Chris Campanioni | Angel City Review

Drift, by Chris Campanioni
Review by Michael Browne

“I want to capture everything,” a character says in the opening pages of Chris Campanioni’s new novel Drift, echoing the very millennial compulsion to document everything, and mirroring the attitudes of the twenty-somethings that inhabit the 400-plus pages that follow. Written over the course of ten years, the book fits nicely into Campanioni’s output, sliding next to last year’s equally impressive, The Death of Art (C&R Press). Hard to categorize as ever, Campanioni has returned with more fractured narratives filled with an unlikely pack of auto-fictional models, college kids, Jersey Shore party-seekers, extroverts, and cynics, all seeking to document their existence by all means necessary. Channeling Bolaño’s 2666 formal structure, Chris Campanioni has crafted another terrific glimpse into our modern anxieties, and our compulsory need to “capture everything.”

Drift is composed of six sections, four of which are based on seasons of the year. Each section follows a variety of non-linear narratives. Mostly we follow a model named Chris Selden—presumably the auto-fictional Campanioni. The reader traces Selden through photoshoots in Palm Desert, trips to Brazil, romantic entanglements, and more. Selden, equal parts cynic and playboy—a la some character from Rules of Attraction or Glamorama era Ellis— believes that everyone born in 1985 is “doomed.” He also speaks at great length about resenting the artist’s insatiable need to observe:

The fact that I can’t look at someone, at anyone, without sizing them up, without writing them into the story. Every encounter in life viewed from above; a tracking shot from the camera eye of a cruising hawk. It wears on me.

Cameras constantly pace behind most of the proceedings in Drift, from photo shoots to coffee shops in NYC. Much of the narrative is described as if everything is being filmed, and the line dividing what is being recorded or not within the narrative becomes nebulous. Words like “tracking shot,” “scenes,” and “stagehand” are used in subtle ways intermittently throughout to elevate the feeling that everything is being captured, recorded.

Like The Death of Art, Drift captures aspects of the modern millennial zeitgeist perfectly. Characters constantly alternate between deciding to document the present moment or just experience it. Campanioni’s characters often crave the actual experience but oftentimes they find themselves living in a purely fabricated representation of experience. The world as simulacrum occupies big ideological spaces within Campanioni’s work. In a passage titled “This Must Be The Place” (one of the many Talking Heads references), the narrator reflects on the fallibility of memory:

Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of eyes, hair, a name or a face. It is not a record, it is an interpretation. A representation of the actual experience. A fake.

Or take for example Selden’s experience as a model in Palm Desert. When time is running short and the crew are unable to shoot in neighboring Idyllwild in the mountains above the desert, the crew recreate the backdrop of Idyllwild on the computer.

Idyllwild was the greatest thing I’d never seen…tall pines, sweet-smelling cedars, legendary rocks…eventually they’ll stick my body somewhere among those pines…

Here the world of simulation has become more ideal, more desirable than the actual world, than actual experience. The main conflict to be found within Drift is the tug and pull between real experience and manufactured, surveilled experience.

The allusions to 80’s new wave and indie music abound through the pages of Drift. Chapters titled “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Girls on Film” broadly work to highlight some of the themes within the text, but also seem to be calls to Campanioni’s musical literacy, if anything else. Twenty-somethings hop into cars where the stereo plays Talking Heads, and casual conversations are had in coffee shops about the legitimacy of genre names like “dream-pop” and “chill-wave.” In Drift, things are begging to be defined and made tangible, but in a world that feels like a production set, real meaning and the correlated experience are always out of reach.

Sections titled “Atrocity Exhibition” (I-V)—borrowed from the Joy Division song of the same name—fracture the narrative even further, providing little vignettes that confound, further exploding any semblance of narrative. This almost apocalyptic stylistic approach works in tandem with the apocalyptic tonal nature of the book. Not only are there end of the world parties—including heightened anxieties around the end of the Mayan calendar (2012)—but the book as a whole feels prophetic of a certain “end times” mentality.

Much like in his previous novel Death of Art, Campanioni wrestles with his public image and how it is represented online. In one section, we are privy to a long transcript of messages Campanioni—or his auto-fictional self Chris Selden—has received from admirers across social media. Inquiries range from requests to befriend Selden, to questions about his diet and exercise routine, while other inquiries prove to be more probing and vaguely problematic. This section works well to display perhaps the ramifications of a public life like Selden’s that is readily available for consumption, for commodification.

