To love an animal is to admit defeat and welcome heartbreak with open arms. That’s why I mourned your death the day I met you.

I was looking for a service dog and considering buying an already-trained golden retriever with a pedigree when a local rescue group got back to me. They wanted to let me know that, while they didn’t have the cute puppy I had enquired about, a female German shepherd named Barbie, they did have another dog available: a mutt who, as I had requested, was friendly with cats. That was you, Variety Magazine, and I felt that, for the name alone, you deserved a chance.

When we arrived at your foster home in Astoria, you received us alongside your foster brothers: a sultry orange cat and a timid black Labrador. We held you in our arms and knew you were the one. Baby Bubu, never die!

Barely three months old, and already we cried at your funeral. I knew that even as you grew into the large body your giant paws predicted, you would still be smaller than the unfathomable grief we would one day experience. Not yet, but eventually. Meanwhile, you seemed nonchalant about the whole thing, lying on the floor with your chin flat against the ground while your foster brothers tried to impress us with their politeness.

Some people go through it once and give up. They say the pain is too great to do it all over again. But isn’t that the nature of true love: to willingly, even gladly, expose ourselves to loss? You aren’t my first heartbreak, and you won’t be the last. Is it too Catholic of me to say that hurt is the price of living?

You can pick him up tomorrow, they said.

When I hesitated, they rephrased it: You must pick him up tomorrow.

Our life together began with the mixture of urgency and timelessness. And the routine that followed was an exercise in patience and empathy: I became your servant, and in return you validated my disdain for linearity. The fact that I contain your lifetime warps my own existence. I love you. Potty training and glassy eyes all at once: baby puppy senior dog. When I look into your eyes, I’m relieved from the pressures of the clock.

BABY BUBU NEVER DIE

From Sept 11th to Oct 17th at Shore Gallery Vienna

Featuring the work of:

Zoë Lund

Gretchen Lawrence

Bruno Zhu

Maya Deren + Alexander Hammid

Camille Henrot

Libby Rothfeld

Jennifer Moon + Laub

Judith Hopf

Ya nos habíamos decidido. Definitivamente no era una buena idea. Más gastos, más impuestos, reparaciones y quién sabe qué más. Con ese dinero podríamos vivir cómodamente al fin, sin el agua al cuello, y permitirnos todos los caprichos cuya ausencia hacía tiempo que nos hacía sentir miserables en la ciudad. El teatro, la ópera, comer fuera. Lujos. Hasta podría permitirme un publicista después de tantos años sin protección mediática y de décadas de titulares injustos. Estaba claro, la casa de campo era un delirio. Legalmente, teníamos que ir a visitarla una última vez con el inspector, pero entre nosotros ya habíamos concretado un plan: volver y decir que tras haber hecho la inspección, ya no nos interesaba la casa. Convencidos, nos miramos a los ojos con complicidad y seguimos sorbiendo la sopa de pollo de Edward’s con el perro a nuestros pies. Tocaba vivir bien, ir en taxis, comprar ropa, ponernos chistera y fumar puros. A la mierda el campo.

Pasaron los días y pensé brevemente en tener un Substack de pago en el que documentar la vida en la gran ciudad para que la gente de provincias se muera de envidia. Pero llegó la Fashion Week a Nueva York y volvieron a mí ese asco y ese desdén por un mundo que hace muchísimos años no me importaba en absoluto. RSVP. RSVP. Invitaciones enviadas por agencias creativas de pacotilla que todavía creen en un mundo regido por la popularidad en redes y por números arbitrarios que pueden haber sido o no generados por bots e inteligencia artificial. Qué bodrio, pensé. Ahora que me lo puedo permitir, no sé si me interesa. Con cuatro excepciones de artistas genuinos, el resto es morralla con tendencias fascistas.

Alquilamos un coche y fuimos al campo con Variety Magazine (mi perro). Nos hospedamos en la cabaña más barata que encontramos en el terreno de un chico que parecía sacado de una película de Rob Zombie. Era una noche lúgubre. Cuando salí a usar la letrina volví corriendo con el culo al aire pensando haber visto un oso. La brisa había movido una rama desnuda. Los tres pasamos un poco de miedo, pero no nos dijimos nada hasta el día siguiente porque hubiese sido de mala gente juzgar así a alguien que había puesto una botella de sidra achampanada en la mesita de noche. Le dimos 5 estrellas. Pero dormimos un poco mal.

Se abrió el día y la película de terror dejó de serlo. Fuimos a la casa, hicimos la inspección y el experto no encontró nada negativo. Yo tampoco. En una de las habitaciones bañadas de sol me giré, miré a mi novio con ojos de corderito y ambos supimos que no había vuelta atrás. Anticipando una recesión y otra guerra, compré una casa de campo, 6 hectáreas y un bosque.

Todo fue culpa de un libro. Hacía tiempo que sentía en mí un impulso que parecía provenir de dentro, un empuje ancestral. Pero todo fue culpa de un libro. Cuando leí La Pared de Marlen Haushofer, lo hice durante mucho tiempo. No por vagancia, sino por saborear cada página con gusto. Sé que el libro en sí puede leerse como una historia casi de terror, pero en mí despertó un placer vinculado al silencio y a la comunicación con los animales. Me cansa muchísimo hablar con humanos. En cambio, pasar días en silencio con mi perro y mi gata, con quienes me comunico por intuición y rutinas compartidas, me llena de felicidad. Ese es mi estado natural. Durante estos períodos de mutismo puedo escuchar y teclear todo lo que me apetece, pero lo que más me cuesta es la comunicación verbal. Leer sobre la protagonista de La pared, una mujer sola, intentando subsistir con un conocimiento limitado de la naturaleza, relacionarse con una vaca, un perro y un gato en medio de los Alpes austríacos, me hizo pensar si yo misma podría vivir así. Se me antojó el desafío. De todas formas, había aprendido, en menos de dos años, a montar a caballo y a adiestrar perros de trabajo, a pesar de una infancia de asfalto húmedo, de clase obrera (y mar). Pero plantar, lo que se dice plantar, yo nunca había plantado nada. Excepto por dos cosas: primero en el parvulario cuando germinamos un haba en el algodón húmedo de un vasito vacío de yogur, luego en el instituto, cuando una profesora de botánica nos ayudó a plantar berza asturiana en el único espacio verde del instituto, un trocito de césped maltrecho al lado del aparcamiento del profesorado.

Mi abuela y sus hermanas hablan de zapatos embarrados como algo traumático y vergonzoso. Y eso es porque son de campo, no terratenientes de la ciudad con campos trabajados por otros. Siendo mujeres de sangre indígena, los conocimientos ancestrales eran un tabú incompatible con las influencias norteamericanas mid-century de la capital a las que ellas, en los años sesenta, se querían adaptar desesperadamente. Es una verdadera tragedia haber perdido todo eso. Y para qué. Paseando por Buenos Aires, mi abuela me enseñó qué tipo de hierbas eran todas y cada una de los hierbajos nacidos entre las baldosas desordenadas de Palermo. Cuáles se podían echar en el mate y cuáles curaban distintos malestares. Pero me lo dijo todo muy bajito. Como un secreto indecente. Yo, mientras tanto, intentaba aprender, pero sólo lograba ver tallos verdes de distintos tamaños, indiferenciables para mi cerebro de ciudad que sí sabe discernir entre distintas tipografías de locales comerciales.

Como se dice en Asturias, “la cabra tira pal monte” y mi genética es toda exilio y campo. Este impulso ha viajado durante décadas desde los territorios guaraníes uruguayos y las comunidades menonitas del Volga ruso hasta las montañas de los Catskills, pasando por Argentina y España, para que yo pueda plantar guisantes. Qué sé yo. Oler la tierra húmeda me hace llorar y el trabajo físico me relaja. Me gusta estar ensimismada imaginando la vida de los topillos que viven bajo mis pies. Me tendré que apretar el cinturón, pero al menos tendré las manos ocupadas y las botas embarradas.

She started the appointment, but instead of talking to me directly, she narrated everything we were doing as if she were training a blind nurse. She wasn’t talking to me so much as talking to it, addressing some invisible thing in the air, in this flat, robotic voice, trying to adapt herself to the machine’s brain instead of the other way around. I am now adjusting the chair.

She’s an eccentric, my dentist. At least it spared me the small talk. I really didn’t want my awkward responses transcribed too. I am now examining the central incisor. Since she knows I’m a film director, she’s always asking how the film is going. And that, depending on the day, can be a touchy subject.

Like a lot of people, she’d initially assumed (because of my gender) that when I said I worked in film, I meant acting. But about a year into the treatment, she asked how the auditions were going, I explained that I’m a director, and she enthusiastically bursted Like Peter Bogdanovich!

I wanted to say I preferred Polly Platt, but before I could, she told me she used to be his landlord. Bogdanovich had grown up on the Upper West Side, and after decades in Los Angeles he crawled back to his childhood neighborhood, renting the apartment above her dental practice, one of the units in a brownstone she’d bought in the nineties. He was here when he was shooting The Sopranos. Honestly, I couldn’t conceal my amusement. Bogdanovich here? My dentist? He was also working on another project while he lived there, his last film, the flop She’s Funny That Way, originally titled Squirrels to the Nuts. I had to admit I had never seen it. But she already knew that. Apparently Peter had shared his disappointment with her, blaming the lack of interest on the lackluster promotion of the film. Although, what is one to expect of a 2014 film about a lecherous director and a hooker-turned-actress after the Dorothy Stratten scandal?

Avoiding the use of my vocal cords, I was thinking about Peter when I finally spotted a tiny microphone perched on top of the stainless steel dental tray. So that’s where it was. That’s what she’d been addressing this whole time. I am showing the patient her chart. I have to admit that, ever since she knows I’m a director she cuts me more slack. I think she saw Peter struggle and now extends a kind of professional courtesy to anyone she associates with film. And every time I go there, I look at his apartment and feel funny and sad. This is where the patient started, this is where she is now.

Los Angeles isn’t a ‘bustling’ city. It is a city that is busy, yes, but busy fighting its own demise. To me, the beauty of Los Angeles lies in its tragedy. Not only is its location cursed – situated in an active seismic zone, and without its own local water supply – but its obsession with reinvention always comes at the expense of some self-destruction. It’s a town with suicidal tendencies. Westlake, for example, which is where the lovely and decrepit MacArthur Park lies, was developed in the 1920s in hopes of appealing to the trendy well-to-do residents associated with the emerging film industry. One of the reasons for its location was that by the time commuters would leave their jobs, it would be a better idea to drive back home towards the east, with the sunset behind them. Nobody would want to drive against the blinding sun, the developers thought.

And they were wrong. Because that’s precisely what Hollywood does to you. After a long day on set, the last thing you want is to get home safe. Instead, what you crave is the exhilarating feeling of driving against the light and hoping to meet God on the other side.

I really can’t remember when and where I first saw Sarah Morris’s Los Angeles. Unlike my crystal clear, didactic and neat impressions of her film on the Beijing Olympic Games that I got to see in China at the UCCA in 2018, my memories of her piece on Los Angeles are fuzzier, like a dream. And I haven’t been able to see it again until now, which made me feel all the more excited to watch it.

What caught my eye this time around, was seeing the iconic lobby of the Creative Artists Agency [CAA] offices in Los Angeles, and most importantly, the massive Roy Lichtenstein painting in it. I was recently talking about how much I like Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway (1932), which hangs in a stairwell of MoMA, when my boyfriend Nick told me about Lichtenstein’s version, commissioned by CAA in 1989 to decorate its lobby. I got giddy connecting the dots. I’m a UTA [United Talent Agency] girl, but still, I would have liked to see the painting in situ. Sadly, like most things in Los Angeles, it was short-lived. The Beverly Hills building that once hosted the agency now houses a different (but still very Angeleno) company, Alo Yoga, who didn’t like the Lichtenstein and replaced it with a black-and-white photograph that, if squinting hard enough, resembles Robert Longo’s ‘Men in the Cities’ but wearing athleisure. What a classic Angeleno move to have such a disdain for your own history!

When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I did my best to read and research as much as I could about my new city. Soon I had to stop. It was too sad. Almost all of the things I found most exciting didn’t exist anymore, like Krotona, the national headquarters of the Theosophical Society which in 1918 were located right on the entryway to the original Hollywoodland Village on Beachwood Drive, or The Edendale, the movie studios that had been located in what is known today as Echo Park. It seemed that the only way to enjoy Los Angeles was the way it intended you to: empty-headed, under the influence, succumbing to the hazy atmosphere and the smell of the night-blooming jasmine.

What I love about Morris’s Los Angeles is that it uses Hollywood’s own language and tricks. Images of Downtown LA skyscrapers, which in reality were mostly empty and unused at the time, are used to create the illusion of the city as a corporate hub. And while the video revolves around behind-the-scenes footage of the 2004 Oscars ceremony, there’s nothing ‘raw’ or expository in this documentary. Instead, the belly of the beast looks as glossy as its face, and the faces on the magazine covers we see populating the iconic newsstand Robertson Magazines – itself now closed, too.

Morris’s Los Angeles isn’t a portrait of the city. (If it was, there would be more Latinos in it.) Rather, it’s a portrait of how the city presents itself to the world, and in particular how it did so at a special moment when Hollywood was still at the top of its game. In 2004, I was only fifteen, and like any other teenagers in unluckier parts of the world, US cultural exports were it. So I can’t help but feel nostalgic about the 76th Academy Awards, when Sofia Coppola won her Oscar for Lost In Translation, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson promoted Starsky & Hutch, and Charlize Theron won Best Actress for Monster. It was also the golden era of Miramax. Kill Bill Vol. 2 premiered that year; Morris briefly shows us Uma Thurman waving on the red carpet, at the height of her powers.

Of course, that LA, the one that Morris reconstructs, is and always was a mirage. In Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), Thom Andersen gives us a sobering narrative about how the myth of Hollywood got it all wrong and doesn’t do any justice to the city and its inhabitants. Allan Sekula’s Gala (2003) documents the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003, catering services and Skid Row homelessness included. And a bit earlier, Mike Davis in City of Quartz (1990) described LA as a white supremacist police state that had successfully marketed itself as paradise. They are 100% correct, and that’s precisely the strength of a myth: everyone knows that it isn’t true, but they will go to great lengths to continue to delude themselves. It’s an industry fuelled by delusion on most levels. Morris lays this before us with an uncanny sheen.

It makes sense that the first movie star to appear in Morris’s video is Dennis Hopper, somebody famously in on the joke. A big lover of Hollywood as myth, that same year he had an iconic cameo playing himself in the Entourage episode called ‘Malibooty’ where Maury Chaykin plays a character based on Harvey Weinstein and Rhys Coiro a role clearly inspired by Vincent Gallo. Entourage isn’t too different from Morris’s Los Angeles. Also created in 2004, it showcases a very similar idea of LA and shares many of its same locations and subjects: the Chateau Marmont, Musso and Frank, the talent agent, the nervous blonde starlet…

Peter Bogdanovich who, desperate to become Hollywood, spent his youth hanging out with a very old Boris Karloff and getting bossed around by the famously rude John Ford, praised Morris’s Los Angeles as a film that ‘vividly bring[s] the place to the kind of life it conveys when you are there: conflicted, ironic, weird, empty, glitzy, dreary’. Then it is no wonder that I, a sucker for Hollywood’s history, love this sleek portrait of Los Angeles too.

In the first of a series on filmmakers and their relationship to the animal world, artist, director, writer and actress Amalia Ulman visits with actress, director (of the short film series Green Porno, among others), model and animal behaviorist Isabella Rossellini at her regenerative farm, Mama Farm. Rossellini can currently be seen on screen in Edward Berger’s Conclave playing Vatican nun Sister Agnes. Photographs by Amalia Ulman.

On October 2, I visited Isabella Rossellini’s farm with Gabriella. We took the train from Penn Station to Merrick, Long Island, where my friend Moises, an extraordinary cat whisperer, picked us up in his car. In the Merrick Station lobby, two plaques commemorated a famous train dog named Roxey:

In 1901, a lonesome dog named Roxey had lost its owner while on a train to Roslyn. Roxey quickly began to explore his new surroundings and soon began riding trains all over Long Island. Roxey became so well known that he got to ride with President Teddy Roosevelt in his private train car while en route to his summer home.

