Jeff Jackson - a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories. The novel features a colony of feral children, teenage oracles, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rock star. It weaves a moving tale of mad hope across a startling, dreamlike landscape

Jeff Jackson, Mira Corpora, Two Dollar Radio, 2013.

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EXCERPTS
Meet the Chorines in THE COLLAGIST
My Year Zero in GUERNICA


Mira Corpora is the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson, an inspired, dreamlike adventure by a distinctive new talent. Literary and inventive, but also fast-paced and gripping, Mira Corpora charts the journey of a young runaway. A coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, featuring a colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar. With astounding precision, Jackson weaves a moving tale of discovery and self-preservation across a startling, vibrant landscape.

“Mira Corpora is fine work in its manic pacing and its summoning of certain cultural emblems. Present tense with a vengeance. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face.”  – DON DELILLO

“Jeff Jackson is one of the most extraordinarily gifted young writers I've read in a very long time. His strangely serene yet gripping, unsettling, and beautifully rendered novel Mira Corpora has within it all the earmarks of an important new literary voice."   – DENNIS COOPER

"Jeff Jackson is a fresh and startling voice in contemporary fiction--a hallucinatory realist whose prose has the scary energy of rock and roll, and who writes with the assurance of a born storyteller."  – DAVID GATES

"There is a scene in this arresting novel in which a group of feral teenagers experience ‘a hushed air of reverence when we confront the lurid and savage details’ of a painting executed by one of their own tribe. The reader would be well-advised to approach Mira Corpora in the same attitude. The prose, in the spirit of Dennis Cooper and Brian Evenson, reads like dispatches from the blackness of a Bill Henson photograph. Jeff Jackson has had his vision, and it is worth a good hard look."  - JUSTIN TAYLOR

"Powered by a feral poetry."   - CHLOE ARIDJIS

"A beautiful and intense book, a grimy fever dream in the shape of the fictional autobiography. There is a mesmerizing episode involving a society of runaway children led by a teenage oracle, a cassette tape that might or might not call to mind certain elements of Infinite Jest, and a take-no-prisoners writing style that made me read the entire book in one sitting." - Andrew Ervin, TIN HOUSE

Trailer for Mira Corpora
I don’t know if it’s more confusing, funny, or depressing when people get their asses in a tear over whether a work of fiction was based on something that really happened or not. It’s like most people can’t be entertained unless the object of their pleasure is a thing that they can see themselves in and relate to. For me, the point of reading was never to learn about myself or even really about the world, but to experience something I couldn’t find in either of those places. To find something that actually extended the possibilities of both. I guess that’s why I tend to avoid art that seems too clearly set within the realm of self investigation, tending more often to be drawn toward work that finds ways to obscure fantasy and reality into somewhere weird.
Before Jeff Jackson’s debut novel, Mira Corpora, even begins it defines itself in contradiction. There is the typical disclaimer for works of fiction: “All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination,” but on the next page a note reads: “This novel is based on the journals I kept while growing up… Sometimes it’s been difficult to tell my memories from my fantasies, but that was true even then.” Such is the first of several enveloping mechanisms at work in the novel, the main body of which consists of seven parts, each following the life of a narrator who shares the author’s name.
The narrator’s life seems both wholly real and wholly unreal. As we follow him from location to location, set at ages six to 18, we find him pushed as if from one owner to another—a child among packs of dogs in a dark forest; in a house with an abusive, knife-wielding mother; in a village of occult squatters where death seems lurking; through teenage obsession with cryptic music and forced experience as a sex dummy. Throughout it all the narrator searches for something that is his, but finds only more connections to further worlds with nothing of him in them.
There are few coming-of-age-esque novels that don’t make me feel like I’m being lied to, manipulated into caring to the point where I can’t care at all. Mira Corpora is one of those few. It subverts itself and what it came from so many times that by the end you feel like it could have existed no other way. - Blake Butler

