For some time, I thought I should avoid my close friends for this project, determining that something is lost when the documenter and subject have a relationship that won’t be translated to the viewer. I violated that rule with this installment, big time. But hell, why should I stick to it? I surround myself with profoundly talented and ever-interesting people—exactly the type of people that you would want to see on this project. Caroline Klibanoff is one of my best friends and a perfect subject for Abditum.

She is the ideal artist; she can just as easily extract inspiration from the scrolls of history as she can from a passing comment in the street. She once told me, in reference to her song ‘Vices, ’ “Yeah this lady next to me took a big puff of her cigarette and I just wrote this song on the spot.” She has a deep understanding of the social and artistic implications of music, taking explicit cues from the narrative style of Bob Dylan and injecting her own hint of southern twang and emotionalism.

I came into her room to find her frantically brushing crumbs off her desk and throwing clothes into hampers. It is the cluttered room of an artist: cramped, overbearing, and decorated with her favorite inspirations. You’ll see little notes written everywhere, a thought, a line, a poem. If you click through her computer you’ll find drafts and drafts of half-finished songs. Caroline writes all the words to her songs first and worries about the rest later. Her emphasis on a lyrical nucleus is evident almost immediately. 

In classic Carolinean fashion, I quote from The Counterlife: “…if you’re written about, if you’re turned into a character in a book, unless it is really crushingly derogatory, the very fact of being focused on like that is somehow curiously romanticizing. He certainly exaggerated my beauty.” If you ask Caroline about this video, she’ll say I made her look cooler than she really is. Anyone that knows her will know that’s not true.