After receiving this blessing from Roxey the dog, we drove to Mama Farm—Isabella’s “Garden of Eve.”

Rossellini: You’re a filmmaker, right?

Ulman: Yes, I make films.

Rossellini: But you also do interviews?

Ulman: This is the first one. I’ve been interviewed many times, but I haven’t interviewed others. This is going to be the first in a long series on animals and filmmaking. But first things first, let’s talk about your latest film, Conclave. I really liked it! As a Roman Catholic and as a Latin American, I was deeply touched by it.

Rossellini: Me too. I’m also a Catholic—not really particularly religious, but I am culturally Roman Catholic because I was born in Rome. I’m very curious to talk [about the film] to my friends who do go to church because I want to know what they think. I do think that they will be touched. The whole purpose of religion is to deal with doubt, and the film is an ode to doubt. We have to say we don’t have all the answers.

Ulman: Yes. I loved that part of the film where Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) talks about doubt: “If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.”

Rossellini: That speech is marvelous. It’s very humbling because we have to recognize that we are human and therefore not perfect. We have to always remind ourselves of that.

Ulman: Conclave was shot in Italy. How was it to go back to your home country?

Rossellini: I go all the time because I still have some family there, but I never did a film in Rome. Maybe at some point I did a series, or some episodes or some scenes, but never a full film. So, it was fun to be back home.

Ulman: Was Catholicism a big part of your upbringing?

Rossellini: I grew up in Italy and France but went to an Italian school in Paris. My family was not particularly religious, although my grandmother went to church every Sunday. My aunt would tell me how much she loved Catholic philosophy. So, it wasn’t really so much about being fearful of God but more about the ideas that are present in the film, like humbleness, pardon, redemption. I think that there is something very warm about that, although many of my Protestant friends say, “Oh, for you Catholics, it’s easy—you sin, you confess, and then it’s over”—you know?

Ulman: Yes, absolutely. Catholics have historically preferred dogs over cats. Are you a dog or a cat person?

Rossellini: I’m more of a dog person. But I’m an ethologist—I have a master’s degree in ethology—so I’m interested in all animals. I’m interested in [ethology] in the way some people who are interested in science fiction ask themselves, “Are there other lives out here? Are they having emotions like us?” I think the Martians are right here next to us—the animals around us. Are they similar, are they different? And how so? That is a question that I’ve had since I was a little girl.

I’ve had cats before, but now I don’t because they are the reason there’s a big decline in wild birds. The cat I used to have would take home two or three birds a year, which doesn’t sound like much—but if you have millions of cats, which we do, and each is taking one or two birds a year, that is billions of wild birds that are dead. That’s why they recommend keeping cats indoors, which is really hard here because everything is open. So, when my cat died, I decided not to have one anymore. Otherwise, it’d need to wear a bell, and that would drive me crazy.

Ulman: Oh, and it drives them crazy, too.

Rossellini: Yes. So, the bell doesn’t work, and declawing and all these things seem cruel.

Ulman: Let’s not bring up declawing. I get very emotional about declawing. I’m a cat person. I only started dealing with dogs last year.

Rossellini: I’d be interested to know, from a scientific standpoint, what makes a human a cat or dog person. When I went to the university, we only studied elephants, lions, very exotic animals—not many domestic animals. So, when I started the farm, I was delighted to be able to access animals that I can have, and I was wondering if they were like dogs. But they’re not. They’re more like cats, they’re more detached. Dogs had a process of domestication, which is the longest of all animals. It is calculated at 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, while the rest of the animals were domesticated with the advent of agriculture, about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. There are certain animals, like the cat, that are domesticated, yes, but they live alongside us. I think they allowed cats to live next to the human dwellings because the cats killed the mice. So, they changed us, and we probably changed them because they became less afraid of us, less aggressive.

But they haven’t had a process of domestication as hard as dogs. There were wolves that came, ate the bones [of their prey] and ate the excrement because they are scavengers. We let them do that as long as they didn’t eat us, and then, little by little, got to where we are today. There is something about dogs that is very similar to us—their family structure, the fact that they bark when there’s a threat. They also hunt in groups. I think the first domestication occurred because we were hunting with them. I have seen that with dolphins—dolphins working with fishermen. They know that the fishermen are able to catch more fish than they can, so they push the fish into a cove to help fishermen in exchange for some of the catch. Dolphins live in the ocean, otherwise they would be a very good candidate to be domesticated.

I think the first process of domestication was not really controlled by humans, it was more about animals willingly working alongside us. Maybe in the second wave of domestication humans started selecting temperament, talents and looks. Cats, on the other hand, look pretty much the same besides colors.

Ulman: Well, some cultures have great esteem for cats, not because of their work ethic but because of their spirituality. Muslims prefer cats over dogs, and in Islam they are considered ritually clean and to possess blessings. For example, if a cat chooses to live in your household, it becomes a source of pride because it shows that it is a calm and happy environment.

Since you mentioned dolphins, are you familiar with Karen Pryor and her clicker training technique? I read that she started doing clicker training on dolphins first.

Rossellini: Yes, she did. She works in zoos, and they all adopted that method. I volunteer for the Guide Dog Foundation, and her technique has been adopted by them. Now they can train dogs much faster. What took seven months before now takes two to three months.

Ulman: I’m currently training a puppy for the first time in my life. Tell me about the work you do with the Guide Dog Foundation. I’m very curious about it—training a pup is hard!

Rossellini: Yeah, I’ve volunteered for the Guide Dog Foundation for over 20 years. There are three ways of volunteering, and I’ve done the three. You can take dogs when they are puppies, eight weeks, keep them for a year, and really train them how you’d train your dog to be a good dog.

There are a few things that you don’t do with them that you do with a regular dog. You don’t throw balls because you don’t want to stimulate them if they have any instinct to chase. But you can hide things for them to find, which they love. You hide the ball because that can translate later on for a person that can’t see, [as] “find my gloves, find my keys.” And you can’t sleep with them on the bed because that is for the blind person to decide if they want to do that or not. Now that I’m old, it’s hard for me to walk these dogs because puppies pull. How big is your puppy?

Ulman: Big. He’s a mixed breed of German shepherd, Great Dane and cattle dog. He’s strong.

Rossellini: I had a very bad back operation, and one day I fell on the floor because a puppy pulled me so hard. So, I can’t volunteer that way anymore, but now they send me mama dogs that are pregnant. They have puppies at my house, and I keep them there until they’re six weeks, then the mama and puppies are returned to the Guide Dog Foundation. They are vaccinated, stay there for a few weeks, then they distribute them to people who volunteer the way I used to.

Talking about Roman Catholics: two years ago, the Guide Dog Foundation called me on Christmas Day and said, “We have a breeder dog, a female that doesn’t have a home, and we’re looking for a place for her to stay permanently.” I never committed to having a dog because I travel often, but they called me on Christmas and I said, “OK, I’m Roman Catholic. Do you know the story of the Madonna? How do you want me to say no?” Of course, I had to say yes. Rosie has been with me for two years, and she had two litters. She’s still at my house, now babysitting my grandson.

Ulman: When did this interest in animals begin? Was there an animal that kickstarted this passion, that opened the gates to a deeper understanding with other species? AKA: Who was your Holga? (Holga was the first animal that unleashed my interest in the animal world. Everyone who is interested in animal cognition seems to have been introduced to it through a relationship with a particular pet.)

Rossellini: We had a lot of animals at home. Dogs and cats, mostly, but hamsters, canaries, the birds, the animals that generally you have. But it wasn’t until I met Nando that I fell in love with animals. I had a cousin who had a little dachshund, Nando. My cousin was older than me, and he was traveling to Paris, so he brought the dog to our home so we would take care of him. But when he came back, I said that I was going to run away from home, that I was going to jump out the window if they took that dog away from me. My mom understood that I was very serious and told my cousin that he needed to get another dog because otherwise I was going to run away from home with Nando. So, that dog became my first dog. Nando and I had a bond. I was about five years old and took him for walks, fed him, took care of him from day one. He lived for 20 years, so he died when I was 25 years old. A very, very lovely little doggy.

Ulman: Has an animal ever surprised you?

Rossellini: My professor, Diana Reiss, was training dolphins to study their behavior. She would ask the dolphin to “get the ball,” the dolphin would get it, then she would give him a fish as a reward. But she didn’t want the dolphin to become too fat, so she cut the fish in pieces: one piece was the head, another piece was the tail and two or three pieces were the body. The dolphin didn’t like the tail, so she discarded it. So, they would repeat the process: “Get me the frisbee.” The dolphin would get it and then get a reward. But when the dolphin made a mistake, she would disengage and ignore the dolphin. These are social animals, so disengaging is kind of punishment. If she said, “Get the frisbee” and instead she got the ball, she would turn her back to the dolphin before playing again. But once, by mistake, she paid the dolphin with a fish tail, making the frustrated dolphin turn its back and disengage. This was mind-boggling to her. Once animals take the initiative and do something that you haven’t taught them, but they’ve seen it happen, that’s language, that’s communication! I remember how fantastic it was, that moment.

Ulman: Yeah, there’s a photo that I really like from two years ago somewhere in Japan. Because of budget cuts, they were buying cheaper fish, and the penguins were refusing to eat them. The photo is of the penguin turning its head, giving the handler the cold shoulder.

Rossellini: (laughs)

Ulman: One of my reasons for wanting to meet you is because I’ve been wanting to take the Animal Behavior and Conservation Masters at Hunter [College], and you are an alumn[a] from that program. But when I was reading about your work, I saw that you got the degree in 2019, after making Green Porno.

Rossellini: Right. Because I was always interested in animal behavior. To me, Green Porno is a work in progress. The first one, which I made before studying the M.A., was very successful, because sex is successful. But, for example, I couldn’t have done Mammas if I hadn’t gone to university. Firstly, because it’s based on a recent study by women scientists, and it is great that more women are now scientists because they ask questions like, “What is maternal instinct?” We all think we know it, but then when we have to define it scientifically, we don’t exactly know what it is. I think any of these series, even Seduce Me, I would have done maybe differently now, emphasizing more what Darwin called the “secondary sexual characteristic”: the horns, the collar, you know? But what brought me back to university, or making these films, was that I wasn’t working. I was old, so I didn’t have work as a model or as an actress. It was then that I attended a conference of Temple Grandin at Hunter, and they were handing out a pamphlet saying that they just opened this new Master’s program on animal behavior. I signed up that evening. Three days later, I was in class.

Ulman: Their marketing really worked! I was gonna say I like all of the series, but I really like, in Seduce Me, when you go, like, “What am I, a bed bug?” or “What am I, a duck?” Green Porno originated as a series of short videos for the Sundance YouTube Channel in 2008. How did it come about?

Rossellini: [Sundance founder] Robert Redford was enthusiastic about YouTube. He’s a big film buff; he loves silent films, and a lot of silent films are short. So, he allocated some money to do short films, especially if the subject was environmental. I’m an environmentalist, so they approached me. I had never directed anything, but then I had a little lightbulb moment and thought: “What if I was a fly… and then transformed myself into the fly?”

Ulman: You mentioned silent cinema. Any favorites?

Rossellini: Méliès for sure. I didn’t know what to do, so I looked at Méliès for inspiration and noticed his camera didn’t move. I liked that simplicity. Also, no special effects. I just didn’t want to do anything that I didn’t know how to do myself. The few times that I’ve delegated things to other people, somehow things go wrong. They don’t have the same flavor. For example, for one episode, we needed a drawing of a school of fish. I drew some, but we hired someone who drew better, more professionally. But the problem is that she colored each fish a different color, and that’s a school of fish who should look all somewhat similar. And just like that, my budget was gone, and the fish were [scientifically] wrong. But I’m very lucky to be working closely with Rick Gilbert and Andy Bright, who were my first art directors and execute my ideas in a truthful way.

Ulman: I love the way you use paper for the costumes and the set design. And I love your drawings! I have your chicken book, and the drawings are very good, very lively. To end our conversation, what changes would you like to see in the world right now with regards to how people engage with animals? Could we coexist better with other species?

Rossellini: It’s hard for me to give an answer that is very global, but it’s easy for me to give an answer that is small. It’s almost like doing Green Porno. So even if the farm is small, I would hope that this little Garden of Eden will be infectious and other people will do it instead of building a pool or a golf course. I operate in very, very small steps that I understand. My next step now involves wool. Like vegetables, wool is also a monoculture. Merino is a breed of sheep that is very soft, so it’s not itchy, so the Merino sheep became very popular.

I am now operating with a group called the Hudson Valley Textile Project, and at Mama Farm we have four, soon five, breeds of sheep. I only buy heritage breeds, meaning breeds that are endangered. So, for example, I have a sheep called Jacob that has two horns. Sometimes they have four horns. This breed is so old that it is described in the Bible.

Ulman: I read that you are doing something similar with the chickens, that since the chickens that are used for eggs are often the same breed, here you try to have heritage breeds to prevent them from going extinct.

Rossellini: Yes, I have 22 different breeds of chicken, all heritage breeds, and I have the sheep, and I have goats.

Ulman: We should go see them!

We went for a stroll to see the animals that currently live in Mama Farm, and I couldn’t help but notice two little sheep who followed Isabella everywhere. This dynamic duo, called Toto and Titi, were particularly charismatic and significantly more friendly than all the other animals. We even took some selfies with Toto! They were so at ease because Isabella has been training them to be in front of the camera next year for a new Green Porno series.

Ulman: So, Toto and Titi will star in the new Green Porno series about domestication?

Rossellini: Yes, about how we changed their coat, how we eliminated their horns, how we made chicken, who in the wild lay ten eggs per year, now lay 300. It would be possible for a mama to raise 300 chicks! So, you know, I would like to make it about that and film it right here on the farm. I would be a primitive woman, an old, primitive woman, and make my breasts look like this, very saggy. I’m always naked in these series.

Ulman: Yeah, I always loved the faux nudity in the Green Porno series. This new project about domestication sounds really good. I’m excited to see Toto’s break as a star!

I was listening to the radio when Lili Taylor came on the air to talk about her first book, Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing. I immediately got excited: I have loved Lili’s work (Dog Fight, Arizona Dream, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, The Addiction, I Shot Andy Warhol, Things I Never Told You, Pecker) for the longest time, so learning that she was a birder only added to her immensely cool aura.

Until now, my relationship to birding had been via New York’s most famous bird, Flaco the owl. He took a fancy to one of the water tanks on my block and spent the last two weeks of his life there, until February 23, 2024, when he was found on the pavement on West 89th Street. I had read he was somewhere in the neighborhood, and then, one winter night at 8:00 p.m. sharp, he started cooing very loudly. I immediately knew it was him. My cat ran to the window, and I followed, thrilled about the celebrity visit. I couldn’t seem to get a glimpse of him from my window, so I ran downstairs, where I encountered a big man with a huge lens. He was a professional birder, of course, so I asked him where Flaco was, and he crudely told me that I would never see him (without his equipment and years of experience, that is). I walked around in my pajamas looking up, gave up and went back home to listen to the sweet coos. That became a routine of sorts, and for the next few days my cat Gemi and I would patiently wait for those sweet, sad, horny, nightly coos. Flaco was looking for an impossible love—he was the only owl in the United States of his kind and would die without mating.

When I learned that I was going to meet Lili Taylor to chat about birds, I thought of that mean birder and decided I couldn’t show up without renting a giant paparazzi lens apt for birding. So, I asked my birder friends and got my hands on the biggest, fastest, most powerful lens. Carrying the huge heavy lens box, I headed to the spot Lili had chosen, a relatively untouched four-acre woodland just outside the Hallett Nature Sanctuary that was only opened to the public recently, and found her at the pond, armed with her binoculars and an infectious curiosity.

I had never even known there was this whole little wildlife [Hallett Nature Sanctuary] area in there. It just opened to the public. We’ll go in there. I’ll show you.

You were saying that it was closed for about 80 years?

Oh, yeah. It’s so cool that you can get off of 59th Street and come into this.

[Lili, my friend Moises and I enter the Sanctuary.]

