“The visit was suffused with death. Real death: the graves of all those cats and dogs, the widows he shopped for, and his own death, which he referred to more than once — but matter-of-factly, like it was a deadline that he was trying to get a lot of things done before. I sensed he’d been making his way through his to-do list for eighty-one years, and he was always behind, and this made everything urgent and bright, even now, especially now. How strange to cross paths with someone for the first time right before they were gone.”

— From “It Chooses You”, wherein I share with you the part of my life where I was interviewing people selling things through the Pennysaver classifieds as a sort of open-ended visionquest that I secretly hoped would help me finish my screenplay (The Future) and teach me how to be a better liver of a finite life.

http://goo.gl/YHrZM

“I felt like Miley Cyrus was speaking directly to me through Lenette, and she was being very clear — she wanted me to keep the faith. I read Dina’s Popeye T-shirt, i yam what i yam, and I felt that I too was what I was. I was a writer, and my characters, Sophie and Jason, were right here with me. In fact, they were me, both of them. We thanked Dina and I said goodbye, knowing that it wasn’t really goodbye. I wanted to wink at her or give her some kind of indication that she would soon be starring in a major motion picture, but I restrained myself.”

— From “It Chooses You”, wherein I share with you the part of my life where I was interviewing people selling things through the Pennysaver classifieds as a sort of open-ended visionquest that I secretly hoped would help me finish my screenplay (The Future) and teach me how to be a better liver of a finite life.

http://goo.gl/YHrZM

“Ron was exactly the kind of man you spend your whole life being careful not to end up in the apartment of. And since I was raised to go out of my way to make such men feel understood, I took extra-special care with his interview. But as he talked on and on (the original transcript was more than fifty pages), I realized that I don’t actually want to understand this kind of man — I just want them to feel understood, because I fear what will happen if I am thought of as yet another person who doesn’t believe them. I want to be the one they spare on the day of reckoning.”

— From “It Chooses You”, wherein I share with you the part of my life where I was interviewing people selling things through the Pennysaver classifieds as a sort of open-ended visionquest that I secretly hoped would help me finish my screenplay (The Future) and teach me how to be a better liver of a finite life.

http://goo.gl/YHrZM

“Andrew turned out to be a seventeen-year-old with three ponds in his backyard. Teenage boys never really made sense to me, and I’ve pretty much avoided them since high school. But Andrew was the one kind of teenage boy I was familiar with: the sweet, curious loner. My brother had also built ponds in high school. Andrew’s ponds were thick with water hyacinths and the special fish that eat mosquito eggs. Actual lily pads floated in the sun and the frogs seemed happy, as suburban frogs go. I watched the sunlight sparkling on the water and practiced mind-body integration for a few seconds by quietly hyperventilating.”

— From “It Chooses You”, wherein I share with you the part of my life where I was interviewing people selling things through the Pennysaver classifieds as a sort of open-ended visionquest that I secretly hoped would help me finish my screenplay (The Future) and teach me how to be a better liver of a finite life.

http://goo.gl/YHrZM

In celebration of “It Chooses You”, Miranda July and her team scoured the New York classifieds, buying up once-meaningful objects and interviewing the sellers. These items, ranging from a modest bottle cap collection to a massive work of art, will be resold for the original asking price (plus tax) at Miranda July’s resale shop within Partners & Spade. Specially-designed packaging will offer insights into the lives behind the hundreds of unique objects, and the local sellers will be in attendance — as will Miranda July herself, signing copies of “It Chooses You”. Joe Putterlik’s obscene and tender homemade cards (described in the book) will also be on display.

http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index.cfm

/fuseaction/catalog.detail/object_id/36
585a59-a7c1-4afa-8b77-b484a84985
aa/ItChoosesYou.cfm

What about this? Who is coming to this in Los Angeles?

November 29, ALOUD at the Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, CA
in conversation with Joshuah Bearman
7 p.m., Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071

http://www.lfla.org/event-detail/673/Miranda-July

Or what about the reading in Brooklyn? You going to that?

November 15, BookCourt
7 p.m., 163 Court St, Brooklyn, NY

http://www.bookcourt.org/category/events/

And did you catch the last installment of It Chooses You on the New Yorker site? That’s not the end of the book though, there’s more.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/joe-fifty-christmas-card-fronts-1-los-angeles-1.html

For you people who asked about an SF event…
Nov 30: City Arts and Lectures

http://www.cityarts.net/n.july.html

ICY on sale from Miranda July on Vimeo.

Ladies and Gentlemen! I am pleased to announce a new book in the world, It Chooses You. I wrote this book.
It is has a cover that is only risque if you look carefully. It is the first book I’ve made that is non-fiction, ie: autobiographical. While not exactly being a “tell-all” I do tell a fair amount. Other people do too. I was looking through my old emails trying to find the one my best friend wrote me after reading it, but I could only this email about a dream she had: “last night i had a dream about you set in thailand, where you were making a movie that was quite a departure from your previous work. it was scared of the thai water getting in my mouth, but i was very tan, with long braids, and very attractive. you were good friends with lots of stars, including julianne moore. i was about to have sex with a few charming people. it was all very vivid and weird. there were no locks on doors and when stores closed they left all theirs goods out, but no one ever stole.” She really liked It Chooses You, and I think you will too. You can get an early copy here: http://bit.ly/qKnJUH

Berliners! Remember the Mexican restaurant in Kreuzberg I mentioned? So many friends asked me for the name of the place that I re-found it, by finding my old apartment on Google maps and then “walking” there using street view. I felt very modern. To have the best appreciation for this restaurant you might have to be an American woman who has spent the entire day working with German men in a windowless room on issues of film post-production that are so subtle that no one is even sure they are visible to anyone but you, the American woman, but you are hell-bent and won’t go back to LA until everything is crossed off your list written in tiny crazy-person handwriting. You have to spend all day making very little progress on the list, and then get on your bike and ride in the dark along the side of Grolitzer park, bumping on cobblestones, face freezing, wearing a dumb warm hat with a hipper hat over it, which doesn’t look so hip on top of the other hat. Park the bike at La Pulqueria and come in and order the 3 enchilada combo to go. Watch the one very pretty waitress as she makes her away around the restaurant and is nice to even you, a non-person in two hats. Then put the dinner in the bike basket and ride home, lock the bike, take the elevator up, hoping there is no one else in it at the same time because you always feel married to them during the short upward journey, and you have so little to offer as a wife right now, even a 2-minute wife. Unlock the apartment door, throw off the two hats, the coat, the boots, the scarf, the mittens. Sit immediately at the kitchen table with the 3 enchilada combo and the computer, and, almost crying with relief to be at this moment in the day, this zenith, watch The Office (american version), a tv show that didn’t seem so incredible back in America, but now is EVERYTHING, all your emotions are processed through the show, you laugh, you cry while eating the enchiladas, which are warm, friendly, loving, kind and reminiscent of Los Angeles, a city which (like The Office) didn’t seem so great when you were actually living there, but now, well, it’s best not to think about it because you might never finish this movie and might never go home.
Bon appetit!

Mexikanisches Restaurant La Pulqueria
Spreewaldplatz 5, Kreuzberg, 10999 Berlin, Germany
+49 30/61657160

http://www.facebook.com/thefuture.derfilm

Saturday 22 October 2011, 18.30

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/24815.htm