Introduction
Corrine Fitzpatrick
I met Barbara Hammer and Every Ocean Hughes (who then went by Emily) on the same night in 2011. From my journal, dated May 8th of that year:
Reading this eight years later, I am touched by the scare quotes I placed around ‘our community’. I was relatively new to the scene in 2011 and likely felt insecure claiming membership to what was, and still is, a fluid, multi-generational patchwork of queer, feminist artists and writers living in or passing through New York City. ‘Lesbian mafia’ (a term equal parts endearment and critique) was often bandied about. In my memory, A Gay Bar Called Everywhere was a fun hyper-performance of the selfsame social milieu that would carry on—only slightly less self-consciously—at the gay bar called Julius immediately after the show. In an attempt to succinctly define ‘our community’, overlapping structures of interpersonal support spring to mind. We are each other’s collaborators, professors, lovers, landlords, coffee dates, critics, employees, icons, and audiences with a common cause—unwieldy as it may be—to steward our marginalized lineage and marshal an ethos of our own design. Hence, Every’s casting of Barbara Hammer and Barbara’s loving pantomime of Claude Cahun.
Every and I both began interview-based collaborations [1] with Barbara during the last months of her life, once she had publicly announced that she was in palliative care. The providentially crossed roots and branches of our projects have formed, as Every wrote in an email to me on the 7th of January, ‘a wonderful triangle’. During my conversations with Barbara we would find ourselves seamlessly workshopping her answers for Every:
‘So you see my brain is faster than my mouth.’ Throughout their correspondence there are instances in Barbara’s writing that appear to be typographical errors or grammatical mistakes. Language loosened for Barbara toward the end of her life, and she had moments of trouble recalling words and names. It was a minor aphasia, but it frustrated Barbara immensely. As with so many aspects from her lifetime of work, she refused to conceal the facts of the matter. Barbara felt an imperative to document and share what dying looked and felt like for her. ‘A queer death is a community death’, Barbara writes in response to Every’s question, ‘What would a queer death mean to you?’ ‘… As one leaves, one leaves with more clarity of the unknown, a sharing of the process, a little bit more revealed.’
Barbara died on March 16, 2019. On the 27th of March, Every came to northern California to attend a death doula workshop, located less than two hours from where I live in rural West Marin. We planned an afternoon pilgrimage to a small house that Barbara built and inhabited in the 1960s in an area, halfway between my home and the death doula workshop, called Joy Woods. It rained heavily as Every and I drove through the village of Bodega, listening to a recording I had made on my phone of Barbara recalling how to get to a place she hadn’t set eyes on for fifty years. Her voice—puckish and gravelly, weary and warm—guided us left off the highway, across a small creek, past a corral, into the redwoods. We slowed but did not stop before what was undeniably the house that Barbara built. The lights were on and someone was home. We continued, climbing steeply up a ridge until we came to an intersection wide enough to turn around in. Joy Way crossed Fitzpatrick Lane. Coincidence has played a subtle yet pronounced role in the creation of this work, which is less a “work” than it is a resonance, ongoing. The correspondence between Every and Barbara that is presented here provides more than an artifact from the end of a life, more than a peek into their friendship. It is a prolongation of Barbara’s frank generosity—an openness that engendered amities and communities during her lifetime as well as now, in her wake.
1. I am completing a book that Barbara and I began work on in the fall of 2018. It is about her experience of dying, and will include selections from her recent journals, transcripts from a series of conversations she and I had in New York City in January 2019, some reproductions of her artwork, and a brief afterward by me.
Corrine Fitzpatrick
We can live only in the event’s reverberation.
—Edmond Jabés
I met Barbara Hammer and Every Ocean Hughes (who then went by Emily) on the same night in 2011. From my journal, dated May 8th of that year:
… last night went to the Kitchen for Emily Roysdon’s A Gay Bar Called Everywhere. A collective theater experiment with a large cast of friends and acquaintances. Was very piqued and moved—various representations of clichés and pathos and themes of ‘our community’. Barbara Hammer homage to Claude Cahun. Vanessa Anspaugh and Aretha Aoki’s duet re: passive-aggressive friend-love, many more vignettes. Met Emily at Julius after and shared a cab home—new friend? I admire her work, and felt comfortable talking about the show with her, turns out she crashed at E’s right after I did.
