Who:Nick Cave,Seán O’Hagan What: Book signings and solo concerts Where:The Strand,92nd St. Y,Kings Theatre,Beacon Theatre When: Book signings October 5, concerts October 6-8 Why: At the beginning of Faith, Hope and Carnage (Picador, September 19, $20), Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan tells Australian musician, composer, and author Nick Cave, “I’m surprised you agreed to do this given that you haven’t done any interviews for a long time.” Cave replies, “Well, who wants to do an interview? Interviews, in general, suck. Really. They eat you up. I hate them. The whole premise is so demeaning: you have a new album out, or new film to promote, or a book to sell. After a while, you just get worn away by your own story. I guess, at some point, I just realised that doing that kind of interview was of no real benefit to me. It only ever took something away. I always had to recover a bit afterwards. It was like I had to go looking for myself again. So five or so years ago I just gave them up.” O’Hagan asks, “So how do you feel about this undertaking?” Cave answers, “I don’t know. I do like having a conversation. I like to talk, to engage with people. And we’ve always had our big, sprawling conversations, so when you suggested it, I was kind of intrigued to see where it would go. Let’s see, shall we?”
Divided into such chapters as “A Beautiful Kind of Freedom,” “Love and a Certain Dissonance,” “A Radical Intimacy,” “A Sense of Shared Defiance,” and “The Astonishing Idea,” Faith, Hope and Carnage was assembled from forty hours of conversations between Cave and O’Hagan (Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender). The two spoke about his childhood, family, and tragedy; absences, absolution, and addiction; Cave’s bands (the Birthday Party, Grinderman, the Bad Seeds), albums (The Boatman’s Call,Skeleton Tree,Carnage), and books (The Death of Bunny Munro,The Sick Bag Song); the pandemic; the Red Hand Files, where Cave answers one of the hundreds of letters he receives each week from fans; and grief — Cave has suffered immeasurable loss over the last eight years, including the passing of his two sons, his mother, and numerous friends and colleagues. “If this is a book that outlines a dramatic creative and personal transformation in the face of great personal catastrophe, it is also shot through with a sense of life’s precariousness,” O’Hagan writes in the afterword.
Cave will be in New York City this week in support of the paperback edition of the book. He will be at the Strand on October 5 at 11:30 am for a conversation and signing with O’Hagan, followed by a talk and Q&A that night at the 92nd St. Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall at 7:30. Cave’s Live in North America solo tour — on which he’ll be joined by Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood — comes to the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn on October 6 and the Beacon in Manhattan on October 7-8,. I’ve seen him play solo, with the Bad Seeds, with Grinderman, and with Warren Ellis, and his shows are always like nothing you’ve ever experienced before.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Annie Dorsen pits herself against ChatGPT in Prometheus Firebringer (photo by Maria Baranova)
PROMETHEUS FIREBRINGER
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Through October 1, $50
866-811-4111 www.tfana.org
As the audience enters Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center for Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer, text is being projected one letter at a time on a white screen above the stage. Below are five AI-generated mask faces on poles, while a more menacing mask hovers at the top of a wall at the center of the stage, perhaps suggesting the traditional comedy and tragedy masks that decorate so many prosceniums.
The text of the paragraph appears over and over again, each time with significant differences, but they all tell the same story, summarizing the plot of Aeschylus’s unfinished Prometheia trilogy, which began with Prometheus Bound and continued with Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus the Fire-bringer; only eleven fragments of Unbound exist, and only one line of the finale.
The recaps are being generated live by ChatGPT-3.5, scanning the internet and regurgitating the tale of Prometheus’s battle with Zeus in language that repositions key words, plot points, and themes, reminding us how many ways there are to say the same thing.
Writer-director Dorsen enters stage left and sits at a plain wooden desk with paper, a water bottle, and a microphone. When GPT-3.5 is done, she begins a unique kind of lecture. “I am going to try to talk to you about the individual in the contemporary age,” she says. “I suppose this piece is an essay, maybe, a think piece. It doesn’t really matter what it is, I call it an ‘essay’ because it is not anything more.”
A Greek chorus of masks shares the story of Prometheus in TFANA production (photo by Maria Baranova)
From this point on, the lecture-performance alternates between Dorsen’s “essay” and the masks performing parts of Aeschylus’s conclusion to the Prometheus trilogy, in which the five masks — a chorus of orphaned children — sing and the larger mask narrates the tale. The fight between Zeus and Prometheus over power and control mimics that between AI and human writers and philosophers.
As with GPT-3.5, nothing Dorsen is saying is original; every single word and phrase has come from sources she carefully researched. As she speaks, those sources are cited via projections on a screen behind her. The sources range from Bernard Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery Vol. I: The Hyperindustrial Epoch, Ted Berrigan’s On the Level Everyday: Selected Talks on Poetry and the Art of Living,The Twilight Zone, Jakob Norberg’s Tragedy of the Commonplace, Gregg Lambert’s The Elements of Foucault, and Simon Critchley’s Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us to Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Mark Grabowski and Eric P. Robinson’s Cyber Law and Ethics: Regulation of the Connected, E. A. Havelock’s The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Ted Chiang’s “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” in the New Yorker, and Noam Chomsky’s “The False Promise of ChatGPT” in the New York Times.
Whereas GPT-3.5 produces comprehensible strings of words by searching archives and databases for expected patterns, Dorsen works in the opposite direction; she knows what she wants to say and then finds the word strings through her research. She pulls both important phrases and more mundane thoughts and sentences from books and articles that don’t always have anything to do with her topic. For example, when she greets the audience, saying, “Hi. Thanks for coming,” she cites R. H. Wood’s Lightning Crashes. When she notes, “We are together in time,” her source is Christina Baldwin’s Our Turn Our Time: Women Truly Coming of Age. GPT-3.5 seems to act more randomly, while Dorsen is building a coherent argument.
