The Story of The Eye by Georges Bataille

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

the poems of ee cummings

the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca

The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

the diaries of Anaïs Nin

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

the Sagas of Icelanders







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p.s. Hey. Today the awesome Chris Dankland gives thanks to Bjork and books via Bjork, and he passes the fruits of his discoveries and gratitude on to you. Pretty multi-sweet, not to mention useful, and have your way with everything, please, and talk to Chris if you will and like, please. Thank you with a full-on 21 gun DC's salute, Chris! ** Sypha, Hi. I feel the same way about my early books, so, yeah, gotcha. I didn't quite get to listen over the weekend as I'd hoped due to unexpected film-related stuff, but I have most of today off, so today's the lucky day, I'm pretty sure. So, you restart work today, I'm calculating? I hope it's magically refreshing somehow. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff. Oh, hm, not really sure about the Kristof comparison, Well, yeah, in a way, I get it, but their actual writing styles are very different. Oh, man, you should read Kristof's trilogy. One of the great works ever, in my humble opinion. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Interesting, very interesting thoughts on the SF thing. I guess I quickly think of SF bands I like a lot that weren't into breaking that band/audience wall like Crime, Flaming Groovies, Mad River, Blue Cheer, Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, etc. But I can see that the overlay of community outreach that SF exudes kind of infects their individual goals if you don't come to them in ignorance or innocence re: their location. But there are always exceptions to every rule, I guess. Really, about Fowley? I really liked him and his thing. I think he was a very particular kind of fucked up pop visionary meets bad businessman, and I find his relentless, usually wishful, corrupted calculating about what would be the next big thing, etc., really fascinating. Like Malcom McLaren without the savvy and classiness. Plus, the conversations I had with him were among the most interesting I ever had. But I certainly understand why his appeal is a graspy thing. ** Kier, Hi, ... Kierampus. Sorry? Your mall score is pretty sweet. Not bad at all. Did you decorate the notebook cover, meaning, in addition to the basic question, can it be seen, if so? My weekend: Let's see ... Yeah, on Saturday we sat down and watched our film, and, yeah, it looked fucking awesome, if I don't say so myself. We just did a little fiddling with some sound issues and minute edits afterwards. It still needs refining and a bunch of tiny details fixed, but we felt like it was ready to be seen by a few invited guests. So, on Sunday, we showed it to our first objective outsider. It was exciting and nerve-wracking, and she ... really loved the film! She totally understood it and got it, and she talked for a long time about it in really smart, knowing ways, and we were thrilled, needless to say. Her only question was about one 2-second shot in the first scene. She thought everything else was perfect. The fact that she totally got it and understood everything we're doing in it was a total relief after the shit with our producers, so our confidence in the film has gone way up. Hooray! She particularly loves the 1st scene, which is probably my favorite, and also the 4th scene, which was great because that's the scene that's been the trickiest to get right, and is the scene that the producers especially didn't like or get. Anyway, so we talked with her for a long time, and then she split, and we celebrated calmly. Now we're going to show it to our next outsider, hopefully sometime this week, and we're taking a slight break right now before we go back in and work on it again because it has to be absolutely finished and locked down by a little over two weeks from now. Plus we have to decide on, design, and do the titles and the credits sequence at the film's beginning and end. That was most of the weekend. Zac, artist/d.l. Jonathan Mayhew, and I made plans to go to Disneyland Paris in Wednesday, so that'll be fun. I finished one of my gif novel interviews and may have finished another one, and now I have a third one to do. Uh, now I'm getting into this-and-that stuff, so I'll leave it at that. It was a really good weekend! Did Monday put an interesting spin on your day-to-day life? How so, if so, or how not, if not? ** Cal Graves, Hi. Thanks a bunch for the links. I'll hook myself up with them today. Of course I'm trying imagine what a 'lead singer just needed to stop castrating that cat in his throat' would sound like. I have a feeling it's more appealing in concept, not that the concept is all that appealing, mind you. I'll always love the Lips, I think, and I think their antics are always fun, and I thought 'The Terror' was very good, but I also feel like something happened after 'The Soft Bulletin' that caused my passion for them to wane or get distanced or something. Maybe their calculating is too present and on the top layer whereas they used to seem more reckless and inspired by something really strange and unique. But I don't know. I think they're still really valuable and interesting, but I don't feel like I feel the surprise that they want me to feel in recent years. I'm not sure. What do you think? Hope your weekend surprised and rocked simultaneously. ** Keaton, I'm sure you're right. I'm definitely not secretly dreaming of hunks. That's a guarantee. No, not Leary. But it's probably different to look back on him than to have been there. I had dinner with him once. He was kind of charming and kind of crotchety. The only Beats I like(d) were/are Burroughs, Terry Southern, if he counts, Paul Bowles, and I also like how nutso Michael McClure's poetry is. The rest of them, although I'm probably forgetting some, and their whole thing was and is really, really not of interest to me at all. I seriously can not accept that some of Phish is okay. Ooh, 'Groovy Underwear' looks really, really good. I've only just glanced for now. Much more later. Cool! Everyone, the latest blog-imbedded mini-masterwork by Keaton is up and fully available as of this writing. It's called 'Groovy Underwear', and it also goes by the REM, I assume, referencing title of 'Talk about the Passion', both of which seem to fit it like a glove. But enough of my pontificating. It's here.** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. I so extremely don't intend to see 'American Sniper'. Like so intensely won't. What do you hear about that film about DFW? I think it's premiering at Sundance right now? Jt. Jackson: huh, I don't know him at all. Sounds fascinating. I'm on it. Thanks! No, I haven't seen any of the Oscar-tipped films lately. Just the Wes Anderson a while ago. None of them interest me very much, although I do like Michael Keaton, so I'll probably see 'Birdman'. I really want to see 'Mr. Turner'. I think that's the one I want to see the most. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. I'm glad the FA Cup stuff has made you sparkle. The Greek election thing is very interesting. I need to read more thoroughly about it because I don't yet understand it in detail. ** Bill, Hi. Oh, the trailer is a teaser thing we put together really quickly for the producers so they could dangle it in front of whoever at he Berlin Film Festival. I'm not sure if it'll go public. It's up to the producers. If they share it with the outside world, I'll link you up. Jury duty? Deferral! ** Steevee, Hi. I know it's terrible, but I'm envying you guys the blizzard. We've gotten nothing but blah cold and rain here all winter, and something dramatic and city-altering sounds really hot. But I do hope its whomp isn't too violent, of course. I'll watch the news. I just tried the Arthur album the other day. Yeah, charming. It reeks of back then in a really nice way. I only heard a few songs, but it did sound like something that got bypassed at the time for a reason. But, yeah, now, from so far away, it sounds kind of cool. ** Paul Curran, Oh, thank you, thank you, Paul, about 'ZHH'! Yeah, cool, thank you! I'm excited about it, and the response has been pretty phenomenal. An awesome stroke of luck, I guess. Thanks, pal! You good? How's novel? ** Misanthrope, G. Sorry to hear about the two days of boringness. You deserved so much better. I'll look to see if I can find a Royal Rumble booing clip. Sounds very interesting. ** Styrofoamcastle, Wow, nice new name. Very psychedelic. Hey, Codester! Well, unsurprisingly, I imagine, my progress on your novel has been minor since I'm still a constant slave of film editing for much of each day, although we do have a very short break right now, so I'll try to dig back in as of this afternoon. I'm sorry for all the slowness. Making and editing a film is super swamping of not only time but a massive portion of my brain cells. Cool about the new novel's progress. I saw a pic of you on Cindy's FB wall co-carrying a bucket of something like ... soup, stew ... beside some kind of, like, tent, and you were wearing this kind of loose fitting Indian looking clothing thing. It was cool. You might go back to So. Cal. for a while?  I'll be there with Zac for a short time but in early March. Love you tons and miss you a lot too. ** Right. Chris Dankland! Bjork! 'Story of the Eye'! ee cummings! It's a veritable superstar fest on the blog today. Wait, not even veritable. An actual, for real superstar fest! Enjoy it. See you tomorrow.

'Philippe Garrel’s first films were made in his teens, shortly before the upheavals of ’68; apart from the one-hour, black and white Le Révélateur, which was briefly available in France on video, these remain impossible for most people to see today. Based on what I’ve sampled, and not counting his TV commissions of that period (basically documentaries, including one about Godard), they resemble his subsequent work insofar as they’re mainly autobiographical, focus on homey and everyday details while remaining detached and painterly, inspired by silent cinema (and, in the case of Le Révélateur— which critic Brad Stevens has compared to David Lynch’s The Grandmother —- literally silent), and employ actors associated with the French New Wave (including Garrel’s own father Maurice, who worked for Jacques Rozier and François Truffaut, as well as Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Zouzou). And unlike many other experimental films, they’re mostly in 35-millimeter.

'Some of Garrel’s more ambitious films of the ‘60s and ‘70s also take on certain epic and mythopoetic dimensions. The best known of these is probably his 1971 La Cicatrice Intérieure (The Inner Scar), shot in deserts found in Egypt, Iceland, Italy, and New Mexico, with Pierre Clémenti, Clémenti’s infant son Balthazar, Daniel Pommereuille, Garrel himself, and Warhol superstar Nico. The latter went on to become the love of Garrel’s life; his next half-dozen films were made with her, and it appears that most of those made after their separation and her death continue to evoke her in one way or another. The only other Garrel film with Nico I’ve seen, Les Hautes Solitudes (1974), is another silent feature, relatively non-fictional; Jean Seberg, Tina Aumont, and Laurent Terzieff also appear in it, and the voyeuristic way it views Seberg, sometimes while she’s either sleeping or just waking up, struck me as intrusive when I saw it at the Dublin conference. It’s a development that heralds some of the more violent psychodramas found in the later narrative features.

'Since the ‘70s, Garrel has spent much of his time recasting his brooding style in terms more compatible with narrative conventions and arthouse norms — Brenez has written persuasively about the ways his films might be regarded as Bressonian — while sustaining most of his autobiographical preoccupations and never compromising his vision one iota. The influence of silent cinema, for instance, remains in force, becoming especially apparent in his uses of solo piano for musical accompaniments, including the effective score by Jean-Claude Vannier in Les Amants Réguliers. No less relevant are tat film’s poetic intertitles introducing various sections — despite the irony with which they’re used, which often seems to reflect the irony of the brief, enigmatic fantasy sequences evoking 18th century military battles. In both these instances, Garrel seems to be looking back on his younger self with a certain indulgent skepticism, meanwhile projecting an overall sympathy towards all his other characters, including even the cops, that is both refreshing and unexpected. Gabe Klinger, writing online, has even plausibly compared him to Jean Renoir.

'Until fairly recently, the Paris Cinémathèque was mainly inhospitable to and incurious about contemporary experimental films. But Garrel, a particular favorite of Henri Langlois (who regarded La Cicatrice Intérieure as a ‘total masterpiece’), was a notable exception, and the fact that he grew up in some proximity to the local film world because of his father probably helped to establish him early on as a legendary as well as highly respected figure. As Cahiers du Cinéma’s Jean Douchet has observed, Garrel `occupies a singular position within French cinema’ because his ‘small but devoted public’ is essentially the one that has traditionally developed in France around poets. (Douchet adds that Garrel’s tradition is closer to André Breton’s in his Nadja mode than to Jean Cocteau’s, and that `his cinema descends in a direct line from that of Lumière, not that of Méliès.’)

'As with Werner Schroeter in West Germany and Carmelo Bene in Italy —- two other avant-garde masters of slow-motion portraiture who developed over the same period — another pertinent parallel might be to chamber music. Even though Garrel pitched his own tent far from the operatic and camp registers of Schroeter and Bene, there’s a similar sense of transporting the viewer to a meditative, almost nonnarrative realm, a soft and somber perpetual present similar to the intimate world of a string quartet. Whatever one’s qualms, it’s a kind of cinema that needs defending today more than ever. Thanks to digital technology, making chamber pieces is theoretically much easier than it used to be, yet thanks to advertising and multicorporate monopolies, finding one’s way to such works and other niche market items is a good deal harder.

'In this respect, Garrel might be regarded as a kind of romantic luxury that only a culture such as France’s can fully support, or perhaps envision: relatively free from most commercial restraints, including many of the usual obligations associated with telling a story; surviving on the fringes of art cinema (where Garrel eventually settled by the early 80s) while retaining the same overall ambitions; defiantly remaining, as Kent Jones put it in the title of one appreciation, ‘Sad But Proud of It’.'-- Jonathan Rosenbaum



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Stills

































































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Further

Philippe Garrel @ IMDb
'The Everyday Fantasies of Philippe Garrel'
'Encountering Philippe Garrel at the Lisbon-Estoril Film Festival'
'Jealousy or, What Does Philippe Garrel Want?'
'Philippe Garrel: "J'ai du mal à me soustraire à la beauté extérieure"'
'Philippe Garrel : “Par moments, le cinéma a construit ma vie. A d’autres, il l’a détruite”'
'Bohemia and Its Discontents'
'Philippe Garrel & Nico'
'Philippe Garrel is the master of the unseen'
'Philippe Garrel tackles another doomed romance'
'Philippe Garrel et les femmes : il les a si bien filmées'
'Lit et horizontalité dans le cinéma de Philippe Garrel'
'ACTUA 1 : LE FILM RESCAPÉ DE PHILIPPE GARREL'
'NOTES SUR LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE'
'Column: a portrait of Philippe Garrel, at his home in Paris, November 2009'
Philippe Garrel's films @ Strictly Film School
'‘THE INNER SCAR’: OBSCURE AND PRETENTIOUS FRENCH ART FILM STARRING NICO'
'The influence of Jean-Luc Godard on Philippe Garrel’s cinema'
'Voyeurism of the Soul: The Films of Philippe Garrel'
Top 20 Philippe Garrel films @ SensCritique



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Plus


Théâtres au cinéma 2013 - Leçon de cinéma de Philippe Garrel


Leos Carax interviewed by Philippe Garrel (1989)


Masterclass com Philippe Garrel


Philippe Garrel (1982) by Gérard Courant



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Interview




Jealousy concerns your parents' separation when you were a child. Is this a subject that you've carried with you for a long time?

Philippe Garrel: No. The idea came after my father's death. I think of his death every day. Or at least, I think about him all the time since his death. So it semed natural to me to talk about him in a film. When he was 20, Maurice landed on the beaches with the Allied forces. I wanted to make a film that would show him leaving Africa, but I couldn't afford it. Caroline Deruas, my screenwriter, was at that point corresponding with a woman who had been my father's partner when I was little, and she suggested that I make a film of their story. Arlette Langmann wrote many of the scenes, and then Marc Cholodenko signed on to fill us in on the world of the theater, the working-class crows of actors, their lives, their anxieties, the world that my father frequented when he was young. I had already titled the film J'ai gardé des anges ["I Kept Angels"]. But finally, on my producer's advice, I chose Jealousy. I thought of Moravia, who chose very general words for the titles of his novels–ideas that would interest everyone.

Would you say that your films speak about your life?

PG: Let's say that they are autobiographical and that, these days, they're dedicated to my life. My previous film, A Burning Hot Summer, was dedicated to my best friend, the painter Frédéric Pardo. This one is dedicated to my father. There are autobiographical spots. But the most autobiographical components of my most recent films come from dreams that I've jotted down and mixed with fiction. I set things up so that you can't pick out the "real" scenes. But I won't tell you what in the film came from a dream. I won't give away my tricks! [Laughs]

Would you say that cinema has complicated your life?

PG: At times, cinema has created my life. At others, it's partly destroyed it. Carax says that "cinema destroys life." That's true, but not exclusively. It's a dialectic, a movement. It creates an erosion; it eats away at life a little. But in other places, it shores it up.

How does it destroy?

PG: It's a way to enter a house full of strangers. These strangers are the characters, and they make everyone mildly psychotic.

In Jealousy, we thought we found your first Truffaut reference. Louis says: "It's been a long time that I've known who I am. It's a blessing and a pain," which recalls the Truffaut-esque sentiment "it's both a joy and a pain"—a line that turns up in both Mississippi Mermaid and The Last Metro.

PG: Truffaut has meant a lot to me, it's true. But Godard, too. The women in Truffaut's films are magnificent, but they're object-women, objects of desire. They're worshipped, and they're a little phosphorescent, like goddesses. Whereas Godard would film his actresses straight in the eye, as intellectual equals. I find that that makes the world much more beautiful and interesting–that equality between men and women. At the start of the Sixties, very few men thought that. My idea today, which I've tried to examine in my recent films, is that the masculine libido and the feminine libido have exactly the same power.

Shooting little footage—which started as an obligation and eventually evolved into an artistic position—makes it possible for you to work for little money.

PG: Yes, that method becomes a part of the whole, in the end. For Jealousy, there were only five hours of rushes, and the film is 76 minutes. I'm far from the 600 hours of rushes Kechiche shot for Blue Is the Warmest Color. His film is better than mine, but is it a hundred times better? [Laughs] It's all right with me that French cinema should be saved by Blue Is the Warmest Color.

Saved? Is it in danger?

PG: Yes, there's nothing anymore. I haven't seen Stranger by the Lake, mind you, and I'm sure it's good, because Guiraudie has a personal style and That Old Dream That Moves was a marvel. I loved Camille Rewinds by Noémie Lvovsky. And Holy Motors by Leos Carax. I find his narrative ideas brilliant. The story of this guy whose job is to play different people and professions, I find that extraordinary. It makes me thing of Situationism: everyone is an actor. Everything happens as the staging of a spectacle. It's a level of collective alienation that humanity's arrived at. And the musical scenes in the church and La Samaritaine are magnificent. And I thought Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel 1915 was terrific. The idea of a famous actress, Juliette Binoche, surrounded by actual mental patients fits a certain reality. Because—and this is an idea I really believe—in nearly every asylum there's a locked intellectual. He's not mad; he just has a persecution complex or some kind of fragility. I think that's always relevant and that if we could see today's society clearly, we'd cry all day, like certain mental patients. The film gives you that idea.

Your previous film A Burning Hot Summer was highly personal.

PG: I dedicated the film to Frédéric Pardo, my painter friend who has the same first name as the character played by Louis in the film. The rest is fiction, but I worked with this friend for 35 years and up until his death. He painted my actors and there were constant echoes between our respective work. I wanted to immortalise a part of him in the film but without lapsing into fetishism. The paintings in the film, for example, are not by him. My father also makes his last appearance at the end of the film in a dialogue he wrote himself.

The film was partly booed at the press screening. What is your response to those critics who didn’t like the film?

PG: The critics are entitled to think that I’m not up to standard, but they’re perhaps the same people who would have booed Pierrot Le Fou at the time, and still would today even. I make films that belong to the dialectics of cinema. I film women with a soul. There are whole parts of the script which are written by women to be acted by women and I think that among themselves, they understand each other. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the men understand too. I’m not saying you have to understand everything, but if the incomprehension is about what emerges from that feminine soul, that may give rise to half the movie theatre booing. I don’t have any problem with that. Non-conformism isn’t an attitude of mine, but my films arise out of it. Inevitably, there will be reactions.



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17 of Philippe Garrel's 32 films

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Le révélateur (1968)
'Philippe Garrel's silent film Le Révélateur is a fractured and elliptical, but instinctive, elemental, and haunting rumination on the process of awakening, maturation, psychological trauma, and transformation of childhood memory. As the film begins, the révélateur - the processor of the images - is embodied through the isolated, spotlighted shot of a young boy (Stanislas Robiolles) in the corner of the frame, looking on as his father (Laurent Terzieff), apparently unaware of his presence in the room, struggles to connect with his abstracted mother (Bernadette Lafont) in an act of implied intimacy through the (iconic) sharing of a cigarette before fading into the proverbial background through a doorway suffused in a halo of light. But despite the physical act of transitory connection, what is ultimately retained in the child's camera/eye is not the residual image of tenderness and affection, but rather, a pattern of codependency, manipulation, madness, isolation, and perhaps even violence - an estrangement that is prefigured in the Freudian, reverse pietà image of the child emerging from a long, dark passageway towards his kneeling mother held in (apparently) resigned captivity tied to a cross at the end of the tunnel - a sense of pervasive emotional alienation and moral bondage that is further reinforced by the austerity and desolation of a seemingly godless, post-apocalyptic landscape.'-- Strictly Film School



Short excerpt


Longer excerpt w/ Sunn 0))) soundtrack



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Marie pour mémoire (1968)
'Marie pour mémoire is the first feature film of Philippe Garrel, he shot it when he was 19 years old. The movie won the Grand Prix at the Hyères young cinema festival in April 1968. Philippe Garrel said about this film: "Marie describes the trauma of the new generation." It is a story of two teenagers, Marie and Jésus who love each other and wants to live together. Their parents refuse this idea. Marie and Jésus get hurt under the order of a police-society. Marie gets pregnant, and her mother forces her to have an abotion and to leave Jésus...'-- unifrance.org



the entire film



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Le Lit de la vierge (1971)
'Filmed in the smoldered ashes of the failed social revolution as Garrel and a community of young artists from Zanzibar film (a film collective of like minded, radicalized artists financed by heiress Sylvina Boissonnas) abandoned the emblematic barricades of domestic protest and retreated to Africa to transfigure their ideological disappointment into subsumed cultural action through the creation of an intrinsically personal, revolutionary cinema, Le Lit de la vierge is, in a sense, the reconstitution of a fevered, post-traumatic creative manifesto - an impassioned, reflexive apologia composed in the fog of a drug-fueled delirium that not only reflected a not yet resigned sentiment of implicit denial over the failure of the revolution, but also served to reinforce the counter-culture generation's delusive posture as alienated and discarded messianic ideologues who, nevertheless, continue to hold the keys to an ever-receding utopian paradise. In presenting an idiosyncratically distorted embodiment (or perhaps, resurrection) of fringe society through a sensitive, misunderstood, outcast savior plagued by self-doubt and dispirited by a pervasive sense of impotence against the weight of human suffering, Garrel illustrates, not only the profound loneliness and alienation caused by a singularity of vision (a recurring idealized representation of the May 68 generation as well-intentioned holy innocents that seeks kinship not only with the abstracted heroes of Carl Theodor Dreyer's cinema - most notably, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Ordet - but also posits their intrinsic state of immanence, as revealed through their allusive alter-ego's consuming empathy for the oppressed and the marginalized (an altruistic desire for connectedness that is reflected in Jesus' despair over the seemingly anachronistic sight of bohemians being harassed by authorities within the sanctity of their own commune-like cavern dwellings).'-- Strictly Film School



Excerpt



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The Inner Scar (1972)
'Garrel's symbolic-experimental film leaves a strong impression, despite its many discomforting flaws. The film begins with Nico and Garrel (lovers in real life) walking in a barren desert and fighting with each other. Something or another happens to Garrel, and then Nico and what little plot there is wander off into new exotic landscapes and allegorical opacity. Much of the film is undeniably silly, from the heavy-handed symbolism to Pierre Clémenti running around naked for half of the film. But the magnificent cinematography and Garrel's long, circular tracking shots work to hollow out the film's symbolic-allegorical tendencies. The film visually abstracts (or is it concretizes?) and explores a set of relations between individuals and the manner in which individuals interface with their milieu. Except for a handful of lines, the soundtrack consists solely of environmental ambiance and Nico's songs, the latter perhaps unintentionally also overriding the narrative's meaning through their desolate beauty.'-- Retention Infinitude



the entire film



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Les Hautes solitudes (1982)
'In keeping with the vast majority of the films of its writer/director, Philippe Garrel, Les hautes solitudes (1974) is an intensely personal experience. A film in which characters thrown together in empty rooms stung by silence drift between fleeting glances, reacting or not reacting as the case may be to what is said, what isn't said, and everything in-between. It is, as one might expect given its technical presentation, a fairly impenetrable work, though one that we're free to carry with us; ruminating on each tattered scene as we gather up our thoughts like raindrops, either during the experience of viewing or afterwards, and inevitably projecting our own thoughts and feelings (or personal preconceptions) onto the images, or its central characters, who remain vague and elusive; indistinguishable from the actors who play them and whose faces dominate each single-shot close-up composition, used throughout to establish a story - or a sense of narrative that exists between sleep and nothing - to reveal a sense of the great loneliness that the title of the film so perfectly describes.'-- Lights in the Dusk



the entire film



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Un Ange Passe (1975)
'Un Ange Passe is a portrait of Philippe Garrel's father, Maurice. "I made it so it didn't cost too much. I made it very quickly. It turned out to be a film that looked exactly like it costs — it was industrially just right. But it was also useful to do to show love to my father." -- Philippe Garrel. Garrel resorted to Nico's songs again, and she acted in the film with the beautiful Bulle Ogier.'-- Smironne



Trailer



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Le Berceau De Cristal (1976)
'A weird and dreamy minimalist underground art movie, Le Berceau de Cristal offers no joy whatsoever to mainstream film buffs - but doomed romantics, drug takers and fans of director Philippe Garrel may find it hypnotic and profoundly moving. An androgynous poet/dreamer (played by Nico - Velvet Underground singer, Eurotrash icon and Garrel's other half) sits and writes and meditates on the aching void that is her life. Hieratic and semi-mythical beings show up to haunt her dreams. Dominique Sanda as a fleshy Pre-Raphaelite earth goddess. Anita Pallenberg as an impishly grinning, emaciated drug diva - shooting up live on camera. An early icon of 'heroin chic.' Not one of these figures utters a word to disturb Nico's reverie. Beyond the poet's voice is only silence and an intermittent, achingly lovely music score. (Uncredited, but perhaps the work of Garrel's frequent collaborator, the Velvet Underground guitarist John Cale.) Impossible to say what any of this is about, only that - in the last few seconds - Nico takes out a revolver and blows a hole in her skull. By that time, you may be so bored that you have an overwhelming desire to do the same, or you may be - as I was - curled up in a primal ball, gazing raptly at the screen and silently sobbing.'-- IMDb



Excerpt


Excerpt



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L'enfant secret (1979)
'It’s as if this autobiographical film has succeeded in holding its bearings without forgetting the trace of each stage of the journey it’s passed through. Fragments of pure sensory experience (touching, feeling cold), heartless acts (shock therapy), serene and furtive moments. I very much like the scene where Jean-Baptiste, now truly destitute, lights the butt he has just picked up from under a bench. I was fooled into believing that Griffith or Chaplin had returned for an instant. Garrel has succeeded in filming something we have never seen before: the faces of actors in silent films during those moments when the black intertitles, with their paltry, illuminated words, filled the screen.'-- Serge Daney



Excerpt


Excerpt



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Le Bleu des Origines (1979)
'Les Bleu des Origins is an uncompromising example of old school avant-garde cinema at its most cryptic, enigmatic and inscrutable. Made by Philippe Garrel in 1979 using a hand-cranked silent camera, Les Bleu represents absolute year zero in film-making, a return to the starkest basics of film's origins in early silent cinema, replacing any trace of narrative or even dialogue with an emphasis almost exclusively on close-ups of women's faces. The film is black and white, and absolutely silent for its full 50-minute duration. The total silence feels oppressive: silent cinema, after all, was accompanied by music. The silence, though, serves to ensure the focus on the actresses' faces is absolute, with no distraction. The faces in question belong to the former Velvet Underground German chanteuse, Warhol Superstar and cult figure Nico, and bohemian French starlet Zouzou. By 1979 Nico had been Garrel's lover, muse and collaborator for a decade. Les Bleu des Origins was the seventh and last film they made together, and marked the end of their off screen relationship as well.'-- IMDb



the entire film



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Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights ... (1985)
'Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel's Elle a passé tant d'heures sous les sunlights... (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps) is more exorcism than expurgation, elegy than lamentation - an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux. A profoundly personal film dedicated to the memory of friend and fellow filmmaker (and May 68 idealist) Jean Eustache, and haunted by the unreconciled specter of Garrel's failed relationship with Nico, the film opens to a crepuscular image of a couple - perhaps an actor and his lover (Jacques Bonnaffé and Anne Wiazemsky) as apparent surrogates for Garrel and Nico - in the midst of a breakup on a public street on a cold, winter evening, as their seemingly tenuous reconciliation is truncated by the subsequent shot of the couple returning home, and an all too familiar rupture as she once again lapses into the desensitized haze of heroin addiction in the distraction of his preoccupying rehearsals. A seemingly isolated shot of another woman, an actress named Marie (Mireille Perrier) waiting in the office of the Ministry of Art subsequently connects the troubled couple through the sound of the rapid, half-whisper, off-screen script reading, first by the actor preparing for the role in the apartment, then subsequently by the voice of the filmmaker, Philippe (Philippe Garrel) as he casts her in his latest project - the seemingly disparate narrative arcs reconciled through the intersection of the autobiographical nature of Philippe's proposed project inspired by his own tumultuous relationship with model, singer, actress, and muse Nico (a transparency between art and life that is further compounded by the eventual appearance of Garrel as the director of the "film within a film" film). Another break in logic is created in the long shot of the actor, in the role of the film director, discarding a film reel from a bridge overlooking the river before meeting Marie, initially unfolding as the shooting of a film scene through the transformation of Marie's visage at the moment of performance, but subsequently subverted by the repeated episode of the couple - perhaps no longer acting in character - driving away, a romantic liaison that is reinforced by a subsequent, silent image of the couple engaged in an (apparently) intimate conversation.'-- Strictly Film School





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Les Baisers de Secours (1989)
'Les Baisers de Secours ("Emergency Kisses") would be an interesting piece of relevant art when it comes to present an aspect of things that sometimes, not always, concerns the artistic process that involves choices while making a movie. Philiosophical and quite realistic, it's too bad that it's too dry, unfairly pretentious, half interesting. The interest for it fades away quickly and the pessimism of the character takes over, isn't constructive for the movie's actions, uninvolving for the most part. Mirroring his own life, Philippe Garrel portraits with his real life family (his father Maurice, his son Louis and his then partner Brigitte Sy) the obstacles an film author puts up against while making choices as an artist and as a man. The discussion begins when his wife, a very talented yet insecure actress is refused by her husband to portray a character who is based on herself in his next project. She even tries to persuade the chosen actress to give up the role but she doesn't give reasonable explanations for such. Art isn't perfect, neither does life. Parallel to this, their marriage seems to deteriorate more and more, separation is eminent and comes the problem of finding what love truly means and share their son's love and attention.'-- IMDb



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J'entends plus la guitare (1991)
'A masterpiece. The meaning of love, the mystery of women, life, and all that: Garrel finds it, everything, in the faces, bodies, and words of his actors. If not the greatest movie we’ll see this year, though it’s a strong early candidate, J’entends will surely prove the most tenderly played. Raw, rueful, and piercingly alert, a film of tremendous formal instinct and cogent human truth, J’entends is an oblique memoir of the filmmaker’s relationship to Nico (Steege) and a testament to the elusive genius of a postwar French master. Why Garrel clicks is hard to pin down in part because he clunks; the eloquence of J’entends is inseparable from its awkwardness. There’s a softly discordant thrust to Garrel’s montage, a pervasive tone of docile atonality. He retains the junkie’s habit of tremendous concentration on nothing; you feel the intensity of his gaze without quite understanding it. He can seem, like Cassavetes (or Henri Rousseau), at once the most sophisticated and naive of artists. My guess is the tremendous force of Garrel’s vision, as exemplified in J’entends is the most disciplined of the half-dozen pictures I know, and widely considered his apotheosis by devotees is rooted in a brilliant eye for casting. It’s in living beings for sure; few filmmakers match Garrel’s ability to register palpable human presence in every shot.'-- The Village Voice



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La naissance de l'amour (1993)
'“Do you love me?” This question involving friends Marcus and Paul encapsulates contemporary egotism and self-doubt. Marcus must ask this of his partner, who may have initiated their love affair but who is now exhausted by her lover’s need for reassurance, which losing his job has only deepened. On the other hand, Paul receives the question from the mother of his teenaged son and infant daughter. He loves family for whatever reassurance it provides against the uncertainties of life; but her in particular? He is more emotionally giving in succession to two mistresses. At one point, their son relays his mother’s question to his father, and we understand that the boy also wonders whether Papa loves him. Paul has returned home only to abandon his family again; “Papa! Papa!” the boy cries out into the street as Paul, suitcase in hand, once again leaves in the midst of his middle-age crisis. Brilliantly written by the director and Marc Cholodenko, Philippe Garrel’s La Naissance de l’amour is a film about two men who are “wanderers” even when they stay relatively put. It is about life’s loose-endedness, its incapacity to provide fulfillment for its artistically gifted members who aren’t runaway successes.'-- Dennis Grunes



