Juliet Escoria, Black Cloud, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2014.
"Juliet Escoria has a poet's knack for knowing when to tie off a paragraph for thunderous effect and displays enormous empathy for the damaged souls that populate her stories." --San Diego CityBeat
"Reading the stories in Black Cloud is like getting punched in the throat; Juliet Escoria leaves you speechless. Her honesty teaches us that beauty can be found in violence, truth in pain, and life where we've always been afraid to look." --Benjamin Samuel
"Juliet Escoria is like a gutter-punk Grace Paley."--Adam Wilson
"Black Cloud is one of the best things I've ever read... I want more literature to be like this: brutal, honest, dark, and incredibly real."--Beach Sloth
"Juliet Escoria will murder the crap out of you, if you let her.”—D. Foy
"I met Juliet Escoria outside a bar in New York. I was selling drawings before a reading. She asked how much for a drawing. I said anything, then she basically started challenging that, saying shit like ‘Really? So if I pay [x amount] that’s okay?’ She was looking at me without blinking the whole time. Pretty sure she called me a pussy as well, which is all really funny because I’d crack this little lady in half and throw her in the fucking garbage and think nothing of it. She paid me eight dollars for a drawing."—Sam Pink
“Juliet Escoria generally makes me feel uncomfortable all the time. She is a dreadful, mean, creepy bitch. When I’m around her, I am constantly seeking escape.”—Kendra Grant Malone
“Juliet Escoria wants us to believe she is ‘white trash’ and a ‘wigger’ and an “Eminem fan’ but she once spelled Hailie’s name Hailey in an email to me so it’s pretty fucking clear she’s a poser.”
—Elizabeth Ellen
See author Juliet Escoria lay bare her mind, too, but in a really different way. Her story collection Black Cloud is due out from Civil Coping Mechanisms, and for each story she's made a corresponding video, many of which you can watch here. All of the videos feature, in one way or another, the author: Escoria talking into a shaky camera, smoking a cigarette; Escoria spitting up blood; Escoria's disembodied voice, accompanied by people in bunny masks on a beach at night. Her stories are confessional, sometimes aggressively, and she writes about human ugliness with bluntness and even a little verve, like maybe she gets a kick out of things being fucked up, which they are in her world, or at least the world of her characters; the line is blurry. The story "Reduction," originally published online at Hobart, is about sex and drugs, and it will be featured in Black Cloud. "Juliet Escoria is like a gutter-punk Grace Paley," says author Adam Wilson, which feels spot-on. - www.imposemagazine.com/bytes/march-books-literature
Have I written about longing here yet? (I’m sure I have.) Every story is supposed to be stuffed to the gills with an aching desire, something pulling a character through the narrative whether they want it to or not. In a good story, longing is a taut tether that a character can neither slacken nor cut, and because they cannot wrench themselves free, neither can we.
In Juliet Escoria’s second-person story “The Other Kind of Magic,” posted in Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s Sunday Stories, the main character certainly is full of longing, but for what she doesn’t know. She’s an adjunct at a local college, but she works as a coat check girl in Manhattan to cover the rest of her bills because she “make[s] more in a night at this job than [she does] at [her] real job.” She’s in a relationship with a man she describes to another character as smart, funny, and talented, yet she lusts after her boss, a man named Tim who we know is bad news, and pursues an affair with him anyway.
To summarize it on the page like this—to reduce what she wants to sex and intimacy with a too-old-for-her club manager—flattens both the character and the story. But Escoria is able to make what should be commonplace and lurid into a deeper exploration of why the character can’t love herself enough to be good to others or to herself—or to ask, What do I want to get out of life?
Just because she can’t ask the question, however, doesn’t mean we can’t feel her desire to know the answer. To create longing in any story, the author must provide a source of dissatisfaction, and in “The Other Kind of Magic” dissatisfaction abounds: it’s in the almost-but-not-quite-perfect relationship; it’s in the unskilled, seasonal, part-time job that pays more than the “real” position requiring an advanced degree; it’s in the unaccessible view from the coat check that looks out over a gorgeous nighttime panorama, the lights on the Williamsburg Bridge described as “there specifically to impress all the girls in their tight neon dresses and all the boys in their polo shirts, as they get fucked up on bottle service and molly”; it’s in the story’s perpetual night, a time of day which is supposed to be reserved for our freedoms; and later, it’s in a casino, a space designed so that wealth is always just out of reach.