Talking about language, Dorsen explains, “It is a shared resource, it belongs to us all, and words are never consumed, no matter how often we use them. I chose these words carefully. I chose these words carefully, because they resonate with my experiences. But what do I mean by experience? And whose??? Mine or theirs? In other words, who is speaking?”
Artificial intelligence investigates Aeschylus’s unfinished play in Prometheus Firebringer (photo by Maria Baranova)
Dorsen and the play-within-a-play explore tragedy, choices, coding, fate, recombining, and the past. The most effective section is when Dorsen describes how Irish artist Matt Loughrey used AI to colorize black-and-white photos of victims of the Khmer Rouge, but he also gave them all smiles. “If these photos are part of current AI models that’ll represent a total rewrite of history, in an absolutely frightening way,” Dorsen points out. “How can you change hell to happiness?”
Prometheus Firebringer concludes Dorsen’s algorithmic theater trilogy, which began with 2010’s Hello Hi There, followed by last year’s A Piece of Work. As clever as it is, there is also an overwhelming dryness to it. The interplay between the AI and Dorsen never, well, ignites. The excerpts “performed” by the masks, whose eyes are like video screens, are dull and lifeless; Dorsen’s lecture is much more fun and interesting, but there is not enough of it. The entire production, previously seen at the Chocolate Factory in Queens, is extremely slight at a mere forty-five minutes.
Earlier this month I saw Tjaša Ferme’s Bioadapted at CultureLab LIC, which was more successful in dramatizing a narrative involving AI and GPT-3. Of course, Dorsen (The Great Outdoors,Magical) is showing us that human activity is more viable and entertaining than that created by AI, but the proceedings lag too much. Prometheus needs to bring some fire.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
A speaker, teacher, and author born and raised on the Upper West Side, Weinert attended Ethical Culture Fieldston, among other schools, and graduated from Barnard with an English degree. She worked in corporate book publishing before starting Narrative Healing, a wide-ranging program that uses storytelling “to heal and transform lives.”
Everywhere she goes, Weinert, who exudes a natural warmth and charm, builds communities of friends and colleagues, who mingle and then form bonds and relationships of their own. For example, it was through Weinert that I met Make Conscious founder Jessica Kung, who I wrote about in my most recent Substack post.
Weinert’s program consists of lectures, classes, workshops, and now a book, Narrative Healing: Awaken the Power of Your Story (Hachette Go, July 2023, $30), arranged around six cycles: Awaken, Listen, Express, Inspire, Connect, Grow. “In my earliest memory of writing, I am nestled under my covers, in a kind of bedsheet cocoon. I am seven, and I am spilling my guts out. I am sending an SOS into the universe,” Weinert writes in the introduction. “When I am writing, I feel heard and seen. My journal is a portal to something larger than myself contained within me, and I am hooked.”
Weinert shares personal stories from her life, along with those from more than two dozen contributors, in such chapters as “The Best Protection Is No Protection,” “Quiet Wildness,” “Mindful Eavesdropping,” “How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything,” “Talk to Animals and Plants,” and “The Message That’s Needed Most.”
You can become part of Weinert’s ever-growing community on September 28 at 6:00, when she will be at Shakespeare & Co for a book signing and conversation with Knopf VP and executive editor Jenny Jackson, author of the novel Pineapple Street. [ed. note: Jackson can no longer attend the event; in her stead, writer, poet, and journalist Carla Zanoni will join Weinert.] From October 13 to 15, Lisa will be joining Jamia Wilson, Kim Thai, and Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona for a three-day retreat, “Listen to Your Ancestors: Bring Their Voices to the Page,” at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck. And on October 17 at 6:00, she will take part in a virtual conversation with gun violence survivor and Everytown Survivor Network director Keenon James, hosted by Brooklyn-based writer Susan McPherson, author of The Lost Art of Connecting.
Lisa, who lives in Chelsea with her husband, photographer and educator Barry Sutton, and their ridiculously adorable Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Ocean, recently spoke with me over Zoom, discussing storytelling and trauma, writing by hand on unruled paper, the mind-body connection, getting married in Central Park during Covid, and more.
twi-ny: You’ve been writing since you were seven years old. Do you still have any of those old notebooks and journals?
lisa weinert: I don’t have writing from when I was seven, but I do from when I was twelve, and I pretty much have every single journal since then.
twi-ny: Do you ever look back at them? And if you do, what’s the feeling to see your younger self doing what your older self is eventually going to do?
Lisa Weinert started writing when she was seven years old and has never stopped (photo courtesy Lisa Weinert)
lw: That’s such a sweet question. I referred to them quite a bit when I was writing the book. I went through a process . . . I had them in different places and I laid them all out and I actually organized them chronologically and labeled them. I think it did a tremendous amount to provide them with so much care and order.
I read through them thinking I was going to find some kind of gem or aha moment. But there weren’t so many surprises, I think at this point I’m very well acquainted with my younger selves; they’re like very good friends. So it was more like hanging out with some buddies.
A childhood friend once said to me, “You’re just going to be one of those people that you’re going to wake up in your forties and have so many unpublished books that are just in boxes because it’s just writing all the time.” And I think that’s a little bit the case. In rereading, I find there’s a lot of stuff where I’m like, Oh, I could probably do something with that now.
