R.I.P. Scottie Agar Jaickes

Posted on November 28, 2009 by Larissa Archer


A friend of mine died a few nights ago. We worked together at my old theater company in San Francisco. I met him the summer I spent reading Steinbeck and so I’ve always associated the two of them–perhaps because Scottie shared the great author’s sense of social justice, and perhaps because he lived on and worked a plot of land in northern California, and seemed like an ideal Steinbeck character: smarter, of course, and more self-aware than Lennie, but innocent and quiet, kind, innately intolerant of gossip, pettiness, and malice. His forearms were tattooed with bombs and other weaponry (which he jokingly or maybe not jokingly referred to as his “prison tatts”) and he spoke in a rough street dialect, but I only ever knew him as gentle and wise, with an astute and disinterested sense of what’s fair and what’s not, someone you could speak with safely. His great strength as an actor was that he was bold enough to be dull onstage–and was therefore riveting. I think what turns a lot of people off the theater is that so much of the time you can sense an actor’s anxiety about his own performance, in his perceptible over-eagerness to please, to provoke, to elicit sympathy, to convince, and worst, to entertain. At best, this is, in the revelation of the lack of self-trust at its base, unmoving or even embarrassing for the audience, and at worst, something that reads as pandering which the audience rightly rejects with disdain. You could always relax watching Scottie because you knew that he wouldn’t subject you to any “acting.” The limitations he placed on himself (he didn’t do accents or adjust his already singular physicality from role to role) were made up for by an unfussy realism that made much of what passes on the major stages of the theater world look like desperate showing-off.

I’m not a psychologist and wouldn’t presume to draw a link between Scottie’s talent as an actor and his best traits as a person, but I’d like to think that they are connected. I will miss him, onstage and off.

Posted in damn good, theatre | 1 Comment

Santa Fe, Bandolier, and Magdalena

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Larissa Archer

Yes. That’s me. with a gun. Steve Bodio showed me the basics of pointing and shooting and shooting range etiquette when I visited him and Libby in Magdalena, southern New Mexico, with Peculiar and Mrs. Peculiar. That’s a “London Best” I’m holding.

in a volcanic ash cave in Bandolier.

Steve with his ….falcon. or goshawk?….oh no I’m going to be in trouble if I’ve named it incorrectly. damn! I watched her devour a quail in about a minute and a half. It was terrifying and bloody, and I can still hear the crunch of bird-bones in its beak. Who needs TV?

Dancing with Lee the Rancher at the Golden Spur in Magdalena. Mr. and Mrs. Peculiar and I slept that night in an RV in the Spur’s parking lot. It was cozy.

Peculiar perched on the ruins….

Posted in my travels | 1 Comment

Here we go again…

Posted on August 15, 2009 by Larissa Archer

I’m back in New York now and have to do something with my life, or at least, to find a job and stall. After a cocky start with the New York Times journalism and education job market, by the end of the first week I was fashioning ways to pad out my resume so I could more confidently answer the craigslist fetish ads. This all induced the sort of motivational narcolepsy that makes sighing myself to death seem the lesser of two evils, the other evil being something I can’t bother myself to come up with. So the next week I spent flopping from one supine attitude of self pity to another, unwashed and awash in drowsy consideration of the difficulties of my life. Finally I decided there had to be more to life than stoned iphone tetris and facebook snooping, and that I should perhaps take a shower and go into the city.