Reading this eight years later, I am touched by the scare quotes I placed around ‘our community’. I was relatively new to the scene in 2011 and likely felt insecure claiming membership to what was, and still is, a fluid, multi-generational patchwork of queer, feminist artists and writers living in or passing through New York City. ‘Lesbian mafia’ (a term equal parts endearment and critique) was often bandied about. In my memory, A Gay Bar Called Everywhere was a fun hyper-performance of the selfsame social milieu that would carry on—only slightly less self-consciously—at the gay bar called Julius immediately after the show. In an attempt to succinctly define ‘our community’, overlapping structures of interpersonal support spring to mind. We are each other’s collaborators, professors, lovers, landlords, coffee dates, critics, employees, icons, and audiences with a common cause—unwieldy as it may be—to steward our marginalized lineage and marshal an ethos of our own design. Hence, Every’s casting of Barbara Hammer and Barbara’s loving pantomime of Claude Cahun.
Every and I both began interview-based collaborations [1] with Barbara during the last months of her life, once she had publicly announced that she was in palliative care. The providentially crossed roots and branches of our projects have formed, as Every wrote in an email to me on the 7th of January, ‘a wonderful triangle’. During my conversations with Barbara we would find ourselves seamlessly workshopping her answers for Every:
January 6, 2019 (43:36:00)
BH: One of the questions that Every’s asked me about is, “What work from the queer community have you learned about dying from?” And [clears throat] this isn’t, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s the queer community. But the books that I’ve read about dying. Well. Um. [sighs] So you see my brain is faster than my mouth! Uh. The great poet and writer of all time, A Room of One’s Own.
CF: Virginia Woolf.
BH: So Virginia Woolf and her book on health and illness.
CF: I love that book so much, On Being Ill.
BH: On Being Ill! [coughs] It’s been republished, with her mother's writing. Oh what’s the name of the press, it’s a friend of Janlori’s and it’s here, and I had hoped to look for these books yesterday, um, to get into being able to answer Every, and I wasn’t well enough. But, there’s a queer [laughs] person who precedes me. But there was no talk of sexuality in her illness.
‘So you see my brain is faster than my mouth.’ Throughout their correspondence there are instances in Barbara’s writing that appear to be typographical errors or grammatical mistakes. Language loosened for Barbara toward the end of her life, and she had moments of trouble recalling words and names. It was a minor aphasia, but it frustrated Barbara immensely. As with so many aspects from her lifetime of work, she refused to conceal the facts of the matter. Barbara felt an imperative to document and share what dying looked and felt like for her. ‘A queer death is a community death’, Barbara writes in response to Every’s question, ‘What would a queer death mean to you?’ ‘… As one leaves, one leaves with more clarity of the unknown, a sharing of the process, a little bit more revealed.’
Barbara died on March 16, 2019. On the 27th of March, Every came to northern California to attend a death doula workshop, located less than two hours from where I live in rural West Marin. We planned an afternoon pilgrimage to a small house that Barbara built and inhabited in the 1960s in an area, halfway between my home and the death doula workshop, called Joy Woods. It rained heavily as Every and I drove through the village of Bodega, listening to a recording I had made on my phone of Barbara recalling how to get to a place she hadn’t set eyes on for fifty years. Her voice—puckish and gravelly, weary and warm—guided us left off the highway, across a small creek, past a corral, into the redwoods. We slowed but did not stop before what was undeniably the house that Barbara built. The lights were on and someone was home. We continued, climbing steeply up a ridge until we came to an intersection wide enough to turn around in. Joy Way crossed Fitzpatrick Lane. Coincidence has played a subtle yet pronounced role in the creation of this work, which is less a “work” than it is a resonance, ongoing. The correspondence between Every and Barbara that is presented here provides more than an artifact from the end of a life, more than a peek into their friendship. It is a prolongation of Barbara’s frank generosity—an openness that engendered amities and communities during her lifetime as well as now, in her wake.
1. I am completing a book that Barbara and I began work on in the fall of 2018. It is about her experience of dying, and will include selections from her recent journals, transcripts from a series of conversations she and I had in New York City in January 2019, some reproductions of her artwork, and a brief afterward by me.
