To Beat Or Not Be Beat by Nicca Ray

Nicca Ray writes and records her thoughts on Beat and Not Beat poetry. Director Kathleen Florence illustrates Ray’s words with the images of visual artist Jesse McCloskey to create a short animation on the writer’s reflections on genre, style and self in poetry.

About the process:

My first read of Nicca’s thoughts on beat poetry brought to mind a micro graphic novel. Her first-person writing is honest, compelling and without pretense. There’s a grit in her words that sounds like New York. But she’s also an LA native, so there’s a slash of punk sunshine in her writing too.

When I mentioned story-boarding, Nicca mentioned her partner Jesse McCloskey. One look at his portfolio and everything fell into place. I gathered images like I was picking ripe apples. Without overthinking the process, I laid out the frames, matching Jesse’s images with Nicca’s words and we had a digital storybook in hours.

But I wanted to hear Nicca’s voice, so I asked her to record herself speaking. Nothing high-tech. No in-studio session or multiple retakes. Just letting the words flow.

What I got back was a recording with background noise, which inspired me to build a sound scape. City buses driving over deep-belly whale moans. The overpowering sound of a typewriter’s nostalgia for the past. No emotion-creating music other than one nod to the snake sounds of cliché.

Much like the storybook, the video came together with ease. Sometimes it happens that way. Other times there’s more of a struggle. Every artist has had this experience, either on our own or in collaboration with others. Maybe it’s about going with flow, not trying to control things so much. It’s definitely practice. Maybe a wink of luck. – K.F.

About the artists:

Nicca Ray was raised in Los Angeles, not far from the ­Griffith Park Planetarium where scenes from her father, Nicholas Ray’s, most famous film, Rebel Without a Cause, were shot. First inspired by the New York Dolls performing on the Real Don Steele Show, she started going to clubs on the Sunset Strip when she was fifteen, and became heavily involved in the L.A. punk scene when she was seventeen. At age twenty, she began work on getting sober, and shortly after, moved to New York, where, in her early thirties, was accepted into the New School University. While a student she published short stories in various journals, made two short films—including one that screened at the New York Underground Film Festival—and starred in Cutting Moments, the first film in the underground gore classic series, Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, directed by Douglas Buck. After graduating in 1999, at thirty-eight years old, she devoted her life to researching and interviewing people about her father’s life, for which Ray by Ray is a culmination. She currently lives in New York City.

Jesse McCloskey is a New York-based artist hailing from a tiny town in Massachusetts where little abandoned cemeteries list smallpox victims and stories of accused witches lay buried near the town green. His latest solo exhibitions include “Romantic Poison” at SRO Gallery, NY and “Making a Scene” at Site 57 Gallery, NY. The artist’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at 490 Atlantic Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Brooklyn Collage Collective, Brooklyn, NY; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, NY. He received a BFA from the Swain School of Design in Massachusetts and a MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York. www.jessemccloskey.com

Kathleen Florence (Reichelt) is based in Canada. She writes and directs scripts for film and stage, and has worked in story development and production for decades. Kathleen studied at Toronto’s OCAD University, Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and has a BA in Cultural Studies from Trent University. She works in performance, film and non-profit communications. Her work has been published by NYC’s Three Rooms Press and Arteidolia, included in exhibitions, festivals and residencies from Montreal to Spain.

“Thoughts on Beat poetry with Nicca Ray, Jesse McCloskey + Kathleen Florence”
was first published November 14 on the Beat Not Beat blog →