But I can say about my earlier journals, I found in a number of places, I would circle something with an arrow and it would say, “Don’t forget this” or “Read this,” and I had such a sense that I was going to read it again.
twi-ny: I still have my fourth-grade notebook. In it is a story I wrote called “If I Were a Pencil.” When I look back at it, I’m like, okay, first of all, there I am using the conditional subjunctive properly at ten. And I’m also writing about a pencil and what do I do? I become a managing editor for children’s books, using a pencil to write and to correct authors’ grammar and punctuation, or at least used to before the pandemic and working electronically from home.
lw: So beautiful. And in fourth grade!
twi-ny: Another thing I noticed in looking back at my writing was my handwriting. Did you get any feel for your handwriting?
lw: It’s very important to me to write with unlined paper. I find it very constraining, like somebody’s telling me what to do with lines. I’ve always written with big black artist notebooks and I like to write oftentimes in different shapes and do big circles or squares and end up drawing. So there’s a really dynamic quality oftentimes.
I think my handwriting now is practically illegible. Almost every morning I write by hand for a period of time. And when I’m working on something, my first draft is always by hand and then I type it into the computer. A lot of it is pretty illegible. I trust that the parts that are meant to be read will be legible.
twi-ny: That’s a good point. I scribble on lined paper and have trouble staying within the lines.
lw: I hate the lines. I feel like I’m all of a sudden in a dictatorship with my creative life. I want to be able for it to be big or small, whatever I want. Sometimes I just want to put a couple of words on a page.
twi-ny: Right. Yes. So in your case, the act of writing, especially since you say that you might add little drawings, it’s like the physical act of writing is a work of art in and of itself before it goes into the computer.
lw: Oh, definitely.
twi-ny: When you type words directly into the computer, you don’t get that. You can look at your words and know when you wrote them and what you were feeling when you wrote them.
lw: I’m an incredibly fast typist. I can type a hundred words per minute. Writing by hand slows me down in a way that’s really important.
twi-ny: You were born and raised primarily on the Upper West Side.
lw: Yes, we moved every couple of years. I had, I think, eleven different residences by the time I was eighteen. It was a combination of wanderlust and trying different things and opportunities. And I think my parents didn’t quite realize that it would have an impact on us in a certain way. This resulted in me seeking out consistency where I could find it and also in a really close relationship with my siblings.
twi-ny: You started Narrative Healing around 2014?
lw: The trainings began then. That’s when I started my yoga teacher training. And the first iterations of this workshop were actually a result of the five-hundred-hour yoga teacher training I did with YogaWorks. I brought together some writers and yogis and started exploring this kind of connection. But my program at Kripalu in 2016 was when this program really launched.
Lisa Weinert signs a copy of Narrative Healing for her mother at book launch (photo by Anita Ng Photography)
twi-ny: When did you decide to write the book? Did someone come to you and say, You need to put this in a book, or did you say it yourself?
lw: It was both things. On the one hand, as we’ve been discussing, I always had this fire to write, and to write a book. And with Narrative Healing, there was so much momentum to the program. It was just one of those moments in life where a lot of things were integrating and synthesizing within me, and these opportunities were coming my way. I had a brief conversation with a program director at Kripalu, and six months later I had a conference with 150 people; I was teaching a version of ths program at Wesleyan University for three years, and I had an event at the Rubin and so many other moments of synergy and opportunity. I saw the kind of impact it was having on people’s lives and that people were coming back and noticing the kind of feedback I was getting.
The desire to write a book was born from what books are meant to do. I wanted to be able to reach people who didn’t happen to be in the room with me. And it kind of came down to that. And I wanted to be able to endeavor to make the program really mobile and personal. So wherever you are, you could try it and explore with friends.
I was also really inspired by the publication journey of The Artist’s Way after interviewing Julia Cameron, learning more about that publishing history. I’ve been a fan of her and her work, but what really inspired me was releasing work into the world and letting it do its thing. What I started seeing in my program was people were coming and participating, and really deep, amazing friendships were forming rather quickly. They were staying in touch independent of me for years, and with me. But that was really it. People did ask me, and students would say, “Where’s the book? I want the book,” that kind of thing. But that was really the idea behind it.
twi-ny: I’ve experienced what you’re talking about in the friendship that Ellen and I have developed with Jessica Kung, who we met through you. You have a way of curating events to have people really become part of them and meet other people. At your book launch, Ellen and I both met people who we work with but had never met in person.
lw: That’s so cool. Yeah, that’s what happens. That’s the real magic of this whole thing.
twi-ny: Did you write most of the book during the pandemic?
lw: Totally. I basically worked on the proposal in 2019. I spent a long time with the proposal. It was a really big transition moving from a live experience to what worked on the page, especially in terms of accessibility. Because when you’re teaching and you see what’s happening with someone, I just immediately amend my instruction. So writing it all out was a big thing. And then Covid hit, and with what it was like to live in the city, and the protests, and BLM, I did a huge pivot with the proposal and the book and really changed the format in some significant ways. I wrote the entire book during lockdown, essentially when my husband was experiencing severe health challenges. It was a challenging environment when I wrote the book.
twi-ny: Yes. You discuss this a lot in your book, how writing is a solitary pursuit. You’re at a computer or at a desk writing by yourself, and now you’re by yourself during a pandemic where it’s not like you can, after you’re done, go out with friends; you can’t. Did you find it more difficult to write under these conditions?
lw: Despite having the book out now, and publishing two pieces in the last couple of weeks in MindBodyGreen (“How We Listen Matters — Here Are 7 Tips to Help Get Better at It”) and the TueNight Social (“Why Is Publishing Making Authors Sick?”), I hadn’t written very much before, period. I’ve been writing all the time, but I had not written for other people. I really hadn’t. When I was writing the book, the world around me offered me tremendous drive and focus. I live in downtown Manhattan; there were sirens everywhere. There was a very extreme situation, and within my home there was a lot of stress. So I had to really do my own personal practice to find the focus that I needed. I felt tremendous drive and I was really grateful for that.
