Dave Young Description

AN ANNOTATION

JONATHAN LETHEM'S MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

Motherless Brooklyn is Jonathan Lethem's fifth novel (published in 1999), and is set in New York in the late 1990s. The narrative is from the point of view of Lionel Essrog: orphan, and sufferer of tourrettes syndrome. Growing up in an orphanage in Brooklyn, Essrog falls in with a group of other "motherless" boys at his school, all of whom are taken under the wing of local "fixer" and small-time businessman Frank Minna. Employing them as part of his removals company, he takes them out of school to move miscellaneous boxes, conspicuously without any explanation. This extended prologue describes the affectionate relationship Essrog builds with Minna, and also gives to reader a good insight into the perhaps nefarious activities he's running in the background of his business. Minna announces one day that he must leave New York city for a while, with Lionel being aware that something is amiss. The novel really begins with the return and sudden murder of Frank Minna. The boys have all grown up by this stage, and Lionel quickly takes on the role of a private eye, trying to find out what Minna may have been hiding, and who killed him.

Lethem disrupts the typically "cool" detective noir-genre by subverting private-eye cliches with moments of farce and dark humour. The novel investigates New York as a cinematic and literary icon - landmarks, soundmarks, lowlifes and gangsters, femme fatales, newspaper vendors and fast food joints provide a simultaneously believeable yet constructed vision of Brooklyn. It fits in with Lethem's canon - common themes between Motherless Brooklyn and his other novels include social isolation, obsession, human fallibility, and New York city itself.

A DESCRIPTION

Radius Music 2.0

Walking into a dark space, you can see an abstract visualisation projected onto a platform [just over 1m^2] that is slightly raised up from the floor. The visualisation on the platform consists of white dots (pixels) [many more being added every second], around a centrepoint at seemingly unpredictable yet ordered radii. From the centrepoint of the platform there is a steel pole, less than one meter high, topped with a small rectangular platform only about 10cm across by 20cm long. The platform on the pole is made from transparent plastic, and is lit from the inside by a white light. A circuit board - and a motor connected to a revolving (distance) sensor by a pair of cogwheels - sits on top of the plastic platform. It might become apparent that there is a relationship between this revolving sensor and the circular visualisation on the lower platform. In accompaniment to the circular visualisation projected onto the platform, there is also a prominent sonic output: warbling sine waves producing a droning, repetitive sound characteristic of early electronic music experiments.