Introduction
Corrine Fitzpatrick
I met Barbara Hammer and Every Ocean Hughes (who then went by Emily) on the same night in 2011. From my journal, dated May 8th of that year:
Reading this eight years later, I am touched by the scare quotes I placed around ‘our community’. I was relatively new to the scene in 2011 and likely felt insecure claiming membership to what was, and still is, a fluid, multi-generational patchwork of queer, feminist artists and writers living in or passing through New York City. ‘Lesbian mafia’ (a term equal parts endearment and critique) was often bandied about. In my memory, A Gay Bar Called Everywhere was a fun hyper-performance of the selfsame social milieu that would carry on—only slightly less self-consciously—at the gay bar called Julius immediately after the show. In an attempt to succinctly define ‘our community’, overlapping structures of interpersonal support spring to mind. We are each other’s collaborators, professors, lovers, landlords, coffee dates, critics, employees, icons, and audiences with a common cause—unwieldy as it may be—to steward our marginalized lineage and marshal an ethos of our own design. Hence, Every’s casting of Barbara Hammer and Barbara’s loving pantomime of Claude Cahun.
Every and I both began interview-based collaborations [1] with Barbara during the last months of her life, once she had publicly announced that she was in palliative care. The providentially crossed roots and branches of our projects have formed, as Every wrote in an email to me on the 7th of January, ‘a wonderful triangle’. During my conversations with Barbara we would find ourselves seamlessly workshopping her answers for Every:
‘So you see my brain is faster than my mouth.’ Throughout their correspondence there are instances in Barbara’s writing that appear to be typographical errors or grammatical mistakes. Language loosened for Barbara toward the end of her life, and she had moments of trouble recalling words and names. It was a minor aphasia, but it frustrated Barbara immensely. As with so many aspects from her lifetime of work, she refused to conceal the facts of the matter. Barbara felt an imperative to document and share what dying looked and felt like for her. ‘A queer death is a community death’, Barbara writes in response to Every’s question, ‘What would a queer death mean to you?’ ‘… As one leaves, one leaves with more clarity of the unknown, a sharing of the process, a little bit more revealed.’
Barbara died on March 16, 2019. On the 27th of March, Every came to northern California to attend a death doula workshop, located less than two hours from where I live in rural West Marin. We planned an afternoon pilgrimage to a small house that Barbara built and inhabited in the 1960s in an area, halfway between my home and the death doula workshop, called Joy Woods. It rained heavily as Every and I drove through the village of Bodega, listening to a recording I had made on my phone of Barbara recalling how to get to a place she hadn’t set eyes on for fifty years. Her voice—puckish and gravelly, weary and warm—guided us left off the highway, across a small creek, past a corral, into the redwoods. We slowed but did not stop before what was undeniably the house that Barbara built. The lights were on and someone was home. We continued, climbing steeply up a ridge until we came to an intersection wide enough to turn around in. Joy Way crossed Fitzpatrick Lane. Coincidence has played a subtle yet pronounced role in the creation of this work, which is less a “work” than it is a resonance, ongoing. The correspondence between Every and Barbara that is presented here provides more than an artifact from the end of a life, more than a peek into their friendship. It is a prolongation of Barbara’s frank generosity—an openness that engendered amities and communities during her lifetime as well as now, in her wake.
1. I am completing a book that Barbara and I began work on in the fall of 2018. It is about her experience of dying, and will include selections from her recent journals, transcripts from a series of conversations she and I had in New York City in January 2019, some reproductions of her artwork, and a brief afterward by me.
Corrine Fitzpatrick
We can live only in the event’s reverberation.
—Edmond Jabés
I met Barbara Hammer and Every Ocean Hughes (who then went by Emily) on the same night in 2011. From my journal, dated May 8th of that year:
… last night went to the Kitchen for Emily Roysdon’s A Gay Bar Called Everywhere. A collective theater experiment with a large cast of friends and acquaintances. Was very piqued and moved—various representations of clichés and pathos and themes of ‘our community’. Barbara Hammer homage to Claude Cahun. Vanessa Anspaugh and Aretha Aoki’s duet re: passive-aggressive friend-love, many more vignettes. Met Emily at Julius after and shared a cab home—new friend? I admire her work, and felt comfortable talking about the show with her, turns out she crashed at E’s right after I did.