Jeff Jackson is the author of the novel Mira Corpora, just released from Two Dollar Radio. He holds an MFA from NYU and is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Baryshnikov Center. His short fiction has been featured in Guernica, The Collagist, the anthology Userlands, and performed by New River Dramatists in New York and Los Angeles. Five of his plays have been produced by the Obie Award-winning Collapsable Giraffe company, including Botanica which was selected by New York Times as “one of the most galvanizing theater experiences of 2012.” Of Mira Corpora, Don DeLillo says this: “I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face.” And Dennis Cooper says this: “Jeff Jackson is one of the most extraordinarily gifted young writers I’ve read in a very long time. His strangely serene yet gripping, unsettling, and beautifully rendered novel Mira Corpora has within it all the earmarks of an important new literary voice.”
Michael Kimball: I’m curious about the way the title and author are presented on the cover. It’s not “Mira Corpora” and then “Jeff Jackson” as it is on the spine. On the cover, it’s “Jeff Jackson’s Mira Corpora.” It’s something I’ve only seen with movie titles, I think, and I’m wondering how you decided on that particular presentation.
Jeff Jackson: Two Dollar Radio was apparently inspired by movie posters when they came up with that presentation. There wasn’t any conscious strategy behind it other than to create something that stood out. I can see how it invites a deeper reading, though. Early readers have said the book’s prose has a cinematic quality (and I’m a huge cinephile) and putting my name before the title seems to reference that the narrator shares my name.
Kimball: Right, the narrator is named Jeff, and you also are named Jeff. And, just past the title page and the copyright page, there’s an “Author’s Note” that says the novel is based on childhood journals. Given what happens in the novel, this author’s note becomes quite disturbing. I’m wondering, though, if the reader is supposed to take it as truth or read it as part of the fiction since it’s placed inside the boundaries of the novel.
Jackson: I believe anything between the covers of a novel should be treated as fiction – whether it’s technically true or not. That said, the novel was inspired by childhood journals, but that inspiration was often very loose. Emotions were magnified to make them more legible. I allowed my imagination to get swept away by certain moments and to use previously existing images as springboards into entirely new scenes. I was aiming for an emotional honesty, but I wasn’t ever sweating the so-called facts.
I included the “Author’s Note” to establish right away that the first person narrator is the same throughout the book – and he happens to share my name. I wanted readers to feel the pressure of a presence on the other side of the page. I was hoping that would establish some emotional stakes and charge the material. Calling attention to the writing process and the layers of narrative was also important to me.
Kimball: The Author’s Note does introduce multiple ways to read Mira Corpora and it does create a strange tension that runs through the entire novel. There was always a question in my reader’s mind about source vs. imagination. But let’s move on to a different structural element. There are three brief sections – “I Begin,” “I Continue,” and “I End” – the longest of which is just over a page. Each of these sections is presented in italics and each of them references or discusses writing in some way. And those three sections seem to be a precursor for the last section of the book, “Mira Corpora (my first fiction).” Could you talk about the function of those three brief sections and how they lead to the “fiction” of the final section?
Jackson: I thought of these short sections as poetic invocations that add a different texture to the book and reinforce the presence of an author. Initially these pieces exist outside the main story – though they echo things that happen within it – but toward the end, they make a direct appearance. The borders increasingly blur. Hopefully, these short invocations prepare the reader for the last section where the narrator picks up a pen and transforms his experiences into a short story. His “fiction” is meant to evoke themes and images we’ve seen previously while partly erasing what came before. For me, all these sections orbit slightly outside the rest of the book while still contributing to its overall gravitational field.
Kimball: Right, the novel begins with the “Author’s Note” and ends with a fiction within the fiction (which, by the way, gives the novel a satisfying ending in a way that I wasn’t expecting, which I’m saying that way so I don’t give away any spoilers), so maybe I’m taking us in a little interview circle, but why did you decide to keep reminding the reader about the writer? And what is gained by calling the last section of the novel a fiction within something that is already labeled as fiction? And how does it partly erase what comes before it?
Jackson: One of the book’s themes is how you transform parts of your life into fiction. I was interested in letting that happen on multiple levels at once and allowing the reader to see it happening. I like layering stories – I probably got a taste for that from the plays I’ve done, where several actions often unfold on stage at the same time.
I’m really glad the last chapter was satisfying. For me, it partly erases what came before by offering a new version of familiar events. You close the book having just experienced a different arc than the rest of the novel – one that rearranges its themes. I think the stories we tell, especially about ourselves, tend to be very fluid and unstable. Reminding the reader about the writer was my way of keeping that idea in play. I wanted this material to complement the body of the story, which aims to be more emotional and visceral.
Kimball: I like that bit about layering stories and that coming from the plays you’ve written. In what other ways has playwriting informed what you did with Mira Corpora?
Jackson: My plays usually straddle the line between theater and performance art. The words are just one part of the overall “text” – sometimes the sound, lighting, and/or video elements drive the piece more than what’s being spoken by the actors. We work hard on the visual environment of the plays and that inspired me to think more visually throughout Mira Corpora and to be more aware of the spaces the characters inhabit.
But the most important influence was probably in terms of process. We create plays over several years of intensive rehearsal and that helped me not to panic during the book’s long gestation. Theatre has also taught me to be fearless about revision. Before one nerve-wracking opening night, the director and I locked ourselves in a bar until dawn and restructured the entire play. And it worked – the piece was much better as a result! With Mira Corpora, I cut over 100 pages, went through countless drafts, and even created an entirely separate version of the novel.
Kimball: I’m big on revision too, so I love this. Do you mind telling me about the entirely separate version of the novel?
Jackson: The original version was much longer. It was made up of 35 short chapters that kept changing tone, point-of-view, and setting. I was way too ambitious about what I could pull off. I was asking readers to change gears too often – and for too little pay-off. There was also a lot of material that commented on the main text. Biographies of minor characters, lists of people who influenced the narrator but never appear in the book, secrets the narrator never shared with anyone. Ultimately that stuff was too self-conscious and clever and it had to go. I radically re-envisioned the novel. The opening section of the original version is now the last chapter of the book!
Kimball: I’d love to hear one of the secrets the narrator never shared with anybody.
Jackson: I’ll trade you for one larger secret: That original narrator no longer exists. I created him because I felt like I needed some distance – maybe even a protective layer – between myself and the material in the journals. He was a sort of mask I wore while writing. But as I revised the book, I became more comfortable with the stories I was telling. The narrator began to morph and I understood him well enough that he earned the right to my name. The mask I was wearing slowly became my face.  -Interview by Michael Kimball


