Dan
Fox
New
York City, November 2015
Dear Ben,
You know you were the first person I ever met who gave me an email
address instead of a phone number? benway@cea.edu. I had no idea what
it was. A jumble of letters, a period and that useless whirly shape
above the ‘2’ on a typewriter, scribbled in blue
ink on a scrap of guidebook outside a bar in Kreuzberg.
‘Internet’ sounded like
‘Interzone’ to me. Didn’t
‘benway’ have something to do with William
Burroughs? You assured me I’d work it out sooner or later.
It was 1995, I was 19. We’d
known each other for just a couple of weeks, travelling together to
Berlin after having met in a cloud of mayflies outside a youth hostel
in Prague. I’d made precocious reference to Warhol, joking
that the short-lived bugs were enjoying their 15 minutes of fame. My
remark would’ve been met with blank looks by people back
home. You laughed, so we became fast friends. Moving out to stay in a
squat closer to the centre of the city, you warned me away from the
backpacking American bros in the hostel. It was a day before that dead
body washed up on the river bank next to where we met.
You gave me your email after that night
at a bar near Oranienburger Strasse, the one suggested to us by a woman
carrying her bicycle along the U-Bahn platform. It was the night you
carried a whole stinking smoked mackerel in your backpack because we
were trying to save money on food, and wondered why nobody wanted to
talk to us as we picked at bits of fish in the corner of the room.
Remember Fanny, whose floor we slept on? “Ze centre of ze
alternative movement used to be in Kreuzberg,” she would
explain in earnestness, “and now ze alternative movement
‘az moved to Prenzlauer Berg but some say ze alternative
movement may now move to Mitte.” I remember we both cried
tears of laughter on a bus late one night, mimicking her thick French
accent. It was mean, but twenty-one years later ‘ze
alternative movement’ still cracks us up. Cracks us up
because if we didn’t laugh we’d have to down tools
and stop for good. Back then the phrase merely sounded old-fashioned,
now it’s plain elegiac.
I’d never before met an
American like you, Ben. OK, I’d not met many Americans at all
until that point. I knew Del and Monica; gentle, elderly friends of my
parents, who came from Cleveland, Ohio. They were lost in Oxford one
wet afternoon in the late 1970s, and it happened to be my folks they
stopped in the street to ask for help. Mum and Dad took them for tea,
and stayed in touch until Del, and eventually Monica, passed away a few
years ago. Del had been a big band musician, and when I turned ten he
presented me with a clarinet that he had once used when he played with
Glenn Miller during World War Two, and made me promise to take lessons.
The other American I knew was Dominique from Arkansas. She attended my
high school whilst her Dad, who was in the U.S. Air Force, was
stationed at nearby RAF Brize Norton. They lived in a cottage in the
village of Little Milton, and her Dad – a stern, religious
man straight out of Central Casting’s Department of
Republicans – would shout up the stairs to keep her bedroom
door open when I visited. I was far too shy for him to have anything to
worry about. That was it for Americans until you. You were from San
Francisco and told me about The Residents and Ween. You were confidence
itself, wickedly funny and I envied how unafraid you were to plunge
into any situation life presented. I coveted your 1970s blue and yellow
windcheater, and was baffled by the nutritious grease substance your
sister had made for you, which you carried in a jam jar and would work
into your hair each morning.
My memory is better than yours, so I
wonder how much you recall of knocking around at my parents’
home in Wheatley that summer? Remember trying to pick out
‘Soldier Boy’ by The Shirelles on the piano?
Remember telling me to read Daniel Clowes’ ‘Art
School Confidential’ before I became an art student? We were
keen to work on a project together, and talked about making music, or
maybe a ‘zine, but never settled on anything. (Still
haven’t, two decades later, apart from that voiceover I once
got you to read about Bruce Nauman being a redneck cowboy holding a
group of us hostage at MoMA.) Wheatley had never seen anything like
you, in your all-in-one bright blue jumpsuit, pilot’s goggles
and long, dyed blonde hair. You looked like Buster Crabbe in the 1930s Flash Gordon
serial. I took you to the King and Queen pub where you were the most
exotic person that any one of my high school friends had ever
encountered. A real, live, Californian. You threw Wheatley’s
smallness into sharp relief.
