Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

Expecting no more response from Dick than they’d had all week, Chris left to do some errands in San Bernardino. But at 6:45 p.m. that Saturday, December 10, around the time that she was driving up the mountain, he called.

Upper Crestline seemed so dismal that night. A liquor store, a pizza parlor. A single row of woodframe facaded storefronts from the ’50s, Depression-era recollections of the West, half boarded up. Wendy and Michael Tolkin had visited last month with their two daughters. Michael’s film The New Age had just come out, following his other great films, The Rapture and The Player. He was a Hollywood intellectual and Wendy was the wittiest and nicest psychotherapist Sylvère and Chris had ever met. After expressing their delight in Crestline’s quaint-ness, Wendy remarked: It must be very lonely living in a place you don’t belong. Chris and Sylvère had no children, three abortions, and they’d been shuttling between low-rent rural slums on both coasts for the past two years in order to put money into Chris’ film. And of course Michael, who was Sylvère’s friend, really, because Sylvère was someone in LA who knew more than he about French theory, couldn’t, wouldn’t, do anything to help her with the film.

When Chris got home and Sylvère told her he’d talked to Dick, she nearly swooned. “I don’t want to know!” she cried. And then she wanted to know everything. “I have a little present, a surprise,” he said, showing her the audiotape. Chris looked at Sylvère as if seeing him for the first time. Taping their phone call was such a violation. It gave her a kind of creepy feeling, like the time the writer Walter Abish’d discovered the tape recorder Sylvère had hidden underneath the table when they were having drinks. Sylvère laughed it off, calling himself a Foreign Agent. But to be a spy is being no one. Still, Chris had to hear it now.

December 10, 1994: 6:45 p.m.

D:So, could we talk about the possibility of your coming out in the next semester—

S:Yeah. I guess the easiest for me would be between March 10 and 20. Do you want me to do something about cultural anthropology? Is that what you’re doing now?

D:If it’s not something you’re interested in, we can maybe, uh, forget about it but—(inaudible).

S:Yeah?

D:(inaudible)—I don’t know if you’d be enthusiastic about you know summarizing James Clifford and other discourses around anthropology, but if you want to do something more original, more, uh, primary, it’s up to you.

S:Okay. And the fee would be 2500 dollars for two lectures and one seminar?

D:Two lectures and a seminar and maybe some studio visits.

S:Oh. Marvin said the crits paid extra…500 dollars more?

D:Uh, look, I’ll see what I can do. I hope coming here is worth your while.

S:(inaudible) Well, I want it to be worth your while too.

D:We’ll get a clearer picture of what’s coming up in the semester in the next couple of weeks, and well, I can phone you in New York. (Inaudible)

S:Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We—I want to sound you about a project that’s a little weird, but I know you don’t mind things that are weird—(laughs)—(silence) Right?

D:I don’t think so, it depends. There’s weird and weird. There’s weird, and there’s impossible weird. Impossible weird is more interesting.

S:Well okay, I might have something you’re looking for then. (Laughs) Well, let me—it’s a, uh, it’s a collaborative project we were thinking of possibly doing before we leave on Wednesday, otherwise we’d have to postpone it to the end of January. And, uh, it started really with our visit to your place. And how we didn’t reconnect in the morning—

D:(Inaudible)

S:Yeah, it was very odd. And then you—

D:I got back about 10:30 and you’d gone.

S:Uh huh, uh huh.

D:I’d crept out the back. I didn’t expect you to know that I’d done that, but I thought I’d find you here so that was very weird.

S:Uh huh. Chris thought that somehow you were in your bed and you were just waiting for us to leave because you were in a different mood.

D:(Inaudible)

S:Yeah?

D:I’d just gone out and done a few errands and—I’m a bit of an insomniac so I’d driven around to Pear Blossom and Palmdale and I picked up some eggs and bacon. That was what I’d been doing.

S:Uh huh. So. What happened was, we had a very strange thing, I don’t know how I can summarize it but basically, Chris felt very attracted to you.

D:(Snickers, exhales)

S:And uh, then we started talking about it, and writing you letters?

D:(Laughs, exhales)

S:(Laughs) and uh, these letters included you, both as yourself and as some sort of object of, you know, seduction or desire or fascination or something, and then—Well, I wrote a letter and she wrote a letter and we planned to send them to you and get you involved in a kind of fax correspondence. But somehow it got a little out of hand and we started riffing around it and getting paranoid and writing all these letters.

D:(Laughs, exhales)

S:And it kind of grew… into a, um, 20, 30, 40 pages and then it became impossible to send you that or sound you about it or involve you (laughs)—So we thought maybe we should do something a little bit more drastic to involve you in some way, and that’s what I wanted to sound you about. We, uh, we got the idea that maybe we should just go back to your place before we leave on Monday or Tuesday with a video camera. Is that something you would like? I mean, I didn’t want you to feel invaded in your territory and all that, but basically it would turn into some kind of an art piece with a text that could be, maybe, hanged on the cactuses and your car and something like that? And you’d come upon it and you know, we’d basically improvise from there.

D:(Inaudible)

S: The Invasion of the Heart Snatchers. Uh, it’s a Calle Art piece. You know, like Sophie Calle? (Laughs) And it involves—I mean we’ve been caught up in a strange storm for several days, it just got a little out of hand—in our emotions and there’s all these ups and downs where we connect and disconnect and somehow it seems so strange that you may not be connected to it at all, because we were totally convinced that you were a part of it—(Laughs)—But then we couldn’t get hold of you, and, well, I don’t know if you had a sense of it but we had such storm in a teapot here. (Laughs)

D:You mean a—tempest?

S:(Laughs) Yeah. Anyway what do you think about it?

D:Well I, I, uh, I need a little bit of breathing space to work out the—, wade through what you’ve told me—(Laughs) But uh, I mean it’s—if we can just ah… Let me think about it yet.

S:Of course.

D:And I’ll phone you back tomorrow and say what my dreams are and—kind of—creating a disposition in relation to this project.

S:Okay that’s perfectly legitimate. In any case we liked your piece a lot, the video, seeing you rambling got us rambling too. After all, Chris is a filmmaker and she’s working in video too.