Altered States Lit T Fleischmann Discusses “Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through” By Toni Nealie You cover a lot of ground. history 101 course, or an intro In your first book “Syzygy, to painting class. But I surrounded Beauty” and now “Time is myself with artists, and loved art, The Thing a Body Moves which shaped how I understood Through,” you are itinerant in myself and my world. I came geography and on the page. around to appreciating the In the new book, you say, engagement and education I did “My relationship to who I was have, what I learned by looking is tenuous.” What are you and talking. Once I accepted the aiming to show regarding value in my experience, I was time, distance and change? interested in trying to write from I’m trying to complicate narratives that place. I’m trying to value what exists outside of institutions, of change and progress, not so much the motion from one place looking especially at personal to the next, or one way of being connections, subjective reactions, which is also a way to celebrate to another, but trying to find a the people who are excluded constant state of revolution and necessary upheaval. There’s the from those institutions, a more change of gender, which for me, anarchic thinking. was not a change from one coher- In “Syzygy, Beauty” you say ent state (boy) to another state you don’t believe in weddings. (nonbinary), but a continual unfolding, where arriving presents In “Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through” you get wed. another opportunity to change, rather than the achievement of a What happened? stable, fixed identity. There’s also The short answer is that I fell in a churning of political revolution, love with someone who wasn’t a constant questioning of belief, a a United States citizen, so it was desire to better serve the places less about changing my beliefs and more about navigating the I find myself and the people I state’s systems to get what I live with. Culturally, we are in Photo: May Allen wanted (love is a negotiation). Of desperate need of change, so about holding myself accountable. course, it’s not so simple and my I’ll say, though, that I gave my I’m interested in finding ways to Lovers and friends are named. friends a choice to have their real partner and I find ourselves stalled The voice seems confident name or to replace it with a fake make that change possible, to and unafraid to reveal itself. one, and they all chose the real make it as easy to reinvigorate the in Trump’s immigration disaster— Why the different style and names! Which suddenly made it past as it is to set aside the ways married before he took office, why this openness now? all feel much more intense and but the process only really getting Yes, one of the things that I tried highlighted the reality that we’re we used to be that no longer to do in “Time” is to say a lot of never actually writing alone. underway after inauguration. I still the things that I was avoiding serve us. “It’s okay, you don’t saying in “Syzygy.” If my first book How does your trans genre reject marriage as a tool of the is about inhabiting the lyric space, writing complement compli- have to be this way anymore” so often obscure and metaphori- cated ideas about gender and can be a radically liberating idea. state and we cling to the idea that cal, the second is about owning identity? You also sometimes on the other side of all this we can up to what I believe and the talk about eschewing labels choices I’ve made, which can be but also talk about being In both your books, you thread get legally divorced and continue a kind of horrifying thing to do in transsexual—what do you reflections on artists such as with our relationship, which is print—being visible means being prefer to be called and how Meret Oppenheim and Felix dreamy and romantic to me. vulnerable. As far as why, I’m not important is that to you? sure I have a good answer. In Much less important than it used Gonzalez-Torres through some ways, it’s a fuck you to to be! I’ve identified widely and APRIL 2019 Newcity personal lyric or narrative. Why “We aren’t supposed to talk people who don’t want me to do you splice art criticism with about some bodies” you wrote exist, but there’s also something deeply personal memories of in “Syzygy, Beauty,” which love, sex, loss and the body? stylistically is lyrical and For a long time, I didn’t let myself indirect, no one is named. write about visual arts, I was too In “Time is The Thing a Body intimidated by that world and the Moves Through” you write way art critics spoke of the work. very directly about bodies and I’ve never had so much as an art what bodies can do sexually. 51