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Le vent de la nuit (1999)
'LE VENT is unmistakably a film by Philippe Garrel, with its deliberate pacing, recurring themes of bitter regret, lost love and longing across generations and relentless focus on the emotional landscape of its three central characters, all which immediately connect it to his other work. There’s a memory-suffused beauty and extraordinary purity to the film, a careful attunement to the passage of time and an underlying pressure that swells beneath the glossy surface of its cross-country sprawl: a road movie and travelogue buttressed by John Cale and his wonderfully attuned soundtrack, the journeyman singer-songwriter-composer formerly of the Velvet Underground also responsible for scoring Garrel’s earlier, 1993 masterpiece, L’NAISSANCE DE L’AMOUR, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Lou Castel, and whom Garrel first met on the set of his 1968 film, LE LIT DE LA VIERGE, along with Nico, the director’s perennial muse and the woman to which the German sections in LE VENT directly relate.'-- Austin Film Society





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Les Amants Reguliers (2005)
'The film’s title creates an expectation around the couple, a subject that Garrel has often recreated. But, surprise: the delicate balance does not sacrifice the group for the couple, on the contrary; of the life of the lovers Lilie and François, Garrel films the nocturnal walks to the musical accompaniment of Jean-Claude Vannier, as if those two didn’t have much to say. The heart of this generational diptych is perhaps elsewhere: in the solitude that entrenches every individual in his/her own body, no matter what his/her community (lovers/friends) that welcomes him/her. Clotilde Hesme suddenly looks over the camera and declares with an astonishing simplicity for so a definitive phrase: “The solitude at the core of every human being is incredible.” By a system of Russian dolls, the film passes from group to couple, from couple to solitude. From an invaluable historic portrait to a veritable existential confession.'-- Cahiers du Cinema



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A Burning Hot Summer (2012)
'I have never seen a Garrel film untouched by grace, and A Burning Hot Summer is no exception. The emotional geography is more intricate than in any of his previous films but no less delicately rendered. Every micro-event, whether it’s a matter of pure dailiness (sharing meals and walks, saying hello and goodbye to friends) or romantic complication (Angèle and Elisabeth’s commiserations about men and their lack of understanding of women, Elisabeth’s fear that the wealthy Frédéric’s cavalier behavior will rub off on the penniless Paul, Frédéric and Elisabeth separately nailing Paul for staring admiringly at Angèle), beats and trembles with Garrel’s absolute dedication to—and consummate skill at—transmitting the rough beauty of people and place from one precious instant to the next. With every new film, Garrel pursues and finds Murnau’s “harmony of atmosphere,” apparently fleeting yet masterfully sustained. Here, working for the first time with DP Willy Kurant and sound-mixing genius and key Godard collaborator François Musy, he returns to the territory he began exploring in Night Wind (99) by way of a loving tribute to Contempt: stately quiet, Apollonian poise, and sumptuously colored and glowing interiors; a world both remembered and endlessly unfolding.'-- Film Comment



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La Jalousie (2013)
'For Garrel, who’s far more of a pessimist than Proust, jealousy isn’t just inevitable in romantic relationships but embedded within their very foundations. Yearning to know and to be known by the other, each partner is also convinced that their own selves are too rotten to be fully divulged; shutting themselves up, they shut down the other, until the suppressed resentments culminate in melodramatic crescendos that Garrel indulges with a brio that can invite mockery from the casual cynic. Thankfully, La jalousie largely avoids the overbearing moroseness of much of Garrel’s recent work, while its brevity (a brisk 76 minutes) gives it something of the feel of an exercise, a trait that characterizes most of his best films. And more than any of his work from this century so far, it packs an emotional wallop, precisely because Garrel relegates his gloominess to the margins and tempers his everlasting sadness with the spectral promise of enduring endearment. “I deeply loved your father,” an apparition says to Louis as he takes a midday nap in his rehearsal room, “and he was also crazy about me. Even now, I love him just as much as I ever did.” A lifetime compressed into a simple yet evocative sweet nothing—that’s really all it takes.'-- Cinema Scope



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p.s. Hey. The plan at the moment is that, barring a downward turn in the weather, which is certainly possible, I'm going to Disneyland Paris tomorrow morning. If that happens, I probably won't be doing the full-fledged p.s. tomorrow. So, it's a wait and see deal. If that's the case, I'll catch up with the accumulated comments on Thursday. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff. I get why you thought of Kristof, and, yeah, there's something there, but Kristof's stuff is a bit icier on the surface and has a more deliberate and complex structural underplay going on, basically. I think 'Fur' is great, like I said. I hope it pans out for you. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I do quite love some of Mike Leigh's films, but I'm especially hot for 'Mr. Turner' partly because the last time he did a period, dress-up film, 'Topsy-Turvy', I really, really loved it. ** Magick mike, Hi, Mike! Great and, of course, sad about the new and final LIES/ISLE. I didn't know it had been launched, and I'll go devour it today. The dedication is, of course, is very moving and shattering. Everyone, one of the very, very best literary sites/journals on the internet, LIES/ISLE, commandeered by the great writer and longtime d.l. M. Kitchell, has just launched its final issue titled 'The Erotics of a Queer Fantastique'. It includes work by super-dizzying array of fantastic artists and writers, many of whom I'm proud to say are d.l.s of this very blog. I mean, check out some of the line-up: Bett Williams, Bill Hsu, Bob Glück, George Michael Taylor, Kevin Killian, Zack Wentz, M. Kitchell himself, and many more. I think you definitely and really want to go visit there and get incredibly filled. It's here. Yeah, ditto on the 'SotE' experience, although I was in my 20s. I immediately read everything else there was by him in English, which wasn't very much at that time: 'Blue of Noon', 'L'Abbe C', 'Literature and Evil', and maybe one other book. Crazy to think how untranslated he was back then. I'm with you on 'Eroticism' being one of his least interesting books. So true about the distribution level's control freakdom. Great to see you, Mike, and thank you a lot! ** Sypha, So, has that blizzard actually transpired? The last time I checked a few minutes ago, it looked like it was going to be something minor that had been massively overhyped? How do you feel about Bill moving out? Is it strange or sad, or is it cool to have a new pad in which to hang out with him? ** Keaton, I'm pretty sure. When I had dinner with him, he was dying. He was just a couple of months from death, and that outcome had, understandably, made him very crotchety and negative about everything, which was weird since he was always so known for his enthusiastic upbeat thing. I still think LSD is pretty much God, but, yeah, I hung out with God more than enough to last a lifetime, and I'm done. Yeah, not a big Ginsberg fan except for a small handful of poems. Shit happens. I think if you didn't know him personally, he's probably easier to like. ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, T. Thanks, buddy! ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! How's it going? How's school, writing, life, and everything else? ** Etc etc etc, I've only seen a couple of stills from that new DFW film, but the actor in dress-up DFW garb/hair/headband gave me the willies. 'Intentionally banal segments'? Oh, that's very interesting. I wonder if it's true. That makes me even more into seeing it. When it gets here, I'll check it out and report back. ** Kier, Okay, cool, whew, that Kierampus wasn't too sucky. I won't press my luck though, at least for today. The notebook cover is is superb and a coil of beauty. When I just clicked over to look at it, I got a pop-up ad warning me that there are 10 registered sex offenders living in my city. Only 10 in all of Paris makes me feel a whole safer, ha ha. I saw some sheep being sheered when I was, like, 6 years old, I think. It was very traumatic. For me, not for the sheep, as far as I could tell. Cleaning sucks. Well, most cleaning. You should see my room. Oh, boy. Not a bad day on your end at all, pal. Cool. I definitely want to see them when they're scanned. I mean, dude, don't deprive me. Not that you would. My day was pretty low-key, which was kind of nice. I spent most of it just going, 'Wow, low-keyness, this is interesting', and not doing very much other than experiencing the lack of things to do. Well, I did have things to do, but I didn't do them very much, which means I have do a lot to do today 'cos today is another quiet-ish, non-film work day. Things I was supposed to do yesterday that I have to do today: (1) Our producers want a line of hype text about our film to go with the trailer, and I hate writing that stuff, but I have to do it, I guess. (2) Answer interview questions. (3) Start working on a couple of book blurbs that I've agreed to do. (3) Get back into my novel. (4) Answer emails. (5) Look over the transcript of the interview thing I did at the Paul McCarthy Show event to see if it's okay and if I can sign off on it re: the book collecting the Paul McCarthy event transcriptions. (6) I forget. So, I didn't do those things, but I made a couple of blog posts, and I talked on the phone with Zac and another couple of friends. I found out that this quite interesting Canadian/Haitian author, Dany Laferrière, is currently in residence here, and I'm going to see if he wants have a coffee, but he's really famous in France, and he might be very busy being famous, but we'll see. Otherwise, nothing to speak of. Today is an open book, however. Mine, I mean, and yours too, I'm sure. What ended up filling your open book? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I like your plaque idea, of course, yay optimism (!), but see how it sits with you. Holly Herndon is performing here soon, and I'm excited. Yeah, I'm blocked from that Adam Curtis film, but I'll see if I can watch it somehow somewhere. Thanks, B. ** Brendan, Hi, other B! My crowdsourcing wasn't too successful, hm. Maybe everyone was running around stockpiling shit for the blizzard. But that would only explain the East Coasters' silence. Off the top of my head, and off the even deeper parts of my head, I'm kind of into the reading and listening and art-making plan. So, you're probably covered. Richard Powers ... I just had to google him to find out/remember if I've read him. I'm checking now. Hold on. Oh, I read 'The Gold Bug Variations' a million years ago. But I can't remember it at all, I don't know why. People say he's fucking great, so I guess he is. Maybe I'll try to get 'Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance', which is such a good title, and start it, and it can be like we're in a two-person book club. I'll see what I can do. Love, me. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! ** Misanthrope, Pizza plus karaoke! I like the first part. I've never karaoke-d. Did you? I think I would do it if the right song came up. But I would have to get drunk-ish, and I never get drunk-ish. Or else everybody in the place but me would have to be really drunk, and then maybe then I'd do it. Wow, that punching guy is a tough guy. I bet he's a really fucking weird guy. I think McClure was pals with Morrison, yeah. What was his public support for Morrison's poetry about? Hm. Well, I can imagine a few possibilities. (1) Morrison really liked McClure's poetry, and McClure was very flattered and returned the favor because he was maybe a saintly kind of guy. (2) McClure realized that propping Morrison's poetry would get him a lot of publicity, which it did, and possibly lead to a giant increase in his readership among rock 'n' roll kids, which it didn't. (3) He was a very interesting writer but with rather pedestrian tastes? Those are my guesses. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. Oh, shit, that nap dream sounds awful. Shake it off. Well, surely by now it's shaken off, I hope. Oh, awesome! Send the post here: dcooperweb@gmail.com. Thank you, thank you! That's okay about the question. I'll ask you one. If you saw something strange in the sky that you thought would probably qualify as a UFO sighting to people who were into UFOs and stuff, would you tell people you saw a UFO, or would you keep quiet and shrug it off? ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul! Steadiness is a plenty good novel report. God knows I know how that is. How Tokyo? I miss Tokyo. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris! Thank you again immensely for yesterday! It was so great! It still is great and will forever be so! I'm gonna download the new Bjork today. I'm very curious. I love Haxan Cloak, and Arca is pretty great. And I had dinner with Matthew Barney the last time I was in New York, and I liked him, and so the whole 'break-up album' thing intrigues me. Excellent that you had a really good writing week! What are you working on? What happened? Is it possible to say? Thanks about the film. We'll see. We're really confident in the film, and I guess we just have this abiding feeling that they'll come around. What did I eat yesterday? Hm, okay, uh, (morning) two giant cups of coffee, a smoothie that I drank along with my vitamins and supplements, (afternoon) two cheese quesadillas that I made myself, two chocolate truffles from this box of chocolates that Zac gave me for my birthday, (evening) my usual: four veggie hotdogs wrapped in flour tortillas with mozzarella cheese, alfalfa sprouts, and basil paste. I don't really like fruit very much. It's stupid, but I just don't and never have. I try to hope that the smoothie takes care of the fruit need. But I should eat more fruit, yeah, as should you too, I guess, since they say fruit is, like, really good. Thank you again, man, take big care. ** Jonathan, Maestro! I'm excited for tomorrow too! Let's sort the coordinates in a bit. Bon day until then! ** Okay. Philippe Garrel is a really fascinating and singular filmmaker. I can't believe I haven't done a Day on him until now. I recommend going over this fest of him-dom with a fine toothed comb. So, the blog will see you tomorrow, and I might not, assuming that the Disneyland gods are kind. We'll see.

'“Mess and Message,” the final three words of a poem in Ted Berrigan’s 1969 book, Many Happy Returns, describe perfectly and succinctly what makes his poetry compelling. The message of his poetry is the mess that is life. Appropriation figures in large and fascinating ways in this message. The very words “mess and message” are copied, as is the entire poem in which they appear, “Frank O’Hara’s Question from ‘Writers and Issues’ by John Ashbery”. Berrigan produced surprisingly numerous kinds of meaning by pilfering all sorts of pre-existing sentences, fragments, and whole passages of writing (literary and prosaic), not to mention visual imagery.

'Berrigan understood that from time immemorial poets had imitated, if not downright copied, earlier poets in order to establish their literary genealogy. A helpful genealogy of appropriative writing—with the earliest example dating to the late nine- teenth century, and including Ted Berrigan—was recently drawn up by the poet and art critic Raphael Rubenstein, who aptly puts himself into the genealogy, just as Berrigan would have done. Berrigan participated in, while at the same time making a joke of, the self-creation of a lineage that is a requirement of inclusion within history—and is necessary to but will not guarantee fame, as Libbie Rifkin argues. His self-consciousness about both his own lineage, and the function of lineage in general, may well stem from his sense of being a literary “outsider.” An outsider, not in the sense that the avant-garde artist is an outsider to mainstream society, but an outsider in terms of social and academic pedigree.

'While Berrigan felt his working-class background set him apart from his idols, appropriation afforded him a method of inserting himself into their lineage. In other words, appropriation was a means for creating a level playing field on which he could comfortably move.

'In his piece “Interview with John Cage,” first published in the collaborative volume, Bean Spasms (1967), Berrigan transformed Warhol’s “everybody should like everybody” into “everybody should be alike”, producing an intriguing paradox. Copying words would seem to correspond to being alike, or with sameness. Yet Berrigan’s various kinds of copying, with their deliberate or accidental mis-copying and with their recontextualizations, show us that this sameness never occurs. This paradox fascinated Berrigan from early on; in one of many notes on “style” in his journals, dated December 27, 1962, he quoted at length from Gertrude Stein’s Composition as Explanation, including this passage on the apparent contradiction of likeness: “Romanticism is then when everything being alike everything is naturally simply different, and Romanticism.” Berrigan illustrates by example that the truth of who anybody is forces itself out no matter what. We are left with “mess and message” instead of with a neat machine-made copy.

'This mess and message of Berrigan’s poetics of appropriation have made it difficult for some critics to know what to do with his writing. In her 1973 overview of contemporary poetry, critic Marjorie Perloff—a great supporter of the work of Ashbery and of O’Hara—complains that Berrigan’s poetry is “self-indulgent” and that it has the “superficial O’Hara trappings,” but that unlike O’Hara’s poetry, “nothing adds up”. Two decades later, another critic, Geoff Ward, repeated Perloff’s judgment, asserting that Berrigan’s writing is too dominated by O’Hara to contain a unique voice. One critic even put Berrigan and Padgett’s volume, Bean Spasms, on a list of publications that librarians need not bother to acquire. Slowly, though, the critical scales are beginning to tip in the other direction, and the recent publication of the Collected Poems has given some critics a better sense of the breadth and complexity of Berrigan’s work.

'If in Berrigan’s poetry “nothing adds up,” as Perloff would have it, then perhaps we ought to say that in life itself, nothing adds up. Perhaps Berrigan’s messy contamination of life with art, and of art with life, has made Perloff and other critics uncomfortable. Or perhaps the honesty of this contamination is the source of their un- ease. The people who knew Berrigan well all have described the full-blown nature of the contamination. Ron Padgett has noted that for Berrigan, writing was “something you did when you read the sports page or ate a donut. It was something you did when you sat at your desk and thought about the gods. It was something you did with scissors and Elmer’s glue”. The poet Ed Sanders put it this way: “Berrigan was one of those wall-to-wall poets. He was the guy who made up the dictum that there are no weekends for poets”. It is the consistencies between, and fluidity of, art and life that characterize Berrigan’s poetics of appropriation and that give it the power of truth.'-- Reva Wolf



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Further

Ted Berrigan Homepage
Audio: Ted Berrigan's readings @ PennSound
'“Time And Time Again”: The Strategy of Simultaneity in Ted Berrigan’s "The Sonnets"'
The Ted Berrigan Papers
'Collage Education' by Richard Hell
'On The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan'
Ted Berrigan's 'from THE BUSINESS OF WRITING POETRY'
'Ted Berrigan. Plagiarism and / or the Found Poem. A Creative Writing Lesson.
Ted Berrigan @ goodreads
Book: 'Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan'
Audio: Ted Berrigan at Bard College, 1982
'You Were Like Skyscrapers Veering Away: My First Time with Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets'
Book: 'Ted Berrigan: An Annotated Checklist'
'The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan' reviewed @ The Believer
The Ted Berrigan Scholarship
Podcast: 'Words: Program No. 14: Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett'
'Jim Carroll' by Ted Berrigan
'Notebook (Paul Cézanne, Ted Berrigan, &c.)'
'Ted Berrigan's Birthday'
'SONNET WORKSHOP' by Ted Berrigan
Book: 'Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan'
'Ted Berrigan and Foreign Film'
Video: Kenneth Goldsmith reads Ted Berrigan's "Train Ride" in front of Alex Katz’s Upside Down Ada
Buy 'The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan'



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Additionally


Ted Berrigan reads Sonnet LXXVI


Ted Berrigan talkin shop & reading "Whitman in Black"


Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan read their poem "Memorial Day," ca 1973






A Reading to Celebrate: The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan



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An Interview with John Cage by Ted Berrigan




INTERVIEWER: What about Marshall McLuhan?

CAGE: Just this: the media is not a message. I would like to sound a word of warning to Mr. McLuhan: to speak is to lie. To lie is to collaborate.

INTERVIEWER: How does that relate?

CAGE: Do you know the Zen story of the mother who had just lost her only son? She is sitting by the side of the road weeping and the monk comes along and asks her why she's weeping and she says she has lost her only son and so he hits her on the head and says, "There, that'll give you something to cry about."

INTERVIEWER: Yes, somebody should have kicked that monk in the ass!

CAGE: I agree. Somebody said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should be alike.

INTERVIEWER: Isn't that like Pop Art?

CAGE: Yes, that's what Pop Art is, liking things, which incidentally is a pretty boring idea.

INTERVIEWER: Does the fact that it comes from a machine diminish its value to you?

CAGE: Certainly not! I think that any artistic product must stand or fall on what's there. A chimpanzee can do an abstract painting, if it's good, that's great!

INTERVIEWER: Mary McCarthy has characterized you as a sour Utopian. Is that accurate?

CAGE: I do definitely mean to be taken literally, yes. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet.

INTERVIEWER: Well, that is very interesting, Mr. Cage, but I wanted to know what you think in the larger context, i.e., the Utopian.

CAGE: I don't know exactly what you mean there . . . I think the prestige of poetry is very high in the public esteem right now, perhaps height is not the right yardstick, but it is perhaps higher than ever. If you can sell poetry, you can sell anything. No, I think it's a wonderful time for poetry and I really fell that something is about to boil. And in answer to your question about whether poetry could resume something like the Elizabethan spread, I think it's perfectly possible that this could happen in the next four or five years. All it needs is the right genius to come along and let fly. And old Masefield, I was pleased to see the other day celebrating his ninetieth birthday, I think, said that there are still lots of good tales to tell. I thought that was very nice, and it's true, too.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think, that is, are you satisfied with the way we are presently conducting the war in Viet Nam?

CAGE: I am highly dissatisfied with the way we are waging this nasty war.

INTERVIEWER: Incidentally, your rooms are very beautiful.

CAGE: Nothing incidental about it at all. These are lovely houses; there are two for sale next door, a bargain, too, but they're just shells. They've got to be all fixed up inside as this one was, too. They were just tearing them down when I got the Poetry Society over here to invite Hy Sobiloff, the only millionaire poet, to come down and read, and he was taken in hand and shown this house next door, the one that I grew up in, and what a pitiful state it was in. Pick-axes had already gone through the roof. And so he bought four of them and fixed this one up for our use as long as we live, rent free.

INTERVIEWER: Not bad. Tell me, have you ever though of doing sound tracks for Hollywood movies?

CAGE: Why not? Any composer of genuine ability should work in Hollywood today. Get the Money! However, few screen composers possess homes in Bel-Air, illuminated swimming pools, wives in full-length mink coats, three servants, and that air of tired genius turned sour Utopian. Without that, today, you are nothing. Alas, money buys pathetically little in Hollywood beyond the pleasures of living in an unreal world, associating with a group of narrow people who think, talk, and drink, most of them bad people; and the doubtful pleasure of watching famous actors and actresses guzzle up the juice and stuff the old gut in some of the rudest restaurants in the world. Me, I have never given it a thought.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about Silence.

CAGE: Sure. You never know what publishers are up to. I had the damnedest time with Silence. My publishers, H***, R***, and W***, at first were very excited about doing it, and then they handed it over to a young editor who wanted to rewrite it entirely, and proceeded to do so; he made a complete hash of it. And I protested about this and the whole thing--the contract was about to be signed--and they withdrew it, because of this impasse. The Publisher, who is my friend, said, "Well, John, we never really took this seriously, did we? So why don't we just forget it?" And I replied, "Damn it all, I did take it seriously; I want to get published." Well, then they fired this young man who was rewriting me, and everything was peaceful. But there was still some static about irregularities of tone in Silence. So I said, "Well, I'll just tone them down a little, tune the whole thing up, so to speak." But I did nothing of the sort, of course! I simply changed the order. I sent it back re-arranged, and then they wanted me to do something else; finally I just took the whole thing somewhere else.

INTERVIEWER: What was your father like?

CAGE: I don't want to speak of him. My mother detested him.

INTERVIEWER: What sort of person was your mother?

CAGE: Very religious. Very. But now she is crazy. She lay on top of me when I was tied to the bed. She writes me all the time begging me to return. Why do we have to speak of my mother?

INTERVIEWER: Do you move in patterns?

CAGE: Yes. It isn't so much repeating patterns, it's repetition of similar attitudes that lead to further growth. Everything we do keeps growing, the skills are there, and are used in different ways each time. The main thing is to do faithfully those tasks assigned by oneself in order to further awareness of the body.

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe that all good art is unengaging?

CAGE: Yes I do.

INTERVIEWER: Then what about beauty?

CAGE: Many dirty hands have fondled beauty, made it their banner; I'd like to chop off those hands, because I do believe in that banner . . . the difference is that art is beauty, which the Beatniks naturally lack!

INTERVIEWER: The Beatniks, notably Ed Sanders, are being harassed by the police lately. Do you approve?

CAGE: On the contrary. The problem is that the police are unloved. The police in New York are all paranoid . . . they were so hateful for so long that everybody got to hate them, and that just accumulated and built up. The only answer to viciousness is kindness. The trouble is that the younger kids just haven't realized that you've got to make love to the police in order to solve the police problem.

INTERVIEWER: But how do you force love on the police?

CAGE: Make love to the police. We need highly trained squads of lovemakers to go everywhere and make love.

INTERVIEWER: But there are so many police, it is a practical problem.

CAGE: Yes, I know, it will certainly take time, but what a lovely project.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it is better to be brutal than to be indifferent?

CAGE: Yes. It is better to be brutal than indifferent. Some artists prefer the stream of consciousness. Not me. I'd rather beat people up.

INTERVIEWER: Say something about Happenings. You are credited with being the spiritual daddy of the Happening.

CAGE: Happenings are boring. When I hear the word "Happening" I spew wildly into my lunch!

INTERVIEWER: But Allan Kaprow calls you "the only living Happening."

CAGE: Allan Kaprow can go eat a Hershey-bar!

INTERVIEWER: Hmmm. Well put. Now, to take a different tack, let me ask you: what about sex?

CAGE: Sex is a biologic weapon, insofar as I can see it. I feel that sex, like every other human manifestation, has been degraded for anti-human purposes. I had a dream recently in which I returned to the family home and found a different father and mother in the bed, though they were still somehow my father and mother. What I would like, in the way of theatre, is that somehow a method would be devised, a new form, that would allow each member of the audience at a play to watch his own parents, young again, make love. Fuck, that is, not court.

INTERVIEWER: That certainly would be different, wouldn't it? What other theatrical vent interests you?

CAGE: Death. The Time Birth Death gimmick. I went recently to see "Dr. No" at Forty-Second Street. It's a fantastic movie, so cool. I walked outside and somebody threw a cherry bomb right in front of me, in this big crowd. And there was blood, I saw blood on people and all over. I felt like I was bleeding all over. I saw in the paper that week that more and more people are throwing them. Artists, too. It's just part of the scene--hurting people.

INTERVIEWER: How does Love come into all this?

CAGE: It doesn't. It comes later. Love is memory. In the immediate present we don't love; life is too much with us. We lust, wilt, snort, swallow, gobble, hustle, nuzzle, etc. Later, memory flashes images swathed in nostalgia and yearning. We call that Love. Ha! Better to call it Madness.

INTERVIEWER: Is everything erotic to you?

CAGE: Not lately. No, I'm just kidding. Of course everything is erotic to me; if it isn't erotic, it isn't interesting.

INTERVIEWER: Is life serious?

CAGE: Perhaps. How should I know? In any case, one must not be serious. Not only is it absurd, but a serious person cannot have sex.

INTERVIEWER: Very interesting! But, why not?

CAGE: If you have to ask, you'll never know.

* The above interview is completely a product of its author. John Cage served neither as collaborator nor as interviewee.



________
Handwritten












___
Book

Ted Berrigan The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan
University of California Press

'Following the highly acclaimed Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, poets Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan have collaborated again on this new selection of poems by one of the most influential and admired poets of his generation. Reflecting a new editorial approach, this volume demonstrates the breadth of Ted Berrigan’s poetic accomplishments by presenting his most celebrated, interesting, and important work. This major second-wave New York School poet is often identified with his early poems, especially The Sonnets, but this selection encompasses his full poetic output, including the later sequences Easter Monday and A Certain Slant of Sunlight, as well as many of his uncollected poems. The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan provides a new perspective for those already familiar with his remarkable wit and invention, and introduces new readers to what John Ashbery called the “crazy energy” of this iconoclastic, funny, brilliant, and highly innovative writer.'-- UoCP

______
Excerpts


Last Poem

Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
'The intention of the organism is to survive.'
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WWII,
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark's Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it, like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.



Personal Poem #9

It's 8:54 a.m. in Brooklyn it's the 26th of July
and it's probably 8:54 in Manhattan but I'm
in Brooklyn I'm eating English muffins and drinking
Pepsi and I'm thinking of how Brooklyn is
New York City too how odd I usually think of it
as something all its own like Bellows Falls like
Little Chute like Uijongbu
I never thought
on the Williamsburg Bridge I'd come so much to Brooklyn
just to see lawyers and cops who don't even carry guns
taking my wife away and bringing her back
No
and I never thought Dick would be back at Gude's
beard shaved off long hair cut and Carol reading
her books when we were playing cribbage and watching
the sun come up over the Navy Yard a-
cross the river I think I was thinking
when I was ahead I'd be somewhere like Perry Street
erudite dazzling slim and badly-loved
contemplating my new book of poetry
to be printed in simple type on old brown paper
feminine marvelous and tough



A Certain Slant of Sunlight

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark's Place too, beneath a white moon.
I'll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
will be too; but
I'll be shattered by then
But now I'm not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941--
I'll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.



10 Things I Do Every Day

wake up
smoke pot
see the cat
love my wife
think of Frank

eat lunch
make noises
sing songs
go out
dig the streets

go home for dinner
read the Post
make pee-pee
two kids
grin

read books
see my friends
get pissed-off
have a Pepsi
disappear



Red Shift

Here I am at 8:08 p.m. indefinable ample rhythmic frame
The air is biting, February, fierce arabesques
on the way to tree in winter streetscape
I drink some American poison liquid air which bubbles
and smoke to have character and to lean
In. The streets look for Allen, Frank, or me, Allen
is a movie, Frank disappearing in the air, it's
Heavy with that lightness, heavy on me, I heave
through it, them, as
The Calvados is being sipped on Long island now
twenty years almost ago, and the man smoking
Is looking at the smilingly attentive woman, & telling.
Who would have thought that I'd be here, nothing
wrapped up, nothing buried, everything
Love, children, hundreds of them, money, marriage-
ethics, a politics of grace,
Up in the air, swirling, burning even or still, now
more than ever before?
Not that practically a boy, serious in corduroy car coat
eyes penetrating the winter twilight at 6th
& Bowery in 1961. Not that pretty girl, nineteen, who was
going to have to go, careening into middle-age so,
To burn, & to burn more fiercely than even she could imagine
so to go. Not that painter who from very first meeting
I would never & never will leave alone until we both vanish
into the thin air we signed up for & so demanded
To breathe & who will never leave me, not for sex, nor politics
nor even for stupid permanent estrangement which is
Only our human lot & means nothing. No, not him.
There's a song, 'California Dreaming', but no, I won't do that
I am 43. When will I die? I will never die, I will live
To be 110, & I will never go away, & you will never escape from me
who am always & only a ghost, despite this frame, Spirit
Who lives only to nag.
I'm only pronouns, & I am all of them, & I didn't ask for this
You did
I came into your life to change it & it did so & now nothing
will ever change
That, and that's that.
Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless
I slip softly into the air
The world's furious song flows through my costume.



Buddha On The Bounty
for Merrill Gilfillan

'A little loving can solve a lot of things'
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. 'You are lovely. I
am lame.''Now it's me.''If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of 'The Slave''
Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence & feeling.
'The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former lives
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon.' I'm not here, now,
& it is good, absence.



Frank O'Hara

Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse
as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures
The birds that were singing this morning have shut up
I thought I saw a couple kissing, but Larry said no
It’s a strange bird. He should know. & I think now
“Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space.” Ron
put me in that picture. In another picture, a good-
looking poet is thinking it over, nevertheless, he will
never speak of that it. But, his face is open, his eyes
are clear, and, leaning lightly on an elbow, fist below
his ear, he will never be less than perfectly frank,
listening, completely interested in whatever there may
be to hear. Attentive to me alone here. Between friends,
nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy.
What seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how
that makes me feel. You are dead. And you’ll never
write again about the country, that’s true.
But the people in the sky really love
to have dinner & to take a walk with you.



Sonnet #13

Mountains of twine and
Teeth braced against it
Before gray walls. Feet walk
Released by night (which is not to imply
Death) under the murk spell
Racing down the blue lugubrious rainway
To the promise of emptiness
In air we get our feet wet . . . a big rock
Caresses cloud bellies
He finds he cannot fake
Wed to wakefulness, night which is not death
Fuscous with murderous dampness
But helpless, as blue roses are helpless.
Rivers of annoyance undermine the arrangements.



Today's News

My body heavy with poverty (starch)
It uses up my sexual energy
constantly &
I feel constantly crowded
On the other hand, One Day in the Afternoon of The World
Pervaded my life with a
heavy grace
today
I'll never smile again
Bad Teeth
But I'm dancing with tears in my eyes
(I can't help myself!) Tom
when he loves Alice's sonnets,
takes four, I'd love
to be more attentive to her, more
here.
The situation having become intolerable
the only alternatives are:
Murder & Suicide.
They are too dumb! So, one
becomes a goof. Raindrops
start falling on my roof. I say
Hooray! Then I say, I'm going out

At the drugstore I say, Gimmie some pills!
Charge 'em! They say
Sure. I say See you later.
Read the paper. Talk to Alice. She laughs to hear
Hokusai had 947 changes of address
In his life. Ha-ha. Plus everything
else in the world
going on here.



Things To Do On Speed

mind clicks into gear
& fingers clatter over the keyboard
as intricate insights stream
out of your head;
this goes on for ten hours:
then, take a break: clean
all desk drawers, arrange all
pens & pencils in precise parallel patterns;
stack all books with exactitude in one pile
to coincide perfectly with the right angle
of the desk's corner.
Whistle thru ten more hours of arcane insights:
drink a quart of ice-cold pepsi:
clean the ice-box:
pass out for ten solid hours
interesting dreams.

2.

Finish papers, wax floors, lose weight, write songs, sing songs, have
conference, sculpt, wake up & think more clearly. Clear up asthma.
treat your obesity, avoid mild depression, decongest, cure your
narcolepsy,
treat your hyper-kinetic brain-damaged children. Open the Pandora's Box
of amphetamine abuse.

