interview: chaotic order
Chaotic Order (Zine in U.K.); Decmber 2003;
Issue #16; Page 24
Transgressive Echo
by Bob Smith
Flicking through Trevor Brown’s website and finding a bruised girl in bandages a la Slocombe, I’m not gonna be complaining, finding out she was in a film directed by Usama Alshaibi made me curious and then finding out his wife also made films and had worked with Nick Zedd pretty much cemented her CO credentials, so her she is…
CO : Could you give me some background to start with?
KA : Not sure what you want to know, or if any of this is interesting, but I’ll start at the beginning and just ramble. I grew up in isolation in Kansas (a suburb of Kansas City), with few friends, and straight A’s in school. My parents did video production (local car commercials and music videos), and ran a video rental store. My dad also repaired audio and video equipment. I would sit outside the shop and flash passers-by, and read horror novels. After running away from home, then coming back, having an abortion followed by a couple of naked orgiastic LSD flavoured summers in a park literally called Loose (Jacob Loose Memorial Park to be exact), I got preggo, got married, had a son and promptly got divorced. Meanwhile, I studied Celtic wicca with a coven for nearly two years.
Struggling as a single mom I managed to get my BFA in Video and New Media at the Kansas City Art Institute, while exploring many lovers, male and female, one of whom was an instructor at the school. My live-in boyfriend at the time was a huge supporter both my work and my promiscuity. In K.C. I began taking on sugar daddies to improve my quality of life, while still getting food stamps. It was in Kansas City that Echo Transgression was unveiled, first as a series of micro-fictional stories and then in photographs.
During my last year at the Art Institute I was given the Princess Grace Award, which gave me hope that the 5 or 6 films and videos I was cranking out each year were not shit. Those videos were more or less academic explorations flirting with notions of sexuality and multiple identities. I also began hosting short video programs at alternative venues around the Midwest.
In 1999 I was awarded a full scholarship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s graduate program in Film. I took it, and left son, boyfriend, and sugar daddies behind to settle into a more urban environment. I started my own production company called Artvamp LLC. I set out to make my first feature length movie, entitled Other People’s Mirrors.
CO : OPM turned into something more ‘communal’ though…
KA : I set up an entire web community surrounding it (inspired in part by performance artist Ana Voog) called 12taboos.com. The idea was to get people to interact with the cast and crew, as well as the main character, my alter ego, Echo Transgression. I set up a web cam in my high rise apartment (funded by still more sugar daddies), and another in an apartment I set up for the cast - who included legendary underground filmmaker Nick Zedd who I flew out from New York. I put dailies from each shoot on the site as Quicktime movies, and asked everyone to cut their own version of Other People’s Mirrors. Several people did, but most didn’t have the bandwidth to download all the clips. As the web community grew I became more creative with the cam and would invent elaborate sets and put on make-up and costumes for short live performances several times each week. I still have hundreds of archived images from that period. At one point I had nearly 5000 members of the community watching the cam shows. Echo and the cast and crew also started web logs in which people could comment and begin discussions, and there were forums and an area to do what I called “Erotic Corpse” - a variation on the exquisite corpse style of writing, in which members would continue each other’s sexy stories.
The core of Other People’s Mirrors were a set of Echo’s handwritten journal entries. Each one described the twelve taboos which she systematically set out to break, instructed by voices in her head. These were scanned and kept on the web site as well. So everyone participating in the community could see the movie from the inside out. Nothing was hidden. Shooting schedules and shot lists were published, and all the ups and downs recorded in our blogs, in lurid and often emotional detail.
Some of the instructors at the Art Institute were disappointed by the direction I was taking, implying that they regretted giving me the scholarship because I was too democratic with my vision. A few were very supportive, however - notably Greg Bordowitz and Jon Cates.
Production was such an exciting time. The economy was booming, so I was able to get private funding for the project, as well as seven credit cards with limits upwards of $3000 each! Everyone seemed interested in what we were doing. The cast and crew were treated well. Expensive meals, new wardrobes for photo shoots (some excellent work done by Richard Burkhart), and cell phones for everyone. I was out on my own in a new city, and I had an excuse to live it up a bit. On top of it all, The Film Society Lincoln Centre awarded me a $5000 grant for a previous video I had completed, and they flew me to the award ceremony in New York and gave me the star treatment - limousines and dinner with Ang Lee and the cast of Crouching Tiger. I felt fabulous, and I felt like the movie I was making was one of the most important new movies that would be made… ever.
Of course, all of this had to crash. You have to believe in your work, but I had done such a smashing job of convincing everyone involved that they were on the way to superstardom, that I inevitably created my own hell. When the movie was in the can, I fell into a deep depression. I was in debt, and completely broke. I could barely feed myself. Echo got a job with a fledgling escort agency which landed both of us in jail on her second outcall. It amounted to a night with no food in a small booger-covered cement cell, and a legal slap on the wrist. Echo eventually quit the agency and became an independent escort. But during that transition her boss - hoping she would be his golden girl - got her an interview with an MTV documentary on the sex industry, and some time on Man Cow (a popular radio show). He tried to get her to do Howard Stern, but I didn’t like the idea. I felt no need to be ridiculed.
