Jacob Budenz On Tea Leaves And Making Art in Baltimore
Dream visions, goth performance art, Queer Climate Cabaret & the changing landscape of American cities — it's a jam-packed TALKTALKTALK!!!
Jacob Budenz is the only one of their siblings not to be diagnosed with ADHD markers. They’re that person who has a zillion ideas and manages to see all of them to completion. Writer, actor, director, musician, performance artist, witch: Dream Baby Jake does it all.
Between publishing a collection of short stories (Tea Leaves), working on new music with their band Moth Broth, and conducting a performance ritual of apology for the divine masculine, Jacob made time to TALKTALKTALK to me — twice!
The following interview is a followup to the podcast we recorded months earlier, when the Sun was in Gemini with Jupiter and everyone was stoked on the excitement of summer.
Vivi Henriette: Let’s start from the beginning. Tell me about the night you were born.
Jacob Budenz: If you're looking for me to out my big three to your followers, I'll save y'all the trouble: Cancer Sun and rising, Aries moon, the latter of which might explain why I'm terminally shy in a lot of circumstances — working on it! — but a complete menace on a mic!
For the mundane, I was born right outside of Philly a year before my family moved to Miami, where I lived until college. If I occasionally tow the line between glamorous goth bitch and tacky old lady with “funky jewelry,” I blame Miami.
Vh: I watched a documentary on JD Salinger and learned that a famous editor at The New Yorker was so claustrophobic that he would carry a machete with him everyday, just in case he got stuck in an elevator and needed to cut himself out. He also refused to go into tunnels. Which I imagine makes using the Subway system in New York rather impossible.
All of which is to say, if we were trapped in an elevator for hours, and I asked about your work as an artist, what would you say?
JB: I'd first tell you that you haven't seen God until you've mashed the 5th floor button in the rickety elevator of Baltimore’s many old warehouse-turned-noise-show venues and felt it lurch once, and then twice, before letting you out. Everyone's an atheist until they get stuck in an elevator.
If I were in my early 20s and this happened, and you asked about my art, I'd be just chaotic enough to reach into my purse for whatever combination of tea lights and gross gallery-opening snacks I kept on me (bananas, skittles, granola bar), and done my old “durational installation performance,” Pastel Witch, a series of anarcho-glamour rituals performed to the looping soundtrack of a series of esoteric poems I'd written and pre-recorded. There would be lipstick and probably strawberry jelly (a great simulacra for blood) all over me by the time they came to rescue us. We'd call it an immersive one-on-one site-specific performance, and you and whatever poor souls were stuck with us in there would probably never speak to me again.
If you asked me now, I'd probably very shyly mutter something about the intersection of the other and the otherworldly, attempt to stammer through an attempt to explain that fiction, poetry, performance, and music are not disparate master-of-none pursuits but are quite compatible, and give up, changing the subject and asking if you wanted a tarot reading to pass the time.
While I'd never actually foist my chaotic performance work on someone without their consent, I guess what I'm saying is that music and writing and music and the the occasional unhinged performance piece are all means of expression for me, but the art, the true magic trick itself for me, is the creation of a life where I can keep being a conduit for things and, when I'm lucky, direct the lightning strike into something cohesive.
Or, perhaps more concisely, I am deeply indecisive (especially about aesthetics —Venus in Gemini, baby!!!) and pretty sure I'll never figure it out.
Vh: A friend of mine recently told me that he thought cannabis would help my nerves. He also suggested I take San Pedro for the same reasons. He says the experience isn’t so much psychedelic as it is spacious.
I hate it when people tell me I should do anything. Then I remembered you telling me you’re something of a stoner — and you’re one of the prolific people I know! Maybe my friend’s onto something. How do you feel about unsolicited advice? Is weed your artistic superpower?
