AND THAT'S MY STORY: MIKE HARTE, WRITER
I have been intrigued to find out more about the creators behind projects that I have been fortunate enough to see and/ or hear for a long time now so I've decided to something about it. And That's My Story is a series on this blog that shares with you a bit about the creators I've met along the way and their journey towards fulfilling their dreams; it will run for as long as I can find people who are willing to share their story. Today, let me introduce you to the funny and talented Mike Harte!
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Remember when I shared the fact that the Cornerhouse was putting on one last exhibition as an ode to the building that had served them for 30 odd years? Don't worry, I won't feel hurt knowing you don't remember my every word as most of the time even I don't. Anyway, in that post I mentioned that I had the chance to interview some of the artists whose work I admired and one of the kind bunch of artists who set aside sometime to answer my many questions was Mike Harte. It has taken me quite some time to put this up but I am sure his answers will have you chuckling all the same.
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Source: Photo courtesy of Mike Harte
HELLO MIKE! TO KICK-START THIS INTERVIEW, HERE IS AN EASY-ISH QUESTION - WHAT ARE 3 WORDS YOU'D USE TO DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
Hi Mo.
Well I’m not sure about easy-ish but you’re certainly starting with a kick. While this would no doubt be a simple question for any rational and well-adjusted human and, realistically, should be for me, it instead brought a cavalcade of ridiculous neuroses bubbling to the surface, highlighting and exacerbating my inherent weaknesses, while I agonized absurdly over a suitable answer.
Vanity inspired the desire to find something pristine, witty and cerebral (Not three words I’d ever dare use to describe myself) yet an equivalent inclination to portray myself (largely dishonestly) as humble without slipping too deeply into my self-deprecatory depths and revealing too much of my mostly under-wraps depressive darkness has proven an irksome now as when I was mechanically obligated to perform the very same task on OKCupid, many, many years ago.
Obviously though you are an innocent party here and so I shall do my best to finally answer your question. I am gonna cheat though and offer more than one answer. Pick your favourite.
- Prefers not to
- Once showed promise
- Not finished yet
- Not ordinarily succinct
- Romanticises Pynchonesque anonymity
- Garrulous yet evasive
- Pretentiously self-defeating
- Clearly misunderstood question
CASTING YOUR MIND BACK TO YOUR PRE-TEEN SELF, WHAT WAS YOUR DREAM JOB AND HAS THAT DREAM CHANGED?
I’m not sure my pre-teen self had any clue what his dream job was and I'm not certain I can say all that much has changed in the interim. I enjoyed art, or more specifically drawing but the prospect of artist as a job in it’s own right was entirely off my radar. As they’re eternally suggested as more practical assertions of creativity I likely considered graphic design or illustration at some point. I’d probably entertained the idea of being a cartoonist or drawing comics, an inclination that would recur and recede a few years later when I was truly clueless and fairly nihilistic amateur inebriate, who after bumbling unenthusiastically through A-levels was thankfully steered away from small town oblivion and toward Art school by the benevolent suggestion of some concerned teachers. (Ms. Barrett & Ms. Arnold as I recall. Thanks)
I enjoyed writing but again am not sure I saw it as a potential career, although I'm sure the word career was likely alien to me at the time as I had no experience of the world of work. I really have little memory of my youth but imagine I had some hugely naive kind of Camberwick Green idea of jobs as something you just fall neatly into and remain in cheerfully until retirement, which is a pretty bafflingly ignorant misconception for a child of the 80’s.
As for now, I’m really not sure, though with many fruitless years of experience in the job market I have a far better idea of what I don’t want to be doing. My ambitions are pretty humble, though in the current economic and sociopolitical climate still seem, depressingly, lofty.
I’d like to be employed to do something I'm actually good at rather than just adequately capable of, or capable of tolerating, paid enough that I could afford to both live in modest comfort and be able to afford a studio but not be obliged to work so many hours as to make renting a studio an obsolete act. I fully recognise though that this is no mean feat.
I know a lot of artists but I'm not sure I know any who don’t have to rely on either a second job or endure perpetual precarity to survive, and those are the successful ones. I’d love to be able to give it a go but have have always fearful of the risk of engineering my own destitution in doing so, and the prospect of it ever being my “job” is woefully implausible.
Similarly people whose opinions I respect have told me I'm a decent writer, and should do more of it, but the chances of my still unwritten first novel heralding grandiose success seems decidedly unlikely, especially given the distant prospect of the first draft’s completion. And with zero experience and no hefty portfolio of literary outpourings showing the proper commitment to my craft my journalistic prospects are deservedly slim.
