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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode 62: Laura Poitras, David Bowie’s Last Band, and the Poet Brenda Shaughnessy
00:55:34
Laura Poitras turns surveillance into art, David Bowie’s jazz band, and more.
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David Remnick
Foreign.
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David Remnick
Automated Call Response center for the Weinbaum Residents, A piece by Gavin Shulman, performed by Becky Ann Baker. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. On the New Yorker Radio Hour. Filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras is arguably the fiercest and most vivid chronicler and critic of the war on terror. When Edward Snowden copied countless NSA files about surveillance and he wanted to leak them to the press, he reached out to Laura Poitras. The stories that followed led to a Pulitzer Prize that Poitras shared with journalists at the Guardian and the Washington Post. And her documentary film about Snowden, Citizen 4, won an Academy Award. But earlier this year, Poitras did something altogether different with her work. She created a Museum exhibit installed in a series of mostly dark spaces at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It used video and images, classified government documents and sound, all to tell a story about post 9 11America and the war on terror. But it wasn't at all what you'd think of as a documentary.
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Laura Poitras
I mean, all my work is about trying to use visual vocabulary to understand the world that we live in and to say something about it. I mean, as an artist, just to express like a writer expresses through words, I express through images. And this is a way to work in a bit more abstract way. Working with images working more abstractly I think can get at different types of connecting to people and emotions.
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David Remnick
The exhibit was called Astronoise, which was Edward Snowden's name for one of the encrypted NSA files that he shared with her more than two years ago. I visited Laura Poitras at the Whitney Museum this past February. She and the curator, Jay Sanders were supervising the finishing touches on the exhibit.
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Sarah Larson
Okay, okay.
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Laura Poitras
So this piece has a screen that hangs in the center and we're projecting on both sides. And this is material that I filmed at ground zero right after the attack. Oh, say, can you see.
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Brenda Shaughnessy
Laura?
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David Remnick
In a sense, there's a narrative here, right?
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Laura Poitras
So there's a double sided projection and both the images on both sides recorded in the immediate aftermath of 9 11. One side I filmed, which was I went down to Ground Zero and filmed people gathering there. And on the other side is a military interrogation that was conducted in November 2001. And so there are on the. So you enter, you see one image and then there's a screen hanging in the middle of the room and then the other images on the other side.
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David Remnick
And you went down to Ground Zero in the same spirit as any writer or artist would go just to pay witness. You had nothing political in mind or even artistic in mind. I would assume at that moment this is what you do.
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Laura Poitras
Definitely had something artistic like I was drawn to document. But the images are not actually of the World Trade center site. They're actually people looking at it. So it's an extended reaction shot. It's just showing faces. And that was a way to kind of capture something that's impossible to capture through looking at the faces.
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David Remnick
How do you mean?
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Laura Poitras
I mean, representations, you know, at some point fail. Like you can't, you know, you can't comprehend that kind of loss or that kind of tragedy. It's actually very hard to represent and you need other ways to get in. And so by looking in the other direction, by looking at people who are trying to process and trying to make sense of what had happened. And this was in the real immediate aftermath. This was before we started the war in Afghanistan. So this was in the really initial weeks. And so I think you learn a lot from these faces. I'm really interested in the faces. Trying to comprehend something that seemed comprehensible.
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David Remnick
We walk into a room, and projected on the ceiling is a night sky. And if you know anything about the architecture of the world, you immediately see these buildings, and it's pretty clearly Sana', A, the capital of Yemen. Tell me about when this was shot. And you meant to, I think, really lie on your back, and there's a kind of platform, and you look up into the sky and there's rather ominous music that goes with it. But it's not overbearing by any stretch of the imagination. And you're meant to be in the sky almost and feel that you're right there.
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Laura Poitras
The idea being to imagine living in places in the world where there are drones flying overhead and drones that potentially could kill you. And it's not just filmed in Yemen. We filmed in. In Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, and in the United States, we filmed at Creech Air Force Base, where they test drones. So there are drone images that come in at the end of the film before it loops around.
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David Remnick
What we're hearing. We're hearing from the night sky of Yemen and elsewhere around the world where drones play an enormous role. What's coming into our ears? What are the various parts of the sound design?
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Laura Poitras
So this is a collaboration. So, I mean, there are many pieces in the show that I've made in collaboration with other people. And so this is a collaboration with a sound designer, Jeff Bryant. And what he's doing is. So it never repeats itself. There's cross fading of sounds of drones that are being cross faded and being. You're in a room that's in a cube and. And it's a 3D soundscape. And so we have eight different speakers, and both the audios are constantly being randomly. The fades are randomized, and then the movement of the drones is being randomized. There are certain things that are locked. They're cued to picture. And that's the sound of the pilots, the sound of some ambient noise that's synced to picture. So the idea is being that it's sort of like an organic piece that's constantly changing. That's never the same. If you were to go in and at any time of the day, you would never hear the same thing. The images would repeat, but you would never hear the same thing.