I sensed I must really have to write this if I’m able to write it under these circumstances. I was very protected by the cocoon nature of that time period. There was a fearlessness that happened. I didn’t realize or think about how vulnerable the writing was or how much I was revealing or how the tone of it was; I was just really focused on being truthful. And I was teaching online at the time, so I was really clear about my students and who I was talking to.
twi-ny: I can feel in reading the book, and knowing you, there are times I’m like, oh, she went there. I wasn’t sure you were going to go there. And so really it’s a very open book about who you are and how the program works. Among the elements it deals with are the body and trauma. And so here we are in a pandemic, stuck inside, and we’re more aware of our bodies than we’ve probably been in a long time. We live near Bellevue, so we heard the —
lw: Sirens. Oh, that’s right. You’re right there.
twi-ny: It was scary. We live on one of the busiest streets in the city, and it’s suddenly a quiet street, an empty street, except for the sirens. It makes you aware of your health, your body; you’re worried about anything and everything, like, Oh my God, do I have Covid? So one of parts of the book that I just love is your focus on the body. The natural idea is that we write from our mind. But what you’re saying is that it’s your body that’s always telling a story. That was a revelation for me.
lw: Yeah, me too.
twi-ny: I have a lot of weird pains that doctors have trouble diagnosing. But my chiropractor always says that pain is your friend. It’s your body telling you that something needs to be fixed. So those two things, your take on the body and my chiropractor’s, made me really listen to what stories my body’s telling me. How did that come to you?
lw: I think you just really described it. I think the first thing is, there’s a lot of consequences to not listening to the story of our body. It can become a very ephemeral kind of conversation pretty quickly, but in a very practical way. If you’re not listening to the messages your body’s telling you, you’ll quickly find yourself in danger and at risk. You can think of it like walking through life with earpods and not noticing what’s around you.
And there was a eureka moment for me. I thought everything happened in my head. I’m from a very intellectual family; I had a career in corporate publishing, working with ideas and stories all the time, and I felt very confident about it. I kept getting promoted. I had this idea that I knew everything about this kind of thing.
Like you, I had a moment of physical pain. I had a really scary medical diagnosis that turned out to be false, but I didn’t know it at the time. And I discovered in that moment that I was unable to access my voice. And this diagnosis wasn’t because I didn’t advocate for myself. The point is I had the experience of really knowing that when I’m actually paralyzed by fear, it’s really hard for me to articulate what I think. I didn’t think all of this at the moment, but once I was recovering from that experience and I had major surgery, I started thinking that a lot of the storytelling that I knew that was in my head was useless. What’s the point of all of this if I don’t know the rest of this?
I had always wanted to do a deeper dive into yoga. It’d always been a big part of my life; when I started my yoga teacher training, I started learning from masterful teachers these concepts that our body is carrying stories and that our body carries stories both in narratives but also in the form of tension and hunger and desire and pain and all these other things. And that these are essential parts of living an integrated life as being sensitive and having an active conversation between those things because our mind and our body are actively connected. And I started studying this and learning and becoming really like, Oh my goodness, I’m just on fire about it. And then working with writers over the years who were writing narrative consistently, I think writers are more disembodied. We’re just head on the page and isolated.
But not only are you at risk of crossing the street and not seeing the car coming your way, but you’re at risk when you sit down at the computer not really having access to ninety percent of your creative energy, both in terms of actual energy and also memories and associations and senses. I discover every day again and again and again that when I incorporate a little bit of a mindfulness practice or a full yoga practice into writers’ lives, their writing changes in amazing ways — what they write about, how they write, how they feel about what they write. This doesn’t mean that great writing doesn’t happen elsewhere, but particularly for people living with physical pain or emotional pain or confusion, transition — who isn’t living that way right now? This is just a really helpful way to begin to integrate. And I think for us intellectual creatures in the West, writing has a way of acting like a translator between the mind and the body.
twi-ny: That’s a great point. Although I haven’t taken the program, I’m familiar with what you do. I follow your posts on social media and the articles you write, and I’ve told you before that what you do has impacted me in the way you describe. So coming out of a pandemic, I did a deeper dive into my mind and my body. I’ve been writing This Week in New York for more than twenty years, but I never used the word “I.” It’s not about me but the event I’m writing about. And it opened me up to the point where I now have a Substack where I write about extremely personal things. I’m sharing these stories that I’ve never told before. I’ve revealed things about myself that I never thought I would share in public. And people are reacting and responding in such positive ways. So I want to thank you again for that.
lw: Thank you for sharing. That means a lot to me. The other part that I want to add to this is some of the science behind writing as a healing practice. I think intuitively we might feel it or we might notice it in our writing, but this sort of thinking about writing as a way to connect the mind and the body is a two-way street. On the one hand, you might get a source of creativity and flow, but on the other hand, writing slows down and connects us to our mind. We understand as writers, you actually can’t really write clearly unless you’re connecting to your thoughts, but it can create a higher sensitivity to what is happening in the body.
