By Tom Robotham

Ever heard of Paul D. Miller, a.k.a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid?

At the risk of sounding hopelessly out of touch, let me admit up front that I hadn’t until the brochure for this year’s Lit Fest crossed my desk.

I should have, I suppose. Way back in 1997 (eons, by pop culture standards), Esquire magazine chose him as one of the 100 Best People in the World. More recently, I’m told, he figured prominently in a New Yorker article, and was the subject of an accompanying Richard Avedon photo. I happen to be a regular reader of that magazine. But somehow I missed the item on Spooky. Or perhaps I saw it and it just didn’t register.

Chalk it up to subliminal prejudice. Chances are, if I did see it, I subconsciously wrote him off as one more proponent of hip hop culture, which is something I don’t really connect with.

Left to my own devices, in fact, I probably would have left it at that. But as a longtime supporter of the Festival, and editor of this supplement, I felt obliged to learn a little more about him. Poking around on the Internet, I learned that DJ Spooky, whose real name is Paul D. Miller, was a founder of something called the "illbient" scene – illbient being a combination of the words ill and ambient. "Where ambient music often focuses on natural themes," the web posting states, "illbient has a darker focus on the urban landscape. The genre generally combines ambient, dub, hip hop, drum & bass in a downbeat rhythm with chaotic sampling, city noises and filtering to create a, generally, non-melodic track."

So far, no good.

I’ve always thought of sampling as DJ imitative noodling masquerading as art.

The next piece I came across was an essay by Miller, something called "Dark Carnival."

"Consider the following mosaic," it begins. "Possible performances. Impossible narratives. Ruptured flow. Binary Dissonance. Questions of omission. The voice divorced from the body that gave it life, the face ruptured and ripped from the skull. Electro-modernity: a spatio-dynamic, disembodied, simultaneous, play of death."

Say what?

It appeared that getting a handle on Miller was not going to be easy.

I read on, nonetheless. And low and behold, the guy starts talking about Emerson, my intellectual, spiritual and cultural guiding light for the last quarter century.

Miller focused, in particular, on Emerson’s essay "Of Quotation and Originality" in which the Sage of Concord tried to come to grips with a certain cultural inertia of his day. Americans, he believed, were too reliant on the past. But escaping the past, enjoying an original relation to the universe, as he put it elsewhere, was easier said than done. Thus Miller quotes Emerson: "Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive…that in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote."

Suddenly I was fascinated for two reasons. First, as I said, any mention of Emerson’s work makes me stop and take notice. Second, Miller’s essay, with its invocation of Emerson, shed light on an idea I’d already been wrestling with: the question of whether the Mod revival in fashion, for example, reflects cultural inertia (as I suggested in a recent column) or whether all cultural creations are, in effect, nothing more than remixes of old material.

If the latter is true, then perhaps I had too easily dismissed sampling.

In any event, this was a curious juxtaposition: DJ Spooky and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Not so odd for That Subliminal Kid, though.

Miller’s mind, like Emerson’s, appears to be inflamed, spreading like a brush fire this way and that, in accordance with his impulses. As it does, it traverses all boundaries that traditionally separate artistic disciplines.

This, says Lit Fest director Brian Silberman, is what made Miller seem like a good bet for the festival.

"As soon as I began to think about the festival I knew I wanted to expand traditional boundary of what we think of as literary," he said last week. "I initially thought of DJ Spooky in terms of sampling. He creates collages of sound, but he’s also a writer, a theorist, a visual artist."

A child, in other words, of our multimedia age. But perhaps, in some fundamental sense, no different from any other artist throughout history.

Like Laurie Anderson, Elliott Earls blends non-linear narratives, video, music and props into his compelling stage presentations

By Kenneth Fitzgerald

Elliott Earls' performances reside in a creative territory established twenty years ago but rarely explored. In the early 1980s, Laurie Anderson introduced her one-person, multi-media panoply, United States I-IV. In this groundbreaking performance, she utilized an array of high to low tech media to create a diverse yet highly personal vision of our country. Few artists since have had the ambition, vision, and ability to bring together such a pageant. In addition to mastering the instrumentation, an artist must also possess a stage presence and have something engaging to present.

