Re-mix of Love Dog by Masha Tupitsyn by Rebekah Weikel

 

 

 

Love Dog was commissioned by Penny-Ante in 2011. At this time, Masha Tupitsyn had only penned a handful of entries for her Tumblr, “Love Dog.” The aim for the book project was to experiment with digital time and form(s); to see if a printed object could encapsulate and extend the immersive qualities of a multi-sensory, multi-media work. Both the blog, “Love Dog,” and now the book sample from sources across the Internet to extend their narratives, appropriating “public” sounds, images, film extracts, quotes and texts as expressions of authorial intent.

When I first commissioned the project, I was interested in exploring the subjects of ‘love’ and (the) ‘loss’ (of), both through digital stimuli and in real-time; grief as it unfolds, narrated diaristically. Masha Tupitsyn wrote Love Dog for exactly one year before we went into production with the book, and though written linearly, the result, with all its digital accompaniments, veers backward and forward through time, realizing its present and future through careful association, memory and nostalgia.

The book presents a muse: X, “the person for whom I read everything now and will write this year, making the ‘you’ into a world.” In Masha’s own words: “I met someone, it rattled me to the core, and I felt called upon to write about it in some roundabout, uncategorizable way that would still examine all the other social, political, and philosophical issues that I have always been concerned with. Tumblr allowed me to write the kind of interactive, associative, experimental, and discursive criticism that I have always wanted to write and that directly responds to the digital structure that now informs and organizes our lives.” (make/shift Magazine, 2013).

This piece was mixed in September 2013 between a Fostex Multitracker X-12 four-track and Wavepad. The music, dialogue, and film used in this piece have a direct relationship to the ideas and themes of the book. Seventeen of the tracks featured are taken directly from the book’s playlist and are noted with an asterisk.

 

NOTES

[ I. ] INTRODUCTION

– Masha Tupitsyn: “What is coming sounds like this.” (p146)

– Masha Tupitsyn: “In real life, people can see something happen between two people and say, ‘It’s nothing.’ In a movie that ‘nothing’ becomes an entire movie.” (p152)

Tracks:

0:00 Masha Tupitsyn reads “Love Dog” from Love Dog

2:04 Peter Downsbrough “Taken Down” (1979)

3:06 Director John Cassavetes on filmmaking*

4:48 The Chromatics “Tick of The Clock” (2007)*

5:05 Tangerine Dream “Love on a Real Train” (Music from the motion picture Risky Business, 1983)*

5:42 Masha Tupitsyn reads “Saudade” from Love Dog

[ II. ] SOUL, START TO FINISH

– Masha Tupitsyn: “I met someone, it rattled me to the core.” (Interview, make/shift Magazine)

The Music of Chance: “We had everything in harmony… everything was turning into music for us and you go upstairs and smash all the instruments.” (p220)

 

Tracks:

7:13 Excerpts from Pretty in Pink (1986), director: Howard Deutch*

7:26 The Persians “Gee, What A Girl” (1968)

9:37 The Chiffons “He’s So Fine” (1963)*

10:32 Excerpt from Stardust Memories (1980), director: Woody Allen*

11:32 Bobby Peterson “Irresistible You” (1960)

14:14 Excerpt from Sleepless in Seattle (1993), director: Nora Ephron*

14:47 Jean Wells “Have a Little Mercy” (1968)

17:17 George Jackson “How Can I Get Next To You” (1974)

20:36 Eddy Gilles “Losin’ Boy” (1966)

23:36 Mixed excerpt from JAWS (1975), director: Steven Spielberg

24:46 John Williams “End Theme” (Music from the motion picture JAWS, 1975)*

24:46 Masha Tupitsyn reads “End Theme” from Love Dog

[ III. ] START: LOSS/START: TIME

– Culture Club: “Time won’t give me time.” (p79)

– Masha Tupitsyn: “The Hanged Man is about suspension. Time is suspended, left hanging. When you are in The Hanged Man space, you stay still rather than move – act. You do nothing.” (p50)

Tracks:

27:09 Kate Bush “Oh to Be in Love” (1978)*

30:20 Polyrock “Romantic Me” (1980)

33:25 The Clash “Long Time Jerk” (1982)*

36:15 Bill Nelson “Eros Arriving” (1982)

39:47 The Times “Blue Fire” (1984)

 

[ IV. ] IN SILENCE

– This clip from Godard’s Scénario du film Passion is not in the book. Masha sent me this in an email (and followed with an entry on Tumblr) sometime after the book was completed. We were emailing, discussing our mothers. I lost mine in 2010. Masha emailed, “When you write about your mom and losing her, it makes my heart ache. I can’t imagine.” For once, I couldn’t agree. Masha could imagine, which is what made her heart ache. Godard: “You can invent the sea for your white beach. Like a mother, she waits. You are her child. You can return to her arms. You can tell her everything.”