Wow, this is so beautiful, I wasn’t familiar with this area at all, although I should be because I don’t live far from here. I’m on the Upper West Side. I feel like I’m always visiting the same pockets of nature.

Yeah, exactly—patches, right?

I read in your book that a common question you get is, “Who was your spark bird, the one that got you into birding?” You wrote that you don’t really have one bird in particular to give credit to this awakening. Was there any other animal, from a different species, maybe, that got you interested in the animal kingdom? (Who was your Holga?)

I had rabbits and mice that I liked as pets. But I guess pets are a little bit different than something in the natural world. One special connection I did have was with a prairie dog.

Where was this special prairie dog?

I was filming [Outer Range] out in New Mexico and started to notice them around. Then, I realized, “I really like these guys.” I didn’t know much about them, so I looked up “prairie dogs New Mexico” and discovered that they are in trouble. They’re landlocked, which means they are stuck in these areas, and if they’re not helped by humans they’ll die. Then, I found out there are people that feed them, and I started to feed them, too. You have to buy carrots, lettuce, celery, and you chop it. When you have a truck full of it, you take these big buckets, go around and throw it down the holes where they live.

Are they picky with food?

No, they just can’t access food because they are landlocked.

Just like P-22, the mountain lion, and all the other wildlife in Los Angeles, right?

Exactly. I like anything that’s living and doing something to help is always nice. Look at this tree: I think it’s oak. If you were going to plant any tree, this is the tree that’s the most beneficial to everything. It hosts 532 species of butterflies and moths.

I didn’t know that! Tell me more about native plants, I’ve read that you have planted them in your own garden in Brooklyn.

Well, it was a breakthrough for me to realize that all plants have names and come from somewhere. I didn’t know any of that. But native plants are not in any of the nurseries because they don’t sell well and don’t make any money. It is easier to find them online. [Lili spies a bird] Oh, that’s a robin! Right now, if you see a bird, there’s a good chance that it could have some young somewhere, like a nest. I realized that birds don’t just eat bird seed, from feeders; they actually have to eat the insects on plants, or berries. The birds that are from here only know how to eat certain plants, and since most of the plants that are here are not native to this land, what they provide is not nutritional for the bird.

Yes, I was fascinated by the idea that you may have a beautiful garden in your backyard, but that it couldn’t feed any of the birds. I love that you took the initiative to change this, to plant some native plants to create this sort of pitstop for these birds to feed themselves the way they know how to do so.

Exactly, invasive plants like oriental bittersweet, they can eat but don’t get anything nutritious from it. It doesn’t take a whole lot to help out birds, which is so cool. A little goes a long way.

When I lived in London, I noticed that every house has a backyard, and all those backyards are sort of interconnected and home a lot of wildlife. It’s like the city has a double life with all the foxes and other creatures.

So, the animals can move throughout… that’s huge. As you know, with the P-22, that lack of interconnectedness is a problem. But they’re building those corridors above highways, and those are working.

Let’s try to find some birds. Are you able to differentiate the sounds of birds when you hear them?

A little bit. Certain families, like warblers— that’s what I was just hearing. There’s about 30 species of warblers. Their calls are very complex, and it’s not easy, but I’m trying to get better. What I’ve been doing is using this app [Merlin Bird]: it’s like Shazam for birds. This is a quiet time in the day for birds, but I’m sure there’s a hungry bird around. A lot of birders are out by 6:30, but a lot of birds [that] eat insects wait till the sun comes out. I was seeing a lot of action around from 7:30 to 9:30.

Do you ever photograph the birds or just use the binoculars?

Sometimes, I take a picture so I can learn about them when I get home. But, yeah, it’s a big difference. I almost feel like if I were to get into photography, there’d be a learning curve, and maybe I wouldn’t enjoy the act of watching the birds so much.

I feel like there’s a big difference between being in the present moment and admiring a bird as opposed to having to photograph it, which is kind of like hunting. I find the whole photographic aspect of birding sort of macho.

Yeah, well, and big, big, big lenses, right? I wonder why? (Laughs)

Yeah, some of these lenses cost about $20,000, like a car. I think I enjoyed more the act of sitting near my cat and looking at whatever she’s looking at without having to document it.

Exactly. It’s very different. There’s a cat bird over there!

All these little funny sounds—the “pspspspspssss” you’re hearing are birders doing this thing called fishing to bring the birds out. I wonder if it’s supposed to be either the sound of a predator or of their young? I don’t like to do it because I don’t like to bother them. What if they’re working on something—maybe a nest? I could try to bring that cat bird out, but why?

Absolutely. I love how birding has become like a meditation technique for you, something you can do anywhere while you’re shooting a film. So many moments on a set are spent waiting around. It’s nice that you’re turning this aimless waiting into something beautiful and meaningful. I know a lot of actors have a hard time waiting. Was there any birding experience on set that was particularly special?

I’ve had, actually, a lot of cool experiences birding while shooting films, but the big one was probably in Bulgaria. I kind of took the job to see the birds. Oh, there’s the cat bird! You’re gonna get a good shot.

I will try…

[I proceed to shoot the way recommended to me by my birder friends, with a very fast shutter speed. It is not very loud, but in a peaceful environment like this, the noise stands out and resembles a machine gun.“Tatatatatata!”]

That American robin was just calling! That’s kind of an alarm—they are saying to other birds, “There’s a problem, the camera!” Do you hear that call right now? He’s telling other birds that there’s paparazzi. And that’s the cardinal. That’s the sound I'm more familiar with. And I think there’s a blue jay! Looking up into that tree with binoculars just feels so nice, you know? I feel transported—I really needed to come in here today. Oh, there’s a raccoon!

He’s huge!

[A huge, fat and sleepy raccoon inspects the lens case and later proceeds to cross from one side of the path to another right in front of us. He looks like a hungover college student in South Park pajamas covered in Doritos crumbs.]

Just want to make sure he's not rabid, you know?

How does one determine that?

If he was rabid, I think he would be coming for us right now.

He seems alright. He doesn’t care about us.

He’s probably so used to people at this point. If he was rabid, he would be coming straight at us because the virus needs to find another host. That’s why they go after you with ferocity and act insane. But this one, he’s not insane. He knows what he’s doing, so we’re okay. It’s just weird that he’s awake at his hour; that’s why I was a little concerned. This is when they should be asleep. But maybe he didn’t get a good sleep.

It’s loud in Manhattan.

I wonder where that raccoon sleeps. I wonder if he’s sleeping somewhere near here. He seemed very—

Comfortable. Like this is his bedroom.

Central Park raccoons are probably on a whole other level.

Noise pollution…. I also wanted to ask you about light pollution. I saw a video of you done for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology initiative Lights Out for Birds about how turning off the lights in New York City protects the birds from collisions while they migrate. It made me think of how baby sea turtles, instead of heading to the sea, following the moonlight, get confused and crawl the opposite direction, toward city lights, and subsequently their demise. So, people volunteer to ensure hatchlings reach the ocean.

I didn’t know! Similarly, birds are drawn into light, then come into Manhattan and either can’t get out of the city or collide with buildings. Cats are the number one cause of death and then, number two, is collisions. Although, I think habitat loss is probably the main cause…

I heard that in Flaco’s case, even though he collided with a building, his cause of death was rodenticide.

Yeah, but the city didn’t want to report on that because—you get the point.

Yes, the New York rats.

But they have worked on taking away the rodenticide in certain parks when the hawks are breeding because a lot of hawks were dying, too.

My last question is about preservation and your work with bluebirds and the National Audubon Society.

I [don’t work with them] officially. I’m just a bluebird monitor,

What does that mean?

If you put up a bluebird box that you can open from the side, you can go in and see how they’re doing. If the nest is in bad shape, you can repair the nest. You can pull out snakes or bugs. And, of course, there’s house sparrows, which are the main killer of bluebirds. So, as a monitor, I try to ensure that they can reproduce and that the babies can fledge.

That’s really cool. I read that they’ve managed to restore the population.

Yes, in the 1930s, and that’s really because of these bluebird boxes.

In your book, you mention Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the definition of flow. You talk about the difference of how time passes or is actively absorbed.

Yeah, you know, there’s two kinds of time. There’s chronos, and then there’s a time called kairos. Kairos the kind of time we’re experiencing in here.

Yeah, I have a hard time mixing the two.

I know, me too. It’s one or the other. And it’s tough with film because filmmaking is so chronos. Whoa, that’s a Canada jay!

Elaine May in a wedding dress, acting and directing, A New Leaf

Never have I seen one woman in whom every social grace was so lacking. Did I say she was primitive? Well, I retract that. She’s feral.

—Henry Graham, of Henrietta, in A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971)

I have been dreading writing this essay because it means admitting to myself and to the world something very unfortunate: I am a loser brunette.

It was 2017, and my then husband suggested we watch A New Leaf (1971) because there was a new Blu-ray restoration, which was exciting. But as I watched Walter Matthau as Henry Graham arrogantly reckoning with the fact that he had run out of money, making teary-eyed farewell visits to his Upper East Side tailor and racket club, I thought of the man sitting next to me and was shocked by the similarities. “He’s just like you,” I said to my husband, who likewise maintained emotional relationships with the institutions that validated his sense of sophistication. Surprisingly, he didn’t bother denying it, just agreed and chuckled. The nerve! I guess it was too late in the game to pretend otherwise. I was already drowning in debt after supporting his life of leisure for years. As I watched the rest of the film, I wondered how I had managed to get swindled so badly. The nerve! My then husband regarded his appreciation for the finest of things as a sort of talent, which he applied to correcting my feral ways, just as Henry cleans Henrietta of crumbs each morning before going to work at the university. And just like Henrietta (Elaine May herself), or like Lila Kolodny (her daughter, Jeannie Berlin) in The Heartbreak Kid (1972), I thought those corrections were a sign of care. I know better now, but my affinity for Elaine May’s sweet but tragic, nerdy characters has remained.

The naturalistic tenderness of these women’s loserdom tells me that they were written by a woman, very possibly from her own lived experience. May’s characters are brainy, vivacious, funny, and good-looking, but for some reason they can’t really fit in. Men are cruel to them because they’re too smart for their own good. Too intense, too enthusiastic, too assertive, too clumsy, too much. It’s the same reason I love Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Elaine on Seinfeld (1989–98). On paper, she’s an attractive woman with a good sense of humor. In reality, she’s a weirdo who’s bad at dancing, an opinionated feminist who can’t keep her mouth shut, and most importantly, a woman who is too comfortable with her sexuality to be sexually enticing to the men around her.

Talking Heads (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1989).

May's acting reveals that playing a character is also a way of writing them. In Clive Donner’s Luv (1967), Peter Falk and May are an unhappily married couple. As ever, she is gorgeous and sophisticated, but can’t compete with the object of her husband’s new affections, a simple-minded gym teacher in blonde pigtails (Nina Wayne). Falk tries to pass May off onto a hesitant Jack Lemmon: “Just meet her. ... She’s an exceptional woman, Harry. She has a photographic memory. And she paints, and she makes charts, and she plays the guitar. … And Harry, she reads books I never heard of, with hard covers.” And there’s really nothing wrong with her except that she’s too intelligent to spend her days in the suburbs, waiting on a husband too detached to ask what’s for dinner, and he resents her for that.

There have been many examples of deeply intelligent and witty femmes fatales on screen, but that’s exactly what May doesn’t do. Her women are annoying to men precisely because they’ve chosen to invest their intelligence in something other than seduction, in interests that aren’t necessarily appealing to the opposite sex. A curative for the contemporary trope of the pick-me girl, May always plays and writes the leave-me-alone-I’m-doing-something-else girl. The beauty of May’s women is that they are aware of how unattractive their interests are. Not even the most enthusiastic botany professor would find Henrietta’s fanatical interest in ferns sexually enticing: It would have nothing to do with him. Everyone talks about Falk’s and Cassavetes’s performances in Mickey and Nicky (1976), but the scene I will never forget is the heart-wrenching exchange with Nicky’s mistress, Nellie (Carol Grace), a sweet, lonely woman both men abuse and mock for following the news and reading books.

Top: Julia Louis-Dreyfuss as Elaine Benes in Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, 1989–98). Bottom: Parker Posey as Libby Mae Brown in Waiting for Guffman (Christopher Guest, 1996).

When I was asked to write about Elaine May, I felt inadequate because I only knew her for A New Leaf and Mikey and Nicky. To be honest, I was dreading having to read more about her life and work. Being a female writer-actor-director and reading about other female writer-actor-directors is never fun. Most stories about women filmmakers in Hollywood seem to be cautionary tales about those who got punished for flying too close to the sun (which is to say, staying true to their vision). Barbara Loden comes to mind, of course, but also Polly Platt, Ida Lupino, and a long list of opinionated, stubborn filmmakers.

I was lucky to rewatch the director’s cut of Mikey and Nicky at Metrograph last year with May herself in attendance for a Q&A alongside editor Phillip Schopper and assistant editor Jeffrey Wolf. It was an inspiration to see her, in her nineties, being so witty and looking so good, but I was saddened to learn that such a brilliant film had been a flop, buried by Paramount upon its release after years of litigation and even, apparently, the threat of jail time for going over budget.

Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976).

As with any other tragedy, I couldn’t look away. I went home and continued reading about how she didn’t direct anything else for a decade until the multimillion-dollar Ishtar (1987), a bigger flop than Mickey and Nicky with an even more difficult production and worse reviews. I could have enjoyed May’s renaissance the way it was given to me, within a frame of reappraisal. I should have let the wave of her current revival wash over me, with all its celebratory excitement, but instead I forced myself to understand her career the way it happened when it happened, disrupted by disappointment, mockery, and disdain. But there was a silver lining: By reading newspaper clips from the 1970s, I also discovered what May was originally famous for in the early ’60s, her improvisational comedy duo with Mike Nichols.

I generally don’t find stand-up comedy from the ’60s and ’70s funny. I understand the appeal of Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman, but I don’t find myself actually laughing. Nichols and May make me laugh. When an older friend of mine told me he had all their records when he was a teenager and would listen to them in his bedroom, I felt jealous in a way I hadn’t in a long time. Ah, to be a teenager in the ’60s and listen to Nichols and May for the first time, with headphones, prying into that lighthearted intimacy only ex-lovers can achieve so effortlessly. When something so simple works, it’s magical, and that may be May’s tragedy. Her visionary improv genius thrives in the present moment. Her medium is theater, language. Even her cardinal sin as a filmmaker, that of keeping the camera running for too long, seems to respond to an interest in truth that lives naturally onstage but is easily corrupted by the Hollywood machine and the art of montage. We might wonder what would have become of such a talent had she been born in Western Europe, like Agnès Varda or Chantal Akerman, and enjoyed state funding, unburdened by the expectation that each film will be a profitable business venture.

Luv (Clive Donner, 1967). Promotional photograph by Bob Willoughby.

May zeroes in on the weaknesses of the common woman with empathy, making good comedy out of them. All of May’s women live in her early improv. In a bit called “Merry Christmas, Doctor,” from Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors, May is a psychoanalyst hurt by the news that her patient will miss his next session to spend Christmas Eve with his wife and kids. This is classic May, an otherwise professional woman has an Achilles heel: her inappropriate attachments. In the duo’s Mother and Son sketch, May can’t stop nagging her son to call more often. She knows that by doing so she pushes him further away, but she keeps on spiraling.

The same sort of insecure, self-destructive, man-repelling behavior is brilliantly performed in The Heartbreak Kid by Jeannie Berlin, who both subtly and intensely transforms from cool girl into tedious matriarch almost immediately after the wedding ceremony. She’s clumsy, can’t swim, and takes too much time to do her hair. Unlike Cybill Shepherd’s character, carefree, conniving, and rich, she’s good-natured, gullible, and working-class. May’s comedy happens at the very moment a man finds an otherwise attractive woman repulsive.

This collection of helplessly sincere, funny losers is what makes Elaine May so special to me. I’m excited about what she has planned for Dakota Johnson in Crackpot—that is, if they find an insurance director to shadow her. Paul Thomas Anderson did it for Robert Altman, Guillermo del Toro for William Friedkin. I’d be more than happy to volunteer for this, of course. The question is, will Hollywood finally let May do her thing? Or will they punish her once again for believing in the integrity of her vision?