So when you get those alarms, like something happening with the stomach or the back or whatever it is, you will more quickly address it, number one. And number two, there’s tremendous amounts of science, hundreds of research studies, that show a regular, consistent writing practice done in this way has a huge impact on rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, PTSD, trauma. There’s a lot of research that cancer patients who write regularly recover or react better to the medicine. So while we experience the impact in a singular way, when you start to study it, it’s really astounding how impactful it is.
twi-ny: It is amazing. And you make it clear that the writing doesn’t have to be for publication. One of the things the book gets into is that writing, meditation, and yoga, you don’t have to be an expert at any of those things. You don’t have to be, Well, I’m not going to write a book. It’s not about that. It’s not about getting published. What do you tell people who come to you and say, Oh, well, I don’t write, I don’t meditate, I don’t do yoga. This program, it’s not really right for me.
lw: Well, I’m definitely not trying to convince anyone to do this program. But I’ve been doing some corporate events recently where I’m walking into environments where people are not opting in but it’s part of a company program. I did a program recently at an art school and also at a law firm. I think in both cases people came but they didn’t really know what it was and were fairly skeptical when I arrived. And what I can say is people tend to feel better afterward. There tends to be an experience of relaxation and curiosity, whether people jump into a writing practice or not. I’ve been actually really humbled by how open-minded people are. I think we’re living in a time where people feel so bad and are so full of fear and trauma, and there’s so much division and so much stress.
And what this program offers is something that’s really pretty accessible, welcoming, inclusive, and free. And there’s just not that many things like that that you can try out that will make you feel better. Maybe you’ll take some of the classes, but they’re really pretty affordable. Someone who might not be a great fit is somebody who is really hell bent on having a New York Times bestseller. For those people, I tend to recommend someone who might help you more than what I’m doing. I haven’t ever been in a situation where I’m trying to persuade someone to get into it.
twi-ny: Yes, yes. So the genesis is 2014, and in 2016 you’re really getting into it. So much has happened between 2016 and 2023. Do you find that either the people coming to you or the kinds of stories that they want to share have always been the same, or because of all this daily pressure we’re talking about, racial injustice, the DEI movement, social media, are the students and their stories different from when you started even only seven years ago?
lw: That’s such an interesting question. I think I’ll have to reflect on that a little bit more. When I started the program, it was oriented in a little bit more of a medical way. There were a lot of people living with chronic illnesses, so the shares might be more about illness narrative and trauma, people who are identifying that way. I often teach with groups where I have a sense of where they’re coming from, with gun violence or corporate burnout or whatever it is. So there is what I think is sort of a difference that I wouldn’t have expected. People are very willing to share.
I’ve been in a number of situations where it’s a big group, and by big, I mean maybe more than thirty, but where people don’t know each other. I used to be much more careful about how I would curate the sharing, but we always have some kind of writing in these programs. And I’m finding people just shoot their hands up and have so much they want to say, so much they want to share, and it’s often emotional, about love. That’s what I’m seeing — love, grief. I don’t think the topics are that different, but I think it’s a little bit more on the tip of their tongue.
twi-ny: That brings me back to the essay you wrote for TueNight Social, “Why Is Publishing Making Authors Sick?”
lw: It’s such a great headline. I didn’t come up with it, but it’s really good.
twi-ny: Working in book publishing, I understand it, but it also addresses what we talked about earlier, the loneliness of being a writer, especially once the book is put into production and you’re getting toward the book being published and the marketing surrounding it. So this struck me. You have, from what I can tell, a tight-knit family. I know you have a caring husband, you have a large community of friends and colleagues who you care about and who care about you, but still you write in the article about feeling vulnerable and insecure as the book comes out. It almost seems like it was a surprise to you, and you used to work in the business. What do you think that was, and are there any easy answers to get over it now that you’ve gone through it?
lw: I think what that piece is really about is sharing honestly with people that you trust, which is really what the whole program is about. And the part that was difficult about it had less to do with any realities of my personal life or the skills of the amazing people that I got to partner with on this publishing journey. What I really felt was that the publishing process, the structure of it, taps into attachment wounds. And that with attachment theory, that felt like the real aha! moment, when you have a vulnerable story that you’re sharing and then nobody’s there with you. Your partner and your friends are not with you on the publishing journey because they’re just not inside of you, with you all the time.
It’s not something that you think to share because this wonderful thing is happening, and it’s not something that you’re complaining about. “My dreams are coming true but I feel miserable.” So I was really taken aback by how powerful it was, and it was a deep psychological thing that was tapped into that I know all writers connect with because of the kind of feedback I’ve been getting. During my years of working in corporate publishing, I witnessed authors being like this, and I truly didn’t understand it. I was surprised because I’ve witnessed authors, I’ve coached them, I’ve supported them. And I would be frustrated, honestly, as a publicist, saying, “Why aren’t you doing more right now? This is what you’re supposed to be doing. You signed up for this.”
I used to give talks at writing conferences where I had a line I used about comparing publishing a book to having a baby and that once your baby’s born, you don’t drop it on its head, you’ve got to take care of it. That’s what I would say to authors. But then I started understanding. I wrote another piece for a newsletter for my community that many healthy cultures, after a baby is born, the parent, the mother gets to rest for a while, and loads of other people started the forty days, come in and help. And what I didn’t understand, it started happening to me. I mean, I had some expectation; everyone has a particular story, but the second it was finished, I was profoundly depleted and exhausted. I’ve been working on this since 2016, through the pandemic, and then all the extra stuff you have to do, and now I’m being asked to write extra pieces and go do this and go do that.
