Read Me #9: Earnest or Joking
1.
A lost & found ad from Craigslist in Providence, Rhode Island:
feeling lost and trying to understand what it means to be found; how to do so. does it require a change of place? does it require another person? i hope not. earnest or joking answers only, and welcome. this is NOT a cry for help (or creepiness). i’m hoping people who frequent this board might have real thoughts. thanks in advance.
The ad was posted by writer and artist Nikki Shaner-Bradford, who then turned the answers she received into a zine called providence>lost. I really like the listing for how much it feels like (and therefore is?) a real, as opposed to a performance of, a Craigslist ad.
2.
The world of zines is booming, yet mysterious. Where do I go for the latest write-up of Nicholas Serota’s Tie — about the neckwear of the former director of the Tate Museum — or A-Z of Exhibition for Chickens, by British zine-maker Jared Schiller? Where’s the BBC radio show dedicated to homemade one-offs like Random Things the Women of Sex & the City Would Buy on the Real Real or How to Survive a Cringe Memory? (I know the answer, I just wish I lived in a world where it was a valid question.)
3.
The chicken zine will surely remind animal art fans of Gino de Dominicis’ 1975 show Exhibition for Animals Only. Held at the Lucrezia de Domizio gallery in Pescara, Italy, it was, by all accounts, described very completely by its title. People at the entrance could catch glimpses of the donkeys and geese who’d been allowed inside, but the actual works on display were seen by no human eyes other than those of the artist himself. De Dominicis recalled that the animals “gazed at the works for a quarter of an hour and then left slowly. For a while a goat seriously considered buying a picture.” I think of this show often, and when I do I tend to wonder: would it be possible to stage art shows for other sorts of nonhuman? What would an Exhibition for Computer Viruses Only be like?
4.
Or how about if a high-end chatbot attended an exhibition and reviewed it for a local media outlet? Is that something you’d want to read? Reports indicate that the Evening Standard wants to bring its acerbically posh art critic Brian Sewell back from the dead as an AI byline. What had been London’s only major newspaper recently moved to a weekly model, laying off around 150 staff as it did so. The idea seems to be that AI Sewell will file a piece about the coming Van Gogh show at the National Gallery. It’s unclear if this will consist of sending a sort of webcam on wheels into the museum to look at the show, or what.
5.
Meanwhile in actually good uses of AI, Infraordinary FM, my internet radio station with Daniel John Jones, is in its final few days of broadcasting so please listen now, as much as you can. The reason for the closure is that we’ve run out of road in terms of our arrangement with ElevenLabs, who kindly provided the generative AI voices that allow us to share real-time breaking news of ships docking and pet grooming salons closing in Chiang Mai. We’re exploring ideas for a future manifestation of the project but this is the end of it in its original guise.
6.
[Conor O’Brien, at home in Dublin, turns his webcam towards his reading chair at the other end of the room.]
READ ME: Oh, right. So there’s a table next to it, I see, with just endless piles of books on top.
CONOR: There at the moment is the Paul McCartney book, the new one that came out about his songs, his lyrics. I just finished that. And I got that Bob Dylan one, which I thought was great, because it’s just so kind of irreverent and silly.
READ ME: Did you watch the TV show Get Back with the studio footage from Let It Be?
CONOR: I think I watched it four times. I lost a lot of my life to it. I love that the other guys had to endure all of the painful parts because they didn’t have any phones. Ringo is sitting there, taking in all of the conversation because he’s not checking his phone so even though he’s doing nothing, he’s actually probably doing a huge amount.
READ ME: Your recent reading list includes the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who I think is also referenced in your songs. Could you tell me about her? I don’t really know much about her.
CONOR: Well, I had a very rare holiday in New York and I went to Broadway and saw The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. It was just amazing. I still get shivers thinking about it. I can actually get quite bored in theatre. I find it has to be really good, to really hold my attention. But this just blew me away from start to finish. I’d only ever heard her name through the context of being friends with Nina Simone and James Baldwin. This particular play was all about kind of exposing the the strange, complicated nuance behind the masks that people wear in everyday life. Nobody goes unscathed at all. Everybody, even the most progressive characters, has been completely ripped apart by the end, and the most regressive characters are exposed as actually, maybe, the most progressive ones. The play was just a very interesting take on the human condition. Then a great play I read during the making of the latest Villagers album was The Amen Corner by James Baldwin.
READ ME: You always reference a wide range of cultural influences. I assume they feed into your music lyrically but do they also work melodically or compositionally in some way?
CONOR: I don’t know, it’s hard to say. Actually lot of my songs, musically, begin as genre exercises. One day I’ll just say I’m going to write a country song or something and I’ll just do the most obvious country song. But through doing that, I might get a couple of really nice verses because I’m being playful and I know it's not very good. Then maybe a year later those verses will still be glowing a little bit on the pages and I’ll finally be able to use them in something a bit more interesting musically. I very rarely start from stuff which I’ve begun that day. It’s nearly always voice memos from two years ago, or whatever. It’s always a collage.
Passing a Message, a book of Conor O’Brien’s lyrics and artwork, has just been published by Faber Music.
7.
For a couple of days, a few months back, I cycled around the city of Paris looking for walls to stare at. Some were notable, like the heavily graffitied facade of Serge Gainsbourg’s apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Près (pictured at the top of this issue) or the wall of the Prison de la Santé near Montparnasse. But my favourites were the walls that nobody can ever have looked at much before: the side of a derelict building in a park, a patch of bricks in the alleyway behind a hotel. It was a joke, at first. The new issue of MacGuffin magazine was to have walls as its theme (past issues have focused on, say, desks, or balls) and I didn’t want to read anything, I wanted to do, so I suggested I take long looks at some real walls. Review them, if you like: surely an absurd task, a caricature of a boring activity. It became addictive, however, the transition from ‘there’s nothing here, it’s just a wall’ to ‘everything is here’. Now I occasionally encounter a wall that achieves a certain balance of particular factors and think, “amazing, wow, that’s a good wall.”
8.
From that same issue, Jack Self writes fascinatingly — and based on various first person encounters — about the walls, both pyschological and physical, that define the lifestyles of the incredibly rich: “In a kind of a zen way, those born ultra-rich live perpetually in the moment. Since they understand very little about causality, they do not understand how events happen or things get made. They can be filled with mystical wonderment at the spontaneous generation of material reality. They can also be blind to social realities that sit outside their lived knowledge, which is terrifyingly narrow.”
9.
A little while back I had an intense conversation in an otherwise deserted cafe with Fiona Shaw, the legendary stage actor turned movie and TV star. We discussed subjects like the age a person must be in order to be “of the moment” (neither of us qualify) and the speaking patterns of intelligence agents, for a piece that’s out now in the landmark 30th issue of The Gentlewoman. Also, my interview with the American artist Paul McCarthy — on everything from the creative usefulness of speaking like a pirate to the controversy over his butt plug Christmas tree sculpture in central Paris — is available in the current issue of Middle Plane.
10.
“Hi I saw your post on craigslist. I am not creepy either for the record. The post resonated with me for some reason because I sometimes feel the same way. I really think being ‘found’ is finding a purpose in your life. I don’t mean a job or kids or marriage or love. It would be about who YOU are and what makes you feel whole. Thanks for the food for thought.” (Reply to Nikki from someone called Amie)
11.
Here’s where you can spend time watching parks from around the world in your browser window.