Elliott Earls strides onto this stage with his own show of music, non-linear narrative and digital video, interactive projections, props, and gadgets. It is both an expansion and condensation of Anderson's effort. Advances in digital technologies (such as midi, imaging, and programming) allow Earls to truly be a one-man show, yet deploy a stunning assortment of effects.

His hybrid identity is in opposition to the artificial, commercially determined cross-media figures regularly packaged and offered by the entertainment industry. An industry figure such as J. Lo. will begin her shelf life as actress, then issue a CD, and then condense into a perfume. The process is less a pursuit of an artistic imperative than extension of a brand.

Earls' has total control of his presentation, from composing and performing the texts and music, creating the imagery (both digitally manipulated and staged photographs, and hand-drawn illustrations), and programming the interactivity to designing the typefaces for the texts. This level of detail for such a complex performance would be unheard of even a few years ago.

Though comprised of high-tech elements, the work is still stamped with Earls' personality: passionate and rough. The technology is fully in service of the vision, allowing new opportunities to express insights. The dynamic nature of inspiration and influence itself is a constant theme in Earls' work. Dynamism is also inherent in his stage actions, whether playing guitar or wielding a sledgehammer. While Earls provides much to consider in his cultural glossolalia, the mood is far from contemplative.

References to iconic figures of art and literature are spliced, woven and remixed throughout Earls' presentation. Rather than existing as academic footnotes, they actively inspire and inhabit the work. The music swings from languid, bluesy chords to hip hop imperatives. Funk rhythms predominate, yet Earls can craft a verse-and-chorus pop tune.

Earls evolved his performance through education in design and the composition of interactive CD projects. He received a M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1993 and now serves as head of its design program. His design work quickly gained attention in the field in collections of progressive design. An early poster series promoting his original type designs are part of the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.

His experimentation with video, spoken word poetry, music composition and design led him to form The Apollo Program. As his muse required, Earls has added the skills necessary to realize his creative objectives, such as teaching himself to play guitar and compose music in addition to mastering electronics. These abilities were first realized in Throwing Apples at the Sun, an enhanced CD released in 1995. In it, the static, printed posters became zones of interactivity, leading to spoken texts, films, and songs. In 1998, he followed Throwing Apples with Eye Sling Shot Lions. Both packages contain posters and a disc which provide the interactive programs, typefaces, and the ability to play them as straight music CDs. With his release earlier this year of Catfish, Earls moved into the DVD format, and further into narrative and film.

Pursuing these determinedly independent, non-commercial projects only heightened Earls' profile-and desirability-to commercial clients (though more so in Europe than the U.S.) His work includes two TV commercials for The Cartoon Network in the U. K. as well as an interactive documentary on the work of Frank Gehry for Casabella in Italy. Other Apollo Program's clients include Elektra Entertainment, Nonesuch Records, Little Brown & Co., Scribner Publishing Co, Polygram Classics and Jazz, The Voyager Company and Janus Films.

Earls' prominent role in his CD works made it almost inevitable that he would branch out into performance. As a performance artist, he was awarded an "emerging artist" grant by Manhattan's Wooster group and was a featured performer at their "Performing Garage" in 1999. Earls has been an artist in residence at Fabrica, Benetton's studio/research center in Troviso, Italy. He has travels extensively as a visiting artist at numerous American universities and given workshops on design, culture and new media in Europe and America.

Kenneth FitzGerald is an Assistant Professor of Art at Old Dominion University.

By Danny Hoch

Danny Hoch is a globally acclaimed actor, writer and solo performer. His three solo shows Pot Melting, Some People, and Jails, Hospitals, Hip-Hop have toured over 50 cities to sold out houses, and have won awards including two Obies, Edinburgh Fringe First Award, NEA Fellowship, Sundance Writers Fellowship, 1998 CalArts/Alpert Award In Theatre, 1999 Tennessee Williams Fellowship. Most recently, Mr. Hoch is the recipient of a 2000-2001 fellowship from the New School's Vera List Center for Art & Politics. Following is an excerpt from Jails, Hospitals & Hip Hop, published by Villard.

