A Sense of Belonging: Miranda July, David Byrne and Becky Stark

By: Alibastard | in: Books, Movies, Music |

The audience is getting excited.

Miranda July

They start humming with chuckles as Miranda removes this cumbersome vase from the table, saying, “We don’t need that,” and places it on the floor two seconds after she was just introduced by New York Public Library Director of Public Programs and highfalutin minister of cool, Paul Holdengraber.
“And there are two waters…I don’t know why I need two waters,” she says, still in this voice that seems like she’s talking to herself and the audience simultaneously, a gesture of comically ill-timed pragmatism rather than real life annoyance.
“We did do a tech rehearsal earlier, um, just not with the waters,” she assures the audience. She pauses and takes a sip out of one of them. She breathes out with pretend relief.
“…That went well.”
And by now, Miranda July, that burgeoning, near-infamous filmmaker/video artist/performance artist/sound artist and just recently short story writer, has gotten the audience wrapped around her finger. She folds the crease of her new collection of brief, heartbreaking, hilarious tales, a work of delicate brilliance called “No One Belongs Here More Than You”. The audience is still winding down from Miranda’s graceful vulnerability, their laughter cooing to silence along the ornate ceiling of the Celeste Bartos Forum room within the library’s first floor. And after a beat, she begins.

Miranda July

“Someone is getting excited,” she reads, her voice suddenly a hypnotic, half-put-on. Although she was reading the first line of one of her stories, she was absolutely right.
About several hundred people were getting excited. They’d paid anywhere between $10 and $20 to see Miranda read to them, rehearse interactive skits, give the stage over to endearing Lavender Diamond singer-songwriter and good friend Becky Stark, and then come back on stage and be interviewed by Talking Heads front-man David Byrnes. And all of it because of the New York Public Library, and their new approach spearheaded by Paul Holdengraber, who has said time and time again that he has been hired, “to make the lions roar” (except he says it with many more words and talks like he’s wrangling whole paragraphs of the great American novel out of thin air.)

David Byrne

In the past year Holdengraber has hosted conversations with German filmmaker Werner Herzog, writer Salman Rushdie and even used the library upstairs as a venue for an opera based on painter Maira Kalman’s newly illustrated edition of Elements of Style.
“What I try to stage here is something I call Cognitive Theater,” says Holdengraber in an interview. “Instead of having people come here and give lectures, I put them in conversation, often goad them with a good moderator, or what I like to call “instigator”, and have them converse about a variety of subjects. And I do it in a way that I hope is more lively than the lectures you hear most commonly in the academic world.”
The fact that the library would host a filmmaker’s risqué yarns, a folk minimalist’s gorgeous strummings, and the wandering queries of an art-house and radio rock star is testament of this last point. Together Miranda, Becky and David were there to create “a sense of belonging.” Holdengraber definitely came through.

Miranda July starring in Blonde Redhead’s Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAUx8-UJ3fE

After her first story Miranda starts talking about the serendipity of events like this – how, once you’re put forth like this to the mass culture, people start appearing from the annals of your past. She then goes into a story about a boy she traded schools in her teenage years in order to be closer to. Apparently she’d never got a chance to tell him how much she liked him.
“Can you please stand up, sir?” She says exultantly. “Yeah, you with the shaved head.”
The audience is mystified. Apparently he’s in the crowd. They are getting excited.
“There’s one more, “she says and tells another story, asking a girl in glasses to stand up. Then she reads a second snippet from her book.
Later, off-handedly, July admits that the two people were strangers, but that the stories were real. This is a nice metaphor for storytelling. You create a fiction where in you displace the truth. No one got angry about it.
And in between Becky Stark played these tender campfire songs, full of dry idealism and hippie confidence and breathy sweetness. Her humor ran similar territory.

Lavender Diamond

“Um, I have a new record –“she said after she was done playing most of her songs. “You know, none of those songs are on that new record –“she admitted after a moment’s thought and then, as if asked by the audience why, she just shrugged a sort of postured “who knows” and smiled with contained laughter.

Lavender Diamond - Oh No

Afterward, David Byrne showed clips from Miranda’s oeuvre and asked her if she talks to herself and asked her meandering questions, the two volleying in the most stuttering, organically brilliant, seemingly spontaneous bit of half hour dialogue you’d ever see. He sifted through her work with a sweet scrutiny, seeming half-prepared and forming makeshift questions that turned out to be better planned than you thought they would.

In the end, Becky comes out again, David accompanying her as she finally plays a piece off her new record – Miranda’s favorite song.
Before they start she tells Byrne, “Those were funny questions, David.”
“Yeah. If you make your voice go up at the end you can make anything sound like a question,” he admits.
“Totally, “Becky agrees, “Totally?” she asks, her voice dipping into higher registers.

Miranda July and David Byrne

Like Holdengraber suggests, it is perhaps more a piece of theater that stimulates our thinking than a dictatorial approach to knowledge. Since filmmaking appears to be our predominant form of tutelage-by-example, it appears we’d do well to examine more playful, more engaging and theatrical approaches to learning like the one created by this trio’s invented “sense of belonging”, this piece of Cognitive Theater, as Holdengraber calls it, that stimulates conversation as the most compelling narrative.

[Buy No One Belongs Here More Than You]
Miranda July Official Site
No One Belongs Here More Than You (best promo site on the net)
Lavender Diamond Official Site
David Byrne Official Site

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Posted on June 2, 2007

Comments

5 Responses to “A Sense of Belonging: Miranda July, David Byrne and Becky Stark”

Lynn on June 3rd, 2007 12:02 am

Enjoyed this, ty

Overview Magazine Blog » Blog Archive » Miranda July on June 3rd, 2007 5:40 pm

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larios on June 3rd, 2007 5:43 pm

Look the coldcut video!

http://www.overviewmag.com/blog/2007/06/03/coldcutwoof-wan-bau/

Siobhan Gunning on June 4th, 2007 9:42 pm

Hi - great review, I felt as if I were there. Really wish I had been. I’ve been a long-time fan of David Byrne and only recently got to see one of Miranda July’s movies (Me and You and Everyone we know). I admit to finding her a bit irritating but the story and everyone’s performances were mesmerising. I’ll keep checking back. Thanks.

Nat JM on June 6th, 2007 1:52 am

Great review, it felt like being there. I love Miranda July, i don’t know David Byrne so much but it was a very interesting read and certainly made me want to find out more about what he’s up to nowadays.