inconsistently over time—bisexual, was first leaving my hometown and gay, dyke, trans, queer, genderqueer, coming into my sense of self still resonates with me—the AIDS LIT TOP 5 nonbinary and so on. And many of Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP,) 1 mai c. doan and Jan-Henry Gray. those identities felt vital and neces- Women & Children First. Poets mai c. sary when I claimed them. After many a John Rechy book, an X-Ray Spex doan and Jan-Henry Gray launch debut record. If someone would have collections, “water/tongue” and “Documents.” years of stumbling around in that Also reading: Xandria Phillips. April 26 language, I finally came to understand given me a Vaginal Davis zine in high school it would have saved me 2 Valerie Jarrett: Inside Power. that it was fine for none of those KAM Isaiah Israel. Valerie Jarrett, words to resonate with me and that years of confusion. But I’m glad longest-serving senior advisor in the you asked those two together, the Obama White House, discusses her I didn’t have to participate in that memoir “Finding My Voice” with her labelling if I didn’t want to, which was artistic and the political. I learned daughter, CNN reporter Laura Jarrett. very freeing. I’ll still accept “trans” as more about art from encountering Moderated by Tina Tchen, former chief of Sylvia Rivera’s activism than I did staff to First Lady Michelle Obama. April 4 an identity and will describe myself that way, because I still find utility in studying in the academy and more 3 Melinda Gates: The Moment of about politics from lesbian poetry Lift. UIC Dorin Forum. Philanthropist, the language (political, cultural, businesswoman, global advocate for than in the newspaper. women and girls, co-chair of the Bill & sexual, medical). But in general, I’m Melinda Gates Foundation and author of “The Moment of Lift: How Empowering uncomfortable with the idea that a You write of “the relentlessness Women Changes the World,” Melinda French Gates says, “If you want to lift a gender or sexuality could be pure, of people in love…of losses that society up, invest in women.” April 27 that a word like “woman” or “gay” are shared…of bodies that are 4 American Writers Museum Annual Benefit OnWord 2019. could mean something coherent, different”—capturing a feeling of Four Seasons Hotel Chicago. Honoring “Friend of the Writer”—author, editor, and I’m more interested in messing winning over the odds, of humans senior advisor to Librarian of Congress and director of the National Book Festival around with the language than in being humans. It feels hopeful, Marie Arana; Cultural and Civic Leadership Honoree Edward J. Wehmer; Inspiring upholding it (one reason the word but a lot of the book seems to Teacher Honoree Tom Elieff, with presenters A. Scott Berg and Rebecca Makkai. transsexual pops up a couple of be about struggle, political and Hosted by Peter Sagal. April 27 times in the book). personal. What are your concerns? 5 The Lushness of Print. Poetry Foundation. A display of broadsides What was your process with I’m a slow writer and have been from the ekphrastic partnership between poet Samiya Bashir and printer Daniela this book? Was it conceived thinking a lot about the difference del Mar. Through April 25 as a single project? between the political conversation 52 An ongoing project, maybe, rather when the book was written and the than a single project. I started out political conversation it is being with a meditative daily writing practice, released into—both the discursive leap from the Obama administration describing ice in prose, that began to Trump, and what people call the when the creek outside the shack “trans tipping point,” one of those where I used to live froze. That regularly scheduled moments in continued for a few months, then U.S. culture when public attention I started to let myself explore the images more broadly, which brought is directed toward trans people, believing us to be somehow new. in this association between the ice and the crinkly blue candy wrappers Anyway, if I were writing the book again now, I’d probably feel com- in a Felix Gonzalez-Torres piece. That’s around when I started spending pelled to have the conversation differently because the broader time with Simon, one of the main conversation is different, but I don’t figures in the book, a close friend think my concerns have really and occasional lover who had his changed. The culture that I come own obsession with images of ice. That writing continued for a few years, from, the Midwestern settler culture that made me white and tried to meditating around the ice and the make me a man, continues exerting relationship with Simon. When the itself, and trans people face similar relationship ended, I found that I couldn’t write in the same style, but and sometimes increased levels of structural violence, compared to I wanted to continue the project. before this whole media circus That’s when I found my way to the second form in the book, along with started. Whether it’s Hillary Clinton a new relationship. While the first part committing war crimes in Libya and Obama building the machine of of the book is written in verse (kind mass surveillance or Trump targeting of), this second form was all prose, the Palestinian people and the a different energy to capture the Republicans dismantling the EPA, difference in romances. It wasn’t the mechanisms of the state and until the last year of writing that the the ideologies of whiteness are still book came together as it is now, laser focused on perpetuating Newcity APRIL 2019 and there were many more pages settler culture—military dominance, written than appear. environmental exploitation, the What is your artistic and nuclear family unit, always about political lineage? taking rather than building. It’s bleak, Trans punks, girly anarchists, prison when the same problems perpetuate, but I’m glad that the book still feels abolitionist poets, performance artists who read essays, anyone who hopeful—I’m not ready to give up on that, knowing that people find understands art to be a function of hope in places far more dire than liberation. Probably the lyric essay. the place I am in. A lot of what I encountered when I
