Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

Dear Dick, today I drove across the panhandle of North Texas. I was incredibly excited when I hit the flatland west of Amarillo knowing that the Buried Cadillac piece would come up soon. Ten of them—a pop art monument to your car, fins flapping, heads buried in the dust. I passed it on the highway, turned back and took two photos of it for you.

Dick, you may be wondering, if I’m so wary of the mythology you embrace, why’d my blood start pumping 15 miles west of Amarillo? Why’d I used to get dressed up to go meet JD Austin in the Night Birds Bar? So he could fuck me up the ass, then say he didn’t love me? Tight jeans, red lips and nails this morning, feeling really femme and like time for this isn’t on my side. It’s a cultural study. To be part of something else. Sylvère and I are twinned in our analytic bent, content with “scrambling the codes.” Oh Dick, you eroticize what you’re not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you’re performing and that they’re performing too.

Brinkley, Arkansas

December 19, 1994: 11 p.m.

The Brinkley Inn

Dear Dick,

Tonight I actually felt like reading as much as writing you. Talking on the phone to Ann, my family, took the edge off.

Everything felt so dismal earlier today in Oklahoma I gave up trying to make good time. I needed to adjust to Northeast landscape. By 2 o’clock the green started looking pretty, and I got off the Interstate in Ozark and walked in a park beside the river. Golden green and blue. In the car I started thinking, once I accept the failure of Gravity & Grace it won’t matter anymore what I do—once you’ve accepted total obscurity you may as well do what you want. The landscape in the park reminded me of Ken Kobland’s films… that bit of video that The Wooster Group used in LSD … camera stumbling around the woods, end of winter, stark blue sky, patches of snow still left on the scabby ground… as evocative as anything of that moment when you’re starting to Get Off. Ken really is a genius. His work is pure intentionality, everything is effortless and loaded and I learned how to make films by watching his.

And now the femme trip’s over. Everything’s different being back in the Northeast. I’m back to basic camouflage. Good country & western song on the radio today: I Like My Women A Little On The Trashy Side .

Since this is such a dead-letter night, Dick, perhaps I’ll transcribe a few notes that I made in the car:

“12:30 Central Time, Saturday, now in Texas. Looks just like New Mexico. Thinking about Dick’s video—the sentiment, Sam Sheppard cowboy stuff, is a cypher. The video was shown in response to my criticism of Sylvère’s sentimentality when he writes fiction. I said, you have to do what you’re smartest at, i.e., where you’re most alive. Then Dick pulled the video out as a manifesto or defense of sentiment.”

LATER THAT DAY—

“I’m in Shamrock now—great emptiness. It feels like a resting point or destination. I forgot to mention, D., the menorah on your refrigerator—that impressed us.”

THE NEXT MORNING—

“I guess the Northeast hit overnight. When I got out of the motel this morning I was no longer West but East in Shawnee, Oklahoma—there’re hills and clumps of skinny trees and lakes and rivers. It’ll be the same now ’til I hit New York—a landscape full of dreary childhood memories I have no use for. There’s a teariness about the worn-down hills and shivering trees, like in Jane Bowles’ story Going to Massachusetts , emotion overwhelms this landscape ’cause it’s so unmonumental. It elicits little fugues of feeling I’m not ready for. The desert overwhelms you with its own emotion but this landscape brings up feelings that’re far too personal. That come inside out, from me. The West is Best, right? I’m nauseous and asleep and the coffeepot is buried underneath the washstand I bought in Shamrock. But all will change. I miss you—

Chris reached Tennessee and Eastern Standard Time on December 20. She needed to stop driving and stayed two nights in Sevierville. She went hiking through wild mountain laurels in the national park and bought an antique bed for 50 dollars. On the morning of the 22nd she reached Sylvère in Paris. Peaceful and contented, she pictured them returning to Sevierville together for a vacation but Sylvère didn’t understand. “We never have any fun together,” she sighed into the phone. Sylvère replied gruffly: “Oh. Fun. Is that what it’s supposed to be about?”

Chris wrote Dick two letters from Sevierville.

“Dear Dick,” she wrote, “I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary…”

She’d begun to realize something, though she didn’t think much about it at the time.

Frackville, Pennsylvania

December 22, 1994: 10:30 p.m.

Central Motel

Dear Dick,

All day and into this evening I’ve been feeling lonely, panicky, afraid. Tonight I didn’t see the moon at all until about 8:30 but suddenly, driving north on 81, THERE IT WAS, deep & huge like it’d just risen, nearly full and red orange like a blood tangerine. It felt ominous, and I’m wondering if you feel as I do—this incredible urge TO BE HEARD. Who do you talk to?

On the road today I thought a little bit about the possibility of creating great dramatic scenes out of material that’s diaristic, vérité. Remembering Ken Kobland’s video Landscape/Desire —all those motels, everything flattened to a point where you don’t expect a story and so just settle in for the ride. But there has to be a point, to give some point to this shifting landscape of flapping laundry, motel bathroom tiles. Perhaps the aftermath of something? But aftermath rarely is that way. You never sense the “aftermath” because always, something else starts up along the way.

To initiate something is to play the fool. I really came off the fool with you, sending the fax, etcetera. Oh well. I feel so sorry we were never able to communicate, Dick. Signals through the flames. Not waving but drowning—

December 23 was the brightest clearest winter day on the road across the Poconos into upstate New York. Dark red barns against the snow and winter birds, Cooperstown and Binghamton, colonial houses with front porches, kids with sleds. Her heart soared. It was the image of American childhood, not hers of course, but the childhood she’d watched as a child on TV.

Four thousand miles away Sylvère Lotringer sits reminiscing about the Holocaust with his mother on rue de Trevise. She serves him gefilte fish, kasha, sauteed vegetables and rugelach in the tiny dining room. There’s something comical about a 56-year-old man being waited on like a child by his 85-year-old mother, but Sylvère doesn’t see it this way. He’s started taping their conversations because details of the War remain so hazy. The Paris roundup following the German Occupation, the escape, false papers, letters coming back from all the relatives in Poland stamped “Deportee.”

“Deportee,” “Deportee,” she intones, her voice like steel, rage keeping her so vibrantly alive. But for himself, Sylvère feels only numbness. Was he there at all? He was just a child. Yet all these years he’s been unable to think about the War without tears springing to his eyes.

And now he’s 56 years old, and soon he’ll need another plastic hip. He’ll be 63 before his next sabbatical. The young Parisians in the street belong to a bright impenetrable world.

Chris arrived to an empty house in Thurman, the Southern Adirondack town she and Sylvère discovered when they were looking for an “affordable estate” seven years ago. They’d come upon it one November driving down from a Bataille Boy’s Festival in Montreal that co-starred Sylvère and John Giorno. Leaving Montreal they started screaming about which bridge to take, and hadn’t spoken since. Chris’ own gig at the Festival had been furtively arranged, a Bataille Boy’s favor to Sylvère, but when they arrived her name was not on the program. Liza Martin took her clothes off to an enthusiastic prime-time crowd; they put Chris on at 2 a.m. to read to 20 drunken hecklers. Still, Sylvère didn’t understand why she was unconsolable. Hadn’t both of them been paid? On the Northway near Elizabethtown a pair of falcons flew across the road: a fragile link between themselves and Liza Martin’s g-string and The Falconer’s Tale of medieval France. They stopped to walk, and Sylvère was eager to share something, so he shared her enthusiasm for the Adirondacks and two days later they bought a ten room farmhouse in the Town of Thurman just west of Warrensburg, New York.