy, by deciding he was a seer, a poet. By building a religion for art made out of suffering, out of experience. That one could become—and then one could disappear. That all of that pain and suffering—that one’s childhood—can be for something.