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David Remnick
So Citizen four, in a way, is a complex but very simple narrative. It's. You're contacted by Ed Snowden, you make your way to Hong Kong. You're in this incredibly claustrophobic hotel room. He's literally in bed like Colette or something, and he's telling you his story, and he's guiding you through endless documents. And he's very concerned about the way this will come out. And it unfolds, and then we see it all come out. That's the through line. Those are the materials. That's the visual material, the audio material. Here you're working with classified documents as your path paints, as your video, as your artistic material. Tell us a little bit about that. Is that the first time that classified documents have been used as materials of art?
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Laura Poitras
It isn't the first time, but it is an unusual set of circumstances that I work both journalism and visual art. And so after meeting Snowden in Hong Kong, I went back to Berlin and really felt an obligation that I had to work on news reporting that this was newsworthy information and that I had an obligation to report. But I really consider myself a visual storyteller, visual filmmaker, and a visual journalist. And so when we were thinking about the show, I shifted my approach to looking at the materials and at the archive from. Into more of a visual perspective. And that's how a lot of these. Some of the pieces in the show have emerged. So there's one piece that's called Anarchist, which my colleagues, Henrik Moltke and Core Courier at the Intercept just reported on. And it's looking at a program where GCHQ hacks into the drone feeds.
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David Remnick
The British Intelligence agency.
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Laura Poitras
Yeah. And is hacking into different signals, including drone feeds, Israeli drone feeds. But what's interesting about that for me is that it's a very visual.
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David Remnick
What do we see?
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Laura Poitras
So you see different things. You see signals that are being. That are being intercepted and processed and decrypted and descrambled by intelligence agencies. And in some cases, you're seeing the end result of a decryption. So you'll see an actual. For instance, a drone, an Israeli drone. And so it was a different perspective of how to approach the archive to get at questions of mass surveillance and a hidden state.
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David Remnick
Now, are you concerned about aestheticizing the horror or journalism or whatever it is you're trying to get at? In other words, we're not looking at a Vermeer painting here. We're not looking even at a. A video landscape that's meant to be beautiful as such. We're meant to be doing. What do you hope is happening?
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Laura Poitras
I think it's the opposite. I think it's the opposite. I mean, I hope it's the opposite, because what I'm trying to do is make people not numb to information. So to reach people in a different type of way, to actually move them more and not to gloss over or to aestheticize. And it's actually. How do you get at different types of content? How do you get at issues of war, of torture on the ceiling?
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Donnie McCaslin
By those chains my feet used to.
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Hilton Alls
Hang over the floor.
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David Remnick
We walk into the next room and there's a series of. This is a much larger, narrower room. There are a series of slits, as if you're looking through a prison door into someone's cell. And we see someone testifying. Tell us about the person testifying.
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Laura Poitras
So there's an interview with Murat Kurnaz, who was. He was a prisoner in Kandahar in Guantanamo and was tortured. He's talking about being tortured in Kandahar. So it was an interview that I filmed with him after he was released from Guantanamo. And then underneath that there are drawings of. I don't know. Did you look underneath?
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David Remnick
Yeah, sure.
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Laura Poitras
Okay, good. And so those are confinement boxes and.
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David Remnick
A water bottle, like a pencil sketch.
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Laura Poitras
But those are drafted by a former prisoner.
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David Remnick
Yes. And so we. One of the things that I found obscure, that I couldn't quite tell what it was. Again, we're looking through. Into this as if through a glass darkly, into the glimpses of the deep state, as you're putting it, of cement being spread as if to create a floor or a wall. What's happening there?
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Laura Poitras
You know what? I'm not going to translate everything, you know, just in terms of the work.
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David Remnick
That image is going to pay off. I don't know whether cells being created or a prison or the road to Valhalla. I just don't know.
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Laura Poitras
That seems like a payoff to me.
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David Remnick
Fair enough. Fair enough.
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Laura Poitras
In May 2004, I traveled to Baghdad to make a film about the US Occupation of Iraq.
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David Remnick
At a certain point in the exhibition, your voice is heard.
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Laura Poitras
After returning to the United States, I was placed on a government watch list and detained and searched every time I crossed the US border. It took me 10 years to find out why. In 2015, I filed a lawsuit against the government to obtain my files. The documents reveal I was the target of a classified national security investigation conducted by the FBI and undisclosed intelligence agencies.
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David Remnick
Can you tell us about that?
