FILM, EYEBALLS, BRAIN reviews "Life As We Show It: Writing on Film" edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn

Film, Eyeballs, Brain has published a review by Benito Vergara of Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn:

Organized, kind of, around the provocative question “if movie-watching has become in itself a primary source of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?”, Life as We Show It features pieces that use “films and the culture that comes with it, as an ingredient for narrative impetus,” as coeditor Masha Tupitsyn puts it.

One or two essays are almost full-blown academic papers that are explicitly engaged with film history and theory; some have little to do with even cinema at all. Sometimes knowledge of the film being discussed is (probably) crucial to appreciate the piece (and therefore, my non-appreciation); sometimes it’s not. Creative nonfiction, a screenplay, poetry: it sounds like a fairly open-ended Call for Papers — both to its advantage and disadvantage — and the fragmentary, journal-entry nature of some of the pieces only helps to underscore the looseness of the collection. (Granted, the fragments do mimic the way in which cinema seeps into our dreams and flickers at the edges of our everyday consciousness: in half-remembered scenes, in random bits of dialogue.) But one person’s “fluid and limber” is another person’s “disorganized”. Eye of the beholder and all, no pun intended.

On the other hand, the more substantial pieces are really well-crafted: Kevin Killian, on seeing one of his students in a porn video; Wayne Koestenbaum, on Elizabeth Taylor (but then, it’s Wayne Koestenbaum we’re talking about here, whose capacity to meld sometimes stunning critical acuity with campy hilarity is probably second to none); Veronica Gonzalez, on Herzog (barely), tourism and marriage; Tupitsyn, on the bodies of Ralph Macchio and Jamie Lee Curtis; Richard Grayson’s “The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County”, on the ephemeral life of suburban theaters; and Myriam Gurba watching Kids and remembering herown traumatic adolescence.

Best piece, hands down: Dodie Bellamy’s “Phone Home”, a piece prompted by Spielberg’s E.T. What follows is a heartbreaking, almost obsessive examination of the film (and crucially, the DVD extras) as a way of working through her grief.

A good chunk of the book (sorry, I don’t have my copy in front of me, and it may even be more than half) deals with love and sex — limiting at first glance, but actually superbly appropriate. For what other medium lets us sate our scopophilia so easily, letting us hungrily consume (and vice-versa) the larger-than-life objects of our desire, with strangers in the dark?

Gay and Lesbian Times reviews LIFE AS WE SHOW IT: WRITING ON FILM

Gay and Lesbian Times has reviewed Life As We Show It in its feature by Richard Labonte,
"Splash into Summer Books." Here's the review, published on Thursday, August 20, 2009, in issue 1130:

Life As We Show It: Writing on Film
edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn
City Lights Books
304 pages, $18.95 paper

Dodie Bellamy immerses herself in thoughts of E.T. while coping with her mother’s dying. Wayne Koestenbaum riffs on the gender “puzzle” that is Elizabeth Taylor. Bard Cole considers both the veiled porn implicit in mainstream movies featuring young men, and the life of erotica icon Joey Stefano. Richard Grayson exhumes the film screens of his Florida youth. Abdellah Taia, sitting with his dozing mother in a darkened Moroccan room, recalls finding sexual self-realization watching a queer French movie on TV. Rebecca Brown overlays her own life with imagery from classic westerns. In these smart essays, few short stories, a poem and a screenplay, 25 entries in all, contributors – obviously smitten by cinema both contemporary and classic – cast a personal eye on a universal medium. They aren’t reviewing films, though. Instead, these writers muse on how film and life are intertwined, how they find themselves on screen and those screens in turn reflect them. Settle in with a box of Twizzlers and revel in the provocative thinking in this fresh take on popular culture.

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Richard Labonte has been reading, editing, selling and writing about queer literature since the mid ’70s.

CHROMA and FANZINE review "LIfe As We Show It"

Chroma, the UK's only queer literary and arts journal, has reviewed Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn:

. . . Life as We Show It is everything that being published by City Lights suggest it will be: a diverse range of voices from New Queer (mainly West Coast) writing, including fan favourites Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Rebecca Brown, Lynne Tillman, Robert Glück, David Trinidad and Abdellah Taïa. . .

It’s an exemplum of how swiftly the avant-garde is forgotten because it doesn’t circulate in the same way as mainstream cinema, and – on the showing of Life – because Americans rarely have access to anything outside their own pop culture at an impressionable age. This is the post-avant garde generation, whose voices are largely ironic and mainly autobiographical, “viewing life through screen-tinted glasses,” to quote the blurb. Slanted through the prismatic lens of (for the most part) popular American cinema, the book suggests a febrile (perhaps fatal) postmodernity where reality is framed by, and processed through, its simulacral representations in pop culture.