Forties, Blunts, Ho's.  Glocks and Tecs
   You got your X cap but I got you powerless

Forties, Blunts, Ho's.  Glocks and Tecs
You got your Tommy Hil but I got you
   Powerless

People be like shut the hell up when I talk
Like I shouldn't be talkin' "black," even though
   I'm from New York

But what's thatt?  A color, a race, or a state of
   Mind?
A class of people?  A culture, is it a rhyme?


If so, then what the hell am I, you might be
   sayin'?
Well, see if you could follow this flow, 'cause I
   ain't playin'

Ya see, I ain't ya average twenty-something
   Grunge type of slacker
I'm not your herb flavor-of-the-month, I ain't 
   no cracker

An actor?  Come on now, you know you wanna aks
   me
I'll use my skin privileges to gal you down a taxi

But I could act mad type of rough to flex my
   muscle
I'm also from the seventies so I could do the 
   Hustle

I been to Riker's Island, did crimes that was wrong
Smoked Blunts and drank Forties 'fore Kriss Kross
   was born!

That's true.  But so what.  I know I ain't "that"
   to you
But I can take your culture; soup it up, and sill it
   back to you

And I can sell crack to you and smack to you if
   you let me
I'm the president, the press, and your paycheck
   you sweat me

You never even met me or can fathom my derision
You try to buck my system, son, I'll lock yo ass in
   Prison

'Cause that's my mission, profit in my pocket,
   I clock it
I got billions invested in jails, you can't stop it

I'm political, I laugh at all this anti-Semitical
It makes you look weak when you try to be critical

And I laugh at all these rap videos with these guns
   and Ho's
While you strike the roughneck pose, I pick my
   nose


And flick it on ya, ya goner, no need to warn ya
I got mad seats in government from Bronx to 
   California

And I got the National Guard and plus the Navy,
Army, Air Forse, son, I got niggers paid to save me

If it every really gets to that but I doub it
'Cause these dollars that I print got your mind
   clouded

A kid steps on your sneakers and you beef with no
   Hesitation
But you never beef with my legistlation or my
   TV station

This is my game, I can't lose
When I wanna see the score I just turn on my
   news

And see you got my Glock and my Tec, aimed at
   your man neck
I got you in check and you still give me respect

Ha. That's real funny.  Mister Money.
Mister Cash Loot Blunts Ho's, Mister Dummy

Mister Car Cellular Phone, Mister Junk
You think you got props, you got jack, you the
  punk

This revolution lookin' like junk, and it sunk
With all the X caps that I sold you out my trunk

You bought my revolution and you wear it on 
   your head
And then you be talkin' 'bout, Yeah, I'ma shoot 
   you dead!

Who you supposed to be scarin', brother?
You ain't scarin' me, but you scarin' your mother

So keep buyin' this fly revolution that I'm sellin'
How much gee's I'll make off you herbs, you ain'
   no tellin'

Keep buyin' my Philly Blunt shirts and my hats
Keep buyin' my Forties, and keep buyin' them
   Gats

And I'll keep buyin' time with the cash that you
   spend
We could hang out, I'll even call you my friend

And we can watch this televised revoltuion that
   you're missin'
On the commericals that's between Rush
   Limbaugh and The Simpsons

What's the moral of this limerick that I kicked?
If you missed it, well maybe your head is thick

Or maybe your ass is too high from the Blunts
That's too bad, 'cause revolution only happens
   Once

Forties, Blunts, Ho's.  Glocks and Tecs
You got your X cap but I got you power...less

Forties, Blunts, Ho's.  Glocks and Tecs
You got your Tommy Hil and your Lex...but
   what's next?

By Michael Pearson

Michael Pearson and colleague Phil Raisor will read from their new books Oct. 1 from 2-3:30 p.m. in Chandler Recital Hall.