3.

Stretch the emotional sine curve; follow euphoric peaks with descents
into troughs
that are unbearable wells of despair & depression. Become a ravaged
scarecrow. Cock your emaciated body in
twisted postures
scratch your torn & pock-marked skin,
keep talking, endlessly.

4.

Jump off a roof on the lower East Side
or
Write a 453 page unintelligible book

5.

Dismantle 12 radios
string beads interminably
empty your purse
sit curled in a chair
& draw intricate designs
in the corner of an envelope

6.

'I felt it rush almost instantly into
my head like a short circuit. My body
began to pulsate, & grew tiny antennae
all quivering in anticipation. I began
to receive telepathic communication from
the people around me. I felt elated.'

7.

get pissed off.
Feel your tongue begin to shred,
lips to crack, the inside of the mouth
become eaten out. Itch all over. See
your fingernails flake off, hair & teeth
fall out.
Buy a Rolls Royce
Become chief of the Mafia
Consider anti-matter.

8.

Notice that tiny bugs are crawling all over your whole body
around, between and over your many new pimples.
Cut away pieces of bad flesh.
Discuss mother's promiscuity
Sense the presence of danger at the movies
Reveal
get tough
turn queer

9.

In the Winter, switch to heroin, so you won't catch pneumonia.
In the Spring, go back to speed.




*

p.s. Hey. The skies over this part of France are being vaguely cooperative this morning, so I am indeed heading off to Disneyland Paris as planned in just a few minutes, and I will catch up with your comments from yesterday and today when the blog and I see you tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm giving the place over to the great poet Ted Berrigan. Enjoy, I hope.

Downtown Los Angeles, 1862





Downtown Los Angeles, intersection of Main, Spring, and Temple streets, 1863





MacArthur Park, 1887





MacArthur Park, 1892





Hollywood, 1900





Hollywood, corner of Highland and Franklin, 1903





Hollywood, Highland Avenue north of Hollywood Boulevard, 1906





Hollywood, Cahuenga Pass, 1878





Beachwood Canyon, 1900





Hollywood Blvd. at Sunset Blvd., 1904





Sunset Blvd. c. Normandie, 1900





Site of future Melrose Avenue, looking north, 1876





Santa Monica Boulevard near the future La Brea Avenue, 1900





Santa Monica Boulevard at Western Avenue, 1906





Western Avenue south of Sunset, 1906





Western Avenue just north of Santa Monica Boulevard, 1896





Western Avenue north of Pico, 1895





Western Avenue at Washington Blvd., 1900





East Hollywood, 1905





Los Feliz, view from the future Barnsdall Park, 1890





Los Feliz, Los Feliz Blvd. at Griffith Park Blvd., 1910





The Los Feliz River, now Los Feliz Blvd. at Hillhurst Ave., 1884





Griffith Park, 1900





Griffith Park, 1902





Silverlake, 1907





Echo Park, Sunset Blvd. and Glendale Avenue, 1904





Echo Park Lake, 1892





The Los Angeles River, near downtown, 1900





The Los Angeles River, near Glendale, 1889





Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Drive, 1911





Bel Air, 1907





Coldwater Canyon, 1910





Benedict Canyon, 1890





The La Brea Tar Pits, 1911





Future site of LACMA, 1902





Culver City, 1903





Santa Monica, 1898





Santa Monica, 1895





Santa Monica, 1887





Santa Monica Canyon, 1885





Malibu, future Pacific Coast Highway, 1905





Compton, 1903





The San Fernando Valley, 1875





The San Fernando Valley, 1900





North Hollywood, 1909





Glendale, Verdugo Blvd. and Clifton Place, 1904





Lincoln Heights, Hancock Street, 1900





Highland Park, 1894





Pasadena, Colorado Blvd., 1895





Pasadena, Colorado Boulevard at Marengo Avenue, 1890





Pasadena, southwest corner of East California Blvd. and South Wilson Ave, 1905





Altadena, 1907





Angeles National Forest, San Gabriel Mountains, 1893




*

p.s. Hey. ** Tuesday ** Bitter69uk, Hi, man! Holy shit, you wrote that review? I usually include the author's name when I take writings from IMDb, and I don't know why I didn't that time. Nice thoughts, man, obviously. Very cool. ** David Ehrenstein, Glad you liked it, sir. I read 'Film: The Front Line' way back when, so good! I think my copy's in LA. It seems possible that I might get to meet Philippe Garrel some day through my friendship and dealings with Christophe Honore, we'll see. The main thing I want to do is ask him is about everything he's willing to tell me about working with my hero Pierre Clementi. Yeah, there are those who had great dealings with Allen, and there are others like me who didn't. Oh, well. Everyone, re: the Philippe Garrel Day of the other day, Mr. Ehrenstein has shared a link to the Nico documentary 'Nico/Icon' if you haven't seen it and would like to. It's there in full right here. ** Sypha, Yeah, I hears the blizzard tiptoed over NYC on the way to semi-whomping you guys up there. Right, you still have two brothers left to hang with. And a getaway spot if you need it to boot. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh! Garrel is def. worth investigating. Very singular. Thanks a lot about the post and my efforts. Yeah, it's just about a full-time job making this place. Weird that I do it anyway, ha ha. Very, very interesting background and insight into the Morrison and McClure and ... whoa, your dad almost designed the 'Strange Days' cover? That's wild. It would have given him this very particular kind of fame, or maybe just bigger name-recognition at the time, and maybe a 'hip' reputation that could have been a hampering as it was spotlighting, I guess, for better and/or worse? That's fascinating. I especially like McClure's 'lion' poems, and especially when I heard/saw him read them. ** Magick mike, Hi, Mike. Yeah, I'm with you about Garrel, obviously, and about the Ash Ra Temple soundtrack too. Would be cool if you recovered that essay-writing urge, obviously, for sure. I saw your book cover on FB yesterday. It looks great! Man, that's so exciting! (And you'll hear from me via email soon.) ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Yeah, I saw about the blizzard being a bust. The hype on that thing was psychotic. ** Kier, Ha ha. Here's a horrible one, sorry: Hi, Makierooni! Whoa. I don't know why it was traumatic. I guess probably because I had always thought that sheep's bodies were just really fat and that the wool was a thin layer, so watching them get sheared was kind of like watching them get killed or something? Those ink drawings are really, really great! Everyone, do what's best for you and go look at some fantastic new ink drawings by the mighty Kier here. Your Tuesday sounds pretty A-okay, cool. I don't know if I can remember mine, let me try. Uh, I think, wow, uh ... Did I write the blurb I was ordered to write for Zac's and my film that day? I think so. And the producers were okay with it. Now I have to write a longer description for them today, which I hate doing, and ugh. I think I must have just worked on this and that otherwise. I don't remember at all, so it must have been a pretty so-so day. I'll tell you about yesterday when I get to you again down below. ** Cal Graves, I couldn't agree with you more about non-narrative. Very high five. I need to have a day when I send more emails than I ever have in my life. I have about a 1000 unanswered emails at this point. No, I don't know much about dream books, but, in the semi-unlikely event that a certain d.l. of this place who's a big expert on dreams sees this and decides to weigh in, I'll ... Bernard, can/will you recommend 'a book that's based-off or inspired by dreams, or a dream diary type deal that isnt total, utter shit' to our pal Cal Graves? Good answer. I think I'd do the first part of your answer too. That new question's super easy. French. I live in France, and I barely know French, and I revere French literature, and I barely know French, so, yeah, French. Second choice would probably be Japanese. You? ** _Black_Acrylic, Disneyland was big fun. I'll tell Kier/you about it below. You might be right about the more effective decision, yeah. I get it. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Cool, glad you dug it. Yeah, I was shocked at how much Garrel was on youtube. I like the ones you like. I of course really like the two featuring Pierre Clementi. I haven't seen 'Jealousy', no. Missed it. Really want to see it, of course. At the moment, our film is 1 hr 31 minutes in length. It'll probably be pretty close to that length when we completely finish the edit. ** Damien Ark, It's weird how the loss of mental shit sucks, but, yeah. It can be juicy and pull up interesting stuff, though, if it's a semi-loss. Ha ha, thanks for biting my book, and thank you for immortalizing yourself doing it. Cool. I'm not really reading right now. Too busy. I'm going to start again today, but, unfortunately, I don't think anything that I'm going to read is an actual book yet. They're all mss. and impending books. What did you lasso on Amazon? ** Misanthrope, Hi. Huh, interesting, I quite agree with you about Morrison. How did that happen, ha ha? Okay, that's a crazy story there, George. Good crazy. Good crazy in the telling anyway. Not that I wish I had been you. My crazy stories are all drug stories. I'm saving them for the memoir I will never write. ** Kiddiepunk, Kidster! Let's talk. We finally rode Ratatouille yesterday! And it was good! And the line was only 20 minutes long! ** Hiero, Hi, Hiero! Welcome to the insides of this place, and thank you very much for entering! Wow, cool, thank you for the link! I'll go watch that as soon as I finish up here. Let me share it. Everyone, kindly Hiero came in here yesterday to say hi and to share something really cool. Here is the trailer for 'Stella da Falla', which should be very cool to watch for all kinds of reasons including the fact that, at 1:53, you will see Hiero himself sitting on Philippe Garrrel's Rolls Royce in 1969/1970. Go to it. It's here. ** Wednesday ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Ted Berrigan, yes! Awesome about the link, thanks! Everyone, courtesy of Mr. E, Ted Berrigan can heard talking as Andy Warhol shoots his portrait on the day of Mr, Ehrenstein's famous interview of Warhol at the Silver Factory right here, here being a generally great post on this very blog made by Mr. Ehrenstein, so use that link for a bunch of reasons. Boon! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Berrigan's great. His book 'The Sonnets' is one of the great books of American poetry ever, I think. ** Brendan, Hi, B. Cool, let me see if a local English bookstore allows me to cohabit our tiny book club. I'll find out as soon as I'm able! ** Steevee, Hi. Two reviews, cool. Everyone, a double-whammy of Steevee-based goodness for you today. I.e., here's his review of Abderrahmane Sissako’s much discussed film 'Timbuktu', and here's his review of Aleksei German’s slightly less discussed film 'Hard to Be a God'. ** Kier, I like denigrate. That's a goodie and so apropos by virtue of my attempts not to denigrate too much, ha ha. Sorry about your bad mood-inflected day. But I'm glad you liked 'Mr. Turner''cos that really ups the ante of my wanting to see it. My day: Disneyland Paris. It was chilly-ish, and it rained off and on, but that wasn't bad, and it kept the crowds small, so we were able to ride rides without the usual hour wait per ride. Let's see. Here's what we rode, maybe in order, if I can remember right: Ratatouille*, Twilight Zone Tower of Terror*, Crush's Coaster*, Rock 'n' Roller Coaster starring Aerosmith, Phantom Manor*, Big Thunder Mountain, Sleeping Beauty's Castle, Peter Pan's Flight, Star Tours, Pirates of the Caribbean, Les Voyages de Pinocchio, Blanche-Neige et les Sept Nains, Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast, and we tried to ride Big Thunder Mountain again, but it broke down so we got kicked out. We also saw a parade and watched the park-closing multi-media plus fireworks extravaganza Disney Dreams*. And we ate some bad food. I've starred the things I liked the best. It was big fun, and we had a blast. Yep. Then we came home, and, of course, parted ways, and then I don't know what they did, and I didn't do much of anything. Hooray! How was Thursday? ** Chris Goode, Mr. G! Always a superb and even, yes, sir, a sublime pleasure to get to see you via your wordage's beck and call followed by my attempt to use words both enthusiastically and with respect accordingly, or something similar to that. Right, about the Cage interview. Oh, you should use it. Is that not a no brainer? Maybe it isn't. I think you should. Well, wow, okay, under my hat ... meaning a cryptic response in this most public of spots. I'm thrilled to my very marrow, man! For you, and, naturally, for my little place in that, funding-wise. Yes! Superb, my man! October 7th is such a good day to premiere! I guess because of its proximity to Halloween! Am I overly lifting the hat that you asked me to wear tightly right now? Shit. Eight years? Holy, shit, maybe, wow. Dude, so incredibly great, and, yeah, let's talk whenever you want to talk as much you want to talk! Is my liking 'Topsy Turvy' really weird? I did have this weirdness inside me when I typed that, so I guess you're right. Yeah, weird. Your dad and I have so much in common, it's spooky, ha ha. Big love to you and to yours, top drawer maestro! ** Hyemin kim, Hi! That's great that you're writing something about Joe Brainard! I'm a massive fan of the so-called '2nd generation New York School poets'. I read them voraciously at a tender-ish age, and I think I owe a whole lot to them as a writer. Berrigan took me a while to love, I don't know why, but then one day I got it. I think it was 'The Sonnets', which I still think is one of great American poetry collections, But, yeah, he's tough in a certain way, I can definitely see that. It's nice to see you! ** Okay. We're caught up. Today I give you these photos I found here and there and everywhere of the L.A. area before it grew up. They really fascinate me, probably because I grew up there and lived there for most of my life. But maybe the magic of them translates to non-L.A. folks too? I suppose I'm kind of counting on that. See you tomorrow.

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The Fallen AngelsI'll Drive You From My Mind
'The Fallen Angels hailed from Washington DC, an area that in the mid 60's, was a breeding ground for rock bands and where such artists as Jim Morrison (Doors), Roy Buchanan, Mama Cass Elliot, EmmyLou Harris and many more got their start. The Fallen Angels were formed in 1966 and recorded two LPs for the Roulette label. Both of the albums have been re-released on separate CD's as The Roulette Masters Parts 1 & 2. The music of the Fallen Angels was aimed for a pop audience as the label was trying to repeat the success of it's major act, Tommy James and The Shondells. It proved that The Fallen Angels were much too "far out" for the commercial radio audience and despite good sales of the first album, the band was dropped by their label after recording a second album entitled Its A Long Way Down. Both album remain prime examples of psychedelic pop music which many band's in the late 90's are trying to copy.'-- Keith Pettipas






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The GodzRadar Eyes, Soon the Moon, Permanent Green Light
'Few bands in the annals of rock & roll were stranger than the New York City-based Godz. Recording for the wonderfully idiosyncratic ESP-DISK label from the mid-'60s until the early '70s, the Godz coughed up some of the strangest, most dissonant, purposely incompetent rock noise ever produced. Part of the Lower East Side scene that produced post-Beat avant-hippie rockers/ performance artists the Fugs and the Holy Modal Rounders, as well as honest-to-God beat performers like Allen Ginsberg, the Godz recorded the most extreme music while being secretive about themselves. As the late critic Lester Bangs noted in an essay in Creem in 1971, the Godz "...are a pure test of one of the supreme traditions of rock & roll: the process by which a musical band can evolve from beginnings of almost insulting illiteracy to wind up several albums later romping and stomping deft as champs."'-- allmusic






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Ultimate SpinachBallad of The Hip Dead Goddess
'Ian Bruce-Douglas was in the wrong place at the wrong time - Boston, 1968, just in time for one of the biggest PR disasters in the history of the music business. The debacle was called "Bosstown" or the "Boston Sound," and Bruce-Douglas's band Ultimate Spinach was the major casualty. Conceived by producer-arranger Alan Lorber, the Boston Sound was an attempt to promote several Boston bands simultaneously, for the sake of efficiency and momentum. MGM Records liked the idea and released the debut albums of Ultimate Spinach, the Beacon Street Union, and Orpheus in early 1968, all promoted as the first wave of a new "Boston Sound" movement. MGM called it "the sound heard 'round the world." Rolling Stone's review by Jon Landau said the sound was "kerplop." In castigating the MGM albums, Landau presented what quickly became the Final Word on the subject: there was no Boston rock scene; the Boston Sound was pure hype; the bands weren't very good; the music was "derivative." In retrospect, it's clear that Ultimate Spinach deserved a much better fate. The Bosstown hype was not their idea, and their records are some of the best psychedelic music available then or now. Their brief time in the spotlight brought them not well-earned glory but unexpected trauma, which fractured an already-fragile band.'-- Terrascope






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NazzOpen My Eyes
'Nazz was an incredibly under-recognized British influenced mod-psych band from Philadelphia that formed in 1967 and remained together for only a few short years. For the time, their music was highly original and still holds up very well to this day. Original members included Robert "Stewkey" Antoni (vocals, keyboards), Thom Mooney (drums), Carson Van Osten (bass) and future rock star Todd Rundgren (guitar). It should be noted that many now consider the Nazz to have had one of the best rhythm sections in sixties rock and Mooney's excellent drum styling has been closely compared to Keith Moon of the Who. Nazz played their first concert in July, 1967, opening for the Doors. By September of that year, the group had received some financial support from a local record store, which also put them in touch with John Kurland, a record promoter who was looking for a guitar-pop band. Kurland took a liking to the Nazz and signed on as their manager. Unfortunately, he and his associate, Michael Friedman, prevented the band from gigging regularly, believing that a lack of performances would increase demand for the group. The managers were also convinced that the Nazz could be marketed as a sharp, stylish boy-band for the teenybopper audience, and helped the quartet refashion themselves in that mode.'-- collaged






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The Freeborne A New Song For Orestes
'This obscure late-’60s band was typical of many young Boston groups of the era in their eclectic blend of psychedelic influences, with a sound heavy on electric keyboards and wailing guitar. Their sole album, 1967’s Peak Impression, was heavy on minor melodies and haunting harmonies, and a little unusual for the time in its wide array of instruments (all played by the band), including cello, recorder, harpsichord, and trumpet in addition to the standard guitars, keyboard, bass, and drum. The record was reissued on CD by Distortions more than 30 years later. The flaws of the album are that there aren't outstanding songs, and that the mood shifts seem more like an attempt to be as eclectic as possible than they do like genuinely well-thought-out compositional statements. The overall spacey, haunting feel of the record sometimes verges on self-conscious creepiness.'-- collaged






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The FugsCrystal Liaison
'Arguably the first underground rock group of all time, the Fugs formed at the Peace Eye bookstore in New York's East Village in late 1964. The nucleus of the band throughout its many personnel changes was Peace Eye owner Ed Sanders and fellow poet Tuli Kupferberg. Sanders and Kupferberg had strong ties to the beat literary scene, but charged, in the manner of their friend Allen Ginsberg, full steam ahead into the maelstrom of '60s political involvement and psychedelia. Starting on the legendary avant-garde ESP label, the Fugs' debut was full of equal amounts of chaos and charm, but their songwriting and instrumental chops improved surprisingly quickly, resulting in a second album that was undoubtedly the most shocking and satirical recording ever to grace the Top 100 when it was released. After cutting an unreleased album for Atlantic, they moved on to Frank Sinatra's Reprise label, unleashing a few more albums of equally satirical material that were more instrumentally polished, but equally scathing lyrically. By breaking lyrical taboos of popular music, they helped pave the way for the even more innovative outrage of the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, and others.'-- collaged






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Blues MagoosPipe Dream
'A Bronx-based quintet, the Blues Magoos were formed in 1964 and were originally known as the Trenchcoats before changing their name to the Bloos Magoos and then subsequently adopting the more conventional spelling as they became fixtures on the Greenwich Village club scene. In 1966, after an intense makeover and a marketing blitz, they emerged as a sort of East Coast answer to the then-emerging San Francisco flower power psychedelic scene with a big single, “(We Ain’t Got) Nothing Yet,” that same year, and attracted further attention with the album Psychedelic Lollipop, which also charted. Really more a blues-rock band with a garage band’s approach and intentions than they were a Summer of Love band, the Blues Magoos nonetheless continued with psychedelic trappings for the album Electric Comic Book, which appeared in 1967, and the similarly constructed Basic Blues Magoos a year later in 1968.'-- collaged






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CromagnonCaledonia
'The legend goes thusly: production visionary Brian Elliot and his associate Austin Grasmere allegedly had written a string of bubble gum hits when they approached ESP Records to produce an LP that would present their original creative ideas, which Elliot described as "movies for the ears", far removed from the formulas of the market place. They said that they had a Connecticut tribe (mostly the remnants of an earlier Elliot production project, a psychedelic band called The Boss Blues) with which they would bring to fruition the ideas that they needed to express... the ultimate theme being "all is one". ESP gave them engineer Otto Schontze and some studio time. The Cromagnon legend says that it only took three days, but recent interviews claim it took many weeks of recording labor to fulfill their musical dream...producing an album titled "Orgasm", which they credited to Cromagnon. It was released in 1969. There actually was a Connecticut tribe of sorts, a typical hippie commune of the day, with several children included.'-- kingfeeb






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Vanilla FudgeIllusions of My Childhood, Part One/You Keep Me Hanging On
'Known as 'the first of the heavy bands' and 'doyens of punk mysterioso' this Long Island group first came to public attention in 1967 with a revival of an old Supremes hit 'You Keep Me Hangin' On'. Vanilla Fudge had slowed down this song to half its original tempo, inserted plenty of neo-classical organ and Indian guitar licks and swelled it up to an almost Spectoresque extravaganza. A full seven-and-a-half-minute version of this single was included on the 1967 debut album Vanilla Fudge, plus Fudged-up arrangements of such songs as 'Eleanor Rigby', 'Ticket To Ride' (both written by the Beatles), 'Bang Bang' (by Sonny & Cher) and 'People Get Ready' (by The Impressions). Their almost fussy neo-gospel harmonies and cinerama arrangements were irritating a lot of people, but created a certainly exhilarating sound. The second Vanilla Fudge album The Beat Goes On was one of the most gallant disasters in the annals of rock, a musical record of the previous 25 years including the entire history of music in less than twelve minutes. Vanilla Fudge made the whole notion of interpretaion interesting again. But their own songs and in live performance they were almost too hard to take. That mixture of overpowering Rascals organ and psychedelic Hendrix guitar, all those slow build-ups and crescendos, those lulls and storms, every bit of it copied by a hundred other Long Island hard-rock groups-it finally got too much for everyone except the fans of what the Fudge termed "psychedelic symphonic rock."'-- trashcanasian






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Lothar And The Hand People Machines
'The story goes that Lothar and the Hand People formed in Denver in 1965. That city hasn’t exactly been portrayed as a rock Mecca of the period, and it apparently took all of a year for them to hightail it to the greener musical pastures of NYC. They consisted of Rusty Ford on bass, Kim King on guitar, Moog and Ampex tape decks, Paul Conley on keyboards, liner controller and Moog, Tom Flye on drums and percussion, and John Emelin on lead vocals. Oh, and there was Lothar, their trusty Theremin, the responsibilities of which fell mainly onto Emelin’s shoulders, or more appropriately, the motions of his two hands. Rather than forcing the issue by grafting the Theremin into situations where it would’ve been inappropriate, they instead showed common sense in a time where levelheadedness wasn’t at a premium. This hasn’t stopped some from hypothesizing that the Hand People’s lack of sales figures came down to an unfulfilled promise of newly broken ground. In reality, it seems to be more a combined case of geography (the East Coast falling behind the West’s and England’s late-‘60s rock dominance) and the group’s popish traits flying in the face of prevailing American ideals that were rooted in blues, folk, and more aggressively psychedelic visions. Consumers just weren’t pining for a more eclectic expansion upon the template of John Sebastian and crew.'-- the Vinyl District






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The OthersMy Friend The Wizard
'The Others were a Rhode Island garage psychedelic band consisting of Pete Shepley (lead vocals), Mike Brand (rhythm guitar), Mike Patalano (drums), John Costa (bass and vocals) and Jim DeStout (lead guitar/vocals). They formed during freshman week at the University of Rhode Island in fall 1964, and the immediate "click" was evident: a mere six to seven months later the collegians were already recording their major-label debut. This came about through a connection of Mike Brand's father, New York City manager/promoter Bob Marshall. After an impressive audition, Marshall immediately booked them at the hoppin' Rolling Stone club in NYC for the entire summer of 1965. They even were granted Vox amps in exchange for endorsements! Through Marshall, the band then auditioned for producer Clyde Otis, who was instrumental in landing the RCA record deal (and co-authored the b-side of their first single). With a major-label 45 and a summer-long NYC club stint under their belt, the Others could safely be called the top rock and roll band in the state, earning opening slots for the major acts which came through town — the Lovin' Spoonful, Animals, Byrds and Left Banke.'-- Rip It Up






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Pearls Before SwineImages of April
'Once, a long time ago, Tom Rapp was a rock star. You've probably never heard of him. In 1967, as a scrawny 20-year-old in Melbourne, Fla., he created a band with a name so arrogant it invited failure. Most musicians selected band names that were safely seditious, like the Rolling Stones; or self-consciously silly, like the Strawberry Alarm Clock; or antiseptically straightforward, like Sonny and Cher. You don't need a degree in marketing to realize you shouldn't alienate people from the get-go. Tom Rapp called his band Pearls Before Swine. It was a crisp one-finger salute to the listening public. The band was mostly just Rapp. He wrote the songs, arranged the songs, sang the songs, played lead guitar. He had a dust-bunny beard and Orphan Annie bedspring hair that rode his shoulders and boinged when he walked. His voice could sound thin and doofy like Rudy Vallee, or rich and rumbly like Neil Diamond, or tremulous like a man weeping at his child's grave. Critics called his music acid folk. It trod the familiar 1960s floorboards: anti-war, pro-drug, get-inside-your-mind kindergarten Zen. But upon this floor he built a minaret, a windswept, rococo structure with spooky echoes and forbidding shadows. His lyrics borrowed from A.E. Housman, W.H. Auden, Sara Teasdale, Herodotus. He used cynicism like a horsewhip. When he wrote of love it did not sound like Herman's Hermits. Pearls Before Swine was not always easy to listen to: Rapp made few concessions to popular taste. His instrumentation called to mind lutes and fifes, things from distant places and forgotten times. He used instruments seldom heard in rock: celeste, cello, sarangi, oboe, wind chimes and something called a bowed psaltery. His words sometimes danced just beyond the reach of reason.'-- The Washington Post






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Beacon Street UnionMystic Mourning
' I saw the Beacon Street Union many times. They were my favorite group at the time when I would see them I would stand right up front. I always thought they must have wondered who I and my friends were. Live they sounded much like the records. John Lincoln Wright the singer had a real presence. He always wore a pouch on his belt which we fantasized was dope or 'drug gear'. Just an outrageous thing for the day. Members met when they attended Boston College together. Boston College borders Beacon Street, hence the name. The Union had a few stage tricks. Sometimes they would throw bags of flour around resulting in a low budget fog show. They always fooled me with this next trick no matter how many times I saw them. They would come on stage and we would all clap and yell. They would start plugging in and tuning up. It seemed to take a long time. Eventually your attention would drift and you would just talk to your friends. At some signal the whole band would slam into the opening chord to "My Love Is" at full volume and SCARE THE BEJEEBERS OUT OF YOU.'-- Punk Blowfish






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Autosalvage Land Of Their Dreams
'The most misunderstood of all the so-called "psych" bands of the late 1960s, the only LP by Autosalvage is the first and best US psych-into-prog record of them all. Recorded in 1967, ahead of its time, this record took a Byrds/Airplane-inspired acid-folk-rock mixture and crafted songs unique, catchy, raucous, and truly flipped in an early Zappa-like way (who had a hand in getting them signed, apparently). Autosalvage stays heavily focused on music rather than zaniness, but the song titles indicate that there's plenty of gimlet-eyed humor as well: "Rampant Generalities,""Glimpses of the Next World's World,""The Great Brain Robbery," plus a jaw-dropping rendition of Leadbelly's "Good Morning Blues." Full-on lead guitars, nasally vocals (the worst feature for some, but I find them punkish), and extended yet carefully arranged 6-minute acid/jam/extrapolations are artfully wrapped in hummable tunes. Traditional themes were mixed with jugband music, while the adventurous, quirky compositions blended shimmering guitar with textured instrumentation. Commercial indifference doomed their continuation and by the end of the decade Autosalvage had broken up.'-- Plain and Fancy






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Silver ApplesOscillations
'On a steamy night in 1967 at Cafe Wha? in New York City, one of the world’s strangest electronic instruments was conceived. The inventor, Simeon Coxe III, states, “One night, on a lark, I decided to plug in an oscillator and jam along with the cover band I was in at the time, the Overland Stage Electric Band. Besides the drummer Danny [Taylor] who later joined me, no one in the band was amused.” And so begins the epic story of Silver Apples, the short lived, wildly influential oscillator-and-drum psych duo from the late 1960s. And so also begins the story of ‘The Simeon’ – the mythic, and aptly named, shape-shifting electronic beast of a rig that Coxe played in the band. The band’s well-documented story was one marked by equal parts chaotic energy and catastrophe, so we’ll just delve in briefly. Lacking any formal musical training, Coxe’s playing alternated between droning oscillator tones and rudimentary atonal chords while Taylor’s drums pounded out voodoo-styled, body-awareness rhythms on specially tuned toms. After developing a cult following throughout New York City in 1967, the pair signed a small deal with the floundering KAPP label – oddly enough, better known at the time as the home for Andy Williams, Burt Bacharach and Cher. The Apples released two albums through KAPP, and while the self-titled debut peaked on the Hot 100 on Billboard, the second album Contact became quickly mired in controversy and pulled from the shelves. "The result was that we couldn’t play music to earn a living," Coxe shrugs, "KAPP folded, word quickly spread in the industry that Silver Apples were ‘untouchables’ and Danny and I just said, ‘screw this!’ And we parted ways.”'-- Red Bull Music Academy







*

p.s. Hey. ** Damien Ark, Hey. Nude LA, it's true. Oh, I'm very interested, to say the least, in those interviews for my blog, yes! And the Sion Sono Day thing too, if you want to e-post it to me at the usual address. Thanks a ton! The park was great. Amusement parks are my Mt. Olympus. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. The only 100 years ago thing is the spookiest for some reason. And I guess one would naturally think 'gone wrong' re: those photos, but for me it's more like both are perfect. LA is like an exquisite corpse or something. Or then and now are just two rough drafts of something else. The river, yeah, and I had no idea that there had been a Los Feliz River at one time, crazy. I didn't know that your dad shot the 'Ghost Tantra' photos. Wow. I've always really loved those, and that's my favorite of McClure's books. Cool: your encounters with Jim Morrison. I only saw him once, and it was from the audience of a really early, maybe even pre-the first album, Doors concert at Cal State LA. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Joe Brainard used to grope me once in a while, but people told me he groped everybody. Really nice to hear that about Clementi. Big regret that I never got the chance to meet him. Yeah, Griffith's massive Babylon set rested on the spot where my current LA apartment is, or that's what people say and what the photos I've seen of it seem to indicate. ** Bernard Welt, B-ster, hey! Oh, I don't know why the downloading of 'ZHH' is a problem. Did you try the direct link? Punch the gif in the blog's upper right hand corner to get there. You can always just look at it online at the same location. I would be really curious to hear what you say to your kiddos about James Broughton's stuff. I didn't get him and his thing at all. And he was creepy as a person. In my dealings with him. Amazing sounding class. I mean, really amazing. The leather thing is really foreign to me too. I come across a billion of those dudes when I do my relentless searching for slaves for my slave posts. They write the most boring profile texts too, really average and grunty. If you actually did a Day, I would be the opposite of a leather guy, very articulately grateful and feckless. Hm, was I not at that Ear Inn reading? I feel like I was. I know I saw you read at Ear Inn at least once. The Berrigan hug rings a total bell, and I feel like it's a visual bell, but I could be tripping. When I read or rather started to read 'On the Road 'a million years ago, I was really excited for about the first 8 pages, and then I drifted off. Same story with every Henry Miller novel I tried to read. I don't think there actually are set cycles when you can and can't apply to the Recollets. I think that's only for the residences arranged through official channels. Sophie isn't here anymore. You should write directly to Chrystel. Do you still have her email address? Definitely mention that you stayed here before. Definitely use me as a way 'in' in whatever way you like/can. You will need a sponsor. I'm not sure if you need to have that sorted yet. Gisele was and, I think, still is an official Recollets sponsor. She's been sponsoring me. She would no doubt sponsor you, if need be, but we/you would need to cook up a little white lie about you collaborating with her on something. Anyway, yeah, go ahead and send it and cc. me. No, I have to start seriously looking for a new place right away. I'd like to stay in the 10th arr. if I can find a suitable/affordable place around here. Somewhere in this general area of Paris probably. Or else maybe near Parmentier, as I hear places can be cheapish there. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. I really admired your two reviews yesterday. I'll see if I can get my head around the 'Dance Mania' stuff. ** Etc etc etc, Hi. Oh, you can blip away at your leisure. It's that kind of place. Even I blip away sometimes, or sort of. I'll go to an amusement park at the drop of a hat. If I can find someone else who's into it, I'll go any old day. Luckily, Zac is as into them as I am, if not more so, so I get to go a lot. In my life, I've probably been to LA's Disneyland, oh, 40, 50 times? It never loses a smidgen of its charisma. You mean have things turned to normal post-the Charlie Hebdo thing? Basically, I guess, but there's an ongoing stronger police and military presence than before, and every synagogue here has been assigned 24 hour military guards. But it feels fairly 'as before' now. ** Sypha, Two feet of now! I hate you! No, I don't. It's just been the opposite of snowy here, and that's sad. Interesting that Penguin is publishing Ligotti. That's pretty big. ** Kier, You must, must go to LA at Halloween time someday. Within the last two weeks of October when all the spooky houses are up and running. It's god. I like the image of a fluffy Blakkå. Can you tell how he feels about his new fluffiness? Does he seem, I don't know, happier or prouder or weirded out or anything noticeable? My day was a low-key one. First I wrote a short synopsis of Zac's and my film for the producers to put on a flyer or something. It was hard to do, and it took weirdly long, but I guess it was okay. Zac thought it was okay. And the producers responded with a kind of general, blaze okayness re: it. My ankle started hurting for no seeming reason, and then it stopped hurting, weird. I had a huge longing for pancakes, and I wished there was a House of Pancakes here, but there isn't, and I was too lazy and intimidated to make pancakes. I got an idea for a poem, and I started working on it, but, so far, it isn't quite working out the way I dreamed, so it may be a dud. It was raining and windy. I made two blog posts. Not much else. No big, yesterday. Don't know about today yet other than that I'm going to a gig of Stephen (O'Malley) and Peter Rehberg/Pita tonight, and it's the first live solo appearance by Peter in about six years, so that's momentous, and that should be fun. What did you do with your own personal Friday? ** Keaton, Cool glad you liked them. They're haunt-y or something. I recommend knowing LA better, duh. Hat, I know, so many hats! And no hoodies! Not a single hoodie! ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. You're ambitious and so much more imaginative and fun-seeking than I am on the language-learning front. Respect. Ha ha, that's true about porn, but, if you play your cards right, you can get a whole novel out of that 'worst', or I have. I love coffee, but disgusting coffee, which I guess in my case would be really thin coffee like the kind you buy in cans in the US. Hm. I think maybe I'll choose the five minutes of unbearable, non-stop speaking just because I would find out what I find completely unbearable, and that would be interesting. You? You sent me a guest post? No, it didn't arrive, shit. Did you get the address right? dcooperweb@gmail.com Oh, I would love it if you don't mind trying again. That's exciting! Thank you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Cool, the decision made at, yeah, some expense, but I'm sure you did the right thing. Cool! ** Tom Adelman, Hi, Tom! Wow, very cool to have you here! Awesome! And such a beautiful paragraph about LA. Deep bow. I've read the Ryu Murakami, which I liked a lot, but I don't know the Hinojosa one. I'll investigate it immediately. My favorite short books? Let me think. Like short short? Uh, Robert Pinget's 'Fable', Derek McCormack's 'The Show That Smells', Marguerite Duras's 'Malady of Love', ... Now I'm blanking. I love really short books, though. Speaking of, are you working on anything that might become a book, short or not? Ultra-best to you, maestro! ** Misanthrope, That is an eerie story. I think she was ghost. That makes the most sense to me, ha ha. Did you see that viral video clip of the guy texting who walks into a bear? That was kind of funny, but not really eerie. Your story wins. ** Okay. Uh, right, I decided to continue my gig-shaped exploration of late 60s psychedelic music by concentrating this time on the East Coast. Hope it causes something of an unknown (to me) nature to happen inside you. See you tomorrow in any case.