The finest pieces in the book – by Bellamy, Killian, Brown, Taïa and poet Fanny Howe – step beyond that Gen X campness, practised to the highest order in a sonata pathetique on Elizabeth Taylor by Wayne Koestenbaum. Killian takes up, in a surprisingly critical manner, the hints of masturbation in “screen-tinted glasses” and castigates the production and spectatorship of violent and abusive pornography through his clever and well-reasoned take on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Tale of Goodman Brown (one of the few literary references in this work of literature). Taïa and Howe both address films from beyond the (anti-) canon of popular American cinema: Taïa writes movingly, and erotically, about encountered gay desire through an obscure French film broadcast on late-night Moroccan TV while his mother sleeps right behind him, while Howe encounters Stalinist Russia at its bleakest in “After Watching Klimov’s Agoniya.” These pieces have a socio-political context, clearly but never didactically established, in which cinema figures both freedom of representation and the hope or desire for change.

Bellamy and Brown show that’s not an impossible effect to achieve when writing about American cinema, and Richard Grayson’s touching “The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County” queers the multiplex in a charming, if slightly sentimentalised, way. . .

You can find the rest of the review by Sophie Mayer here.

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Fanzine also reviewed Life As We Show It and listed it as "recommended":

Lots of people write about film. In fact, one of the easiest things to do might be to write about some movie you just watched, your critique, your interpretation, your blog. So what makes this book special, aside from the fact that several of our lovely contributors wrote for it? Well, this isn't just a book on film and feelings, it's actually kind of haunting in strange and lingering ways, like a silent, but heavy presence in the room. Kevin Killian's "Young Goodman Brown Effect" is quintessential Killian, tracing a midnight walk with the devil with his own journey into dark corners of the Internet, while Donal Mosher ponders the crucifix scene in The Exorcist while keeping a diary as he films a documentary about his family. Myriam Gurba recounts horrific parallels as she traces, chronologically, her way through Larry Clark's Kids. It's all very surreal, and equally disconcerting and concrete. The pieces move like scenes and vignettes themselves, flickering and shimmering in the dark, shining in and out until one can almost hear the lead frames of the film monotonically whipping against the takeup reel in an otherwise silent room. -Michael Louie

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On Monday, August 3, there'll be a reading at the wonderful McNally Jackson bookstore in Soho at 7 p.m. with Life As We Show It contributors Donal Mosher, Masha Tupitsyn and Richard Grayson.

Wednesday Evening in SoHo: Masha Tupitsyn, Lynne Tillman, Wayne Koestenbaum and "Life As We Show It: Writing on Film" at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe

This evening we took along an umbrella as the L and 6 trains brought us to SoHo for a very enjoyable reading at the great Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. As we noted in earlier posts, City Lights has just brought out Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, co-edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn.

Two stellar contributors to the anthology, Lynne Tillman and Wayne Koestenbaum, read tonight from cinema-related early pieces, both tours de force that prefigured later books that we consider masterpieces. We'd enjoyed both immensely in our reading of the book last week, but it was a special pleasure to see the authors and hear their words in their own voices.

There was a crowd of 35 to 40 in chairs in the back of the store, next to the cafe. We've spent a number of interesing afternoons and evenings here (for example, these September 2007 panels on the future of book reviewing and on literary magazines online, and we know they're well worth the occasional distraction of the sound of food and drink being made.

First, as usual, someone thanked us for coming and told us about Housing Works. If you've been living on Uranus, you know about them, but they're a now vulnerable New York-based non-profit fighting the twin crisis of AIDS and homelessness.

Housing Works runs a chain of nine thrift shops, this bookstore and cafe, a catering company and a screen-printing business as social enterprises to support their work and lower their dependence on grants and donations. All the books and periodicals in the booktore are donated, so if you live in the city and have some books you think they could use for a great cause, take them to the store at 126 Crosby Street and stop to buy some new books and get something good to eat and drink.

Anyway, then there was an introduction of Masha Tupitsyn, co-editor of Life As We Show It (along with our good friend, the brilliantly original filmmaker, novelist and critic Brian Pera).

Masha is an amazing writer and an astute cultural critic. Her book Beauty Talk & Monsters from Semiotext(e) Press, is a collection of film-based stories, and she's currently working on Star Notes, a new book about our favorite actor, John Cusack and the identity politics of the actor. Her fiction and criticism has appeared or is forthcoming in Animal Shelter, Fanzine, Creative Aggression, the anthologies Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century and the Encyclopedia Project Volume II, F-K (Encyclomedia Press, 2009), Make/Shift, Bookforum, Fence, Five Fingers Review, and San Francisco's KQED’s The Writer’s Block.