The first time I met Mark Twain he wasn't even Mark Twain. A long way from it, as a matter of truth. He was just a skinny red-haired young pup with freckles and a smile that hinted at the mischief about to come. He was in his father's store, standing behind his mother, half peering around her skirts to see who she was talking to. My sister was asking for an extension of credit, and he was craning his neck around to see just who was doing the begging. I didn't see much of him that day because his mother waved her arm behind her back without looking at him, like she was swatting at a fly, and said, "Scat now, Sam." Then she shook her long red hair and turned toward her husband, who stood behind the counter, stiff-necked as a preacher on Sunday, and said, "Marshall, step over here to speak with this young woman, please." Mr. Clemens wiped his hands on his apron and stepped around the edge of the counter. And Sam was gone before I could see anything but the fire in his blue-grey eyes, aflame like a cat's, as he turned tail and went out the door.

His home on Hill Street was uphill from the river and the front door to his house opened directly onto a road that was only a stroll to the main street. My family had moved across the way from him, along North Street, into a big old barn of a house with as many pigs and dogs as children. We were as different as moonlight and the illumination from a candle, Sam and me, but I could tell from his glance the first time we saw one another that we had something in common and that our lives would be intertwined like brothers.

In a manner of speaking, I fell in love with Mark Twain that day, before he even truly existed, the way a boy can fall in love with another, admire him so much that he would follow him anywhere without losing a hair of confidence. He was nearly two years younger than me but he always seemed older and smarter than any of the boys I knew. From the very beginning, he struck me as a person who could imagine just about anything into life. I knew right away that he was the kind of boy who would make life interesting. If it hadn't been for the love and admiration I held for him from the start, it wouldn't have been as hard for me when he convinced himself that I had betrayed him.

By Phil Raisor

Philip Raisor, who teaches modern literature at ODU, has contributed to numerous literary journals, including The Southern Review, Contemporary Literature, Tar River Poetry and The Writer's Chronicle. His memoir Outside Shooter has just been published by University of Missouri Press. Following is an excerpt from the book.

Maybe it was the begonia’s rush of color on the Louisiana State University campus or the contours of the Greek Theater near Tiger Town, but I had a thought that was both fresh and ancient. I would drift for a while, recover, start anew. Occasionally that spring of 1958 I attended classes, shot some hoops in the gym, and took in a few Fellini movies, but mainly I wandered around, absorbing the Spanish architecture and the creaking and slipping sounds of the Mississippi River. Only once, sitting on a bar stool in the Unicorn Bar and Grill, did I grind away at my failures the previous year at Kansas University. I had blown my chance to play on the Jayhawks with Wilt Chamberlain. I had hated fraternity life. I had lost the love of my life. But a few more drinks and I saw things differently: I had another basketball scholarship and was eight hundred miles from the past. Louisiana had struck me as a wonderfully exotic place where Herbert was pronounced A-bear and bayous and Huey Longs were not impossible to imagine. Three Saturdays in a row I hitchhiked from Baton Rouge to New Orleans just to be on the road. It wasn’t as hard as I had thought to tell myself: "Get on with you life. Get on with it."

One of the first things I wanted to do was go to Mardi Gras. I’d seen pictures. I’d heard stories. How better to get on, to get down the road, than to cop a disguise, disappear into a festival, and wander raucously through Bourbon Street. Throw away the middle-class basketball player who had plenty of sunlight and let him come back anonymously. All my life I had been a growing plant in the window, admired and tended. Now, though wilted, I had dug myself up. That’s where I wanted to be for now – a root system dangling in the wind. Because of NCAA transfer rules, I could not play on the LSU team until the following January, so I had one year to reinvent myself. Maybe discover myself. On Fat Tuesday I headed toward New Orleans to get started, smelling already the steaming crawfish etoufee.

In the French Quarter, where darkness had been shoved aside, I wandered into the damndest trap. After a Hurricane drink at Pat O’Brien’s and a couple of beers at Pete Fountain’s, I slipped easily into a snake of people, masked and chanting, who tossed beads up to balconies and caught flowers coming down. Two pale arms slipped around my neck and I was kissed below my own half-mask. Then she was gone. I felt jostled and grabbed my back pocket, but my billfold was still there. A circle formed and I was linked to a skeleton’s elbow that spun me into a fluffy cat on stilts that flapped and danced its paws on top of my head. Someone shouted "Boogaloo!" and I guess that’s what we started doing. Then I was pushed through a door into a packed bar and hand was unbuttoning my shirt. "Let’s loosen up," a male voice said, and I was kissed again. I jerked away and, pinned between town bodies, caromed against a pillar. I was free, backing out like a gunslinger a t a showdown. When a street vendor offered me a hot dog, I laughed and chose a slice of pizza instead. With another beer in hand and another ensemble forming, I joined the revelry for a nightlong dance. I knew no one. I was no one. I was just music in a honky-tonk town.