The story isn’t long—it’s under 3,000 words—but Escoria packs in the dissatisfaction just as much as the longing. Everywhere the main character goes, she rubs up against the empty space where satisfaction is supposed to be, and she doesn’t get a moment’s rest.
For the longing to feel as palpable as it does in this story, we also need hurdles. We need obstacles and impediments, sticky complications to muck up the line between desire and its object. Otherwise longing would be converted on the back-end to satisfaction, happiness, and wholeness, without ever coming to our attention.
At first glance our main character seems to want Tim, and the obstacle there is obvious enough—her monogamous, committed relationship with her boyfriend. But the hurdle in this story isn’t one of illicit lust and love: it’s the main character’s inability to recognize that she’s looking for the wrong thing to fulfill her.
To be a bit less objective, perhaps what compels me about this character is how she reminds me of a woman I used to know, a brunette with long hair and ankles dirtied by ash from campfires, who wanted so much but always reduced her choices—her world of want—to a decision between two men. We get so little information about the main character in Escoria’s story: her friends are nameless and out of focus, and her life outside work remains a mystery unless it’s connected to her boyfriend.
Usually such gaps in a character’s history would distract me, but in this case it seems to be the point. These details aren’t mentioned because they aren’t important to the main character. (And, I’d posit, if they were essential, she wouldn’t be so unhappy.) We can’t see what else could be good in her life, so the story and her longing make us feel as claustrophobic and lost as she does. Get out of there! I want to say to her. Find something else! But I can’t come up with any ideas of what, I can’t see enough of the other good around her to point in a direction and say, Maybe something like happiness lies that way.
“The Other Kind of Magic” stuck with me. I found myself thinking about it in the following weeks, which is one sure-fire sign to me that I’ve loved something (even if I don’t know it yet). So go check it out and let us know what you think. -
There are as many approaches to writing about drugs as there are stars in the sky, but most fall into one of two categories. Both take the reader on a journey to the depths of depravity, but one brings the reader back while the other leaves her there. The drug-addled heroines of Black Cloud, Del Mar writer Juliet Escoria's debut collection of 12 terrifying short fictions from publisher Civil Coping Mechanisms, belong to the latter camp.
Escoria's stories feature young women at loose ends. They do ketamine or coke or heroin or meth. They drink too much and choose partners poorly. Even though the stories are exceptionally short, in the span of a few pages, the protagonists manage to run through all their options.
"He went to work and constructed code. I waited tables and collected tips. Sometimes I'd wake up at dawn and find myself tangled in his arms, one of my yellow hairs stuck to his eyebrow. We got nosebleeds. We made lasagna. I got pregnant."
Escoria's stories seduce the reader with their normalcy, and then the bottom falls out. She's a master of thinly sketched narratives whose characters are believable but not reliable. Her characters usually can't see past their realities, but they're beginning to have doubts about their circumstances.
"I would only look at books about aliens and crop circles. I wasn't too sure about aliens before, but recently I'd risen into a new clarity."
In "Glass, Distilled," the narrator fixates on her one-armed dealer. He used to be a fisherman, and now he deals cocaine out of a rent-by-the-month motel room. Meanwhile, her boyfriend becomes obsessed with tropical fish when their relationship takes a turn for the worse.
"...I stared at the fish in the tank that illuminated the room from the foot of our bed. The fish's eyes were blank and their mouths opened and closed with nothing coming out. When I looked at them, it seemed like we were the exact same kind of being."
Escoria has a poet's knack for knowing when to tie off a paragraph for thunderous effect and displays enormous empathy for the damaged souls that populate her stories. Her fictions are like fish tanks: unnatural habitats that we can peer into but whose inhabitants are unlikely to thrive. She forces us to consider what these beings were like before they became undone and what they still hope to become. - Jim Ruland
In a 2013 piece for The Guardian, the actor Russell Brand, a recovering addict, wrote that his problem wasn’t drugs and alcohol, but reality. The characters in Juliet Escoria’s Black Cloud are the same way, which is to say that their problem is everywhere, all the time. For them, reality is a constant, gnawing headache. They work shitty jobs and float through empty relationships. Reality leaves them unfulfilled. Reality makes them boring, and bored.