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Laura Poitras
Yeah, So I filed a lawsuit, a FOIA lawsuit, with the help of EFF Electronic Frontier foundation to obtain my FBI files. And in October, I started getting redacted files back. And the FOIA case is ongoing. So I haven't received everything, but there is several that I'm publishing or including as part of the exhibition. And, yeah, they're actually, for me, it was pretty shocking to see the extent to which. I mean, it's pretty shocking to see that there was a grand jury is.
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David Remnick
About your experience as a filmmaker in Iran.
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Laura Poitras
Well, it's actually the point of the piece. So what I've done in the piece is that I'm showing 8 minutes of unedited footage. And that unedited footage is shown continuously on a monitor. And then it presents these FBI documents that presents a certain narrative. And what I'm trying to do with this piece is present information that the government actually never asked to see. I mean, if you look at these documents, they make a lot of assumptions of what it means to be on a roof. And it seems that I'm just filming kids and a family on a roof. And so I'm bringing forward that. That footage in juxtaposition with these. With these FBI files.
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David Remnick
There are aspects of the exhibition that dramatize in one's own experience of going through the exhibition of the surveillance state. As if you're, again, intent on making sure that we don't get too comfortable with this, that we're walking through a surveillance state all the time. That's part of the point. Very much being driven home. And at the end, toward the end of the exhibition, we reach a point, there's a screen. And from what I can tell, again, I'm not very sophisticated in this. It seems to be our phones are being read by something.
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Laura Poitras
It's showing you what your phone is broadcasting, what your phone is looking for, what network.
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David Remnick
It goes right up on a screen.
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Laura Poitras
Yeah, yeah. And the idea, and it goes back to your question at the beginning, like, why do I do work in museum? Or what's the point of it? It's not to. It's actually to make you think about it in a different kind of a way to trigger something else. So to, you know, to sort of show the viewer that actually they're broadcasting something that reveals a lot about them. And to do that in a way that's not just using text to say we know there's surveillance or certain things we know, but to do. To just. How do you get at issues different kind of way?
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David Remnick
Laura can't help Asking you, maybe you won't answer. The work you've done, the work you continue to do, has had an enormous effect. What hope do you have politically for the work that you're concerned about, for the issues that you're concerned about?
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Laura Poitras
I mean, the hope that you have. I mean. So I lived in Berlin, and that's a country with a very dark history. And it happens to currently be a country that is very protective of privacy because of its history. And so that's that, you know, we create the political landscape in which we live and we can change that landscape.
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David Remnick
Laura, thank you.
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Laura Poitras
Thanks.
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David Remnick
Laura Poitras is the director of Citizen four, the documentary about Edward Snowden. I spoke with her earlier this year when her exhibition Astronoise, was about to open in New York. These days, to be a jazz musician means more often than not, accepting a life of artistic integrity and public neglect. So how do you go from playing in little jazz clubs to being on the number one record in the United States? The story of David Bowie's last band. That's in just a moment on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the many reasons David Bowie has been mourned and celebrated so intensely since his death was his credibility as an older pop star. The man could have kicked back in about 1980 and kept coming out to big stadiums full of people to play the old hits. But in his 40s and 50s, even in his 60s, Bowie kept pushing, changing things up and finding new ways to present his music. At the very end of his life, he co wrote Lazarus, a musical theater work that just ran in New York, and he enlisted a brand new band to shape his final record, Black Star. Those musicians were four jazz guys who'd been living their musical lives almost entirely outside of the Limelight, the Donnie McCaslin group. Sarah Larson went to talk with McCasland and the band, and when she arrived, they were setting up at a little Hole in the Wall joint where Bowie came to first hear them in 2014.
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Sarah Larson
Thanks for doing this. So we're in the 55 bar right now, which is a little space with Christmas lights and pictures of jazz musicians on the walls. And you guys have been playing here a lot. Can you talk about your relationship with this place?
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah, I think we've all played here for many years, and for me it started I moved to New York about 25 years ago, and so I've had this long standing monthly gig here. So it's a really great place for us. To just come and try things.
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Sarah Larson
Yeah. So one night you were playing and David Bowie walked in.
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah, I mean, that's true. And what happened was, at that time, he was writing with an incredible composer and arranger, Maria Schneider. They were writing sue together. Sue.
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David Remnick
I got the job.
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Laura Poitras
We'll buy the house.
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Donnie McCaslin
When Maria was working with him, I guess she played him a track off one of our records called Casting for Gravity, and then she suggested to him that he record with us. So it was during that period, the summer of 2014, where Maria brought David down here to hear us play.
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Sarah Larson
Do you remember what you were playing?
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Donnie McCaslin
Well, we were playing a lot of the music that is on Fast Future. So we would have played no Eyes by a guy whose stage name is Baths.
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Sarah Larson
Stage name is what?
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Donnie McCaslin
Baths. Bath. Like the pool of Bath.