By Rick Skwiot

I'll tell this story as best I can, but it happened so long ago that it comes to me as a fable, something vivid yet remote. And it seems even more distant because so much has changed so quickly, so much has been lost, irretrievably. For me that change began here, on Long Lake, at Christmas 1953….

I: Christmas Eve

Translucent glass. Morning light waking me on the back porch, where I insist on sleeping even in coldest weather. The sun refracts through Jack Frost scrollwork painted on storm windows that replaced summer screens, those covered during hot thunderstorms by a beige tarp nailed to a beanpole and lowered on ropes.
I lie in my narrow bed, peeking out from layered blankets covering me, studying patterns on the glass. There on the sill a sweet-potato plant and a carrot grow from two jelly jars I keep filled with water, now topped with ice.
My robe-brown wool plaid with white twine belt-lies on the foot of the bed. I manage to turn and worm my way under the blankets to it and pull the cold robe into my warm burrow. I get my arms into the sleeves, tie the belt tight, and rise with the blankets wound round me Indian-style. My stockinged feet find wool-lined slippers resting on the frigid floor. I shuffle to the far end of the boxcar-sized room where an iron stove sits.
There I kneel, open the coil-latched door, and peer inside to find dim coal ash on the iron grate. As I shake the grate by its metal handle, gray ash sifts below revealing glowing orange coals. From a galvanized bucket to my right I feed fresh coal into the stove with a black tin shovel until the bucket is empty.
…Coal bucket and tin shovel in hand, I push out the back door into a still cold that stings my face, careful not to let the screen-door slam and wake my parents and big brother, who sleep within the house. Though it really isn't a house. Just an old fishing shack on the banks of a long-dead branch of the Mississippi, a summer clubhouse, as they are called, which my family has made into a year-round home. Let them sleep, I think, while I stoke the stoves so they can wake to a warm house….
…By gray morning light I find the coal bin door and pull it open. With the tin shovel I fill the bucket resting on the gravel floor, black dust rising earthy to my nose. Using both hands I lug the coal past the Plymouth and back toward the house, clouds of warm breath hanging before me in the still air and settling damp onto the false-fur collar of my coat.
Inside I doff the coat and carry the coal through the dark kitchen and into the living room, where another stove sits cold. I steal over the worn carpet, place the coal beside the stove, and kneel to open the door and shake the grate. Making as little noise as possible, I load coal into the stove and shut the iron door. I rise to put an ear first to the door of my parents' bedroom then to that of my brother but hear no one stirring.
As I turn back, my eyes fix on the Christmas tree standing tall and dark in the corner, its unlit star on top nearly touching the ceiling. On it hang strings of popcorn laced on waxed thread, chains of red and green construction-paper strips glued with flour paste, gingerbread men adorned with white icing buttons and raisin eyes (all of which I helped make), scant store-bought ornaments, and meager strands of colored electric lights that go black every time one bulb blows. As I kneel before it, the green fragrance of balsam resin comes to me. I gaze at a fragile globe of silver glass hanging by a mere thread, a precarious little world afloat in black space. In the ornament I see a distorted reflection of my own face, eyes oversized, as if my dominant feature.
I focus next on the manger beneath the lowest branch. The scene of the infant Jesus, Joseph, and Mary surrounded by animals in the still night fills me with a sense of warm well-being. I lie on my stomach under the tree, gazing at the family secure in the manger.

A Conservation with Sarah Vowell

Nothing gets past Sarah Vowell. In her books Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, and "Partly Cloudy Patriot," her columns or appearances on NPR’s This American Life or Late Night with Conan O’Brien, the social observer and author has been known to wax humorous/poignant on a wide variety of subjects from the experience of visiting the Gettysburg battlefield to the existentialism of former Cowboys head coach Tom Landry to the controversial 2000 presidential election, in which her party’s candidate, former Vice President Al Gore, was defeated. Vowell, who will deliver a speech at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 2, at Old Dominion University as part of its annual Literary Festival and the President’s Lecture Series, talked with Jay Lidington Sept. 12 by telephone from New York City.