At several points, Escoria seems to intentionally blur the line between character and author by punctuating the stories with photographs of herself in vulnerable moments: underwear-clad, or in her bathtub, or hugging her knees to her chest. Turning to each of these photographs, the reader might feel compelled to apologize for intruding. In some ways the collection feels like a book-length version of Sky Ferreira’s album cover–click here to take a peek–and Escoria shares Ferreira’s guise of direct—almost aggressive—vulnerability. She wants the reader uncomfortable. She wants the reader ready to say, “I’m sorry.”
One of the highlights of the book, “The Sharpest Part of Her,” sketches the entirety of its narrator’s adolescence with a drug-addicted mother, capturing “her cigarettes, glass and paper, always something being drawn to her mouth that wasn’t me.” By the story’s end, the narrator makes it to adulthood and her mother cleans up, which would feel happy if the story didn’t then turn, in its final moment, toward the impossibility of forgiveness.
Black Cloud is, of course, a depressing book. Yet, I return to the first story, “Fuck California,” in which a young woman says “I love you” and means it, or at least “thought [she] meant it.” The story ends with the narrator tricking herself “into thinking the roar of the jets was that of the waves, and the lights on the landing strip were, in fact, stars”—anything to deflect attention from reality. I wonder whether Escoria is familiar with Erika M. Anderson and her song “California,” which begins with the lyrics “Fuck California,” and ends with her begging “you please to look away.” It’s what so many of Escoria’s characters want—for someone to look away. But at least it means somebody was looking in first place.- Benjamin Rybeck
“Black Cloud” is one of the best things I’ve ever read. Literature is distilled down to a life lived. I want more literature to be like this: brutal, honest, dark, and incredibly real like living it. Of course prior to reading this Juliet Escoria released a series of cryptic, dark transmissions. The videos are a definite welcome addition to the stories. Reading the entire collection in one sitting is highly recommended. Within each of the stories rests a particular rhythm that connects everything. Much of this is disconnection from surroundings, not sleeping, weird relationships, and lots of movement.
Emotion reigns supreme throughout the collection. Whatever attempts to leave this maelstrom are relatively futile. Safe harbors are the boring ones. A nice guy dives deep beneath the waves. Yet another one tries to prepare Juliet Escoria for a hurricane. Rather than spend time watching fires burn she decides ‘Nah’. Here the jerks are the fascinating one. Bad ones are fascinating with their glimpses into different worlds. One of the bad ones talks about New York City before it got clean expensive: back when it was wretched, filthy, and foul. More personality can be found among the wreckage than among the crystal clean.
Stabs at normalcy appear to be nothing but that. A glass casserole dish takes on a far greater heavier role providing sustenance in different forms. Lasagna may be nutritious and easily freezable. Nobody denies that. However there are other kinds of hungry, different sorts of emptiness to fill. The glass casserole dish serves many great purposes. It allows for time to get killed off, to transform itself into little blurs. Eventually the blurs become bad things the sorts of things that become a quiet bus coming from New Jersey or puffer fish trying to get their fill.
The best part is the others. They sit on the edges of Juliet Escoria’s stories. Some of them live in ratty motels and barely scrape by. Others still visit her world briefly. A few friends try to come by, friends like Zachary, who have been there and serve as a sort of guiding light. Yes they too have seen the darkness which makes it easier for them to appreciate the lighter moments. Some try to ask for forgiveness for what they did from years ago, how they tried to clean up, to be better. Unfortunately time can heal but only so much. Reconciliation is not an easy thing and it can take more than six years to make up for many more wasted ones. For at the end of the collection there is a heart stop, a realization that things can be beautiful liquid things never transforming into anything solid. Life is a permeable thing and “Black Clouds” celebrates life’s many forms. - Beach Slot
Juliet Escoria is a witchy woman, and Black Cloud, her aptly titled debut collection of (autobiographical?) stories, punctures deep into the heart of drug and sexual abuse, and casts a harrowing spell on the reader that, like her characters, will not easily break:
We went to sleep, together but alone, that night. We did no eye gazing at all. Just stared at the backs of our own eyelids, an act that doesn’t take and gives nothing to no one.
