Five on It with Curator Bradford Nordeen

This week, in acknowledgment of the Birdsong Collective’s collaboration with queer experimental film and video series Dirty Looks, curator and cinephile Bradford Nordeen answers our quick-and-dirty interview questions. Be sure to check out Dirty Looks’ Under the Stars program Wednesday evening and the celebration of the tenth issue of USELESS MAGAZINE tonight.

1. What is the last song to which you listened?

This great Greek electonica duo Marsheaux just took a stab at Sally Shapiro’s 2008 single Jackie Jackie (Spend this Winter with Me), and the results are quite favorable. It makes no sense for the season, but Sally is my god, so what can you do?

2. What did you want to be when you were ten?

Yikes — a theater actor, I think. Or an artist.

3. What is the best advice you have ever been given?

Does the entire Diane Warren songbook count? It’s very inspirational. And she once wrote to me on Twitter.

4. What is the last thing with which you were obsessed?

That’s always too many to name, but the most recent zinger would have to be Magdalena Montezuma — this amazing experimental German actress who was in films by all the greats — Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Ulrike Ottinger, Rosa Von Praunheim, and Frank Ripploh. She was so extreme, in every way; I just wrote a small piece on her titled Achingly Memorable.

5. Of what are you afraid?

Spiders.

Five on It with Author Michael Kimball

Author of a novel told in suicide notes, Michael Kimball answers our quick-and-dirty interview questions.

1. What is the last song to which you listened?

When I opened your email with this question in it, I was listening to Obadiah Parker’s cover of Outkast’s Hey Ya.

2. What did you want to be when you were ten?

A professional basketball player – I had a pretty sweet jumper.

3. What is the best advice you have ever been given?

I really like this from my friend Cynthia Gray: don’t give up. It’s good to be reminded.

4. What is the last thing with which you were obsessed?

Right now, I’m obsessed with the Poet’s Athletic Club, a coed softball team made up of Baltimore writers, artists, and musicians. We’re 0-for-the-season so far, but it’s so much fun.

5. Of what are you afraid?

Not being able to write another book – then what would I do?

Total Styrene

FIVE ON IT WITH ALEXANDER

The self-proclaimed velvet voice of morose disco-soul, Alexander, answers our quick-and-dirty interview questions.

1. What’s the last song you listened to?

The Party’s Over Now by Noel Coward. It’s my manifesto.

2. What did you want to be when you were ten?

A priest. I was a very devout Catholic, and I always found the Church to be the height of glamour. It was my gateway into psychedelics and drag shows.

3. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?

Never fuck anyone you wouldn’t want to be, which Max Steele told me once backstage at an award show. Words to live by. Probably to die by, too.

4. What’s the last thing you were obsessed with?

Bent, the new SSION record. My neighbours feel very differently. We have conflicting tastes in music. Our sensibilities apparently only converge at one point, that point being Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover by Sophie B.Hawkins, and I’ve been obsessed with that since the dawn of time, or thereabouts.

5. What are you afraid of?

Flying, which is a shame because I do it constantly, and really it’s a bad use of time to be frozen in terror at twenty-thousand feet when there are all of those Simone de Beavoir texts to read.

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Five On It with Christopher Schmidt

A few months ago I got the chance to take a class with Christopher Schmidt at Poets House (where I work… nbd). I hadn’t taken a writing course in over a year and was feeling really stuck (by “stuck” i mean “like hadn’t written anything but facebook updates in a really long time”). To lay it all out – I couldn’t decide which class to take and Chris looked the dreamiest in his photos. So I enrolled in his class called “Writing Between the Lines” where I ended up writing some killer stuff (like a love poem that could be read as being BY Richard Brautigan or TO Richard Brautigan, a piece that was made up of every text my boyfriend sent me that month where he used my name, a four page long essay on my love of Elizabeth Taylor (RIP), and a catalog of everything my poetry friends and I ate at the Waverly Diner over the course of three months (barf)). Chris was an AWESOME teacher – and guess what? – he’s an awesome poet too! I asked him to answer our five little queries a while back. Here are his answers:

1.) What did you want to be when you were ten?

