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WASHINGTON DC – BLAKE MEMORIAL

Last night at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Silver Jew David Berman, who served as a collaborator on one of the late Jeremy Blake's video projects, Sodium Fox, bid Blake farewell and played some bare-bones versions of songs that will appear on his upcoming record, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea to a crowd of about 100 in a columned, blue, and utterly decent auditorium where, I have to believe, Newt Gingrich has rented and held "air debates" with now deceased American statesmen and not coincidentally won them all…

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Gingrich: Sorry, Mr. Jefferson. If you'd read my first book, it came loaded with caveats. One is that when your wife has cancer, you learn to listen more closely to the needs of your penis.

Thomas Jefferson: [nothing]

Gingrich: (to assistant) Are you getting this? On the video I mean? When I go down to speak at the Citadel I want to do more than just wear fucking knickers, okay?

Museum Attendant: Mr. Gingrich is everything okay?

Gingrich: (to attendant) There'll be time for questions after I'm done filleting T.J.

Anyway, if you only know Blake from the amazingly wild tales surrounding his and his girlfriend Theresa Duncan's (check out her blog here) demise at their own hands, or more simply, from his work on the cover of Beck's Sea Change, the Corcoran retrospective, which ends in about five minutes, is armed with all the awesome you need.

Sodium Fox, a Berman-narrated portrait imbued with paranoia and loneliness, hovers ominously within the boundaries of California and touches on its most banal, debauched and spooky qualities—both the imagery and the monologue seem to borrow equally from the imaginations of Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, and the kid who played Oliver on The Brady Bunch. And the end result feels like a troubling date in the basement rec room of now deceased superproducer Don Simpson, or a peek at Michael Bay's shrink's notebook. "Hollywood <3's (this is as close as I can get to a heart) a retard," flashes on screen at one point, this is as close a direct manifesto upon which anyone could place a thumb. But maybe not.

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Berman's one-liners and non sequiturs give the narrator the sort of life story that rings close to one we unfortunately assign ourselves while waiting in line at Duane Reade, so maybe the portrait is more about America than just feeling scummy out west:

Our gang was called the Rivergate 8.
Most parents thought we were a Cineplex. A sweater covering the spectrum of hospital jello. Fire's not a thing because where is it before you start it. "The elderly make poor novelists," was his unpopular maxim. Men who throw crumpled paper into wastebaskets and yell, "he scores"
Rival shampoos on the windowsill. A box of frozen Dexatrim burgers. I just moisturized the dashboard at the car wash. Tonight God has asked her to love me as a favor to Him. Four stars twinkled in the sky like a restaurant review. Cross-eyed from giving too much head. An ancestor communicating through a bowl of Alphabet soup.

Before Sodium Fox screened, Berman played new songs:

"Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer": About a bluegrass-drumming fellow who wants to fall in love but hooks up with a woman with the last name Buttermilk or Butterfly. She's a "gobbler and a guzzler of hydrogenated crap," and hooked on street fat like suet, lard, and tallow.

"Candy Jail": A jail bunk is made of peanut brittle and the walls made out of marshmallows.

Other highlights: "San Francisco B.C." is about uncovering the beating death of a barber and finding out it's a guy named Mr. Games' stepson named Gene. "My Pillow is the threshold" written for Jeremy. "We could be looking for the same thing" duet with wife Cassie.

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When asked, Berman claimed he'd be reading this book of Jewish problem solving and listening to Johnny Paycheck.

Finally, questions from the audience ensued.

How did Sodium Fox come together?

"Jeremy came to Nashville and I had some text for him to look through, and we started working with the idea of me riffing on California. And then we went into a studio and did all the individual takes. He cut them up and put them together the way he wanted to… The guy who was helping him record had done the sound for one of the Predator movies, but it doesn't really carry over. Jeremy and I got along so well. It was the beginning of our friendship. He was a person who took an interest in me as a writer and he took it further than I thought he would. To me, he overrated me. No one was as excited about my work as he was. That interested me. It made me curious. He was always rallying me, and pushing me."

Someone else asked what common ground they had as artists, and Berman's response hinted at why his poems and music dwell, briefly, on subjects like Gene Rayburn, or the rapist from All My Children, or "Eye in the Sky" by the Alan Parsons Project.

"Latent structure as master of obvious structure. The hidden is the master of what appears. I think both of us put our hearts with the hidden—but what's hidden is coming up. If you're about 40 and you're making art and you went to college, you saw all these professors talking about postmodernism and teaching it to you and as you got older and your realized it was really just the way you did things anyway. It ceased to become a strategy to destroy. It was just another tool or a quiver like hyperbole or something. So bric-a-brac and things like that—it's hard for us to understand how it must be for a kid to relate to a computer because we don't know what it's like for one to always be there—and that's the way it is with me and bricolage, you know. It's just like just become a natural thing.

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"To me, I think a lot of times you suspect that the document can be a Frankenstein, and that's why it's important for me to close the circle on these things and give them some form. I think that Jeremy and me just used things as forms, like even segment length or things like that. And also we believed in just going on nerve. When you think you're going to go on nerve, there's nothing there yet. And no one's asking for it. No one wants another song. And so you have to go on your own nerve and bring something into the world that is most likely unwanted. And that's just where you start. But just giving yourself the permission to change something, or chop something up or say something that sounds goofy… I think that as much as Jeremy and I placed ourselves at opposition to the rest of the culture or the world, we always want to be a part of it."

He also came up with a new meaning for the name Silver Jews.

"I looked at Jews when I went to synagogue. I wanted a model. I found life hard. And I looked at all these people, And I thought 3,000 years, what the hell? They're still here. Everybody else that tried to kill them is gone, and they're still here. Who else would you want to follow? I decided at that point there might be something congruent about Judaism and life on earth. I'm not even a member of a community. And you can't really be a Jew without being a member. It's all about community. So there's many different reasons I'm not a Jew. And that's why I am a Silver Jew, which is technically second place. People try to tell me I'm not Jewish—I know! They won't let you say half-Jewish. So if you're not Jewish and you're Jewish, you're Silver Jewish."

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Then, as a final comment, Blake's stepfather got up and told Berman that "If Jeremy's art came out as words instead of images, this is it…" and Berman responded.

"I feel the last few days being here in Washington has really filled out a lot of the questions or empty space I had about what happened to Jeremy. I feel that just to be with someone's art… You know when I worked at the Whitney, sometimes I'd be the late night guard and I'd be the only one in the museum. And you'd walk around the galleries in the dark, in this place with David Smith and Jackson Pollock who all died these violent deaths, and the older guards would say watch out when you're on the third floor! I wanted to come to be with Jeremy. You know we just shared a lot of the same reference points. We shared a lot of the same dislikes. And, uh, it's hard."

Related:

Sodium Fox clip

Video for Beck's "Round the Bend"

JEFF JOHNSON