The level of purpose one needs just to walk down the street here is preternatural. The ambition, the exuberance, the if-I-can-make-it-there, I’ll-make-it-anywhere self-belief is only uplifting if you share it yourself, and you can only share it to the same degree if you haven’t already gone through the slogging, the day-to-day smackdowns, the landslides of rejections, and the regular revelations of your own minuteness that comprise New York’s hazing ritual for the newly arrived. The benchmarks of adulthood, like finding employment that justifies your education, accommodation better than your college dorm, financial independence from your parents, are at their most elusive here. It’s not that you lose your hope, it’s that you go from having huge, king-of-the-hill dreams, to weeping with self-pride over landing a job in something other than catering. Looming larger is the spectre of what you might become if you don’t save yourself from failure. You know you have to succeed at something—who cares what—or turn into one of those people barricaded in their studio apartments by piles of dried catshit and unsent letters to Mayor Koch, who pass their time in picking skintags and talking to cockroaches. You become an American English eccentric, except unlike actual English eccentrics, other Americans don’t regard you in your sphincter-cringing social inappropriateness as a quaint national personage. New Yorkers can achieve orgasm through schadenfreude alone, and there’s only one side of that word you want to be on.

It occurred to me that now that I’m in America, I could put my networking skills back to use. I’ll say this for New York—it doesn’t pretend not to function in significant part by nepotism. One of the less admirable aspects of London is that it, too, is ruled by nepotism, but pretends not to be. You’re not supposed to mention it, or admit it’s there, or suggest to anyone who has achieved anything that nepotism had anything at all to do with it, or, worst of all, attempt to make it work for you. English nepotism works in such a way that, hustle all you like, you’re not cooking with gas unless your name and alma mater are doing their part. Most helpful is sharing a surname with other people who have already achieved renown in your field, and barring that, go to Oxford for politics, or Cambridge for the arts. Of course it helps you get into either if someone else of your surname also went there, particularly if they went on to achieve renown in their field. So the English have developed a system that allows them not to have to sully themselves with gauche American-style “pushiness”–that so-undignified compulsion to make colleagues out of friends and friends out of colleagues. They’ve made a virtue of showing they don’t have to stoop to self-promotion–that’s all the famous English self-deprecation is about–and they’ll put their smugface on if you so much as ask them to pass along your resume. New Yorkers are more honest. They accept that connections are how it’s done and expect you—in fact, don’t respect you unless you sniff out opportunities everywhere you go and do your damnedest to exploit them, whether you came from the right family or went to the right schools or not.

I still have a few acquaintances and ex-colleagues here from the first go-around. First I contacted the ones who hadn’t already fired me. Most had changed careers in the three years I’d been gone. Sometimes I think taking a Notes From Underground approach to life is good for a laugh, and choose my next move based on what could make the most hilariously terrible story. So I called Richard, my old editor at New York Moves. People who pretend they’re above eating shit miss out on all the fun, I say. Alas, he never responded to the message I left on his voicemail. Other colleagues were from jobs regrettable except for their blogability, and I’ve already written that story; I’m too old to find amusement in sacrificing myself to someone else’s robber baron dreams. And so I’m left with the less entertaining, last resort, which is to start over clean—back to those grim job market pages.

Most positions listed have names I don’t even understand, names with words in them like development, support, coordinator, IP Telephony, unpaid. And most have descriptions that would make Bartleby consider retraining. The unbelievable thing is how the employers don’t even bother to mask the disparity between what they expect of applicants and what they’re offering. A benefitless part-time position writing ad copy for a manufacturer of beige thread in a Hoboken basement requires a post-graduate degree in journalism, a working knowledge of Quark, whatever that is, and preferably a previous internship at the White House. On their applications they ask you to describe your leadership skills and an event wherein you showed yourself to be a “team player.” The worst, though, was when I applied to work at the famous Strand bookstore. Along with all the usual fill-in fields on its application there’s a ten-question author-to-title match test. I could only answer six of them. I saw that there was an inaccurate match-up, where it listed Master and Margarita, but not Bulgakov, and Dostoevsky, but nothing by him. I considered scribbling ”Fuck your trick questions” in the margin and flouncing off but realized that wouldn’t make it any less humiliating not to be able to complete the quiz. To be fair, the only qualifications one should ever have to cite on The Strand’s job application form are whether one can look bored and be unhelpful, but I thought pointing this out to the human resources manager wouldn’t help my case. The only thing I had on my resume that might have put me ahead of the emo throngs who apply there every day is that I studied the “great books” program at college, and now I proved, to them and to myself, that not only do I not know the stuff I didn’t study, I don’t even know the stuff I studied instead of the stuff I didn’t study. And then it asked me whether I knew how to use a cash register. I staggered down the stairs and out onto Union square with crinkled chin, pretending that I’d got something stuck in both contacts.

