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We need your dick out hereChris Kraus

There was a time when was thinkingLA might be something like Paris. I

had just gotten back to LA afterspending the fall in East Hamptonbecause I was writing a book, and Iwas thinking, to write it I would haveto stop talking and be more alone.Except then I was lonely, and then Ibegan having sex on the phone withsomeone whose voice got all mixedup with what I was writing. It was abook about chance. The voice wascoming from Africa. It belonged to afamous producer who, years beforehe'd ever been famous, I'd maybeonce met. Now he was making a filmin Namibia. (This film, to myknowledge, was never released.)

Africa called me at times I never knewhow to expect, and I let his cues guideme. I was telling him stories about thedifferent kinds of sex we would have,and where we would meet. Locationwas very important. In our real lives,Africa lived in a compound in Malibu; Ilived in a suburb downtown. Because I

didn't know him at all, I kept lookingfor places to mentally hook him: theparking lot of Musso and Frank'srestaurant on Hollywood and Vine ...the entrance gate on Big Rock Road ...the Taj Mahal building erected bysome English Hindus in the HollywoodHills ... a condo rack on WhitleyTerrace where the entry-level starsand moguls partied around the pool ...the Good Luck Wishing Well inChinatown outside of Hop Louis. Henever talked about himself and I

thought that I could get a picture ofhim in my mind if I could locate histaste. What was romantic, and whatwould be tacky?

Africa's film wrapped on December14th, and then he left for Fiji. Ireturned to LA with my book. Afterbeing alone in the woods, LA mademe feel dizzy and lost. The sites of ourstories became my guide to the city. Iwondered which one he'd choose for

our meeting. I was reading and re-reading Nadja by Andre Breton ...

Nadja's madness (maybe he inventsit) leads him through the city like abull by the nose. It is a book aboutParis. The city becomes some kind ofgrid with melting edges: the taxicab

outside the restaurant, the one-starhotel where Nadja lives, the lost glovediscovered in the surrealist Boys' Cluboffice. LA in the winter is uniformlygolden and soft, a diasporic utopia. Itoccurs to me that sex can be used inthe same way as madness, as ameans of fixing some points on alandscape that is otherwisemarkerless, that is all interstice. I startimagining our cars: the routes theytraverse towards these points, and theroutes start to stand off the map,

charged with a purpose -- can sexreplace history? A week or twopasses. But when Africa gets back toLA, he stops returning my phone callsand e-mails, and all I'm left with arethe places.

I can't let it go because Africa'spresence suffuses the book, and thebook is not finished. I buy a cheapRussian camera, rent an office inHollywood and start to take pictures.

There are no longer any coincidences.When I take a photo of the outside ofMusso and Frank's, I notice a storediagonally across the street that saysAfrica Imports. I walk into a Hollywoodmemorabilia shop: on the top of thecounter, there is one of Africa'sscripts. I start to wonder if what I'mdoing is anything like the projects ofthe artist Sophie Calle (I jokinglycompared myself to Calle when I waswriting I Love Dick -- I fell in love withsomeone named Dick and started

writing him letters and everybody saidthat this was stalking -- although Ididn't see it this way at all, any morethan Shakespeare's sonnets written tohis unnamed "mistress" were an act ofstalking. A woman up in Canada wasarrested once for sitting in her caroutside of someone's house eachnight and writing something in hernotebook -- what is it about womenwriting in their notebooks that isapparently so dangerous andscandalous?) -- but Calle's projects

have an object, a purpose that's

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outside herself, in which she's presentmostly through her act ofdisappearance. She is investigatingsomeone through their traces, and itis always someone who she's not

particularly interested in, and so thetopic really is the content and thenature of these traces, the presenceor absence of aura, a ghosting.Whereas these photos that I'm takingsay nothing about anyone but stillthey are intensely personal: theyrecollect (for me) the stunnedbewilderment of missed connections.

Unlike the woman writing in hernotebook in her car, Calle is neverconsidered offensive or objectionable.Calle's work is aloof and purposeful,deliberate, It is mysterious, intelligent,well-executed. It raises fascinatingquestions about privacy, identity,control, seduction, secrets andsurveillance. Hack feminists like itbecause it offers another chance toruminate on reversing the "malegaze." It is fascinating, stimulatingand pleasurably unsettling because,as Amy Gerstler notes in Art week,Calle-the-narrator "keeps herself

under wraps." She does notembarrass us because she doesn'tspeak to us directly. Therefore, wecan assume that her intentions aren'tbranded by what, for women in the artworld, is the kiss of death: to be in anyway direct or psychological.