Like most of Campanioni’s work, his new novel works best when it’s ideas are constantly in motion from one page to the next. Drift could not be a more apt title for a book whose ideas drift from page to page, appearing like a revelation and then vanishing just as quickly. Shifting from autofiction, to memoir, to metafiction, and realism, sometimes all within the course of a few pages, Drift is a book that begs us to put it back together, to frame our own narratives, and to follow its often transcendent insights in our own lives.

Drift is available now via King Shot Press.

Novel by Chris Campanioni
Review by Michael Browne

Writer Chris Campanioni gives a crucial glimpse into our modern narcissism with his new book of memoir / non-fiction / hybrid text / does it really matter, Death of Art. Despite the ostentatious title, Campanioni tactfully avoids repeating oft-argued cliches regarding art’s apparent demise, and instead uses the title as an entry point for talking about identity, language, social media, and modern life as a kind of performance.

The book begins with Campanioni sitting around with a stranger cutting his face out of magazines in which he modeled. The book follows this act of self-immolation throughout, as Campanioni struggles with trying to refashion his own image and his own identity, in a world where these things are valued above all else. Campanioni is frank and open about his stints as a model and actor, and his struggles with the performative aspects of both. The text almost becomes a space where Campanioni can explore himself; a liminal space where he can avoid binaries and social norms and—in a way—deconstruct himself:

I had lately been thinking of a project titled Death of Art, which itself came from the blacked out title of a poem I’d just written called ‘Death of the Artist…’ Cutting out my face could be the beautiful overture.

Formally, Death of Art moves from vignette style passages of memoir, to essays and poetry. Campanioni’s tone alternates from playful, to philosophical, to the banal and the confessional, and all at a blistering pace. His subjects range from 90210 and Tinder dates, to social media narcissism and celebrity culture. An obsession with 90210 and a brief reference to Care Bears in particular become interesting pivot points for Campanioni to make comparisons between the empathy of our former analog world, and the disconnectedness of our modern digital world.

Death of Art brilliantly taps into our insatiable need to be seen and felt via social media, and how life is not experienced in our modern age, but rather, documented. The Facebook photo as preferred cultural currency to the actual image and experience represented.

The same way that our generation will look back on our lives in sixty years and there will be plenty to see. Probably we only wish we would have lived it too.

In the section titled “Self-Interested Glimpses,” Campanioni adopts an essay style (as he frequently does) and argues that “Authentic experience has been replaced by fetishized experience; existence becomes object.” In Campanioni’s world, the Instagram photo of a sunset now reigns supreme over the actual sunset. This is not a wildly new concept, as many postmodern thinkers have believed that society and modern culture have started to place more importance on “simulacra” or the simulation of reality, rather than the object itself.

For Campanioni public spaces have become zones of anti-social behavior. He argues that the increased access to each other that social media provides us has “led us to become less tolerant, less sympathetic, and less understanding.” This is exemplified in the book via the nearly tweet sized entries describing a series of Tinder dates where he struggles to make eye-contact and prefers to meet in coffee shops, hotel bars, or “anywhere public enough to pass through, in transit, like anyone else. Just passing through.” The Tinder passage in particular reads like a detritus of ineffectual millennial dating experiences that only work to solidify Campanioni’s belief that our ability to connect is stunted, not enhanced, by applications like Tinder.

Much of the book is devoted to Campanioni’s self-reflection and almost reads like some playful postmodern diary. The author is constantly engaged in a dissection of his own image, striving and hoping to dismantle it. “The Internet has its own idea of me, and so do its worshippers. I want to create my own idea of me. Maybe the Internet will follow.”

Campanioni’s concept of life being fetishized but not experienced, is nicely juxtaposed with passages that reflect his childhood:

We lived our days as if they were scenes in a musical; we danced & continued to sing. Sometimes in Spanish or English but also often in a language made up by my father, a practice I’d adopt too, & which became my true joy in life: the pleasure of words & the sounds they contained. Whether it meant anything was besides the point; it meant everything.

Here childhood is reflected upon nostalgically and without the author’s jaundiced view of our current culture’s unchecked narcissism. It’s also indicative of Campanioni as a great linguaphile, and the simple pleasure he derives from the physical sensation of the words exiting his mouth. This runs counter to the mechanized way we communicate now:

Face-to-face meetings have given way to my face on your touch screen…

Death of Art is a punchy hybrid text that holds its own intellectual weight and does well to not veer off into pretension nor cliche, which is no minor triumph considering it’s broad and aspirational title. Campanioni is a serious writer and a world class thinker, and there is something great to be gleaned from his latest offering that seems to revel in its ability to avoid classification and open up a dialectic about the modern ways in which we communicate.

Death of Art is available now through C&R Press.