AMERICAN GOTHIC READING
Night Gallery
Los Angeles
July 25, 2024
The United States is definitely haunted. I mean, the whole country is built on an “Indian” graveyard. And it has all the trappings of a horror movie: dark forests, hypersexual teens, and a news cycle that makes jump-scare clips look like meditation videos. (Plus, according to a speech Donald Trump made last Wednesday, the infamous Silence of the Lambs villain Hannibal Lecter is not only “real,” but he also “wants to have you for dinner. He’d like to have you for dinner.”)
All of that’s to say, I wasn’t entirely surprised when the American Gothic–themed reading at Night Gallery last Thursday felt more American than Gothic. The current exhibition — which, though the reading was a one-night-only event, runs through the July 31 — is named for the eponymous 1930 painting by Grant Wood, which famously depicts a buttoned-up and brooch-boasting, pitchfork-wielding couple and wavers between satire and sincerity. Entering the gallery, I came face-to-face with this dour duo, their image improbably transferred onto a large, mug-shaped cookie jar by ceramist Grant Levy-Lucero. The show brings together a series of Levy-Lucero’s pop culture – referencing cookie jars (another, shaped like Inglewood’s programmatic architecture case study of a classic glazed, read “Randy’s Donuts”), with several paintings by JPW3 inspired by the Gothic typefaces favored by many US newspapers.
Honestly, the pairing felt a bit forced. But the reading that accompanied it proved more organic in its eclecticism. Bryan Byrdlong started off the evening with several poems; one, titled “Strange Flowers,” speculated on the longevity and ultimate fates of those once-ubiquitous “SCIENCE IS REAL / BLACK LIVES MATTER / NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL / LOVE IS LOVE” signs that sprang up in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Next came Colby Cotton, who dressed all in black for the occasion and recited poems about wheat fields and sensations of purgatory (inspired by an adolescence in rural New York and an overly ambitious ingestion of marijuana). Brittany Menjivar sported a large crucifix and leopard-print bodysuit as she read from her recently published collection Parasocialite; the story she chose for the occasion focused on a Trader Joe’s employee who fakes the Stendhal effect for clout.
Here, there was — if not a Gothic one — an eminently American interruption: the Domino’s arrived. Post – pizza rush, Ivy Pochoda wrapped up the night with a harrowing account of a prison riot from her novel Sing Her Down (2023).
I spent most of my adolescence in suburban malls drowning in a Champion XXL black hoodie; I’m no stranger to the dark side. I am also the first to admit that labels like “Gothic” have been expanded and co-opted to the point of almost total incoherence. The adjective was first used to describe the style of medieval architecture that spread across Catholic Europe between the 12th and 16th centuries, an aesthetic employed primarily in ecclesiastical buildings like cathedrals and abbeys. Perhaps this is why attending literary readings reminds me so much of going to church as a kid: the rows of chairs, the forced silence, the amplified speaker. Hell, most of the time, both situations involve wine.
As in church, so at readings: I try to focus on the words, to stop my mind from wandering, and hope that what I hear at any moment might cause the ground beneath my feet to slip away and leave me floating.