Reading this eight years later, I am touched by the scare quotes I placed around ‘our community’. I was relatively new to the scene in 2011 and likely felt insecure claiming membership to what was, and still is, a fluid, multi-generational patchwork of queer, feminist artists and writers living in or passing through New York City. ‘Lesbian mafia’ (a term equal parts endearment and critique) was often bandied about. In my memory, A Gay Bar Called Everywhere was a fun hyper-performance of the selfsame social milieu that would carry on—only slightly less self-consciously—at the gay bar called Julius immediately after the show. In an attempt to succinctly define ‘our community’, overlapping structures of interpersonal support spring to mind. We are each other’s collaborators, professors, lovers, landlords, coffee dates, critics, employees, icons, and audiences with a common cause—unwieldy as it may be—to steward our marginalized lineage and marshal an ethos of our own design. Hence, Every’s casting of Barbara Hammer and Barbara’s loving pantomime of Claude Cahun.
Every and I both began interview-based collaborations [1] with Barbara during the last months of her life, once she had publicly announced that she was in palliative care. The providentially crossed roots and branches of our projects have formed, as Every wrote in an email to me on the 7th of January, ‘a wonderful triangle’. During my conversations with Barbara we would find ourselves seamlessly workshopping her answers for Every:
January 6, 2019 (43:36:00)
BH: One of the questions that Every’s asked me about is, “What work from the queer community have you learned about dying from?” And [clears throat] this isn’t, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s the queer community. But the books that I’ve read about dying. Well. Um. [sighs] So you see my brain is faster than my mouth! Uh. The great poet and writer of all time, A Room of One’s Own.
CF: Virginia Woolf.
BH: So Virginia Woolf and her book on health and illness.
CF: I love that book so much, On Being Ill.
BH: On Being Ill! [coughs] It’s been republished, with her mother's writing. Oh what’s the name of the press, it’s a friend of Janlori’s and it’s here, and I had hoped to look for these books yesterday, um, to get into being able to answer Every, and I wasn’t well enough. But, there’s a queer [laughs] person who precedes me. But there was no talk of sexuality in her illness.
‘So you see my brain is faster than my mouth.’ Throughout their correspondence there are instances in Barbara’s writing that appear to be typographical errors or grammatical mistakes. Language loosened for Barbara toward the end of her life, and she had moments of trouble recalling words and names. It was a minor aphasia, but it frustrated Barbara immensely. As with so many aspects from her lifetime of work, she refused to conceal the facts of the matter. Barbara felt an imperative to document and share what dying looked and felt like for her. ‘A queer death is a community death’, Barbara writes in response to Every’s question, ‘What would a queer death mean to you?’ ‘… As one leaves, one leaves with more clarity of the unknown, a sharing of the process, a little bit more revealed.’
Barbara died on March 16, 2019. On the 27th of March, Every came to northern California to attend a death doula workshop, located less than two hours from where I live in rural West Marin. We planned an afternoon pilgrimage to a small house that Barbara built and inhabited in the 1960s in an area, halfway between my home and the death doula workshop, called Joy Woods. It rained heavily as Every and I drove through the village of Bodega, listening to a recording I had made on my phone of Barbara recalling how to get to a place she hadn’t set eyes on for fifty years. Her voice—puckish and gravelly, weary and warm—guided us left off the highway, across a small creek, past a corral, into the redwoods. We slowed but did not stop before what was undeniably the house that Barbara built. The lights were on and someone was home. We continued, climbing steeply up a ridge until we came to an intersection wide enough to turn around in. Joy Way crossed Fitzpatrick Lane. Coincidence has played a subtle yet pronounced role in the creation of this work, which is less a “work” than it is a resonance, ongoing. The correspondence between Every and Barbara that is presented here provides more than an artifact from the end of a life, more than a peek into their friendship. It is a prolongation of Barbara’s frank generosity—an openness that engendered amities and communities during her lifetime as well as now, in her wake.
1. I am completing a book that Barbara and I began work on in the fall of 2018. It is about her experience of dying, and will include selections from her recent journals, transcripts from a series of conversations she and I had in New York City in January 2019, some reproductions of her artwork, and a brief afterward by me.