CO : How did you come to work with Nick Zedd on Other People’s Mirrors?
KA : I went to the Chicago Underground Film Fest when I first came to Chicago. I saw that Nick was spinning at one of their parties. I had been looking for some dark thin man with a long coat to play the Narcissus character, and it dawned on me that he might be perfect for the role. I had seen his work (as well as the stuff he was in by Richard Kern) in my early 20s when I rented the Cinema of Transgression compilation at a little video store in Kansas City, and also picked up Jack Sargeant’s book Deathtripping. I was a bit nervous, and am debilitatingly shy. So I went to the party in a silver glitter mask, which I did not remove the entire evening. I handed out little promotional cards for my web site, sometimes covertly dropping them on people’s heads from the second floor of a club called Subterranean. I still hadn’t the courage to approach him, so a friend and patron with whom I attended the gathering spoke to him first. We made plans for dinner at a little Mexican restaurant and he agreed to look over Echo’s journals. Nick is a bit mercenary, being a perpetually starving artist and all. When I told him their was money involved, and a free place to stay, he was pretty enthusiastic.
I had a huge crush on him for a while during production, and I asked him why we never fucked. But, he never really saw me that way, since I wasn’t his type, and he had a couple of other women with whom he was deeply involved. I probably was too eager and horny and pathetic (pretty embarrassing really). We did get booted out of a club called Berlin for making out (we got kicked out of quite a few bars during his stay here for various reasons), but that’s as far as anything ever went. I had a hard time talking with him, as I do with everyone until I actually have sex with them. In person, I am timid and silent and awkward when there’s no sexual relationship going on. A friend once told me I can only talk while horizontal. The crush wore off within a couple of weeks, when I realized that I was behaving like a silly groupie girl. After he returned to NYC, we had a few disagreements over his web site, which I designed as a favour (an on-line friend of mine who runs Oubliette Records, actually took over and did the recent re-design). He rubbed me the wrong way a couple of times, as I’m sure I did him, but I still consider him a friend. He was very serious and committed during the production of OPM.
CO : Who / what do you use as influences on your films?
KA : Influences - Cinema of Transgression (Zedd, Kern, Beth B and Scott B, Jack Smith, etc.) of course (thus the name Echo Transgression), but also Peter Greenaway (particularly his methods of categorization), and in some way David Bowie (multiple identities). David Cronenburg happens to be my favourite director, so I’m sure his influence is in there. I think he’s at least a hundred years beyond his time regarding his notions of mind / image / body / technology. Dogma 95 was a HUGE influence in the making of OPM, as I’m sure is common with a lot of first-time DV feature directors. Harmony Korine is a big inspiration. There’s some movie from the eighties for which I can never find the title, about this female photographer with a psycho gay assistant who kills off all her models… saw it when I was a kid and it stays with me always… Writers - Kathy Acker, Deleuze & Guatari, and most significantly Georges Bataille. Also Mariarosa Sclauzero - a great surrealist writer who also had a brief affair with the instructor I was having sex with in undergrad (long before I did)… Her books Narcissism and Death, and Marlene are really good, and sort of helped me form my ideas of narcissism as a sort of organic philosophy rather than a mental disorder (not a philosophy I adhere to necessarily, but a philosophy all the same).
CO : How did you meet Usama Alshaibi?
KA : He helped me set up a location for one of the scenes in my movie, and played some of my earlier work at the first annual Z Film Festival. As a thank you, I bought booze for the entire fest. He was otherwise attached at the time, and I was in a long distance relationship with the aforementioned live-in-boyfriend in Kansas City.
Later, after ending his relationship, he and I began an intense romance. It was violently sexual, and intellectually edifying! I thought his films and videos were the most amazing I’d ever seen. He was animalistic drunken chaos! I fell hard and fast! I engulfed myself in him, and excluded everyone and everything else around me. This was fine with me, but it made my few close friends a bit peeved. I created an chasm between people I once cared about due their investment in the movie, and ostensibly put Other People’s Mirrors on the back burner on account of severe burn out. I did some morphine, and made a few shorts, including one called Satyr/Sadist, which hinted at the fantasy world Usama and I played in, which got criticized as too violet and misogynistic. A couple of underground fests like it, though. My flirtations with opiate use never became an addiction, contrary to the anti-drug alarmist propaganda.
The memories of my husband and I moving in to each other are a bit obscured by what happened immediately afterward - September 11. Soon after I married Usama in a small pagan ceremony - just the two of us and a friend who is a minister. Together we’ve continued programming the Z film Festival and other related screenings in Chicago.
CO : Have you been treated differently since your relationship & marriage to Usama in regard to the hostilities with Iraq & 9/11?
