Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

Chase Joynt Mike Hoolboom

Sex, Death and Transition

YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive.

What if it's not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales, confessional missives that map out the particularities of occupying what they call ‘second lives’: Chase’s transition from female to male and Mike’s near-death from AIDS.

Weaving cultural theory with memoir and media analysis, YOLT asks intimate questions about what it might mean to find love and hope through conversation across generations.

Mike Hoolboom is an author and filmmaker based in Toronto. He has written four books, received more than thirty international film prizes, and enjoyed nine international retrospectives of his work.

Chase Joynt is a Toronto-based moving-image artist and writer who has exhibited his work internationally. He recently received a Mellon Fellowship in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the University of Chicago.

Available products
Book Published 2016-04-19 by Coach House Books
Book Published 2016-04-19 by Coach House Books

Comments

Meeting at an impromptu gathering at Orly Airport on the day of Chris Marker's death, Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom embark on an extended correspondence inspired by their affinity with the filmmaker. Over time, the two correspondents will investigate the thrill of discovered affinities, most especially their own. You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in 'second lives' when all past expectations have been foreclosed.

What a wondrous, shimmering, piquant concoction of tales and tails and herds and heads. By tails, I mean all the wagging bits of bodies that Joynt and Hoolboom so courageously put on the line. By herds, I mean all the communities with whom they so gracefully graze. By tales, I mean the way they trouble memories. Stories are never simply recounted, but instead, offered as queries and question marks and interrobangs for all of us to worry over like bones. Most of all, such heads! The writing is out of the park -- strong and surprising, a relay race of brilliant twirling, tossing thoughts back and forth like balletic rugby bros. Joynt and Hoolboom’s dances of disclosure are so courageous and generative, gifts to us all.

Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one’s life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I’m so glad they have each other, and that we have this.