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Sarah Larson
Like taking a bath.
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Laura Poitras
Okay.
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Sarah Larson
It's a good name. Do you remember what that was like?
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Donnie McCaslin
Well, I think these guys will know. I don't think I told them that he was coming because that was it, you know, made me a little nervous. And I tried not to think about it, frankly. And I tried not to look. Frankly, I tried to stay in the music. But I did look up, and they were sitting, like, right in front me of front, you know, and I. I think he was very, you know, like.
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Sarah Larson
Five feet away then.
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah, he blended right in. And I think he had a knit cap on. And I. You know, I glanced over once or something and. And then just tried to focus on the music.
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Sarah Larson
Do you guys remember when he came in?
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Jason Lindner
I remember I saw Maria and then. Oh, so the guy next to Maria is David Bowie. It was pretty. I mean, he really even, you know, in the recording sessions, too, he did have this ability to blend in and be so normal.
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Sarah Larson
Yeah.
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Jason Lindner
I don't know if anybody knew he was here. You know, we had a similar experience. He came to hear us at the Jazz Standard after the sessions for Blackstar. It wasn't until after he left, there was these rumors. Wait, David Bowie was here? I didn't even know even the. The waitress who served him, you know, pretty cool. The waitress was like, there's this guy at the.
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Laura Poitras
At table 31 that looks like an old David Bowie.
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Sarah Larson
That was his disguise.
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Donnie McCaslin
Sa.
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Sarah Larson
Do we have to talk now? That was really incredible. I just feel like I was on some crazy journey that you were all on. Did you talk to him after that night that he came here? Did you talk to him at all, or did he just kind of come.
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Donnie McCaslin
In and go out? They left. We didn't talk to him. Yeah, but it was shortly thereafter, like it could have been later that night or the next night that I got an email from him and he sent me an MP3 of a demo track that he had made and asked if I wanted to record with him.
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Sarah Larson
And you hit reply?
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Donnie McCaslin
I think I. I sat there in stunned silence for a while. No, it was just. It was so exciting, you know. And the track that he sent was Tis a Pity She's a Whore. And the version he sent ended up being the B side to Sue.
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Sarah Larson
Oh, right. Yeah.
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Donnie McCaslin
And then we re recorded that song in the studio as part of Blackstar, but the original version David made at home. And so it's him playing saxophone and him playing all the instruments. And that's the first thing he sent me.
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Sarah Larson
I interviewed Henry Hay last month. I talked to him about Lazarus and he described a similar process where David would send him a demo and then they would get together and then more spontaneity and stuff would happen there. But I like the idea of being able to have both the sort of individual, intense focus and the collaborative vibe, you know.
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah, that's a similar dynamic. By the time we got to the first recording session in January, I had maybe seven songs, demos that he'd sent. In my case, you know, I was thinking a lot about how I could orchestrate the horns with the different Woodman instruments I play. And then, and then we got together and then we went out there and we started practicing and he was singing and, you know, immediately Jason started playing something and he said, oh, you know, I like that. And so it was also very creative in the moment in terms of an intro to a song. Like the intro to Lazarus, for example, was something that happened in the studio where we were. Tim was playing something or, you know, it just sort of spontaneously happened.
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Sarah Larson
What do you think he was looking for by bringing you in to work with him?
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Donnie McCaslin
I know that Tony and David had talked about making a jazz recording.
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Sarah Larson
Yeah.
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Donnie McCaslin
Of some sort. Right. Jazz is a pretty umbrella term, especially right now.
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Sarah Larson
Yeah. Tony Visconti.
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah. And what we're doing is. Is, you know, exploring this territory of electronica music. You know, we're not playing straight ahead jazz, although we come from that. And I think the energy that we play with, I think was appealing to him. But maybe a better way I could describe that, Sarah, as I remember the first day in the studio and even, I think even prior to that, in an email correspondence, he said something like, donnie, I don't know what's going to happen with this. I don't know where this is going to go, but let's have fun.
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Sarah Larson
But I think you'd mentioned before that you'd heard some jazz influences on some of his earlier music, right?
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah. Tony talked about that in an interview that we did together and was saying that in a lot of David's earlier music, Tony felt that harmonic jazz influence was a little more hidden. But then on this, it's out there in the open more. And I remember there's this particular song that we recorded that didn't make the record, and it had a lot of these chords that had minor ninth intervals in them, or half steps next to each other, or, you know, the tritone in there. So really, in the jazz lingo, we'd say crunchy chords, you know, crunch chords that have a lot of grit and tension in them. And this song was just laden with it, you know, I remember as I was trying to transcribe it, I was just like, over and like, what is that voicing? You know, and over trying to find it and stuff. And. And for me, that was a really clear example.