Masha read a little of her terrific introduction to the anthology, which begins with a meditation on the movie theater scene in The Blob. The passage she read begins:

When the great comedian Gene Wilder got his first big movie break, he ran around Lincoln Center ecstatically proclaiming, "I want everything I've ever seen in the movies!" With Reality TV currently reigning supreme, the symbiotic bonds that we have with screen fantasies and screen idols -- that is, the way we contain, portray, and pursue images, rather than the way images portray us -- have largely gone on to erode any kind of real civic alliance, making images the ties that bind. . .

Her reading gave a look at what Life As We Show It is all about. As the book's publicity stuff says, it's

a dynamic cross-genre collection that uses short stories, essays, and poetry to explore the cinematic experience. In these innovative writings, the movie-viewer relationship is positioned as protagonist, theme and plot, and most importantly, as a new genre in its own right. The texts play with the trope that life imitates art by asking: If movie-watching has become a primary way of experiencing the world, what kind of movies are our lives imitating?

Then Masha introduced Lynne Tillman, giving Lynne's bio note from the book. Here let's just plagiarize ourselves, from the last Lynne Tillman reading we reported on, an event for BOMB Magazine in Tompkins Square Park on August 1, 2007:

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and two nonfiction books. Lynne’s No Lease on Life was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her novel, American Genius: A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press last year. Other novels are Motion Sickness, Haunted Houses and Cast In Doubt. Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including The New Gothic, New York Writes After 9/11, The Show I’ll Never Forget, The Penguin Book of New York Stories, and This Is Not Chick Lit. She’s a professor and writer-in-residence at the University at Albany, and last year she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lynne said she'd been thrilled that Brian and Masha wanted to use her story "Other Movies" to lead off the anthology because it's one of her works that "no one had ever mentioned" but it's precious to her because, as is obvious to all of us who love her masterwork No Lease on Life, its themes and styles prefigure that book's.

The story takes place on Tenth Street in the East Village in the 1980s and the block in those pre-gentrification days was more quirky and vibrant, if somewhat more dicey, than it is today. The narrator describes the block's residents and their eccentricities and reimagines them as (or casts them as) characters in one of the movies or TV shows that are frequently shot in the picturesque neighborhood.

Here's a short excerpt of a scene in a bar that's "Cheers or Archie's Place except the ethnic groups are different. For the regulars, it's a home away from home" and two of them, Kay and Harvey are talking:

Kay's wearing a cut-up T-shirt with a Bruce Springsteen logo on the back. She reminds me of Sally Fields. . . Then she drinks a shot of vodka and rolls her blue eyes at him, as if she were Demi Moore in St. Elmo's Fire. They talk about disease. His heart. Her breasts. AIDS. Kay's good friend Richard died two months ago, and she still can't believe it. Life, she tells Harvey, wasn't supposed to be like this. Kay slides off the barstool, goes to the jukebox, and plays "Born in the USA" and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

Joe the bartender is nothing like Archie or Ted Danson, the guy from Cheers. He's a tall black guy, sort of like the lead in The Brother from Another Planet. . .

A longer excerpt would show how good this piece really is, but we're a little slow on typing tonight.

After Lynne stepped down to a round of applause, Masha introduced Wayne Koestenbaum and we realized we've mispronounced his name in our head all these years we've been reading his work and about him. His bio, which we've stolen from the indispensible Soft Skull Press:

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of several works of cultural criticism including The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist), Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics; the Penguin Lives biography of Andy Warhol; and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon. He is also the author of a novel Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes and five collections of poetry, Best-selling Jewish Porn Films, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, The Milk of Inquiry, and Model Homes.

Wayne's piece from Life As We Show It, "The Elizabeth Taylor Puzzle," prefigures his book-length studies on the role of divadom and gay male culture, The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin. Film Comment said the Taylor essay is one of the highlights of the anthology, and Wayne's reading of much of it tonight had the Housing Works audience enraptured after he said how great it was to read with one of his idols (and ours), Lynne Tillman.

Koestenbaum's take on Liz Taylor is a wonder. Perhaps you can get a feel for the tour de force Wayne Koestenbaum pulls off in this essay from this excerpt:

Elizabeth Taylor and masturbation: recall the marvelous scene in National Velvet when she plays invisible horsie in bed, pretending to ride a horse, making it go faster and faster, panting as it accelerates and she guides it over hurdles, her screen sister Angela Lansbury in bed dreaming of boys but Elizabeth Taylor as Velvet hot for a horse named Pie, as in mincemeat pie.

References to eating, hunger, and gluttony mark most of Taylor's films. In A Place in the Sun, she enters the pool room where Montgomery Clift is playing and she nibbles. In BUtterfield 8, she says, "Waitress, could you bring us some french fries?" In the first scene of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? she eats cold meat straight out of the fridge. . .