I’m still looking. I’ll let you all know whether I find anything newsworthy.

Posted in crap jobs, my neuroses | 3 Comments

announcing…..

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Larissa Archer
By Larissa Archer

<a href="http://www.blurb.com/books/891246&quot; force="true" only_path="false" style="color:#fd7820; text-decoration:none;" title="Book
Preview”>Book Preview
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Barcelona, Mon Amour

Posted on February 23, 2009 by Larissa Archer

Yes, I’m in Barcelona now. Off to Madrid tomorrow! Here is my haiku on the continuing construction work on the Sagrada Familia:

Stupid ugly crane
Ruining my photographs
Fuck you, crane.

on the roof of Casa Pedrera

at the Palau de la Musica Catalan


Escribo, a bakery on La Ramblas


at Schilling

Posted in my travels | 2 Comments

R.I.P. Anne Berven

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Larissa Archer

I sang in Anne’s chamber choir all four years of college. I think it might have been the most enriching artistic experience of my life, and my college years certainly would not have been the same without it. I have many things to thank her for, foremost of which is introducing me to some fantastically beautiful music, and teaching me to listen to it, as well as sing it. I’m sure anyone lucky enough to have sung with her, been coached by her, or studied in her music class would concur. Her ear for how a piece should be sung: in what voice, which sections should stand out from the others and when in order to “tell the story” more clearly, how to keep from going flat when singing in French—was masterly. Perhaps these are all prerequisites for musical directors, but it’s surprising how many professional choirs sing Rachmaninov as if it were Mozart, or Palestrina as if it were Poulenc, or why some of them bring out the tenors in Russian music when the bassos clearly have the melody (that is if one should ever bring out the tenors over the bassos in Russian music).

Anne also taught me a lesson for which I’m grateful. Sometimes she reproached me for not having continued my music studies after college. She asked me once a few years ago, “How could you treat music like it’s this thing you can dabble with and then throw away, like it’s not worthy of a place in your life?” I bring this up because for me it was a new way of thinking about art—it is not just something to amuse yourself with while you pursue things you respect more; an art form such as music is something towards which one has a responsibility, like a person, or a political cause—not to be treated lightly. People often talk of theatre and responsibility, but the context is usually that of rescuing that art form from failure-by-inanition, or that of an artist’s responsibility to the audience, to move, to educate, to provoke. Anne was speaking of music as though it were itself a human being with a soul and dignity, and that to love it meant to honor it somehow—through continued consideration, examination, participation. It is not just something to entertain yourself with when nothing’s on TV, but something requiring an active and sustained, intellectual as well as emotional (and physical, for practitioners), study. I believe she felt music to be as much of an educator as are books, and that to disrespect it is to let a major aspect of one’s self, of one’s soul, atrophy. It might say something more about my own retardation that I hadn’t considered this until given a talking-to in my mid-twenties; nevertheless, I’m grateful that Anne was as critical as she was generous, and taught me this lesson unasked, which she did over chocolate martinis at Geronimo, a posh restaurant in Santa Fe where we sometimes went when we wanted to feel glamorous and get drunk.

She was also one of the funniest people I’ve known, and her humor added another delightful aspect to our rehearsals, which were never without laughter. I shall miss her.

Posted in ART, damn good, Music | 3 Comments

Sometimes London is Funny

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Larissa Archer

http://www.youtube.com/get_player

This is what I did last night. I didn’t play; I just shouted along with the players. I didn’t realize there were so many people who knew how to play the ukelele. And that they all get together every wednesday night for a play-and-sing-along. London really surprises me sometimes. More surprising, however, was how many couples were making out. I didn’t manage to videotape them (I definitely would have if I had been able to get a good shot–privacy be damned!). But…..so is ukelele music some big untapped aphrodesiac or something?