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germanteenslave4blkafricanjail, 24
i am a dirty white boy slave who needs an unscrupulous evil guy who has the power to let me vanish without a trace in one of the remaining prisons in rural black Africa where hundreds of black tribe boys are kept in naked custody like in the 18th century in filthy gloomy dungeons crowded together in hundreds.

A jail that is a dominion of sexual darkness where i will be condemned to be made the humiliated helpless victim in the orgy of naked massrape that takes place every night, where i will be hanged on my wrists or tied up on my back or simply get dragged to the ground where hundreds of those hot black boys spread my legs and make sodomy-sex in my ass and ejaculate in my mouth all night until it is burned into my flesh that from now on i am born to live as the meat for heavy sexual black boys to commit perverted sex crime on me every coming day of my life with no chance 2 escape to escape ever again...

will also serve 4 slim or muscled huge-dicked black rapemaster who imprisons me stripped in old cellar in old ironchains with shakles with on my wrists and ankles and lets me abuse their by hordes of cruel street boys or who keeps me naked in a huge farm or mine facility for the black workers and im also ready to be used for the production of underground rapesexporn in black africa (nigeria, ghana, sierra leone, liberia, and so on) until there is nothing left that anyone wants to do with me whence i will be deported into jail with no return or murdered during the production of underground black africa snuffporn.






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KidofDevil, 23
I was a bisex, my hobby is listening to music, height 171 cm, I was not looking and I also do not sweet but I will make you excited.

In control all the time, high stress job; crave zero limits anything goes rape use burn carve mods.

You must have shaved head beard stache.

You can be a little bit fat but not that fat.

I prefer ltr but whatever works.





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leave_me_alone, 19
I want a master to give me a long voice-rape and voice-torture and teasing my boy cock only with his words, never touching me, controlling and using and destroying my body with his words, degrading me, making me cry at my own worthlessness and give up hope, confusing and exhausting me verbally, mentally, and emotionally, making me achieve my long fantasy of cumming handsfree. I pray just hearing my master's words telling me to cum will be enough, one day...





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boy012910, 22
I'm looking to be someone's sub boy. Preferably live-in. I would also do all the grocery and toiletry shopping for the house. I will require that I continue chasing my dream career of becoming a successful novelist.

I have both ADD and high level anxiety. This means I can be hyperfocused or all over the place. I do my best to manage, but I only ask that you be patient with me. The anxiety comes out most in social situations. I often think that even my closest friends might find me annoying or exhausting. Again, I'm pretty good at controlling this, but it can wear me out easily. But I can throw an amazing dinner party.






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Dantefuckedmeinhell, 21
I am a slave from Lisbon with an appetite for interacting on global issues as it concerns our corporate and social existence. I can be your toy when respect is shown for my warranty conditions and instructions for use. To summarize, slavery and its related activities for me is better experienced than explained.








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iloveoldguys, 19
I want be owned want be a slave that all i shrivel on i don't wanna be relised i want to be a slave

I am comg frm poor family my situations make me as a slave i want want room for live

I will do anything to be a slave for life even xplore gay love i ain't got a passport

I can be blown off let it fly participate in rush hour traffic or SM i nymphoboy enjoys it formally

English by google translate







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deviouscreature, 22
I'm hetero boy recently just got into the kink of being a fag. Love being called one and lying that I am. I'll even spread my cheeks and you can use me and take pics of me moaning and smiling like a fag (: would be awesome.

Honestly, about me, I'm a huge nerd. What can I say, I'm into stuff like card games and video games, sue me.

Ultimately I'm looking for a guy with big dick, which will castrate me and take me to live with him as a fag in India. I am from Ukraine.








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Spookyghoul, 19
I have deep desires to be taken and kept as a total torture prisoner, no rights, no way out. I seek a life of rape, torture, forced extreme surgeries, maiming, brain damage, and sentenced to a hard core death in electric chair once sir is done.

(Being brutally honest, I'm quite a confident guy but I overthink things and always get caught up in my head when it comes to actually doing something about it.)

I will be at the Dallas Fortworth airport on January 26th.






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toy_of_fate, 21
my name is nick and today could be the night u will never forget. i love to get beat up choke fuck hard by People to have adventures makes me happy! i love to get the fuck beat out of me then breed me piss on me by People after 30's yo! can be at any position based on the requirement and stranded.

since im in the field of the slave all the street beggars are strictly prohibited as they may get infected and harm to someone. i hope u all got the point of my hinting, but for those who is still want to be in clear cut so i would like to them my hint is related for those who is affecting contagious disease like HIV( AIDS) please keep away from me.







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Debussy, 18
Im 18 old boy. Im not slave, Im not prostitute.
Im wanna to meet for now with someone for fast money.
I go back 14.01 to my home far away from Dusseldorf and I wanna get money.
Im looking for a what ever job you have to offer, a real job or as a sexual proposition is to discus about.
Im looking for a ordinary friends with money too.
I can be fuck, suck you dick. I guess you can hit me. ): I can even be a tranny. Give me all your cum. Hit me. ): Tranny with fake titties and soft dick or no titties and hard dick.
I just want money fast!!! Come take me tonight and start experminating on me.
Or leave me the fag boy I am now and fuck me.
Please guys, help me with get some money!!!






________________

cutedrunkmeat, 19
I want to watch my boyfriend get beaten up, tortured, raped, fisted and worse by another guy. Very violent and unsafe only. Lengthier the attack the better. He'll be too drunk at the time to put up much of a struggle. He's always very drunk. The age and photos are his. I'm 30 years his senior. Discreet. New to this so bare with me. There's an extremely good reason why this needs to happen to him but I prefer to share that in private. Even though he has no idea this is coming, I would prefer to find someone his type. Which would be from late 40s to 60s.







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nasty_boy, 22
Looking 4 fun? Very 100% bottom slut boy from tokyo here. i am looking gud. big dildos, vibrators, toys, fist, cum, .. Own playroom. It`s writen in the profile what I do. Read the fucking profile! 3 lines!






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QueerPoet, 23
I'm slavery positive; that is, I'm not ashamed that I like being a slave and I won't be around any shaming. I'm finding people who are about mutual upliftment in all regards, including the inherent goodness of rough sex and all the beautiful slaves in the world.

And potential masters need to know that I am passionate about peace, justice and ecology. I don't care if my master(s) is/are, but I will need a mutual exchange of loving support as I play amid my books and music, advancing my happiness and a world of peace simultaneously. Masters of mine must be ready to lovingly interact with people of various abilities and ethnicities and immigration statuses.

Soon I will live off the income of my poetry and have a center for yoga and natural cooking. The latter will provide education and loving spaces to everyone, especially the very young and the very old.





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4sale, 18
i like to make you fell evil
you will not have what to lose
the only condition to ask is no fire





______________

kitten, 21
Just a dorky soccer guy XD Just started college :3 I'm gay, I like anything extreme as long as I am the bottom, and nothing is off limit.

Hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me :3 That's how I look at it. I want to be used and abused, to the fullest and even fatal extent if that happens :D

Now, lets get something straight! :O I love the idea of being a slave for life, snuffed, whatever, but like don't expect me to do your chores XD I can cook (badly) but I'm not cleaning or anything, lazy people! :3







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Moper, 20
You can do anything you want to me, I don't care if you are 18 or 88, hot or not, but I have to warn you I'll be really mopey when you do.





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neednewmasterasap, 20
I'm ♥just a boy ♥who fear God for He's my Father and my creator
My pussy is still vergin but am ready to give that for time being only
I'm so simpla and crasy but in the same time, i am special

I'm a fucking terminator who wanna be fucked and then sleep 3 days after
You like use and fling young passive defenseless pussy?
My pussy only for guys not stupid and not people who dont wanna do nathing

Photos/videos so that the pussy is a souvenir of your weekend in Berlin!





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luckyyou, 23
love is my life. don't leave away from me.

what am i.







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STRAIGHTTEENSLAVE, 18
I AM KYLE. I WANT SEVERE TORTURE AND PAIN. YES I AM STRAIGHT. I HAVE HAD A MISTRESS MY GIRLFRIEND SINCE 14. SHE STARTED TRAINING AND CONTROLLING ME THEN ALL THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL. SHE RECENTLY LOANED ME OUT TO A DUDE TO TRAIN AND I LOVED IT AND THAT IS THE DIRECTION I WANT TO GO IN LIFE.






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TreeBound, 24
bounded naked to a tree





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Iamsimple, 18
I am a submissve greedy teen fistpig living in the Hague,..
I am the yungest cutest sleezy fisting btm in the world that I know of,.
I have had FF since age 14 by my self, boys, men, girls,women and my ass can be stretched to crazy unbelievable,...
Also my ass hole can be fisted deep, you will not believe how deep you go,..
Be prepared becuase you mightfroget even your name when your arm is in my tight and smooth little ass all of it, ...
I have been Chemsfr also since 12, I don't get hard any more so no cum is possible from me & my mind is simple so no conversations,..





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Permanentdisposal, 22
Boy seeking to trow its life away for a very extreme Master.

Those who live in an isolated place with an isolated basement/room to keep me stored away forever so that i may never see daylight again.

Hooded, blind, deaf, and cocooned in so many layers of rubber that it can't move an inch.

If the owner ever gets tired of me, it can just plug the holes of my hood and masturbate as i suffocate to death.

I don't have money to offer, but i do live in my car so i can definitly relocate.

I have no friends or relatives and am not subscribed to any community as i always move places. No will miss me... So take me.






*

p.s. Hey. So, the internet and almost all of the electricity/power has been out here in the Recollets since last night for unknown reasons, and I'm using my phone's Personal Hotspot to do this p.s., and, since my PH is cranky and tends to conk out on me, I'll be moving swiftly-ish to try to get this done before I'm exiled. ** David Ehrenstein, I remember you saying that about Ken Weaver. Cool. I didn't know that about the Sonbert film. The Autosalvage record is really terrific and overlooked. If I could shape shift with you, and if there were time machines, I'd gladly drop you into my past at those randy Brainard moments. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Spex Pistols, ha ha, nice combo of clever and dumb. Are the new frames a noteable or even radical change from your current ones? I anxiously await the deluge. ** Sypha, Oh, yeah, I can see the problems there. My snow experiences are of a nature whereby the only darkish downside I ever foresee is soggy socks. There's something spooky about the idea of Far Right types reading books. But then that Huckabee isn't much of a book, I guess. ** Keaton, Thank you for the hoodie history. I did not know that. Hoodies would maybe be my look if they came in organic, and, wait, they do, and if a guy my age wearing a hoodie wasn't just sad to see. I won't tell anyone. 20 boys, wow, sure, all the luck to you. Law of averages says there's got to be at least one perfect dude in amongst them. Love back! ** Cal Graves, Hi. Cool, glad you like Vanilla Fudge. They were intense. And 'The Beat Goes On' is one of the craziest albums ever. Weird about gmail. You could try just sending me a super simple email with a 'hello' in it, and I could respond, and that might open the doors for sending the post? Today's question. Gosh, this is the most boring answer ever, but since 'The Velvet Underground and Nico' album is probably the most important rock album ever made, I might choose that just to watch history being inadvertently made. What's your choice? ** Dungan, Sean! Thanks, man! It's kind of nuts how incredibly up to date Silver Apples still sound. I have to figure out the LA dates soonish. Maybe I can find someone who knows stuff about film post-production to estimate how long that process is likely to take. That's the hold up, planning-wise. Yeah, an actual feature film! I haven't said too much about the film itself because there's kind of a lockdown about that right now, but, once it's finished, the word starts going out, and hopefully I can talk it up and show some stills and stuff then. Thank you! Really great to see you, man! Love to you and to everybody in reach. ** Gary gray, I love you being around when those posts pop up too. I feel like I've heard of Witch Hazel, but that name is one of those names that forces resemblances. Moody hair is a sterling choice. I mean, I can't even think a moody haircut that isn't powerful. I feel like I'm building a car too, how weird. Paris is pretty all right. Not too shabby at all. ** Steevee, Hi. East Coast Psych was much more esoteric and brainy as a general rule. Other than some blippy hits, it was pretty underground even at the time. If you want to check something out, I highly recommend giving a listen to the Cromagnon album. It's pretty amazing and crazy and singular, and it was incredibly ahead of its time. That article you linked to looks interesting. I'll check it. Everyone, here's Steevee with a good tip: 'An interesting piece by Richard Brody on the failed careers of female filmmakers like Elaine May and how critics could've helped them.I'm not sure it's our job to be mentors, but I have the feeling that if May were a dude, she would've been able to make at least 1 or 2 films post-ISHTAR.' ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Yeah, with exceptions, I think the best East Coast Psych holds up a lot better than most of the West Coast stuff. I think because it was more deliberately art in a lot of cases. I saw some live clips of Silver Apples, and it looked really genial, which made me not want to see them, although I don't know what I was imagining. Glad you liked Showroomdummies. I saw Pita play his first live gig in 6 years last night at this cool art/music venue here, and he killed it. Oh, the Black Forest! Never having been there, that name conjures up so much whirly mystical scary imagery that is surely way, way over the top, but still. Have big fun there!  ** Misanthrope, The parameters of what constitutes plausibility have become so immensely spread wide apart in the last years. Theoretically, the internet seems like it would have scrunched what's plausible, but it's the opposite, which, now that I think more about it, makes perfect sense, so never mind. Oh, God, the stuff with LPS's mom. She is such a reality show on wheels. Ugh. Is LPS old enough to legally emancipate himself from her? God knows he has a locked down case to do that. ** Bill, Hi. I know, the past has been worming up into the blog inordinately this week. I don't know what's up. Well, I would offer you the same body-changing, time traveling deal I offered Mr. E, if I could. Your LIES/ISLE piece is super great! Kudos! ** Jonathan, Buddy boy! I know, we got some solid real world time in this week, and that's been pleasure central. Ultimate Spinach are really charming, but you have to deal with some ultra-wack 60s lyrics and poetry, which, if you're in the right mood, is a frown turned upside down. To wit, and I can't believe I remember this from memory: 'Collapsed laughter / running falling slipping across the mind field of your thoughts / Dissolved / Wondering who am I? / Why should I be alone ... alone?' How's dem apples? Bon-est weekend to you, pal! ** It looks I made it. Luck of the draw means you get a whole weekend filled with a poet-like slaves. Enjoy them. See you on Monday.

“On a deeper level, women’s breasts are a microcosm of Gaia. When you think of Mother Earth, the beauty of nature comes to mind. Fertile mounds of earth, majestic mountains, nurturing waters, all relate to the shape and function of breasts. The dense soil of hills is like the rounded bosom of a woman, while the flow of rivers or water coincides with a mother’s milk.” -- Laura Hamilton, “The Spiritual Symbolism behind Women’s Breasts”






















































*

p.s. Hey. Today the multi-talented Sypha adds gif stacking to his already considerable c.v., and the stormy, magical crux is something you don't often see around this place, so there are ways upon ways to enjoy his gift, and please do, and please let him know what happens inside you. Thanks, and thank you supremely, James! ** Thomas Moronic, Gorgeous, poignant, LOL, wowzer, and much more, my brilliant, responsive friend. Thank you! RIP: Will McBride, yes. ** David Ehrenstein, That's a curious combo, personally and aesthetically: May and Donen. Huh. ** Bill, Hi. Superb, man: LIES/ISLE + you. Oh, I think Jeff Coleman is reading Giraudon right now too unless my brain isn't working right. How did you find her? I mean, not 'find' her as in locate, but rather i.e., assess? ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool! your Cromagnon post! Everyone, if you'll harken back to the East Coast psych gig for second, you might remember that one of its highlights was a ditty by a band/project called Cromagnon. Well, Mr. _B_A did a coverage post about them on his blog a ways back, and if you want to know a lot more about it/them, and I recommend you do, you can do so here. And, also courtesy of _B_A, here's a new BBC documentary on Kraftwerk that he highly recommends. Definitely going to watch that Kraftwerk thing the very moment I can. Thank you! ** Sypha, Hugs and kudos to you for this spectacular Day today! ** Keaton, Yeah, I tried on a hoodie once, and it did not take. I think I"m too tall too. Hoodies on really tall guys look strange, wrong, spooky in a bad way, maybe? Novel this spring? Holy niceness in advance! Go for it! ** Steevee, Hi. My understanding is that the one album is all they did. It was a guy's project, and I believe the musicians were hired for it. ** Kier, Hi, K! I bet your weekend wasn't so boring, or I bet if I'd been a fly on the various walls and bushes and stuff, I would have been riveted. Mine, hm. Oh, on Friday night Zac and I saw a gig by Pita/Peter Rehberg, his first solo gig in years, and Stephen O'M at this quite cool art/music space in Montreuil. Peter was masterful, and Stephen tore it. Ran into a bunch of groove ball fans of note there like Jean Luc Verna, Ryoji Ikeda, our own Jonathan Mayhew, and a heady brew of others. On Saturday, I think I mostly worked on stuff. Yeah. This and that. Can't remember much. Yesterday Z. and I went to look at Gisele and Stephen's new apartment in the morning, which they bought a while back and which is now being ripped apart and rebuilt. It was a cool construction site, and it's going to be a not so little palace. Then I worked more: on the ventriloquist theater piece, assembling the credits for Z's and my film's credit sequence, line-editing an interview I did, blah blah. Not very eventful in the event sense, but it was a cool enough couple of days. Today Z. and I go back into the film editing one last time to make sure everything is in its proper place before we upload it into a private area of Vimeo to show to our producers and a couple of select folks from whom we'd like an objective opinion. How was Monday? ** Hyemin kim, Hi. Yeah, Brainard is sublime. Well, 2nd generation-contextualized as he is, understandably, he's also a very unique writer who is category-antithetical too. You have a nice week too! ** MANCY, Hi, Stephen! Cool, glad the psych sat right with you. And 'Edwin Mulhouse'! Awesome! And, well, you can only imagine how thrilled I am that you're getting into Bresson. The great book on his work, in my opinion, is 'Robert Bresson' edited by James Quandt. This is it. It's a collection of essays on Bresson by all sorts of critics and filmmakers, and interviews, and so on, and it's a fantastic tome. I also highly recommend you read Bresson's book 'Notes on Cinematography', which is unbelievably great, I think. You can read the whole book online right here. Oh, that's extremely exciting about your upcoming releases! If you don't mind, would you drop a hint here around the time they're released because I definitely want to get them before they run out, and, obviously, there are a lot of other people around here who will too. Thanks a bunch, if you don't mind. In the meantime, I'll go get the info on your site. Everyone, MANCY aka the amazing artist Stephen Purtill is soon to release some new projects, one being a zine he has made in collaboration with fellow d.l. Thomas Moronic, and another a cassette of two new sound pieces by him. These will be imperative. Go here to get more info. Super fantastic news, man! ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. I think sometimes about publishing the best of the slave profile texts as a book of found poems. My weekend was fairly uneventful but productive on a practical level, so I'm okay with it. Yours was good, obviously, since you entered two things whose awesomeness I am in agreement with you about. Wow, terrible sentence. My favorite Jelinek is probably 'Lust'. Ah, the Doors album, makes sense. My favorite composers? You mean 'serious music' composers? I'm guessing so. Hm, off the top of my head, Mahler, Ligetti, Stockhausen, Pierre Henry, John Cage, Subotnik, Bartok, ... Yours? Favorite movie soundtrack? Huh. Uh, I do really like Michael Nyman's soundtrack for 'A Zed and Two Naughts'. Yours? How was Monday? ** Statictick, H, N! Cool, glad you liked the batch. I hear you about about having to organize and remove Dusty's stuff, and so fast. Doing that with my mom's stuff was very, very intense. Thank you so much about 'ZHH', man! Trippy to think of my stuff and MM's being in sync. I've never had much time for his thing. But, you know, more power to him. Good luck with all of that stuff, my pal. Lots of love, me. ** Okay. Go back up a ways now, please, and live or relive Sypha's festive construction. I will see you tomorrow.

'Many of you, perhaps most, have never heard of Luc Moullet. So much the better. Not all news gets into newspapers, and not all movies get into theaters. The sculptor Paul Thek once proposed an interesting solution to the newspaper problem to me: Get rid of all of them, except for one edition of one daily paper (any would do), and pass this precious object from hand to hand for the next hundred years –- then the news might mean something.

'Living, as we do, in a time and culture where cinema is becoming an increasingly occupied and colonized country — a state of affairs in which a few privileged marshmallows get saturation bookings all over creation while a host of challenging alternative choices languish in obscurity –- the need for legends has seldom been quite so pressing. Such are the established channels nowadays that even avant-garde films come to the viewer, if at all, in a form that is almost invariably pre-selected and pre-defined, with all the price tags and catalogue descriptions neatly in place. Given the need for legends that might gnaw at the superstructures of these official edifices, the adventurous filmgoer has few places to turn. Even in specialized magazines, one is most often prone to find duplications of the choices available elsewhere; and unless one lives in a megalopolis, the mere existence of most interesting films today is bound to seem almost fanciful and irrelevant.

'Within this impossible setup, one is obliged to construct a pantheon largely out of rumor and hearsay: at one big state university, stories still circulate about the one time that a few students got to see half an hour of Rivette’s 252-minute Out 1: Spectre.

'Needing an emblem, agent provocateur, and exemplary scapegoat for a legendary cinema that by all rights should be infinite and expanding, I nominate the figure of Luc Moullet, patron saint of the avant-garde B film. Whether or not anyone chooses to second the motion is beside the point. ...

'“Our Jarry,” Rivette calls him. And when I asked Straub in Edinburgh two years ago which contemporary filmmakers he admired, he cited Mizoguchi, Ford, Renoir, Lang, Godard … and then Luc Moullet: “I am willing to defend him until next year — things can change — even against all those who accuse him of being a fascist, which he is not. He’s the most important filmmaker of the French post-Godard generation…especially for Les contrebandières more than for the other two.” ...

'Manny Farber — whose termite category could have been invented for LM — asked me a couple of months ago how formal analysis could account for the tenderness Straub displays towards the young waiter in Not Reconciled; I asked in turn how a proper formal analysis could avoid it. It would seem, from the available evidence, that LM has shown a comparable tenderness towards everyone he’s ever filmed, and yes, Virginia, this is “work on the signifier”. It’s the signified of commercial cinema that gets short-changed in The Smugglers— not its production of meaning, which is indicated in virtually every shot. This makes some people angry because they want to forget they’re at the movies. LM starts with the assumption that you want to be there.

'Nevertheless, at one time or another, LM’s films have defeated distributors, exhibitors, spectators, even projectors. At Filmex in Los Angeles last March, people who arrived to see Anatomie d’un rapport— not very many — were essentially informed that the 16 mm projector refused to contend with the film, and those who wanted to see it had to come back the following day. When I returned, along with an even smaller group of people, the projector grudgingly complied this time, but not without a couple of spiteful breakdowns. Every time I’ve seen Les contrebandières, the projector has obstinately refused to keep all of the image in focus at the same time; the gate usually seems to shudder and flinch at the very prospect.

'Maybe cameras rebel against LM’s cinema too; consider the awfulness of that still I cited from Les contrebandières. I wonder if the breakdown in representation implied by it may, after all, be a fair indication of what his films are all about: not a breakdown of the people and things represented, but of the sort of guff that money and idealism dress them up with. All I know is that the longer I look at that still, the more it inspires me. Like the best of LM’s cinema, it is priceless — language that isn’t theft, because it takes nothing from anyone, but offers, rather, a gift that anyone can have. If anyone will let us have it.'-- Jonathan Rosenbaum



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Stills



















































____
Further

Luc Moullet @ IMDb
Luc Mouleet @ New Wave Film
'LUC MOULLET CINÉASTE CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON COMIQUE'
'Filmmaker, Film Critic, Enfant Terrible. Luc Moullet offers his thoughts on cinema past and present.'
Luc Moullet @ Senses of Cinema
'Luc Moullet and Parpaillon’s Pataphysical Theatre'
'Luc Moullet : “J’aime la manière dont mon frère, assez primitif de nature, découpe son steak”'
Interview with Luc Moullet by John Hughes and Bill Krohn
Luc Moullet @ France Culture
'Luc Moullet tracks the Origins of a Meal'
Video: Tracks: Luc Moullet - Poulidor du cinéma français'
'Est-ce que ta grand mère fait du vélo?'
'Seven Comedies: The Films of Luc Moullet'
Luc Moullet interviewed @ VICE (France)
'Luc Moullet's 10 favorite films 1957-1968'
'L'HISTOIRE DU CINÉMA D'ANIMATION VU PAR LUC MOULLET'
'Portrait(s) de Luc Moullet'



_________
Rockefeller's Melancholy
Luc Moullet on Michelangelo Antonioni




Drifting is the fundamental subject of Antonioni’s films. They are about beings who don’t know where they are going, who constantly contradict themselves, and are guided by their momentary impulses. We don’t understand what they feel or why they act as they do.

Psychological cinema could be defined in this way: it is psychological when you don’t understand the motivation of emotions and behaviors. If you understand, it means it’s easy, immediately, at a very superficial level... The filmmaker must therefore let it be supposed that there are a pile of mysterious, secret, deep, and unlimited motivations, as much in the characters as in the filmmaker (who maybe doesn’t exist). You can ramble on at your leisure about them (cf. the bottle of spilled ink in L’avventura, the tennis game in Blow Up). It’s a way of bluffing the viewer, particularly noticeable throughout L’avventura and La notte, which is very National Enquirer (or Us Weekly, or Star, or People), dignified by an Edward Hopper emulator.

Drifting reveals two facets, one that is positive, one that is negative. First, the positive: it directs the film towards an unusual and surprising elsewhere. It’s the road movie (Zabriskie Point, The Passenger, L’avventura). The beginning of that last film is centered on the couple of Léa Massari/Ferzetti, and then on the disappearance of Massari who will be looked for in vain, very slowly and boringly, by the new—rather disappointing—couple of Ferzetti/Monica Vitti, and then on a semi-documentary and off-topic (but is there even a topic?) stroll through Sicily that, after an hour and a half of yawns, gives us the best (or the least bad) part of the film: the piercing gazes of the men on Monica Vitta alone in a small village square, the flirtation with the maid on the train, the prostitute’s press conference, Vitti imitating the bellboy, suddenly singing and dancing, passages that I am maybe overestimating because they happen after 100 very monotonous minutes. This kind of drifting film - a backpacker’s, a wanderer’s cinema - will come back later in Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes) and Wenders’ Kings of the Road, with the frequent submission to chance - natural and organized—that is equally present in Blow Up. This path will also be found in The Passenger, Identification of a Woman, and L’eclisse, objects in that film definitively replacing the protagonists in a revolutionary ending that happily gives a new twist to a film until then filled with drunks and common places (especially about the stock exchange).

The other facet is more negative. Since drifting is a way of fighting against boredom, it leads to a new form of boredom, inevitably found as soon as the center of the film is lost. Films about boredom are inevitably annoying. An inherent problem in filmmakers’ activities, one that is a vicious circle, is that, in order to make films, you have to be rich or, if not, you have to very quickly become rich. So, filmmakers only know the problems of the well-off, cutting them off from the reality of the masses and diminishing the reach of their oeuvre. But, after all, Rockefeller’s melancholy is a human reality to which it is only normal to bring attention. It’s something. It brings us back to an ancestral conception of art, one that was fundamental until around 1850. It is the expression of noble souls, men of noble births, excluding the mediocre spiritual life of the proletariat. Going back to it (Il grido) seems like a displacement of very artificial problems.

And when one is rich, one has everything—money, work (if one still needs to work in order to live), and love. What more can one hope for? From this comes the boredom, depression, and melancholy that one looks to fill in by looking at other things, left and right. A cinema that is foreign to me, that aggravates me—me, who, like the majority of people, had to fight for decades to reach a summit similar to the one that Antonioni’s characters want to forget. Maybe the height of happiness is to realise one’s ambitions as late as possible, or never, in order to avoid the agony of an earthly beyond.

(cont.)



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Extras


LUC MOULLET: The cinema according to Luc


Essai d'ouverture: Luc Moullet


Luc Moullet, enfin cinématonné?


Questions de cinéma Luc Moullet



______
Interview
from mubi




You mentioned in your introduction at Cannes that Land of Madness was initially suggested to you by Edgar Ulmer.

LUC MOULLET: Ulmer wanted to produce films by young people, and when I saw him he asked me to write something, but Ulmer had great difficulties getting his own movies produced, so this ended up not being made.

Was it originally a documentary?

MOULLET: No, it was a fiction. It was too long and too expensive. Ulmer spoke a lot without really having the power to supervise this film made by young people. I took a little part of it—10% or 5%, all about madness, this little part—and came back to the documentary way of filming, which was easier and more interesting in this case. And less costly. That gave me the idea of the title.

Did you know other directors from that era? I know you interviewed many, and Fuller you worked with.

MOULLET: Yes of course, because I was writing text for Cahiers du cinéma, and I was just beginning so I couldn’t write about great, great directors; Truffaut and Rivette spoke about them, wrote about them, so I had to concentrate on other directors who were a little forgotten or not yet known, such as Ulmer and Fuller.