JB: I'll start by saying you are the first California witch who has expressed doubt about the utility of marijuana to me. Hah! As an artistic tool, weed is only useful for me in poetry writing, when I need to get out of my way and touch the live wire of whatever I'm feeling. For performance, absolutely not; I have gotten high only once before performing a set at a kind of sad Sunday night goth show and just wanted to go straight to bed, and for fiction it makes me way too spacey! MY unsolicited advice here is that substance stuff is subjective as hell and that your intuition on the matter is 100% of the time!
Unfortunately, as a college teacher and advisor, unsolicited advice — usually in the form of editorial feedback — is my job. At least with tarot the advice is solicited! I try my best not to mansplain — or in my case, “transplain” — and I'm like you in that if everyone tells me I have to try something, that I'm gonna love it, that's it's so my shit, etc., you can bet I will take pleasure in blowing them off until, years later, when I grudgingly admit they were right. I find myself in the unfortunate position of a queer who couldn't get into the zeitgeist of Chapel Roan OR Charli XCX until I heard “Pink Pony Club” at a gay clothing-optional dance party in rural Pennsylvania in the late summer and finally said, to no one in particular, You know what? I kinda get this. So I guess I have a lot of apologizing to do.
Vh: Your collection of short stories, Tea Leaves, is one of those books I only allow myself to read in small increments because I fear the day when there is no more book to read. It’s dark and charming and contains the fairy tales I wish I read as a child. The one about Sleeping Beauty – perfection!
Where did those stories come from? Had all those characters just been living inside you for years? How does it feel now that they’re out?
JB: Aw, thank you! “Borealis” and “Mask for Mask” (the unhinged gay alligator parable) are actually the two pieces which, despite undergoing probably the most rigorous revision process, were the ones I was least sure about including in the final edit. They're two of the stories that have wound up getting the best response!
At the risk of starting to answer in the most precious way, in my late teens to early 20s I got a lot of the seed ideas for stories — whole scenes or narrative arcs — from what I call “dream visions,” the kind of dream where you're semi-lucid, where if you wake up and fall back asleep the story picks up at a later time. Another case against weed for artists, perhaps! Other stories, at the risk of outing myself as a person who has a tenuous grasp on reality, are often philosophical and mystical representations of how I see the world.
The story “Seen,” for example, started off as a journal entry pep talk to myself where I was lacking inspiration and trying to remind myself that inspiration was everywhere, that the cheap colored lights around the mantle could be fairies if I wanted them to be. From an initial scene, image, or dream sequence, I just kind of vibe out the narrative voice, try to get to know the character a little bit, consider what points of tension and desire might surround them, and write.
If I'm lucky, a theme emerges and the supernatural image or element I started with might become some near metaphor for what they experience — as the octopus in “Trial” becomes the manifestation of a lot of queer people’s experience of fear in public spaces or the demand to society that we try twice as hard to prove our worth. I find myself even luckier, though, when the pressure does not emerge for the supernatural element to “mean” anything, and it becomes a backdrop for something more profound, internal, and complicated than a one-to-one metaphor can capture. Those stories, like “Borealis” or “Mask for Mask” or even (to the chagrin of my MFA program director) “The Color of Cream” get closer to how I see reality writ large: messy, complicated, and sometimes meaninglessly magical.
As for the craft stuff, I am a product of the academic writing workshop — another word of unsolicited advice to anyone considering this: do not do an MFA if it will force you into debt; that kind of pressure is an enemy to the creative process, and I'm really lucky to have gone to a well-funded program. A lot of stuff about creating plot, character, stakes, tension, (without forcing it) metaphor, and so forth are pretty boring “how the sausage is made” stuff any other serious writer could describe with more conviction than I can. These things are extremely useful in crafting a successful, publishable story, and it took me a long time to grasp them (arguably, I still haven't) as tools you can be in control of. The rest of it, honestly, is just vibes and the kind of commitment that lead to the diligence you need to see it to completion.
Vh: We recorded a podcast months ago that I was late releasing due to something of a personal breakdown. These things happen. At that time, you were working on a performance of ritual apology for the divine masculine. How’d that go?