Music God Isn’t While I hold out hope for post-music, there’s plenty My Only Co-Pilot of “post-rock” still to explore. Two recent records speak to the vitality and continued creativity of the genre, boasting Post-Rock Thrives On Two New Releases a snaky sinuousness as well as a whale’s worth of winning tunes, inspiring purple prose the size of a State Fair blue- By Craig Bechtel ribbon-winning eggplant. Justin Lerner and Nick Biscardi formed post-rock-shoegaze APRIL 2019 Newcity duo Pilot Cloud in Philadelphia in April 2008 and released their debut, “In Transition” that December. In 2010 Biscardi moved to Chicago, Pilot Cloud dissipated, and Biscardi drummed with local band Rocket Miner, producing their debut EP, “Songs For An October Sky” in 2011, released on his own Jacuzzi Suit label. The music for Pilot Cloud’s third full-length, the self-released “Signals Through The Static,” was composed via email in 2012 while Lerner and Biscardi lived in different cities, and the songs sat idle for years while they weren’t on speaking terms. Both now call the Pacific Northwest home, although neither knew they were moving geographically closer together when their relocations happened within months of each other. Those 2012 demos were resurrected in 2018, re-recorded and released to commemorate the decade since their debut. Given all that, it’s remarkable how well this album coalesces, with the throughlines being Lerner’s wispy, winsome tenor vocals and his high-pitched, dueling electric guitar parts accompanied by Biscardi’s pummeling, backbeat-propelled rifle sport drums. “Signals Through The Static” is all about space… and not just the space of space rock. It becomes clear after repeated listenings and a close analysis of song titles that the album is a metaphor for the space that once existed between Lerner and Biscardi. The recording begins with a latticework of static on “Twin Hemispheres,” backbeat-heavy drums and rhyming guitars, before building to a majestic electric drone and Lerner’s indiscernible vocal howls coming through as though voiced via megaphone from a distant satellite. It’s neither the best composition on the album nor the right choice for the single (which it was), but they positioned it perfectly as a statement of intent, as if to say, we are still Pilot Cloud and we’re picking up precisely where we left off. The real thesis is found on the next track, “Worlds Apart,” which begins with a spare and delicate guitar part that builds into an instrumental crescendo that clocks in at almost a minute and borders on headbanging, as much as space rock can, before Lerner sings, “Here we are,” a whole bunch of indistinguishable things, and then a rocking chorus of “All we are is men.” Lerner posits Pilot Cloud’s weak position on 53
Earth and in the universe, before the nothing, no music, no voices, no rustle of the wind.” short instrumental “Return to the Stars” launches the next chapter of fuzzy, guitar-drenched chaos into the Pilotcan can also be characterized MUSIC TOP 5 as post-rock, but aside from that stratosphere. 1 Van Morrison. Chicago Theatre. classification and their moniker, The grand old man of folk rock returns, pipes and passion intact, to celebrate the “So Long” begins with a clarion call their backstory differs from Pilot deluxe reissue of his seminal 1997 album, “The Healing Game.” April 25 that speaks to the length of time Cloud, even with a similar hiatus. Van Morrison the duo was separated in space You can hear echoes of Mogwai’s 2 Son Volt. Thalia Hall. Jay Farrar’s and mentality, building from a slyly orchestral pop majesty when “Page, alt-country veterans ride into town to tour their highly anticipated, unapologetically underdone vocal part to a full- take me to the lair” begins on their political new album, “Union.” April 27 strength scream, transitioning to fourth album and their first in 3 Cheryl Wheeler. Old Town School. After forty years, this singer-songwriter the Milan Kundera-quoting, pia- fourteen years, “Bats Fly Out from deserves cultural benediction, not only for her shimmering folk music, but for her no-laden experimentation of the Under the Bridge.” After all, the seriously lethal wit. April 14 next cut, punctuated by static and quartet hails from Scotland and 4 Amanda Palmer. Chicago Theatre. The barriers-busting a faraway guitar. released early singles on Mogwai’s singer-songwriter-entrepreneur tours her confrontational new album, “There Will “Still Life” provides explosions in Rock Action label. But after that Be No Intermission,” which she financed through crowdfunding. April 12 space, if not in the sky, and the opening track, you