And now they are associated with the New Wave and Cahiers.

MOULLET: I remember when Truffaut came to New York there was a question, “who are the best American directors?” And he said Edgar Ulmer and Samuel Fuller! Which in ’59 was rather provocative since the critic who asked the question may not have known Ulmer and saw very little of Fuller. At the time, people said Kazan, or Stevens, or Zinnemann.

That’s our cinema of quality. Now not very many people of our generation watch those films any more. They are underappreciated, almost, because of their reputation for being overblown. I was very startled to see this area of France on film. The landscapes here look like many of the landscapes I see in your movies, and it occurs to me that A Girl is a Gun could have been shot in your backyard. It was interesting to see the land that exists in your fiction films take such a vivid place in your documentary.

MOULLET: There are certain landscapes for fantasies like a western film and for a true story for murder and madness, which we can see here.

There’s something really romantic about your films, which I like. They have a reputation for being austere in a way, because they deliver facts, but there’s something really romantic about the landscapes.

MOULLET: It certainly is a romantic landscape, and these are ugly stories in a romantic landscape—it’s an interesting contradiction. You could say the same about Wuthering Heights, a very beautiful landscape and a certain kind of madness. I think it might be the same as in West Virginia!

Do you look for inspiration in films that you love?

MOULLET: Yes, of course. I wrote many films about American movies, I made a book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead, and there are some influences, some borrowings from The Fountainhead in A Girl is a Gun, from Hitchcock in Brigitte and Brigitte. In Brigitte and Brigitte there’s a girl who has some difficulties finding a secret dictionary in her closet during an exam, and this was made after the end of Strangers on a Train, looking for his lighter—things like that. There’s a borrowing from The Whispering Chorus by DeMille in Le prestige de la mort; it’s a bit of a similar story. There are many things I borrow from American cinema, always in a different context because Brigitte and Brigitte is a comedy and Strangers on a Train is a suspense film. It’s always better to take things from other genres because then nobody sees them…unless I speak to you about them! There are some borrowings from Moonfleet in my short, The Milky Way.

You wrote a book in 1995 called Politique des acteurs—Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Cary Grant, James Stewart, which unfortunately, like much of your criticism, has not yet been translated into English. Could you talk a little bit about why you wrote the book, and what you say in it?

MOULLET: Actors are very important to good authorship, especially in the comical field (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Raymond Griffith, Linder, Tati, Fields, Marx Brothers). Who remembers the official directors of their films, Clyde Bruckman, James Horne, Donald Crisp? I chose to write a book about actors because Truffaut always told me it was the most difficult thing to do, to write about actors. I liked this challenge. Before, almost nobody wrote seriously about actors.

Speaking of material unavailable in English, it is quite dismaying to see your work receive so little attention in the United States in terms of distribution. For someone unable to see most of your films, what have you been up to since the early 1970s?

MOULLET: I can tell you that I worked in many of the usual genres, comedy, western, erotic film, murder film, sociologic documentary, copying (or try to copy) the career of Hawks.

How do you see your filmmaking changing over this period?

MOULLET: I don’t know what difference one can find between a film I made in 1960 and a film I directed in 2006. Maybe there are less puns.

In the U.S. the French New Wave is almost exclusively associated with a very small group of Cahiers du cinéma critic-filmmakers—Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol. Again, due mostly to issues of distribution, access, and translation, we have seen little from other contemporaneous filmmakers and Cahiers writers such as yourself, Jacques Donoil-Valcroze, and Fereydoun Hoveyda.

MOULLET: My films have less success than those of Godard and Truffaut because I do not have their genius. I was a follower to them, a groupie, a fan. And all those who came after the Big Five of the New Wave had great difficulties during their—I mean Hanoun, Pollet, me, Eustache, Vecchiali, Straub, Rozier, Garrel. The audience had enough with the Big Five. We came too late, some months after, but it was too late.

To my knowledge, unlike many of your Cahiers critic-filmmaker colleagues you still remain active as a critic. How do you see your criticism changing since your earlier days? Do you see a difference between the way you worked as a critic-filmmaker during the first years of your career as a moviemaker and now?

MOULLET: To write an article about a film and to do a documentary, that’s the same work—we show a reality that does exist, a film, a factory, a town. I took the same pleasure in writing the book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead and in shooting a film about Des Moiners, The Belly of America. What difference between my film criticism of 1956 and that of today? Difficult to say. I saw more films during those years. I am less interested in giving a shock to my audience. My analysis is more precise—I presume—and I am more fair with the films. Now I try to find the truth while writing my texts, and I no more try to impose a truth, a message before writing an article. The first years in criticism, we often to tried to impose aggressive judgments. After, all that is over.



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11 of Luc Moullet's 36 films

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Brigitte et Brigitte (1966)
'Brigitte et Brigitte is a 1966 French feature-length film written and directed by Cahiers du cinéma film critic Luc Moullet. Two girls meet accidentally at the station as they come from their oppositely remote small villages. It seems they have patterned themselves against the same model as they are identical in every respect that they can be. They become roommates and go to collage, eventually studying film because it is easy. What follows are episodes, all reflective in some way on the nature of film, either explicitly or as a matter of how life is patterned by film. Eric Rohmer plays a role. What sets this apart from other new wave projects of the era is that it sits in its deep selfreference without taking itself seriously. As it happens, the identities of these girls drift apart in terms of appearance, manner, values and place in film. Its no less consequential than others of its ilk, but seems more fun in being consciously trivial. One episode, for instance has our girls doing a survey of the three best filmmakers. One Frenchman answers: Welles, Hitchcock and Jerry Lewis. Another querent gives the same answer for who are the three worst filmmakers. The joke is that he is a ten year old boy. Worse, pulls out a list with ALL filmmakers ranked in order and he tells precisely that those three are numbers 281, 282, and 283! Moullet's debut film, Brigitte et Brigitte was praised upon release by one-time colleague Jean-Luc Godard as being a "revolutionary film."'-- collaged


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Les Contrebandières (1968)
'In his follow-up to his debut feature Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), Luc Moullet further distanced himself from his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries by cocking a snook at anyone who sees revolution as an effective driver for social and political change. Moullet's cynical view that nothing ever changes ran contrary to the thinking of other New Wave directors who, in common with a vast swathe of bourgeois intellectuals, saw revolution as not only necessary but inevitable. Jean-Luc Godard's Week-End (1967) and Moullet's Les Contrebandières (1968) are both wildly anarchic but their premises are diametrically opposed. Like Godard, Moullet evokes the thirst for rebellion that was rife in France in 1967/8, but his conclusion is that all that revolution achieves is to move people from one miserable, unsatisfying groove to another miserable, unsatisfying groove. Moulet's minority view proved to be the most realistic. Ten years on from the events of May '68, you'd be hard pressed to notice any significant change in France.'-- French Film Site



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A Girl is a Gun (1971)
'Jean-Pierre Léaud and Rachel Kesterber star in the greatest French western ever made. Never released in France but distributed in South America in an English-language version dubbed by Moullet himself, Billy’s dark tale of lust and revenge swings wildly between a slapstick insanity and a delirious experimentation that are kith and kin with Wellman's Yellow Sky, Vidor's Duel in the Sun, Godard's Week-end, and Garrel's La cicatrice interieure. In rewriting an old saw (cinema and a girl is a gun, indeed), Moullet tackles favorite themes—time, landscape, exhaustion—with relish.'-- Harvard Film Archive



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Anatomie d'un rapport (1975)
'"For me," Luc Moullet wrote, "there isn't intelligence and stupidity, but intelligence-stupidity." A Cahiers critic who championed Samuel Fuller as an "intelligent primitive," Moullet turned to directing well after his comrades (Godard, Truffaut, et al.), and has been playing catch-up ever since. With one exception, the movies in International House's "5 Comic Films" showcase are emphatically unserious, teetering concatenations of moth-eaten gags splintered with Dadaist verve. Moullet has said his "main aim is to make people laugh," but he lacks the killer instinct of a natural comedian. Even though his features typically run less than 90 minutes, they're never rushed; for all their frenetic dislocations, they're somehow restful. Fond of barren landscapes, blackout gags and Sisyphean slopes, Moullet is, like the Parisian rebels of May 1968, "Marxiste, tendence Groucho," a slapstick anarchist who expresses his hostility to the modern world by refusing to take it seriously. The series' most atypical entry is Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), co-directed with Moullet's wife Antonietta Pizzorno. With Moullet as himself and Christine Hébert as an obvious Pizzorno stand-in, Anatomy dissects in painful detail the sexual dysfunction in its makers' marriage.'-- Arsenevich



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Barres (1984)
'Funny little short film about fare dodging in Paris with a touch of magical realism, a testament to human ingenuity and imagination used to get out of paying those couple of Francs. "My main aim is to make people laugh. For me, that’s very easy: lost between the rustic peasant world whose rituals I have forgotten and the chic Parisian world into which I have never really assimilated, I am a character who is out of place; everybody finds me comical. I only need to show up for people to laugh. So it’s not because I’ve got any great skills: I take full advantage of my situation. And this comedy factor goes beyond my personal self, stretching into whatever I care to imagine."'-- Luc Moullet



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La comédie du travail (1987)
'From the very beginning, film comedy focused on the world of work. From exploitation to unemployment, from adaptation to resistance, directors multiplied their points of view on survival in the modern world, especially from Chaplin on. With a humor superceding certain conventions and steering towards an eminently political dimension, Moullet follows three characters in order to build one of the blackest satires about the conflict arising from our everyday relation with work. Nobody but Luc Moullet, former witty critic of the Cahiers du Cinema, would have dared to make such a film on unemployment.'-- IMDb



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Parpaillon ou à la recherche de l’homme à la pompe Ursus d’après Alfred Jarry (1993)
'To understand Moullet’s contribution in Parpaillon, it is perhaps not pointless to ask a question at the outset that is finally quite difficult to answer: what is a gag? Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie suggest a practical definition: ‘More narrative and often more abstract than a sketch, the gag is short in form and relatively autonomous, and in itself does not necessarily belong to film (there are theatrical, and even musical or pictorial gags). In its most general form, it is characterised by the incongruous and surprising resolution of a situation that may or may not be realistic in its premises ... The gag, in most cases, is less inclined to mobilise cinematic language than body language.’ The gags created by Moullet in Parpaillon seem in perfect agreement with this definition. The fragmentary nature of the film, resulting more from a narrative aesthetic than an ‘aesthetic of attractions’ – to borrow an expression devised to explain the specificity of early cinema – favours self-sufficiency in the situations being shown, emphasising their intrinsic value as gags. Similarly, all the situations in Parpaillon, however realistic most of them might be at the outset, are pushed to their most incongruous extrapolations.'-- Rouge



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Toujours plus (1994)
'Aujourd’hui les supermarchés se construisent sur l’emplacement des cinémas ou des églises. Évolution normale puisque le consumérisme est la religion du XXème siècle ; les supermarchés sont les cathédrales du futur.'-- Cinematheque Grenoble



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Foix (1994)
'C'est en 1973 que Luc Moullet fait la découverte de Foix, ville qui saute à ses yeux comme étant la plus ringarde de France. Pendant les vingt années suivantes, il garde en tête ces images de Foix qui ont impressionné sa rétine de manière indélébile, cherchant si chaque nouvelle ville qu'il visite peut, même de loin, rivaliser avec ce parangon de ringardise. Au bout de ces longues années de recherche assidue, il ne peut que conclure que Foix reste indétrônable. Désirant réaliser son hommage à la ville, il y retourne en 1994 et constate que rien n'a changé depuis cette année 73. Heureux cinéaste qui va enfin pouvoir imprimer sur pellicule ces images qui le hantent depuis deux décennies... Le principe du film est des plus simples, avec des images qui viennent contredire un discours touristique décliné imperturbablement en voix off. Le portrait est accablant. La ville est construite n'importe comment, sans aucune vue d'ensemble urbanistique, tout est empilé à la va-comme-je-te-pousse, en dépit du bon sens et bien sûr sans aucune recherche d'esthétisme. D'improbables compositions florales, des canaux inutilement tarabiscotés, des enseignes vétustes (lorsqu'il y en a, Moullet débusquant même un commerce vierge de toute inscription !) plaquées sur des façades abominables, des bâtiments d'une incommensurable laideur, des statues modernes d'une incommensurable laideur qui poussent comme des champignons... Rien n'est pensé, tout se mêle dans un fatras délirant que Moullet résume en ces termes : "La politique de l'urbanisme se fonde sur le mélange, figure mère de l'art néo foixéen."'-- dvdclassik.com



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Le prestige de la mort (2006)
'Whilst seeking out locations in the South of France for his next film, director Luc Moullet comes across a male corpse. He immediately decides to use this to his advantage. By swapping his passport with that of the dead man, Moullet hopes that the world will believe he is dead, thereby ensuring a renewed interest in his work. Unfortunately, the scheme backfires, since the dead man was someone rather important. The film stars Luc Moullet, Antonietta Pizzorno, Claire Bouanich, Iliana Lolitch and Gilles Guillain. It has also been released under the title: Death's Glamour.' -- French Film Site



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La Terre de la folie (2010)
'Originating from the southern Alps, Luc Moullet has been struck by the abnormally high incidence of mental disorder in the area. Accounts of murder, suicide and self-immolation are plentiful. In this documentary, Moullet examines the causes and consequences of these extreme psychiatric phenomena and arrives at some disturbing conclusions. The film stars Luc Moullet, Antonietta Pizzorno and Jacques Zimmer. It has also been released under the title: Land of Madness.'-- French Film Site



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*

p.s. Hey. ** Jonathan, Hi, J. Cool. That Bresson book will not steer you wrongly, guaranteed. Yeah, that was Ryoji himself in a rare Paris outing. Super nice guy. Yeah, I forgot to ask Gisele about how the guitar seemed to be being played even when Stephen was nowhere near it. I couldn't figure that out either, and my height didn't help. What are you up to on this ... wait, let me look out the window ... strangely clear, chilly day? ** David Ehrenstein, I like how the word boggling went viral as a response to Sypha's, err, stack. ** Ultra VGA, Hi, awesome to see, and thank you for the props on un-asked for behalf of Sypha. How's it going? ** Tosh Berman, Mr. Tosh! You're so lucky to get to see the Sparks + orchestra 'Kimono' show. I hope they get it to Paris. And you are just as lucky to get to be at, much less star in, the Book Fair. Serious cravings for that. And that craving was without even knowing the high physical quality of the customers. One of these years. Did you buy stuff? Any highlights? ** Bill, That is nice timing. 'Pallaksch, Pallaksch', cool. I'll particularly look for that one. I'm doing the English language bookstore rounds today. ** _Black_Acrylic, Howdy! Fingers crossed that your new spectacles -- such a nice term for glasses; sad it's fallen out of use -- reach readiness by the deadline. So much stuff on its way to you and, through you, to the world, including us, or at least some of us in certain cases. Ah, the Adam Curtis film/video has already taken down, drat. ** Kier, Did I already say, Hi, Kierispy Kiereme? If not, hi, KK! Jean Luc was, and still is, in 'I Apologize' which had a fairly rare gig just last week somewhere. He's amazing inside and outside. Is that sheep shearer the only in town or something? Or is he related to the owner by blood or something? What a lazy ass. The poor innocent sheep, that's terrible. I guess on the surface it's cool that he asked you that question? I don't know what farmers are like in Norway, but, in the US, a farmer even asking you that question would be relatively enlightened or something, I think, given the generally conservative, Christian bent of US farming industry folk. I don't know? Wild sheep shed naturally? Wow, I didn't know that. Are sheep who don't shed naturally mutations, or, I mean, were they bred/created 'artificially' at some point? My day: Well, film editing. We didn't finish the film. There's still a bit more to do. Today Zac is working with a sound recordist to re-record some sounds that aren't good enough in their original versions, like the Krampus bells in particular, and then tomorrow we will have an all-day marathon to finish the editing of the film at last and then upload it onto Private Vimeo. In the nick of time because our producers are breathing heavily down our necks now. So, we edited and did some sound corrections, and we started figuring out the Titles and the Closing Credits. We have to decide quickly if we want music over the closing credits or not. We kind of do, and we kind of know whose music we would like to use, but we'll have to decide and then ask the artist in question right away. After the editing, I came home and did stuff like correcting that interview, and I did some back and forth with Gisele about the ventriloquism piece, and I've been working on a gif poem that I hope to finish and post later this week, so I furthered that for a couple of hours. And ... I think that's it for yesterday. How was yesterday in Kierland? ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. The projects are going really well. Busily but not crazed. No, thank God the great majority of the French do not give one shit about the Super Bowl, so it was an absence here. I only saw stills of the Katy Perry/ Missy Elliott/ Lenny Kravitz thing. I might take a peek. I hear she did 'Firework', which is a guilty pleasure song of mine. And I love Missy Elliott, of course. But I can not bear neither the sight nor the sound of Lenny Kravitz, ugh. Happily also, 'American Sniper' is not yet playing here, so no one is talking about it other than talking about its social network gobbling. ** Keaton, Hi. Glad you liked the slaves. Nice lads. Tall guys are comfy? That's nice. I like that. I angle for comfiness. ** Steevee, Hi. I have, like, no patience for the 'literature is dying' and 'publishing is dying' stuff. I find that just embarrassing. No Jacobsen indulging for me, in other words. ** Sypha, Hi! My great pleasure being its background host, thank you ever so much again! ** Misanthrope, Oh, I don't know. I've had a few friends who legally emancipated themselves from their horrible parents at one point. The problem is the headache and cost of the court business involved, and the 'public' destruction of the parents' reputation, and the time involved, and so on. But it can happen. But it is not easy. I would like one of your pizzas, you bet. Can't they, like, heat up a pitcher of extra sauce and pour directly onto their slices? I guess not. I stopped reading Ian McEwan a million years ago, so I have no idea. ** Right. Today I focus on Luc Moullet, one of the more obscure and unseen and yet cultish revered New Wave French film directors, whom I thought you might not know yet. See what you think, if you will. See you tomorrow.

February

Mark Doten The Infernal (novel)
Gray wolf Press

'Nothing in The Infernal recurs quite so stubbornly or mercilessly as violence and death, and suffering comes in different ways for different characters: an Iraqi nurse is bled dry by the predations of war; an unraveling veteran unravels; Bin Laden blithely causes the death of one devoted boy after another through increasingly slapstick means; Bremer exults in his ignorance and idiosyncrasy as Baghdad’s skyline seethes and burns outside the window. But suffering comes, universally, and it just keeps coming. Despite Doten’s legitimately thrilling inventiveness and wild, dark humor—and, more rarely, his empathy—none of this is any more fun than it sounds. But entertainment is not the task Doten set himself here; he’s after something darker and more difficult. Doten has created an impressionistic map of the atomized imperial realities of the War on Terror, and it is every bit as harrowing to consider as the inane and bloodthirsty era it depicts. Crucially, though, he does not do this work with the neutered, judiciously-as-you-will passivity presumed in that Cheneyite aside; he rejects the realities that the War on Terror’s architects have given us to chase, and goes in search of his own. That refusal, which is both bigger and braver than it seems at first, is what gives The Infernal its power. It’s a start.'-- The Believer

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Ben Fama Fantasy(poetry)
Ugly Duckling Presse

'Ben Fama’s Fantasy operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama’s language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one’s own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism.'-- Ugly Duckling Presse



Jeremy M. Davies Fancy(novel)
Ellipsis Press

'An elderly shut-in delivers a series of pet-sitting instructions to a young couple who’ve come to watch over his many, many cats. A story (or series of stories) about the ways that methodical, abstract systems interface with messy, personal obsessions, Fancy is a kissing cousin to the work of both the late Henry James and the early Thomas Bernhard: an object lesson in how our need to make sense of the world winds up devouring it whole. "Each paragraph of the novel begins with “Rumrill said” or “he added,” and this repetition has a hypnotic effect, nudging the reader deeper into the underground caverns of the story … Davies slowly peels away layers of contradiction to reveal the abstract mental gymnastics Rumrill uses to function in the world… Davies has written a challenging but exceptional aria of a novel. This weird portrait of an unreliable and eloquent narrator could become a cult classic." -- Starred review, Publishers Weekly.'-- Ellipsis Press

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Joyelle McSweeney The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (nonfiction)
University of Michigan Press

'In The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, poet Joyelle McSweeney presents an ecopoetics and a theory of Art that reflect such biological principles as degradation, proliferation, contamination, and decay. In these ambitious, bustling essays, McSweeney resituates poetry as a medium amid media; hosts “strange meetings” of authors, texts, and artworks across the boundaries of genre, period, and nation; and examines such epiphenomena as translation, anachronism, and violence. Through readings of artists as diverse as Wilfred Owen, Andy Warhol, Harryette Mullen, Roberto Bolaño, Aimé Césaire, and Georges Bataille, The Necropastoral shows by what strategies Art persists amid lethal conditions as a spectacular, uncanny force.'-- UoMP



Sarah Jean Alexander Wildlives(poetry and fiction)
Big Lucks

'Sarah Jean Alexander expresses happiness on the internet via Facebook. Happiness is a big thing with Sarah Jean Alexander. Out of countless online writers Sarah Jean Alexander is one of the few that has previously worked as a bartender, making her transition to the poetry world especially easy. Her poetry readings are the things dreams are made of: funny, poignant, and downright captivating. Few can compare to Sarah Jean Alexander’s poetic chops. Besides writing her own stuff she curates the infinitely excellent ‘Parlor’. Everything Sarah Jean Alexander has done has been working towards this moment. From her relocation to New York City to her constant readings, Sarah Jean Alexander has changed the lives of countless online citizens. With so much work already being done on behalf of the internet Sarah Jean Alexander has so much more to give. ‘WILDLIVES’ will be the best poetry collection of 2015.'-- Beach Sloth



Noah Cicero Bipolar Cowboy(poetry)
Lazy Fascist

'I have okayed the final proof of Bipolar Cowboy
Valentine's Day 2015
Love changes forever'-- Noah Cicero








Mark Gluth Goners(stories)
Kiddiepunk Press

'The Goners is a haunting suite of interconnected stories about death and loss.'-- Kiddiepunk











March

xTx Today I Am A Book(novel)
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'Today I Am A Book is maddening, the ‘I’ bringing you in close only to wink and push off again. It is an alluring, irresistible book. And it was written by xTx. That should be all you need to know. She is a master and we are her grateful subjects.'-- Lindsay Hunter

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April

Amelia Gray Gutshot (stories)
FSG

'A woman creeps through the ductwork of a quiet home. A medical procedure reveals an object of worship. A carnivorous reptile divides and cauterizes a town. Amelia Gray’s curio cabinet expands in Gutshot, where isolation and coupling are pushed to their dark and outrageous edges. These singular stories live and breathe on their own, pulsating with energy and humanness and a glorious sense of humor. Hers are stories that you will read and reread—raw gems that burrow into your brain, reminders of just how strange and beautiful our world is. These collected stories come to us like a vivisected body, the whole that is all the more elegant and breathtaking for exploring its most grotesque and intimate lightless viscera.'-- FSG

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Gregory Howard Hospice(novel)
FC2

'When Lucy is little something happens to her brother. He disappears for months and when he returns he’s not the same. He’s not her brother. At least this is what Lucy believes. But what actually happened? Comic, melancholy, haunted, and endlessly inventive, Gregory Howard’s debut novel Hospice follows Lucy later in life as she drifts from job to job caring for dogs, children, and older women—all the while trying to escape the questions of her past only to find herself confronting them again and again. In the odd and lovely but also frightening life of Lucy, everyday neighborhoods become wonderlands where ordinary houses reveal strange inmates living together in monastic seclusion, wayward children resort to blackmail to get what they want, and hospitals seem to appear and disappear to avoid being found. Replete with the sense that something strange is about to happen at any moment, Hospice blurs the borders between the mundane and miraculous, evoking the intensity of the secret world of childhood and distressing and absurd search for a place to call home.'-- FC2

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Leopoldine Core Veronica Bench(poetry and fiction)
Coconut Books

'Leopoldine Core was born and raised in Manhattan. Her poems and fiction have appeared in Apology, Open City, Agriculture Reader, The Brooklyn Rail, Big Lucks and elsewhere. Her chapbook “Young Friend” was published by Perfect Lovers Press. Her first full-length book, Veronica Bench, is forthcoming from Coconut Books.'-- the HiFi





Steven Millhauser Voices in the Night(stories)
Knopf

'From the Pulitzer and Story Prize winner: sixteen new stories--provocative, funny, disturbing, magical--that delve into the secret lives and desires of ordinary people, alongside retellings of myths and legends that highlight the aspirations of the human spirit. Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small-town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unsettling what-ifs or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even our bodies. Here, too, are stories culled from religion and fables: from Samuel, who in the masterly "A Voice in the Night" hears the voice of God calling him in the night; to a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha; to Rapunzel and her Prince awakened only to everyday disappointment. Heightened by magic, the divine, and the uncanny, shot through with sly humor, Voices in the Night seamlessly combines the whimsy and surprise of the familiar with intoxicating fantasies that take us beyond our daily lives, all done with the hallmark sleight of hand and astonishing virtuosity of one of our greatest modern storytellers.'-- Knopf



Molly Gaudry Desire: A Haunting(novel)
Ampersand Books

'Even alone, writes Molly Gaudry, 'we are not unloved.' And indeed, a reader cannot help but be trapped in tentacles of love when reading her twisting, tender Desire: A Haunting. No one but Gaudry paints language with so much care, with so much lonely, heart-dreamed beauty. No one else paints scars so naked and so necessary. This book is a breathing thing, a piece of life-in-love-in-art.'-- Amber Sparks

'A pretty book that gives the reader vertigo as the words and images kind of swirl around the page and through the reader's head in an intimate and heartbreaking manner that reminded me of early Anne Carson.'-- Shane Jones




May

Katie Jean Shinkle The Arson People(novel)
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'Katie Jean Shinkle performs extraordinary feats of emotional and narrative funambulism. Her linguistic high-wire dexterity is gorgeous and devastating in equal measure. It is, in fact, the painful deadpan beauty of the prose that will knock you to your knees and allow you to feel things you may never have felt.'-- zoran rosko vacuum player

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Sean Kilpatrick Sucker June(novel)
Lazy Fascist

'Let’s toss off in your mouth about the poet’s snobbery. Picture the poet: studio head for a day. Merry Christmas. His piss in your charities. The revenue loss. The PR disaster. The Enemy Mine of industry. The productions of a million new Putney Swope-s. Les Blank-style recasting of all actors. The ending of There Will Be Blood in perpetuum behind the scenes. More than two women directors. Union assassins snapping California off its axis – dropped like a health pill into the ocean. Him really appreciating how many times he’s hanged. Nope, the reality is James Franco has a book of majorly-distributed, tastefully-balanced, intentionally-said, well-plotted, kind-of-quietude, kind-of-tasteful, good-intentioned, strong-closing, gender-appropriate, Jack Gilbert-restrained, but stumblingly-confessional, toolkit workshop poems. Nothing about this person’s life is capable of experiencing censorship. That’s fine. I can giggle through some grab-ass. I’ll stuff down the jelly until I might afford the high tech weaponry necessary to wield it. Oh, did they divert the taints? T’was some minor poet’s critique via deep web language-terrorism? Nope, it was surplus political bullshit for the news. Enjoy your ten billionth suppositionally buzzfed red-state blue-state cocksuck bicker of a click bait talk point, you fucking anti-brummagem, self-dignified, faux-responsible nation fulla rat-minded adults. The more you care the more shit still won’t matter! Anyway, sure it was a coward’s move by rich racists. What isn’t? Shucks, you know the only racism worth a damn comes from poverty. I like Franco when he’s silly. I kinda wanna make him smear his robe. He causes me to feel erotic as football. I am not convinced he’s of a race. That’s how well I regard the sun. When he smiles, every conviction turns a little gray. It’s the kind of smile that says talk to me during business hours. Sometimes you need an electric blanket of a flick right around your hangover, a buffer ‘gainst the elbow grease ‘a trudging forth, a lithe ferret to rub your past dues on. Even I’m down to a 36 waist, ladies. Too bad I got the posture of a burn victim and a face only, well, it’s somewhat influenced by the sharp undercarriage of a fence, inwardly dented and is roundishly corpse-like. People tailgate and honk at me as soon as I leave my driveway or I am fined and arrested if caught going fast enough to not be tailgated. The car is borrowed and about to die. The fucking driveway is borrowed, too. I have a Band-Aid-sized graduate degree and it is about to be 2015. Lately, I was called pussy for refusing to eat part of a large sandwich. Guess why I’m a happy person, though? Because when I call the Franco types cunts it is the rare occasion in which I am absolutely correct.'-- SK

Excerpt



Ron Padgett Alone and Not Alone (poetry)
Coffee House Press

'The latest from Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett, Alone and Not Alone follows 2013′s triumphant Collected Poems (winner of the LA Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) with new poems that demonstrate how vital Padgett’s skills as a poet remain, continuously reminding us that the world may be seen in a clearer and more generous light.'-- Coffee House Press





Nathaniel Mackey Blue Fasa(poetry)
New Directions

'Nathaniel Mackey’s sixth collection of poems, Blue Fasa, continues what the New Yorker has described as the “mythological conception” and “descriptive daring” of his two intertwined serial poems—where, however, “no prior knowledge is required” for readers new to this poet’s visionary work. This collection takes its title from two related black musical traditions, a West African griot epic as told by the Fasa, a clan in ancient Ghana, and trumpeter Kenny Dorham’s hard bop classic “Blue Bossa,” influenced by the emergence of Brazilian bossa nova. In two sections Blue Fasa opens with the catch of the heart and the call of romance, as it follows a band of travelers, refugees from history, on their incessant migrations through time, place, and polity, toward renewal.'-- New Directions




M Kitchell Spiritual Instrument(novel)
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'I was obsessed with cinema before I was ever obsessed with books. I've basically been obsessed with eurohorror since the age of 13, which led to everything that has become a part of me. I pretty quickly moved beyond the obvious greats like Argento and Bava and Fulci (though don't get me wrong, Fulci, specifically, holds a very special place in my heart) and into the weird shit like Renato Polselli and Alberto Cavallone and more experimental shit that's filled with terror like Frans Zwartjes and Paul Sharits. There's also this Alain Fleischer movie called Zoo Zero that stars Klaus Kinski and Catherine Jourdan, who is in Robbe-Grillet's Eden and After, and it's kind of perfect in the same way that Jean Rollin's Night of the Hunter is, but with a completely different iciness. It has the sort of iciness that I want present in my work. There are all these great movies out there that are so fucked up, but thanks to the internet they are finally being rescued and people are watching them. It's this incredible absent world of fantastique terror-filled sex narratives that are better than anything else. I mean, these movies reach beyond perfect and become so impossible. Also, more recently, the films of Andrzej Zulawski and Philippe Grandrieux played a major role in inspiring the texts in my book. Trying to translate the moves of perfect fucked-up cinema into text is both impossible and necessary.'-- M Kitchell

Excerpt



Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin Untitled Project (?)
SF/LD Books

'I asked publisher Elizabeth Ellen what this book was about and she said she didn’t know yet. She said it would involve illustrations done by both Mira and Tao and that it might resemble a flip book. This seems awesome.'-- Juliet Escoria







Darby Larson Ohey!(novel)
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'In Order to form the United States and establish the People of the United States and Justice, We establish a more perfect Justice. The People of the Union and Justice, We, to form, in Order to form a more perfect People of Justice. The United States of a more perfect Union, in Order to establish the People of We, form a more perfect Justice in Order to establish it. So, We form a more perfect establishing of Justice just as the People of Justice formed the United States before us. We the People of a more perfect Union establish the United States for a more perfect People of it. But in Order to insure the People of a more established Justice feel okay about it, the Union, in Order to insure the People of the Union, forms a more perfect People of the United States. This insures the People of the Union feel insured and a more perfect Union forms. The United States and the form of the Union, to establish Justice, forms a more perfect Union. Meanwhile, the People of the United States establish a more perfect People.'-- from “Pramble”, Darby Larson



Matthew Revert Before I Die, I Will Build a Windmill(novel)
Lazy Fascist Press

'Before I Die I Will Build a Windmill will be released soon from Lazy Fascist Press. It is set amid perpetual bushfires that slowly consume the cities of Australia and force humanity to seek refuge atop mountains. The story follows the life of Tom, an early settler, who, after receiving advice on an anonymous cassette tape, vows to build a windmill. The book focuses on the cyclical nature and embedded patterns inherent in life and the associated difficulties when one attempts to escape.'-- MR

Excerpt



John Ashbery Breezeway
Ecco

'With more than twenty poetry collections to his name, John Ashbery is one of our most agile, philosophically complex, and visionary poets. In Breezeway, Ashbery’s powers of observation are at their most astute; his insight at its most penetrating. Demonstrating his extraordinary command of language and his ability to move fluidly and elegantly between wide-ranging thoughts and ideas—from the irreverent and slyly humorous to the tender, the sad, and the heartbreaking—Ashbery shows that he is a virtuoso fluent in diverse styles and tones of language, from the chatty and whimsical to the lyrical and urbane. Filled with allusions to literature and art, as well as to the absurdities and delights of the everyday world around us, Ashbery’s poems are haunting, surprising, hilarious, and knowing all at once, the work of a master craftsman with a keen understanding of the age in which he lives and writes, an age whose fears and fragmentation he conjures and critiques with humor, pathos, and a provocative wit.'-- Ecco

Excerpt




Spring

Tim Jones-Yelvington This Is A Dance Movie! (novel)
Tiny Hardcore Press

'No progress in sequins. Nothing but mutations. Glamour is the cure for that seasonal affective crap. This my literary church, go on and lick my steeple. Sequins is the glorification of instant character -- a person being one very intense THING. Copy TJY, simulacra touch the sky. Sequins is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities. Shampoo your hair in the 1990's. Sequin your whole mortifying, imaginary and symbolic theater. Spoiler alert: After the cataclysm, TJY becomes the last remaining diva of dance. These thighs they aren't for walking. THIS IS A DANCE MOVIE. After the death of the author comes the rise of the LIT DIVA EXTRAORDINAIRE!!! XOXOXOXO'-- Tim Jones-Yelvington



Edouard Leve Newspaper(novel)
Dalkey Archive Press

'In Newspaper, Edouard Levé’s second “novel,” the acclaimed writer, photographer, and artist made perhaps his most radical attempt to remove himself from his own work. Consisting of fictionalized newspaper articles, arranged according to broad sections—some familiar, some not—Newspaper provides a tour of the modern world as reported by its supposedly impartial chroniclers. Much of this “news” is quite sad, some is funny. The work as a whole serves as a gory parody of the way we have been taught to see our lives and the lives of our fellow human beings.'-- DAP




July

Gabby Bess Post Pussy(poetry)
Coconut Books

'well, i've just finished a book of poetry entitled 'post-pussy' so i guess the rest is up to god.'-- Gabby Bess









September

Frank Hinton Eternal Freedom from Social and Natural Programming (novel)
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'My novel is about meditation.
It is about the struggle to find enlightenment.
My novel is about the fact that North American lifestyle is inconsistent with the fundamentals of eastern spirituality
My novel is about how culture/society fucks with the ability to attain peace
My novel is about two people who have holes in them they are trying to fill.
My novel is about the wall you come up against, over and over when trying to meditate.
My novel is about someone dying and the feeling of emptiness you feel when they are gone.
My novel is about living a privileged lifestyle.
My novel is about what sex is to men and women these days.
My novel is about the internal monologue that regularly works to disrupt the process of watching/relaxing/letting go during meditation.
My novel is about being raised on SNES games and 90s movies.
My first novel was about two people wriggling through life using drugs as a substance of fulfilment. My second novel is about two people wriggling through life using meditation and spirituality as a form of fulfilment.
My novel is set in the present day and reference top 40 songs.
My novel is about the importance of siblings, the strange relationship one has with a sister. It is about being parentless.
My novel is about aloneness which is positive and loneliness which is negative.