We kept in touch after you had returned
to San Francisco. I still didn’t know what an email address
was, so I sent you letters through the mail. They took the form of
collaged figures cut from magazines and old picture books, the
compositions held together by bold, inked backgrounds depicting radiant
suns and vast landscapes. They looked like Terry Gilliam’s
animations for Monty Python, crossed with works by Jess or Bruce
Connor. Except back then I didn’t know who Jess was and only
knew Connor as a guy who made some Devo video I saw late one night on
Channel Four. So I guess they were just Gilliam homages. The letter
part was spread across speech bubbles coming from the mouths of cut-out
cherubim or old B-movie monsters. I modelled my handwriting after that
of my brother Mark, who has a beautiful, ornate script – all
sweeping curves to his ‘g’s and elegant peaks on
his ’m’s. Mine looked like a drunken
spider’s cry for help. (My eldest brother Karl for some
reason always wrote in UPPER CASE. He left home to travel the world
when I was small; perhaps he was just trying to make himself heard.)
In return you’d send me
packages containing strange ‘zines with titles such as
‘Beer Frame’, ‘Murder Can Be
Fun’ and ‘Lackluster,’ which took a wry
look at 1950s sex education guides, vernacular architecture or carried
interviews with people doing jobs such as embalming and bail bonding.
You’d send geological samples from the extreme edges of US
culture – copies of Jack Chick’s hate-filled
evangelical Christian comic strips, for instance, or flyers for a
Survival Research Laboratories’ performance event featuring
mechanised robots and lethal power tools. In my early teens my brother
Mark had turned me on to John Waters films and B-52s records, training
me to understand re-runs of The
Munsters
and
Batman
on
British TV as a form of archaeological appreciation for camp. We
grokked it as Cold War gallows humour disguised as nostalgia, made in a
far-away country where life could be terrifying but did not always have
to be taken seriously. Your care packages helped build on that
education in Weird America, Subcultural America,
All-Knees-and-Elbows-Awkward-America, an America populated by keen-eyed
satirists, hopeful communitarians and harmless crazies, by those able
to find pathos in pop and pulp. My Collaged America.
I got my first email address in
’96. I found out that the ‘cea’ in your
email stood for ‘Center for Electronic Arts’. I
longed to work in what I imagined to be a tech-utopian studio staffed
with beautiful Californians labouring over glowing control boards in
darkened rooms that looked like spacecraft interiors. I never could
fathom what you did there. Back in the Old World I’d stopped
making the collages and had begun writing lengthy email letters to you
instead. You introduced me to the first person I knew only through
electronic correspondence, Andrew, who used to work for the cyberpunk
magazine ‘Mondo2000’ and was researching a piece
for Artforum
on education and wanted background colour on being an art
student in the UK. In ‘97 I went to San Francisco to visit my
brother Karl; I stayed with him out in Richmond and trekked over to the
city to spend a few days with you. I was excited, looking forward to
hanging out with beautiful Californians labouring over glowing control
boards in the Centre for Electronic Arts. I discovered, to my selfish
disappointment, that I had timed my visit whilst you were depressed
about your relationship situation. I had recently turned twenty-one,
and as you were a few years older, it was one of the first adult
experiences I’d had of a friendship’s mood changing
considerably under life’s meteorological conditions. You
introduced me to Americans who may not have been quite like you, but
seemed to be fellow travellers: Amy and Sarah and James, and whomever
else I now can’t remember. I can, however, recall visits to
Aquarius Records, nights spent pouring over copies of RE:Search
and
devouring your music collection: Japanese techno and Cambodian pop.
‘Bat Macumba’ by Os Mutantes and
Negativland’s ‘Dispepsi’. (Such cultural
pond-skating sounds commonplace these days, fraught with the dangers of
appropriation, but I had scant access to the Internet then and had to
leave the house to find art of any stripe.) I remember the temperature
of gold your kitchen turned at dusk, and how the BART train we took to
Berkeley one afternoon reminded me of photographs I’d seen of
the Epcot Center – or if not Epcot, then a positive,
future-minded World’s Fair I’d read about, perhaps
a scene from a National Film Board of Canada PSA about
technology’s promise. I recall trying to hire a Super 8
camera from a community filmmaking centre in the Mission, and enjoying
Mexican food on Valencia not thinking the area would ever
change. I remember borrowing a bike from Amy and joining you on a
Critical Mass cycle protest, shutting down San Francisco during Friday
rush hour – the agony of trying to pedal up all those hills,
the giddy careen back down again, and the cool Bay air on my skin. My
impression of America was being shaped out of the corner of the eye, at
the back of my nose, as mouthfeel. More sensation than idea.
