1 vintage black sequin suit from Scout; jewelry and belt by Fog
photo by Ramona Rosales
Miranda July, the dreamer
Issue #34
Continuing her streak of ambitious projects, the queen of quirkiness gives insight on releasing two books in the same year, raising funds for creative endeavors, and why she aims to make her work a ‘terrifying’ experience
By Leah DeVun
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 2:28pm
Photography by Ramona Rosales
Wardrobe by Scout LA (scoutla.com)
Makeup & Hair by Liz Larios
Special thanks to John Vargas
It goes without saying that Miranda July does a lot of things. The performer-filmmaker-writer emerged out of the West Coast punk scene in the late 1990s, singing with indie-rock faves the Need and directing the much-loved video for Sleater-Kinney’s “Get Up” in 1999. Her interactive performances and experimental films made her a darling of the fine art circuit, leading to gigs all over the U.S. and a spot in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. She found even wider recognition in 2005 with her feature film debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won awards numerous film festivals, including a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the prestigious Camera d’Or at Cannes. This year Scribner published July’s collection of short fiction, No One Belongs Here More Than You, which won praise from literary critics and celebrities like Dave Eggers and David Byrne. In other words, she’s got a résumé to die for.
But July doesn’t just do a lot of things; she wants you to do things too. In her spare time, she organized Joanie 4 Jackie, a video project intended to encourage aspiring girl filmmakers. In November, she released another book with Harrell Fletcher, Learning to Love You More, based on an Internet art project (still going strong at learningtoloveyoumore.com) that invites people to follow art “assignments” crafted by July and Fletcher. The often hilarious results of tasks such as “Take a Picture of Strangers Holding Hands” or “Give Advice to Yourself in the Past” have been posted online and shown in galleries from New York to the Netherlands.
In September, I spoke on the phone with July, who now lives in Los Angeles, about her new books, forging her way DIY-style, and helping to make space for others’ voices too.
You got your start performing at the punk rock venue Gilman Street in Berkeley. What were those first performances like?
At that time I called them plays, and the first one was based on a correspondence with a pen pal I had, a man in prison who I’d never met. I didn’t act in it. I held open auditions in Berkeley and, bizarrely enough, all the actors who were in it were adults, even the woman who played me, even though I was only 16 at the time. It had a sort of Rushmore quality to it, although in a Berkeley way. People were really confused. I rented chairs from a church, and the audience was a weird combination of punks, friends of my parents, and random people. I have to cringe — I still have a tape of it somewhere — because it was pretty painful, but at least the subject matter was substantial in trying to capture the life of a middle-aged man in prison from the point of view of a 16-year-old girl.
From there you moved to Portland and started playing music. What was it like to be a part of the riot grrrl scene in the Northwest?
I spent almost two years at UC–Santa Cruz before I dropped out and moved to Portland, and I continued directing plays and started to be in them. But everyone in Portland was in bands, so I formed a band with my girlfriend at the time, Radio [Sloan], and Rachel Carns and we became the Need. But it was becoming increasingly clear that I couldn’t sing or play instruments. I was a performer and really just wanted a backup band, which was not what they were cut out to do, so we went our separate ways. But Calvin [Johnson of K Records] and Slim [Moon of Kill Rock Stars] saw the Need and said that if I wanted to do my own stuff, they would put it out.
No one could accuse you of being unhip, but in your new book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, we find all these decidedly unhip, even pathetic, middle-aged men and women. What draws you to these characters?
I know it all sounds quite hip, but I really wasn’t one of the cool girls. I always felt completely out of the loop. And it was pretty hard going in the band at the beginning there. There were times when I was physically defending myself onstage, with people yelling at me. At that time I was still carrying some pretty alienated high school feelings with me. I think that however you grow up, those things are so deeply entrenched that it doesn’t matter how cool or famous you become. You still are that person. So the stories come from a pretty essential feeling inside myself, and I also drew from different people around me, and from my parents, who are both the black sheep of their families.
Your parents are both writers who ran an independent press when you were growing up. How did that influence you?
All the best things about it were also the things that I rebelled against. I hated having my parents’ publishing company in our house. They published books by all these odd characters who were in our lives — literally, like, in our living room. But I also grew up thinking that that was how you made a living: you took whatever was your own specific interest and went as far as you could with it, and that was how you met people and engaged with the world. Not that you went out and got a job. So even though my parents didn’t seem to understand why I was totally unable to get or keep a job, in my mind I hold them up as the model for that.
You haven’t worked a day job since your early 20s, yet your characters generally have pretty crappy jobs.
Well, I had enough of them! My experience was a lot like the two girls in the story “Something that Needs Nothing.” At first they’re excited to get jobs and then they’re startled to realize how horrible it is. That never stopped being confounding and amazing to me. But I did have quite a few shitty jobs that I’ve milled for all they’re worth. ... The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn’t allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It’s a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some almost accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded, they immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.
Years ago, you did an experimental video about swimming, Atlanta, and a swim team appears in your fiction as well. What’s the deal with you and swimming?
I can’t swim, for one thing. I actually took swimming lessons as a kid, and I kept a diary, so I was able to look back later and see that I got really into it for about one summer. I had some pretty big Olympic dreams, which I was shocked to see when I reread the diary, especially because I never actually learned to swim. I think I got better at whatever I was doing, but the Olympics were so far off.
There is some awkward and even disturbing sex in No One Belongs Here More Than You — sex between a father and daughter, sex between a teacher and student, phone sex between sisters. What was it like to write those kinds of scenes?