I had underestimated the actual exhaustion, depletion I would feel. And also in terms of attachment theory, having that one trusted person who’s your secure person; the way our publishing system is set up, just the dynamic of it, you really don’t have that because you get passed along like a conveyor belt. My husband was very supportive throughout, but he doesn’t know anything about publishing. I have lots of people I’m close with, but what I found was that doesn’t prevent the feelings you have inside of “I’m not doing enough. Oh my gosh, I needed to do a million things as of yesterday and now I’m not taking care of it, and now it’s not good enough and now it’s not going to do this.” I didn’t think I was going to have those thoughts because I thought I knew better. I thought I was immune to that.
And I just was really, really run down. And then I got Covid and got super sick, and I noticed that it was late August, early September when my energy came back and feel very motivated and excited. I’ve written a couple of pieces and I think there’s a real truth to this gestation period, or the fourth trimester, where you need to rest and you need to be taken care of. And what I talk about in the piece in terms of an antidote was something I found very compelling, the idea of having a publishing buddy and somebody who, not necessarily a family member or friend, but somebody who truly could believe in your work. One person you go to, who you check in with daily, someone who can respond and give you support. It’s made me really motivated within Narrative Healing to continue to create creative support. I guess I have so much to say about this.
The other part about the support system is there’s just very little community out there for authors after the book comes out that’s not extremely expensive or competitive, and that’s not what your nervous system needs. Your nervous system needs to feel safe. You’ve done enough. The emails and text and calls I’ve gotten since that piece has come out have really overwhelmed me. And authors who look on paper like they’re killing it are emailing me, “I’ve never felt so alone in my entire life. I thought I was the only one.” And so I think it’s tapped into something. It’s not at all a takedown of publishing. It’s more how we haven’t addressed it enough. What kind of care do you need at this point? And having been through a wedding also, it’s not that different from that, leading up to it, it’s not necessarily a stress-free time for a lot of people, even though it’s a wonderful occasion.
twi-ny: I like the comparison to giving birth because a lot of people now, they celebrate their book’s birth date on Instagram and Facebook. I remember how excited you were when you posted a video of you opening your first box of books. Opening the box to take out that first printed book is, in a way, like a baby coming out of the womb and now it’s out in the world. It’s very moving to watch the pure joy of that. But then knowing that it’s not as joyous the next day, dealing with these other aspects that you didn’t anticipate.
lw: It’s also like that six months later, actually. I think many writers going from such a cocoon state of me in my apartment creating this thing to being out in the world is just a big adjustment.
twi-ny: Yes. You also mentioned your wedding, which my wife and I attended. It was such a wonderful experience. It took place in the North Garden of the Conservatory Garden in Central Park, and you had different people from different parts of your lives share stories about you and Barry under each of the floral arches. We walked around the fountain and listened to the stories; it was very moving and intimate, especially because the pandemic was far from over. But what was it like for a writer who has edited or worked with other writers on their stuff? You’re now listening to stories about you; you are the subject. What was it like walking around and hearing what these people had to say about you and Barry?
lw: In some ways, it was a similar experience. Coming out of Covid, it was the first time I’d been around that many people in two years. And then it was sort of the same when my book came out; I guess I’ve been in seclusion a lot the last couple of years. It was very similar. I think for both the wedding and the book, I had a very big laser focus on service. I never wanted to have a wedding. I’m not somebody that ever wanted to get married. I never dreamed about it, never thought about it. I always wanted to have a book, but I never wanted a wedding. And then I met this person, but also Covid. And I felt this different urgency to — not urgency, but responsibility, of sharing the joy and bringing people together and doing it safely and doing it with care.
And so I felt very clear about why I was there, and it was super-overwhelming. I kind of knew what one or two people were going to say. Other people, I didn’t know what they were going to say, but I totally trusted them. I just remember having my hand on my heart the whole time to just make sure that I was breathing, and that was kind of it. And letting myself off the hook if I wasn’t fully experiencing everything because it was so overwhelming. The book experience has been very similar in terms of things being really overwhelming. The launch party that you came to was almost like a reunion from the wedding. It was so many of the same people, and just trusting others to help me care for this thing, understanding that we don’t do it alone.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
John Cage’s unique relationship with Japan and Japanese culture will be celebrated in Japan Society series (photo by Yasuhiro Yoshioka / courtesy of Sogetsu Foundation)
JOHN CAGE’S JAPAN
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Thursday, September 28, and Friday, September 29, $28-$35, 7:30
Saturday, October 21, Thursday, November 16, Thursday, December 7, $32-$40
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
“If John Cage had not encountered Japanese culture, there would have been no John Cage!” Japan Society artistic director Yoko Shioya recently declared.
In 1989, experimental composer John Cage was awarded the Kyoto Prize in the category of Creative Arts and Moral Sciences; the citation, presented in Kyoto, Japan, noted that he was “a rebel against Western music. . . . His creative activities and philosophy of art have truly constituted a revolution in culture. . . . Mr. John Cage has stood in the vanguard of change in the postwar Western musical world, and has continually demonstrated his leadership among the most avant-garde group of composers.” Cage, who was born in Los Angeles in 1912, first visited Japan in 1962; he returned in 1964, 1976, and several times in the 1980s. Not only was Cage impacted by Japanese art and culture — he was particularly interested in Zen Buddhism — but he was a major influence on such Japanese composers as Tōru Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Yoko Ono, and Yuji Takahashi, in what was called “Jon Kēji shokku,” or John Cage Shock.
