January 25, 2012 2:00pm
Dear Wes Anderson, I heard you took the train from Chicago to southern California. I thought it was kind of cute to hear you don’t like airplanes. They scare me too, somewhat, but not enough so that I can’t ride them. The other night, Brett told us the story. He’d been gone for Christmas to Columbus, Ohio. He didn’t mention the train story until after a couple beers at the kitchen table. I showed him I Love Dick by Chris Kraus—a series of billet-doux glitter bombs from a married couple to a man named Dick.
Chris (a failing experimental filmmaker turned writer) falls into this weird obsession with Dick (a cultural theorist from Australia). Her philosopher husband Sylvere Lotringer encourages her to write letters to his colleague Dick.
There’s this really amazing four days when all Chris and Sylvere do is talk about Dick in their apartment in Crestline, California. One night they get stuck at Dick’s place in Antelope Valley because of a pending snow storm in San Bernardino. The following morning = at IHOP Chris tells Sylvere she’s convinced that what she experienced with Dick was a “conceptual fuck.” Why am I telling you this? It just feels like a place to start because obviously I wouldn’t introduce Dick as a way of breaking the ice if it was me on the train.
So let me start over. When do you think those high-speed rail trains are ever going to happen in California? I’m looking at the website and can’t tell if its a myth Christians believelike the second-coming of Christ. I understand now why Jews are so cynical. My boyfriend is Jewish but he’s the most optimistic person I know.
It’s so sad, Wes, high-speed railways, legalizing pot, and lowering public university tuition might make California what it really is—a Golden State.
Anyway, I should probably get the day moving. My rabbit is out of food and water. Ben is out being a graduate student. I don’t have to start tutoring poor kids for another few hours and I should try to feel happy and productive without spending any money.
If I close my eyes and imagine what you’re doing now all I see is darkness. I can’t imagine you, just that image of you and Brett on the train eating dinner and him sincerely not recognizing you at all. So when he told us the story it felt like we were there too.
Sincerely,
Feliz
*
A CLEARING
Dear Wes,
I’m not much at beginning letters but don’t worry, I tend to pick up steam once I catch the rhythm. I’ll start at an arbitrary yet important intersection. Later, I’ll loosen up and start making some interesting turns:
so… who [am i] (are/we) and why [am i] (are/we) writing to you (ish)?
We met briefly on the Southwest Chief in the dining car gliding through New Mexico. I’m Brett, a rogue, young grad student who chatted with you and your partner about writing, Haruki Murakami, geographic media etc.
I explained that my partner, Kylie, is an artist as well and will soon be moving to New York. You suggested Chinatown and Greenpoint. And in case you were concerned, things are still going well. In fact, as it stands right now, she will be here for the summer.
I hope these details jog your memory. The devil is in the details as they say, the weird ones stick out, kind of like smells. (I think we talked about the lack of good smells in ‘classic’ literature). I smell whiskey right now (scotch) ((hot toddy)) definitely a smell I’m fond of, but like most interesting things, it can be overused in bad taste.
Details aside, memory is a dodgy thing and if you don’t remember me, well, I don’t blame you. I imagine you probably meet billions of people every year and they’re all impeccably dressed. One of my mottos… not that I am a motto kind of a guy… is to be memorable. At least, that’s one of the secret performances I have in the works. I want to be ridiculously present, crystal clear without daydreams. So present that I infect people’s minds and all of the sudden everyone is performing outside-brett. In this way, I can slip off and assume other identities, tricksterlike…
You know, I’m not one for psychoanalysis, I think it’s just expensive toilet paper, but there seems to be a strange death drive/eternal life obsession that I have with being recognized…
WAIT!!!
ah! recognition… yeah!!! alright theres that rhythm…
So, this is how we come to our point. I’m writing to you (regretfully, a full month after meeting you, because MFA writing programs are designed to make you do everything BUT write) to clear up an oddity in our initial conversation—
—WHY I DIDN’T ACKNOWLEDGE OUT LOUD THAT YOU ARE WES ANDERSON!!!
I’ve told the story lots of times now, because I’m a storyteller, and each time this story tends to grow and acquires new limbs, freshly produced memories. Despite its meanderings and unkept appearance, it’s a handsome story with lots of nice sweaters but can be self destructive from time to time (another overused character prop).
My favorite part of the story is explaining why I didn’t start gawking and blushing and saying OH MY GOD YOU’RE WES ANDERSON!! I WATCHED ALL OF YOUR MOVIES A HUNDRED TIMES WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, GETTING AWKWARDLY HIP….
Well, at first, since I didn’t know what you looked like, I was just sitting there with a doomsday spider bite festering on my left hand that was swelling and making me feel a bit dicey/dodgy. It was kind of embarrassing and disconcerting… so I was drinking wine to cheer myself up when you guys sat down in front of me. I was like, “who the hell are these assholes?” in a very Andersonian move. Then after some awkwardness I asked where you were going, what you did for a living etc… Something Something Hyundai—Something Something—shooting a commercial in LA. Then I spoke with your partner for a while about writing, which was very nice, and we all spoke at length about trains, art, and we were generally having a pleasant time, (unless that was just a heartbreaking display of polite society)… anyway, in the middle of us trying to figure out how we could floodlight the midnight desert…. you said, “ I did a movie on a train once, we had a similar problem” and at once, you shot up to investigate the surreal christmas-lit houses flying by the window.