Posted in London, Music | 1 Comment

Stupid Magazines

Posted on November 7, 2008 by Larissa Archer

I was recently invited to submit some work to a new luxury magazine. That’s right—a magazine celebrating wealth, leisure, and conspicuous consumption. The editor sent me a list of possible topics including an examination of whether one should buy, part own, or lease private air travel, a spread on the custom interiors of the yachts of the world’s super-rich, and profiles on “Russian billionaires and their money: How they earned it and what they spend it on.” These are the one-off features for the first edition, and will be added to the regular stories on the current most attractive countries for basing off-shore businesses and the world’s poshest postcodes. The commissioning editor assembled and sent out these story ideas whose every tagline ends with, “when money is no object,” in the week Washington Mutual was devoured whole by JP Morgan Chase, a large hunk of London’s City was spontaneously laid off, the country of Iceland collapsed, and the US Congress was sweating over a preposterous bailout plan it would shortly reject, add another $180B to in special interest money, and finally pass in despair.

The story ideas were accompanied by a long-winded and dissembling paragraph on the humble scale of the magazine’s editorial budget and that therefore, Vivo, the world’s newest international luxury magazine, with headquarters in London and Dubai, unfortunately could not pay its writers. However, writers who brought with them contacts who proved lucrative would, at some future point when presumably the rag would have become the nouveau riche’s favorite monthly guide to untrammeled money-flinging, be “rewarded.” This, however, was not to say that we would be encouraged to “sell” anything. Except, of course, our fondness for social justice and our dignity.

This is obviously a laughable and outrageous example of the everyday iniquities served to people with talents other than capitalist pig-doggery. That a magazine glorifying new and unchallenged wealth is not able to, or willing to, offer its contributors even the usual niggardly compensation accorded freelance writers just makes it all the more eminently bloggable. Oh, the irony! Even an American can see it!

But actually, my guess is that most magazines not owned by Conde Nast operate by the same financial model. To an extent, it’s understandable. Writers want to be published and are often willing to work for little or no money, as long as they get a by-line, especially when they are starting out. I was. Contributor compensation is one thing a publisher can scrimp on, unlike the immovable costs of printing and throwing launch parties. Sometimes, however, one has to ask whether the magazine is betraying its own raison d’etre by paying little or nothing to the brains and labor behind it.

Take my old glossy, New York Moves Magazine. It looked like an upscale operation. It was printed on high-quality, thick paper, its office was in a hip loft space in Tribeca, and it threw regular parties in various venues of middling swankiness (though these might have been “rented” with advertising space). The only people I knew of to be on a proper payroll were the managing editor and the art director, both of whom were clearly paupers. Long-term readers of my blog will recall that my relationship with New York Moves came to an end when it surfaced to both the publisher, Moonah, and me that the editor, Richard, had been paying me twice the rate Moonah had allocated. In my fight to retain the salary, I had several arguments with Richard, the gist of which was basically,

Me: “I’m worth that much and more. Put some pants on and stand up for me!”

Richard: “I know you are but we simply don’t have the money and Moonah, who wears my pants, will never agree to it. ”

I never took the argument to what I now see as the next logical step:

“Why, then, should you bother to maintain this crummy magazine at all?”