My novel is about the fact that a person living a life using tools like facebook, google, driving cars, working, making money, partying, that this lifestyle is wholly inconsistent with the kind of lifestyle one needs to live in order to achieve a state of satori; which is a state of enlightenment I fully believe to exist as I have in certain times of meditativeness touched upon it, rubbed it’s membrane, felt and experienced something of it, however ephemerally, and want to fully attain but feel I cannot attain it in this present world.'-- Frank Hinton

Excerpt



Michael Seidlinger The Strangest (novel)
OR Books

'A modern retelling of Albert Camus's The Stranger.'-- MS










Brian Oliu I/O A Memoir(memoir)
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'The entire book is written in computer code/MS-DOS prompts—it’s a project I’m immensely proud of, as it was critical to my growth as a writer. In a lot of ways, it is a book about understanding the lyric essay & the confines of artifice: for the longest time I thought it was unpublishable, but I’ve never been so happy to be proven wrong. I’m really excited to see how it’ll look in book form.'-- BO





Eileen Myles Chelsea Girls(reprint, stories)
Ecco

'It’s a little hard, because I don’t want to be stuck, I don’t want to give the copyright to someone that I’m uncomfortable with. So a number of people have asked to publish Chelsea Girls, and what I keep waiting for is a publisher that I’m excited about. That was the plan with this book Inferno: A Poet’s Novel, but I’m always too weird. With fiction I’ve always had agents who are always like, ‘Of course you’ll be able to sell this book!’ And then people are so weird about my work. With Chelsea Girls it was like, ‘These stories just kinda crumble, they don’t, you know … arc.’ Or, ‘They kind of deteriorate.’ And I was like, Yes! Yes. I’ve had a few editors in the mainstream who have been interested. They’ll say to me—and this is even in the nineties when I had published a lot of books—they’d say, ‘We’ll have to work very closely with you because it’s a first book.’ It’s like, you’re kidding. So what I felt time and again is what I’m being told is they’re going to help me fix my work. Fix that bad English. Make those stories pop at the end.'-- Eileen Myles

Excerpt




October

Elaine Equi Sentences and Rain(poetry)
Coffee House Press

'American, Me? I would never have thought to describe my poetry as "American." And my first reaction to doing so, even as a speculative exercise, is resistance. I could point out my interest in French and Spanish Surrealism, in German Romanticism. I could say that America does so little to support poets (either financially or spiritually) that it has no business trying to claim them. I could say that, like most poets, I believe writing should transcend geographical borders and cultural limitations rather than reinforce them. I could say all those things, but in doing so, I'd probably become aware of my own particular Midwestern accent. So that gradually, I'd begin to see, as well as hear, how inescapable certain influences are.'-- EE

Excerpt




Fall

Gary Lutz The Gotham Grammarian (?)
Calamari Press

'Speaking of [Gary] Lutz, pleased to announce we (our Cal A. Mari arm) aim to publish his massive Gotham Grammarian sumtime in 2015 ... stay tuned for details. Might start serializing sum ± all online ... hope in the process we dont become self-consious bout our shite grammar.'-- Calamari Press






James Nulick Valencia (novel)
Nine Banded Books

Excerpt










?

Jamie Iredell Fat Kid(novel)
Spork Press

'I’m way more interested in the process than the final product. Just looking at this from the writer’s point of view, you spend so much time with a text, living in it, letting it be this big part of who you are, until it fades, and starts feeling like its own thing, like it’s no longer a part of you. You know you’ve reached this point when you haven’t looked at a text in a while and you read it and you’re like “Who the hell wrote that?” Hopefully you’re also thinking, “Whoever wrote it, it’s good.” After that, everything else that goes with doing stuff with texts feels like a job. I guess there’s the editorial process, and that makes you live with the work again, but sometimes this period feels somewhat artificial, as it’s forced. If you’re working with a good editor–and I’ve been fortunate to have that with most of my books–it’s a great and creative process. But by the time a book’s published and I’m going through the promotional stuff and doing readings and everything, I’m pretty bored with that book, or I’m deeply involved with the creation of another, and my head’s in another space. Don’t get me wrong; I still enjoy doing readings, going on a book tour, having a release party, all that stuff. It’s just that I feel most alive when I’ve spent a day inside something, something that’s so engrossing that when I’m jogging all I’m thinking about is that book, and before I know it I’ve run five miles and I feel like I’m only getting started.'-- Jamie Iredell

Excerpt



Kevin Killian Shy (novel, reprint)
Rebel Satori

'Those who read past the disorienting first chapters of this gritty debut novel will be richly compensated by its intellectually stimulating and emotionally gripping prose. Killian produces a pantheon of distinctive characters--including himself as a young writer whose half-hearted work on a book about his murdered gay lover is stalled by his absorption in the dramas of others around him. The misfits, losers, adolescent rebels and rootless souls of Smithtown, Long Island (N.Y.), whose petty dreams and futile hopes the author sets forth with mercy, are the spiritual kin of Christopher Isherwood's creations in The Berlin Stories. Killian displays a facility for developing teenaged characters, such as Harry Van who, at 15 or 16, is continually aware that his golden youth is temporary; and Paula, a romantic who finds enlightenment in the music of David Bowie. His work is also noteworthy for unlikely phrasings ("Her face lit up like a jack-o-lantern, from inside, with the incredible light and heat of love").'-- Publishers Weekly



James Champagne Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (stories)
Rebel Satori Press

'Some news to report on the writing front: my 2nd weird fiction collection, Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange & Unproductive Thinking, will most likely be coming out later this year. It's being published by Rebel Satori Press, who also published my first collection, Grimoire, back in 2012. As the subtitle indicates, it has ten stories, each of which is illustrated by Benedetta De Alessi (plus cover and interior design by Michael Salerno). I'll continue to give further updates in the future as events unfold.'-- James Champagne




*

p.s. Hey. And those are just the ones I can remember. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed! And somewhere on the page where I found and took that Jonathan Rosenbaum text, he thanked you for your help. Yeah, wild news about the Harper Lee novel. So curious. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I've never heard of Red Noise. I'll go listen and also ask my local music aficionados about them. Huh. Oh, yeah, I've said this multiple times, but the writing and publishing situation in the U.S. is the best right now that it's ever been in my lifetime, so that contrary comment is just ignorance on parade. I've been following your Roxy Music thing on FB. If I wasn't so urgh about commenting there, I would have agreed with that guy who said the Phil Manzanera album is the best of the non-Ferry, non-Eno Roxy solo albums. A great, overlooked gem, that one. And I would have chimed in to say I think 'Taking Tiger Mountain' is one the greatest ever albums, Roxy-related or not. Let me pass along your ... Everyone, or at least everyone reading this who's on Facebook, here's Tosh with a thing of high note/alert: 'On my Facebook, I'm posting up the entire Roxy Music catalog for discussion - including the solo albums of their main era. So anyone here wants to put their thoughts on a specific album that is up, please do so. Just look for "Tosh Berman" on Facebook. My page is open to the public, and there are two. One for my personal writing projects, but then I have one just for 'Facebook' stuff. That is where the Roxy Music stuff is at.' ** Steevee, Hi, S. Oh, very nice about the Mullet retrospective. I'm just discovering him now, but Criterion does seem like they should get on his ball. ** Magick mike, Hey, Mike! You're absolutely right and not pedantic in the slightest, and I don't know how I let that happen. Weird. Anyway, I nipped it as soon as I saw your comment. Envy on the LA Book Fair visit. Shelter Press, yes, wow. I really should do a post focused on them. And the reading sounds really great. Shit, yeah, just a heavy dosage of envy. And I really wanted to catch the Paramount Ranch Art Fair. It's organized by a bunch of people I know and like a lot. I like what that the setting plus its point does in my head, but it could be one of those better dreamed things? An art fair shitshow sounds refreshing though, if nothing else. Anyway, awesome you went down there and then made it back precisely. ** Kier, Hi! Jean Luc is a sight to behold, and he was wearing black contact lens, which added pizazz. He often wears bright red contact lens. That's something to see. Okay, thanks for the sheep shearing info. And, whoa, the guy actually showed up, and he's a homophobe who wounded the sheep. Worth the wait, NOT. Sheep wrangling sounds exhausting. Like going to a demon-possesed gym or something. I'm amazed your typing fingers even functioned yesterday. Kind of a great day, all in all, no? It read beautifully. Mine was an in-between day mostly. I ... worked on stuff. I went out and about collecting pastries and chocolates to supplement our hopefully final day of film editing today. Some mildly irksome back and forth with the producers. Some emailing back and forth with the stars of our film because we need to confirm how they want to be credited in the credits of our film. A handful are using pseudonyms, mostly the ones who are also working fashion models. Uh, oh, Gisele has this new idea/plan. She wants to make a kids TV series about puppets, or, rather, a kind of weird TV show for kids starring ventriloquists and puppets. I guess there's some famous French kids' TV show from when she was young that's her model. I don't remember the name. She says it was for kids but quite strange and poetic. Anyway, there aren't puppet-centric kids shows anymore that I know of -- in the US, I only think of really old shows from my childhood like the Shari Lewis Show and Howdy Doody and stuff -- and she thinks it would be really fresh. And she wants Zac and me to write the series, starting with a pilot. So when we go to Halle to work on the ventriloquist theater piece, we'll be studying everything in a double duty way thinking about the kids show pilot. I'd planned to go to bookstores but I didn't make it. And everything else I did was boring or would turn boring if it was framed inside wordage. Big editing day today for me. How's about you? How did you use your day off? ** Keaton, Oh, okay. That dream was so kind of slow, rhythm-wise, and contemplative and very French New Wave or something. I feel like my dreams always move really fast and are kind of junky rather than artful. Anyway, thank you. That was colorful and serene, a bonus combination. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, cool, about the plaque! Very interested to it see it crystal clearly, obviously. ** Sypha, Okay, I do understand why all that snow would be a drag, but, living in a winter desert as I am, my sympathies are qualified. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff! Yeah, I'm boggled and buggered and bewildered that I let that R-G still slip through. I haven't read an actual book by Kluge, just things here and there and with great interest. 'Cinema Stories' sounds like a total must. That new book sounds very exciting. Sebald intro? Crazy. When does it come out? It would have been in this post, obviously, if I'd known about it. Glad you're feeling a lot better, man. Shit. Thank you very much about 'ZHH'. It's like the little gif novel that could or something. The response has been amazing. I totally fucked up the Mark thing. He wrote to me, and it was in the middle of marathon film editing, and I procrastinated, as I so often do with email and then spaced out and never got back to him. I regret that now, obviously. But thank you so much for alerting him. ** Misanthrope, Your dislike of 'TKAMB' is legendary. The idea that there could be too much cheese on anything involves a concept I can not grasp. Okay, about the emancipation difficulty. I'll just say that his poor school attendance is a pretty big problem and probably one that would grab someone's attention. ** Cal Graves, Hey, Cal. Oh, that sounds cool, the reading. Are you nervous and/or excited about workshopping your story? Do you already know whose opinions you respect and can potentially dismiss? I'd be very interested to hear how that goes, if you don't mind. Good luck. I hope they recognize its undoubted wonderfulness. Oh, I like all of those composers, I guess. Hm. Maybe I'll do a post or something and figure out which particular works I like and recommend that way. I love Reich. Especially the early and early-mid stuff. A film's universe as my home, huh. Why does 'Wizard of Oz' immediately spring to mind? That's weird and kind of embarrassing. How about a cross between 'Wizard of Oz' and 'Salo'. Whatever that would be. Wow, that's even more embarrassing or something. You? Sincerely, yours truly, affectionately, me. ** Okay. Yeah, this year is going to be completely insane as far as new potentially amazing books go, and those up there are just the ones I knew about/remembered off the top of my head. If you have anticipated upcoming books that you want to share with me and the other folks around here, that would be cool. See you tomorrow.

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CaïnaI am the Flail of the Lord
'Caïna, the UK-based black metal project helmed by Andy Curtis-Brignell, can described in a number of different ways, given how much its sound has evolved over the years. It’s rooted in black metal, and has carried at least some element of its ferocious darkness with every permutation, though Caïna has never been particularly faithful to the sounds of church-burners past. At times, like on 2008′s Temporary Antennae, Caïna more closely resembled post-rock. And 2013′s Litanies of Abjection, Curtis-Brignell once again stepped away from tradition and delivered a dark ambient record. Much of Setter of Unseen Snares is remarkably accessible, not just by Curtis-Brignell’s standards, but of black metal in general. Its first proper track, “I Am the Flail of the Lord,” has the momentum and roar of a great metal track, but it’s unusually catchy. In fact, it almost doesn’t sound like black metal, pummeling with the urgency of hardcore.'-- Treble






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The Inward Circles And in Their Groves of the Sun This Was a Fit Number
'Richard Skelton's explorations of the human soul within the landscapes of the British Isles have made for some of the most eloquent and evocative music of recent times, and his recent concert at LSO St Lukes with the Elysian Quartet was one of the live highlights of the year. Now, he returns with a new project, The Inward Circles, and a refreshing new direction. His distinctive drones and rough sonics, the capturing of water over landscape and air moving past rock, have taken on a tougher, more electronic edge reminiscent of artists like Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg's KTL. Where before his music, and the beautiful books that he published to accompany them, might create images of the vast damp spaces of the north of England in a way that seemed to reflect the ambivalence of nature towards us fragile and fleshy mortals, The Inwards Circles is full of threat, things ancient and unknown appearing amidst the sphagnum moss and heather.'-- The Quietus







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Tujiko NorikoMinty You
'My Ghost Comes Back sees the return of Tujiko Noriko after a hiatus exploring worlds beyond those we regularly inhabit. The results of these travels provided the formula for this, her most accomplished record to date. As rich in ambition as it is skewered in it's melodic stance, the album is a decidedly more acoustic affair in which a host of guest musicians incorporate mandolin, viola, musical saw, optigon and other such wares into the exotic environment where her unique songwriting now resides. Furthering an exploration of unorthodox arrangements, rhythm and melody Noriko concocts engaging pop explosions where flickering electronics, staggered rhythms, shimmering vocals all dance on a plateau of melancholic ecstasy. 'My Heart Isn't Only Mine' launches proceedings as a slow burning landscape of electronics, organ and subdued vocal arrangements which unfold over 14+ minutes, delicately setting the scene for a new kind of record. 'Give me your hands' and 'Minty You' exude a joyous warmth as pop perfection extends into the ether.'-- boomkat






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Secret CircuitRogue Unit
'Emotional Response have trawled through boxes of old cassette recordings from L.A multi-instrumentalist Eddie "Secret Circuit" Ruscha to compile a follow-up to 2012's brilliant Tropical Psychedelics compilation. Predictably, the resulting collection is nothing short of brilliant. Typically eccentric, melodious, atmospheric and bristling with interesting ideas, Cosmic Vibrations delves deeper into Ruscha's archives and comes up with gold. Highlights are naturally plentiful, but keep an eye out for the psychedelic ambience of "Electric Brain", the analogue electronic explorations of "Nova Laser", and "Shockers", an acid-flecked chunk of chiming Balearic deep house with exotic, Arabic touches.'-- Boomkat






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Aaron Dilloway & Jason LescalleetBlack Mountain
'It doesn’t mean anything to you until you decide that it does. That could easily work as a mantra to be repeated before playing any of Jason Lescalleet’s or Aaron Dilloway’s music, as a precursor to the experience and a step toward preparation. It’s an interesting premise, because there are no boundaries as to how far you can take it; you can nearly apply this concept to anything and feel content that what you are experiencing is a product of your own intrigue, your own desire to make “it” work. But in order for that to happen, you need to have an entry point that can send you somewhere fascinating. On Popeth, the second collaborative full-length from Lescalleet and Dilloway, that entry point is a deep-cut and disintegrating tunnel of sound, a fractured rumble that marks negotiated conversations between respective artistic methods of instrumentation.'-- Tiny Mix Tapes






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CassegrainNew Hexagon
'Building on ample evidence provided by previous EPs and their bracing live performances, the duo has crafted in a late masterwork of this particular school, even in the face of increasing creative overcrowding. Centres Of Distraction is very much in keeping with the zeitgeist of experimental techno, but it easily surpasses most of its contemporaries in clarity and depth of execution. The pendulum swings of stylistic popularity and focus may already be moving on, as demonstrated by newer outcroppings of noise, kosmiche, and industrial that are now merging their way into dance music, but that is immaterial in the analysis of this particular streak of creativity. Cassegrain may go down as an odd footnote next to more famous peers whose music broadly falls into similar stylistic territory, but they have accomplished the rare feat of creating their own interpretation of that style, and this album is the most formidable, complete expression of their ideas yet and a work that rewards intent listening, hopefully and deservedly for years to come.''-- collaged






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Ghost CultureLucky
'Ghost Culture excels in atmosphere and layering, rather than heading direct for the doof. That's not to say there's nothing to dance to; it's like some sumptuous buffet of electronic wonder - minimalist techno, kraut, ambient house, full on electro. You feel you know something or half recognise a fraction or mood. Like a secret shared by only the listener, like sensual caress and warm whispers and a tune that sounds both familiar yet reformed into new shapes. Ghost Culture is well aware that everything has already come before, but not in an irritating "DO YOU SEE?" way. Managing to make the sounds you've heard millions of times from history, sound fresh and new. This isn't some retro Jack White analogue borefest, this is a snatch of the beauty that remains in the wheezing and dying lights.'-- The Quietus






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canooooopymono montaged oratorio
'Japanese producer Canooooopy draws from the more mundane moments of daily life. "The sound of an air conditioner, the rhythm of a pen falling down, a conversation from other people," are just some of the ho-hum influences on his music that he mentions in an interview with Japanese music blog Hi-Hi-Whoopee, capping his answer off with "a monotonous life." Canooooopy subscribes to a "100% sampling" ethos, and builds every track on his first CD release Disconnected Words Connect the Worlds from noises that seem innocuous enough in their original context—an automated telephone greeting, people chatting, children singing. Yet he’s able to warp them into disjointed little worlds, and Disconnected serves as a solid introduction to one of the wonkier beatmakers to pop up out of Japan over the last couple of years.'-- Patrick St. Michel






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Napalm DeathSmash a Single Digit
'With much of the metal scene in a permanent state of superficiality, Napalm Death’s righteous fury and utter disregard for routine sonic styles mark the grindcore legends out as one of the few truly subversive bands around. But even by their own standards, Apex Predator – Easy Meat is startling. Thematically centred on the horror of industrialised slave labour in the modern world, the band’s 15th studio album revels in the perversity of such compassionate and humane lyrical ideas being tethered to music that seeks to leave real scars. It’s a diverse set that veers from expected bursts of dizzying speed and violence such as "Smash a Single Digit" and" Cesspits" to gruelling, hypnotic dirges such as the dense, unearthly Swans-isms of the title track and the churning "Dear Slum Landlord", while the hammering, dissonant grooves of "How the Years Condemn" and "Timeless Flogging" add twisted accessibility to an otherwise remorseless onslaught. Untrained ears might shrivel in terror, but those who appreciate the joy of noise will recognise the sound of veteran masters on unassailable form.'-- The Guardian






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Spencer Radcliffe & R.L. KellyGreen Things
'Chicago’s Spencer Radcliffe and L.A. native R.L. Kelly (alias for Rachel Levy) make an exceptionally compatible duo on Brown Horse, released earlier this month on Orchid Tapes. Though Radcliffe’s brand of heady and meandering pop isn’t perfectly congruent with Levy’s simple, saccharine tunes, the two converge on a thematic plane. Ultimately, Brown Horse is a record about yearning, whether it’s for a past we can no longer access or an idyllic future that may never actually play out. R. L. Kelly and Spencer Radcliffe both convey an understated authority, bordering the line between youth and maturity, self-deprecation and self-assurance, and quietly asserting themselves through their liminality.'-- Impose






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DalglishOidhche
'Chris Douglas is one of the most enigmatic, progressive and emotionally arresting producer/ composers currently operating around electronic music's fringes. After an eventful youth that saw him host seminal parties in his native San Francisco before taking up root in Detroit - where he worked with and learned from such luminaries as Underground Resistance's Mike Banks and Drexciya's James Stinson, and established his O.S.T. project - he moved to Berlin in 2003. He has since written a series of unexpected, mysterious and affecting albums that twist and reimagine electronic music in enigmatic yet moving ways. Douglas has operated under a variety of names such as Rook, Scald Rougish and Dalglish, with the latter rising to prominence when his 2011 album Benacah Drann Deachd drew considerable praise. This month sees the release of Dalglish's much-anticipated third album, Niaiw Ot Vile, which sees Douglas make his debut on Bill Kouligas' increasingly renowned PAN label. The album marks a clear progression from its predecessor - a beautifully nebulous collection of outsider electronics mapping out new territories that touch on techno, musique concrète and the avant garde.'-- The Quietus






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Black To CommHands
'As the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen's video Earth traveled around the world, different musicians were enlisted to provide live music for it, from Australia's Oren Ambarchi to Germany's Black to Comm. The latter was a natural fit for a video in which long pans take in a fabulous landscape full of piled corpses and visual references to European painting. In Black to Comm's music, we likewise feel ourselves to be plowing across wastelands of aestheticized violence and apocalyptic beauty. You could call it a match made in hell. Black to Comm's music is as abstract as an inkblot, and so you can project your favorite influences onto it: 1970s German experimental music, contemporary noise, eccentric outsider art, classic film scores-- all fair game. Liberated from any one set of formal constraints, Richter uses his many resources to conjure delicate effects of mood and graded shading. If you generally listen to music on the factory speakers in your car or computer, you can basically forget about Black to Comm. All you'll hear is distant rustling and moaning; some indifferently fretted acoustic guitar. The music is for close listening or for nothing.'-- Brian Howe






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PeverelistKinetics
'One to roll with the punches, Tom Ford aka Peverelist belongs to dubstep’s most intriguing characters without being one for the spotlight. Biographical articles or even interviews are rarely to be found. Music nerds care about music, not about their public relations. Notable for holding down the Rooted Records specialist shop in Bristol, and curating the Punch Drunk record label, the man like Peverelist is a driving force behind the marriage of techno and British bass music, alongside his peers Appleblim or Shackleton. Techno at heart but dubstep in name, his sound bridges the gap between the hypnotic minimal patterns of the music first given its name in Detroit, and the heavyweight polyrhythmic machinations of dubstep. Check amazing and outstanding tunes like Gather on his aforementioned Punch Drunk outfit that combines the legacy of Bristol’s bass control, its sound systems and London’s DMZ and FWD>> scenes.'-- rbmaradio.com







*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Who's Leonard Reed? I'll google him. Actually, the testiest waiter in Los Feliz, but testy enough to maybe win the prize for the whole East Hollywood area. ** Sypha, Hi. Do you have a publication date or general release time for your book yet? No, I really need to get Oscar's children's book. Thank you for reminding me. The Harry Potter movies take a big upswing in quality with the third one, if you ask me. ** Tosh Berman, 'Fancy' is great! That's one of the few on that list that I've already read. Jeremy Davies is an awesome writer. He's also one of the editors at the great, great Dalkey Archive press. Hardcore France 1970 sounds like plenty of an allure to me. ** Wvandenberg, Hi, welcome, and thank you a lot for coming in here! Wow, I don't know if I have a very favorite Millhauser story. Huh. I would have to really think about that. Do you have one? ** Slatted light, D-ster! Always greatness to see you! Yeah, 2015 might just be the best US literary year yet. It's crazy. You good? What's up, man? Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi. That Facets set rings a bell. I think I saw it when making the post and spaced out on linking to it. Zachary Quinto as Glenn Greenwald, wow. Weird. Dylan doing standards is just such an incredibly uninteresting idea to me for some reason. No interest in hearing that, at least in theory. But I stopped following Dylan in general ages ago. ** _Black_Acrylic, I'm reading the Kitchell book now. It's really great! Shit, evicted, ugh. I feel that. I have to start seriously searching for a new place right away. I've been putting it off because I've been so busy, but time is starting to run out, ugh, so I need to get on that. I hope the place that your mom found pans out. ** Gregoryedwin, Hi! Oh, well, man, 'Hospice' is a particularly shining light in there. Don't forget that I'd love to do a 'welcome to the world' post re: it if you're still game. Thanks for the props about this place. Very kind of you. Love, me.  ** Chilly Jay Chill, Cool, thanks, I'll look into that Dibell novel. I'm going to scour the local shops for those Kluges first, but I don't have much hope on that front.There's only one actually really good English language bookstore here, and it's mostly used books. So I'll probably order them. That's very exciting! We should start getting more feedback on the film soon. We finished it yesterday, and it's going up on Vimeo Private today, at which point a couple of people we want to get feedback from will be able to watch it without the hassle of coming over to Zac's place. The producers are being very curt with us. They'll see the final version of the film tonight or tomorrow when it's uploaded, I guess. I don't have high hopes there at all. ** Keaton, As you know, I remember about 3% of the dreams I have, if I'm lucky. My dreams that I remember since I was a kid are like the same dream over and over just with an ever-changing cast of characters. That 'Inferno of music' thing is wild. 'Bill Evans Trio with an 80 yr old David Gilmour' is a hell of a brain-twister. Me, I vote for Dylan Carlson never ever ever working with singers again, unless I can pick them for him. Much love back. ** Grant maierhofer, Hi, Grant! That Gary Lutz book news bowled me over too. Exciting news about 'Marcel'! I wish I'd found that in my search when making the post. Awesome! And I'll go check out Queen Mob's Teahouse, obviously! Lots of you = lots of great! Sean Kilpatrick's editing help must have been super. He's so good. Really excited for his new book. Cool, awesome thoughts on Blake's work. Very interesting. New tumblr. I'm there. Everyone, mighty writer and d.l. Grant Maierhofer has a new tumblr. Go check it the heck out, why don't you? It's here. Thanks for your kindness, man. You've very important to this blog and to me too. Word. ** Misanthrope, The Mark Doten novel is fucking great, absolutely! Fingers crossed that ... nothing comes of her trip down South. That's the ideal, right? Yeah, poor LPS has been through way too much shit, and, yeah, heartbreaking it is. I hope he ends up okay. ** Brendan, Hi, B. Cool, let me know how it is. I've had zip luck getting a copy so far, but I'm still on it. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. You're being really sane about the workshop experience, I think, cool. Very good. I find those things can be so traumatic, but, after going to poetry workshops for a couple of years in college, which actually was really helpful, I stopped. I'm easily spooked about feedback until I feel like something is completely finished, I don't know why. Anyway, it sounds sound like a classic workshop experience, complete with the most praise being rained on the most conventional seeming piece. Bleh. Ha ha, unprofessional is a compliment in my book. It usually means 'original'. We finished editing the film yesterday, or probably so. Any changes now will be minuscule, I think. The trailer we made was a quickie. It probably won't go public unless our producers decide to make it so. We'll make a proper trailer at some point. We hope to show the film to a couple of more people later this week. That's a good answer: the camera in 'Slacker'. That's a really nice answer. Hm, your question today is one I think I can't answer just because the film I showed would totally depend on what I knew of the person I was showing it too, like what I thought would be helpful or revelatory to him or her, I think. Yeah, I think I would have to have a particular person in mind. I can't think of a film that would transcend and be fit for anyone. Strange. Can you pick a film that you'd show? Cock-a-doodle-do, Dennis ** The Man Who Couldn't Blog, Hi, Matthew! This is so cool! That's such great news about your new book! Re: the news I saw on Facebook yesterday, I mean. I'm very excited! I will definitely read the new Shya Scanlon. I seem to have accidentally missed that one when I was compiling. Cool! Great to see you! Respect! ** Mark Gluth, The honor is most entiely only mine, Mr. Gluth. Yes, the Purtill/Moore zine, absolutely! I would be a billion percent into hosting that interviewish thing as a post here. Please, even. I'm on my knees, even. ** Kier, Hi, hi, hi! Yeah, that's what Gisele has assigned Zac and me to write. We'll see. She gets a million ideas, but she does seem pretty set on this one. Generally, my health has been great since I went vegetarian. But I was 16, so maybe my body grew into accepting it or something? I do take supplements most of the time, and I do eat a lot of protein stuff. But, yeah, iron pills, for sure, Why not, right? I've never played a single Playstation game in any of its generations ever. Weird. I've always been a Nintendo guy other than one year during which a friend lent me his Xbox. Yesterday Zac and I spent all day into the night finishing the film. And we did! I guess if we get some criticism from the people we show it to, we could go back and fiddle, but we've worked the film to a point where we think its pretty perfect apart from the technical stuff we'll do in post. I would imagine our producers will shred it, but since their opinions and suggestions on the rough cut were incredibly dumb and wrongheaded, I think that won't change anything, and we're confident enough now to defend the film, and I just hope we don't have an ugly war with them. It's been uploaded now, so they'll watch it tonight or tomorrow, I guess. Anyway, we mostly corrected some sound and color issues, and we did a last fiddle with the edit of Scene 2, which is the 'club scene', and, yeah, I think it's done. But we have a little less than two weeks to get select feedback and revisit it before we leave for Germany, at which point it has to be set in stone. That was the massive majority of my day. Then I came home and looked at emails and did a little work and blog-making stuff. That's it. And you? And Thursday? How did you and these current 24 hours get along? ** Done. Up there is the latest gig from me, this one full of newbies after the couple of elderly psychedelic-focused ones. Some awesome stuff in there. Please try it out, if you like. See you tomorrow.