In spite of the long hours (And insect bites) I really enjoyed working on the Rough Cut shoot and I really love film so could happily be involved in that world. Sadly though I am again mostly lacking in the abilities or knowledge that’d allow me to do so professionally.
CREATIVE WRITING IS SOMETHING THAT I HAVE ALWAYS LOVED DOING. WHEN DID YOU DECIDE YOU WANTED TO DEVELOP YOUR WRITING SKILLS & EXPRESS YOUR IDEAS USING VARIOUS MEDIUMS AND HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT IT?
Fairly late now you mention it. I've been working with text as part of my artwork since my student days but I wouldn't really classify that as a branch of creative writing. I made a decision that I wanted to do more writing as a studious enhancement to my practice after I graduated, to make my work more intellectually engaging and personally entertaining, but having never actually made good on this it hardly counts. I've had a couple of blogs over the years but nothing that was rigorously committed to.
It’s only really within the last 5 years that I've begun to think about having a proper go at writing fiction, and that’s largely because after a mostly uneventful life, I found myself in a situation that might hold within it the basis for a potentially entertaining novel.
So to answer your question, I'm not sure I ever consciously made a decision to develop my writing skills, and so have gone about doing so almost entirely by accident.
I have spent an extremely unhealthy amount of time in the last decade online trying to impress and entertain small groups of charming, intelligent people but I'm not sure how I feel about suggesting that to be a beneficial mode of development. Though it is useful to write for an audience, so I suppose there’s that.
BEING A MULTIMEDIA ARTIST, WHICH ARE YOUR FAVOURITE ARTISTIC MEDIUMS TO USE TO INFUSE LIFE INTO YOUR IDEAS OR DOES IT DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THE PROJECT?
I’d like to think it depends entirely on the project and that I try to use the medium that works best to communicate the idea but I imagine the reality is my familiarity with certain media or modes of creation probably prejudices my thinking somewhat. Occasionally I’ll have a strong idea of what I want something to be come to mind straight away, which is often hard to shake and doesn't shift until I come up against the practicalities/difficulties involved in translating it from concept to reality.
There’s also the less glamourous issue involved when making work in your bedroom that things involving noxious smells or excessive mess become less desirable, so I'm currently more likely to sway toward small drawings, watercolours or work utilising found or pre-existing objects than large pastel/charcoal drawings, oil paintings or plaster-casts but the ideas that would work best in those forms just get tucked away for another time, so hopefully this betrayal of my integrity isn't judged too harshly.
IF YOU DON'T MIND SHARING, WHAT WAS THE TITLE OF YOUR FIRST EVER PIECE OF WRITTEN WORK THAT YOU COMPLETED & SHARED WITH OTHERS AND WHAT WAS IT ABOUT?
Well I made a piece of art that transcribed a late-night, juvenile and massively uninformed pseudo-political rant for my final show of my foundation course back in 1998 but I've no idea regarding it’s title or content and I’d much rather it were forgotten entirely.
I suppose my first post on my blog on Myspace, inauspicious as it was, best fits the criteria. Having checked my archive, I can tell you it was title “ Desire and disappointment” and it would most accurately be described as floundering, meandering bullshit and thus not really about anything. In amongst the self-indulgent blabbering there is a brief section that laments my inability to satisfy a sudden inexplicable desire to watch a Matthew Broderick film before going to sleep, specifically Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or 3 O’Clock High or failing those, Ladyhawke. It goes on to cover my general difficulty in selecting a suitable film to watch in bed/fall asleep to. (This was back in 2005 when films were less readily and instantaneously available online)
My first post on tumblr was much more coherent and has a much better title; “Portrait of the Artist as an Aging Failure” and details the state of various aspects of my life circa October 2011.
'Bourbon Joy' // Source: Photo courtesy of Mike Harte
SO, I DID A LITTLE DIGGING AND DISCOVERED A VERY INTERESTING PROJECT THAT YOU WORKED ON WITH JAMIE SHOVLIN CALLED BOURBON JOY. HOW DID THAT IDEA COME ABOUT AND HOW DID YOU FEEL BY THE 7TH NIGHT?
