Big,I Would Rather Kill You Bent Ears, Epilogue: We’re Not Actually Here

Joseph Mitchell amid the wreckage of Lower Manhattan.

“Big, Bent Ears,” our ten-chapter multimedia series with Rock Fish Stew, has come to a close. Over the past seven months, this “serial in documentary uncertainty” has enfolded a host of writers, artists, and musicians, including Joseph Mitchell, Jonny Greenwood, tUnE-yArDs, Sally Mann, Cormac McCarthy, Grouper, Nazoranai, Matthias Pintscher, Tyondai Braxton, the JACK Quartet, Swans, Tacita Dean, and Cy Twombly, as well as artists of a different stripe: a family of piano tuners, a chef, a translator, and, of course, a documentary team. There were also multiple audiences, an earthquake, strangers on a train, and the city of Knoxville.

We’ll leave you with an epilogue in which Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss return to Mitchell’s midcentury chronicles of New York City and sift one more time through his collected objects. This postscript is also an introduction to a filmed interview with Laurie Anderson, whose comments typify the spirit of uncertainty that binds the series.

 Read the epilogue here, and catch up on the rest of the series:

• Chapter One, There Are No Words
• Chapter Two, Borderline Religious
• Chapter Three, Nazoranai, a Documentary
• Chapter Four, In Search of Lost Time in Knoxville
• Chapter Five, Alien Observers
• Chapter Six, Treatise on the Veil
• Chapter Seven, Anatomy of a Sequence
• Chapter Eight, Surrender to the Situation, Part 1
• Chapter Nine, Surrender to the Situation, Part 2
• Chapter Ten, Surrender to the Situation, Part 3

Nicole Rudick is managing editor of The Paris Review.