We recently signed the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson. The book is called Mira Corpora, and follows a young runaway on a dreamlike adventure, during which he encounters a colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar.

Dennis Cooper says: “Jeff Jackson is one of the most extraordinarily gifted young writers I’ve read in a very long time. His strangely serene yet gripping, unsettling, and beautifully rendered novel Mira Corpora has within it all the earmarks of an important new literary voice. The excitement level of his talent is exceeded only by its enormous promise.”

The following is a Q+A we did with Jeff that touches on coming-of-age stories, naming characters, and the future of literature.

I hate coming-of-age stories and typically steer clear of anything that applies the label, but it seems as though Mira Corpora is sort of an anti-coming-of-age story: a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories. You destruct or invert all the familiar tropes that might appear in these types of stories and travel a much darker path in service of a much more adventurous adventure. Is it our knee-jerk reaction to affix a coming-of-age label to any story that deals with a protagonist of a certain age?

It is a knee-jerk reaction, but for good reason. Most stories that deal with younger protagonists in books and movies are coming-of-age stories. They’ve become a cliché and I generally steer clear of them. I’m glad this novel doesn’t fall into those same traps. I hope the book lives by its own specific rules and expectations. For instance, although it’s a dark story, there is some redemption – but it comes in a very unusual form.  

How conscious of this were you in crafting the story?

I didn’t set out to write an anti-coming-of-age story. Maybe it’s my own blinders, but I didn’t even realize that the book might be seen as a coming-of-age piece until I was close to the end. In general I try to be conscious of not falling into any familiar tropes, tones, or narratives. I tried to keep the language, the imagery, and the characters alive to all the possibilities of the moment. That’s always the real struggle.

You received your masters in creative writing, but spent much of the recent past writing plays. In Mira Corpora, which will be your first novel, the dialogue is sparse and the main character doesn’t speak until fifty pages in. Was this deliberate on your part, to steer clear of dialogue?

I’ve been writing fiction all along, I just haven’t been publishing much of it. I’ve always admired Julio Cortazar, who didn’t publish until his late 30s because he wanted to hold his fire until he had something really strong. So the plays have been the more public expression of my writing and they’ve scratched a different creative itch.  

That said, in the plays, I don’t often use conventional dialogue. I’m more interested in language that isn’t theatrical and energizes the performers and the piece in unexpected ways. In Botanica I wrote a series of elaborate stage directions which we then turned into a voiceover for one of the characters. For Damfino, I was inspired by crackpot letters written to astronomers in the 1920s trying to explain how the universe really works.

Since Mira Corpora is written in the first person, you’re getting the protagonist’s voice mainlined into your head. It’s almost like his running monologue. I wasn’t consciously shying away from dialogue, it’s just that it wasn’t necessary to hear that character speak during the first part of the novel.   

‘Botanica,’ a play you co-wrote with Jim Findlay, was recently named one of 2012’s most galvanizing theater experiences by the New York Times. In it, three characters catalog “the effects of human interactions on… plants,” and the set features roughly “200 plants cover[ing] every visible surface.” You’re writing a play now that incorporates sleep. Without giving too much away, in Mira Corpora there are a couple of interruptions to the progress of the story that enhance the consciousness of the act, of reading. I absolutely love these blips, and to me, in my mind, they contribute so much to the book. Your work seems deeply aware of the sensual experiences involved with consuming art. Could you discuss this?

I’m glad you like those blips. I love unusual structures and digressions that open up a story in surprising ways. Dennis Cooper talks about how it’s important to pay attention to the reader’s pleasure. That doesn’t mean dumbing down your book, but rather seducing the reader into doing the work necessary to get everything out of the text – and being excited about that. I want Mira Corpora to be a pleasurable experience. It has a plot with serious momentum, while also allowing for stylistic shifts and giving readers the space to piece together the story for themselves. I tried to avoid the trappings of most so-called literary fiction – which is becoming its own cliché – because it dulls readers and leads them to expect a certain type of story or style or tone. 

I think real literature is incredibly enjoyable. There’s a thrill to reading great work by, say, Agota Kristof or Flann O’Brien. To me, it’s commercial fiction that’s often tedious, empty, and soul crushing. Many TV shows are better made and more entertaining than the average bestseller. If reading is going to thrive, books need to deliver an experience that only they can offer.

The protagonist of Mira Corpora is Jeff Jackson, and the story follows him from age 6 through 18. Jeff leaves home at eleven and lives in the woods with a band of misfits who lope around abandoned amusement parks inhabited by gibbons. So the story is lifted into the realm of the fantastic by these flourishes. But the novel opens with an author’s note stating that the story is inspired by journals kept as a child. I believe it’s a fantastic read (obviously), but curious whether there is any kind of reality that anchors the story?

Sure. Those old journals exist and they were the jumping-off point for the work. But the book is definitely fiction. I took situations and let my imagination transform them. Ultimately, in a novel it shouldn’t matter what came from real life or didn’t. The reality of the words on the page are all that count. I hope readers will be able to feel that there’s an emotional truth underlying everything in this book. Originally, I didn’t want to call the protagonist Jeff. But as the novel evolved, I came to know the character so well that he earned the right to my name. - Interview by Eric Obenauf


An excerpt from Mira Corpora

We find the body at the bottom of the river. It has floated downstream and been snagged in the shallows by a dam of fallen twigs and branches. A teenage girl, lying there submerged, bobbing peacefully in the gentle current, strands of long chestnut hair mixing freely with the underwater ferns and kelp. The first thing we notice: She wears a nondescript pair of fraying jeans and faded purple T-shirt. Second thing: None of us recognize her. Third thing: A rope is fastened smartly around her bulging neck.
It’s a clear case of suicide. Or maybe murder. Daniel figures the girl came to this remote sector of the woods to end it all in solitude, dangling herself from a branch over the river. Isaac thinks she was hiking into Liberia when some truckers intercepted her, maybe raped her, definitely strangled her. Nycette refuses to offer an opinion. She rolls herself a joint with trembling fingers and puffs away with fearsome determination. In her penetrating French accent, she keeps repeating the word “heavy.”
Nobody bothers to ask what I think. I stare at my watery reflection as it floats superimposed over the image of the girl. She’s flawlessly conserved in the cool current. Her lips a perfectly serene shade of blue. Her pink tongue protruding between her teeth, just so. Her eyes halfway open and unfocused on something they couldn’t see anyway. The expression on her face would seem sexual, except it’s too fixed to suggest any kind of desire. She looks beautiful.
The four of us hover on the banks of the river, everyone afraid to speak. Isaac finally announces that people at camp need to be warned in case the truckers strike again. Daniel counters that everyone is paranoid enough already and it’s irresponsible to panic them. They look to Nycette to cast the deciding vote, but she throws up her hands in exasperation. In the background, I pace the points of an invisible triangle.
It’s a stalemate. We leave the girl in the water and stare at her undulating corpse as if it’s an aquarium exhibit. Nycette anxiously braids and rebraids her blonde dreadlocks while getting profoundly stoned. Daniel repeatedly pops the cartilage in his oversized nose, the only part of him that doesn’t conform with the suave pretty-boy image. Isaac sits cross-legged on a tree stump, wearing an expression so serious that his features seem squeezed into a single dot at the center of his bald head. I anxiously skip rocks several yards downstream.
Isaac is the one who breaks the silence. “So tell me this,” he says. “If we do keep it a secret, what the hell are we going to do with the body?” There’s another long pause punctuated by the plinking skip of stones. It’s Nycette who eventually answers. She exhales a fat plume of smoke. Her golden eyes are shining. “It is very simple,” she announces. “We will burn it.”
It turns out Nycette has done some reading about the rites and rituals of the Incas. According to what she remembers from a moldering anthropology text, the only honorable way to send off the dead is via funeral pyre. The flames release the soul from the cage of the dead person’s body. Set it free to travel to the afterworld. Greet its maker with a purified slate. Something like that.
Isaac rolls his eyes at Nycette’s spiritual talk, but this is obviously the perfect option. She reminds us that it’s small-minded to demean the spiritual traditions of esteemed ancient civilizations. Daniel suggests we start gathering kindling moss and fallen branches right away and reconvene tonight. He seems pleased about our secret and makes everyone swear a blood oath to return alone.
The last thing we do that afternoon is dredge the body from the bottom of the river. We wade up to our shins, stoop into the current, and each grab a limb. A cloud of silver minnows bursts from beneath the corpse and swarms our feet. We lift on the count of three. A one and a two and—. Waterlogged and rigor-stiff, the girl is heavy as a slab of stone. We heave her onto the grass. Her inert body looks as incongruous as the sculpture of an anchor displayed on shore.
When I return that night, the fire is already a thick column of light. Daniel stokes the white-hot embers and slots several plank-like pieces of wood across the top. “This is going to be good,” he keeps repeating to nobody in particular. He pulls his black mane into a ponytail and promenades around the blaze, surveying it from every possible angle. It’s unclear whether he knows what he’s doing or is simply excited to be in control.
Nycette smokes an extra-thick joint. Her pupils are tiny buoys of blackness in a sea of glitter. She stands over the body, confidently preparing the spirit inside for its journey to the heavens according to a set of half-remembered precepts. “We name her Mama Cocha,” she says. “We give her the name of the Incan sea mother.” She solemnly drapes her own shell necklace around the girl’s swollen throat. It almost covers the purple ring of clotted bruises.
Isaac stands with his back to the fire. The rippling shadows make his features flicker like an old tube television caught between stations. “You’re really okay with this?” he asks me. There is something unsettling about the ceremony, but I don’t want to break rank with the group. So I shrug my shoulders and act as if none of it really matters.
Time to put the body on the pyre. Isaac refuses to touch it on the grounds that he’s decided this whole idea is totally sick. So Nycette and Daniel hoist the corpse between them. They look queasy wrapping their fingers around the clammy, bloated limbs. The fresh air has accelerated the decomposition process. The body has pickled and the skin has started to suppurate. The mottled flesh is inhuman. They awkwardly swing the corpse back-and-forth to gain momentum. They toss it atop the fire.
It rolls off. The body lies face-down on the ground. Daniel and Nycette pick it up again, trying not to seem distressed. They get a firmer purchase on the arms and legs. Choose a better angle of approach. Pitch the body with more force. But it takes three more tries before the dead girl lies on her back atop the pyre. Her empty face stares up at the blinking stars. Flames conflagrate beneath her body, separated by only a few wooden planks. It’s a breathtaking sight. The girl looks almost majestic. I think that claptrap about the spirit might be true after all.
Then the stench. As the flames blacken the boards and catch the corpse, they unleash a consuming odor. A mixture of the raw and the curdled: Overripe fruit and mold spores; singed hair and meat rot; fresh blood and smeared shit. There’s a perfume-like undercurrent, a sweet tang that’s briny. It’s the sort of smell you can only fully register in the back of your throat as you start to gag. I smother my face with my shirt and retreat to the edge of the clearing.
Isaac screams: “Somebody take the body off the fire.” He hops in a mad circle around the flames, trying to leap close to the pyre without getting burned. Panic blurs his features and there’s a horrified glaze to his eyes. “C’est impossible to stop,” Nycette says. “Her spirit is still trapped inside.” And it really is too late. The girl’s body is completely charred. She’s a glowing cinder.
I shimmy up a tree to escape the smell. This is my first funeral. As I watch, part of me wants to obliterate the experience from my memory but part finds it exhilarating. I can’t take my eyes off the blaze. It’s several minutes before I realize what’s missing: None of us are grieving. Daniel grimly stokes the fire, determined to finish the job. Nycette chants a round of basic incantatory stuff, trying to splice into some primeval spiritual current. Isaac curses us all and flees into the woods.
The body ignites. It ruptures into a mass of flames, followed by a sickening pop. “There she goes,” Nycette shouts. The corpse is completely alight, an incandescent effigy, starting to flake off into swirling sheets of gray. The putrid smell continues, lifted by the flames and carried in the smoke toward the firmament. Ash rains down like confetti on Nycette and Daniel. They are coated from head to toe in flecks of burnt skin, but they hardly seem to notice, staring up at the sky, tracing the soul’s journey home, marveling that something up there might be looking back at them. Their upturned faces are beatific and shining.
While Nycette and Daniel are fixed in their private rapture, I leap down from the tree and slip into the woods. I need to be alone. I spend the night curled under a canopy of ferns in a clearing upstream. No matter how many times I tell myself to stop thinking about the girl’s face submerged in the cool blue current, the horrid pop of her body won’t stop echoing in my ears.

In the following days, the other kids in camp avoid Daniel and Nycette. Both their bodies give off a rank and fleshy odor. Even the canines aren’t sure how to deal with the smell; their carrion instincts are scrambled and they can’t decide whether to make a move. Nycette and Daniel are too pleased with themselves to care. They’re often seen together on nightly strolls talking cosmology in the meadow. A pack of dogs always trails a few paces behind, their noses vibrating.

Collaborations with the Collapsable Giraffe theater company and director Jim Findlay. Rave reviews in The New York Times, Time Out New York, and The Village Voice. Received numerous grants and a prestigious Obie Award for ongoing excellence. 

DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER:
A PERFORMANCE FOR A SLEEPING AUDIENCE A deeply ambient journey through Cao Xueqin’s 18th century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber — an epic love story between a stone and a flower, framed by a dizzying series of metaphysical dreams. Come grab a bed and experience performance from a new vantage. Opens Spring 2014.
BOTANICA 
Botanica examines our complex and interdependent relationship to plant life. Sealed in a human terrarium, two unorthodox botanists and a caretaker with a penchant for erotic literature unleash a flood of unusual findings and overturn the constraints of science and social norms.
 “One of 2012’s most galvanizing theater moments.” – New York Times
DAMFINOAdapted from letters written to the astronomers of the Mt. Wilson Observatory about the origins of the cosmos and inspired by the films of Buster Keaton. "The unknowable -- what inspires genius and what determines insanity? -- is a topic of serious reflection here. And as with Keaton's movies, the production toys with how novel things and unpredictable events over which we seek to exercise control have a confounding way of controlling us. Damfino is an eerie assault on the senses.” - New York Times
THE LAST CRASH…  a.k.a. PEE PEE MAW MAW
 Inspired by rock legends including Syd Barrett, Ian Curtis, Jandek, and Bucky Wunderlick, The Collapsable Giraffe made this piece about the disillusionment and terminal stasis that leads to a rock band breaking up and in the process the company itself disbanded. There were two final blow-out performances at the Collapsable Hole in Brooklyn. Hospitalizations occurred.
WITCH MOUNTAIN/BLACK TARANTULA
 A couple of orphan girls journey through the landscape of Kathy Acker’s texts, via the Dream Machine, in hopes of unraveling the mystery of their origins. They’re hijacked by female pirates who soon find themselves outmatched. The group’s final destination: Witch Mountain.