No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

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For me the piece is very moving. The young man leaning on Jesus’ shoulder reminds me of the trust my daughter seems to have in God (well, most of the time!) which often teaches and challenges me. The wounded Jesus reassures me that He is never a distant God and like any loving parent experiences his children’s hurt and suffering as his own. His vulnerability reflects the God that came as a vulnerable baby and then refugee and then victim of torture. It reminds me that, whilst sadly we Christians are a very poor advert for Christianity and can appear bigoted, racist, exclusive, homophobic and judgemental, Jesus is not like this. Jesus is the friend of the overlooked and those on the edge. He is the God of an upside-down Kingdom. With Miu Miu’s support, July worked closely with designer Thea Lorentzen and a team of developers at the award winning Stinkdigital to create the complex, GPS-based messaging system. Half-app / half-human, Somebody twists our love of avatars and outsourcing —every relationship becomes a three-way. The antithesis of the utilitarian efficiency that tech promises, here, finally, is an app that makes us nervous, giddy, and alert to the people around us. When you send your friend a message through Somebody, it goes — not to your friend — but to the Somebody user nearest your friend. This person (probably a stranger) delivers the message verbally, acting as your stand-in. The app launched at the Venice Film Festival along with a short companion film, part of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series.

Miranda July's is a beautiful, odd, original voice – seductive, sometimes erotic, and a little creepy, too." —David Byrne Official Somebody hotspots so far include Los Angeles County Museum of Art (with a presentation by Ms. July on Sept. 11), The New Museum (presentation on Oct. 9), Yerba Buena Center for The Arts (San Francisco), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and Museo Jumex (Mexico City.) Museum-goers are invited to send and deliver messages in these spaces where there are likely to be other users.

No One Belongs Here More Than You 2013 Curatorial Statement

So I can enthusiastically recommend her film Me and You and Everyone we Know, and also her novel The First Bad Man. But not these short stories. They’re just too short, and also too arch, which the dictionary defines as marked by a deliberate and often forced playfulness, irony, or impudence .

Whimsical…extraordinary tales…at the core of each strange, often comic tale lies the basic human need for love and understanding.” — The Village Voice Filmmaker Magazine rated her number one in their "25 New Faces of Indie Film" in 2004. After winning a slot in a Sundance workshop, she developed her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which opened in 2005. The film won The Caméra d'Or prize in The Cannes Festival 2005. If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s that the empathy the reader feels for the characters soon gives way to annoyance at their remorseless narcissism. They all seem like thinly-veiled sketches of the author, wondering what it means to really love. It seems trendy to complain that, with so many new gadgets and digital landscapes designed to improve communication, no one knows how to speak to each other anymore. But July’s characters don’t just want to talk, they want to belong. And in their search for connection, they somehow manage to scratch out a place of their own. The UK’s first interfaith charity shop is run and staffed jointly by four religious charities chosen by Miranda July: Islamic Relief, Jewish charity Norwood, London Buddhist Centre and Spitalfields Crypt Trust. The proceeds will be shared equally between the four partners, all of who run their own charity shops. Items for sale are typical of those traditionally sold in charity shops – second – hand clothes, books, games, DVD’s, kitchen ware, toys ornaments and bric – a – brac. Prices are the same as in any charity shop.

Table of Contents

July's inventive tales swing from laugh-out-loud funny to heart-clenchingly sad" ( Daily Telegraph) Artangel produces and presents extraordinary art in unexpected places in London, the UK and beyond. For over 30 years Artangel has generated some of the most talked – about art of recent times, including projects with Clio Barnard, Jeremy Deller, Roger Hiorns, Michael Landy, Steve McQueen, Rachel Whiteread, an d more recently Ryoji Ikeda, PJ Harvey and Jorge Otero – Pailos’s The Ethics of Dust at Westminster Hall, Houses of Parliament. Appearing anywhere from vacant apartments stores to subterranean vaults and London’s night sky, Artangel produces art that surprises, inspires and wouldn’t be possible within the confines of a gallery. How to Tell Stories to Children", the final story in the collection, and the longest, describes the friendship between a single middle-aged woman and her married friends' daughter. "Don't underestimate how much joy an eight-year-old and an almost-forty-year-old can bring one each other." It's a complex, confident narrative, spanning a couple of decades, that brilliantly investigates the miserable plight of a childless woman who lives most passionately through her relationship with someone else's child. By the time that the child is 20, the narrator is alone and lost, her life gone, her friends elsewhere. "Inelegantly and without my consent, time passed." When Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) decide to adopt a stray cat, their perspective on life changes radically, literally altering the course of time and space and testing their faith in each other and themselves. Despite the bleakness of their lonely lives, the adults in the stories respond to their surroundings with child-like puzzlement and wonder. One woman teaches the elderly inhabitants of her small town to swim by having them crawl across her apartment floor, their faces submerged in bowls of water. Another witnesses a neighbor having a seizure, and rather than rush for help, lays her head on his shoulder and takes a nap. Then, when she is awoken and sent to retrieve his medicine, a photograph of a whale on the refrigerator door sends her into a reverie. The woman, an amateur advice columnist, suggests depressed readers share their sorrows with a telephone operator or postman.

July’s stories are sexy and fast… Her characters are a new lost generation.” — O, The Oprah Magazine And yes, Miranda July might be accused of impudence in thinking these slight wisps are worth some of our hard-earned conscious moments but it’s the forced playfulness which got on my nerves.

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Surprising, amusing and touching... they'll fill you with a renewed sense of wonder at the world" ( Venue) And this line from the story Majesty that's all about dreams: “That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it. ” Swim Team” is also about failed expectations. The narrator, a woman living alone, teaches elderly people how to swim by teaching them to hold their faces underwater in a bowl; she never takes them to a pool. She reflects on how most of her students died over the years without ever knowing how to swim. Fantasy is vital to July's characters. Her stories are populated by sad, lonely, isolated people who feel a terrible dissatisfaction with the failure of their lives to match the drama and intensity of their dreams. "Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them. I thought these were just my starter friends and the real ones would come along later. But no. These are my real friends."