– In Part II of Love Dog, we hear from Masha while in Greece. She had posted a photo of a blue blow-up raft floating in the ocean that belonged to her. Though this image didn’t make its way into the book, it’s one that’s sat with me. There was something serene about it, but also sad. Lonely. “Speak To Me” is a track with a certain fluidity to it, a backward and forward sway. A floating, felt.

– Masha Tupitsyn: “My ears have been hearing things, things which aren’t even words, or messages, while my eyes, along with everyone else’s, are forever telling me that nothing is there. That nothing is happening. It is the difference between inward and outward. Between me and everyone else.” (p66)

– Masha Tupitsyn: “In contemporary American culture, something is only something if it is something. Loud. Silence is empty, non-active. Failure. But to hear nothing, to be in the nothing, to feel what the nothing has to say, to tell you, is maybe more powerful…” (p51)

– Masha Tupitsyn: “By the ocean, I feel like maybe I have a chance to not lose my mind. I think of Derek Jarman’s words.” (p170)

 

Tracks:

42:57 Music from the motion picture La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), director: Carl Theodor Dreyer*

43:55 Masha Tupitsyn reads “Mourning After” from Love Dog

45:26 Moose “Speak To Me” (1991)

48:04 Mickeranno “D.D.” (1985)

50:46 Self-recording

51:06 Excerpt from Scénario du film Passion (1982), director: Jean-Luc Godard

52:33 Laurie Anderson “O Superman” (1981)*

1:01 Excerpt from Faces (1968), director: John Cassavetes*

 

 

 

 

[ V. ] WAKE-UP!

– Sink or swim

– The Smiths: “What a terrible mess I’ve made of my life.” (p178)

– James Baldwin: “If you don’t do your work, you really are useless.” (p148)

Tracks:

1:01:21 Umberto “Night Fantasy” (2013)

1:06:14 Makis Prekkas “That’s the Way Out” (1985)

[ VI. ] AWAKE

– Hit ‘Restart’

– Masha Tupitsyn: “Blue, water blue, is one way to get your energy back. To survive being alone.” (p173)

– Derek Jarman: “In the pandemonium of image, I present you with the universal Blue.” (p178)

– This section includes “Reunion” read by Masha, an essay which appears toward the beginning of the book. I chose to place it toward the end of this mix given its prophetic nature: “Work is destiny; destinal.”

– I think about the death of my parent(s) and if I would have been drawn to this project in the way I was if they were still alive.

– The song “Crossing” echoes the period of five months it took to produce the book after Masha completed her last entry: Endless email threads, many late nights/early mornings. Love Dog was put to page collaboratively, obsessively, entirely through email exchanges.

 

Tracks:

1:09:42 From the film Blue (1993), director: Derek Jarman*

1:14:55 Jean-Paul Sartre Experience “Transatlantic Love Song” (1986)

1:18:06 Conrad Schnitzler “Ballet Static” (1978)

1:18:20 Masha Tupitsyn reads “Reunion” from Love Dog

1:20:47 Midori Takada “Crossing” (1983)

[ VII. ] IN THE END IS THE BEGINNING

Love Dog is wrapped, completed May 8, 2013

– A book trailer is made on June 24, 2013

– Roll credits. “Make Love” (cyclical).

– Masha Tupitsyn: “’Make Love’ has a mezzo beginning, which means it comes from the middle, from something that is already there.” (p182)

– Avital Ronell: “A call comes from within you and beyond you. A call is ontological and rooted in being. Your being is being called.” (p260)

Tracks:

1:25:05 From the motion picture One From the Heart (Trailer, 1982), director: Francis Ford Coppola*

1:27:50 Gullivers People “Splendour in the Grass” (from Dream Babes, Vol. 2: Reflections CD comp, 2011)

1:30:06 Daft Punk “Make Love” (2005)*

1:33:43 Excerpt from the documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (American Masters, 1989)*

—————–

MASHA TUPITSYN is a writer, cultural critic and multi-media artist. She is the author of Love Dog (Penny-Ante, 2013), LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotexte, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009).

 

Love Dog is the second in a trilogy of immaterial writing on the Internet. This experiment in material and immaterial forms began with LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film and will culminate with a sound installation, Love Sounds, an oral history of love in cinema.

REBEKAH WEIKEL founded the journal “Penny-Ante” in 2006, which saw three issues. In 2012, Penny-Ante was reformed as a small press and has since produced books and other forms of media under the series title, “Success and Failure.” Along with her publishing efforts, she has produced works of writing, sound, art and film and works as a Deputy Managing Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently is based between Melbourne and Los Angeles.