There is a part in Nadja where Andretalks about the Place Dauphine asbeing something like the "sex" of awoman. This is really beautiful. Awoman's sex is like a spicebox,

mysterious in its many folds,rhapsodic and encircling. A woman'ssex will wrap around you like ablanket. It isn't anything like a big fatcunt sitting outside your suburbanhouse in her car and writing in anotebook. And I'm wondering if thedifferences between a woman's "sex"and a cunt might actually beanalogous to the difference betweenphotography and writing. Stalk thoughshe might, the photographer is a verycircumspect, acquisitive beast,whereas the woman writing in her

notebook is more like a dog who peeson the floor. Because photos aremysterious, elusive, even if they arenotoriously "stolen," whereas writingis just one short step away from

talking. To talk is to commit yourself,and nobody likes a talking cuntbecause it's so demanding. Presenceis always accompanied by a demandfor recognition -- do you see me? Totalk or write is to explicitly assertone's presence.

Disappearance never struck me as avery interesting subject. It's always somuch harder to appear. In a film Imade called How to Shoot a Crime,two dominatrixes are videotapedtalking about themselves to SylvereLotringer, the interviewer, in his FrontStreet loft in New York City. The yearis 1987 and the neighbourhood issoon to be reborn as the commerciallydeveloped Downtown Seaport. Thetwo women speak rapturously toSylvere about the "electric space" ofkilling. Meanwhile, on the other side oftown, a police videographer namedJohnny Santiago travels betweencrime scenes to document the dead

bodies of their victims. Anonymousand often decomposing corpsesstrewn around the city's interstitialzones: a railway yard, a parking lot, arooftop. The crime scenes become toNYC what the Marche au Puce andPlace Dauphine are to Nadja andBreton. The crime scenes are a meansof marking. Halfway through thevideo, one of the women, MileVictoire, picks up on her interviewersvoyeuristic interest in sadomasochism:

V: Bullshit, boy, you have to be in herewith me. I'm out here alone.

V: No ... It's one thing to trust theseexperiences up against things youshare. But we're not going back andforth, this is not a conversation.

S: I'm here.

S: That's why I have a camera. I'm

here.

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V: No, we need your DICK OUT HERE.This is HALF a conversation.

Circling round the interviewer's ownsuicidal will to disappear within the

interviews, the film chronicles thelarger disappearance of theneighbourhood during New York's firstmassive wave of gentrification. Thecrime scene becomes the only placein which time stops: the policeinvestigation, the barricades, thecameras, become the city's only ritualact of mourning. "When a deathoccurs," the interviewer finallysurmises, "there must be a reason.We just have to find the reason."

Calle's work, of course, opposes this.There isn't any special reason why shefollows Henri B., much less anymeaning. This kind of ghosting is aneffect she pushes later on in workslike Color Blind and Ghosts, in whichthe shapes and colours and emotionalaffects of famous artworks arerecalled in writing in their absence.Her projects are all conceived within agame plan -- games that referencerandomness and chance. But unlike

certain late modernists who devisedchance events, like the writers of theOulipo Group, or William Burroughsand Brion Gysin, Calle has noparticular belief that "chance" canbreak the code of randomness andreveal a hidden meaning. Despite itsenigmatic surface, Calle's work isvastly less romantic. She reveals theempty space of chance to be just whatit is, just empty.

Except for the anger vented at her bythe owner of the famous Frenchaddress book, Calle's work elicits verylittle condemnation in the art world.And surely, in her calculated wittyabsence, Calle is as mysterious asBreton's Place Dauphine. She is not asmelly cunt. She's flawless.

Annie Sprinkle became famous in theart world for inviting audiences toview the inside of her vagina througha speculum. Sprinkle's friend-

competitor Penny Arcade was dubious

about the nature of this success.Creator of the notorious performance,Bitch Dyke Faghag Whore, Penny likedto talk. She talked directly to heraudiences and encouraged them to

talk to her, and when they did, sheanswered. She invoked her audiencesto get up and dance with her companyof seven girl-boy strippers. They did,and often people took their clothesoff. "Hmmm," Arcade surmised, "nowif she could get the audiences to stickthe speculum up themselves, I thinkshe'd have something."