By mere chance, The Friend has been a part of my life for quite some time now. I was first introduced to the book when Hal Hartley recommended it for my book club sometime around 2021, when I was just a girl with two cats. Fast forward and it’s 2024, now I love dogs and had just adopted a puppy named Variety Magazine. It was during that spring, on one of those early days of puppyhood, that he got street cast for a b-roll sequence in an upcoming film… that was to be an adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s The Friend. I couldn’t believe it! I was especially touched by this because he is a quarter Great Dane, just like the dog in the book. The stage mom in me impatiently waited for a year to know if Variety had made it into the final cut… because if he ended up on the cutting room floor we would have to rehome him. (I’m joking, of course.) But I’m happy to report that he’s in it, alongside the magnificent Bing, Naomi Watts and Bill Murray.

Last week, I was lucky enough for Bing to find some time for me in his very busy schedule. I picked him up at his hotel in downtown New York and went on a little walk around the Financial District. I gave him some chicken hearts, and I saw him do some tricks. Then he took me to the hotel conference room so I could speak to his owner Bev Klingensmith and animal training superstar Bill Berloni.

Ulman: How did you meet Bing?

Klingensmith: I’m actually his breeder too. So, yeah, he was born in my home. He’s my fourth generation.

Ulman: And since you’re a breeder, I assume you sell a lot of the dogs you breed, right? How did you choose to keep him?

Klingensmith: When they are, like, eight weeks old, we have an evaluation process that involves structural things, mostly. I was very glad he was the pick of that litter, because I already kind of had a little bit of a bond with him, which is hard as a breeder — you have to make the decision to keep the nicest puppy in the litter, but [Bing] was both the nicest puppy in the litter and the one I wanted to keep. So, it was perfect.

Ulman: You are clearly familiar with breeding and training, but have you ever worked on a film?

Klingensmith: I have a normal nine-to-five job. I work in financial technology, but I volunteer at an obedience club, and I teach obedience classes. [Bing] started training super early, when he was around eight weeks old. Bing is an AKC [American Kennel Club] champion, so he has some obedience titles and other things as well. But I never worked on a film of this scale. Bing’s grandma and great grandma did some local commercials in Iowa. But nothing this big.

Ulman: And what style of training do you do with him? Clickers?

Klingensmith: We use treats and praise. Danes are a very sensitive breed, so you have to be firm, but if you’re too harsh with them, they just shut down. They don’t enjoy it, and they won’t really work as well. So, you have to keep it really fun for the dog, and, yes, he enjoys working. So, he’s been a real joy to train. (looking at Bing) You always make me look really good, don’t you, buddy.

Ulman: So how was it working on set?

Klingensmith: It was a lot of fun. It was interesting to see the behind the scenes. And he really enjoyed it. He got to go to work with me every day. The days he seemed to enjoy the most were the days he had very active behaviors. There was a lot of “stay” or walk on a leash. But when he had more active behaviors, he really enjoyed those, like when he had to scratch on the door. He likes figuring out what’s being requested of him.

Ulman: Was all the waiting around between takes hard for him? I know it is hard for human actors sometimes…

Klingensmith: The waiting around sometimes worked well, because dogs can only have so much time when they are actually focusing, like 20 or 30 minutes tops, so it was nice for him to take naps. Dogs sleep a lot normally. So, you have to balance it all and place the more complicated behaviors earlier in the schedule, when he was the most energized, and then something that was maybe easier for him, like just laying down or walking, for later. When we were in between takes, he would go take a nap, and he desperately needed those naps during those long days of shooting.

Ulman: What is his favorite thing to do?

Klingensmith: He loves puppies — he is enthralled with puppies.

Ulman: Has he fathered some?

Klingensmith: He has had a few litters — we’re very careful who we breed to. So, yes, he has, but he likes all puppies, not just his own.

Ulman: Oh, that’s so sweet. I noticed he always has his head on the ground, sniffing. He seems to be very good at it. Does he do a lot of scent training too?

Klingensmith: He does love to sniff, but it is because he is an intact male. But scent training isn’t really his strong suit. We just capitalize on the things that he enjoys more like obedience. We do something called Rally obedience. The typical AKC obedience is very structured. Rally obedience is a little bit more free form. Instead of the judge telling you what to do, they have placards on the ground that say, “Walk up to the station and do something, tell your dog to stand, tell your dog to lay down, turn, do something.” You can kind of have a running dialogue with your dog, so it’s a little bit more fun than traditional obedience. He is a really sweet, silly dog. A lot of people think that he’s a couch potato because he’s so subdued, but he’s not. Great Danes can be calm, but they also have energy needs, especially when they’re young. He’s a pretty energetic boy.

***

Ulman: I’m very excited to be talking to you. I’m a big fan of your work. Could you tell me how you got started?

Berloni: I’m from Connecticut, born and raised here, and when I graduated high school, I wanted to be an actor. There was a local theater that did professional productions, the Goodspeed Opera House. I wanted to be around professional actors and professional theater, so instead of spending my summers hanging out with my friends. I became an apprentice working backstage. In the summer of 1976 they were doing a new show that needed a dog, and they couldn’t afford a dog trainer. I was given the chance to be an actor in one of the shows if I would find and train a dog for free. And, so, I accepted that challenge, and that show was the original production of Annie. I went to the shelter and found the original Sandy for $7, adopted him, and a year later, the show opened on Broadway. And at the age of 20, I became a world-famous animal trainer. That was 47 years ago. I’ve had this blessed career with animals all this time, and I finally got to do the movie of my dreams.

Ulman: Yes! How was it to work on set with Bing?

Berloni: That’s a great story because Bing and Bev had never done anything like this. He was a sweet dog who knew how to heel and sit and stay and all the basic commands… but I had to turn him into a movie dog and Bev into a movie trainer in less than a month. And, so, it was a whole crash course in teaching Bev how to let someone else give commands, desensitizing Bing to the sounds and sights of the city, and then working with Naomi Watts and teaching her how to be a trainer. It was taking this raw clay and turning him into the star he is now.

Ulman: That was something that I had found interesting, that Bing had to play a city dog. Was he startled by Manhattan? Was it shocking to him?

Berloni: You could shock [any dog], but if you do it slowly, that’s how they learn to not be afraid of it. We were housed in Staten Island, so walking around the streets of Staten Island and down their main street, he started to get used to a more populous area, and then Naomi lives in the southern part of Manhattan, in an area that was quiet, so there wasn’t a lot of traffic or foot traffic. So, we started walking there. And then again, as [Bing] got more comfortable, [Bev] started bringing him to the more trafficky places. And after a week or two, he was fine with all of it.

Ulman: That’s great to hear. What sort of training do you use? I know that you’re improvised a lot since you started, sort of figuring out animals on a case-by-case basis and doing a lot of problem solving. But is there any school of training or other trainers you’re a fan of?

Berloni: No, I figured it out by myself. Back in the 1970s animal training was much more harsh and negative — if the animal didn’t do what you wanted, they would be punished. I grew up as an only child on a farm, and my companions, my playmates, were animals, so I quickly learned at a young age that if you don’t understand them and what they like to do, they’re not going to play with you. So, when I got the opportunity to work with Sandy, it’s like, if he’s not happy, he’s not going to want to go on stage. So how do I make him feel safe and secure, make the things that he wants to do fun and so he knows there’s a reward. Working with canines is much easier than some other species, but I’ve taken that theory and applied it to other species — cats, birds, pigs, sheep, goats and horses. It’s getting to know their physiology, their behavior, and then creating a method to ask them to do certain behaviors for rewards that they would appreciate.

Ulman: I don’t want to throw any species under the bus, but was there any animal that specially harder to train?

Berloni: Oh, every animal outside of a canine is harder to train because most other species don’t have any reason to listen to man. Maybe horses. Probably the hardest is the cat. They are independent nocturnal hunters, so getting them to follow you around on a set is hard — you can’t train them to do that. You can find cats who think they’re dogs, who have atypical feline personalities, and those are the cats we train. There’s probably only about six of them on the East Coast that can do that work, and I represent one of them.

Ulman: There’s this woman, Samantha Martin, who has created this show called The Amazing Acro-Cats, and the funniest thing about it is how the cats barely do the commands they are supposed to do. What has been your biggest revelation while training an animal? Have you ever had a breakthrough moment after struggling to train an animal for a while?

Berloni: That pretty much happens on every job that I work on, you know, because a human will write a script in which they’ll come up with animal behaviors based on their experience, on how that animal will tell the story. And often you get into the situation where, for example, there’s a person who is crying, and the dog’s supposed to go over and get a Kleenex box. You say “action,” and the dog believes the situation, believes that the person is actually crying, and does what a dog really would do. And most times what the animals do is better than what the people have written. On The Friend, we were constantly thinking of ways to make Bing look sad as a character. And one day, Bev and I were at the house, and the fire truck went by, and he started to howl, and it was a funny sound. And I said, “Wow, I wish he could do that.” And Bev went, “Oh, I can make him do it.” And she howled, and he sang right with her. Well, it was so fun that I decided to use it on set. Every time someone wrapped, as if to say, “I’m sad to see you go,” we had Bing howl. And once the directors saw that, they were like, “Wait a minute, we could put that in the movie.” That was one of those poignant moments that none of us had thought of, but Bing showed us he had that talent.

Ulman: Were you in Staten Island first only to desensitize him to Manhattan more gradually?

Berloni: When pre-production took place, it all happened very fast. When they finally got the green light. I think we had three months to prepare, and I said to them, “I need housing for three trainers and two large dogs and a big backyard,” and finding an Airbnb within commuting distance of New York City that could accommodate two Great Danes was difficult. The only house we could find was this little house on Staten Island that had a beautiful fenced backyard. It wasn’t the best accommodation, but it worked for us. It had a basement that we could rehearse in, but it was the backyard that I was most interested in, so the dogs could get out and run a little.

Ulman: Talking about New York City, I like your stories about hiding animals in rental apartments where they weren’t allowed to be. Like when you pretended a pig was a dog with a strange cough. So many people refuse to keep animals because of these restrictions and I always tell them, “If you wanted to, you would!”

Berloni: I mean, I won’t disclose my current apartment location, but yeah, I’ve had as many as eight dogs there, and I’ve got good neighbors. They don’t make any noise, and nobody complains. But, yeah, it’s, it’s New York City, and again, it’s a temporary lifestyle. We’re artists, and we just do what we have to do to make it happen.

Ulman: Who was your Holga? (An animal that changed your life and showed you the way to communicate to animals at large.)

Berloni: The very first dog I trained, the original Sandy. I had a dog growing up who was never on a leash — he was just by my side all the time. He slept in my bedroom. He was my best friend. Obviously we had some sort of bond and communication, but when I was actually given the task to ask an animal to do something, I really discovered that they communicate, they are sentient, and that you could actually communicate with another species, you know? I learned that I don’t need to go to Africa to see wild animals because I can look in the eyes of my dog or my cat and see another whole species who inhabits this earth. And the things they do, to me, are wondrous. And, so, it was the very first Sandy who taught me that.

Ulman: I love that. Is there anything that, whenever you do interviews like this that nobody has ever asked you but you wish you were asked?

Berloni: Yes. If I’ve ever won an Academy Award, because the answer is no. There’s no award for animal trainers and animals and their performances.

Ulman: And there should be!

Berloni: And there should be. You know, it’s amazing to me when you read the reviews of The Friend, they say how brilliant an actor Bing is. Well, Bing is not an actor. He’s doing everything I am telling him to do. He’s a good listener. And it happens to be filmed, but he himself is not the actor. I wish at some point there’d be a union for animal trainers, or an award for animal trainers, because I do believe our contribution is as important as anybody else’s on set.

Ulman: Of course, animals are a very important part of Hollywood history! Thank you so much for chatting with me and I hope you get a very much deserved Academy Award once they add the Animal Training category.

Today I followed the guided meditation in honor of David Lynch’s birthday and it was heartbreaking to hear his voice at the end of the session. I cried, I can’t believe he’s gone. I spent the day meditating, lounging and stretching with my loved ones because it is my birthday too, and Fellini’s, a fun fact that makes me feel like I’m predestined to direct films forever or die trying.

I always thought it was fitting that I had a black eye when I met David Lynch. I was only 26 but I felt jaded and depressed like I had lived a million years. Everything was difficult back then. Every step, every breath and every gesture took me immeasurable efforts. All I wanted was the comfort and routine of a family and instead all I had was this very Los Angeles loneliness. That big Los Angeles void… a series of days and months that felt like a precipice. It was on one of those cursed days when, attempting to be very normal, I gave myself the mission to buy a desk. And I tried very, very hard. In slow motion I showered, got dressed to the nines and drove my white Volvo to Chinatown. I parked carefully and got out of the car very mindfully, one foot first, then the other, only to find myself bleeding on the ground seconds later. Blinded by the Los Angeles sunshine, I had walked into a lamppost at full speed giving myself a concussion and smashing my sunglasses in a million pieces. I was mortified. Thankfully, as is often true in Los Angeles, the streets were deserted. Not letting this misstep stop me from having a “normal” day, I walked into the Chinese mall and did my best to fulfill my plans. Covered in blood, I confidently walked around the store until I bought something. They didn’t have any desks so I bought a tiny stool that somewhat resembled a miniature table.

I was seeing stars though. My head really hurt and I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t safe to drive back. I spent the rest of the day with ice over my forehead, avoiding slumber and doing my best to get better fast: in less than 24hrs I had to attend a panel with Miranda July and David Lynch organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

I don’t remember spending time together on stage but we waited backstage for a while, just the two of us. I remember sitting across from him and observing his every move. I can’t look for role models in my own family so whenever I meet an older artist I admire I pay a lot of attention. Not so much at the art they make but the lives they lead. Unfortunately, my expectations weren’t too high, every other man his age that I had met had been at worst, criminally twisted and at best, smug. But Lynch was different. He was present, he was curious. And when we talked, he was very respectful. But it wasn’t about how he related to me or anyone who entered the room, but how he saw the world at large. He looked at things with intent, I enjoyed that. And I know it sounds weird but when people get too successful they delegate curiosity to their assistants. Which is sad. I remember thinking, when I grow up, I want to be just like him. I know it doesn’t sound like much but I was a girl with a black eye and he made it seem like everything was going to be alright. And that meant the world to me at the time.

#32: Amalia Ulman

Amalia (@amaliaulman) is an artist, filmmaker, and water sommelier. “I tend to make work about and become attracted to things that I find either unsettling, terrifying, or unpleasant,” she wrote in a 2015 diary from Pyongyang. Her second feature film, MAGIC FARM, Health Gossip Newsletterwill be out next year.

https://www.instagram.com/health.gossip.world

Sun/Moon/Rising

Capriquarius (I share a birthday with Lynch and Fellini)

What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?

Not being in physical pain, feeling clear-headed, sharp. That’s how I imagine heaven to feel.

How would you describe your current lifestyle?

My whole life revolves around avoiding feeling disabled. Both my legs were permanently damaged in an accident and I’m autistic, so I plan my days in advance so as to not feel disabled in the near future. Sometimes it is hard because my work requires me to be very available and spontaneous — and that’s when I need to rely on pharmaceuticals, which I’d rather not.

(By the way, I’m not against drugs for any reason other than the fact that drugs don’t let you listen to your body. Painkillers help push through activities you should be avoiding and putting a strain on the body that’s suffered later. Drugs are amazing but unfortunately we are not at a point where drugs don’t come with side effects.)

My animals have always helped me a lot and my service dog has changed my life. He is young and still in training, but he has given my life a structure that I’m very grateful for. Suffering from pain in my legs has sometimes made it hard for me to leave the house. When I’m with him, I feel the pain but not the suffering. There’s a big difference between the two. Temple Grandin explains this very well in her book Animals in Translation. Variety, my dog, makes me very happy and serotonin/dopamine are both neurotransmitters that play a role in pain modulation. I still have metal in my legs but thanks to the joy he brings to my life and my daily routines, I don’t notice it as much. That helps me be more physically active, fulfilled, and happy.

Enjoying nature with Variety. If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be out in the sun as much.

How do you start and end your days?