Back in 2000 I made a painting, very obviously inspired by Edward Ruscha, which was simply the word Joy painted in Jack Daniels. It was a simple nod to an artist I liked and a declaration of inebriate enthusiasm. Being a pedant, when some time later I discovered that in using Jack Daniels what I had actually created was Tennessee Sipping Whiskey Joy rather than Bourbon Joy, I felt the need to address this heinous faux-pas. From this I hit upon the idea that if I sold the remade piece, I could use the profits to buy a better whiskey, remake the piece again slightly larger to denote the greater value/quality of the work/whiskey and continue in this fashion as a means to create work that discussed connoisseurship and relationships of scale, quality and value in relationship to art and consumerism, and also to accommodate my desire to drink progressively fancier booze.
Mentioning this to idea to Jamie he astutely saw that unless shown together the relationship between the pieces was likely to go unnoticed and if produced in the proposed fashion; sequentially financed over a number of years, they were highly unlikely to ever get made, let alone be shown together. And so he proposed to bankroll the production of the work (Buy the whiskey and paper) on the condition that the whiskey should be consumed the same night as and during the creation of the work. Having a history of coming up with ideas on drunken nights out together it was decided we would also try to document the conversations that occurred during the creation of the work and exhibit this separately as an ordinarily unseen stage of production. So it became a piece about patronage, exploitation and friendship and in some ways an attempt to undermine the idea of the drunken as heroic, as opposed to mundane, silly and more prone to lapses of memory. Also as with the paintings we’d be producing these austere relics of an inaccessible night of revelry, we were hoping to communicate the distance between what you can see in a finished artwork and the machinations of process of it’s creation, that all the bit’s that were fun for the artist might remain undisclosed. Or at least I was, though I'm not necessarily sure why now.
I felt disturbingly OK by the seventh night. I didn't feel exactly right but nor did I feel especially wrong. It was troublingly easy to consume so much without any major side effects and how someone might slide into some kind of Leaving Las Vegas style habit became suddenly a much more plausible prospect to me.
YOU WROTE THE SCREENPLAY FOR THE FILM 'ROUGH CUT' WHICH WAS CO-COMMISSIONED BY TIFF: TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AND CORNERHOUSE ARTIST FILM. CAN YOU PLEASE WALK US THROUGH YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS AND HOW IT FELT WHEN THE SCRIPT WAS TRANSLATED ON-SCREEN?
While I am delighted (far more than I should be) to have an IMDB page thanks to my credit for Rough Cut I still feel like a bit of a fraud having received it. Technically I wrote the screenplay and co-wrote the script for Hiker Meat, a fictitious lost 80’s horror film that supposedly existed in numerous edits with differing plots and political inclinations. Rough Cut documents the attempt to recreate the opening and closing sequences of Hiker Meat as well the trailer (All of which existed as filmic collages created by Jamie from existing horror films) and use this as a springboard to explore the various stages of film-making processes undertaken to complete this process. Rough Cut largely features on-set and interview footage so to suggest I wrote it is somewhat misleading.
But anyway, the process. This will be fairly long and convoluted, so some of you may wish to skip ahead. Hiker Meat began as a hastily constructed narrative that was a minor detail for an earlier project, Lustfaust. It was created to fit around an existing track-listing for the album Uberblicken/Uberzeugen by Lustfaust, a mid-70’s German band, which was supposed envisioned as the soundtrack to an imaginary pro-communist horror film. It should perhaps be noted that the band and album never existed. Anyway, I can up with a very brief synopsis that threw enough narrative cliches together to seem plausible and for a while that was the full extent of Hiker Meat. Later I expanded the narrative to be more polished and detailed for a piece of exhibition text that went unused and then maybe a year or two later, when Jamie suggested we explore the idea further, I set about filling in the gaps to create a fully formed story.
I'm not really sure how to explain this but to a large extent by treating it as a simple task of fleshing out the story, and not being precious about it, I think I effectively tricked myself into writing it. In the early stages arbitrary decisions took on significance and later on, rather than address this, these became the armature to apply further details to. Many of these further details related to a specific date August 1st, which I’m now largely uncertain why I chose, but I then went through the Wikipedia entry for the date, picked out anything that struck me as interesting or potentially significant, along with the names of people who were born or died on the date and through various tenuous associations gave characters names or attributes that related to famous people, and effectively reverse engineered a political subtext by referencing specific events.