- [33:23]
Sarah Larson
I'm now realizing it's such a coherent sounding album. You would hear it and you'd assume these people had been playing together forever, you know?
- [33:32]
Donnie McCaslin
Yeah. What that is to me is our relationship together and the way we play together and the different combinations we've played in for years. And then again as improvisers, us looking for that magic in the moment and how we play off each other. And then he steps in and the frame are these wonderful songs that he's written, but he's also interacting with us while we're tracking. And I think all of us have remarked, as we've listened to it, like, wow, that's what we played in the studio. All the stuff you hear there, you know, it's. It's beautiful that his vision was us playing and interacting with each other and that. That's what you hear when you hear the record. It's not like we're in, you know, an inconvenient backing track.
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Sarah Larson
Right. Have you listened to it since he died?
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Donnie McCaslin
I listened to I Can't Give.
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Sarah Larson
That's a sad song.
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah. And I just. I. I just didn't. I can't. I haven't really been able to listen.
- [34:51]
Sarah Larson
Yeah.
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Donnie McCaslin
To it.
- [35:03]
David Remnick
The pulse returns for prodigal Sons with blackouts Hearts with flower Muse with skull Designs upon my shoes I can't give everything I can't give everything.
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Donnie McCaslin
Away.
- [35:38]
David Remnick
I.
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Donnie McCaslin
Can'T give everything away.
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Sarah Larson
I'm just in awe of the. You know, the last year of his life. I mean, to think about. Did you see Lazarus?
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Donnie McCaslin
Yeah, we've all seen it.
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Sarah Larson
I felt like, you know, and I didn't know that he was sick or anything, but I wondered, you know, and I just kept thinking, this is sort of preparing us for a time in which we're going to have this music. But he's not going to be here then. When I thought about it after he died, I just. And when I thought about this album after he died, I mean, I feel like he was so conscious of his mortality and that these were just such beautiful final projects, you know what?
- [36:40]
Donnie McCaslin
Something that I found out later was that in January when we were recording, we would record like 11 to 4 or so, and then he would go over to Henry Hayes place and work on Lazarus.
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Hilton Alls
And then.
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Donnie McCaslin
But I didn't know that. And then. And then I think at night he was listening to what we'd recorded that day and going over it with a fine tooth comb and stuff. That's an amazing amount of output. I mean, and that's really inspiring.
- [37:12]
Sarah Larson
Yeah.
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David Remnick
Sarah Larson talking with saxophonist and band leader Donnie McCaslin about David Bowie's album Blackstar. They spoke in January of this year. And we also heard drummer Mark Juliana, Jason Lindner on keyboards, and bassist Nate Wood. And you can hear some more of the music they played for us that day@newyorkerradio.org this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Much more to come. I can't give everything.
- [38:18]
Donnie McCaslin
Away.
- [38:30]
David Remnick
I'm David Remnick. Welcome back. Hilton Knowles has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1994. Officially, he's the magazine's theater critic, but he knows about pretty much everything that goes on in the city, culturally in particular. He reads a lot of poetry. Recently, he went to visit a poet named Brenda Shaughnessy.
- [38:53]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Could this wallpaper be any worse?
- [38:55]
David Remnick
At the house she had just moved into in New Jersey?
- [38:58]
Hilton Alls
Brenda, you have a whole house and.
- [38:59]
Brenda Shaughnessy
There are like four bedrooms on the first floor, so we all have a place.
- [39:03]
David Remnick
She lives there with her husband, Craig Morgan Teicher, who's also a poet, and their two kids.
- [39:08]
Hilton Alls
How old is he now?
- [39:09]
Brenda Shaughnessy
He's eight.
- [39:10]
Hilton Alls
Oh, my God. Cal.
- [39:11]
David Remnick
Cal showed us his eight year old has cerebral palsy. And that's one of the reasons that they left New York City.
- [39:17]
Brenda Shaughnessy
If the landlady is like, oh, we're gonna raise the rent $2,000, we couldn't be like, well, let's find someplace else. Like, we can't, you know, I mean, we had to have a ground floor Apartment or an elevator building, because this wheelchair you can't get up, you know?
- [39:31]
David Remnick
Shaughnessy wrote about living with and loving a disabled child in her last book, Our Andromeda. Her new book is about coming of age and her life in the city as a young gay woman, before kids, before marriage. And I do want to mention in her conversation with Hilton, Shaughnessy does use some choice words to describe gay life in that period. So the book is a kind of a memoir. And she did a lot of her best thinking. She told Hilton, in the swimming pool.
- [39:57]
Brenda Shaughnessy
I do this thing when I go swimming, I do laps, and I count my laps. 1, 2, 3. And each lap as I'm swimming it, I relive that year of my life.
- [40:10]
Hilton Alls
Oh, wow.