*

p.s. Hey. ** Scunnard, Hi, man! Sure, happy to be picked apart re: sound artists when your time comes. I've been good, thanks, busy finishing a thing just like you've been. Is this project/pdf/book going to go public, he said hopefully? Oh, I can't remember what I asked you. Lost questions are kind of poetic. I have to find a way to enter the comments your way. It feels weird that I don't know how the gate works. Best to you, buddy! ** MyNeighbourJohnTurtorro , Howdy! I'm good, thanks, and you? Oh, influences, well, Zac is the director, so he has command of that stuff, and he's really original, so I suspect it's pretty unique. The few who've seen it say it's very fresh. I mean, I can feel some kind of relationship to Bresson and Malick in there, in its depths or whatever. Glasgow U., cool. Is that squared away? I mean are you in/accepted or still in the app. phase? Really glad you were into the gig, man, of course. You have a most splendid day ahead too! ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, he's a tap dancer who ran with the wrong crowd. That sounds juicy. ** Tim Jones-Yelvington, Hi, Tim! Very glad to see you! Thank you for making me excited. Oh, okay, yeah, I'll get on that asap. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Dylan as a glam artist, that's interesting. I have to think about that. I'd go for the label genius on his late '60s stuff, 'Blonde on Blonde' and 'The Basement Tapes' especially, but that's it, I think. I love mid-late Phil Ochs: 'Pleasures of the Harbor', 'Tape from California', 'Rehearsal for Retirement'. And I adore Donovan, who's a god. And I would add to the 'as good as if not better than Dylan' same period guys: Leonard Cohen, David Ackles, Loudon Wainwright III, Buffy Sainte Marie, Tim Hardin, a.o. ** Sypha, Thanks! Well, we still have to figure out what the Titles and Credits will look like and sound like and a few other odds and ends, but, barring whatever, we're pretty finished. It's only February so hopefully, surely your book will get out this year, but those guys are notoriously unpredictable in their timing, no? That Kevin Killian 'Shy' reprint has been announced for years. ** Justin Headrick, Hi, Justin! Welcome to here and thank you for entering. Oh, wow, no infringement at all. That's an honor and exciting, I'll go listen. Thank you very, very much for that! Cool! ** Grant maierhofer, Hi, Grant. Oh, man, I've meaning to read Mathias Enard's 'Zone' for quite a while now. I really need to get that. Noted in bold. It sounds really interesting and totally up my little alley too. Thanks a lot for filling us/me about it. That wasn't rambling at all. Perish the thought. Thanks again, Grant. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I got the new Napalm Death because I was reading here and there in places whose thoughts I believe in mostly that it's their best in a while, and I think so. That 'You Suffer' Day was/is a classic. Hope the place is both dreamy and utterly available when you tour it today. And that the ArtinScotland.TV interview goes splendidly. Quite a day for you today. Huh, off the top of my head I don't think I know Florian & Michael Quistrebert's stuff. Might be spacing on the name. Looks pretty interesting. I'll see what I can find. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Really, really glad that the gig had some stuff in it that proved to be helpful discoveries. That's the best. Ha, yeah, I can see the coolness of the name Lescalleet with 'Jason' as the whipped cream topping or something. Black Forest in the snow. You just made me hungry for some reason. Oh, Black Forest cake, right, that must be it. And the snow. We apparently got 20 seconds or something of snowfall yesterday here, but I was staring at my laptop at the time and missed it. Hope you slept great. ** Keaton, The 'repetition' thing, maybe, yeah, good call. I'm not a massive Tom Waits fan or anything, but Lanegan is like the muck on the bottom of his shoes. Well, since I actually admire Earth but find them kind of really boring at the same time, I would pick singers whom I think would wake Carlson the fuck up. Russell Mael from Sparks maybe. Or what's-her-me from Crystal Castles. Or Mickey Mouse. ** Steevee, Hi. I've watched a lengthy excerpt from 'La Brune et Moi', but not the whole thing, entirely to see Clementi, and back when I was doing 'research' for 'The Marbled Swarm'. It seemed really charming. I remember wanting to watch it in its entirety. If you go, I would be really interested to hear how you find it. ** Mark Gluth, Thanks, man! Yeah, I think we're finished. You never really know, and we have 10 days or so to fiddle if we want to, but, yeah, other than invisible-to-the-naked eye changes, it's probably a done deal and ready for its post-production polishing. Yes, Elri is one our stars. That's how Michael found him. He's amazing in our film. I may be busy, but I'm never too busy to turn down something on the order of that pdf, so, yes, please, thank you! ** Alistair McCartney, Hi, Alistair, maestro, old pal! You're back! In LA and in here. Having followed your Australia visit remotely via FB, it seems like you were there quite a while. But then with that flight, it would be crazy not to. Really, really happy that your book is going well! The light at the end is always proverbial, so that's great! Pruning, yum! Anyway, sweetness to see you, my friend! Love, me. ** Cal Graves, Ha ha, deneanor is good. Thank you! My name is such unexpected mulch, it's cool. Cool that your prof. got it. That's pretty key, obviously. Oh, right, yeah, I didn't even think about the fucking them up angle, which is kind of weird, me being me. Got it. The film is a done deal, I think, except for the sound and color correcting. It's like the final degree of focus, I guess. Good question, hm. Well, when I did drugs a lot, my drug of choice was LSD, but when you take LSD with someone, the someone basically just disappears for most of the time, if it's good LSD, so I guess I won't pick that. I guess it should be some kind of social enhancing drug. And I'm in a benevolent mood or something, so I'm not going to pick a Date Rape drug and choose some historical hottie as my companion, tempting though it is. So, what and who does does that leave? I used to wish I could have met Rimbaud really badly. It's not as strong a dream now, but it's still a pretty appealing idea. But there would be the problem of him seeming to have been kind of a total prick. So, okay, maybe ... this might work ... I want to take Ecstacy with Rimbaud. What's your choice? Cool, I'm not even going to try to outdo my sign-off from yesterday if it worked that well, ha ha, so I'll just say Fare Thee Well, an old standard. ** Kier, Ha ha, denightful. Seriously, what is the story with my name's mutability? I've always hated the name Dennis, but now I'm softening on it. Oh, yeah, your body should be used to it. But you do a lot of physical stuff, and I don't at all, so maybe my body's deficiencies are always napping or something. Oh, ugh, terrible, about the chicken killing. Jesus. Out with the old and in with new? Weird. That Gira book is really rare, yeah. I don't know why he's such a hard ass about reprinting it unless it has finally been reprinted without my knowing. Really, about 'Streetcar'? Huh. I remember there being kind of great things here and there in it, I think, but I haven't watched since I was a youngun, so I believe you. Anyway, your day was really rich in event and detail. Cool. Mine wasn't, ha ha. I ... hm. Not much of note, this and that, stuff, a bunch of minor stuff that I can't even remember. Zac had to wait until last night to upload our film to Vimeo because his internet connection is too crap, and it would have taken 20 hours or something, so he used some friend's high-speed spot when the friend got off work, so I guess it got uploaded during the night. I'm waiting to hear. Made two blog posts, emails, phoners with associates, a bit of reading, a bit of listening, a bit of figuring out the upcoming trip to Halle/Berlin, and ... wow, it's just a blur of my nose having been to a grindstone of little entertainment value. Oh, well, sorry. Maybe today will hold something colorful in store. Could be. So, how did you top your yesterday? ** Bill, Hi, Bill! Thanks! Well, thanks on behalf of the various authors and publishers, I mean. canooooopy is really, really curious. A recent discovery for me. Looks pretty fruitful. You good? What's up, man oh man? ** Slatted light, Hi, David! Oh, the Hebdo thing, yeah, I was weirded out about that in general for a while, sorry. Thank you very much about 'ZHH'! That means a whole lot. I'm really happy with it, and, as you can see from today's post, I am not yet finished with my interest in working literarily in that form. Hard to tell at this point when our film will actually get out to people. I know the producers want it to play some festivals first. I know they'll be shooting for Cannes and Locarno early in the spring, but I don't know about any others. I know there's some kind of limited theatrical release plus DVD release deal in the States, but the producers are keeping Zac and I in a lot of darkness about all of that stuff. I suppose all of that stuff will get more concrete when we're in Berlin doing the post-production. And, as I've mentioned, the producers don't like the film, so that will undoubtedly affect everything too. So, big question mark re: your question for now for a lot of reasons, but I do think that we'll know a lot more once we've been in Berlin. Great to see you, D-ster, and big love back from me! ** Okay. So, I managed to write a novel using gifs. And then I managed to write a short story with gifs that I posted here a short while back. And now I think I've managed to write a poem using gifs, and there it is. Dig or don't or whatever you do, and I will see you tomorrow.

'Despite having directed over a hundred films in a career that has spanned five decades and also being responsible for, as producer, a number of key works of the Japanese ‘New-Wave’ during the sixties and seventies, very little has been written, in English, about independent director/producer Koji Wakamatsu. In no small part, this is due to the fact that very few of his films have been seen outside of Japan, barring a few international festival screenings in his heyday, the fairly recent (2001) DVD releases of three of his films in America (two of which are already out-of-print) and some international acclaim for his two most recent films (Cycling Chronicles: landscapes the boy saw, 2004 and United Red Army, 2007), which have led to a few retrospectives of his work in Europe and the U.S.

'Another factor has been the critical dismissals of his works put forward by respected Japanese film and culture expert Donald Richie, who, at a time when French film critic Noel Burch was championing Wakamatsu’s films in Europe, wrote that “Wakamatsu makes embarrassing soft-core psychodrama and Noel Burch led the French into seeing great cinematic depth in Violated Angels. It occurs to no-one that the reason for making it was non-cinematic. So Koji was treated like his junk meant something.” It is my intention, with this essay, to try and argue the case that Koji Wakamatsu is indeed a director worthy of attention, whose work displays complex thematic and stylistic elements beyond the confinements of the genre in which he mainly functioned.

'From the available sources, it is clear that the bulk of Wakamatsu’s formative films took their plots either from sensationalist headlines of the day, or from other films that were popular at the time. While it would be fair to say, based on the few films that are available for viewing, that these films lacked any particular signs of originality or talent on Wakamatsu’s part, it must also be noted that although it wasn’t until the release of his eighteenth film (Secret Behind The Walls, 1965) that Wakamatsu developed a style that could be defined as his own, this was not unusual within the Japanese film industry, where it is not unheard of for a director to make five to ten films a year due to the extremely short production times of most Japanese films. Given that Wakamatsu was taking his ideas from news stories of the day, these quick turnarounds worked in his favour, as by the time his films hit the theatres, the headlines that they were based on were still fresh in the audiences memory and he quickly began to gain a reputation as a director of edgy, contemporary films that did fairly well at the box office (compared to other productions of the time).

'From the standpoint of Auteur theory, acknowledgement must be given to the involvement of both Adachi and the films cinematographer, Hideo Ito (who would lens at least ninety percent of the films Wakamatsu directed during the period covered in this chapter), both of whom, it can be argued, can claim a degree of authorship over the work. To counter-argue this point, it must be stated that Wakamatsu rejected a number of early drafts of Adachi’s script and that in his position as director and producer he would have had the final say over the composition of the shots.

'Starting with his politicization of the sexual act and developing over the years to an artistic maturity that gave voice to a number of creative, personal and political ideas that were very much his own, even when collaborating with other artists. While it is true that much of his work is filled with less that subtle uses of metaphor and symbolism, it is to some degree, this heavy-handed approach to the subject matter that can be seen as one of the keys to his status as an Auteur. To return to Astruc’s pen analogy, it could be said that instead of a pen being Wakamatsu’s tool of authorship, he used an AK-47, which would better describe both his revolutionary political viewpoint and his sledgehammer approach to delivering his messages.

'It has also been shown that there is a consistency of style, theme and personality that runs through the majority of the films covered in this text and that Wakamatsu’s work easily meets both Bazin’s ascertation that an Auteur's films must ‘reflect the directors personal vision’ and Astruc’s definition of not being ‘hindered by traditional storytelling techniques’, the proof being readily found in Wakamatsu’s experimentalism and his constant use of turning his films into vehicles with which he could convey his personal and political viewpoints. It is also clear that as his own world view changed with his increasing maturity, so did that of the films he was directing, from the ideological rantings of his earlier works to the, mostly, subtler approaches of his later films.'-- EG



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Stills

























































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Further

Koji Wakamatsu @ IMDb
The Essential Films of Koji Wakamatsu
'Koji Wakamatsu: Film-maker who was unafraid to explore the less palatable aspects of Japan'
The official 'Pink Years' page @ Facebook
'Remembering Koji Wakamatsu'
'Koji Wakamatsu: From yakuza to pornographer'
'KOJI WAKAMATSU: THE REBELLIOUS AUTEUR'
Koji Wakamatsu @ dissidenz
Un Certain Regard Q&A: Koji Wakamatsu
'Koji Wakamatsu: ode to a radical film-maker'
In Memoriam, Koji Wakamatsu
INTERVIEW WITH KOJI WAKAMATSU
'HOMMAGE À UN CINÉASTE PERSÉVÉRANT'
'Hommage à Koji Wakamatsu'
'koji wakamatsu: the ambiguous gaze'



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Extras


The Hardcore History Lessons of Koji Wakamatsu


A collection of scenes from Koji Wakamatsu's films


Koji Wakamatsu's last interview


Don't F*** With Koji Wakamatsu


Koji Wakamatsu on "Season of Terror"



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Interview




You've been back and forth to Europe several times over the past eighteen months or so, which struck me because I remember you used to have difficulties obtaining visas for certain countries.

Koji Wakamatsu: Yes, that was because of my various stays in Palestine. I remember one occasion when I came to France to shoot a music video. We arrived at Orly airport and every crew member and all our equipment was allowed through customs, except for me. They stopped me, took me to Charles de Gaulle airport and put me on a plane straight back to Tokyo. They first discovered the $50,000 cash I was carrying on me. Then when they checked their computers they found that I had ties with the Red Army, so they immediately suspected that I was going to deliver all this money to Red Army members. They only started listening to me once I got an interpreter and explained to them that I was a filmmaker and that I had produced In the Realm of the Senses.

These days, with the European Union, it's gotten easier. On this trip they didn't even check my passport properly. But it's true that I still can't get into the USA, Russia, and Australia to this day. Aside from those three countries I can basically go where I like.

How does it feel to see The Embryo Hunts in Secret find a new and appreciative audience so far and so long from its place of birth?

KW: Nobody took the film seriously after I'd made it. Most people said it was rather mediocre, in fact. It took me five years to actually get it released in Japan. That's how long it took for people to grasp what I was on about. In the movie I talk about the relationship between those in power and the people, but I do it through the relationship between a man and a woman. I didn't address any political issues directly, but I'm sure most viewers will understand what the film is trying to say. You could give it a more philosophical reading if you were so inclined, but it's not a difficult or complicated film. I mostly wanted to talk about politics, but without judging what's right and what's wrong.

In the 1960s, The Embryo Hunts in Secret caused a bit of a scandal at a festival in Belgium. Back then you said that people would come to understand the film better in the future. It looks like you were right.

KW: That's true, they even threw raw eggs at the screen. Some people got up to stop the projection, so there was this crowd gathering in front of the screen. Then there were others who wanted to see the movie and they started launching those eggs at the protesters. Yoko Ono was also at that festival, with her movie about one hundred women's bottoms. She was so poor she begged me to let her sleep in my hotel room. To thank me, she gave me some grass. I discovered marihuana thanks to Yoko Ono.

How did you experience that incident, you as a filmmaker who likes to provoke his audience in order to get a reaction from them?

KW: I thought it was better to have a ruckus like that, with two very polarized opinions, than to have everyone agree. Consensus is boring. It was really fascinating to see such diverse reactions. When I see now how people react to my new movie about the United Red Army, where everybody just finds it "interesting", I must admit feeling disappointed.

It's true that nobody throws eggs at movie screens anymore, but even a touchy subject like the Red Army doesn't provoke any strong reactions anymore?

KW: Directors and producers in Japan all hope to receive funding from the Ministry of Culture. It's logical that they should follow the ministry's guidelines, but it leads to boring films. Pretty soon there will be no more films like mine in Japan. The money for that fund comes out of taxpayers' pockets, but the committee that takes the decision which projects to support is made up of various industry figures: directors, producers, scriptwriters, etc. I call them illiterate, because they have no idea how to read a screenplay, they don't have a clue how two directors can bring entirely different visions to a similar storyline or subject. These committee members are puppets of the ministry. They use the people's money, but they act like it's their own.

I am a member of the Directors' Guild of Japan. My colleagues in that organization had heard that I was making a film about the United Red Army, and they told me they really wanted to see it. So I set up a special screening, but I told them they had to pay for their tickets. Aside from Sogo Ishii and a handful of others, most of them declined. Those guys are idiots, parasites. They are useless and I have every intention of continuing my struggle against them.

In that sort of climate, what are your plans for your film United Red Army?

KW: I will self-distribute it and handle all the promotional aspects too. It will be shown in one theatre in Tokyo, in Shinjuku. In Nagoya I will show it at the movie theatre I own there at least until March of 2008. After that it will play around the country. We've got Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Okayama, Sapporo, and Niigata already lined up. Once you have a hit in smaller theatres, the multiplexes start to show an interest. That's what happened with Aleksandr Sokurov's movie about Emperor Hirohito, The Sun. It made 300 million yen that way, starting out in a tiny number of small cinemas. Also, that theatre in Shinjuku recently scored well with two documentaries, an American one called Hiroshima, and another on the battle of Okinawa called Himeyuri.

I want the Japanese people to see this film. Those who remember the period will surely be moved by it, but I want young people to see it above all. The film talks about the years between 1960 and 1972, the things that really happened. Kids don't know about these things, because they're not treated in their school textbooks. In the 60s you had the assassinations of Kennedy and Malcolm X, you had the Vietnam War, May 68, Mao in China, all these major events happening around the world. In Tokyo we had the Shinjuku riots, when students stopped a transport of material destined for the US Army in Vietnam. Some of those young people ended up going to North Korea, others wound up in Palestine, and the ones that stayed behind formed the United Red Army. They holed themselves up in a mountain lodge, which became the famous Asama-sanso case. It's a simple story, I guess, but I wanted to record it and pass it on to others. I saw that movie The Choice of Hercules, directed by Masato Harada. What he shows is completely wrong. Film has the power to influence people, and they're going to believe that that's what really happened. I wanted to present my take on the story, which is why I put all my money into this film. I mortgaged both my houses and spent more than 100 million yen. But I will do everything in my power to have this movie make back at least ten times that amount.

I heard you used your own country house as the stand-in for the Asama lodge.

KW: Yes. The story required that I destroy it for the filming of the police siege, so that's what I did. I leveled my own house to make this film.

You said the people who remember the period will be very moved by your film. But those people are all responsible citizens now. They've left whatever ideology they had behind them.

KW: Yes, they live like nothing happened. That's the generation that lived through the bubble era and also experienced its burst. It's a big group of people, and if one in ten comes to see my film, I'd be happy. In the sixties, when they were young, it was easy to express your dissatisfaction. You could go out into the streets and demonstrate. Today if you do something like that, express your discontent in public, you'll get arrested much more quickly. Back then, we threw stones when we were angry. When I meet kids today, I tell them they should throw stones while they're young, because they won't do it when they grow up. But nobody does that sort of thing anymore. Maybe today's kids are more conservative in the sense that they think more about their individual futures. They figure that if they want a good job later, it's better to not get in trouble today.

It's interesting that the student activists of the 1960s were all from well-off, middle-class families. They weren't poor. When you're poor, you are too busy worrying about surviving. Even finding a bowl of rice to eat is a struggle in itself. But when you're a little better off, you have time to spend on things like activism. It's something for the young, though. When you have a job and kids, you can't go out throwing stones anymore.

Do you believe that movies are still an effective way to inform young people?

KW: I'm not talking about education. What I'm after is telling the truth. Movies are entertainment, but that doesn't stop us from telling the truth through them. In Harada's film you get Beethoven on the soundtrack and Koji Yakusho as the chief of police. It's a hymn to the cops, but it was those same cops that pushed those kids to go as far as they did. If it's a profit you're after, there are other ways to make money than by making films. Me, I try to at least remain truthful when I make my films. Also, a true filmmaker doesn't make films from the point of view of those in power. To me, that's a fundamental rule: you have to make films from the perspective of the weak. Take Akira Kurosawa, for instance. His films were always about the downtrodden.

Those five young people that wound up at that mountain lodge swore an oath to never reveal what really happened in there. Two of the survivors are still in prison waiting for their death sentences to be carried out, a third committed suicide in jail, but another one managed to escape and flee to the Middle East. I met him there and he told me the whole story. With this movie I tried to get his words across as faithfully as possible. I didn't choose sides. My film doesn't condone what those students did, but it's also not on the side of the police. What I wanted to show was the truth. I wanted to show the history, what happened and why, how things changed. It's their history. It starts with the riots against the Anpo treaty and the rise in university tuition fees that was the actual reason for the students to unite and start protesting, and continues all the way up to the aftermath of Asama-sanso.

Knowing your own history, your neutrality will come as a surprise to many viewers expecting a political pamphlet.

KW: I show the good sides, but also the bad sides of their actions. The truth is that they didn't have enough courage. That's the last line of dialogue in the movie. Once we get a bit of power, we start trying to consolidate it, because we are weak. That happened here too. The head of the United Red Army wanted to stay in charge, that's why he had his own comrades killed. It's like Joseph Stalin. Such people are completely responsible for the consequences of their actions, but at the same time their wish to stay in power is understandable, which also makes them very tragic. So both the victims and the perpetrators are tragic.



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14 of Koji Wakamatsu's 107 films

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Secrets Behind the Wall (1965)
'The first of Wakamatsu’s films to gain both international attention and national controversy when it screened at the 1965 Berlin International Film Festival, Secrets Behind The Wall is also the first of his films that can seriously be considered as an Auteur film, displaying both an increase in his artistic abilities as a director and a talent for turning the personal and sexual exploits of the films protagonists into metaphors for wider, political concerns. The film follows a young student, named Makato, as he studies for his university entrance exams and who knowing he is doomed to failure, spends his time reading American pornographic magazines and spying on his neighbours, one of whom is a woman having an extra marital affair with an ex-radical activist suffering from a radioactive keloid scar, a side effect of his exposure to the atomic blast at Hiroshima. As the film progresses, Makato becomes increasingly frustrated, both sexually, with his surroundings and at his impending failure with his exams, finally snapping and murdering his sister before he rapes the adulterous neighbour, who has by this point become so jaded that she openly encourages his aggressive advances, ultimately resulting in her death at his hands.'-- EG



Excerpt



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The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966)
'The Embryo Hunts in Secret offers one of the first variations on a story that recurs again and again in the Japanese cinema of provocation, in which characters, either in a folie-a-deux or through coercion, usually by a man over a woman but not always, retreat into an oedipal space and begin devolving through a process of sexual and violent exploration of the body and the psyche. Certainly such a description also encompasses the likes of Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976), which Wakamatsu produced, Yasuzo Masumura’s The Blind Beast (1969), through to Takashi Miike’s Audition (2000). The Embryo Hunts in Secret, unlike some of Wakamatsu’s follow-ups (Violated Angels, 1967, Go, Go Second Time Virgin, 1969), isn’t based on a famous crime case, although it could easily have been. The story is simple in the extreme, commencing with a couple making out in a car, grappling in feverish ecstatics as rain pours outside. The man (Hatsuo Yamaya), manager of a department store left to him by his parents, invites the girl (Miharu Shima), one of his shopgirls from the men’s fashion section, into his house, which proves a Spartan space. Drunk and horny, the girl’s excited to be with the boss, but he has rather different intentions to mere sexual acrobatics.'-- this island rod



the entire film



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Violated Angels (1967)
'As Noel Burch says about this film, it is “…emphatically and specifically informed by the rather mechanical association of unbridled sexual fulfillment with revolutionary politics, an association which characterizes not only much independent film-work, but also the ideology of certain ultra-Leftist groups in Japan”. It is this relationship or association between sexual fulfillment and revolutionary politics that I want to talk briefly about today. And while you can certainly argue, like Burch does, that in this film the association between sex and politics is rather ‘mechanical’, it nevertheless resonates with ideas prevalent not in only in Japanese Leftist circles but in the West as well. As Dagmar Herzog says regarding Germany in the 1960s and 70s, “Numerous New Leftists argued directly that sexuality and politics were causally linked; convinced that sexual repression produced racism and fascism, they proposed that sexual emancipation would further social and political justice”. Similar views were widely held in the US and the rest of Europe during that time as well. While these ideas that were prevalent in the Left during the 1960s are largely dismissed today, Noel Burch concludes that Violated Angels“proves that when erroneous concepts are put to work by gifted artists, they can be extraordinarily productive”. While the ideas I’ve presented are one way of approaching this film, it is of course not the only way and one of the reasons Wakamatsu’s films are still watched and discussed today is that they are so open to divergent interpretations, they are, as Burch says, “extraordinarily productive”.'-- Matt Winchell



Excerpt



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Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969)
'It was shot in four days and represents probably the apex of Koji Wakamatsu’s early shock fests that so delighted the underground devotees and saw him labelled as a pariah to rank with Tekechi in Japanese film infamy. While Yoshida and Oshima were testing the limits of the cinema for the more intellectual audience, Wakamatsu was doing the same on his own cheap, guttural level. Go, Go, Second Time Virgin, if probably surpassed as art by Ecstasy of the Angels, is still probably the place where Wakamatsu virgins are best starting. Shot in monochrome (including a blue-tinted flashback to an earlier beach rape), the films bursts into colour for the orgy sequence, one which, urolagnia aside, now seems no more erotic than a game of naked twister. Even the rooftop rapes are cold, mechanical, almost functional, the victim so dispassionate as to give the whole a sense of the decrepit, of almost necrophilia, only emphasised more by the lyrics of the song, including even references to incest. “Love is a nitro”, so the heroine states, and it’s certainly a lethal cocktail. Put simply – you fuck, you die. “Tell me why you want to die and I’ll kill you” Tsukio says. “You can rape me, it’s really OK”, Poppo tells him, oblivious as to the contradiction in the statement, as if rape and sex were one and the same. As succinctly as possible, it’s a statement of nihilistic rebellion whose inflammatory spirit would later be captured by Sid Vicious, by Tim Roth’s skinhead Trevor in Made in Britain, by Malcolm McDowell’s Alex de Large and distilled in essence to Poppo’s fierce repeated cries of “fuck you!” to both the world and the audience.'-- Wonders in the Dark



the entire film



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Violent Virgin (1969)
'Violent Virgin (1969) is one of Kôji Wakamatsu’s early films. Although it is certainly part of his pink film oeuvre the film maps out many of the director’s later concerns. Like other filmmakers working in the late 60s and 70s, such as Melvin Van Peebles and Ruggero Deodato, Wakamatsu used the format of sexploitation as a way into an exploration of other transgressive acts such as extreme violence, amorality and oppression. The film does have a story: a man and a woman are held in captivity by a group of yakuza thugs and the film explores various shifts in power dynamics between the pair and this group and another group of well-dressed yakuza bosses. For a film constantly switching between numerous complex sexual and socio-political positions it remains elegantly simple in its poetic rendering. Wakamatsu favours an uncluttered mise en scène. Yamatoya is nude for much of the film or wearing a woman’s slip, and his lover Hanako, played by Eri Ashikawa, is topless and wearing only her underwear. So many shots depict nude flesh against the grassy wilds or bare earth. There is something levelling about this that creates a sense of equivalence between the characters, a grounding that is present at the same time as a sense of fluctuating structures. This suggests that Wakamatsu wanted to show the characters as base essence as if he was somehow trying to get close to the root of the motivations that prompt the members of the group to behave in the way they do. He, like us, is left with a sense of enigma but also the suggestion of myriad social configurations.'-- Electric Sheep Magazine



the entire film



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Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969)
'As well as being Wakamatsu’s first colour feature, the heavily saturated colour schemes adding an almost psychedelic flavour to the usual freeze-frames and overlays, it is also the first of his films to incorporate Landscape theory into its structure. First formulated by Adachi, left-wing film critic Masao Matsuda and script writer Mamoru Sasaki, Landscape theory stated that our environment had the power to effect our personal and political identities and that through the use of urban design, state power became embedded in our very surroundings, it also theorised on the political implications of recording these landscapes on film. In Running in Madness, Dying in Love this theory manifests itself in the long durational shots of the protagonists’ surroundings, making their environments as important a part of the narrative as the actors and making their travels as much a journey through Japan’s political landscape as it is an attempt to escape from their crime. Throughout the film there is something of an air of bitterness that can be detected, most obvious in the film’s conventionally unsatisfying ending which can be seen as a reflection of Wakamatsu’s sense of dissatisfaction with the idealism of the political movements with which he was involved.'-- EG



Excerpt



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Sex Jack (1970)
'Set in the near future, a small gang of revolutionary students are hidden away by a small-time thief. While they are hiding, all but the thief take turns having sex with an unhappy (and perhaps unwilling) girl who has had the misfortune to get involved with them. About Sex Jack, Kōji Wakamatsu said: "I wanted to show how the revolutionary movements are always infiltrated by the moles working for the government."'-- Wiki



Trailer



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Shinjuku Mad (1970)
'Shinjuku Mad was released in 1970, a year after student activism reached its peak with the shutting down of college campuses in Tokyo. Although his previous films were critical of young people, his sympathies still lay with them. However, Shinjuku Mad seems to be going another direction. The father of a slain young man comes to Tokyo to find the killer, known as Shinjuku Mad. The police are no help so he sets out on his own, poking around in (sometimes literally) underground coffee bars and crash pads in Shinjuku, then ground zero for the Japanese counter cultural movement. He's straight-laced and square but he's not insensitive to young people. In fact, he likens what they're doing to the architects of the Meiji Restoration, the men who helped bring Japan out of its feudal age. It's clear Wakamatsu and his usual screenwriter, Masao Adachi, have more respect for the honest working man of Japan than the "revolutionary," who talks a lot but never does anything except squabble with others. Even more than the fact that Shinjuku Mad feels like a real movie, complete with coherent plot and resolution, it's this aspect that surprised me the most. That a revolutionary filmmaker should take the position of the conservative working class says a lot about how he felt about the state of the revolution.'-- yakihito



Excerpt



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Ecstasy of the Angels (1972)
'Originally created in 1961 to distribute European art films, Japan's Art Theater Guild (or ATG) began producing their own independent films in 1967, and soon unleashed a string of experimental, innovative, and highly controversial works that would challenge not only postwar Japanese society, but cinema itself. ATG captured the pulse of Japan's blistering underground movements and cultural schisms, tackling everything from queer pride to the after-effects of World War II, communist radicalism to Situationist theater, pornography to politics. “We are going to war! Smash it all!” cries a revolutionary in Koji Wakamatsu's incendiary cine-assault, Ecstasy of the Angels; ATG aimed to do just that, with film as its main weapon. This film is the creation of Director Koji Wakamatsu who, after filming the Japanese Red Army in the Palestinian territories, became a target of both the Japanese government and Interpol, and was blacklisted by the American government, unable to leave Japan. Maverick auteur Koji Wakamatsu once again marries softcore porn with radical politics with this trippy tale about a member of a militant group coming apart at the seams as it plans its latest strike against society. The members of the group, who all go by code names based on the days of the week, labor under the "Autumn" branch of the organization. Following a late-night weapons raid on a U.S. Army base that turns bloody, members of the "Spring" branch attack, torture, and rape Saturday and Friday, demanding the weapons cache. This betrayal echoes throughout the group, turning friend against friend, as one and all descend into paranoia and sexual decadence. Some go crazy, as others grow ever more revolutionary. Evidentially, a splinter group unleashes a wave of bomb attacks upon the unsuspecting bourgeois of Tokyo."-- Jonathan Crow, Rovi



Excerpt


2 excerpts


Excerpt



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Torture Chronicles (1975)
'A cult film master, Koji Wakamatsu, reveals the Japanese taboo!! Shot by 35mm film. Various tortures have been executed in the Japanese history. Director, Koji Wakamatsu has put together a collection of these tortures to reveal its bloody history.'-- Cinema of the World