We went to sleep, together but alone, that night. We did no eye gazing at all. Just stared at the backs of our own eyelids, an act that doesn’t take and gives nothing to no one.
This is not an Oprah Book Club selection. These are twelve soul-smashing vignettes, each prefaced by an ominous word: RESENTMENT, APATHY, DISGUST, REVENGE, and so on.
CONFUSION segues into “The Other Kind of Magic,” a sad and skillfully paced story about a Manhattan coat check girl’s love triangle between her boyfriend, the older man she falls for, and her own demons:
There is something deeply wrong at your core and you know it and have always known it but he doesn’t see it yet.
There is something deeply wrong at your core and you know it and have always known it but he doesn’t see it yet.
In “Reduction,” a woman retraces the events—ketamine, coke, Taco Bell, having unprotected sex with someone she can never love—leading up to her almost-abortion:
He tried to kiss me, on my cheek, on my forehead, turning my face toward his and placing his mouth over mine, silently demanding I kiss back, but it was always him kissing me, and me just being there.
He tried to kiss me, on my cheek, on my forehead, turning my face toward his and placing his mouth over mine, silently demanding I kiss back, but it was always him kissing me, and me just being there.
Like their crystal meth habits, the couple in “Glass, Distilled” take their lovemaking to extreme measures; normal sex—normal anything—no longer applies:
Adam liked to tie me up and hit me with his hands, sometimes a belt, sometimes a crop we’d bought at the pet supply store—because crops meant for horses were cheaper than those meant for people—
Adam liked to tie me up and hit me with his hands, sometimes a belt, sometimes a crop we’d bought at the pet supply store—because crops meant for horses were cheaper than those meant for people—
To lighten the mood, you’ll find arty pictures accompanying each story: road kill; power lines cutting across grim skylines; the author bathing (in blood?) among rose petals; scary trees. As nice as these images are, they are perhaps an unnecessary distraction: the stories—all seemingly linked via a person floating from one sour, substance-consumed relationship to the next—are enough; each one, despite the book’s thematic nature, stands effectively on its own.
The mother in “The Sharpest Part of Her,” a coke addict and sometimes fashion model, repeatedly brutalizes her child, usually while listening to Jane’s Addiction. As an adult, the daughter looks back on these heartbreaking events with cold concern:
Things really began to slip once her teeth started getting fucked up. The phone in the kitchen rang less. My mother was home more. Her front two teeth were grey, hiding in shadows.
Things really began to slip once her teeth started getting fucked up. The phone in the kitchen rang less. My mother was home more. Her front two teeth were grey, hiding in shadows.
The woman in “Here Is a Ghost Story” is haunted by the memory of her boyfriend’s late ex-fiancé. The woman questions why her lover sings to this woman’s grave and not to her. She grows jealous of someone she will never know or understand, and her obsession swallows her up. This is ENVY:
“Eliza,” I said, and by saying her name, her form became that much more solid. It felt good to conjure; it felt good to finally, for once, have some power. I said her name again, and then her fine blond hair blew upwards in the wind. “Why won’t you leave us alone?” Her form was fading and it was starting to rain.
“Eliza,” I said, and by saying her name, her form became that much more solid. It felt good to conjure; it felt good to finally, for once, have some power. I said her name again, and then her fine blond hair blew upwards in the wind. “Why won’t you leave us alone?” Her form was fading and it was starting to rain.
Finally, in “Trouble and Troubledness,” the now sober narrator reminisces about her history with self-mutilation and self-medication. There is equal parts shame and longing in her telling. She is somehow coping:
I liked pyramids, so I carved one into my thigh. People are so fucking stupid. They say cutting is for attention, it stems from pain, it points to a hatred of self. But sometimes you just want to make something on yourself that will never go away, something you shaped, something that will be there forever: a sign for someone else to find.