- [40:11]
Brenda Shaughnessy
So I imagine that's what you do.
- [40:12]
Hilton Alls
In the first poem of your new book when you do the time travel, right?
- [40:16]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Yes.
- [40:17]
Hilton Alls
And you say, suddenly you're just one year, you're yourself consumed by shame and embarrassment for having lost a library book.
- [40:28]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Those little flashes of memory are ones that have come up when I've been swimming. And then right around the time I'm super tired, around 11 or 12 is also when things get kind of bad. You know, like, then pubescence happens, and suddenly you're like, this is terrible. I gotta get through these years. And so you are motivated to keep swimming and to get past that time and get to where it gets sort of more interesting again. So around 18, 19, around college time, things start getting a little more fun. Over the years, different memories have popped up that I've have. That I've used in poems.
- [41:06]
Hilton Alls
This new book of poems begins with a poem that the New Yorker published that has that kind of forward and backward movement at the same time that I love so much about your writing. Would you mind reading it?
- [41:19]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Sure.
- [41:20]
Hilton Alls
Okay.
- [41:22]
Brenda Shaughnessy
I have a time machine, but unfortunately, it can only travel into the future at a rate of 1 second per second, which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me. But I managed to get there time after time, to the next moment and to the next. Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead while not zipping. And if I try to get out of this time machine, open the latch, I'll fall into space, unconscious, then desiccated. And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that. So I stay inside. There's a window, though. It shows the past. It's like a television or a fish tank. But it's never live. It's always over. The fish swim in backward circles. Sometimes it's like a rear view mirror Another chance to see what I'm leaving behind. And sometimes like blackout. All that time wasted sleeping myself age 8, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book myself lurking in a candled corner expecting to be found charming me holding a rose though I want to put it down so I can smoke me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion of some dark star all the way back Struck hard at mother's mother's mother. I turn away from the window anticipating a blow. I thought I'd find myself an old woman by now Traveling so light in time But I haven't gotten far at all. Strange not to be able to pick up the paces I'd like to. The past is so horribly fast.
- [43:07]
Hilton Alls
Gorgeous. How long did you work on that piece?
- [43:13]
Brenda Shaughnessy
I had a really strange experience last summer in which most of this book came to be, which is that I started taking singing lessons.
- [43:25]
Hilton Alls
That's so crazy.
- [43:26]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Yeah, it was a really weird thing because I'm not a singer and I'm not a good singer and it's not like I want to be on the Voice or anything. It's not like I'm trying to like have a second career here. I just. I've never let it rip, you know. Never once in my life, you know, maybe on like a roller coaster have I ever like really done that. But. But never really. And the other thing too is that I've always sang to Cal. He's always been very comforted, even when he was a colicky baby. He's always been very comforted when I sing, but I can't. He's not comforted. If I phone it in, I have to bring all of it.
- [44:00]
Hilton Alls
This will be the guts he really.
- [44:01]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Wants me to like.
- [44:01]
Hilton Alls
He wants the guts.
- [44:02]
Brenda Shaughnessy
He wants me to do like the full on, like Broadway Annie kind of thing. And from the very first lesson, I started going home and writing obsessively. It was like it unleashed my. I mean, it. It unclogged my voice. I felt like I could say anything. I was no longer afraid of what I sounded like.
- [44:21]
Hilton Alls
Give us the title of your new book.
- [44:23]
Brenda Shaughnessy
The new book is so much synth. A lot of the book is set in pubescence and adolescents. And so when I was 12, 13, 14ish, it was the 80s, it was the early 80s where like all the music had like laser sounds and just full on synth keyboards. And it was supposed to sound cold and robotic and futuristic because we all thought we were entering this robot age.
- [44:51]
Hilton Alls
Yes.
- [44:52]
Brenda Shaughnessy
And the poem, this long poem is called Is There Something I Should Know? Which is a title of a Duran Duran song.
- [44:59]
Hilton Alls
It's interesting because in the second part of the book, there's a sort of struggle going on between the narrator of some of the poems, those very intense short poems, and objects of desire, particularly another girl, it feels like.
- [45:16]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Yeah. So the second part, and that's sort of tracing my sort of decade in New York as, you know, as an out lesbian. I moved to New York City with my college girlfriend. She was going to grad school for a PhD program, and we were so in love, you know, of course I was going to move to New York with her. And I had $1,000. And I was like, I'm gonna be fine. I have $1,000. Like, what more could I possibly. I've got my suitcase And I have $1,000, everybody. I have so much money. It just never even occurred to me that that wasn't. You know, my grandfather in Okinawa had given that as a college graduation gift.
- [45:57]
Hilton Alls
Wow.
- [45:58]
Brenda Shaughnessy
And I'm like, I'm fine.
- [45:59]
Hilton Alls
I'm set. I'm totally set.