Once the detailed narrative was in place, Jamie constructed a full length filmic collage from hundreds of horror films produced between 1970-1990 that approximated the story I had written. After this, we went back to the collage and scripted the action as it appeared on screen, again not being remotely scared of or concerned with being cliched, generic or unenthralling. The intention was to create an approximation of a script for a bad 80’s horror film, so not everything needed to make sense and quality was not of prime concern. On occasion the dialogue was written to lip-synch with the actors on screen, occasionally it’s stolen directly from what’s being said in the collaged film. In one sequence it’s a paraphrasing/adaption of a speech that appears in Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, which was probably the most authentic bit of writing I did for the whole thing.
I'm not sure it’s a repeatable process sadly.
As for how I felt when it was shown on screen, by the time finished film came out it felt somewhat dislocated. What I wrote forms a very small part of the film and the script was completed years before the production started. I’d largely forgotten the majority of the details. I enjoyed it of course, I just didn't necessarily feel much proprietary legitimacy for it.
HAVING HAD A LONG-STANDING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CORNERHOUSE, HOW DOES YOUR PROJECT, 'LEFT/RIGHT, HERE', FOR THE FINAL CORNERHOUSE PROJECTS EXHIBITION 'FLULL STOP' ILLUSTRATE YOUR FEELINGS TOWARD THE ICONIC BUILDING?
Ah well, the thing is I've only been living in Manchester a few months and have been working for Cornerhouse a little less than that. Prior to that I’d only visited a handful of times in relation to the production and premiere of Rough Cut and for the opening of the Hiker Meat exhibiton. So effectively I don’t really feel I do have a long-standing relationship with Cornerhouse, and it felt a bit awkward that I was been offered the opportunity to offer my opinion. Accordingly I focused on doing my research and tried to keep things balanced between the respectful eulogising and positive sentiments concerning the next chapter; HOME.
Personally I tend not to be especially nostalgic nowadays. I think you carry your experiences with you in memory and if they happen to fade, it’s not the end of the world. Attempting to hold onto or live in the past comes at the detriment of making the most of the present, which is where, like it or not, we all actually live. Transience, change and renewal are fundamentally part of the fabric of not just our cultures and civilisations but the universe at large so I feel these issues are areas where a healthy dose of pragmatism is justified.
Also I find it a little strange that people seem so attached to the building as a physical space and seem to overlook that all the things it has housed will be still be taking place down the road in a matter of weeks. If you had friends who moved house to a bigger more luxuriant place, better suited to their needs, around the corner, you wouldn’t spend too long mourning their departure from their former home or attempt to befriend and visit the new tenants instead would you? You’d probably just go a little further to visit, right?
THERE WAS A PART OF THE DISORIENTING SPOKEN-WORD RECORDING WHERE I FELT LIKE I WAS REALLY ON A BOAT THAT WAS SWAYING FROM SIDE TO SIDE. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE IDEA FOR 'LEFT/RIGHT, HERE' AND WHERE ON EARTH DID YOU FIND A WALKMAN?
Well I'm glad the boat bit worked for you, I wasn't sure the recording was good enough once it transferred to tape to be effective. (Incidentally I stole the idea of that particular mode of disorientation from a Propellerheads track, that I used to listen to on a Walkman) The idea for “Left / Right, Here” is largely the product of word association with the titles of the final exhibitions as a starting point; Full Stop and Play Time. If you switch them, you get Stop/Play and Full Time so I started with that and tried to branch out from there in a way that could grow to include or touch on a number of key things detailing the history of the buildings and discussing the move to the new building. I was unsure what form the piece would finally take. While I loathe the term mind map, as a form I find it both useful and interesting, and it was the method I used to flesh out the idea, so that was one option, a performance poem was another though I was decidedly wary of inflicting that on the cafe regulars. Fairly early on I hit upon the idea of a recording, which would give more people the a chance to engage with the piece and give me a way to combine the more freely poetic aspect of the work with the dry factual elements using dual audio streams and with a left right balance allow people to engage with one or the other as they prefered. It could have easily been a CD, but CD spin rather than turn, whereas tapes are both turned and have turning parts. Plus there’s the theatrical reference, to Beckett obviously and, with The Stone Tape, to ghostly resonances within a building, which was a feature of some of the other works in the show. Tapes are an obsolete format too, a discarded technology, and have a greater association with the era of Cornerhouse’s birth than it’s end, so there was that too.
Walkman’s can be found on eBay for around £20 (For stereo models. Cheaper contemporary versions, available from Argos/Amazon, are mostly mono) I bought 2. The first one to arrive didn't work, the second one arrived after the exhibition had started, so the one that features in the show is actually a generous loan from Callum, who also features in the show, who luckily happened to have a few in his studio. Thanks Callum. I also had one tucked away at my parent’s place, but it was too well hidden for my mum to find.