I liked pyramids, so I carved one into my thigh. People are so fucking stupid. They say cutting is for attention, it stems from pain, it points to a hatred of self. But sometimes you just want to make something on yourself that will never go away, something you shaped, something that will be there forever: a sign for someone else to find.
Black Cloud, despite what you may or may not think going in, is not the lurid confession of some angst-happy Goth girl with Johnny the Homicidal Maniac tattoos. It’s not that at all. There is stunning depth to Escoria’s writing, a penetrating detachment, and each story is a subtle exorcism—your head will spin and you may even vomit and it will be beautiful and, for a moment, it might even feel like your heart has stopped. - Brian Alan Ellis
Black Cloud Video Funtime Extravaganza
By
So far, it seems like people look at the videos and see them as some sort of creative act of promotion for the book. This is true. But if this was the only reason, the videos would be a lot shittier because I wouldn’t care about them as much.
The main purpose of the videos—in my mind, at least—is to create a window for each story. Some of these videos illuminate, showing the groundwork beneath the story—the things that I, the author, experienced which caused the creation of a fictional world. Some of the videos open the story up and give it more room, elaborating on a theme or prevailing emotion in a way that words can’t do.
I’m not a cinematographer. Making videos was something entirely new to me. I found it to be immensely satisfying, though, and something I want to continue to do—another tool I can use to tell stories. The progress of the videos charts not only my development as someone using this medium, but also my life for the past year—and it’s been an interesting and eventful few months. I guess you could say that the following is a window into the windows of the stories in Black Cloud, which is a confusing metaphor so maybe it’d be better to call the whole thing a hall of mirrors.
I’ve always loved music videos. I’m old enough to remember back when MTV played music videos almost exclusively. This was back before Spotify or Pandora or even AudioGalaxy, back when your options for listening to music were limited to buying CDs and tapes or listening to the radio or watching MTV. I remember waiting around for “Heart-Shaped Box” to come on. I remember waiting around for “November Rain.”
I conceived of this video as the story version of a music video. I had no idea what I was doing when I made it, no video editing experience to speak of, no real “vision” of what I wanted the end result to look like—I just wanted something that looked cool and conveyed what I felt when I wrote this story, which was like an emotionally messy freak.
I asked Sunny Katz, my best friend, to come over and help me shoot the footage. I put on a lot of make-up and a slutty dress that I used to wear when I worked in nightlife. Sunny and I drove around San Diego, taking footage in canyons and shopping malls and freeways. Then I went home and started editing. It took me a really, really long time to edit this because I didn’t understand how the software I was using (which is the free version of VideoPad Video Editor & Windows Movie Maker; fuck Macs) worked yet, but I’ve always been good with computers so I picked it up fast enough.
My ex-boyfriend, David Rogers-Berry, is a musician, and we’ve been able to remain friends. When we lived together, he and our roommate Steven and their friend Jorge used to mess around with a bunch of turntables and tape decks and records and weird instruments, recording it all under the name “Princess Peter.” I’m not a music nerd the way they are, but I liked what they were doing and thought it would be a good fit for the video. The video uses a shortened version of one of their tracks. It all felt fortuitous because the explosion sound that comes in at 2:20 coincided nicely with me jumping in the air without needing to edit so it did that.
When I posted this video, Black Cloud wasn’t finished yet. At this point, I planned on making two or three story-videos total. But everything about making this video felt like a good omen.
Shortly after posting the video, I finished the collection and sent it around, including the link to the video as part of my pitch. One of the first people I sent it to was a literary agent who had contacted me a while ago, when she and I both thought that I was working on a novel. I didn’t foresee the collection as the kind of thing that would interest a big publisher or an agent, but I figured it was worth a shot. Because the goal didn’t seem realistic, I figured it was okay to lie to her and I told her there would be twelve videos, one for each story. After that, though, I decided I liked the idea. It seemed insane to me, insane in the good way, so my lie became a truth.
I started taking Seroquel in January of 2013. At first it made me puke almost every day, and then the puking slowed down to a couple times every week, and then once a week, and then a couple times a month. I started recording myself taking it every night. I decided I would record myself puking from it too. Except then it stopped making me puke altogether, so I only recorded one vomiting session. I’d like to confess to this—Seroquel doesn’t make me puke anymore. I am a big fat liar.