can hear much 5 Squirrel Nut Zippers. SPACE. The composition hums with electric more than those post-rock wunder- recently reunited 1930s-style jazz band brings back its ecstatic, pomo pastiche of potential; the title belies its kinetic kinds at work. Indeed, their inspira- klezmer, swing, gypsy jazz and honky-tonk just when we need it most. April 13 underpinnings, bubbling and tions are more American—EVOL 54 frothing, but never boiling over. isn’t just their own record label and the name of leader Keiron The duality of the duo is reinforced Mellotte’s nightclub in Edinburgh with “Binary Road,” an interview (now Dunfermline), it’s also the title about belief in aliens backed by the of Sonic Youth’s third album. The no-wave NYC foursome are clearly sounds of street traffic, serving as an introduction to “The Guardians,” an inspiration on the woozy, shoega- zy “Daylight Savings Time” and which may express the belief that “(The) Schneck,” both of which could aliens are advanced beings sent be counted amongst some of Lee back in time to defend the Earth from the human-generated apoca- Renaldo’s best work. Even the down-tempo and heavily orchestrat- lypse of the Anthropocene age. Again, it’s hard to make out the lyrics, ed “Slack And Candy” channels and the sound is far more important, some of Sonic Youth’s finest “post- fame” music, a la “NYC Ghosts but when on the next track, “Dark Nebula,” collects a voiceover about and Flowers” or “Murray Street,” the transcontinental railroad mixed and “3rd and Bannister” ratchets up in with chimes echoing an esoteric the cascading chords in Pilotcan’s music box, it’s hard not to hear the most pulverizing fashion. theme of exploration and destruction. Sonic Youth performed much of The back half of the album reaches the material from “EVOL” live for the first time in Austin, Texas. It’s an apex with “Erase The Path,” on unclear whether or not those bent which Lerner sings that through “wasted skies… Away we go to find notes permeated the waters of our home,” and builds to a Hum-like Ladybird Lake, but it is clear that apogee, singing “we can’t go back.” Austin was an inspiration for Pilotcan, With the dynamic musical accompa- to the extent that the album title describes a natural phenomenon niment, this is Pilot Cloud at their of the Lone Star State’s capitol. most chilling and thrilling. Confusingly, the song itself sounds The concluding, sprawling “The like Irish-English shoegazers My Sky Never Ends” comes close to Bloody Valentine, but the lyrics for approximating the majesty of their this entire record were inspired by previous masterpiece, “Ex Astris and composed in Austin, and later Scientia,” from their underappreciat- recorded in their native country. ed 2008 debut. In addition to rhyming guitar work and propulsive, Ginning up the confusion, after those battering-ram drumming from Pilot meaty American-ified (if not refried) rockers in the middle of this musical Newcity APRIL 2019 Cloud, it includes some beautiful sandwich, the record is topped off spoken-word snippets read from with lovely (and lengthy) string-laden “Sputnik Sweetheart” by Haruki Murakami. It ends abruptly, with just instrumentals in the form of “Heidi and Oscar” and “… Everlasting the whisper of one last feedback Happiness.” It’s as if Pilotcan is hum, leaving the listener rapt, saying, much like this writing, that panting for more. As Murakami’s words put it, “the music had already the true meaning can be discerned stopped, the enigmatic performance in the haze that’s generated by the music, like a miasma… an aura was finished. I listened carefully, I formed of aftertones. couldn’t hear a thing, absolutely
BERNSTEIN SONDHEIM INCLUDING FAVORITES LIKE “MARIA,” “TONIGHT,” “AMERICA,” AND MORE! MAY JUNE , A coproduction of Lyric Opera of Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, and Glimmerglass Festival. Lyric premiere of Bernstein’s West Side Story generously made possible by Lead Sponsor The Negaunee Foundation and cosponsors an Anonymous Donor, Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin, Robert S. and Susan E. Morrison, Mrs. Herbert A. Vance and Mr. and Mrs. William C. Vance, and Northern Trust. Major in-kind audio support provided by Shure Incorporated. .. WESTSIDESTORYCHICAGO.COM SAVINGS FOR GROUPS OF OR MORE .. Arts + spirit in the magnificent setting of Rockefeller Chapel’s resonant space TALLIS LAMENTATIONS Kiran Misra A MEETING OF TWO SEAS: Erielle Bakkum MIGRATION STORIES THURSDAY APRIL 18 | 7:30 PM SUNDAY APRIL 28 | 3 PM For Holy Thursday, the Chapel Choir performs two settings of Lamentations by English Celebrating the performance traditions that Renaissance composers Thomas Tallis and emerged from the movement and migration of Robert White, alongside works of lamentation- diverse spiritual communities across South Asia, themed music on organ by Thomas Weisflog. the Middle East, and Andalusia. Refreshments Directed by James Kallembach. FREE. afterward. FREE. Full details at rockefeller.uchicago.edu | Rockefeller Memorial Chapel | 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave., Chicago IL 60637 | 773.702.2667
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