Like the sun and the moon                      

Spoon Jackson

role in Michka’s films

Spoon —  Voice, poems

MF: A lot of people talk about Michka’s generosity. The first time she would meet someone she would often bring a gift. I was thinking of the first time she met you. In the film, you describe how you stuck her hand through the fence, which was not allowed but she did it anyway. You talked about how you trust someone instantly or not. At that moment, you trusted Michka. What would have happened if she hadn’t shaken your hand? Do you think your friendship would have unfolded the same way? 

SJ: Yeah, because of the spirit that was there. It was like we had known each other forever. We had the desert in common and probably different types of trauma. She had so much interest in finding and sharing our stories. For me, we were connected from that day on, forever. We didn’t even have to say. That’s a gift. It was like the sun and the moon. It was like Beckett. He had the sun and the moon, and silence. Beckett loved silence. That’s one of the key things that brought us together, me, Michka and Judith Tannenbaum[1].

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MF: There’s a moment in the film where you were in the Arts and Corrections group and you jumped right beside her and said, “Write to me, write to me”, and jumped away again. It happened so fast she thought she was dreaming.

SJ: I knew because of the “eyes” and “ears” we weren’t going to be able to talk. When people come into the prison, they don’t want them to focus on one person. There were other people who were in the Beckett play, who said other things, but Michka and I had the common ground of the desert and Beckett.

MF: In the film, she also says, “Spoon is the only person I can talk to about poetry without feeling ridiculous.” Even before the film, you exchanged hundreds of letters that I still have, and had a lot of phone calls.

SJ: We wrote that many letters!

MF: At least a hundred! There’s a scene in the film where she is going through all the letters in the box. What did you talk and write about all that time?

SJ: We talked about life, about Beckett, about Judith, about plays and writing and poetry. About being real. We talked about the desert. She inspired me to write the “Where I’m From” poem. In fact, in The Rabbits of Realness[2], I’m going to dedicate that poem to her.

MF: I didn’t know that Michka inspired that poem.

SJ: Well, yeah. Don’t make me question my own memory! I’m pretty sure she did. I have it written down somewhere how it came about. I know Judith had the “Where I’m From” prompt in her book Jumping Right In. I wanted to write about where I’m from being the desert.

MF: That makes it even more poignant that…

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MF: I realized quite recently that the text in the film, where she talks about her desert, is placed just before your poem. I had never considered it to be a poem, but that’s what it is. It is Michka’s version of “Where I am From”. There’s another poem you wrote about the desert that’s in the film called “No Winds”. You dedicate it to Michka and Gil Scott-Heron. I’ve always wondered about that.

SJ: For some reason I connected them. I think I found a common joy and struggle between them and me. It was something I saw in them. A kind of life, magic and art. Of Realness.

You have 60 seconds remaining.

MF: We’re going to get cut off. Do you have time to call me back?

***

MF: I wanted to tell you something cool that came out of my interview with Lihong, Michka’s friend and production coordinator for her film China Me. Michka was fashion-conscious and flamboyant, and she showed Lihong another way of being around clothes. She said it was like Michka had freed herself from a prison that she hadn’t even seen. It was almost word for word what you said in Spoon, about how everyone is in their own prison, and they need to find a way to free themselves

SJ: That’s true. I think Michka and I understood that the establishment that you grow up in, the morals, the education, the government, no matter what country, instead of parents fostering who you really are, they foster being good citizens – whatever that means – and put you in some kind of prison. I was meant to find a job and fill out the rest of my life in Barstow without even discovering that I was an artist. Sadly, trauma had to hit for me to find out who I really am, and it freed me from the prison of naivete that I had grown up with. As soon as I got to prison, I had nothing to relate to.

Once you discover that you’ve got your own way of living, eventually you’ve got to feed that torch inside you that frees your spirit and your soul, and allows you to walk in your own shoes. I think Michka understood that very well. That’s how she made her films. That’s why she never wanted to have some of those bigshots give her money and take control of the art. Like Beckett, who didn’t let anyone control his art. He didn’t want his work taken over by entities where he had no control. It’s like The Little Prince. Everyone’s got their own little planet. But if you don’t know that, then you don’t cultivate it, and share it with others to have them share their world and find their niche. Not everyone wants to be a poet or a filmmaker. Someone could be a great cook…

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SJ: …whatever suits their fancy. But they’ve got to discover it on their own journey, and breaking down the walls that society places in front of them.

MF: Yes

SJ: It’s so cool that both Michka and me knew what we were. I never wrote for money, and I think it was the same for her. She just wanted to have a way of doing her films to share with the world — a way to share her heart with real love and creativity. Like Ani DiFranco who turned down the big record companies because she didn’t want to be controlled.