The elephantine giantism of such vehicles as Giant and Elephant Walk signify that she's a star, that the emotions she inspires are huge, and that her figure is large. (Is it really? The allegedly "large" Liz often seems tiny. Liz is a matter of perspective.) It has alway been considered acceptable to comment on her size. . . She was called plump long before she was actually plump. Fluids and solids that pass through Elizabeth Taylor' body, or that stay in her body, are part of the public record.

After Wayne read, Masha thanked the audience and after the applause died down, people got up to talk with the authors, get books signed, etc. (We found a little room where we could pass fluids out of our body first.)

Masha will be reading from her own contribution to Life As We Show It, along with the wonderful Tisa Bryant, next Friday, June 26, at Bluestockings.

"The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County" by Richard Grayson at The Rumpus

Richard Grayson's "The Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County" is featured today, with beautiful original artwork by Mikayala Butchart (coincidentally, a niece of our old friends Ted and Ellen Butchart), at The Rumpus.

The story appears in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, the new anthology co-edited by Masha Tupitsyn and Brian Pera, just published by City Lights.

Film Comment reviews "Life as We Show It: Writing on Film"

In its current (May/June 2009) issue, Film Comment has a review by Nicola Evans of Life as We Show It: Writing on Film, co-edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn and published by City Lights. The editors were kind enough to include our "Forgotten Movie Screens of Broward County" in the book.

In the review, Evans calls Life as We Show It "an anthology of essays, screenplays, and stories about watching movies that has the virtue of not treating life and cinema as obvious antagonists" and goes on to say

One of the pleasures of this collection is that writing about movie viewing produces a cheerful and salutary indifference to conventional judgements of a film’s “importance.” In Richard Grayson’s charming paean to the suburban cinemas of his youth, Victor/Victoria is remembered not for being a great film, but for marking the first time the author held hands with another man. For me the two highlights in this regard are Wayne Koestenbaum’s essay about the body of Elizabeth Taylor (which might, just might tempt you to look again at Cleopatra), and “Phone Home,” Dodie Bellamy’s story of her preoccupation with E.T. when her mother was dying of lung cancer. . .

I would buy this book for Bellamy’s piece alone. To watch as cinema’s most famous stranded alien becomes by turns a figure for the narrator’s alienation from her mother’s body through illness and age, the alienation of the able bodied from boys like Matthew De Meritt, the boy with no legs who helped bring E.T. to life by walking on his hands, and finally an opportunity to reflect on what alien technologies like cinema can do to repair these rifts—is to have one’s own ideas about how and why films matter to us completely and productively overturned.

LIFE AS WE SHOW IT posts Richard Grayson's Teenage Movie Journal

LIFE AS WE SHOW IT, the blog for the forthcoming City Lights anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film, co-edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn, has published the movie-going diary entries from Richard Grayson's Summer in Brooklyn, 1969-1975:

Monday, August 11, 1969

I saw Goodbye Columbus & thought it was very good. The theater was pretty crowded. The wedding scenes in the movie were so true to life. I think the message of the film is to decide for yourself what is right and what is not. But what if you're like Brenda Patimkin or me, and aren't sure?


Saturday, July 11, 1970

A hot, humid day. Johnny was up early & went for drum lessons. Marc & I woke later & together we went to the Brook to see Boys in the Band. It depressed him altho he admitted it was great, & I have to confess I didn't come out of the theater feeling very happy, either.


Thursday, August 13, 1970

After lunch, I went to the Marine to see The Games, a surprisingly good movie about Olympic marathon runners - something that looks very exciting. I felt enormously happy this evening, for no apparent reason.


Thursday, August 20, 1970

I drove to Korvette's on Bay Parkway & bought 2 hardcover books. One was The Lord Won't Mind by Gordon Merrick, a straight-forward novel of a lasting homosexual relationship. I think its candor upset me. I went to the Rugby to see Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which I thought was a funny story of American morality today.

Thursday, June 10, 1971

We went to the Marine & saw a double feature: Little Murders, a wild movie about violence & feelings in the city, based on the Feiffer play, & Making It, about a high school kid's sexual adventures. Shelli was upset by the abortion scene in the last movie - she may take the pill after all.


Friday, June 18, 1971

Shelli came soon after, bringing a card that said "thank you for being you." When I told her about Dr. Wouk telling me to date other girls, she dialed his number & shouted "Pig!" into the phone. She was upset, & as the three of us went to Kings Plaza & looked around, both she & Avis tried to convince me that Dr. Wouk is a nut. I'm very confused at the moment. We went to the movies to see Summer of '42, a pretty good film about a teenage boy's growing up during World War II. Avis took the bus home, & Shelli & I came back to my house.

You can read the rest of the entries at LIFE AS WE SHOW IT.