Visit with Barbara Bestor
Bec and Ruben were nervous to meet Barbara, since they were already big fans of her work. I promised to protect them if she was mean. Kidding. She's was and is the opposite of mean. We all fell into a comfortable social exchange that would have lasted a lot less time had she not been having a good time, so that was a good sign. There was a kerfuffle about her computer, lost in action, but its priceless how it was found: via an image off of Ruben's camera from the evening and he noticed it underneath the couch in the photo, and then he called her telling her he'd found it.
I'd approached Barbara about the project, and the architectural aspect of it, after re-reading Thomas Bernhard's Correction. Its not a 'date book' like Fatal Attraction is not a date movie, just to give you some idea of the tone of the book. I wasn't interested in re-capturing the tone, but I was interested in having someone approach the couple in the way the protagonist approaches building a house for his sister in the middle of the forest and how it was manifested. "... his project of constructing an extraordinary habitation, the Cone, as a present for his beloved sister... "
The main character, Roithamer, was a touch obsessed with his sister, and set out on a project to capture her essence as a building, to get her soul down as architecture. It didn't bode well for the character of the sister in the book since the mere sight of the building was too much for her brain to cope with - too much sight into self, but again, this is not the point. Barbara and I talked about capturing the essence of a couple as architecture - a psychological portrait of Bec and Ruben as a house...however loosely or directly she would want to deal with that idea.
Amazing writer to discover, or rediscover, and though not jolly, his mastery of word rhythm and subtle shift in topic. Its like a wave hitting the sand over and over again - the topics in the book (most of his books) are like waves and you don't even notice that the topic is changing - its as if the crest of the wave (topic) gets lost at sea while another germ of an idea gets sucked in from below to add to the body of the wave (topic). Its a rant that brings in new content gradually whilst beating the majority of the content over and over again into your psyche. There's also a potent section of this particular book, Correction, that deals with the empty page, the unfinished work, which I think of as the empty canvas, or whatever empty white or blank space or crumpled piece of paper with a discarded idea, that anyone may want to fill with content or meaning.
After our warm and spirited evening of introduction, Barbara interviewed Bec and Ruben about their relationship and history in a pleasant but thorough way; then we took a tour of the house, top to bottom, including the basement where Bec had recently completed an incredible and surprising sculptural installation (but that's a whole other story but It does remind me of a great piece I want to show her out in Joshua Tree by Noah Purifoy (click here for the website devoted to his life's work).
A couple of days ago, Barbara sent us these images as an entryway into her thoughts about her approach to the project. If anyone wouldn't be intrigued by these images, wake them up, they're asleep.