If this seems an odd response to the modus operandi of this and countless other enterprises—theatres, art spaces, literary journals—consider that the “concept” of this magazine is supposedly a celebration of female empowerment. The subline is “Fashion and Lifestyle for the New York Career Woman.” They even dedicate an issue every year to New York’s “power women,” successful career women who would probably never dream of giving their time away. In his mission statement, Richard says, “I wanted to create a magazine for smart women that treated them like the sentient beings they are.” The magazine sets itself up as an arbiter of the ever-advancing status of womanhood. So how can it claim in good faith that female empowerment is its main interest when it expects women–and its staff is mostly female–to work for pennies or for free? What is more empowering than to be able to feed yourself and pay your rent through hard work and painstakingly-developed talent? Or, perhaps this is clearer: How discouraging is it to not be able to feed yourself or pay your rent despite your hard work and painstakingly developed talents? So many womens’ magazines purport to be created with the same concept in mind—the empowerment, the advancement, the celebration of all things female—and, so many of them work on a similarly sigh-inducing budget. New York Moves and all its indistinguishable sisters preach empowerment but offer their own staffs only the opportunity to be used. The operation is hypocritical at its core.

Then there’s the implied insult to the readership, and not only that of cynically selling an idea they do not uphold in practice. I wonder how all the upwardly mobile, educated, ambitious career women who read these magazines would feel if they knew they were being lectured on new-wave feminism by 20 year-old interns doing work experience for their B.A.’s at the New School? Likewise, how would Donald Trump feel knowing that the “pimp my yacht” feature he’s reading in Vivo was written by some part-time coat-check boy who’s only ever seen a yacht on Dynasty? Some of the writing that makes it to print makes me wonder if people ever feel insulted that magazine publishers, or editors, assume they are not discerning enough to recognize bad writing or weak thinking. It’s not unheard of for good writers, even ones with some experience of the world, to be willing to write (or edit, or design, etc.) for free or little money, but a lot of the time in magazine publishing, people work at the level their skills merit. Face it, when people get really good at what they do, they start to expect to get paid for it. Most exceptions to the rule occur for the opposite scenario: the mystifying ability of people with paltry talents to land plum gigs at otherwise reputable publications (Independent, I’m looking at you and your sex columnist!) Apart from the occasional exception, the reader gets what the magazine pays for.

Maybe this is an overly-idealistic expectation, but no matter how noble the convictions and progressive the message a project has, if it is unable to function without violating those convictions and that message, then the project is a fraud and should be quit. When Oedipus realizes that he has lived his life mired in the horrors he sought to escape, he doesn’t rationalize the disaster. He doesn’t say, “Well it’s not ideal; of course I really wish things could be different, but on the bright side, if I hadn’t married my mother and killed my father I wouldn’t be where I am today, so I might as well just carry on.” No, he stabs his eyes out. These magazines, on the other hand, are run by people so arrogant as to believe their vanity projects more important than the ideologies which supposedly form the foundation of those projects. Instead of, er, stabbing their eyes out, they rationalize their hypocrisy and carry on. At New York Moves and its like, where they pretend to support Women’s Advancement while denying their own women this most basic tool for advancement, or at Vivo, the magazine dedicated to other people’s money, the survival of the magazine itself justifies the negligence of its philosophy, its content, and its creators.

All of my adult life I’ve been asked to work for free. My education was enormously expensive, and it taught me to do things that I fight and fail to use in even a humbly gainful way. The only steady and above-board (and still pathetic) money I’ve ever been able to make has been in jobs I didn’t need to graduate from middle school to perform. I’ve never had much patience for the common attitude that if I wanted to ensure that I could make a living I should have gotten a ‘proper’ degree and then a ‘proper’ job. It’s akin to saying that art and ideas are not important and that sensible people don’t bother with them, and if they do, they shouldn’t expect any better than to live out their lives as paupers. I think we can and should expect better. Putting the guilt on those pursuing traditionally risky vocations is just letting the people who exploit them off the hook. For every writer, or actor, or artist, or designer (and the list goes on) willing to “give it away” there are many others who can’t get a paid job as a result. No one at the helm of an enterprise will conduct it with integrity unless he is compelled to do so. And no one, not the apathetic consumers, not the opportunistic employers, and not the breathless interns or workers resigned to hobbyism, is providing that necessary compulsion.

I can’t think of an ending sentence. Maybe I should get an intern. Any takers?