A: Ambivalence always has a place where human beings are concerned, what with nobody being perfect and all. I’m less ambivalent (now) because things are less ambiguous. If you had a heart at all, and I would like think that I do, a lot of the ambivalence in that book and in that story is just about empathy and even empathizing with people I disagree with, such as the president. But a couple of years down the line, I’m much less empathetic toward him and his plight. It’s one thing to feel sorry for the president when a bunch of people just died. It’s another thing to feel for him when a bunch more people are dying because of his policies. I don’t want to hate him and I don’t want to hate what he does, and I guess the nice thing about that horrible season of horrible air and horrible feelings was that I really wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt. Not so much anymore.

A: That was probably the last straw, I would say. I have my ideals and all. But I’m a realistic person. When it comes down to death, I’m against it. Anti-death, that’s me. Death always wins anyway, right? Johnny Cash died today. He’s one of the great heroes of my life. And he got to live an incredibly long, full, amazing life with a cherished marriage and children he loved and records he’s proud of and a late-breaking career flourishing, and he still died. We don’t really need to help death along.

A: I think my doubts are something I can offer people. The thing about the people who usually yak in public is they are usually sure about things: people on the extreme right; people on the extreme left; people who think they have all the answers and want to shout to the rooftops that they do. Ninety percent of the rest of us are kind of in the middle saying, "Well, I can sort of see both sides and what about X, Y and Z? I have these misgivings." (The people shouting) are right and they’re also wrong. There aren’t all that many people in the middle (shouting,) saying, "I’m confused. How ‘bout you?"

A: Johnny Cash, I’m so sorrowful about that. But I have to say John Ritter interests me, also. He has a real dark side that appealed to me and, like, I loved this guest appearance he did on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when he played Buffy’s mom’s boyfriend who turned out to be a robot. That was an amazing performance, like he was this Stepford nice guy, but then he turned into this horrible meanie and he was hitting Buffy. It was so depraved, which is so cool. He also would do these things on the Conan (O’Brien) show where they have these movie stars do their confessions and he was really funny at that. He was a very perverse guy in a way that I liked.

Johnny Cash…he’s on my Mount Rushmore, that’s for sure. Not just his voice or his songs; it was just the way he talked or the way he was, the way he said things. I’m working on a radio story about him for the radio show next week about the song, "Ring of Fire." So I’ve been looking through Cash, (his autobiography), which is a really good book. He ‘s from Arkansas and there’s that Arkansas/Eastern Oklahoma/Eastern Texas/Western Missouri/sort of Mark Twain/Tom Sawyer/Woodie Guthrie lingo that I’m very attracted to and was born into myself. He ‘ll be sitting on his porch remembering things and he’ll say things like, "This is good land." That’s an amazing sentence. I was really encouraged by the last 10 years of his career. After you do your job for awhile, you wonder "When am I gonna burn out?" He had this second wind at the end where he did all those great records. He does that charming little Beck song about the rowboat and he’s doing Nine Inch Nails, "The Beast in Me," etc. How stark and American and huge those records sound, even though most of them are just him and a guitar.

A: The last few months, I haven’t been keeping track of new music, but right now the thing I’ve been listening to a lot is the original cast recording of Steven Sondheim’s musical, Assassins. I think it tanked when it opened on Broadway because people don’t want to listen to presidential killers sing and dance….

A:….but not me. I saw a production of it in Massachusetts last month and it’s so funny and the songs are good. Within the last year, the Camper Van Beethoven box set came out and I used to love them so much and had forgotten about how much I loved those songs. The thing I like about them is it’s not the usual "I liked this when I was younger" nostalgia trip. So many of the songs are all very Cold War and "Joe Stalin’s Cadillac" and "My Revolutionary Sweetheart," all that sort of Commie iconography that people on the Left would sort of flirt with and refer to, that was just such a part of our lives. It’s nice to remember that. That sort of felt like going home to the 20th Century. I should get some new records, I guess.