How to start the day has always been an issue for me. I have a nocturnal circadian rhythm which has always made it hard to conform to a culture that celebrate early risers. In the mornings I’m a bit dimwitted so I use that time for errands and manual labour. It’s at night when I feel as if my brain is twice its size, when I feel like a genius that must devour books and films and make up for half a day of catatonia.

My morning routine consists of getting up, turning on the radio, brewing coffee and sitting in the armchair with my cat, Gemi, for about an hour. During this time Variety is out with his walker — dog trainers all say walkers hinder training, but I hire one for the mornings because that’s when my leg pain is usually the worst. I know this overall routine isn’t “optimized” and that I should be instead stretching and drinking lemon water, but my cat likes it. After that hour has passed and my dog returns from his walk, the day begins.

I often don’t think of days and nights to be in the same 24 hours. Since I’m autistic and have a physical disability, I like to organize my days in the following way: one day is a “day” and the next day is a “night.” By this I mean that I try to alternate ON days and OFF days, scheduling most activities (social, physical) to one day and stay in my home and neighborhood the next: running small errands, doing physical therapy, being non-verbal, reading and hanging with the animals in silence. That system keeps me healthy and balanced. Of course, there are times when I have to be ON for many days in a row (like a being on a movie set!), but that’s risky: pain in my legs can accumulate to the point of being bedridden, and I might feel autistic burnout from overexerting myself socially. Drugs are helpful in emergencies, but I don’t like relying on that for too long.

Was there a specific moment in life that made you change your approach to health, or become more conscious generally?

Yes, definitely the accident that left me permanently disabled. I was only 24 when it happened, and I had to deal with a near-death experience and learn to walk again, at such a young age. The worst of it, though, was being 24 and having the physical issues of a 80 year old… Limping, having a cane, and being in pain added new layers to the challenge of being autistic and spending all my time in public trying to pass as “normal.” If I already had a hard time relating to people my age, the accident made it even worse… But this experience has given me a very non-linear understanding of time and aging which I’m grateful for. I see time as circular and cyclical instead.

Resting my legs with my cat Gemi. Girls-only time. Watching the Elizabeth Taylor documentary.

What’s your relationship to self-healing?

As a woman I started mistrusting medical professionals early on. I remember being a preteen and always feeling terrible and suffering from sensory overload, dizziness, allergies, weakness, fatigue, migraines, stomach aches, etc. I would go to the doctor a lot and they would just shrug.

Now I realize that many of these symptoms have to do with autism, which I was not diagnosed until I was an adult, in part because doctors perceive autism as a male-coded condition. Also, when I was in my twenties, I lost my period for about six months, probably due to stress and malnourishment. That’s clearly concerning, but I remember going to the family gynecologist (a man) and him saying that it was “totally normal.” Of course it wasn’t normal (or shouldn’t be!). It was then that I started doing my own research and reading medical papers. I still go to the doctor when I have issues, but I take whatever they say with a grain of salt. I go to doctors for prescription drugs, X-rays, blood tests, MRIs, etc., but then I make sure to read all the results myself, ask for second opinions, do my own research and make my own decisions.

Probiotics with strains that are okay for people with histamine intolerances.

Do you have any guiding principles?

All bodies are different. Whatever health fad that works for some is terrible for others. For example, I find I don’t benefit that much from turmeric, but there was a huge trend a few years ago when every health drink had turmeric in it. The other trend that turned out to be actually terrible for my body was fermentation-heavy diets, full of products like kimchi and kefir. I’m histamine intolerant, so for me the bad of fermentation outweighs the good. (There are interesting recent studies that explore the correlation of histamine intolerance and Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder [PMDD], particular among women with autism.) So yes, things are good or bad depending on the body ingesting them.

Where do you look to for information or advice?

There’s not a particular person I follow (although I appreciate Bryan Johnson’s experiments). One thing I do is compare people’s experiences on Reddit or personal blogs. It’s interesting how important the internet has been for women’s health, especially for things like PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome). I don’t have PCOS but I’ve had hormonal imbalances in the past, and whenever I’ve gone to a doctor with issues such as being in pain, having my hair fall off, teeth chipping, whatever, they do very generalized tests where the results look “OK” even though things clearly aren’t. When that inevitably happens, the most useful things for me have been very detailed blogs and message boards from women doing their own trials-and-errors and sharing resources. I hate it when this happens because it is very tedious to have to read so many blogs and medical papers myself. But that’s how I’ve always found out what’s really going on.

Many people think that being autistic just means being shy, but it actually comes with a set of physical health issues that are all interconnected. I have Raynaud’s syndrome, hyperextension, gut issues, histamine intolerances, poor balance and motor control… and all of that is very common. The problem is that most general practitioners aren’t well-versed in this, so autism is often relegated to psychiatry only. Usually I combine what the doctors say with lengthy sessions of research. And so far it has worked! I feel better now than I felt when I was 21.

The kind of food I eat when I’m alone so I can reset my tummy.

What’s your perfect meal?

A perfect meal is something that I can digest well. This brings us back to histamine intolerance, which is something I only learned about quite recently, but is maybe the most valuable dietary lesson I have learned in my entire life.

I’m very lazy in the kitchen and used to eat a lot of canned fish, which is very normal in Spain. I would eat a lot of bread and tuna or clams or sardines…you name it. At the same time, ever since I was in my twenties, I’ve suffered from horribly debilitating premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). It’s one thing to be PMS, but it’s another thing entirely to suffer from PMDD. PMDD is hardcore. It can make you want to kill yourself everyday for three weeks out of a month. And I’ve dealt with this, on and off, for decades. This has obviously affected my work a lot, causing me to lie to colleagues and friends, telling them I was “busy, working” when I actually just didn’t feel the strength necessary to be alive. I always knew that it was a chemical imbalance because I never felt “objectively” sad. I just felt insanely depressed “for no reason.” I always felt stupid about it and tried to balance it out by reducing stress, eating healthy, exercising…

A few months ago, the symptoms were terrible, so I started researching about PMDD again. And just like that the algorithm pushed a video of a female gynecologist saying, “Are you autistic and suffer from PMDD?” It went on to explain how many autistic women suffer from PMDD and also have histamine intolerances. I know it sounds silly that an algorithm-pushed video put me on to this, but I read up on it and everything started making sense. When I was a child, I wasn’t necessarily allergic to anything (I got all the tests done, they were always negative), but I had strong allergy symptoms daily. The doctors didn’t know what to do and prescribed me Zyrtec, which I took every morning before going to school for years.

Your body releases histamine before and during your period to aid in uterine contraction. This increased histamine may not cause a major issue for everyone. However, if you already have histamine intolerance or consume too many high-histamine foods during this time, it can become too much for your body. The higher histamine levels can lead to cramps and other PMS symptoms. Moreover, many symptoms of PMS and symptoms of PMDD, including fatigue, mood swings, anxiety, and brain fog, resemble symptoms of histamine intolerance. Since symptoms can overlap, symptoms of histamine intolerance can amplify similar symptoms of PMS.

And guess what: excess histamine can cause joint pain, musculoskeletal or connective tissue pain (fibromyalgia)…

Now I always bring with me DAO histamine digestion aid when I eat at restaurants.

At the time of my discovery my diet consisted mostly of high histamine foods. For breakfast, I was drinking yerba mate (the national tea of my native Argentina, but alas) and eating eggs and mushrooms covered in nutritional yeast with a big side of kimchi. I was drinking kefir, eating avocados, and making A LOT of tuna sandwiches. When I say a lot, I mean it. I might have had tuna sandwiches daily for years…

Anyhow, I stopped eating canned fish and the suicidal ideations stopped and what are called depression blinders, disappeared. Now, I feel normal and happy 29 days a month instead of seven. So yes, this small piece of information changed my life forever and I’m eternally grateful for this. Women helping women, to me, is sharing medical information with one another (especially since the medical establishment couldn’t care less)!

F*ck, marry, kill: three health trends of your choice.

Beauty Fuck: Living Libations, Marry: Biologique Recherche, Kill: facial fillers and dermarollers

Nutrition Fuck: Erewhon smoothies, Marry: eating fresh organic foods, Kill: Soylent

Mental health Fuck: drugs, Marry: service animals, Kill: talk therapy (I’m aware that talk therapy works for a lot of people but it is contraindicated for people with CPTSD and PTSD)

What advice would you give to your past self?

You’re just autistic, take it easy on yourself.

What advice would you give to the person reading this?

Don’t let the medical establishment gaslight you. Only you know how you’re feeling.

My favorite horse and the first I’ve ever ridden. His name is Wiley and he’s a sweetheart beginner horse.

What would you like to see/create more of in the world?

Disability awareness and accessibility outside of the culture-war framework. One thing I hate about the US right now is how disability awareness is seen as “woke” or a part of identity politics. Everyone should care about health. As a leftist I understand that is often leftist politics that push for accessibility and better healthcare, but that seems so silly, since literally any and every body will be at some point in their lives disabled in some way or the other, even if just by the inevitable process of aging. There are other countries where even the right-wingers accept this as a responsibility of government and society, like the postal service or roads.

https://shop.heavytrafficmagazine.com/product/heavy-traffic-v

My Dog, My Husband, My Son

Please pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Jesus Christ, don’t make me talk to the answering machine. You never pick up the phone when I need you the most… I NEED YOU! I’m serious, I need to talk to you! He did it again. It’s bad… It’s so fucking bad… merde! There were screams, insults… Blood everywhere. I’m so fucked. I saw a police car and I ran back in. I panicked. We’re locked in the basement now. Together. Just the two of us. I don’t know what to do… The poodle is DEAD. He killed him! It’s not his fault that people in this neighborhood have these gay Miniature Poodles and Chihuahuas and Pugs and other non-sentient beings that look like squirrels but still… WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? I don’t know if I can afford to pay for any more vet bills… I can’t ask my uncle for money again. What are the vet bills for a dead dog? Do I need to replace it? If it was from a serious Poodle breeder I’m fucked. The surgery for the Cavachon cost me $6,000, the Pomeranian that got disfigured, $8,000. Should I declare bankruptcy? And did you know that Monica quit? I’m doing all the work at the cafe now… Did you know that? I’m cooking AND cleaning AND organizing all the literary events for the petites histoires season. I’m so fucking exhausted. I’m burnt out. And Lauren Abioye refuses to fly if it isn’t first class. She refuses to come unless we pay her well. And after all the complaints, you know? That the store is “too white,” that we only cater to rich Upper East Siders. And guess what? The owner of the poodle is black too… (sobbing). I think someone has put a spell on me. Am I cursed? What have I done to deserve this? (sobbing). They want me to put him down. But I can’t do that, right? He’s my son, you told me that he’s my son! Do you think his adulthood ceremony will change things? Soften him a bit? Can we reschedule it so it happens sooner? I know you said that it has to happen during the summer solstice, but this is an emergency. I don’t think we can wait nine months. I don’t think I can wait nine months. I’m not exaggerating, I’m hitting a wall. Can’t we do the ritual on the winter solstice instead? Or the autumn equinox? I don’t know… call me…

All out of words, Juliette slides down to lie flat on the ground and join Syko, her one-year-old German Shepherd, who is panting at her side. She’s staring at the moldy ceiling of the basement, wondering why she’s the one being forced to keep the French children’s bookstore alive when it wasn’t even her idea to open it in the first place. It was her uncle’s suggestion, to help her, to keep her distracted, to build a front for that mysterious mental illness that at one time made her live in the stables of her grandfather’s estate in Sint-Martens-Latem for more than a month, living on carrots and ketamine alone. She’s the youngest of all her siblings, the one who has struggled the most to find her “calling,” her place in the world. A product of her father’s last marriage to a Belgian model, she carries with her the misfortune of having inherited neither her mother’s looks nor her father’s intelligence. Plain looking and not very charming, despite being an heiress to the Verizon fortune, she never managed to get people to like her—but she sure loves horses and dogs. The phone rings. 

Alpha Mommy Wolf: Hi? Are you okay? I had seventeen missed calls… 

Juliette: No, I’m not okay. Je veux ma maman… (sobbing).

AMW: Okay. First of all, breathe. I need you to relax. 

Juliette: D'accord, d'accord. 

AMW: Breath in. Breath out. Are you wearing your tail?

Juliette: Yes. 

AMW: Okay. Good. Repeat after me. I’M PART OF THE CELTIC LINEAGE OF THE SACRED PACK. 

Juliette: I’m part of the Celtic Lineage of the Sacred Pack. 

AMW: I’M THE ALPHA, I’M THE LEADER, I’M THE ONE TO TRUST.

TOGETHER WE DO WHATEVER IT TAKES, WE'RE IN THIS PACK FOR LIFE.

Juliette: You’re the Alpha, you’re the leader, you’re the one to trust. Together we do whatever it takes, we’re in this pack for life.

AMW: Okay. What happened? 

Juliette: He killed a Toy Poodle. This is the end of me, the bookstore, everything. 

AMW: Not so fast my sweet cub. This is his calling. To cleanse the world of weaker energies. 

Juliette: I know, I know. It’s just… it is hard sometimes. You are not the one dealing with the pack’s day-to-day, you know? I can’t handle the…

AMW: Oh, do you think it is easy for me to carry all of your pain? 

Juliette: I apologize Alpha Mother Wolf. Please forgive me. I’m just overwhelmed. 

AMW: How is he doing? 

Juliette: He’s resting. He knows I’m upset. He’s lying on the ground looking sheepish. Tout penaud. His snout is covered in blood. 

AMW: Clean him. 

Juliette: There’s no water here in the basement. The bathroom is in the store upstairs…

AMW: You are his mother, clean him. 

Juliette: Okay, I think I have a water bottle in my bag…

AMW: You are his MOTHER! 

Juliette: I know, I know. 

AMW: Lick him!

Juliette: Oh… D'accord.

AMW: Put me on speaker while you lick him clean. 

Juliette: Ok. 

AMW: Darragh is YOUR husband. Syko was carried to term and birthed by Aoife. But YOU are his mother. It was YOU who engaged in procreative intercourse with Darragh. Aoife only served as a surrogate to carry the sperm. Aoife and you are sister wives. But you… never forget that YOU and only YOU are his mother. 

Juliette: (licking) Yes. 

AMW: Also, never again ascribe the word “sheepish” to him. He’s a handsome German Shepherd. He’s not spineless, he’s not a sheep. He’s only responding to your cowardice. Pull yourself together. You’re pathetic.

Juliette: Je sais… I wish you lived here with us. I wish you could be around more often. No one else here understands me… And since Claire’s ceremony, I have no one to talk to…

AMW: It’s a test. To prove your strength. 

Juliette: I know. But everyone expects me to put him down. A lot of parents have unenrolled their kids from their French lessons at the bookstore. They don’t feel comfortable sending their kids here if Syko is around. Of course, you should see how well-behaved he is around children and babies… But the moms… They are the ones who are scared. 

AMW: I know. The pack is very perceptive and toddlers are still connected to the spirit realm. It is their parents who are out of touch.

Juliette:  Je comprends… But does he really need to be at the French lessons? Can’t he stay at home? It’s becoming…

AMW: Juliette. Syko is YOUR child. Children belong with children. He can’t go to a regular kindergarten so the children have to come to him. We already discussed this…

Juliette: Yes. You are right. I’m sorry. Je suis désolée.

AMW: Have you finished cleaning him?

Juliette: I think so. 

AMW: Make sure he’s spotless before he steps onto the street again. 

Juliette: Oh gosh, do we have to? What if they are still outside? Last time they called The New York Post… 

AMW: Just go upstairs alone and peek out the window. If it’s safe, go back home. In a high-stress situation like this, the pack must stay together. That’s what families are for. 

Juliette: You are right. The pack must be worried sick. 

AMW: Exactly. 

Juliette: Mother Wolf. I don’t want to seem too eager, but I have another question. If you don’t mind, is there a way that his adulthood ceremony could happen sooner? Like during the autumn equinox. I remember that you mentioned that the ceremony would calm him down. Is that true? I don’t mind paying more or… 

AMW: Ah, my little impatient cub. You know that the ceremony must take place during the summer solstice. That’s the only time when the God in Heaven and the God of the Earth are holding hands. The only ceremony that takes place in the winter solstice is the reincarnation ceremony. And I don’t think you want to walk through that gate before his ceremony takes place, right? Who knows how long it would take for your soul to encounter your pack again. It could take decades, or even centuries, to find the right body, the right vessel. And there’s no guarantee that you’d be back as a wolf if you do it wrong…

Juliette: I don’t know. I’m so tired. Sometimes I fantasize about the Winter Ceremony…

AMW: I understand. 