WHICH ONE OF YOUR PROJECTS HAS BEEN YOUR MOST CHALLENGING YET?
Challenging is a tricky word. I have lot’s of projects I haven’t got around to making because I haven’t had the right combination of time, space or money to meet their demands. Working with Jamie has often been challenging because he’s considerably more focused, organised and determined than I am so I’ve often struggled to keep pace, but never in a way that wasn’t and enjoyable. They’ve all had and have challenges but resolving them is in large part the nature of the work; it’s the good bit. I like problem solving.
Having said that given my propensity for distraction and procrastination, trying to get my teeth into the mammoth task of writing a novel from the position of a rank amateur is currently proving slow progress.
HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH WRITER'S BLOCK?
I'm not really sure yet. Inadequately.
AND DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR THOSE WHO ARE LOOKING TO MAKE THE JUMP FROM "DREAMER" TO "DEVELOPER"?
I really don’t feel qualified to authorititvely advise anyone else, more than to suggest you stop thinking or worrying about making the jump or how you do it and just start doing it. The Kubrick quote “The best education in film is to make one” springs to mind. I currently have a series of pages perpetual open in a separate window on my desktop, featuring advice for writers from various literary luminaries so, providing Mo allows a temporary disruption of the interview format, I’ll share those instead:
Areogramme Writers' Studio - Writing Tips
Areogramme Writers' Studio - Joss Whedon's Top 10 Writing Tips
Areogramme Writers' Studio - Pixars' 22 Rules of Storytelling
Areogramme Writers' Studio - Neil Gaimn's 8 Rules of Writing
The Guardian - 10 Rules for Writing Fiction Pt. 1
I also enjoyed this but it’s proven divisive so feel free to disregard or disagree if you wish:
The Stranger - Things I can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One
I’d also recommend the Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to high school students that’s been doing the rounds, the David Foster Wallace commencement speech and, just for fun, Chuck Jone's 9 Golden Rules for Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner stories, which demonstrates the potential beauty of a very simple structure.
HAVE YOU FOUND YOUR NEXT PROJECT? AND IF SO, IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN SHARE WITH US REGARDING IT?
Yes, I'm taking the first fledgling steps of trying to write a novel, hence my mild obsession with other people's rules for writing. It will be, like most first novels, a thinly self-portrait but framed with a likely overly ambitiously and over-complicated structure, that’ll let me also write sketchy pseudo-political science fiction, film essays about outmoded masculine iconography all under the broad umbrella of the same story, in some ways using it as a crutch to excuse and exploit the flaws of old ideas. Hopefully it’ll be more fun than that may sound. And will eventually actually exist.
AND LASTLY, SEEING AS I DO LIKE TO TALK ABOUT MOVIES, WHAT ARE 3 FILMS THAT LEFT YOU INSPIRED AFTER SEEING THEM?
Hmmm, another tricky one. Most of my work is either inspired by or features reference to films.
Lustfaust featured extremely obscure references to, off the top of my head, Commando,Die Hard, 48 Hours, Police Academy, Soylent Green, Deliverance, Silver Bullet, The Omen. Oh and a Sonny Landham porn film, whose name I’d have to look up. Hiker Meat is entirely about film and even the initial plot was very loosely inspired by Argento’s Phenomena in that on first viewing it made little sense so I didn't feel Hiker Meat had to either. Other work I've made has directly referenced Halloween, Vanishing Point,Risky Business, Big Trouble in Little China, Zabriskie Point, The Thing and The Great Escape. And those aren't even the works involving videos or DVD.
So as I say, in one sense this is tricky, so I am going to give you three films that left me more broadly feeling inspired rather than have directly inspired me creatively.
- Day For Night (François Truffaut, 1973)
- Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)
- A Man Escaped (Robert Bresson, 1956)
All of which are beautiful, captivating and compelling in their own way and which come highly recommended to anyone who’s unfamiliar with them.
You can find Mike Harte here || tumblr blog
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And there we have it folks! I hope you enjoyed reading what Mike's had to say (thanks again for this Mike!!) and have taken note of the links and films he has so kindly shared with us. If you would like to find out about other creatives I have interviewed, check 'em out here. Now, go forth and create some of that magic you know you are itching to share with the world.... then come tell me all about it ;)
Mo x