I can’t stand this video. It makes me embarrassed. I think I sound like an idiot. I think I look stupid. I tell myself that this is good, that the embarrassing things are the ones worth talking about, but I’m not really sure I believe this. I also hate the thumbnail, but it got way less plays when I had it set to a shot of the spilled pills. (Obviously part of me doesn’t hate it if I’m still concerned with the number of plays.)
Michael J. Seidlinger (the publisher of CCM; he also designs book covers) chose a still from this video for Black Cloud’s cover without my consent, but I loved it when he showed it to me. Seems funny that the cover came from the video I like the least.
I live a block away from the beach. This video was shot in August, and it was the first time I’d been to the beach that summer. For me, it is way more fun to go to the beach with your friends if you bring a giant spotlight, an ax, two bunny masks, and a camera rather than sunscreen and beer or whatever it is that most people bring to the beach these days.
This is the second video that involved unusable footage of me jumping around while Sunny threw glitter at me. It turns out that this just doesn’t look cool. It also gets glitter everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I looked like this when I got home:
What isn’t pictured is the glitter that had found its way into my pubic hair.
This video is currently tied for my favorite. It’s very intimate, but in a way that is different than “Taking Antipsychotics and Puking.” It involved me putting words on a bunch of my friends, a bunch of people I like and love. There’s a photo of my mom in it, and, if you look closely, you can see her and my dog reflected in the door of the oven in the baking cookies shot. My terrible handwriting is in the video, too.
Most of the footage was taken at my house. I threw myself a birthday party, which was a thinly-veiled excuse to bring a bunch of people together so I could put words on them. I’m not a particularly affectionate person, and it was very strange for me to touch so many people in so short a time. I felt super uncomfortable at first, but then it became sort of nice—touching people in a way that had nothing to do with romance or sex or even comfort. It made me realize how strange it is that we—I—tend to avoid touching other people as much as possible. I’m pretty sure most other mammals aren’t like this.
The footage that wasn’t taken at the party was taken at Scott McClanahan and Chris Oxley’s apartment. (Scott and I are now engaged.) I was on a break between quarters (I teach college), and I stayed with them for most of it. When I watch the video, I remember what those couple of weeks felt like, exactly. Scott and I were really starting to fall in love hardcore, which was something that had been in the works for a while but still surprised me. I wouldn’t let him say anything specific about me anywhere publicly yet, and I refused to put any pictures or direct mentions of us together up on social media because of a bunch of different reasons; the easiest one to explain is that I am superstitious and I thought that doing these things was bad luck. It feels okay now that we are engaged. I am typing and including this sentence and the two preceding it not because I think they are interesting or necessary but because I hope that doing so will perhaps dissolve the bad luck that would come if I didn’t write them. I think I might sound insane right now, oopsie!!!
The trip was a good one, but strange, too. Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca were visiting for part of it, and at one point, we decided to drive to Matthew’s great-grandfather’s grave, which was a couple hours from Scott’s house. He’d died in a coal mining accident, and was buried in an old forgotten graveyard on a hill off the side of the road in a very poor part of West Virginia, which is saying something because it is a very poor state. We had some weird experiences on the way, the kind of stuff that will probably be perfect for some piece of writing someday so I will just leave it at that. Thinking about the whole trip is making me want to cry right now, in a really nice way.
The music is by a group called Narrator, which is Nathan Keele Springer, Scott Riley Irvine, and Nicholas Lowery. I was stressing out because I didn’t know what to use for music for this video, and finding just the right song seemed pretty essential. I found Narrator through a writer friend of a writer friend, and it felt perfect immediately.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time on the last video, so I was determined that this one would be simple. All of the footage was taken by me at my house (except for the last shot, which was actually a leftover from an earlier video) over the course of about an hour, which simplified things in itself.
This video makes me really miss smoking. (I quit a couple months after this was shot.)