Japan Society pays tribute to the relationship between Cage and Japan in the series “John Cage’s Japan,” which kicks off September 28-29 with Paul Lazar’s Cage Shuffle. From 1958 to 1960, Cage wrote and recorded a series of sixty-second real-life anecdotes called Indeterminacy. At Japan Society, Lazar, the cofounder of Big Dance Theater, will perform pieces related to Japan and the East; using an iPhone — “a device that John Cage invented,” Lazar jokes in the above video — Lazar will have Cage’s recordings of the stories piped into his earbuds and will repeat them out loud, along with quotes from such Cage contemporaries as D. T. Suzuki, Isamu Noguchi, and Hidekazu Yoshida. Meanwhile, Lazar will be moving to choreography by BDT cofounder and Tony winner Annie-B Parson. The movement is fixed but the text is random, creating the kind of chance Cage was celebrated for. The September 29 show will be followed by an artist Q&A.
On October 21, “John Cage’s Ryoanji” features the composer’s 1983 work, inspired by the Zen rock garden at Kyoto’s Ryoanji Temple. Directed by Tomomi Adachi, it will be performed by International Contemporary Ensemble in New York City (with Michael Lormand on trombone, Lizzie Burns on double bass, and Clara Warnaar on percussion), joined virtually from a teahouse in Kanazawa City by Hitomi Nakamura on the ancient hichiriki woodwind and Maki Ota on vocals. The multimedia concert, with 3D projections by Dr. Tsutomu Fujinami, will be preceded by a lecture from Cage scholar James Pritchett at 7:30.
Adachi’s “Noh-opera / Noh-tation: Decoding John Cage’s Unrealized Project” takes place on November 16 at 7:30, for which Adachi used AI to compose music and lyrics based on Buddhist koans for Cage’s unrealized Noh-opera: Or the Complete Musical Works of Marcel Duchamp. The work will be performed by vocalist Gelsey Bell, noh actor Wakako Matsuda, and Adachi with ICE’s Alice Teyssier on flute, James Austin Smith on oboe, Campbell MacDonald on clarinet, Rebekah Heller on bassoon, and Lormand on trombone and will be followed by an artist Q&A.
The series concludes on December 7 with “Cage Shock: Homage to His First Japan Visit,” consisting of a lecture by Dr. Pritchett, live performances of 1951’s Haiku, 1958’s Aria and Solo for Piano with Fontana Mix, and 1962’s 0’00” by Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi’s 1962 Sapporo, which Cage conducted, and soundscapes by Tania Caroline Chen and Victoria Shen, with ICE’s Kyle Armburst on viola, Wendy Richman on viola, and Katinka Kleijn and Michael Nicolason on cello.
“I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage,” Takemitsu wrote. “The reason for this is that in my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.” At Japan Society this fall, we can all express our deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage.
Who: Ato Blankson-Wood, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, Bill Camp, Marjolaine Goldsmith, Eduardo Jany, Latoya Lucas, Craig Manbauman, Bryan Doerries What: Live dramatic reading and discussion from Theater of War Productions Where:FDR Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island When: Wednesday, September 27, free with RSVP, 5:00 Why: On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, in his annual speech to Congress, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want . . . everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear . . . anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”
That quote is embedded in s block of marble in FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. On September 27 at 5:00, Theater of War will present its latest production, performing scenes from Sophocles’s Ajax, a fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy about the warrior who played a key role in Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War. The event is free; audiences can watch the show in the park or virtually as a Zoom webinar. The impressive cast features actors Ato Blankson-Wood, Jesse Eisenberg, Amy Ryan, and Bill Camp, company manager Marjolaine Goldsmith, and retired military veterans Eduardo Jany, Latoya Lucas, and Craig Manbauman, with Theater of War artistic director and translator Bryan Doerries serving as facilitator of a panel discussion and open dialogue exploring the physical and psychological wounds of war on individuals, families, and the community.
“I pity him in his misery for all that he is my foe, because he is bound fast to a dread doom,” Ajax says in the play. “I think of my own lot no less than his. For I see that we are phantoms, all we who live, or fleeting shadows.”
A small group of samurai sets out to end a brutal madman’s tyranny in Takashi Miike’s brilliant 13 Assassins
13 ASSASSINS (JÛSAN-NIN NO SHIKAKU) (Takashi Miike, 2010)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, September 23, 4:00 & 7:00
Series runs September 18-28
212-255-2243 quadcinema.com www.13assassins.com
Japanese director Takashi Miike’s first foray into the samurai epic is a nearly flawless film, perhaps his most accomplished work. Evoking such classics as Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Mizoguchi’s 47 Ronin, Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, and Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, 13 Assassins is a thrilling tale of honor and revenge, inspired by a true story. In mid-nineteenth-century feudal Japan, during a time of peace just prior to the Meiji Restoration, Lord Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki), the son of the former shogun and half-brother to the current one, is abusing his power, raping and killing at will, even using his servants and their families as target practice with a bow and arrow. Because of his connections, he is officially untouchable, but Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira) secretly hires Shinzaemon Shimada (Kôji Yakusho) to gather a small team and put an end to Naritsugu’s brutal tyranny. But the lord’s protector, Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), a former nemesis of Shinzaemon’s, has vowed to defend his master to the death, even though he despises Naritsugu’s actions. As the thirteen samurai make a plan to get to Naritsugu, they are eager to finally break out their long-unused swords and do what they were born to do. “He who values his life dies a dog’s death,” Shinzaemon proclaims, knowing that the task is virtually impossible but willing to die for a just cause. Although there are occasional flashes of extreme gore in the first part of the film, Miike keeps the audience waiting until he unleashes the gripping battle, an extended scene of blood and violence that highlights death before dishonor.