JB: Thanks for asking! The original draft of the piece was, I think, successful in its context and very instructive for future iterations. I am performing “Apology for the Divine Masculine” in October as a series of excerpts for an incredible art activism organization putting on a “Queer Climate Cabaret” (extremely niched to my interests), and again at the Walters Art Museum in downtown Baltimore in response to medieval depictions of the Christian god and saints in their medieval collection. I'm extremely excited for the latter; the piece is ultimately a rejection of patriarchal masculinity and a commentary on the Christian paradigm of imperialism, and I think I am going to grow a beard out one last time for this piece before I laser all of my facial hair away in my first formal step toward gender-affirming care. I'm pumped.
Vh: During that podcast, we talked a little about your chosen home of Baltimore. How much has the city shaped your work? Do you feel the city supports you as an artist? Is there any other place you imagine yourself? What is your ideal living situation? Real or imagined.
JB: The perennially scrappy DIY spirit of the Baltimore avant-garde scene has definitely shaped my work which, while more polished now, generally smacks of the interdisciplinary, anarchist spirit of the art scene I came of age in. I've pontificated about this before, but the scene I stumbled into at 19 years old was one where you could walk down an alley through an unmarked door and find yourself in the most incredible, surreal immersive art installation for the steep, steep prices of $5-10 dollars (no one turned away for lack of funds!). As the scene has waned, even after coming back to life from early pandemic years, I do occasionally have dreams of moving on from here. It's one of the last cities where you can kind of live cheaply and pretty well as an artist, and I've done some really incredible things here, and I have plenty of unfinished business with collaborations and organizations that will keep me for a good while.
New Orleans is the only other city that's felt like home, and for reasons of climate catastrophe doesn't feel like a super long-term home. If I had a wealthy patron and endless funds, I'd consider New York or LA, but I like my space. For climate sustainability reasons, Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes are always on my radar. If the shit hits the fan with climate stuff in the next ten years, you can catch me convincing all my queerest friends with the most niche survival skills that we should head that way. For now, I'm here to stay until I have a really compelling reason to be elsewhere!
Vh: When we spoke you were quite hopeful about Jupiter’s recent ingress into Gemini and its creative promise. Are things going as planned? What’re you working on? What’s in the future?
JB: Honestly, yes, Jupiter in Gemini has been kind to me so far! No earth-shattering opportunity to be a super powerful mega-rich artist has fallen out of the sky (yet!!!!), but I feel hopeful around a new long-form fiction project, finding a lot of success working on poetry that attempts to understand the sacred nature of getting to a pretty Ace of Wands flow with my band in completing our second album, and pretty galvanized around a couple of pathways in my academic life that I’m not ready to put into writing but feeling pretty sure about! The Walters thing is pretty big for me, as has, of course, been Tea Leaves and all that's come of it; it feels like kind of a missing piece for a lot of the kinds of grant and residency stuff I felt like too much of an imposter to apply to before.
In times like these, I think of the fig tree in Plath’s The Bell Jar, that Seven of Cups overwhelm of choices. But instead of feeling like I can't choose between things and watching dreams die of my indecision, I have simply accepted there are no shortcuts to any of these things — that if I want to cultivate this grove of fruit-bearing trees, I just have to cultivate each, slowly. The prospect of a life’s work of this, regardless of how long it takes for any of it to catch on, has begun again to thrill me.
For shameless plug purposes, readers everywhere can stream the first single off Moth Broth’s forthcoming album, “Willa,” hauntingly remixed as well by indie legends Xiu Xiu; it's everywhere music can be streamed, and I'm really proud of it. There's also a music video featuring Greg as a smoldering explorer and me as a desperate, extremely unsexy basement ghost. Typecasting, anyone?
And soon, very soon, Tea Leaves will be available as an audiobook! I narrated it myself and even made a cute little baby song for each story. Listen to it while you're folding laundry or wishing you weren't sitting in traffic.
MORE ABOUT JACOB
Jacob has an MFA in Creative Writing from University of New Orleans and a BA in Writing Seminars and Spanish from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where they currently live and make art.
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