It would be some years until I would
visit you again in California. You came through London a couple of
times in the early 2000s then we gradually dropped out of touch. Both
of us were to blame. The solid, crafted emails liquefied into
occasional phone calls, then evaporated into infrequent text messages
from one or either of us saying it’d be nice to speak on the
phone. And then we wouldn’t. Life thickened and got in the
way. Your email address changed; Dr Benway left the room and went to
‘bentropy.org’. The bentropy took its toll. I
remember calling you in December 2010, a year after I had moved to New
York. We’d not spoken for some time. You thought I had fallen
out with you, and I thought you’d gotten bored with our
friendship. That changed when I’d told you I’d had
nowhere to go for Thanksgiving that year. I was in Miami when we spoke:
I was miserable, lonely in a new country, alienated by an art fair I
was obliged to attend for work. I was so struck by the shock in your
voice, your outrage that it simply wasn’t right to leave a
person alone for the holidays, that it brought me to tears. Americans,
like you, floor me sometimes.
We reconnected properly around 2014.
There was a new seriousness to you. We no longer exchanged collages and
‘zines, but during your visits to New York we traded a couch
to crash on for copies of ‘The Black Radical Politics
Reader’ and long conversations about Occupy. I wished to be
as galvanized as you. The intensity with which you analysed your
emotions, questioned your actions and doubted your assumptions had
ramped up considerably since I’d last seen you. I worried
your self-interrogation would put up more barriers than it might pull
down, but your correlate empathies as a friend had increased manifold
too. By then I’d met many Americans who shared your values.
Remember that evening with Oki and Sierra? A grey, muggy night in the
East Village. I recall how accelerated the conversation at the
Ukrainian social club was, making an effort to keep up with you all,
then later drinking beer back at mine, the four of us going deep on
politics before laughing over so much else and for so long that the
giggles became life-threatening. We briefly time-travelled back to
’95 and spoke in our Esperanto of music and movies.
I returned to San Francisco a couple of
times. Valencia Street had altered beyond recognition. The changes made
me anxious so I visited Aquarius Records in the hope I could reel back
in the atmospherics from that summer of ’97, but it was in
its last days, being squeezed out like the old collaged letters. Me,
you and Oki cycled to The Audium in downtown SF; composer Stan
Sheff’s delightful immersive sound theatre, a throwback to
1970s hippie utopianism. They’d call the vibe ‘hippie modernist’
these days. The visit left me charmed and sad. I knew that
I was in love with an America I had made a collage of in the 1990s,
clinging to a adolescent memory of valuing oddball
‘zines and beatsploitation movies and Dead Kennedys records
because they helped hotwire my cultural literacy, hooked confidence up to difference, and played a part in shaping my friendship
with you. None of this flotsam could in
any way represent America. Geek male enthusiasms, that’s what
they were. Transitional objects. Admitting to narrowmindedness is
useful, but tough.
I originally thought that I’d
make a new set of collages for this letter. Trouble is, now
I’ve been an editor for 18 years, spending my weekend leafing
through old magazines in search of pictures to cut out is a
busman’s holiday. It’s harder to channel that old
Python spirit through scissors and glue and those old collages are just
screen condensation on group messages between you, me and Andrew. So
maybe I’ll phone you this December from Miami, alienated for different reasons than five years ago. Nothing has faded
from view: it is just harder to see our present motives and ideals as
meandering, ropey extrusions from those we found in a cloud of flies
outside a youth hostel in Prague. ‘Ze alternative
movement’ has long been knock-kneed and needing to sit down
but it thrives in your mind. When I call I’ll hear your
awkwardness, eccentricity, anger, introspection, generosity,
intelligence, empathy, warmth and wit.
It’s good to know Americans like you.
Ever,
Dan