A lot easier than it is to think about them now! And when I have to read them out loud at an event, I’m always searching for the ones that are minimal damage in that area, especially when my family members are there. I just disassociate and think, “I’m just reading the words that are printed there.” A lot of the stories were written purely from the unconscious at a time when I was learning to write. I really wasn’t thinking of an audience. I was in my 20s, and I was also writing the script for Me and You and Everyone We Know, which also has a lot of weird sex stuff in it, so I guess the most I can say is that I was thinking about those things. At least on a subconscious level, that’s the territory I was in.
You have an unusual promotional Web site for the book, in which you use a marker to write the relevant information on your household appliances. What possessed you to write all over your refrigerator and stove?
It was just supposed to be the refrigerator, so it wouldn’t have been the stove at all if the refrigerator had worked out better. Scribner wouldn’t pay for a Web site, so I had to come up with something myself that was cheap and wouldn’t take a lot of programming. A Web site for a book is such a redundant thing. You’re only going to look at this Web site once, so I thought why not make it like a performance that you only experience once?
The Internet played a big role in your other new book, Learning to Love You More. What made you decide to give out assignments over the Web?
At the time when Harrell and I started, we sometimes gave each other assignments. For two people who have issues with authority and who’ve organized their lives so that they’re pretty free, there seemed to be something radical about doing what you’re told. Especially if you’re told by someone that you like — then it can be liberating. You have your whole life to be rebellious and creative, but if you try to do what someone else says for an hour, it turns off that ego part of your brain and maybe lets you be creative in a new way.
You’ve given out artists’ grants through the Web site too.
We try to do that every year. They’re just little grants, but given in the spirit that it’s nice to have money for your art.
What do you expect people to get out of doing the assignments?
We like that there’s just one more option in the world of what to do at any given moment. We try to have the assignments come from a deep place within us, even the ones that seem simple or silly. Also, I’m too embarrassed to take a picture of my parents kissing, but I’m not too embarrassed to have the idea. So I can put the assignment up and a whole lot of other people can do it, and then I can look at their work. It’s also a way to make art without making it yourself — you take away the need to have any authorship. You can see what something looks like through the eyes of all different kinds of people. It can be tiring just being yourself and seeing everything from your own point of view.
What’s the relationship between this project and your earlier work with the video network Joanie 4 Jackie?
It’s along the same lines, but Joanie 4 Jackie was specifically about having women connect with each other. There was a booklet that came with each videotape, and people were asked to write a letter to the nine other women they were sharing the tape with. So it was actively trying to create a sense of community. Now more than ever, I see the point of Joanie 4 Jackie, of trying to have outlets that don’t have to do with Hollywood or film school that are in place to support women and help them to know about each other and help each other. Maybe there’s something out there like this already, but if I had unlimited time and resources, I would restart Joanie 4 Jackie as a really safe, relatively kind YouTube, not a place where there’s comment sections where you get ripped to pieces.
Before you were able to get funding from more orthodox channels like IFC and Film 4, how did you finance your early film projects?
The most I ever spent was on Nest of Tens, which was $3,000, and I used a grant from the Andrea Frank Foundation. I got lots of grants when I was living in Portland. What little money I spent on films and performances I got from grants or commissions, usually, like, $1,000 at a time. We got a grant from Creative Capital to do the Learning to Love You More Web site. But now there’s no point in applying for them, because everyone thinks I have a lot of money, even though I don’t. I just don’t seem eligible for them anymore.
Do you have advice for young artists who are trying to finance their work?
There are prestigious grants that everyone’s trying to get, but I got a lot of small regional grants. People should look at what’s right there in their cities, and they’ll find it’s a lot less competitive.
What are you working on now?
This year I started doing this performance at the Kitchen — “Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going to Talk About” — and I was simultaneously writing a movie script based on the same story, which I’m shooting next year. It’s along the lines of Me and You but a little more expensive. I also made a window shade for The Thing [a quarterly subscription service run by artists Jonn Herschend and Will Rodin ]. It’s fun to make something that would make a good gift. I always feel bad giving people my book as a gift because now they have to read it — it’s kind of a chore. But a window shade, that’s just fun.
You’ve worked in so many different genres. Is there a dream project that you’d still like to do?
My dreams now have more to do with ways of living. I’ve put so much energy in my life into making art that other things are more challenging now. I took a vacation with my boyfriend a few weeks ago, and it was the first time I’d ever been out of the country when it wasn’t for work. It was actually really hard for me. I had about 12 nervous breakdowns. I’ll always have art dreams — that’s second nature now. But I’m so identified with my work, and my work is so much about me, that to exist outside of it raises all of these questions and feelings for me. To dare myself to do things that don’t have anything to do with that whole world that I’ve created but are still interesting and challenging, those are the biggest dreams that I have. My work is a really safe place for me. I try to find ways to make it terrifying and risky and be vulnerable, but in other ways, there are a lot of things harder than making art.
____________
“Things that I discovered in 2007 but which may be old news to everyone else”
By Miranda July
• Designer and architect Eileen Gray
• Not watching the little TVs on the airplane
• That resolution can’t always be the goal. Life is more about living with lack of resolution.
• James F. Miles is a Boyfriend and a Girlfriend by Harrell Fletcher
• Les Enfants Terribles, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
• Elsa Schiaparelli, Parisian fashion designer from the ’20s and ’30s
• Pinenuts on everything
• Pantone 810 C 2X
• iCal
• Elderberry juice
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