KA : Regarding being married to Usama, I have only had one major problem. My ex-in laws, who had custody of my son, actually said that they were afraid that Usama would steal my son away and take us all to “his country” and never allow us to return. Their primary reference was that horrid TV movie called “Not Without My Daughter.” They said this as if the U.S. is NOT his country… I can’t even go into everything that is wrong with their statement! It appals me that such xenophobia and racism are still so ingrained. I’ve noticed quite a resurgence of it since 9/11. The ex-laws also claimed that my son was afraid of Usama because of his name! As it turned out my son gets along very well with my husband, and has no problem with his name. He too smart to make such superficial associations.
9/11 was used as convenient excuse for certain jealous admirers (who perhaps saw me as their own before Usama came along) and people who had problems with the porn and such to lash out at me, and try to hurt me or my husband.
But regardless, my attitude towards it all has been very dismissive. I try not to let it get to me. I just do what I do. Some people like it. Some people don’t.
CO : I believe your web logs and output have caused a few worries, especially after 9/11?
KA : After 9/11, I became increasing politically outspoken in my still persistent web log. So outspoken that someone tipped off the FBI, who came knocking at our door one August morning. They wanted to know what I meant when I said that if the government was profiling young Arab men, a blonde white girl would be the next destructive force. Was I to be that terrorist, they wondered? Did I have any plans to harm the US or Israel? Did I know anyone who did?
Somewhere around that time I channelled Echo Transgression into a pure unadulterated porn queen, sparking great interest from several Chicago journalists. I opened objectifyme.com, embracing porn for porn’s sake. I was terrified that the content of the site had transgressed some federal obscenity regulation, and that was the reason for the Feds’ sudden appearance. But it was not.
I shut down 12taboos.com. I got my MFA, quit escorting, and got a job with a high end art gallery, putting together proposals for the sale of works by Hockney, Dekooning, Kline and other modernist-types. I went to the gallery owners’ beach resort for a few days where Usama and I worked on the script for his recently finished feature Mohamad and Jane. But as soon as Echo’s work in porn, and my controversial political views were exposed by an article in the Chicago Reader, I was asked to resign. My public image was incompatible with their own.
In the meantime, I had declared bankruptcy, and lost custody of my son to his grandparents (my ex-in-laws) because of the things I admitted to in my web log. The loss of my job was the final blow, which I took as an opportunity to finally complete Other People’s Mirrors - which I did in October 2002.
CO : Where did the idea / want for the multiple identities (Kristie / Artvamp /Echo) come from? Is it just the splitting of separate facets of your personality or do you feel there are more practical purposes?
KA : The multiple identities. Well… As a young child some strange things happened to me - sexual things - and when they happened, I tended to space off into my own internal world. I finally gave a name to girl who stayed behind to deal directly with what was going on in 1997, when I referred to her as “my twin sister who was born several years after me.” She’s the part that felt it, and tried to enjoy it, while I was somewhere else, or simply observing.
Artvamp is an all inclusive handle, and the name of my company. Echo is my alter ego. She does all the things that I think about doing.
Also, being diagnosed as schizophrenic, with audio hallucinations and the whole bit, it just simply makes logical sense to me to have a second identity. It feels very normal, whereas a cohesive single identity seems false. I am very detached from Echo’s actions, but in concert with the thoughts and inspiration for those actions. I guess I’m the voice in her head.
CO : On Echo’s site there are distinct boundaries which I was quite interested by, and shows a very obvious level of control on her / your part, is this one of the points where Echo / Kristie become a single distinct entity?
KA : Yes it is. If I let Echo have her way she’d be having bareback anal sex with anyone who wanted to fuck her. She’d rape, and murder, and drink blood, and eat shit, and fuck around with little kids and beasts of all kinds. She’s got no limits, that delightfully sociopathic creature from another place. She can still do most of those things, but they have to remain fictional just to keep us out of too much trouble, and to maintain a semblance of mental stability.
CO : Anything else?
KA : Oh yeah, I’m the proud mama of three young Norway Rats - Hyde, Mooshiga, and Punjabi. They are the guardians against depression and the overcomers of all obstacles.
Oh I wanted to add that Echo is going to be starting her own internet radio station this winter. It will be linked from echoplasm.com She will be able to spew her “Cult of Echoplasm” propaganda and air her own audio creations (and those of people who she works with - like Magic is Kuntmaster, for example) for whomever is willing to listen. This is part of the next phase, after she’s returned from beyond the looking glass.
I’ve also begun shooting another movie which has nothing to do with Echo. I’ve fallen in love with the look of my tiny black and white spy camera, which serves as the POV of the entire movie. My three rats have supporting roles, and yeah, there’s some graphic sex… can’t seem to quit shooting fucking…
I’m also working on a manifesto, or thesis of sorts called “Art Viscera.” It’s a term I coined a few years ago that refers to any art that either a.) represents uncontrollable reactions of the body, reactive functions of the organs, or trauma to the body (sudden violence, operations, orgasm, etc.) or B.) causes an unexpected or uncontrollable sensation or reaction in the body (arousal, or nausea, a cold sweat, or racing heart, for example). That’s the loose definition for now… I’m working on refining it a bit.
CO : Thanks for your time.