Posted in Publishing rants | 5 Comments

R.I.P. Yma Sumac

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Larissa Archer

One of my favorite singers has died. Her passing has been overshadowed by the big news of the day–but here’s a brief example of her work for those who don’t know her.

Posted in damn good, Music | Leave a comment

If Schlock Shops were Bedbugs…..

Posted on October 16, 2008 by Larissa Archer

I’m beginning to worry about an unpleasant infestation occurring in my neighborhood of Kilburn. Every couple of weeks a grocery store or hardware shop closes and is replaced by a haphazard set-up shilling “leather” handbags for under a fiver or clothes your mother wouldn’t let you wear for two pounds. These shops comprise long stretches of the high road, rendered useless to residents who aren’t in the market for goods that fall apart if you breathe too hard on them. Of course the uncomfortable underlying knowledge is that it is unlikely that the companies employing people to make products that you can buy with the loose change from the bottom of your purse employ practices which would land them in Fortune Magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For” list. But disregarding the murky social politics of it all, how much tat do Northwest Londoners need?

Kilburn High road has long hosted all sorts of bargain shopping, from Traid, my favorite fair-trade-supporting charity shop, to vast and varied pound shops that actually sell stuff for a pound. It’s heaven when you’re broke and you need bulk paracetemol, no-name drain cleaner, cheap Toblerone, or a sari painted with glitter glue. It’s also always had a lot of stores selling, well, crap. Blouses with cut-out bellies, plastic shoes, and of course the ubiquitous handbags, both knock-offs and ones that could only dream of knocking-off. But the number of this sort of shop has risen alarmingly in the past year.

It started with the closure of my local Sommerfield’s. This upset me, even though Sommerfield’s is the poor man’s Sainsbury’s (that is to say, poor indeed) mainly because it stocks black cherry-flavored Amore yoghurt, which Sainsbury’s does not, despite my pleas. But it was also odd to see a store in no danger of collapse close a branch in such a busy area. Unsurprisingly, residents of that postcode, of whom I am one, shortly after received notice that several buildings on that block with the Sommerfield’s store would in the coming year be gutted, renovated, and built up to include two additional stories of luxury condos. Sommerfield’s had simply shut up and moved out early. Within a week the large store housed the new “Amazon Discount Clothing,” with bargain racks pushed out onto the sidewalk and signs in the window reading, “Closing Down: Everything Must Go!” from the day it opened. A few months after, the other shops in that block of buildings, which include an army surplus store, a home and houseware emporium, a Muslim-friendly clothing boutique, and a suitcase shop, had all posted their closing down signs. Some businesses have just vanished, and in their places, having arrived as swiftly as the previous occupants had left, are the new bag-and-shoe shacks. It’s not only on that block of the high road where the luxury condos wait to be built and, no doubt, snapped right up in this fertile economy. Across the road, Soho Books has closed. Hand bags, again. Hand bags made of plastic leather, with plastic metal furnishings and plastic zippers and plastic fringe hanging off the plastic zipper grips. Hand bags that smell like car exhaust. Hand bags that melt if you leave them in the sun.

What the hell are Londoners carrying around that we need this extraordinary supply of cheap sacks to carry it in? And why are they all in Kilburn?? I have to bring my own tote to the grocery store now that the big chains are too eco-friendlier-than-thou to hand out plastic bags to customers. Where’s the outrage against the plastic tat industry? And how is it that wherever you open a Starbuck’s, all the other coffeeshops within a mile-radius wither and die, but somehow the presence of a giant Primark on the high road isn’t any threat to the cluster of equally low-end mini-marts sprouting up like mushrooms in its shadow? Is there a level of “tacky” where the rules of supply-and-demand just don’t apply anymore? Huge banks are collapsing and entire economies teetering toward abjection. Are the schlock shops the cockroaches of the retail world? Vile, but hardy enough to survive the economic winter in which creatures of better mettle perish?

Posted in London | 1 Comment