How us Multimedia Guys Play
Riminem
Where do fun ideas come from? Juxtapositions that no one’s put together before. Oranges and apples type stuff. In my last year of academic French studies, I took an AP course from an exceptional teacher who focused a good part of the year on writers not included on the recommended AP reading list. Early in the fall, he slapped a copy of Camus’s “L’Étranger” on his desk, told it was on the list, but informed us he wouldn’t waste time on such trash in our class work. We could read it if we wanted, just not in his class.
Instead we devoted well over a month to the study of the four great French Symbolist poets who were seminal to the development of, among other things, modern poetry and modern art. Their names were Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. The first two were very accessible and quickly enjoyed by everyone. I memorized and still remember some verses of both of them. The other two were more difficult, considered so in their own country, so not surprisingly more abstruse for American teenagers in high school. I struggled with them until our teacher, Mr. Miller, shared a connection with one of my own favorite writers. Mallarmé (and the other symbolists, we were assured) drew considerable inspiration from the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, whose complete poetical works were translated into French by the master himself, Stephane Mallarmé. After reading his translations out loud to myself, I could hear Poe in his own poems as well, and it was even easier to see the influence in Baudelaire (“The Flowers of Evil”):and Verlaine (“Les Chansons Long de Violons”).
Rimbaud was a farther reach. He was the real wild man of the bunch. Living the high life, he stormed Paris as a teenager, finished writing poetry at the age of 19, became a gun runner, and died younger even than Poe did, at the age of 37. Poe was the fearless adventurer in literature, creating new genres as he drank his way to the profundities of life and death, and Rimbaud was also an adventurer, both in letters and in the reckless acting out of his fantasies. I learned to appreciate his poetic works but neglected them after my school years until I happened upon a movie called “Total Eclipse.”
1995. David Thewliss and Leonardo di Caprio.
Well, okay then. Mr. Miller had neglected to tell us about the precise relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud. It was not a happy story. The IMDb ‘Metacritic’ from ReelViews said of it, “Despite its flaws, Total Eclipse is the kind of movie that stirs thoughts and ruminations about the nature of genius, the true meaning of art, and the unfailing capacity of great people to destroy themselves and others.” It was a French/Brit production and so probably more frankly portrayed than it would have been here at the time. I didn’t feel shocked by the movie as much as cheated. The poetry was what interested me the most and the sexual angle eclipsed it pretty thoroughly (pun intended). It also made me realize that I had never seen photographs of Verlaine or Rimbaud, or at least not that I could remember. Did they really look like Thewliss and di Caprio? I found pictures on the Internet. Yes, they did, kind of. Close enough anyway.
There I left the Rimbaud story again for nearly a decade, until I came across an intriguing coincidence. My taste in music has always been eclectic — ranging from classical to AC/DC, with Jazz, Blues, Motown, Country, and even Zydeko in between — but Rap had always thrown me for a loop. A few individual hits got through to me, but I overlooked the stars of a genre that often seemed more focused on murdering rivals than producing a body of work. Then I stumbled on Eminem in the movie “8 Mile”:
2002. Starring himself. Final ‘8 Mile’ Rap battles here.
After that I paid occasional attention to Eminem, whose private life and album releases got lots of press, and I realized he was getting better, developing rap into something that could be accessible even to outsiders like me. When I looked around for comparisons to help me explain why I found him interesting, the image of Rimbaud popped into my head. By image I mean the photographs I had found some years back. That was my ticket to a post at the old Instapunk that seemed to piss a few people off, even one of my close friends. [click on these to blow them up and stretched even more…]
Take a breath, then…
I let it go at the time. Not much more I could do at the time without writing a book no one would read. Who cares what I think about two delinquent white boys I have some obscure connections to. (Yes, Eminem too, in my own Detroit years, I learned about the Mile Roads that circle the city and drove through them, raced to appointments through them, many times…)
Then, as I continued to play with graphics and caricatures and such, I found an application called ‘Mixing Booth’ that enabled me to blend two faces into one. They work for politics and the contemporary gender confusions we call equity. Here are a few I worked out in the Mixing Booth:
That’s the process by which I arrived at the photo of ‘Riminem above. Uncanny likeness of both, I think. Now what if… what if… unnhhh, what if I could mix together a Riminem Rap recording? That might be fun. A lot of work but a lot of fun and maybe it will suggest other things that might be done with a similar approach…
I provided the backbeat. Many fine artists supplied the images. Happens with Poe too.
All things considered, it didn’t take that long to do. If you’d like to see what a translation looks like in part, here’s an excerpt:
Rimbaud: ‘The Drunken Boat’ translated by Estill Pollock
…alone, I reach the rapids, guided through
beyond a sense of distance—double-crossed
to screaming savages, my crew
nailed naked to the bull’s-eye totems, lost.
No second thoughts for deck hands: the cargo
scow of Flanders grain, of English cotton,
cast clear of the imbroglio
upstream to catch the careless current down.
The winter runs to tantrum tides, empty
childish fury fuelling my direction,
the breakaway peninsulae,
each tinny coup, slaves for my selection.
I wake to tempests. The oceans sanction
my weightless two-step on the flood, the waves
beneath, breaking towards extinction,
the harbour lighthouse blind to salty graves.
This seepage hull, this apple flesh, this crab-
green infancy of sweetness shoals the seams,
snap-anchor swells that clear the scab
of vomit, wine, this listing bridge of dreams.
And now awash in milky starlight, sea
rhymes sunk to these devouring azures,
nudged by the drowned, pale subsidy
of pain the brooding look of corpses cures;
where, though a sudden cobalt saturates,
measures languid time, beating to the noon,
a manic, boozy chord dictates
a bully red, love’s dregs, its bitter tune…
The translator also provides some additional information about the poem and its author. As a bonus, here’s a Mallarmé translation into French of Poe’s Annabel Lee.
Anyway, I had fun. Which is the whole point of playing.
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