My favorite piece of David’s was, and likely will always be, Pay Attention!, which speaks to art, making art, working with artists, working with David, understanding David, and more. I made a new edit of the piece for the website, which was equalized for clarity and touched up a bit here and there to sound better. It’s almost entirely perfect, but don’t take my word for it. Listen:
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Somehow, I keep expecting he’s going to call me and this will have all been one of his more insidious bits, but I just don’t know. I’ve been working on restoring this website, which has been in hibernation since the poetdavidfranks.com disaster of 2008, and it’s a strange feeling to be working at it without David hanging over my shoulder, arguing for me to do things that are essentially impossible in the context of making a usable website.
“Can’t we just do this on the typewriter and post pictures?”
No, David. I had to say “no” quite a lot, and David did not like to hear “no.”
Now, it’s this matter of all the little stuff, the little lectures I’ve gotten over the years, the explanations of why there needs to be an extra space between the period and the comma. It’s funny, I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of recollections, and sometimes, I know that they’re not exactly right, and yet they’re probably exactly as he explained them to others. Reality followed different rules with David, and often bent to his will. I can’t imagine wanting to know the real truth, in all its clinical emptiness.
Something’s odd, too. For the first time since 1949 or so, no one brought flowers to Poe’s grave. Rafael Alzarez mentioned this, and I thought, hmmm, but I don’t know…or hmmm.
But…hmmmm…roses.
The man was an incurable and intense romantic, you know, and he did love impossible gestures above almost all things.
One has to wonder, right?
Still frantically rebuilding the web site. There’s a lot of work to be done. We’d made a lot of progress, David and I, but we lost the finished structure in a server meltdown last year, so I’m having to reassemble the archives and reformat everything for the new site here. I’m missing a lot, and it’s impossible to describe how hard this is going to be without David’s nagging, insistent, and very clear voice guiding me along. Laurie Anderson once said that when her father died, it was like a whole library burned down. With David, it’s a library, a circus, a school, a dime store—everything—all in flames. It’s been a melancholy few days, but the work’s gotta go on.
I worked with David for a long, long time, putting this stuff together, but there are so many missing pieces, absent narratives, and fragments that I no longer have someone around to explain. I’m going to be posting images like this as I go along, and if you’ve got any insight or memories of these events and projects, I’d love for you to share it with the me for this site, and with the rest of his circle of friends.
David Franks was found dead today.
If you knew him, and want to share stories, please leave a comment.
His website, alas, is pretty bare right now, as we had a calamity with the server some time back and lost all the original code (though all the source material is intact). I’ve been slowly re-gathering material to build it up again, but have been overwhelmed with work and was not able to get on it as quickly as David (or I) would have liked. Now, I guess, it’s a new kind of mission, and one I’d have hoped would have been years, decades even, down the line.
Tell me stories, will you?
Joe Wall - David’s web guy, collaborator, friend.
P.S. I have to approve the comments before they’ll post, unfortunately, or the page would be nothing but Viagra spam, but I’ll be watching.