Then it hit me—“Darjeeling Limited and North By Northwest are the only movies I’ve ever seen that were actually filmed on trains….”
…. HOLY SHIT, is that WES ANDERSON?”
Now here’s my favorite part of the story:
In about three quick sips of red wine/purple lips, I went through the various stages of celebrity shock… At first, I wanted simply to be recognized by you, so that I would have a validation of being alive. As if celebrities were the only ones with access to being real-real in a world that is, at best, real-fake, at worst, fake-fake. Then I went through the phase of wanting to ask for a job, playing out all my fantasies of being the next young famous actor-writer, because obviously I’m a broke grad student in a country that pretty much hates avant garde literature. I resisted the impulse to puke my movie ideas all over you. Calming down, I just smiled and enjoyed the conversation, forgetting all about your position in the hierarchy of creativity and the morbid circuit of cultural capital. I just sat back and enjoyed the wine, listening to your suggestions for films to watch… you didn’t even touch your dinner.
So, our intersection itself has become a catalyst for a storytelling machine, maybe even a character development. I am specifically writing these letters to forget, or to replace memory with stories, shifting sand and perhaps some magic. I hate writing from the dreaded ‘I’, probably because of an ashamed bullshit white male positionality, or even just the boredom of being in one narrative body. But this is proving to be an interesting practice… to dump out my subjectivity into an accumulation of narrative extravagance, horror, jubilation, failure.
In fact, my dear friends, Feliz and Ben have been writing letters to you as well, we are compiling the whole project into book form…
We hope you enjoy these, at whatever stage you receive them in, if ever, and wherever you are… either way, expect more notes from us… of infinitely small wonders. Notes of love and luck… you can think of these letters as a train slipping through the night eating up and replacing the miles.
Naturally, more soon…
! brett
*
February 6, 2012 5:36pm
Dear Wes, I’m lying around in bed feeling nauseous. It’s most likely from the iced-coffee and driving around the city in circles. All morning I finally put together a lesson plan for students and was looking forward to it until suddenly the ghost of anxiety came knocking for a visit, which took me for a joyride back and forth between the coffee shop, apartment, drive-thru at McDonalds and back to the apartment.
I called Ben while crying in the driver’s seat feeling insanely confused and abused by the broken GPS and Google Maps on my smartphone. Basically, the techno-pathological mania felt uncontrollable. Do you ever get a bad feeling and then search for an image to render the feeling? Do you ever think you’ve found the image and feel worse that it’s not the right one? For instance, in that mania all I could see was quicksand even though obviously quicksand was not a feeling. Sometimes I wonder if I act out emotions to make them more real.
It helps to keep a soundtrack in the back of your head, a poet once told me, when I was feeling panicky about walking through dark woods or was it someone’s wedding I had attend who I didn’t know. This afternoon was the soundtrack to Mad Men and flashes of Don Draper giving me the same condescending tough love scowl he gives Peggy Olson whenever she fucks up. I get motion sickness checking email, but writing to you calms me because the further I type the more real you become.
Thanks for being here for me.
Yours, Feliz
*
Dear Wes Anderson,
When my friend met you on a train and told me and my girlfriend about it, we all were so happy. We talked about that episode for a good hour, in the kind of mutual, communal joy that is momentarily perfect and hard to hang on to. Now, I think, at least in part because of the amazing letter-writing scene in Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick, my friend and girlfriend are both writing all kinds of letters to you. And as the ball of letters gathers speed and mass, my own efforts are being added. What do you think about that? How does it feel to be a muse instead of a maker (for once)? Did you ever think your fear of flying would turn you into a postal magnet?
And the thing is, we have requests. Not to be movie stars or anything, just maybe small things. For example, I like drawing monsters. I would love to have a tiny monster drawing in the background of a shot in something. As graffiti maybe? I don’t know, think about it.
I also have this idea for a movie called Romantic/Comedy in which a stand up comedian records an audio track that plays over a soundless clip of two very very attractive people kissing. One long shot, maybe even a still camera…
I imagine you are reading this on some kind of tablet device in a pool of water. Let me set the scene: You are in a pool, a hot tub most likely, using an expensive e-reader, not really worried about dropping it into the bubbling tub water, gently scrolling down the screen, letter after letter. The funny part is that we sent you these as hardcopies, so an assistant of yours must have scanned and digitized all of your correspondence. In this fantasy you are a fanatic for e-readers. I imagine that, actually, you have an enthusiast’s nostalgia for the physical book.
It’s getting late, Wes, and I have been battling a cold all week so I really ought to be getting some rest. Wish me well!
Until soon,
Ben