Juliette: I miss Claire. 

AMW: Claire was ready to free her soul and become one with the cosmic waves of the Sacred Pack.

Juliette: Yes, but I miss her. 

AMW: You are just tired. It’s understandable. A lot happened today. Even the strongest wolf can feel defeated sometimes, if only for a brief second. Make sure no one is outside the store and go home with Syko. Reunite with the rest of the pack and have a good night’s sleep. 

Juliette: Oui.

AMW: Remember, you are part of the Celtic Lineage of the Sacred Pack. Nothing that happens in the three-dimensional world can affect your inner peace. 

Juliette: I am part of the Celtic Lineage of the Sacred Pack. Nothing that happens in the three-dimensional world can affect my inner peace.  

AMW: This is your mission. 

Juliette: This is my mission. 

Alpha Mommy Wolf hung up. Juliette crouched next to Syko and made him sit. And then high five. Good boy. She went upstairs and checked that it was safe for them to leave. It was. They jumped in a cab and soon arrived at their apartment on 5th Avenue. She tipped the driver meagerly and murmured a hello to their doorman, who greeted them cautiously. Back home, the rest of the pack greeted them, wagging their tails happily—and since they could smell blood on them, proudly too. Aoife, Darragh, Juliette, Syko and Uncle Kieran; the pack is together again. It is good to be home. Juliette directed her family to the terrace and commanded them to STAY, so she could go to the kitchen alone. She came back to break the spell with five plates of meat that caused a brief celebratory stir: dinner time. Their enthusiasm turned into a deep silence when the five of them focused on their respective slow-feeder bowls, chewing thoughtfully on raw bison, on the floor of the balcony that overlooked Central Park, in the apartment that she had inherited when her father died. 

Now that the smell of Pyongyang has started to fade I feel the urge to write about it. As much as I look at the photographs or watch the videos that I took, I have a hard time remembering the tone of the morning light filtering into my room, or the exact pitch of the 7:00am workers’ wake up siren. I watch a YouTube video titled “Morning in Pyongyang, North Korea. Very Eerie.” That’s the word. Eerie was my time in the DPRK.

I have a strange relationship with the DPRK. Many times I’ve been asked why I visited. Many have called it a project, as in “art project,” that ambiguous and annoying combination of words. Was I trying to exploit this bizarre country? No, I doubt it. Though it is hard to ignore history. Why did I ever get on that plane? Why was I ever interested? I tend to make work about and become attracted to things that I find either unsettling, terrifying, or unpleasant. It was out of fear and aversion that I fell in love with the DPRK.

It all started when my mother recommended I watch a Spanish TV documentary on Pyongyang. For the first time, I was exposed to the city’s private spaces—its hairstyles, its mirrored elevators and trinkets. I realized how much it resembled my artworks at the time: a combination between resilience and glitter, extreme poverty and Swarovski crystals.

Then I learned that they welcomed tourists. It isn’t even that difficult to visit, as long as you’re not a journalist. It’s just very expensive. I looked at my bank account and decided that even though it was crazy, I had to make it happen. Instead of googling my zodiac compatibility with my new crush, I obsessed over images of the city, imagining myself in it. I watched videos of the DPRK compulsively before going to bed. Anything that I could find, I’d devour it. I read all the books on the topic that were published in the U.S. Slowly, Pyongyang became the location of all my dreams. It became a backdrop of scenes where all emotions get mingled and confused. There, I’d feel both terrified and calm. Darkness hid behind the pastels. For me Pyongyang was a feeling.

From California to China, I thought of my lover, the lover-city. The three-night layover in the capitalist monster of Beijing only fueled my excitement. Along with my Comme des Garçons and Yamamoto clothes, which I had cut the tags out of so as not to seem like a Japanese sympathizer, I filled my suitcase with fruit because I had been told fresh produce was of value in the communist-dream-gone-wrong. A bunch of apples replaced another one, my computer, which I didn’t dare bring with me and left at the Beijing airport consignment.

Day One

Time stopped. The flight from Beijing is one hour long. That’s what the itinerary and the ticket said. And that’s what mattered because as much as my iPhone told me three hours had passed, time in North Korea is not ruled by Greenwich. It is ruled by the great leader and the great leader is magical, therefore unquestionable. Patience is a virtue, in some places more than others. In the DPRK, patience is a means of survival.

Arriving in Pyongyang, my legs were drained. The previous year, a bus accident left me permanently disabled. I can walk, but not for more than 40 minutes. I sat on the floor despite my fear of garnering attention from officials. Security was surprisingly light. They looked at my book of Gertrude Stein’s poetry, the only thing I had left in my bag, and shrugged. On the other side, an awkward 21-year-old student greeted me with sincere enthusiasm. Amalia, bienvenida a nuestro pais! I had forgotten that my passport is Spanish. His Franco-era politeness only made things more surreal. Here I was in the DPRK, speaking my mother language, with someone who spoke like my grandmother.

The weather was like springtime in Los Angeles but without the smog. I sat in a van with who became my three guards, my three wise kings, mis tres reyes magos: the driver, the guide, and the young translator. Though they all spoke Russian, the DPRK’s unofficial second language. No one spoke Spanish except the student. He burned with curiosity; he’d never met a tourist before. He also seemed nervous, almost uncomfortable, to be sitting so close to a girl. Taking into account the country’s conservatism it was very possible he was a virgin. I could see him trembling but his curiosity overtook his shyness as he began to ask me questions in Spanish. Inside the van, Spanish quickly became a secret code.

The van drove in a long straight line from the airport to the city center. On the roadsides, tall thin lilacs stood in perfect rows, 20 centimeters apart, as if a human hand had lovingly planted one every day for 100 years. Later, it was confirmed to me that, yes, humans had done this, if not as a labor of love, then as forced labor. 

First stop was the Arc de Triomphe. Or, as the Virgin translated, Arco Triunfante. I was commanded to have my picture taken in front of it, and to smile, of course, because if I had ever been to Paris, I should be happy to know that the Korean version is bigger.

After that, everything was a repetition of the same script, a mantra. The great leader did great things, the Japanese are evil, the Americans are fat and the Koreans of the South are their puppets. They used words like imperialist pigs, capitalist puppets, disgusting consumerism. It reminded me of my childhood in post-industrial northern Spain, where we endorsed—I’m not really sure why—a similar hatred towards American imperialism. Putos fachas de mierda.

That night, the silence in the crystal tower that was my “luxury” hotel was overwhelming. There was no internet. The tourist TV programming, even CNN, Russia Today and Al Jazeera, seemed censored. To read I only had Tender Buttons and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, but Modernism didn’t make sense in Pyongyang. I stared at the ceiling with a boredom I haven’t experienced since childhood. I remembered a routine of scarcity and mediocrity, when there was nothing left to do. No fresh cultural input, no news, no urges, no stakes, no goals. Nothing on the radio, maybe a Simpsons rerun on TV.

What is my life about now, now that I’m never bored? I thought of my body in space, in this hotel room, its location in the world, the size of my toes in relation to the universe. A feeling of community and insignificance weighed heavily on my chest: my individualism was of no value anymore.

I’ve been exposed to extreme boredom a few times in my life, all of which I clearly remember. First, as an only child with not many possessions. Then, as a hospitalized woman after all my belongings, and legs, were destroyed. Then of my own volition on a religious retreat. In all of these situations there was a moment when the brain’s productivity peaked in an epiphany of sorts, when I could see my life with perspective, living in the present moment. It feels like dying a little and not minding at all. Or like taking amphetamines for the first time. It is just me and my body and my memories, and no one can take that from me. But a mind with no stimulation dissolves into a pause. How much is too much and how little too little?

In religious retreats, the little information ingested is supposedly of an absolute truthful nature. Someone has the answer, nothing else is needed. Studying the wisdom of someone who knows better is calming. Infantilized, you only need a paternal figure. These answers have to do with eternity, transcendence, and a general indifference to the material world we inhabit only temporarily. But the DPRK’s pseudo-religiousness surprisingly denies the metaphysical. I’m nothing, but not in regards of the infinite. I’m nothing in regards to the giant bronze sculpture, to the monstrous granite replica of an Arc de Triomphe.

An ideology that denies the immaterial, like many inventions of the 20th century, falls flat. Humans are mystical creatures. The words of Kim Jong Un are definitely not a mantra, and after a while, people talk about something else. Whether or not they are allowed.

At some point my trip stopped being about the DPRK and instead became a tour of performativity through body language, accessories, and fashion. Everyone differentiated themselves as much as they could within the sea of standardization. I became a tourist of the underworld, noticing hidden economies and wit. Beneath the dull noise of propaganda were conversations in the realm of the senses. My favorite memories consist of jokes, stares, outfits; variations of voice, posture, hairdos.

Day Two

I woke before my alarm. Needing to spend time by myself, without surveillance, I sat naked in front of the window and stared at the sun. I wasn’t allowed to leave the room, but that room was all I ever needed. The light coming in was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. The orange hues brought peace and pierced my body with a reminder of independence: the sun is and will forever be free. If I was ever given the choice to recreate any moment of my life, it’d be the intoxification of falling in love, or a sunrise in Pyongyang.

The breakfast cafe was at the top of the tower. Its pink and beige walls and mirrored ceiling called to mind Vienna, or a sex hotel, or an ‘80s cruise ship where the staff outnumbers the guests. I ordered coffee from a waiter who looked like Tony Leung Chiu-Wai and began to fantasize about him. The light was beige and the soundtrack was Chopin. The idea of a having holiday affair wasn’t that delusional, after all. The previous night I had dinner with a group of entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley who boasted about sex with local waitresses.

I’d get Tony’s attention by lifting up my cup and smiling. I was happy that I had an excuse to make him come over. It took five North Korean servings to make up for a regular American coffee cup. Everything was perfect. Food was abundant, everyone was happy and apples were served delicately in silver trays. Tony got comfortable and said he wanted to learn Spanish. He took notes on napkins. It was incredible how he’d memorize everything on the spot. Everyone was eager to learn anything. Their memories made me ashamed of my internet brain. Soon more waiters came over to my table to take notes.

After breakfast, I met my guides in the lobby. I gave the Virgin a peach and he seemed puzzled. He probably wanted a newspaper instead. We jumped inside the van in silence. We didn’t know each other well so everything was superfluous. The itinerary I requested had been modified to visit all of the Great Leader’s landmarks. Everything was propaganda. But who was I to complain? This was a dictatorship. 

We started with the Museum of Fine Arts, where a girl waited for us in a corner in the dark and seemed annoyed that she had to turn on the lights and guide us through a room filled with souvenirs, hand-painted posters, and paintings of dogs wearing ribbons. The Virgin would mention the names of these internationally famous artists. He was disappointed I had never heard of them. All had price tags.

After the Museum and the School of Fine Arts, which was mostly groups of women doing ceramics, we went to have lunch at a restaurant for tourists. A flat-screen showed the same footage I had first seen on the plane over: flowers, shiny hammers and sickles, and the very same concert of the all-girl Moranbong Band. Everything looked like a cornucopia. It reminded me of my mother whenever I go back home, because she exhibits fresh produce in trays so I think everything is going fine, precisely because it isn’t. A lot of people say North Korea looks staged. To me, it just looked poor.

There are no restaurants under communist rule, so this one felt contrived. We ate at a huge round table covered in little plates. The dishes seemed Korean, but looking closely they turned out to be Russian, except for the kimchee, to which the Virgin attributed exceptional qualities, such as curing AIDS. There was enough food for ten and we were four. I was told to eat but wasn’t hungry. They seemed resentful. Guides weren’t allowed to eat tourist’s food. I swallowed as much food as possible while trying to ignore the Moranbong Band’s music, or learn to like it. Meanwhile, they drank beer, giggled, and said dirty things about me in Korean. On the way out, we went to a souvenir store. I bought a wooden turtle on skis.

*

A few months earlier, at the Hong Kong airport, after having made a bunch of money from a brand endorsement, I had decided to fulfill one of my working-class teenage dreams. I would buy a brand new pair of Miu Miu shoes at the official store, the silver ones with Swarovski crystal-encrusted heels.

I tried the shoes on, walked around, looked at myself in every mirror, from every angle. The shop assistant told me I looked beautiful and I believed him. In their silver reflection I saw the epitome of luxury. This intoxicating feeling ended when I saw the receipt. I hadn’t converted the HKD into USD correctly, and the shoes were much more expensive than I thought. I felt nauseous thinking of all the single mothers in the world who couldn’t afford to pay their rents; a feeling to which I reacted by swiping the card to then leave in the deepest embarrassment. A rookie mistake, or the result of a life of poverty.

There are restrictions for everything in the DPRK except for the shoes. Women expressed themselves through the height and amount of crystals they could handle. So my style was sincerely appreciated. They adulated me for having a good style, unlike the other tourists, those unfashionable imperialist pigs. For the first time in my life, I was part of the mainstream. I let myself be loved in Pyongyang.

Other tourists thought the DPRK was the most bizarre place they’d ever been, but I understood it. I had also decorated sad apartments with plastic fruits and flowers. I’d worn pale makeup, glitter eyeshadow, parasols and flowery hats, all which seemed to be the official dress code of the women of Pyongyang. For someone like me, whose sexual education came from bondage and movies like Secretary, the city was heaven. The citizens of Pyongyang had a (non-consensual) S&M relationship with the Great Leaders—and I was embarrassingly into it.

When simplicity comes from scarcity there’s little enjoyment in minimalism. Minimalism comes from abundance and the DPRK still is in pre-abundant times. We went to Department Store Nº1 and I was thrilled. I wandered around the aisles looking for stationary and browsed the make-up kiosks filled with lipstick and eyeshadow from different decades, as if in a museum of beauty. I asked about the theatrical makeup everyone was wearing and was introduced to the Koryo beauty line. Koryo like the hotel and the cigarettes. Koryo like every brand in the DPRK. I picked two jars of foundation and while I was paying the lights went off. 

We all stood still, quiet. Once again, time didn’t exist: it was a Pyongyang pause. I thought of how in the past I myself had romanticized “English Rose” white skin, trying to be as pale as possible—as if I could be more European than Latin, as if I could be selective with my genes for the sake of a better life in an environment hostile to differences.

The lights came back on. We continued as if nothing had happened, taking our conversations right from where we had left them. There are no electricity cuts in the DPRK. Nothing had happened.

Day Three

The sun was shining and I was PMSing. Since my accident, my leg pain is even worse during my period. Everything hurts. I can’t walk. Usually I stay in bed, but on this particular day we were heading to Mangyongdae, Kim Il-Sung’s birthplace. The Virgin wouldn’t stop talking. I was his first tourist and he couldn’t help but being thrilled, but my politeness from the past two days was gone. “What do people think of my country abroad?” he asked. “That it is a dictatorship ruled by a maniac who lets its people starve to death,” I answered.  He shrugged with pride and I felt even worse. We arrived and walked up the hill towards a reconstruction of The Eternal President’s childhood home. Every step was torture. Communist brutality isn’t disabled friendly.

I hated myself and everyone else, but the nature was beautiful and the air fresh. Like every other site, the path was neat, clean and empty. Considered a Revolutionary Site, the Native House includes a Sliding Rock, a Warship Rock, Wrestling Site, Rainbow-Catching Pine, a Study Site, old farming tools and a spring with water we got to drink at the end of our visit. I was told that it was the purest water in the world, also, that it had healing properties. I asked if it cured AIDS. They said it cured everything. I drank and it was indeed the best water I drank in my entire life.

Back in the van, my guides asked why I looked so sad, even though I had just visited such a special place. I told them I was expecting my period. They almost covered their ears with their hands. Irreverent, I kept on talking about it: ovaries, blood, women. But the uncomfortable exchange was distracted by the sight of the Mangyongdae Funfair on our way down. I said I loved funfairs and they said not to worry, that we were headed to one later. After lunch, I managed to cancel a visit to another Great Leader Landmark and went back to the hotel to lay down. They mentioned how lazy foreigners are and how Koreans are genetically superior. I contained my desire to tell them to fuck off and retired to my room.