The video looks nothing like I had originally imagined. I had intended for it to be really ugly, but it turns out that even when you’re trying to make San Diego look ugly, it’s still pretty (boo hoo, poor me). Despite me failing at my original intention, this is my other favorite. I know some of me liking it has to do with the song. It also seems pretty obvious that, by this point, my video-making skills had increased. And then there’s the spitting-blood-in-bikinis business. Fake blood: A++ would recommend.
For whatever reason, the monologue parts don’t annoy me the way they do in “Taking Antipsychotics and Puking.” This is either because the stuff I am talking about here is less recent, or because the content is unscripted, or maybe it is because I am vain and I think my eyes look pretty.
The Other Kind of Magic
I was concerned about what type of video to do for this story because both New York and wintertime have such a central role in it, and those things are hard to fake in Southern California, so I decided to focus less on the content of the story and more on the emotional undertones. These have to do with being confused about one’s own motivations and actions, and feeling estranged from both yourself and the world around you. So getting abstract seemed to make sense.
I had been planning on going to Joshua Tree, and I knew that I wanted to shoot stuff for a video while I was there but I didn’t really know what, exactly, I’d shoot or what I wanted to do with it. Joshua Tree is one of my very favorite places in the world, but I’d never been to the Noah Purifoy Foundation, which is where it was shot. I got out and was walking around for a while before I realized that duh, this shit was perfect. But I still didn’t know what kind of video I would make.
Then I got home and started messing around with the footage, treating it more like a collage than I had with the others. I’d been talking with Katelan Foisy about Gysin/Burroughs’s cut-up method, and that seemed to fit. The voicemail thing was added in last. I think it makes the video feel a little more desperate, and I like that.
People seem to think it’s unbecoming to speak favorably about your own work (which is stupid but people are stupid, so what do you expect?), but I fucking love how the whole thing looks. I want to live in a world that looks like this always. This video has the lowest views of all of them and that pisses me off. Guess I should have worn less clothing.
I took an extra two months in between videos because I was stressed the fuck out. I felt guilty about this at first, but then I decided I didn’t care because the only person who ever said I was doing one video per month was me.
I was getting sick of myself as a subject. I also like the stories that people tell about drug experiences, because they always have this weird mixture of bravado and vulnerability, sadness and humor. It made sense to me to get other writers to tell their heroin stories, but I also got some of my non-writer friends to tell stories too, because it seemed impure to only have it be writers. I’m not entirely sure I can explain this line of thinking, but it has something to do with the fact that you don’t have to be a fucking writer to tell a good story.
I had a couple internal crises while making this video—moments where I was certain that the video was going to turn out shitty. The first was because it was harder for me to find subjects than I’d originally imagined. I thought that because I had stories about heroin and was open to discussing them publicly that of course everyone else was the same way. This is poor logic, obviously. So then I started targeting people that I knew had heroin stories because they wrote about drugs (Jamie Iredell, Sean H. Doyle, Mira Gonzalez), and I also put out a call on Facebook, and that was that. Crisis averted.
The second had to do with editing. I figured I could take all the individual videos and cut them up into the parts that I liked the best, and then glue it all together and everything would be good. But the resulting video was really, really bad.
I started over. This time, I took each video and broke it down to its core beginning, middle, and end—although some of the videos had two middles or ends or whatever. Then I put them all in an order that felt akin to making a mixtape; I wanted the stories to all feed into and move against each other. I liked the result this time. They’re all telling different stories, but they’re also all the same story.
I bought a waterproof case for my iPhone because I want to film some stuff underwater, and I also asked Carabella Sands to help me with some illustration. This will be video #9, Spite.
Chris Uphues is a former roommate of mine. He read the collection and liked it and asked if I was interested in collaborating. He is an amazing artist so of course I said yes. This will be for Disgust.
I have an idea for Shame, but I’m not sure I want to execute it because it might borrow too much from the book I’m currently working on. I have no idea what I’m going to do for Resentment. Like, literally not a single one. If you have an idea, you can email me at julietescoria at gmail.com. Please keep in mind that my budget is around $0. - atticusreview.org/black-cloud-video-funtime-extravaganza/
"A List of Games I Used To Play With My Parents"
Interview @ Hobart
Interview @ The Quietus
Interview by Jamie Iredell
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