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Miranda July
Miranda July’s quirky style of narrative and
signature themes, developed over the past decade, have infused her
performance pieces, feature-film work, video art, Internet projects,
and even seven-inch recordings. Indeed, despite the multitude of
forms her work has taken, some things about July’s projects—which
have been called both self-consciously adorable and borderline
creepy—are remarkably the same. As she explained to Rachel Kushner
for Bomb magazine (Summer 2005), “I was (and am) interested
in seeing different kinds of people together, unusual pairs in terms
of age and gender and race.” Kushner summed up the predominating
themes in July’s work as “people hoping for miraculous events to
intervene in their lives, children cultivating their own private and
idiosyncratic longings, everyone improvising ways to communicate
with one another.” July’s recent endeavors, the feature film Me
and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and a collection of short
stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), have
significantly expanded her audience and celebrity.
Miranda July was born Miranda Grossinger on February 15, 1974 in
Barre, Vermont, and raised in Berkeley, California. She has an older
brother, Robin Grossinger, a biologist with the San Francisco
Estuary Institute. Her parents, Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger,
are the founders and publishers of North Atlantic Books, whose
mission, according to its Web site, is to “develop new ideas,
nurture practical education, spread timeless wisdom, and help turn
destructive energies into positive forces.” Books published by the
company include Healing with Whole Foods and Your Inner
Physician and You. In an interview with Kimberly Cutter for
New York Magazine (May 21, 2007), July recalled that during her
childhood, her parents talked with her about their personal--even
marital--problems. “I wasn’t neglected at all,” she told Cutter,
“but my parents didn't have the best boundaries in the world.” She
added that her parents' openness contributed to her own “desire to
be the one who understands.” The environment proved to be a
nurturing one for the young girl's talents. At age seven she began
recording herself holding one end of a conversation and then playing
it back, so she could “chat with herself,” as Karen Durbin reported
for the New York Times (June 19, 2005). A precocious and
creative teen, she created, with a friend, a “girlzine” called “Snarla,”
in which she wrote about her experiences. That activity generated a
character called July, whose name she adopted as her own--marking
the first of many instances of self-reinvention in her career. She
began writing plays and staging them at the 924 Gilman Street
Project, also known as the Alternative Music Foundation, an all-ages
club in North Berkeley. July attended the
University of California at Santa Cruz, where she studied film. She
dropped out at age 20, disenchanted with a course that was “all
guys” and in which “every project had a gun or a dog in it,” as she
told Durbin. Within a year she was living in Portland, Oregon, where
she fell in with a group of musicians called the CeBe Barnes Band.
She contributed vocals to a seven-inch punk record called The
CeBe Barnes Band, released on the Horse Kitty label. Next, she
collaborated with a band called the Need, providing vocals for a
second seven-inch record, Margie Ruskie Stops Time (1996),
released on the Kill Rock Stars label. At music venues she was
paired with alternative-rock acts, among them Sleater-Kinney, Chicks
on Speed, and Dub Narcotic. In 1996 July also began
making short videos and creating performance pieces, quickly gaining
attention and funding. Within a year she had received grants from
organizations including the Andrea Frank Foundation, Art Bridge
Association, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. The
character-oriented performances July produced during that period,
including Atlanta (1996), The Amateurist (1998), and
Love Diamond (1998–2000), often involved her playing many or
all of the roles (she portrayed, for example, both a woman and the
woman's mother); the works also featured slide and video projection
and music. Her videos were screened in a wide variety of venues,
among them the Chicago Underground Film Festival, the Whitney Museum
of Art, in New York, and the Barbara Gross Gallery in Munich,
Germany. As a result of that exposure, July won additional awards
and grants as well as guest-artist positions at the University of
California, Swarthmore College, and Bryn Mawr College.
As July continued to portray characters in her films, videos, and
performance pieces, her roster of characters grew. In Nests of
Tens, for example, a teenage boy performs an elaborate cleaning
ritual on a baby in an empty house, creating an atmosphere that is
at once nonsexual and unnerving. The notions of striking
juxtapositions and of disparate but functioning communities are
present in other projects, such as Learning to Love You More
(begun in 2002), in which July and a fellow artist, Harrell
Fletcher, brought together segments of the public through art
assignments, whose results are shared via the Internet. Assignments
range from finding art in the everyday (“Draw a constellation from
someone’s freckles”), to pursuing meaningful experiences (“Spend
time with a dying person”), to creating self-reflective art (“Make a
Learning to Love You More assignment”). Other, more
performance-oriented works, including How I Learned to Draw
(2002–04) as well as Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely
Are Not Going To Talk About (2006–), also rely in part on viewer
participation. In Draw, the collective title for July's
performances from 2002 to 2004, she chose by intuition the audience
members who could potentially be good friends with each other, then
introduced them to one another before casting them, on the spot, in
roles in her live performances. How I Learned to Draw, like
Learning to Love You More, was—according to July’s Web
site—“primarily concerned with drawing attention to the present
moment.” July next explored the world of narrative
film. Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) is a visually
lush, 90-minute work described on its Web site, meandyoumovie.com,
as “a poetic and penetrating observation of how people struggle to
connect with one another in an isolating and contemporary world.”