Unable to sleep, I wandered the hotel. There’s nothing I enjoy more than wandering around, and since the accident, it’s a luxury I enjoy by the second. I visited the shop downstairs. I wanted to buy everything but there was nothing I could afford. Maybe as a protection against empty shelves, all the little Chinese imports that anywhere else in the world cost less than a dollar, here cost over $100. It was a shop that didn’t want to sell. And I loved it.

I met the guides and was taken to the Juche Tower, where we were welcomed by a woman who had taught herself English. My hero. She had a funny accent, wore a pink shiny traditional dress, and instantly became one of my favorite people in Pyongyang. I still watch videos of her posted by tourists on YouTube. We took the elevator to the top, for which we had to pay a little fee. Or I could take the stairs for free, the main guide said, pointing at my legs and laughing.

From there we could see the whole of Pyongyang. The clear skies, the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel, the river, other gigantic sculptures and a park where hundreds of people practiced their synchronized dances for the celebrations of the Day of the Foundation of the Republic. The city itself looked like a poster, as if someone had painted it from above. As it grew dark, we headed to the Kaeson Youth Park.

In the square next to the giant Arc de Triomphe the darkness was interrupted by Christmas lighting, though it was a summer night. Teenagers in school uniforms ate ice cream. A woman met us at the amusement park gate. They were opening the whole park for just me. I felt like a teenager in one of those Sweet Sixteen party TV shows. I was perplexed and terrified by the idea but the Virgin was endearingly overexcited. Because the park was always closed, this was his only chance to go in, which meant I was forced to get on as many rides as possible to make him happy.

He chose our first ride. We sat on it, tightened the seatbelt, and the machine took us upwards. Forty meters above the ground, it flipped us upside down and started spinning. I could see a night version of what I previously had seen from the Juche Tower, though distorted by the speed and nausea. After a few seconds, convinced that I was going to die, I started praying. “This is it,” I thought. “I have no boyfriend, no children, I don’t speak to my father and my mother hates me. If I die now, it won’t be a big deal.”

So when we were lowered to the ground I almost kneeled to kiss the concrete. The Virgin misinterpreted my relief at not dying as wanting more. Sadly, I disappointed him by insisting on rides that didn’t involve gravity, like bumper cars or shooting videogames, in which he didn’t miss one single target, proving that even though he was a nerd, he had impeccable military training.

On our way out, the power went out again. The whole park was dark. I could hear the sound of the crickets and the guides breathing. The darkness was heavy in its immensity. I wondered what would have happened if the shortage had taken place while we were up in the sky, upside down. And then I wondered what will happen if they ever transition into democracy. Having grown up in a post-transition Spain I considered the difficulties of these changes. The Spanish dictatorship lasted forty years; North Korea’s, sixty. Will they open a McDonald’s in the center of Pyongyang and go only on the weekends, wearing their best clothes, just like people did in my town in the 1990s? Seems like a bleak future. A downward spiral just like falling from a ride in a funfair. The lights came on and once again we continued as if nothing had happened. I got my picture taken and I don’t think I’ve ever looked more relieved in a photograph.

Day Four

After another breakfast flirting with Tony, the guides took me to the circus. When we arrived, it wasn’t a circus tent that I saw but a building devoted to acrobatics lined with tour buses. Inside were hundreds of Australian and European tourists. I hadn’t seen so many foreigners since I’d arrived. For the first time Pyongyang wasn’t silent. The Virgin was trying to show me the vitrines exhibiting the numerous international prizes granted to the DPRK circus team but people kept on bumping into us so we decided to move on. Also because I already knew that international just meant Russian.

I was sat in between French men in cargo shorts. It wasn’t hard to understand why the Koreans call westerners capitalist hamburger-eating-pigs. Going to the DPRK is expensive. Only baby boomers with disposable income can afford to visit, and most of them are pale and fat. The show started and it was okay. Some performers tripped a little. If anything it was cute, except when the bears came out, which was just sad.

While daydreaming and falling in love with one of the broad-shouldered female leads, the show ended. I asked a British couple how they felt about the trip. Interesting, they said. Which is for me the most condescending colonialist comment one can possibly make. I stopped interacting with the other tourists.

Because it was my last day, my Tres Reyes Magos decided where we’d go next. So we went to a shooting range. Though it was in the middle of nowhere, the circular building was still crowded. Families brought the children and grandparents. Everyone loved shooting. I wanted to shoot too! My excitement waned when I realized I was surrounded by twenty Korean men with shotguns. “This is it,” I thought to myself again. 

Both guides asked me for money to buy bullets. Fearing I’d run out of KPW, I bought only one bullet each. They rolled their eyes at me and came back with guns. The Virgin tried and failed, but the older guide killed a pheasant. They were ecstatic. My stinginess had created a hero. He had killed a bird with just one bullet! He left to grab his prize and came back with a blue plastic bag dripping blood. He winked at me and had the virgin translate that it was a present for me. We would now go to a restaurant and have it cooked for us. It was the first time a man “hunted” to feed me and to be honest, it seemed romantic.

In the van I tried not to stain the seats with the bag and wondered if I had gotten my period yet. We arrived to the restaurant triumphant. The waitresses took the pheasant to the kitchen. As the virgin repeated the tale to everyone around us, the main guide would look down like it was nothing. He was some sort of playboy. The waitresses liked him. 

Pheasant takes a while to cook, and ours was done just enough not to get food poisoning. The meat was hard, dry and chewy. It didn’t matter though, we feasted on the legend. We were in Pyongyang after all and the meat was instead delicious, tender, juicy. I asked the waitress for some feathers to keep as a souvenir. The main guy winked at me, again.

After, we went to the Hakdanggol Fountain Park for ice cream. Women heading to Mansu Hill Grand Monument for weddings and celebrations swept across the park, making it look like a glittery cake. Their traditional dresses made of nylon and polyester reflected the yellow sunlight, as did the rhinestones in their tall heels, which made little white drawings on the concrete surrounding the fountains.

Since arriving, I had seen women walk long distances in high heels. “Don’t they ever get tired?” I asked. My guides replied with a solemn negative: North Korean women never get tired, they are built to wear high heels. Wanting to slap them, I asked to go to the bathroom instead. In the stall, checking my own underwear for a red stain, I saw in the trash can, a torn book page covered in menstrual blood. It seemed that North Korean women were women after all.

It was my last day and I realized I hadn’t had a private conversation with a woman. I had spoken to them in our field trips, yes, but always accompanied by the Tres Reyes Magos, under their supervision. When they asked if I wanted to see a movie with them on my last evening, I declined. I got a massage instead. Not only because the film would be propagandistic, but also because I wanted to be alone with a woman. My communication with other women in Pyongyang had taken place through our body language and our stares. Now I wanted to communicate through touch in a private room. It was nice not to be followed. For an hour I was naked with her.

After the massage, dinner. The guides left me by myself in the restaurant next to the hotel. The food was bad, I was bored and again the same concert of the Moranbong Band was being played on the flat screen. I went outside to smoke. In the DPRK, a woman smoking has the same connotations it had during the Spanish Dictatorship. A prostitute, a harlot, a whore, a woman of the night. Things that now sound silly, as if coming from a movie like Shanghai Express. 

So I stood there, right in front of the hotel, at one of the busiest hours of the day, performing for all the pedestrians. For the children coming back from school, who looked at me confused. For their mothers, who seemed outraged. For the working men, who got turned on. And last but not least, for the women who smiled at me. This stupid little transgression was my love letter to Pyongyang.

That night we got drunk. I dreamt about my last breakfast with Tony and even though I was terribly hungover, I jumped out of bed early to make myself look decent. Standing at the elevator, nervous, someone tapped my shoulder. It was the virgin telling me that we were having breakfast at the airport instead. My heart sunk, I wasn’t going to be able to say goodbye to Tony and ask for his postal address. It felt like seeing someone die, and soon I realized it’d be the same for the driver, the main guide and the virgin. My Tres Reyes Magos, I would never see them again.

Used to social media, the idea of a final farewell was painful. A definitive goodbye? How could it be possible, when in the capitalist networked west one is forced to stay in touch. And so it was. I took the city off me like a Band-Aid. Between a clothing store named CLOTHES and a bookshop called BOOKSHOP we had breakfast at a cafe called COFFEE and said goodbye.

This text was published in The Whitney Review.

https://www.whitneyreview.org/

In the midst of making her second motion picture, artist and film director Amalia Ulman logs her experience reading Natasha Stagg’s third book, Artless, a collection of essays and fiction that operates as a time capsule, its subtitle Stories 2019–2023. The book features 28 stories, and here Amalia reflects on 17 of them, their titles in bold. 

I haven’t read anything except the script for about seven weeks. Nor have I had any thoughts unrelated to the film. Being on set is all consuming, even in my dreams, I’m directing. Mostly I dream about the actors. It doesn’t help that they all sleep not too far from my bedroom, our subconscious intertwined.

Today is my first free day in a long time and the first thing I want to do is not talk to anybody, and the second, to read. I start with Annie Ernaux’s Pura Pasión because I have it in Spanish and that feels more like a treat to my ESL brain. Sadly it’s a bore, a waste of paper. Or maybe it just makes me sad to read about older women obsessed with unattainable men, like we don’t ever learn or “get better.” So I’m happy to start reading Natasha’s book, since her choices have never disappointed me.

G. had to bring me a hard copy in person, alongside other things needed for production, since most things can’t be shipped to Argentina without them getting stolen at the border. This made the paperback feel more valuable, a little souvenir from New York. But, do I even miss New York?

I’ve been in rural Argentina for way too long and my quiet nature gets used to small village ways too soon and too comfortably. I like the niceness, the slowness, and all the animals. If no one pulls me back out, I make myself small, adjusting to the rhythm of nonverbal creatures happily and readily.

Is Anyone Listening to Me? I Love It. So yeah, reading about Natasha taking a break to smoke a cigarette outside, alone, before meeting Catherine Keener and Sarah Jessica Parker is a strong way to start and I begin to panic about my social life once I’m back in the city. But then My Best Friend in High School grounds me. Natasha’s writings on being a teen are not too far from my experience of adolescence and I appreciate the closeness. So much so that it makes me text my high school best friend, the only person I can truly gossip with honestly about what’s going on behind the scenes, safely, knowing that nothing would ever get leaked to the press.

The Dollhouse. Canceled men. I’ve been thinking a lot about Weinstein lately, because a lot of the films I referenced to make mine, were produced by him. We need a new Weinstein, I told my producers. Minus the robe, the hotel room, and the exposed genitalia, of course. Or, was that part of the genius and we can’t do without the monsters? Scott Rudin was also a nightmare, right? Natasha’s musings on getting older resonate with me, not because I felt older when I got cheated on with a younger person (the only time I felt hurt by a situation like that I was 26 and the other woman was 22, which is quite comical now that I think about it) but because of the responsibility that comes with age. I may have been fucked over millions of times due to my feminine ways, but I still think of myself as a man, even when I wear a pink Prada pencil skirt and some kitten heels… It's a habit I’ve carried since I was little, maybe synonymous with being in control… It’s hard to explain. And maybe this is why when a handful of canceled men, out of the blue, called me for support and solace, each one said things like “people like us,” the “us” including me. Being older, having more experience, and a career, gives me more power but that doesn’t come without the burden of tremendous responsibility. I want everybody to be okay on set but I also didn’t want an intimacy coordinator overseeing the sex scenes. The young actress seconded this decision eagerly but… I don’t know, for the first time in my life, I was on the other side of the scale and it was terrifying. 

Difficult. But maybe I think of myself as a man for fear of coming to terms with the fact that I might be considered a difficult woman, the way Natasha describes Elizabeth Wurtzel. Or worse, a nasty woman. I just want to politely and steadily do whatever I want and mind my own business… 

Rock, Paper, Scissors starts with the line “Tech neck, said the page from the Post, was exactly what it sounded like.” What I like about being on set is not having time to be on my phone. That makes me like myself, to be physically busy. I like being in pain from moving too much, not from moving too little. Maybe that’s what frightens me about coming back to New York, the editing room, the endless scrolling on the RealReal. Please, no more screens. On my last day in rural Argentina I find an unleashed pony grazing peacefully in the park. I sit next to him and give him an apple. We hug. His warm body and fuzzy fur feels surreally cartoony. His innocence makes me cry. Indulging in classic white girl bestiality, I kiss him on the mouth. 

I’m now on the airplane back to New York. I’m flying back with actor Joe Apollonio and one of the producers. The (female) flight attendants are obsessed with Joe. They are so loving and attentive to him that it makes the horrible way they have been treating me extremely comedic. I don’t mind the inconvenience as long as it is funny, and this feels like that Seinfeld episode where Elaine and Jerry fly together… One of my misfortunes on this flight is that my screen doesn’t work at all and since the flight is packed, there’s no solution. Without films to watch, I grab the book again.

The Planet. I start reading this text with a dumb smile until I see my name and realize this is the text Natasha wrote about El Planeta (my first film). Then I turn red and start sweating. For being someone who’s “out there,” I really don’t like reading about myself. It feels inappropriate, like I’m eavesdropping on something I shouldn’t be. It’s funny to read this now though, an account of shooting my first film after wrapping my second. I shake my head while I read some inaccuracies about my relationship with my father. I had forgotten about this conversation, which makes me think about all the memory lapses I’ve developed pretending to be okay. It makes me feel a bit sad and embarrassed. I need to take a break. To distract myself, I grab another book, a book about horses, just like many other horse-themed gifts I got at the wrap party because I started riding a few months ago (and wore riding outfits to set embarrassingly often). 

Hollywood. “Women are not brought into a conversation easily.” I remember not liking Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and surprisingly sharing that with my mother (even though she adores and romanticizes the seventies and that mustard and brown palette). We both thought it was a film not for men, but for old men. Nothing wrong with that, by the way, I just felt there was nothing much in it for me, except for the violent ending, which I thought was fun. I first saw the movie at a theater in Cologne, where they had added an intermission. The line to the bathroom was so long and my hotel was so close, that I decided to go to my room’s bathroom. I texted my ex, “this film sucks ass, I might not go back in, it’s so booooring” to which he answered that I was crazy and that he thought it was a masterpiece. Godard said that a man and a woman who do not like the same films will eventually divorce. And well, eventually we did divorce.

Back in New York, I’m finding it hard to readjust. I still dream about directing. Sometimes the dreams are about fixing an issue with the art department, other days I’m having a fight with the DP. And every morning I wake up shaken because I think I have missed the pick-up call, and on top of everything, I don’t know which scene we are shooting that day. Joe, who still dreams about the shoot too, jokes that I will call him to capture B-roll in Central Park pretending it’s Argentina until he has to block my number. We both miss the dogs though. The village where we shot the film was full of friendly semi-stray dogs. They would come and visit our set everyday, leaving a trail of dumbfounded smiles along the way. I miss the dogs so much that I walk into an adoption center on my way to Penn Station to pick up my boyfriend, who I haven’t seen for over a month. They try to get me to adopt a senior lady dog who is on “media hold” because she will be appearing on The Golden Bachelor soon. “This is crazy, I’ve only been back for a day,” I tell myself declining the offer. I daydream about having a dog, a pet cow, and enough acres for some horses... But for now I should focus on what I have, a tiny apartment and a very polite cat named GemGem.

New York, 2020. “I love musicals about show business because they are always sad.” When I read that I can’t help but to think of And All That Jazz, another musical about show business which I’m sure is supposed to be quite sad but I find exhilarating because I think it is cute that Bob Fosse dies of a heart attack doing what he loves the most, directing. I have a toxic relationship with filmmaking. Missing the adrenaline rush from the shoot, I head north on the 1 train to visit a perilous ex-racing horse named Virginia. I ride her, I sweat a bunch, and I go straight from the stables to the editing room in Midtown. On the subway I read Natasha’s writing about the pandemic and all the self-romanticization that took place in the city. New York Tough. Cuomosexual. I fell into the trap too. Having just arrived in New York from Los Angeles, I was desperate to be a part of it, especially in such a historical moment. But actually what I liked the most was visiting Prospect Park, where the city’s “wild” life was thriving. I’m sure that animals appreciated the silence.