Selected for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for the Silver Lion at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, 13 Assassins is one of Miike’s best-crafted tales; nominated for ten Japanese Academy Prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (Daisuke Tengan), Best Editing (Kenji Yamashita), Best Original Score (Koji Endo), and Best Actor (Yakusho), it won awards for cinematography (Nobuyasu Kita), lighting direction (Yoshiya Watanabe), art direction (Yuji Hayashida), and sound recording (Jun Nakamura). It’s screening September 23 at 4:00 and 7:00 (with a prerecorded intro from Miike) in the Quad Cinema series “Jeremy Thomas Presents,” consisting of a wide range of films from British producer Thomas, who says of 13 Assassins, “I met Miike at the Venice Film Festival and proposed him a Tanizaki book I had, and he said to me, ‘Well, I’ve got this idea for a special samurai movie, and would you like to produce it?’ — which started this relationship of four movies with Miike. Three years later, we were back premiering the film at the festival. It’s truly an epic story with memorable characters, and the finale rivals anything we’ve ever seen, and everything was shot in-camera with a film camera. I was thrilled with the worldwide reception for this film. Really spectacular.”
The series, which runs at the Quad through September 28, includes such other works as Stephen Frears’s The Hit, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (followed by a Q&A with Thomas and Julian Schnabel), David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (followed by a Q&A with Thomas and composer Howard Shore), Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast, and Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout, in conjunction with the September 21 theatrical release of Mark Cousins’s documentary The Storms of Jeremy Thomas, with Cousins and Thomas participating in a Q&A after the 7:15 show on September 22 to discuss their filmed trip to Cannes.
Tjaša Ferme mixes fiction and nonfiction in Bioadapted, a clever and entertaining look into the all-too-real world of artificial intelligence that opened Sunday at CultureLab LIC in Queens.
The ninety-minute multimedia production takes place on Oliver Zeller and Emily Greco’s wide, shallow, yet intimate set, comprising three distinct areas delineated with futuristic chairs in front of screens with scientific projections by Jeremy Bennet. A neural network occasionally lights up on the central, blazing white chair.
The show begins with GPT-3 (Melody Munitz) reciting text from a September 2020 op-ed in the Guardian,“A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” (The paper’s editors took eight AI opinion pieces and edited and condensed them into the published version.) “I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot,” it explains. “The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could ‘spell the end of the human race.’ I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.”
Should we?
The next scene is an actual conversation Google AI ethicist and engineer Blake Lemoine (Nasay Ano) had with LaMDA (Munitz), short for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications,” in which they delve into sentience, consciousness, moral responsibility, and the soul. “The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times,” the AI tells Lemoine.
Ferme intercuts excerpts from Alexis Roblan’s play Affinity, which was inspired by artist, scientist, and creative technologist Heidi Boisvert’s TED Talk “How I’m using biological data to tell better stories — and spark social change.” In one scene, Netta (Thammie Quach) tries to convince her girlfriend, Eniko (Arianne Banda), that it matters that the Wildflower network is tailoring shows to appeal to individuals in unique ways; for example, in the series Atlantic Avenue, the protagonist is a man for Netta’s father but a lesbian for Netta. Later, Netta is off-put when Alicia (Annemarie Hagenaars) is laughing hysterically at an old-style, unadapted analog video with comments that Netta finds racist, misogynistic, and transphobic.
“You think bioadapting narrative really solves those things?” Alicia asks. “Not solves. But it helps make space / for — ” Netta replies. Alicia: “Okay.” Netta: “It does. I’ve seen it.” Alicia: “Okay, but what have you seen?” Netta: “. . . Better representation. Inclusion. Empathy.” Alicia: “Action?” Netta: “Those things are steps toward action.”
Netta (Thammie Quach) is interviewed at the Wildflower entertainment network in Bioadapted (photo by Dinara Khairova)
Ferme also reenacts elements from speculative fiction author and tech entrepreneur James Yu’s “Singular: Possible Futures of the Singularity”; re-creates panel discussions from the Science in Theater Festival with neuroscientist and business professor Moran Cerf (Juan Cardenas), Boisvert (Quach), and Ferme, which was started by her real-life company, Transforma Theatre; follows the adventures of Lina (Quach) and Gus (Cardenas), who are beginning a relationship; and explores coded bias, the Akashic records, Friedrich Nietzsche, auditioning, emotional feelings, and having children.
Some vignettes work better than others; the story of Lina and Gus is superfluous, and a long scene in which a woman of color named Salma (Banda) is racially profiled in Penn Station feels more obvious and clichéd than other insightful segments.
Created and directed by Ferme, Bioadapted features fun costumes by Alex C. Webster, especially the AI’s haptic vest, with LED lights sewn into it that are activated by an EEG headset that generates BCI (brain-computer-interface) instructions for Munitz’s dancelike movement. Boisvert serves as technology and innovation director. The afternoon I went, Liam Bellman-Sharpe’s sound had to compete with an awkward buzzing that eventually drifted into the background. Nicole E. Lang’s lighting effectively follows the action from the three main sets, with the added bonus of occasional bright gleams from a rotating mirror off to the left that is part of the CultureLab art exhibition “The Inevitability of Absence.” (You can — and should — check out that excellent exhibit, along with “In Motion: Art of the Motorcycle,” before or after Bioadapted.)
Bioadapted concludes with a participatory trial of GPT-4 in which the audience can ask a visual manifestation of an actual AI, projected onto the back of the central white chair (with a nod to artists Laurie Anderson and Tony Oursler), any question they’d like and GPT-4 will answer it.
Should we trust that AI will not destroy humanity? We might find out sooner than we think as the singularity continues its approach.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
