she won my favorite heart

"I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again."
- Miranda July, from No One Belongs Here More Than You.

Miranda July is just oozing with talent. She is a performance (or is it performing?) artist, writer, actress, film director, and musician. I first fell in love with her in her 2005 movie Me and You and Everyone We Know, which she both acted in and wrote. I got another sweet taste of her in her 2007 collection of short stories No One Belongs Here More Than You, which is now one of my favorite books ever.

What I love about July's work is her ability to reach out to her audiences in a brutally honest and raw way. Her stories are written with almost childlike sincerity and thoughtfulness, making sense of certain universal (but seemingly surreal) truths, like the inevitable loneliness of the human condition. Her characters are clumsy, sad, and painfully ordinary, but sometimes they reach out to each other. The plots are bizarre but virtually disposable; the clear importance of July's work is in how characters interact and in the fact of interaction itself.

This same focus comes through in the artist's websites as well, which take a particularly performative route. In turn, her sites force interaction between artist and viewer, an odd idea in that this interaction is taking place over the most public and anonymous medium of interaction. Indeed, the website for No One Belongs Here More Than You is split into a number of photographs that tell the story of the book's release tour. Oh, and each photo is of a hand-written message from the author, scrawled onto the top of her stove. The viewer must click an arrow at the bottom right corner to advance to the next page, and, in doing so, he says, "Yes, I am listening." July's messages are both funny and sweet, allowing the reader to forget the absurdity and commanding nature of the whole operation.

July's homepage opens with an equally bizarre and demanding splash page, asking readers to enter the secret admission password. "(you know the password, just clear your mind and look within. it will probably be the first word you think of.) (if this doesn't work, try looking at a candle for a few seconds.)" I remember the first time I browsed the site, immediately writing "BLANKETS" into the allotted password bar. Of course, any password works -- even not typing in a password and just hitting 'submit' -- and advances you to the main page whose header reads, "YOU OBVIOUSLY KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT."

I believe this idea to be the most interesting part of July's work: that is, she is always in constant conversation and communication with her audiences, but never really letting them say anything. She's always filling in the blanks, whether it be by only allowing a next arrow or by revealing that their own thought-out secret passwords are unimportant. Still, she appears to listen and engage in something sincere. "YOU OBVIOUSLY KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT." And it is comforting and cozy there, nuzzled into Miranda July's mind.

I'm always trying to figure out what communication can possibly be real and/or sincere. More often than not, I feel a huge disconnect between my brain and mouth and hands, knowing that I cannot accurately express a single idea with more than one of those places. This seems to be what July is getting at: I imagine her saying, "I know this isn't real. I know you can't really see me. But I'm trying, and we are talking, and something is happening."

She then pauses and quotes her book,

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real."