ANAÏS DUPLAN



INFORMATION

   IN HIS FOURTH BOOK, Anaïs Duplan reinvents ekphrasis as an act of devotion to art as both the sense-archive and future tense of Black embodiment. In this vibrant thinkspace (where thinking is singing), Duplan hosts a vivid community of Black musicians, performers, painters, photographers, poets, critics, filmmakers and video artists, even a chorus of lovelorn chatroom denizens. I Need Music hosts the lyric re-arrivals of unquiet pasts, enacts a haptic intimacy with the present, and vibrates with the immanence of Black, queer futures.

   THIS COMPANION SITE houses the notes, acknowledgments, responses, miscellany, etc. that made I NEED MUSIC possible.



Section 19: [Alice ‘n’ Freddie rehearse. What’s the matter with you?]



Alice ‘n’ Freddie rehearse. What’s the matter with you?








Carolyn Lazard

“It's not a poem. It's an art work:


Shot Reverse Shot.


A still from a video with 2 channels. The still, the image, is made of two images. Two little squares inside one big square. Both channels are of the exact same footage at the exact same time but from different angles. A white couple, a man and a woman are talking in a park. There are trees behind them, growing up a slope. The trees are thick enough to cover the whole background of the frame. The man wears a suit with a skinny tie and a handkerchief in his pocket. He’s got brown and gray hair. The woman wears a patterned pink dress or top (she can only be seen from the waist up) with a monk neck collar. She’s got a blond bob with bangs and she’s wearing eyeliner. On the left channel, the man’s face is visible and the woman’s face is partially obscured. He is looking at her quizzically. Her hand is raised and gesturing away from her body while holding a folded piece of paper. On the right channel, the man’s face is obscured. The majority of the frame contains the woman’s expressive face. Her lips are parted, tense jaw, teeth-bared, mid-argument. At the bottom of the the frame of the entire video are subtitles that read ‘Yesterday you were a fag./Today you are not.’”