When I was ten, my parents were divorced, so I for lived half of the year on my father’s farm. Because I was left alone much of this time, I learned to entertain myself. I would ride my bike on the gravel road connecting the house to the quonset and make up little songs to shout into the wind. I suppose those were my first poems.

Another thing I loved to do was build things. A hay-bale fort in the barn loft. A bridge made of planks across a field creek. It’s here where my first real career aspiration emerged: to be an architect. During these years, I spent my free time drawing floor plans of skyscrapers and ancient Greek cities. (I still have the notebooks.) Although I didn’t end up following this path—a brief career as a graphic designer was the closest I came—I still consider the architect to be the ultimate in intellectual glamor.

In an odd way, I’ve combined these childhood pursuits in my writing. When I write poems I sometimes feel as if I am designing floor plans with words. The space I’m writing is more conceptual or ambient than actual. (Which may explain my ambivalence about publishing: I prefer the romance of the unrealized structure to the disappointment of the built.)

2.) What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?

Underneath my agreeable facade, I’m impossibly stubborn. I’m always on the hunt for advice, but usually resent it when offered. Ginsberg’s “Kill your idols” may be the best advice I can pass along—because it’s no advice at all.

3.) What are you afraid of?

That my desire to avoid ugly feelings will make it difficult for me to write well. I’m also afraid of heights. Even vistas terrify me. Driving through Ireland was some kind of sublime hell.

4.) What’s the last thing you were obsessed with?

My obsessions focus and motivate me. Can’t name just one.

Recent fixations include Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and the Office for Soft Architecture, especially her essay on scaffolding; Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies; all the novels of Thomas Bernhard except The Correction, supposedly his masterpiece. Also: fetish wear designer David Mason’s blog, House of Vader (I read it for the erotic philosophy, not for the pictures, which are highly NSFW); the photo blog Beyonce and the Fourth Sex; Farrow & Ball’s paint color Downpipe; occasionally Glee (especially the “Substitute” episode); the performer Justin Bond; the Wooster Group’s House/Lights.

Since my teenage years I’ve been caught in the sometimes uncomfortable grip of an obsession with the model Linda Evangelista. Like the narrator of Bernhard’s The Loser, who keeps scuttling his essay on Glenn Gould, I try and fail to develop a writing that can express my attachment to her—the temperature of it, the queer coupling of transport and shame.

5.) What’s the last song you listened to?

I’ve saved this question for last because it terrifies me.

In junior high school, I was a band geek who listened to Wagner and Prokofiev and was scared by rock music. (It hurt my ears, and I was plagued by worries about Satanic messages.) So I avoided it—at my peril. One day on the bus home from school, the most vindictive of the “cool kids” subjected me to an unannounced pop culture test. Amber was my tormentor’s name, and in front of the entire bus she asked me what rock band sang “Wanted (Dead or Alive).” I guessed Poison and immediately became a laughing stock.

My song choice in some senses repairs this trauma. It’s a little bit back country, a little bit rock and roll — very much a return to my Dakota roots. According to iTunes, I’ve listened to Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again” twenty-one times since I bought it ten hours ago (and six of those hours were spent sleeping). And yes, I rediscovered it via last week’s episode of Glee.

If you don’t know it, the song is an almost instrumental Lindsay Buckingham vehicle from the album Rumours. Buckingham’s ambling, spidery guitar line is punctuated by a voice that begins in melancholy and turns more plaintive at the chorus. The lyrics themselves show an almost Creeley-esque restraint:

She broke down and let me in.
And made me see where I’ve been.
Been down one time.
Been down two times.
Never going back again. Mmm-hmm.

You don’t know what it means to win.
Come down and see me ‘gain.
Been down one time.
Been down two times.
Mmm-hmm. Never going back again.

What is the song about? It could be describing a mythical conquest and retreat from the valley. On a more literal level, the song is also (infamously?) inspired by oral sex. This knowledge could render it grossly chauvinistic. No matter: a song’s lyrics are always the last thing I weigh. With a powerhouse delivery, even a song that’s virtually content-free can become monumental.

——————-

Christopher Schmidt lives and teaches in New York. He is the author of a book of poems, The Next in Line. A new chapbook, Thermae, will be released soon in EOAGH 6.

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