The film centers on Christine (played by July), a struggling video
artist who sets her sights on Richard (John Hawkes), a recently
divorced shoe salesman. The story includes other unusual matchups: a
gallery director and a seven-year-old who are in contact through the
Internet and a teenage boy and younger girl who lie on the carpet of
the girl's bedroom, talking about her fantasies of marriage. The
soundtrack, created by Michael Andrews, full of “winsome
beep-and-buzz keyboards” (according to the Summer 2005 edition of
Sight and Sound), underscores the melodic dissonance of the
central, interrelated characters. Some felt that July had shied away
from the reality of her awkward cinematic couplings once their
humorous or startling effects had been achieved. Many others,
however, celebrated July's first feature film, which won the
Originality of Vision award at the Sundance Film Festival, the
Camera d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and an Independent
Spirit Award nomination. In the New York Times (June 17,
2005), A. O. Scott declared, “I like [the film] very much, and I
hope you will, too.” July has attributed her forays
into fiction to encouragement from the fiction writer and essayist
Rick Moody. In 2003 her stories had begun to appear in journals
including the prestigious Paris Review as well as the
Harvard Review and Tin House. In those stories July
continued to explore unsettling sexual dynamics and atypical
pairings in intimate situations. Some of the pieces, among them
“Making Love in 2003,” were collected for the 2007 volume No One
Belongs Here More Than You. Discussing the book with August
Brown for the Los Angeles Times (May 6, 2007), July explained
that the year-long press tour for her first film had left her
exhausted, self-conscious, and strapped for funds. “I was trying to
pull myself together creatively . . . ,” she recalled. “I was very
broke. I thought, ‘Well, if I can finish this book and write a bunch
more stories, I bet I can sell it now that I have a little bit of an
audience.’ I was happy to have something to do, a task at hand.”
July described the writing process to Kimberly Cutter as being
difficult, explaining that she forced herself to continue even
though “everything I wrote seemed terrible.” She also said, “The
stories aren't technically autobiographical, but in an emotional
sense, they are.” Some critics heralded the
collection as marking a new phase in July's work, a more mature
period that would see her refrain from what her detractors saw as
posturing—or, as Cutter phrased it, “serv[ing] up preciousness in
place of thoughtfulness, trafficking in . . . faux-earnest
indulgences.” The book's effervescent tales feature sexual
idiosyncrasy (stemming in part, once again, from unlikely,
uncomfortable pairings) as well as a wide variety of odd subjects
and details, including a little dog named Potato, earthquake
awareness, and Prince William of Great Britain. Such seemingly
random references, which become entrances into her characters’
complicated emotional lives, are a signature part of July’s creative
voice, regardless of medium. The uniformity of her narrative voice,
in fact, is perhaps the most frequently cited aspect of No One
Belongs Here More Than You. Josh Lacey wrote for the London
Guardian (June 30, 2007), “Whether the narrators are men or
women, young or old, gay or straight, they all tend to speak in a
very similar tone.” Lacey also called the book's 16 stories
“blisteringly good.” David Wiegand, reviewing the collection for the
San Francisco Chronicle (June 28, 2007), agreed, exclaiming,
“July’s stories startle us at every turn . . . sometimes by passages
of impossibly lush eloquence that rise from their post-minimal
settings like great adagios, and very often, by their sheer
inventiveness.” Though the critical and commercial
success of her more recent projects, her most mainstream works to
date, has attracted the attention of dealmakers in the entertainment
industry, July has chosen to stick to her own--not necessarily
mainstream--agenda. As she told the New York Sun (February
27, 2007), her response to “brand new fancy movie agents” attempting
to capitalize on her newfound celebrity and success was, “Oh, by the
way, just don’t even talk to me for a year because you're not going
to care what I'm doing.” While working on the screenplay for her
next feature film, July has also devoted time to playing the
typewriter in a Los Angeles, California, band, hiking in the
Hollywood Hills with her boyfriend, and working on smaller-scale
projects, such as an art book related to the Learning to Love You
More Web site. Discussing future projects, July said to Rachel
Kushner, “I have a gigantic plan . . . and it involves performance,
and fiction, and radio, and the [World Wide Web], and TV and
features that are both ‘conventional’ and totally not. And when I am
done with my plan, when I am very old, hopefully there will be a
little more space for people living with profound doubt to tell
their stories in all different mediums. Also Hollywood won't be so
sexist. . . . But one thing at a time.” July lives
in Los Angeles with her boyfriend, the graphic artist and film
director Mike Mills, whose recent releases include Thumbsucker
(2005).
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