- [46:01]
Brenda Shaughnessy
I'm set forever. And then six weeks in, she dumped me. So I had to find another place. And the place I found was this dyke loft in Tribeca.
- [46:11]
Hilton Alls
Yes.
- [46:12]
Brenda Shaughnessy
And it was really fun. And we would go to all those great lesbian clubs that used to exist that don't anymore.
- [46:18]
Hilton Alls
Would you read another from that section?
- [46:21]
Brenda Shaughnessy
There's only a few.
- [46:22]
Hilton Alls
Yeah.
- [46:26]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Well, one is about, as. You know, that Melissa Etheridge song that was like, on non stop. Do you remember this one? When everyone was playing But I'm the Only One by Melissa Etheridge all the time. It was just on everywhere. Yes, but it's too long to read.
- [46:40]
Hilton Alls
How about the first page?
- [46:44]
Brenda Shaughnessy
But I'm the only one who'd walk across a fire for you, growled Melissa. That song blared from all four of our bedrooms tape decks, often simultaneously, as if that song was the only one we all loved. The only one we could agree on. That summer in the dyke loft, just when it all started to change, Catherine was moving out to soho to live with Melanie. So Shiggy's girlfriend DM took her room. But not for long. They broke up and Michelle moved in. Shortly after, Cynthia came. Tonight you told me that you ache for something new. This was way before we'd even dreamed we'd have to rent out Shiggy's office to Aaron as a fifth bedroom. Without Catherine, we couldn't afford the loft. But we didn't know that yet. At the time, we thought everyone was poor like us. We weren't the only ones. We all smoked constantly. Anyone could afford to smoke back then. Catherine bummed my last butt, but I know I saw her new carton in the freezer. She didn't want to open it yet. She was trying to cut back. This was before we almost got the gas cut off, before we lost electricity. The first of many times after. Justine had been bullied out with her three cats. But Kristen, whom we suspected was asexual and not really lesbian, was still hanging on, even though she adopted yet another cat into the loft without asking. It was only one more, she reasoned, but we already had Seether, Amber, Balzac, Jiggly, and now Eviluna. Anna and Jackie came by. They were friendly to me, but Jet and Julie weren't. T and J were clique club. A and J were literary. Then Michelle and Shuggy secretly slept together. A disaster. And Cynthia got kicked out for being bi. And then bringing a guy to the loft.
- [48:18]
Hilton Alls
You then met Craig and your life changed. Just in the poet circles or.
- [48:23]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Yeah, just in the poet circles.
- [48:24]
Hilton Alls
Did you always feel that you wanted to have children, Brenda?
- [48:29]
Brenda Shaughnessy
I don't know. I think I liked kids and I wanted to have kids. I didn't think I would ever be stable enough to have a kid, and I didn't think I would ever have a partner that I could trust enough to have a child with.
- [48:40]
Hilton Alls
Yes.
- [48:41]
Brenda Shaughnessy
But now that I have these two kids, I. I find myself more and more obsessed with time, with death.
- [48:49]
Hilton Alls
Because you're here to protect them from mortality in a certain way.
- [48:52]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Yeah. And wanting to make sure I give them what they need.
- [48:56]
Hilton Alls
Yes.
- [48:57]
Brenda Shaughnessy
You know, everybody, it's. It's hard for anybody to reconcile the fact that your child is disabled. You know, just like, you know, one of the key things of being a parent, you want your kid to be able to do all these things and have any. Have their options. And when your child can't walk or can't talk, it's sort of accepting those limitations on his behalf is very difficult.
- [49:18]
Hilton Alls
Yes.
- [49:19]
Brenda Shaughnessy
And then the older I get and the more of my friends and peers I see who have grown children who have various kinds of mental illnesses, I think, you know, we all have disability's everywhere, and none of us really have all the options open to us. You know, it's. Cal has these very specific major ones, but it doesn't necessarily prevent him from living a full spiritual life, from loving and feeling. And he's mastered this other ability to, like, lift skirts. It's a Horribly embarrassing. It isn't to me. And I know how to do it. But he'll do it. People on the street. And I'm just. That is not. Of all the things to use your limited motor skills on, you just come up with something different than that.
- [50:03]
Hilton Alls
That's funny.
- [50:04]
Brenda Shaughnessy
But I don't know what his outlook is going to be. And what's so shocking to me is that the same is true for my completely typically developing daughter. I don't know. I mean, she's going to go out into the world. I don't know what's going to happen. And the whole thing is just horribly frightening. I have to feel hopeful and excited for my kids futures.
- [50:29]
Hilton Alls
Yes. It's the thing that makes you get.