Fire. “The fireworks going off might be some covert tactic that proves to those incensed by them that if the cops were gone chaos would reign.” I remember all the paranoia and the solidarity. “Seeing the destruction in Soho was like seeing a fire hydrant open on a hot summer day.” I loved New York then because I could hear the birds. I realize now that I loved New York then because it felt a bit more like rural New Jersey.

Social Suicide. I remember when Natasha deleted her Instagram. I admired that impulse because I was never that brave. I can’t bring myself to use my main account but I haven’t erased it, just emptied it. I’m unable to use it the way it was intended. I’d actually like for a publicist to tell me what to post because I can’t tell the difference between what’s too weird or not anymore. I like the feeling of silly oversharing without a filter that I can do on my finsta but I can’t come around to “being normal online,” or being professional. I think it’s because I don’t really care. Not as a virtue, but because I’m old. I wish I didn’t have to look at a computer ever again. But I do get bitter when I don’t get invited to things. So maybe I’m not as old and jaded as I think I am and there’s some clout chasing left in me.

The World. I’ve loved Akeem’s work for many years now. I probably learnt about him through an ex-boyfriend in London who was an 18-year-old bisexual twink who a lot of queer New Yorkers adored. I envy Akeem’s access to a history so solid, so well-documented. “It really isn’t even for our generation or anything in the present,” Akeem tells Natasha. “It’s for the people in 2120, 2130, to have some sort of historical context.” I also admire Akeem’s and Natasha’s knowledge and immersion in nightclub culture because that’s something that doesn’t come naturally to me. My autism allows me to be cool in the way Robert Crumb is cool but not in the effortless high-energy fun Kate Moss kind of way. The appeal of these parties is the dialogue that comes from being seen and that to me feels stressful. My favorite “night” club I’ve ever been to was in Shanghai. It was a semi 24-hour joint that was mostly open during the day and where they didn’t sell alcohol. They played techno and nightcore, and dancers of all ages showed up at different times of the day to blow off steam. This, I thought to myself, is an idea I can get behind, dancing like nobody’s watching, but for real.

Transplant. Even the name of one of the characters, Dierdre, reminds me of Salinger’s (unpublished) short stories, which I adore. Dierdre, Dierdre… Dierdre’s father has a pig-heart transplant. “The pig’s heart was no longer a ghost. It had attached itself to Mr. King’s insides and sprung to life anew.” A pig’s heart sounds dirty but I have no issues becoming one with an animal. Since I started riding, I’ve been thinking a lot about that 2011 news story “Naked woman, 21, climbed inside gutted dead horse because she wanted to ‘feel at one’ — and no charges were brought.” 

Trends, 2021. “A friend of a friend has a new facial modification, some kind of glowing implant to make it look like a neon circuit board is beneath her skin.” There’s something cyborg-like for me in horseback riding. A more successful feeling of hybridity than the clunky giant rod I have inside my leg. Since I can’t use my legs speedily, riding a horse and feeling at one with it, makes me feel invincible. (Not always though. Today I took my first hit. Virginia the ex-race horse tripped, spooked herself and jumped and bucked aggressively, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground. Later, the other riders tried to calm me down by telling me how many times they’ve fallen and how many bones they’ve broken. I don’t think that’s okay. But it’s hard to talk about patience and positive reinforcement in the city, where everyone seems proud to be desensitized. Thick-skinned. My plan to bring what I learnt in rural Argentina to my cosmopolitan life is failing.) Natasha writes: “We ourselves are nothing if we’re not something.” Riding horses also comes with being a horse girl, something I’ve welcomed gladly because I love uniforms. A lot of it has to do with my love of fashion and therefore shopping. Putting little riding outfits together is fun. Maybe I could get a ponytail facelift to become the teenage horse girl I never was.

Retrospective. Reading about DIS Magazine in a historical context makes it a better reason for me to get a ponytail facelift. It’s funny how I was so obsessed with office spaces and “blurring the lines of art and commerce” and corporate aesthetics precisely because I was provincial and the city seemed inaccessible, therefore something I wanted to tame. In my ignorance though, I only learned about Art Club 2000 and the Offices years after having my own office in Downtown Los Angeles. I don’t know why my art practice has always been so impulsive and intuitive while my filmmaking is way more grounded in history. “The intertwining of art practice, management studio and publicity machine continues. The semiotic square that introduced the term normcore sold as an NFT for 3.5 Ether.” When all the net art old-heads were selling stuff that had never been sold as digital art back in the day as NFTs, I was very tempted to do the same with Excellences & Perfections because I had found BTS videos of the making of some of the more famous photos in the series. But everyone around me told me not to. That it was a bad look, that it was like a yardsale. But most importantly because I had something else in my life, filmmaking. It’s fascinating how the film world romanticizes the art world and vice versa. Knowing the art world as well as I do, it is funny to think of types like Shia LaBeouf and James Franco imagining the art world as a space for truth and freedom. Little did they know.

The Cult. I love every bit of information about Day Life Army because as someone who is fascinated by religions, this is the only cult that’s felt surreally close to home. Back in 2012, when I lived in London with my twink musician boyfriend, I was surrounded by DJs and early DIS Magazine, Total Freedom, Nguzunguzu, GHE20G0TH1K-adjacent SoundCloud musicians, which is the demographic this cult was preying on: unsuccessful musicians with little talent but plenty of white guilt. If I had seen any of their posts before, I wouldn’t have noticed. As a Catholic, I need imagery which is aggressive and bloody or based on discipline and cleanliness, not the meme-like marketing of this group which I find unserious and unsexy. In 2020, when an article came out about this cult-looking group actually being a very real and fucked up cult, my ex remarked they had tried to recruit him, probably based on his carefully curated Instagram. Knowing that a cult could so easily perceive my then-husband as an easily manipulated hipster, made me feel depressed. Learning that one of the cult’s leaders was the sister of Ashland Mines AKA Total Freedom was the cherry on top. Dating lost artsy boys was a pattern that needed to change. Or is it me? Do I have evil mastermind tendencies? After all I do share a birthday with both Fellini and David Lynch, and dressed as Ma Anand Sheela for Halloween once. Isn’t a director a guru of sorts anyway?

The Director. “Take the most unsparing portrait of Ferrara’s frustration with Hollywood and with himself for courting it, Dangerous Game. Here, a fictional director, Eddie ([Harvey] Keitel) pushes his lead actress, Sarah (Madonna) by breaking down her confidence.” I take it back. Reading about directors who deliberately abuse the trust of their actors makes me realize how much I despise that dynamic. I love actors. “[Catherine Breillat] baldly recreates a problematic dynamic she once created, even hiring back the actress who suffered the original trauma this metanarrative depicts.” Most importantly, I love actresses. Out of all the aspects of making a movie, being in front of the camera is the most draining to me and I respect actors immensely for doing that full time. But even without the sadism, isn’t it crazy what’s expected from everyone involved? Actors (behind closed doors) are treated like cattle, the crew is expected to be away from their families for months… To think that suffering makes better art is juvenile. If “entertainment will inevitably always articulate and generate power imbalances” the most subversive thing one can do is to make sure everyone’s having a good time. 

The Girl. I never cared much about Vincent Gallo because that’s the kind of stuff my parents were into and I spent my life rebelling against them. I do think Buffalo ‘66 is a perfect film and that Brown Bunny is certainly not the worst film in the history of Cannes, but I never truly romanticized “breakable masculinity” and the kind of guy who “races motorcycles, plays guitar, knows the streets, films undressing women” because that’s who my dad and his friends were. And as a child I didn’t understand why I had to be relegated to love a man like that instead of being one myself. And that I did, behaving any way I wanted, but now I want to do all of that wearing pink. And I don’t think I’m the only one. All the dolls are turning their brains off and I don’t think it’s just the Y2K revival. Afterall, Paris Hilton had to go through a lot of shit in Provo to become Paris. “Be my girlfriend, says the man in the suit, to the woman in pink, who doesn’t hear him or believe him or trust him, because she can’t.” It’s harder to be taken seriously in pink but it’s worth the effort.

I’m finishing the book at the ER. My boyfriend and I got mauled by a foster cat that I had taken in with the intention of eventually giving company to GemGem while I’m at the editing studio finishing the film. The creature, a large  six-year-old tuxedo cat ironically named Fester, had been behaving normally for five days until the ugly incident. He viciously attacked us between hisses and growls just as we were about to fall asleep. There was blood everywhere. After a very rough night, professional animal handlers retrieved him so we could run to the hospital and get our festering wounds treated. I give up. I better suck it up and start writing my third film. No more bucolic fantasies. New York is New York. I’m not built to be a cowgirl. God, I hate New York… but isn’t that what a New Yorker would say?

NATASHA STAGG

ARTLESS: STORIES 2019–2023

Semiotext(e), 2023

192 pages

I love America. I love America the beautiful because she’s still young and naïve and drunk with opportunity. But like a beautiful teenager (who everyone wants to fuck) she says a lot of stupid things (that everyone chooses to ignore). It is her ignorance that makes her cool, fresh, unconceited. La ignorancia es atrevida, we say in Spain: ignorance is daring. During the past few years there was a trend (hopefully dying out) that really tried to make fascism seem cool, based. But like everything America touches, these ideas of fascism, Catholicism and monarchism are Disneyfied caricatures of the European originals. A girl wearing a holy trinity bikini set. 

It’s funny to imagine fascist repression as something colorful, but here we are. To me fascism is gray, claustrophobic, and heavy on the chest, like the moments before a summer storm. That very moment when the air smells bad. 

I spent my childhood in a Spain still adapting to democracy after forty years of fascist Catholic dictatorship. Although they were closeted, many fascists were still around – about half of the population. It wasn’t so rare for someone wearing an Austrian loden jacket to shout, Viva Franco!, and for someone else to answer Viva! in a public setting, while everyone else awkwardly pretended nothing happened. 

I once loved a fascist. She wasn’t openly so, because she was a yoga instructor, but you could say it was in her blood. Her family were right-wingers with Francoist materials hidden in the corners of their home. They collected Lladró figurines, silver cutlery for special occasions, and lived by a very strict set of rules based on “tradition.”  In our ten years of friendship, I visited her home often but never stayed for long. I was always terrified to make a mistake: their rules were hard for me to follow because I was from the “other side of the tracks” (I lived further away from the church than they did). She was Spanish, I merely had the passport. I went to public school and she went to catholic school. 

I always envied the girls who went to catholic school particularly their uniforms. I craved the objectification they received from the punk boys I hung out with when I was a tomboy leftist dirtbag…

Set in Argentina, a country still living under the long shadow of a bloody military dictatorship orchestrated by Nazi escapees, The Holy Girl by Lucrecia Martel (2004) reflects the hermetic white middle classes of Argentina through the mystical thinking of Amalia and her friends, a group of Catholic schoolgirls (often in their uniforms). I always felt deeply connected to this film because their battle with desire and shame rings true to me. Plus her name, of course. The mental gymnastics in their conversations about Catholicism remind me of when she and I talked religion. It was in one of these chats, during recess, that we realized we had taken our first communion together, many years before meeting at La Universidad Laboral, a former Fascist Phalanx compound turned High School for the Arts. God clearly wanted us to be together. It was a sign from above. We were best friends. 

A perfect product of 1968, If… by Lindsay Anderson (1968) is a film about rebellion in a British boys’ school, awash in classically British self-objectification of Brittania, present in Oscar Wilde,Vivienne Westwood, and Brit Pop alike. Casting Malcom McDowell pretty much as Alex from A Clockwork Orange before Kubrick’s film even existed, If….. is an ode to homoerotic, almost Yaoi, relations as much as it is a criticism of stuffy discipline.

Perhaps you fashionably and happily believe that it’s all a simple matter of evil dictators, rather than whole populations of evil people like ourselves? Do you disagree? Don’t you find this view of history facile? 

Says the teacher to his pupils, in If…, only a few minutes before scenes of bullying, hardcore spanking and “fagging” – a traditional practice in British boarding schools where younger pupils were required to act as personal servants to the eldest boys, sometimes suffering physical and/or sexual abuse. 

My fascist girl never spanked me but she once disciplined me. After ten years of friendship (or was it fagging?) I committed a grave mistake: my mother had lost her apartment and I decided to stay at her place for a week. Unfortunately, there was a set of rules I had been unable to follow and one morning, at 8am, she and her mother were waiting for me in the kitchen: I deserved to be punished. I was too free, I did whatever I wanted in life and that was wrong. So they laid into me for hours. It was dark and confusing and like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. But this is what happens when you ascribe morals to etiquette. 

With my tail between my legs, I cried to my other childhood friend: a goofy fun-loving leftist whose communist family had always kept their home and hearts open to me. She only had one thing to say: what else could you expect from a facha? A fascist is a fascist is a fascist. I felt stupid for thinking that my fascist could maybe have a heart. In a civil war, we would have aimed at each other. 

My fascist girl had a weird relationship with her mother. It was as if she was a marionette controlled by her elder. When I read Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, I couldn’t help but think of her and her mother and their doomed fate. I had always been terrified of her. A supermarket fishmonger with rough hands, but as a right winger she could never see herself as part of the working class. What a strange way to live. Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) does a good job of reflecting not only the heavy atmosphere of oppression I mentioned before, which in Spain we call, very accurately, rancio*, but also the obsession that fachas have with the upper classes and royalty. 

Despite Isabelle Huppert’s queenly beauty, her character, Erika Kohut, will never be a sophisticate like the Klemmer family, and for that, she needs to be punished. Her sexuality is a mix of morbid voyeurism and masochistic self-mutilation because, like a good fascist, she can’t experience personal joy. If she feels any resemblance of happiness she must be stopped, redirect her attention to physical pain, and ultimately, learn to enjoy the pain. What makes this dangerous is the belief that no one else should experience joy either. When self-mutilation becomes the mutilation of others, things get sour. And wars begin.

One night, after a New Year’s Eve dinner at the home of my fascist friend, I asked her mother if I could take home a piece of leftover cake for my mom, who was home alone. She very calmly said no. If she’s not here then she doesn’t deserve it. 

The Executioner by Luis García Berlanga (1963) is the only film from this series that was made under fascist rule. Unlike other writers and filmmakers that used minimalism and gloom to get past the censors, who interpreted their materials as harmless, boring works (Carmen Laforte’s Nada or Carlos Saura are good examples of this), Berlanga used satire and an endearing, relatable representation of the common folk that probably passed as inoffensively sweet to the authorities. Even though the film is obviously about the death penalty and there are many direct references to the tedium of living in Spain during the dictatorship, there’s one moment that represents falangist Spain better than any other. When the young couple goes on a picnic, they step away to flirt and dance to the popular tunes that fill the park’s air. When the owners of the radio see this, they shake their heads in disapproval and, castrating their own fun, turn the music off, get up and leave, after imparting their lesson: if you want to dance, bring your own music. 

The word rancio in Spain is very hard to translate. It means rancid and stale but is mostly used to describe anything “facha.” If a person, it’d be pale, with a somber expression, dark circles under their eyes and probably slicked back hair. Almost vampiric. If it was a smell it would be a room that hasn’t been ventilated for a while. It’s something sad, mediocre but with delusions of grandeur. 

CALENDAR

Monday, August 19

9:45PM - The Executioner, Luis García Berlanga (1963)

Tuesday, August 20

9:15PM - The Piano Teacher,  Michael Haneke (2001)

Thursday, August 22

7:00PM - The Executioner, Luis García Berlanga (1963)

Saturday, August 24

5:15PM - The Piano Teacher,  Michael Haneke (2001)

Saturday, August 24

7:45PM -The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Sunday, August 25

6:00PM - The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Monday, August 26

7:00PM - If…., Lindsay Anderson (1968)

Tuesday, August 27

9:30PM - If…., Lindsay Anderson (1968)

Wednesday, August 28

7:00PM - The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Friday, August 30

5:00PM - If…., Lindsay Anderson (1968)

Saturday, August 31

5:30PM - If…., Lindsay Anderson (1968)

Sunday, September 01

5:00PM  - The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel (2004)

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