MF: Catherine[3] agreed that Michka could not have done Spoon so well earlier in her career. With some of her early films, when she had funding from the National Film Board, she was under more pressure. With Spoon, she was drawing on a well of knowledge of experience, and working with people she had known for many years. She trusted them and gave them the freedom to give input into the film. For Catherine, the metallic sound of the trains made her think of the steel in prison. Once she expressed an interest in recording the trains, Michka insisted that we stop immediately to record the sound. Because in filmmaking and in life, you have to seize the moment. I’m rambling now.

SJ: That’s a stream of consciousness. A lot of time with stream of consciousness you come out with a bunch of wisdom that if you don’t write it down or put it somewhere… like you say, it’s seizing the moment. There’s about three or four ways I may be able to get out of prison next year. I’ve been telling people that finally after all this time the dark clouds are lifting, and the light is coming in. But I used another metaphor as well and I didn’t write it down. You’ve got to seize those moments and articulate it, or record it. We think we’re going to remember something but we don’t. It’ll be gone, gone forever. I’ve missed out on songs, and the first stories I wrote.

You have sixty seconds remaining.

MF: We can pick this up again on Friday.

***

SJ: What’s happening?

MF: Did I tell you about finding a VHS copy of The Snail Position, Michka’s only fiction feature film? I gave it to a shop, and I’m hoping to get a digitized copy today or tomorrow.  And then I’m going to see if I can get a real digital print made from the original film because what I’m doing is not good enough to be seen. It’s just for research.

SJ: I’ll be going on Sirius Satellite in a few weeks. There’s a lady who wants to interview me. She does public television. They gave me the telephone number, and when she answered I started quoting Shakespeare. And she said, “Oh, that was breathtaking!”

MF: Which Shakespeare?

SJ: Oh, just the regular ones. “To be or not to be”

MF: Oh, the regular ones…. You know Michka started your film with you saying, “To Be or Not To Be”.

SJ: That’s perfect. I’ve got to bring that up in the Sirius interview. I’ve got another interview with Caits from PEN, who’s going to do five episodes.[4]

You have sixty seconds remaining.

MF: Well, that went by fast.

SJ: How many languages did she speak?  

MF: Apart from English and French, she spoke Hebrew and some Italian. When she was thirteen or fourteen, she had a summer job in the floor of a factory in France. It was a horrible experience, and I think that’s where she got asthma. But they needed someone in the office to translate German to French. She’d been studying German in school so she got that job. So I think she could probably speak some German as well, and some Spanish.

SJ: Did she speak Arabic?

MF: When she shot her film The Snail Position in Tunisia, she told everyone that she didn’t speak Arabic. At a certain point, she went with one of the Arab drivers to a food stall. And she started speaking some Arabic words. They came out of our head, from some recess of her childhood. She had completely forgotten them, and yet they were there.

SJ: She was a great writer, too. A lot of people didn’t know that. She sent me this short story about something that happened in the subway.[5] Yeah, she could write.

MF: I spoke to her first love, Guy, who is still a friend of mine, about her writing. When they were together back in the 1970s, he said she was writing constantly in notebooks. He said it was a natural transition for her to move from that into making films. When I look at her notebooks, there is so much cross-fertilization. There’s a title of a film she tried to get funding for that ended up as a short story, and vice versa.

SJ: She did a lot of research, too. She loved learning about something.

MF: Oh yeah. When she went to China, she didn’t speak the language, but went ahead and did the film anyway, through a certain fearlessness. I was talking to Catherine about recording sound in the desert for Spoon. And she said the whole experience was so incredible for her, and that MIchka already knew to try to capture the desert in sound alone would be a huge creative challenge.

SJ: In the desert, even silence has sound. The wind has a voice. Shimming, and all that different stuff. The moon has a voice, especially near the desert where there are no streetlights or buildings that can block the sound. And the sand shifting.

MF: I went out with Catherine once, and she gave me the headphones. I was hearing in a completely different way. I was hearing insects.

SJ: There’s a lot of hidden sounds that you’ve got to get amplified. 

MF: There’s one moment in Spoon where you’re reciting the poem where you were talking about being a boy and putting your ear to the desert where you could hear the underground riverbed. It’s very powerful. In one of your other poems, you talk of the desert sparkling like orange sherbet. I love that Michka doesn’t show the sparkling sands when you are saying the words. It comes later so it’s not linear or literal. It’s very poetic.

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 SJ: That’s what filmmaking is. It’s making visual poetry. And that’s how she can make these poems come alive.

MF: Exactly. Trying to find the metaphor. That’s why giving freedom to her team was so important.

SJ: You could send me the film 30 seconds at a time.

MF: Could I? How do I do that?

SJ: You get the video app, and send it in 30 second increments. You didn’t know that?

[1] Judith Tannenbaum (1947-2019) was a poet, writer and teaching artist who led poetry workshops in California prisons.  

[2] Rabbits of Realness Publications is a zine by Spoon Jackson and SaraMarie Bottaro.

[3] Catherine Van Der Donckt.

[4] Caits Meissner is director of Prison and Justice Writing at PEN America.

[5] Le Critique, La Lune des coiffeurs.