- [50:31]
Brenda Shaughnessy
Up and say, well, you have to get up, yell and scream until you get up. Someone, I don't know who said this, it's very cruel. But like every kid you have, that's a book you didn't write. You know, some, some idea around how they take your energy and they do take your energy. But I think even if you don't have kids, even if you only have one job, even if you're only doing one thing, like how do we do it all? There's actually too much to do all the time. It's always been a huge mystery to me that we all have the same amount of time.
- [50:58]
Hilton Alls
Yeah.
- [50:59]
Brenda Shaughnessy
You know when you say I don't have time to do that, it's like, well, you have the same amount of time as I do. So if I have the say if I have time, then, you know, then why not.
- [51:10]
David Remnick
The poet Brenda Shaughnessy talking with the New Yorkers Hilton Alls. She teaches at Rutgers University and her book of poems, so Much Synth, came out earlier this year. Before we go, I'm going to check in on Emma Allen, who's an assistant editor around here. And she does an amazing job of putting together the Daily shouts pieces on newyorker.com she's fantastic with young writers, humor writers of all kinds. Let's go see what's on her mind.
- [51:38]
Emma Allen
Well, one of the things I thought I'd bring up in this chat today, it's a board game called Cowgirls Ride the Trail of Truth.
- [51:45]
David Remnick
I'm saying nothing.
- [51:47]
Emma Allen
I recently played it with a bunch of our cartoonists with Ed Steed and Jason Adam Katzenstein and Con Stokes, the cartoon assistant. And none of them are cowgirls. It's a game for teen girls ages 13 to 17. You progress along the board, you have to cross the emotion Ocean to get to Paradise Ranch along the way.
- [52:08]
David Remnick
Ocean, Ocean. Paradise Ranch.
- [52:10]
Emma Allen
There are some other great landmarks too, like Courageous Pass, but then also it's like Montana, but you move along.
- [52:18]
David Remnick
So it's like Candyland for older people.
- [52:22]
Laura Poitras
Yeah.
- [52:22]
Emma Allen
I mean, not that there's anything wrong with Candyland.
- [52:25]
David Remnick
Candy Land is awesome. So what else you got?
- [52:27]
Emma Allen
Okay, I have, in fact, a comedian, Aparna Nancharla. Nancharla. She has a bit about how no one can pronounce her name. So I feel a little.
- [52:35]
Brenda Shaughnessy
I don't know if I'm mispronouncing it.
- [52:37]
Emma Allen
But she is amazing. She does a lot of stand up comedy around town and she's got like a Mitch Hedberg ish quality to her. She tweets a lot, one of which was recently. Blizzards. Always feel like nature going, no, this is white privilege. And what else did I have on there? Oh, one is this book that I brought to show you, which is a collection of recipes by artists who at times are reliable cooks and at times less so.
- [53:04]
Laura Poitras
But who's the reliable cook?
- [53:07]
David Remnick
Well, I mean, is Marina Abramovich cooking for you?
- [53:10]
Emma Allen
Marina Abramovich's is an aphrodisiac recipe which is all about how many days to spend without eating, talking, sleeping and sexual intercourse before you bathe in almond oil and engage in intercourse.
- [53:25]
David Remnick
Wow.
- [53:26]
Emma Allen
But other ones are for toast and stuff?
- [53:28]
Donnie McCaslin
Yeah, for toast.
- [53:29]
David Remnick
Sometimes toast is good too.
- [53:31]
Emma Allen
Yeah, but it's great because a lot of times cookbooks pretend like they're giving you all this objective information and then it turns out that, like, you know, they're impossible to follow and you might as well be looking at a drawing of an octopus.
- [53:43]
David Remnick
So what are you going to be making this weekend from the artist's cookbook this weekend?
- [53:47]
Emma Allen
Well, one of my favorite ones is very vague and it's just for an egg. It's by Sarah Oppenheimer and it offers no information. But I inevitably will be cooking an egg. Name of meal, egg. Duration, 6 minutes. Ingredients, egg, Water. And then there's just a hole in the next page.
- [54:08]
David Remnick
Poached egg.
- [54:10]
Emma Allen
I was thinking the other day about getting a. I poach a lot of eggs, but I can never remember how long it takes. And I was thinking of getting that as a tattoo, which is the closest I've ever come to.
- [54:19]
David Remnick
You want to get a poached egg tattoo?
- [54:21]
Emma Allen
Just the, like, basic outline of the, like, how long to do it. Start recording.
- [54:25]
David Remnick
I'm recommending against it. Emma. Thank you, Emma Allen with some useful suggestions. And that's it for today's show. I'm David Remnick. If you want to stay in touch, please subscribe to our Twitter feed. Ewyorkerradio. See you next week.
- [54:59]
New Yorker Radio Hour Announcer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Baron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfiel, Michael Lee Rao and Steven Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, Becky Cooper and Casey Holford. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment.