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NOTORIOUS
BJD
THE BRIAN JOSEPH DAVIS STORY
 TDR tabloid executive and literary
entertainer Nathaniel G. Moore caught up with media piranha, that
should read darling, Brian Joseph Davis to discuss his life in
the modern arts. On the heels of his new book Portable
Altamont, Davis dishes the dirt on all things bright and
small. With such an eclectic subject, it was not an easy task. Here it
is, the befuddled, murky, dark, superlative Brian Joseph Davis Story.
Not to be confused with The Betty Davis Story.
www.brianjosephdavis.com
(January 2006)
*
With fashionably bloated notes and
errata courtesy of the interviewee.
Mr. Davis, Danforth Review, yes,
over here, can tell us about your artistic background…when did it all
start?
I came out of Windsor a few years
ago and in Windsor I didn’t really have what you would call a
"make things/sell things" art practice. Mostly I just created
these offensive posters. I would do a "Portable Altamont" gag (1)
on a poster and past it all over town.
And how did Windsor react to that?
I don’t think they noticed at all. I
met a few people who tracked me down because they liked the posters but
other than that I don’t know if anyone noticed. No one notices
anything in Windsor. Then I moved to Toronto and tried to be a
commercial photographer, which I rather sucked at.
 Now let us talk about they way that
books are presented to the public when they are back from the printers.
The industry calls it a launch. How do you feel about these so-called
book launches? What do they mean to you?
I think readings, as far as live
performance-based entertainment go – I think it’s cheating. How can
you fuck up with the book in your hand, I don’t understand why anyone
gets nervous on stage.
I try to do something different every
time I do a reading. Most of my projects of late involve the public as
co-creators: setting up auditions for the US presidency in the streets,
or in the case of Montreal I wanted the audience to do the reading for
me but I didn’t want to come off as arrogant. I thought I would keep
myself part of the process by setting up a video camera over my
shoulder. I would point it at my book as I was reading. That was fed to
a video monitor, and myself and Jon Paul Fiorentino [host of the event]
had managed to get the audience into a good mood about it. So, I think,
using the video and the monitor was a lot less dangerous, then had I
gotten on stage and just read silently.
The reception was really great at your
launch.
Jason’s well liked.
(2)
Nathaniel laughs.
Getting back; when you pitch an idea to
This is Not a Reading Series you have to come up with something
that interests them. What we came up with was sort of a Show and Tell.
Instead of putting forth this romantic idea of an author who sat there
alone for years and came up with their genius, like God just came and
took a magical dump in their skulls, we just admitted that we had all
these cultural references and inputs. We played examples of songs that
might have influenced our books, artwork we stole. Admitting what all
writers do.
So is this your official debut then?
Yes, my first ISBN.
As far as my writing throughout my life
I’ve never cracked the one page mark. I only recently started doing
that. So I’d never envisioned myself doing a book. Writing was always
part of something else, like a poster project or an art piece. So the
book surprised me, that I did it.
 How long had you been working on it?
It did come out as a Pocket-Canon
originally. And that was twenty-five pages. From that point on I heard
through the grape vine that my [future] [editor] [Darren] (3)
was interested in finding out who wrote it and in putting it into
consideration at Coach House. He thought it would make a great book if I
could write it to a hundred pages. So I sat down in my spare time over a
year and got it up to fifty pages. And I handed that in, and that was
actually met with a bit of displeasure. It kinda blew and it wasn’t
long enough. So another year later it was a hundred. Three years total.
Do you think your work will outlast the
references? I think that is what I’m getting at.
I consider it a comedic book. And
if you look at the history of comedy, it’s always steeped in
contemporary references. But hopefully if it’s written well enough,
the joke structure will lead us to laugh without necessarily getting the
references. About halfway through I stopped writing, believing that
Altamont would be pointless in three months. And then someone turned me
on to the writing of Rabelais, the fifteenth century French writer. He’s
making jokes about bishops who’ve been dead for four hundred years,
yet it’s still really really funny.
(4) It’s because of his whole approach, the
mercilessness of his attack is maintained after such a long time. That
got me through. The ideas that not only do the references not matter,
but it will make it a better read when the references are forgotten.
Catullus used to name-drop all the time
and have these elaborate alibis.
References aren’t the point. To me it’s
the MSG of the writing; it’s just on top.
Imagine your book with non-celebrity
stunt muses?
Could I have stand-ins? Well, my
methodology with writing was not to come up with the celebrity first.
That didn’t really matter. It was what was written around the
celebrity, or the situation or the wordplay. And I would have to wrack
my brain and search a lot of websites to find out which celebrity would
fit in, which celebrity would telekinetically move a glass to their
lips. And of course Val Kilmer worked. No one else would work for that
one. The James Spader piece was different though.
Tell us about the Cat and James Spader.
Please.
If you want the entire story,
this goes back to one of my first jobs in Windsor. I worked as a waiter
at a restaurant. And all of us on staff would sit around and get stoned
during slow times and make jokes. I think at the time Stargate
had just come out. And we realized that in toy stores, there would be
action figures of this really bizarre cast. Which included James Spader
and Jaye Davidson from the Crying Game. So we all sat around
thinking about which would be the toy figure to have from Stargate.
Davidson was voted the coolest one. But we also theorized that James
Spader’s hair would translate well into plastic. He has permanently
feathered hair (5),
and somehow in the stoner conclave it came out that he looked like a
cat. And I just carried that with me until years later I said, "I
think I’m finally going to write that James Spader cat piece
down." Much later when it came to do the footnote, I connected this
with Borges essay in Labyrinths, "A New Refutation of Time."
In which, he references a parable about "the man dreaming he’s a
butterfly or the butterfly dreaming he’s a man." I thought okay
somehow I’d be able to work this in.
And then the final touch was to ask
"What is the context for Borges saying this?" Well why not
just put him on Entertainment Tonight. OK why not and then it
works. You don’t have to justify everything.
Did you think people would riot? Was
there any hesitation in publishing the work?
No not at all. I was surprised it wasn’t
as much an ordeal as I thought it would be. Any publisher that wanted to
stay in business probably would run from this book. Kudos to Coach
House. The only problems came with the actual design of the cover in
that I really wanted to have a cover piece that was as potentially
litigious as the inside of the book. Thankfully, some feet were put down
and I relented with my suicide mission.
Anything particular against Margaret
Atwood? Is there something about Margo?
I get that question a lot and I think
people assume we have an Elton John/Eminem relationship and someday we’ll
appear on stage together and hug. Atwood being Eminem of course. I can’t
see her having a problem with it to begin with. Anyone having been a
writer in Canada for as long as she has must have a sense of humour. All
I did was accuse her of having flow.
I’ve read none of her novels but I
actually quite like her poetry.
Does pop culture oppress you? Are you
oppressed by big lights big city big celebrity?
No not at all. Celebrity is a product
that we all crave, that we all have a hand in creating. It’s not this
top-down served culture that we’re force-fed. It’s a reflection of
our wants, needs, and desires. Each of us has created celebrity culture.
And to get in there and figure out the why and how, and what you can do
with that and how you can play with that, is when it gets fascinating.
To simply hate it would be boring.
Is pop culture now an accepted part of
people’s diet?
We’re coming up against the two
prevailing opinions about pop culture. One: that it is this monolithic
thing forced upon us, and that when engaged with, reinforces all that is
wrong about contemporary society and then you have the other argument.
Which is that pop culture is something we partake in, something that is
full of both reactionary and revolutionary forces and trends. That
people can actually draw strength and identity from pop culture.
Throughout my life I’ve been in between those two opinions and I’ve
never quite figured it out. (6)
I don’t know what question I asked
here. I can’t hear my own voice for some reason.
Let’s talk about me some more.
I am working on a new book. It’s called I Tania; it’s about
the Symbionese Liberation Army and how they kidnapped a newspaper
heiress in the 1970’s and how she joined their forces. My goal is to
write this novel without ever mentioning Patti Hearst. Hearst had taken
the revolutionary name "Tania" so the book will be an
autobiography of "Tania," not Hearst. So in a way it’s a
sustained Portable Altamont gag. (7)
I’ve got a couple of new audio
projects. "Ten banned records burned then played" just
launched as a website and as part of a group show.
Another project is with the Art
Gallery of York University. It’s called "Voice Over." I
found this list of five thousand film tag lines (from trailers and radio
advertisements). Over the last few years I sorted this list out into
large chunks of narrative and I was able to string it into some kind of
story. It sat there and I pitched it a couple of publishers who didn’t
know what to think of me. So I thought it would work if I took it to a
voice over artist (8)
and had him read it in voice over style. Rather than have it as a text,
return it to its audio origin.
Nathaniel G Moore is a
Canadian tabloid star and author of Bowlbrawl (www.bowlbrawl.com)
*
EXCLUSIVE TO TDR:
PORTABLE ENDNOTES!
* No one will soon forget the spectacle
that was Nathaniel G Moore dancing with Jon Paul Fiorentino during the
half time show at the Gillers, which resulted in Fiorentino’s exposed
nipple.
1.What the fuck am I talking about?
Well, take a lot of Situationist theory (which we seemed to all be
gobbling up at the time), a lot of early 90s transgression and Xerox at
your roommate’s dad’s print shop. Things like fake interviews with
the police chief, maps for blowing up the Casino. Kid stuff. However,
for my first art show I made dolls of my favourite members of the Red
Army Faction. That, I’m very proud of coming up with as a 19 year old
miscreant.
2.Jason Anderson is the author of Showbiz.
Portable Altamont was launched alongside his book, as part of
This Is Not a Reading Series. Jason’s book is a celebrity motorcade
that cruises at an Ellroy-esqe clip and stops for just enough Palahniuk
style black humour. Highly recommended.
3. Meaning Darren Wershler-Henry.
Former child actor (Near Dark, River’s Edge) and former senior editor
of Coach House books.
4.Fart jokes people, fart jokes. There
are hundreds of them in Gargantua and Pantagruel. A
well-constructed fart joke can be as devastating and as effective as Das
Kapitol.
5.In sex, lies, and videotape
Spader actually sports the worst hairdo ever. Worse than James Hetfield’s
mullet phase. In that film it’s like Spader’s hair has taken him
over, roots fusing with his synapses and controlling his thoughts and
movements.
6.Could I possibly sound like a bigger
windbag? What; am I looking for "answers" or something?
Walking down the only road I’ve ever known? Like a drifter I was born
to walk alone?
7. Here’s an excerpt…
That night, Marx came out on stage with
his curly locks teased out, reading lines such as, "Political
economy conceals the estrangement in the nature of labour by ignoring
the direct relationship between the worker and production" while
shuffling across the stage with a cocky two-step and looking directly at
the audience after a particularly pleasing word. A simple, quick moue
from Marx then sent the audience’s cries into climax register. As his
bongo player launched into the chapter "Antithesis of Capital and
Labour. Landed Property and Capital (Get It On!)" a groupie ran on
stage with arms like grappling hooks into Marx, causing a staggered
launch into the hit thesis. After a paragraph, Marx signalled the
breakdown with a banshee cry and the quick rhythmic thrusting of his
pelvis three times. Slinging his book away, he raised his hands in the
air, clapping joyously before picking up two tambourines to aid in
frenetic response. Breaking a tambourine in half Marx, increasing the
tempo of his suggestive mince, joined his bongo man while the bass
player dove into a loud funk. With a roadie handing Marx another book,
he arched his legs into his signature splits pose, and began reading
loud random passages, scaling up and down the pages, forcing his book in
and out from between his legs, his head vibrating and turning his hair
into a black hole fro, the centre of which was held by his pained face,
suggesting cosmic love as much as the heartbreak of worker alienation.
At a point where it seemed Marx had begun speaking every word ever
spoken all at once he stopped and without a lost beat arched his back
and flung his book into the audience. A final sacrifice from Glam’s
first prince.
8. Scott Taylor, who’s voice can be
heard in the trailers for Traffic, Return of the King and others. |
