Him by Laura Mullen
“This Valentine was created by running the hard sell of an on-line dating guru through ‘Dictation,'” says the Vimeo description by Laura Mullen, a practitioner of “hybrid poetics” with seven books under her belt. In an interview posted on her blog, afteriwas dead, she answered a question about the making of the video:
LG [Lola Gerber]: The video you showed at your reading at Naropa had both performance and writing in it. Can you tell me more about the process of creating this video? Did you write and then perform the writing? Or do you perform first and then write from that?
LM: Ah, you’re talking about “Him” (a play on Hymn), the Valentine’s day video (up on my Vimeo site, with other movies…). The text is the pitch of a famous dating guru, available on-line, full of promises (including that wonderful: “I will teach you how to speak the secret language of men”!)! I wrote it down, then read it into “Dictation,” which—as far as I can see—speaks “the secret language” of the pitchman, exposing the truth behind those promises made to lonely women. Then I recorded the result as a voice over—and attached it to the film (my friend Marthe Reed helped me make) of me peeing in a giant box of chocolates. But I led up to that with film work (with Afton Wilky) of Valentine’s Day merchandise, and also a Valentine’s Day performance (live) where I read from a journal entry about losing my virginity while smearing my face with Valentine’s day candy (actually, that didn’t work so well—it’s got too much wax in it, doesn’t really melt), while backed up by three brave women who (off-mic) described their loss of virginity experience…
It seemed like an apt follow-up to Monday’s posting of 15th February.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.