Trailer



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Erotic Liaisons (1992)
'During the first few years of the 90s, 18-year old Rie Miyazawa was taking the Japanese media by storm. The half-Dutch/half-Japanese 'talento' (a catch all term that essentially equates to an all-singing, all-dancing "entertainer") had debuted in a series of TV commercials when she was 11, her early career as a child model paralleling such wholesome girl-next-door types as Brooke Shields and Patsy Kensit. Perhaps what is most curious about Miyazawa's initial two-pronged assault on the Japanese cinema screen is how it could have yielded such radically different results. By all accounts she acquitted herself well in the title role of Hiroshi 'Woman in the Dunes' Teshigahara's lavish historical adventure, Princess Go (Go Hime). Her appearance in Koji Wakamatsu's Erotic Liaisons, however, piques the curiosity as to what sort of public image she was exactly trying to cultivate at the time. Opinions on the film from Western critics vary wildly, with Thomas Weisser proclaiming it "a near perfect film" in his Essential Guide to Japanese Cinema, and Mark Schilling's offhand dismissal of it as "dreck ... made by dirty old men for dirty old men" in his Encyclopedia of Japanese Pop Culture. I wouldn't say it's either, really. Whereas the very title would seem to pitch it towards the erotic thriller end of the market, it is ponderously paced and decidedly unexciting, and its erotic content pretty sparse.'-- Midnight Eye



Excerpt



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Endless Waltz (1995)
'Koji Wakamatsu's documentary film about Japanese free jazz/improvisation saxophonist Kaoru Abe.'-- IMDb



the entire film



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United Red Army (2007)
'The most militant of the many radical political groups forged in late 1960s Japan, the United Red Army has also been among the most contested and controversial. After a string of bold and deadly attacks on the police in 1972, several URA members fled to a remote mountain holdout where the bloody events unflinchingly chronicled in Wakamatsu’s celebrated most recent film took place. A frightening exploration of the conflict between individual expression and ideological conviction, Wakamatsu’s powerful and unsettling film focuses with harrowing intensity on the disintegration of the group as its members gradually turn on each other in grueling sessions of critique and, eventually, torture. While drawing extensively from his own experience within radical politics, Wakamatsu also based his screenplay and story on exhaustive interviews conducted with those surviving Red Army members he was able to track down, many in prison or in exile.'-- Harvard Film Archive



Trailer


Excerpt


Excerpt



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Caterpillar (2010)
'Aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually crude, Koji Wakamatsu's brutally effective Caterpillar finds the legendary fringe-relegated director making obvious points about Japanese nationalism/ militarism and less obvious ones about the sexual dynamic of marriage. Naturally, the two are intimately linked. Shooting in a unlovely palette of browns and employing barely functional framings and jagged shock cuts, Wakamatsu's latest revamps most of the premise from Dalton Trumbo's classic novel Johnny Got His Gun; our returning "hero," fresh from the second Sino-Japanese War, similarly loses his arms, legs, and hearing, but maintains his eyesight and ability to speak. More importantly, Wakamatsu's film places the soldier's homecoming in the context of a small-town village brainwashed by wartime patriotism and focuses its attention on the veteran's wife, torn between an indoctrinated sense of duty and her growing sense of the absurdity of her situation.'-- Slant Magazine



Trailer


Excerpt




*

p.s. Hey. I'm due out the door unexpectedly very soon so I'm going to have to move very fast and talk in sound bites today to get this in, my apologies. ** Kiddiepunk, Thanks, Kiddie. Film is finally up! Link, etc. coming right away. ** Keaton, It's fuck-up-able, that's for sure. Thank you re: the poem, man. Hotel?! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. If I knew who made the gifs I would pass along your compliments. ** Etc etc etc, Hi. I'm missing all the high gloss shit. I need some of that, I think. 'Hard to Be God', sounds familiar. Good? No, extremely hard to get indie books here. Only by extreme luck and, otherwise, via online ordering. Sucks. ** Sypha, No, you did it again, ha ha. Yeah, into the Kim Gordon book as a fun thing to do. Anna Kavan is excellent. 'Ice' is great. ** Steevee, Hi. Agree on Tim Buckley although I think of him as more visionary/Scott Walker-like. I really can not stand Joni Mitchell. I'm a massive fan of Buffy Sainte Marie's experimental album 'Illumuinations'. Highly recommended. Among her more folksinger/protest stuff, my favorite is probably 'Little Wheel Spin and Spin'. ** Damien Ark, Thanks, man. Grab that rim gif with my blessings. ** The Man Who Couldn't Blog, Weirder and darker, yum. Can't wait, man. Best of the best to you, Matthew. ** Thomas Moronic, Thank you, sir. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Thank you a lot. Yeah, that would be pretty tough.  I wish. ** _Black_Acrylic, It's 'mum' as in silent. The poem is about the muted noise/sound in it. That was a great, mega-successful day you had there, congrats! I'll check out those artists in that show when I get back from where I have to be. Bon weekend! ** Kier, Hi! No, we had big uploading issues yesterday, and the film is only uploaded as of this morning, so the immediate future will tell re: everyone's reactions. That's a weird-ass dream by your co-worker. Kind of weird that he told you that. Kind of weird all around. Luckily, since I have no time right now, my day was a big nothing yesterday. Really, not a thing happened that I will feel sad neglecting to tell you due to the utterly minor nature of every action. But now it's the weekend. I'll try harder. Pony up about your hopefully big, fun two days. ** MANCY, Thanks a bunch, S! Cool, very cool, I'll get your cassette when I get back from where I'm about to zoom to. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Oh, maybe, I'm not sure. I'm still very excited by working with gifs, so probably something will continue. Like I told Kier, the film only got online this morning, so reactions should start coming in over weekend maybe. Glad you've at least got that time to power up your novel. I did see that new about the Malicks. So excited! No, I need to query Christian about that, for sure. I like Jess's collages/paintings, yeah, sure. Do you? ** Cal Graves, Hi. You always have the best answers to the questions. Good timing, 'cos my rushing would result in a shitty answer anyway today, probably. Have a superb weekend, man. ** Okay. Sorry again about the high speed p.s. Gisele was talking about Wakamatsu to me the other day 'cos she's been watching his films to research something or other, so I thought I'd do a Day on his stuff, and there you go. Have great weekends! See you on Monday.

'When I drove up to Zackary Drucker’s home off San Fernando Road, the front door was wide open—a startling sight since most of the surrounding houses have metal bars over the windows and doors. The Los Angeles video and performance artist lives in Glassell Park, an industrial strip in Northeast Los Angeles. Besides the open door, the house also stood apart with its manicured lawn and the polished wood floors I glimpsed through the doorway. It was as if Drucker’s house was in color, and the rest of the neighborhood in black and white.

'Drucker welcomed me with open arms. We’ve only met a few times socially at art functions, but that’s just how she is. The house is immaculate, though she explains—as if apologizing—she has recently moved in and the decorating was not quite finished. The empty walls are freshly painted in dark grays, browns and puce. Drucker also is dressed in neutral colors wearing a white T-shirt with snug pants, showing off her slim figure. Drucker is a natural beauty, with blond hair and a devilish smile—like she’s got something up her sleeve, but in a harmless way. Her deep-set eyes are so blue they practically sparkle.

'Drucker is a dynamo, who, at the young age of 29, has created an insightful body of films, photographs and performances challenging gender normativity. Her work, which always intersects with her own transsexual identity, postulates queer alternatives to the status quo. She has staged performances inviting audience members to perform depilatory actions on her body. She has created gorgeous and inquisitive photographs and films that document her life, her personality and image, but also interrogate larger questions of gendered performance, fashion, class, historical lineage, and bodies that resist codification. Recently she was invited to take part in the 2012 Hammer Biennial, presenting SHE GONE ROGUE, an opulent and fractured narrative film with existential leanings.

'Drucker is an artist who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality and seeing. Her participatory art works complicate established binaries of viewer and subject, insider and outsider, and male and female in order to create a complex image of the self. The disciple of a silenced, ghettoized community, Drucker uses a range of creative devices that all strive towards the portrayal of bodily identity, her own and that of others, obsessively infusing visual media—photographs, videos and performance art—with acute, masochistic emotional compulsions.

'Conceiving, discovering, and manifesting herself as “a woman in the wrong world,” her work is rooted in cultivating and investigating under-recognized aspects of transgender history. Interested in obliterating language obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark subconscious layers of outsider agency, Drucker disarms audiences and uses her body to illicit desire, judgment, and voyeuristic shame from her viewer.

'Drucker, whose work often celebrates and amplifies the viewer’s inability to affix easy norms and codes, is one of the leading participants in a new generation that is rediscovering performance as a space for revolt, expression, and creative bedlam. “We’re preparing for a future generation and also laying the foundation the same way that our predecessors have laid the foundation for us,” Drucker says. “A lot of what I’m interested in is my own history, my own kind of counterculture history, or the history of transwomen, drag queens, gender outlaws. I think that we’re doing necessary work. And we’re contributing to that rich history of perseverance, of determination, or creating our own narrative."'-- collaged



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Further

Zachary Drucker Website
Zachary Drucker @ Twitter
Zachary Drucker @ Facebook
'The Growing Transgender Presence in Pop Culture'
Zachary Drucker @ Lus De Jesus Gallery
ZACKARHYS @ tumblr
'Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, from many angles'
Photos: ZACKARY DRUCKER: DOCUMENT JOURNAL
'Until Now: Zackary Drucker Retrospective'
'Zackary Drucker wants to archive Flawless Sabrina's lifework'
'INTERVIEW WITH ZACKARY DRUCKER AND RHYS ERNST: SIX YEARS'
'Relative Truths: Zackary Drucker interviews Flawless Sabrina'
Q&A with Multimedia Artist and SVA Alumnus Zackary Drucker
Photos: ZACKARY DRUCKER @ Volta NY
'How Zackary Drucker Photographs Trans People'
'zackary drucker | made in god'
Buy the Zackary Drucker Doormat



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Additionally


YouTube curated by Zackary Drucker


Destabilizing a Destabilized Existence, Panelists: Zackary Drucker and A.L. Steiner


Trailer: 'Irma Vep, the last breath', starring Zackary Drucker and Flawless Sabrina


Transactivation


Zackary Drucker at Bitches Rule: Cycle 2



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Interview
from Art Pulse




Your most recent work is an experimental film titled SHE GONE ROGUE, which you made with director Rhys Ernst for the Made In LA 2012 Hammer Biennial. I know that the film features queer legends such as Vaginal Davis and Holly Woodlawn. Can you say a little about this film? What inspired it, and how do you see it relating to past work?

Zackary Drucker: Though the film is abstract and is situated in a fantasy/dream world, it is also autobiographical. I have relationships with all of the people in the film, whom, disparately assembled, represent my chosen family. All of the spaces we shot were on location, in the actor’s home’s, including my parent’s cottage in Crystal Lake, Pennsylvania, and the hundred-year-old house in Silverlake that Rhys and I live in. We also shot with Vaginal Davis in Berlin, Flawless Sabrina in New York City, Holly Woodlawn in Los Angeles, and there was an additional shoot in the Mojave Desert. Rhys and I were taking a break from our relationship, and he had moved out when the piece (that became SHE GONE ROGUE) started to form. I was alone in this house and the walls were literally falling down around me, the ancient plaster crumbling. I fixated on this for months, and it began to fuse with my psychological state-it somehow seemed symbolic or an actualization of my internal world. Rhys and I never actually split, and the film was made as a reconciliation of sorts; we wrote and produced it together. Over the year it took to make the film, he had moved back in, and it felt as though it was an afterlife of a relationship; restored, rebuilt, and we fixed the walls, too.

My character, who is only ever referred to as ‘Darling,’ has a break with reality that leads her to her parents and archetypes, but as they may exist in the future or in a parallel dimension-reality as it’s reprocessed in dream state. It’s about so many things, and honestly is so fresh, I think we need some time and distance to adequately unpack what we did. Speaking for myself, I was thinking about how our bodies age and we go through time existing in any number of spaces and as constantly morphing forms. I think it’s also about mortality, about disappearing into one’s mind, about locating and reconciling my history (personal/cultural), while situating myself, now, within it. I think it’s a pretty deep Saturn Returns existential question mark-who am I, and how did I arrive here? Where am I going? What does my future look like? The people I look to in real life are the people I find in the film, even if their characters are, at times, nebulous and confounding, providing more questions than answers. It was exciting to have an excuse to make art with these brilliant performers and loved ones that I have always looked to as monuments of strength and perseverance.

The film itself is quite beautiful, with decadent set decoration and some fantastic costuming. Did you style your actors, specifically Vaginal Davis and Flawless Sabrina, or was the construction of these characters more of a collaboration between you and these legendary performers?

ZD: There was a lot of collaboration involved with set design and costuming, but much of the aesthetic was already built-in to the character’s spaces and personas. Vag and Flawless’ apartments were pretty much left as is, though we brought select props into Flawless’ place-the altar, the wind-up toys, the record player, which we secured through one of Flawless’ friends. Flawless is her own brilliant stylist and always knows how to push the envelope with her look. Since Vaginal Davis was playing the Whoracle of Delphi, which called for more of a specific costume, my friend Marcus Pontello created her look for the television infomercial scenes. My friend Taylor Lorentz embellished Holly’s place for her scenes, and otherwise, Rhys and I filled in the gaps and made many of the decisions with art direction.

One of my favorite recent works of yours was a doormat with your face on it emblazoned with the word ‘WELCOME.’ The work turns self-deprecation on its head, a kind of preemptive way of ‘throwing shade.’ I know you’re interested in the history of queer languages and that you’re inspired by the book The Queens’ Vernacular by Bruce Rodgers, which specifically addresses the art of reading. Your work often uses ‘reading’ as a device to talk about what is not talked about, especially in videos such as You Will Never, Ever Be A Woman…, in which you and Van Barnes trade loving chains of insults and a kind of Craigslist personal ad banter while lounging around in a domestic setting in various states of undress. I’ve always thought that the way you incorporate ‘reading’ into your work relates in some way to how the fine art world ‘reads’ work, with all the accompanying criticism, gossip and social accoutrements that inform the reception of artist and artwork. Does understanding the dialectics of insult and ‘reading’ ever influence how you see the art world, how you take or give criticism?

ZD: Absolutely. ‘Reading’ is about inoculating or preparing a person for a larger culture of intolerance. If we can articulate the most hurtful things we can imagine, then the words will have less power when being inflicted on us from the external world. It’s also a form of verbal self-defense; anyone who has been bullied or ostracized understands the power of words-it’s all we have to utilize in our uphill battle for self-respect, especially when your physical power or agency is constantly being compromised and dominated. I’m interested in The Queens’ Vernacular because it’s about identifying and putting names to things that didn’t have a name in the American lexicon-we’re talking between the 1920s and 1972 when the book was published. How do we understand our bodies, our genders, our desire, with the limited tools of language? We have to create a new language to define ourselves. I think of the possibilities of gender expression as color 3-D to hetero-normative culture’s black-and-white 1950s television set. All of these things are changing, and it’s up to those of us living in the future to define a new vision for the rest of society.

In your films and performances you establish a relationship with the spectator that confronts him with your gender, your sexuality and your body. In works such as The Inability To Be Looked At and the Horror of Nothing to See, the viewer is involved in the work and feels a variety of emotions that range from admiration, desire, judgment, to voyeuristic shame. Can you share with us how this resource challenges the viewer and impacts in the interpretation of your work?


ZD: My work in performance coincided with my decision to transition my gender from male to female. I started to become more aware of how often my body was being evaluated and scrutinized by the external world. I know this is consistent with a universal truth of being female, continually being seen and assessed, but there is something particularly awkward and vulnerable about going through puberty a second time as a fully formed adult, and towards a more visible gender at that. And eventually, the men who used to call you a faggot are suddenly licking their lips when you walk by, and women who were sympathetic become threatened or competitive. It takes a lot of energy to reconcile and overcome this inner voice that is constantly wondering if the people you come across in your daily life are reading you as a man, as a woman, as transgender, or as a non-person. If they are sympathetic, laughing at you, or shit-talking you in another language. The concept of ‘triple consciousness’ is at play here, and again, is not unique to gender so much as to any group of marginalized people who are visibly different than the dominant power group. Those works where I’m directly incriminating the viewer, their potential assumptions or judgements, are perhaps more of my own projection of what some of those voices of evaluation might sound like, as well as a verbalizing of my own internal process, an exorcizing of internalized shame, or self-doubt. There’s also a nod towards the relentless fetishizing of trans bodies, which is something of a subculture amongst a group of disenfranchised straight men; the underbelly of heterosexuality. The language of that particular style of sexual objectification seemed especially brutal and without boundaries. Performing, for me, is also about collectivity, about tapping into the truth that we are all trapped in bodies that we didn’t choose, and nobody makes it out alive.

For many trans-identifying people the concept of family and home can be a troubling or frustrating thing, with parents often not understanding the complexity of gender and identity. Many parents end up being outwardly hostile towards their trans children. You returned to your childhood home to work on the recent show at Lus De Jesus. Your parents are in your upcoming video for the Hammer Biennial. How has having supportive parents impacted your work, and what thoughts do you have about the notion of family, both drag and trans families and biological families?


ZD: I am incredibly fortunate. My parents are my role models, and I believe that they are role models of good parenting, which is one of the primary reasons I include them in my work. The world needs to see that there is an alternative to parents rejecting and marginalizing their transgender children. The child-parent relationship is so much about reciprocal learning, and I think I’ve taught them as much as they’ve taught me. They never took a strict authoritarian position with me, so I think they have a less-defined sense of hierarchy and have always been open to learning. No parents are free of expectations or dreams of who their children may become. I’m sure it takes a lot of adjustment to reconcile who your children become as adults, but I think it’s narcissistic to expect your children to reproduce your projection, or align with your ideology and values. Above all, my parents are invested in my happiness, and they realize that it took me becoming an artist, a woman, a Californian, etc., to get there. I’m fortunate because they are progressive-minded and educated, and in most ways I am a pretty direct descendent of their ideals. Millennium version. Many parents are probably too invested in their own antiquated values to accept their children’s autonomy, but mine are cool, and they’re fun to be around too.

The confidence my parents’ support has given me has been really instrumental in enabling me to present myself as a subject/object without feeling shamed or disempowered as a trans person. And some of it comes from my ancestors I’m sure, and queens, and trans people, past and future. As queers, we’re lucky to have the advantage of assembling a chosen family too, which has been crucial to my development and my manifestation of self. (Aunt) Holly, (Mom) Vag, (Dad) Ron Athey, (Grandma) Flawless and my (Sister) Van-and that’s just a start, as I have a handful of other siblings-have all been incredibly influential and powerful figures in my life.



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Show

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Relationship (2008 - 2013)

'Relationship is an intimate and diaristic record of Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst's relationship as a transgender couple whose bodies are transitioning in opposite directions (for Drucker from male to female, and for Ernst from female to male). As both subjects and makers of these photographs, Drucker and Ernst engage various elements of self-fashioning, representing themselves in the midst of shifting subjectivities and identities—making images that are simultaneously unguarded and performative, an extension of their narrative filmmaking practice. Collectively, the photographs become a cinematic document of their romantic, creative negotiation and collaboration. In Drucker’s words, “Our bodies are a microcosm of the greater external world as it shifts to a more polymorphous spectrum of sexuality. We are all collectively morphing and transforming together, and this is just one story of an opposite-oriented transgender couple living in Los Angeles, the land of industrialized fantasy.”'-- The Whitney




















________________
Video and performance works

w/ Rhys ErnstShe Gone Rogue (2012)
22 mins, digital video

'“Darling” (played by Zackary Drucker) attempts to visit her “Auntie Holly” but instead falls down a rabbit hole, encountering trans-feminine archetypes (legendary performers Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal Davis, and Flawless Sabrina) who are in turn confounding, nebulous, complicated and contradictory. Engaging a world of dream-like magical realism, SHE GONE ROGUE references Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, utilizing a space where singular selves multiply and expand, offering windows into parallel dimensions, with time and space collapsing into a whirlpool of divergent possibilities. When Drucker finally finds the white rabbit, the process of identity construction completes a full circle, offering more questions than answers.'-- ZD



SGR - titles and text


Outfest Interview with Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst of "She Gone Rogue"










Bring Your Own Body: The Story of Lynn Harris (2012)

'Bring Your Own Body is a tribute/biographical monologue to the late transgender figure Lynn Elizabeth Harris. Harris, who was born a hermaphrodite in Orange County in 1950, was raised as a female through high school and beyond by parents who never reconsidered his gender identity, even when, at age 5, Harris developed male genitals. Harris’s mother and father were doting parents, and, through the auspices of a Los Angeles archive of gay and transgender documents and memorabilia, Drucker has come into possession of an extraordinary array of baby photos, family pictures, school reports, driver’s licenses, and other images and documents. By projecting an array of these images on a screen behind her while she recites the details of Harris’s odyssey, Drucker weaves a deeply disorienting tale. What is one to make of a life story that includes both beauty-contest wins as a woman (Costa Mesa Junior Miss, 1968), and an eventual and rapid self-transformation in 1983 at age 33 into the mustachioed man called Lynn Edward Harris? For Drucker, Harris remains both a cautionary tale — his life was sensationalized in painful ways by the tabloids and shock television — and a boundary-busting hero. Her final words sum up these mixed feelings in a simple question and answer: “Cause of death? Not enough love.”'-- The Independent












At Least You Know You Exist (2011)
16mm film transferred to DVD, 16 minutes

'Created inside an archeology of the uptown New York City apartment inhabited by legendary performer/drag queen Mother Flawless Sabrina, At least you know: you exist is a site-specific exploration of a fixed space where everything is in a state of change. Known as Jack to those close to him, he has lived in the same apartment at 5 East 73rd Street for more than 45 years—a crowded, unwieldy place that fiercely pronounces his rejection of conformity. In this 16mm film, totemic mystical objects act as a collection of mysterious sculptures in different states of mutation, and rich layers of feverish history interface with a new vision of transgender performativity. Navigating the real and the unconscious, oscillating between documentary and myth narrative, Zackary Drucker weaves a fluid, parallel text of these two divergent lives, exploring a legacy being passed from a lost generation towards the future.'-- ZD



Excerpt




One Fist (2010)
Live Performance, 10:30 minutes

'This live performance work finds the body of the artist mummified on a rotating turntable. An audio track leads viewers through a schizophrenic journey that vacillates between an Academic discourse about deconstructing the gender binary, and a masochistic sub conscious voice that details the artist’s experience of being objectified. Unraveling layers of language, complicating the intellectualization of the queer body, and challenging modes of spectatorship, ONE FIST is a deep re-contextualizing of outsider representation.'-- ZD



Excerpt




Lost Lake (2010)
HDV, 8 minutes

'Filmed at the peak of autumn foliage in a rural Midwestern US locale, this non-narrative collaboration posits beauty and fear as inextricable from the psyche of the American landscape. Contemplative moments and stunning vistas are jarringly punctuated with the vocabularies of witch-hunts, hate crimes and psychological violence.'-- ZD



Excerpt




Performance Clown (2010)
Video and live performance

'Performance Clown uses tropes of drag performance to abrasively reverse the power exchange between audience and performer. The video introduction begins, the audience watches. The lights come up on Zackary looking foolish, like a rodeo clown. Zackary singles people out and reads them, while they are simultaneously blasted by a pre-recorded laugh track.'-- ZD



Performance Intro




P.I.G. (2009)
15 minutes, live performance with video

'Addressing notions of misinformation and revolutionary impulses, PIG is a performance that stages a meeting of politically involved “girls.” This multimedia work places the trio of Zackary Drucker, Mariana Marroquin, and Wu Ingrid Tsang within a dialog about contemporary trans politics as it relates to the history of civil rights movements. Inspired by non-hierarchical forms of social gathering, PIG uses tropes of consciousness-raising and group therapy to explore language, identity, agency, and the societal construction of trans as a “monstrous biological joke.”' -- ZD











The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See (2008-2009)
Live Performance, 17 minutes

'The Inability to Be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See is a live performance that takes form as a group meditation. Viewers are directed, by a disembodied voice, through a series of breathing exercises, new-age visions, and dark, dysphoric confessions, all the while being instructed to pluck out the hair from an androgynous, stripped body in the center of the gallery.'-- ZD



Excerpt













You Will Never Be a Woman. You Must Live The Rest of your Days Entirely As a Man and You Will Only Grow More Masculine With Every Passing Year. There is No Way Out. (2008)
In collaboration with Van Barnes, Mariah Garnett, and A.L. Steiner.

'You Will Never Be a Woman. You Must Live The Rest of your Days Entirely As a Man and You Will Only Grow More Masculine With Every Passing Year. There is No Way Out: features two characters that are expressing the most painful things they can say, to prepare each other for a larger, more dangerous, culture of intolerance. The characters occupy multiple roles, and prepare on all fronts, as they appropriate and enact the fetishistic language of sex ads, assault the spectator, antagonize (“read”) each other, and ultimately regain their agency.'-- ZD









FISH: A Matrilineage of Cunty White-Woman Realness (2008)

'FISH: A Matrilineage of Cunty White-Woman Realness is an extension of a life-long feminist dialogue with my mother. Utilizing a coded language of contemporary and historical queer vernacular, the syncopated language is a conduit between the second-wave and the new-wave/future. The intergenerational dialogue addresses our relationship, and our respective cultural and political positions as women.' -- ZD



Excerpt




*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I think I must not be easily disgusted or something. 'URA' is fascinating, yeah. That Variety review's attempted qualifications only made me more mega-excited for the new Malick. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Intense insane is great description of 'URA'. I tried out that Dylan, and it's not for me. I did wonder while listening to it if the reason you like it so much might be somewhat because it's kind of the most Bryan Ferry-like thing I've heard him do, by which I guess I mean styled in a more dense, conceptual way than he usually does? ** Scunnard, Thanks, man. I'll try to prepare my future brain for picking if I can figure out how to presage that state. I like the sound of 'book'. And of 'odd and hybrid', and of 'beast' too. ** Bill, Hi. The Wakamatsu I liked the most so far, and the one that Gisele especially loves and recommended, is 'Go, Go, Second Time Virgin'. Thank you about the poem! Did you get to that concert, and, if so, what was situated the stage, assuming a stage was involved? ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, 'URA' is pretty incredible, no? I watched it on a small aka laptop screen. 'Illuminations' is a very strange record. Completely unlike anything else she ever did. I really love her voice. If you like it too, do try one of the more normally folk albums like 'Little Wheel ...' where she lets her voice really do its thing. Cool that you're reading the Millhauser. Do you like it? ** Styrofoamcastle, Hey, Cody! Oh, that's cool. It was early March not May when I'm pretty sure I'll be in LA. Yeah, I'll get in touch wit Cindy when my plans are firmed up. We just finished the almost final edit of the film the other day, so I'm having my first break in ages, at least until we start working on it again in a couple of days. I've made very inching progress on your novel, which just gets more and more impressive, wow, but to make a real run for the ending will probably have to wait until I'm in Berlin and have some downtime. Big love to you! ** Keaton, I think Hotel California is the last hotel on earth that I would want to stay in. Oh, okay, weekend hotel partying, nice. Cool about the same boy. Uh, isn't OBD dead? Cupid must have been lured in hopefully by the sameness. You sound busy in a very good way. Yes. ** Sypha, Hi. I didn't know that about the 'Shy' cover. I'm sort of surprised that RS cares that much about their books' covers for some reason. Cool re: the new Sypha Nadson rerelease! Everyone, here's Sypha with something to vastly upgrade your current listening experiences: 'This afternoon I released the 2nd (of 5) Sypha Nadon archival anthologies. This one is called "Distant," a previously cassette-only concept album I recorded all the way back in August 2000, and some 3 months after the "First Report" tape. It can be listened to/downloaded here.' No, our film isn't public. It's not finished yet. We just uploaded the latest, hopefully final draft to Vimeo with private settings so our producers and the guy who's doing the post-production could look at it. It won't be finished until probably early March, and it won't go public even then. It'll be only for film festivals for quite a while, I think. ** _Black_Acrylic, Plaque looks really good, man. Everyone, here's _B_A with something to vastly upgrade your current viewing experiences: 'Last night was the opening of the annual Generator Members' Show and I took a photo of the new artwork, titled ART101 Reddit.com Negative Feedback Plaque. I'll go back next week and take another of better quality, but this will have to do for now and I'm very happy with the piece itself.' Fingers crossed into a knotted mess of a thing re: the new flat. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi. Yeah, 'G,G,STV' is probably my fave of the ones I've seen, and that's the one that Gisele is kind of obsessed with. I haven't penetrated that obsession with my questions yet, but I will. ** Misanthrope, Thank you, I do try. I like Jim Carroll's poetry a lot, and I think 'Basketball Diaries' is a classic, so that compliment is a goodie. Yeesh, glad you're okay. It's interesting that some people respond to being scared shitless by immediately becoming angry at the thing that scared them. ** Cal Graves, Hi. My weekend wasn't too bad. Not hugely exciting, but really okay. The highlight probably, no, definitely was that, to my utter shock, our producers really like our film now, or at least they said they do. It could be a trap, I guess, ha ha, or no ha ha. I was rushing out the door because Zac was leaving for an out-of-town trip in the early afternoon, and we had some things to do before he did. You have a friend named Bathtub? That is such a great name. How did that happen? Wow. Workshopping a poem by you? If so, how did it go, or even if not, how did it go? Recent great discoveries? I feel like I've been deprived of great discoveries lately, but that can't be true. Let me think. No TV shows. I never watch TV. Movies: I finally saw 'Boyhood', but I didn't like it very much at all, so that doesn't count. Music: It's not great, I don't think, but I discovered this Russian shoegazer band called Pinkshinyultrablast that kind of hit a spot, and I like the new Novella album 'Fantastic Planet'. Novel: I'm reading things I've been asked to blurb so they're not out yet but there are some awesome things, and I'll restate them and my admiration in time. So, not a very exciting answer. Can you recommend some recent great discoveries, please? I need them, obviously. Awesome that my name inspired a thing if you do keep working on it, or even if not? Respectfully, me. ** MANCY, I did manage to jump on your tape! It goes to LA because my stupid Paypal account won't let me buy things through them and have them shipped internationally, but I'll be in LA pretty soon, I think, or my roomie there will send it on to me. Excited! ** Hymen kim, Hi! Sorry about Blogger's terrible habit of swallowing comments sometimes. Oh, yes, that beautiful Ashbery book from Hannuman. What a great press that was. I so wish I had collected all of them at the time. They never put out anything that wasn't very worth reading. We've had, collectively, about 1 minute 30 seconds of very wet, barely snow. The winter has been a big dud here. Our film has a lot of snow in one scene, but it's all fake snow. Have a lovely Monday! ** Okay. Today my blog becomes a gallery that hopes to draw your attention to the awesome work of Zackary Drucker. See what you think. See you tomorrow.

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I like Linklater generally too. And I especially like his two animated films 'Waking Life' and 'A Scanner Darkly', which I still think is the best Philip K. Dick adaptation. And I really need and want to see that documentary about RL and James Benning, 'Double Play'. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Interesting, yeah, I understand. I still keep responding and relating more to the work of newer, younger artists in my 'twilight years', which is quite strange, I guess. Anyway, obviously, I totally get responding strongly to the overall form of what an artist is doing, Dylan in this case, and I, of course, do that thing all the time. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Very happy to know that the Drucker post was inspiring. Thank you! ** Cal Graves, Howdy, C! Yeah, I think I'll believe they're sincere when we get to Berlin and have a real face-to-face. They had made generally positive noises about the earlier cut of the film in emails until we Skyped with them whereupon they suddenly tore it/us apart. Cool, I really do like that name Bathtub. It's smart in this weird way, and it also has this goofball undercurrent like ... what's that name Michael Jackson saddled one of his kids with? Right, Blanket. I'll find and try Maudlin of the Well, thanks. Curious name. Unobtainable object ... Object being any non-sentient, non-human thing? I'm thinking you mean something non-fictional, so, like, not Harry Potter's magic wand or whatever. Mm, in that case, hm, okay, I sure wouldn't mind owning Winchester Mystery House. Does that count? What's your unobtainable object of choice? Pentagrammatically, me. ** Kier, Hey, buddy, I'm glad you're back! RE4 is an excellent excuse. Ah, I miss that game. Well, it would seem that the producers have come around, but, given that they have no real choice, it could be begrudgingly, or, as I said yesterday, it could be trap. I don't trust them, obviously. We did do a lot of work on the film since the last cut. Also, even though they claimed to have watched the earlier cut of the film, I'm getting the distinct impression now that they had in fact only looked at the scenes randomly and out of order, so maybe finally seeing the film in order as a film woke them up? Don't know. We'll see. Daim-Cake? Hold on. Google tells me it's an almond cake. It looks delish. I remember where you are in the game, yeah. Cool. Sigh. Wow, let's see ... The weekend has become blurry now, I think. I think it was a pretty stay at home- and work-ish weekend. There was the producers' reaction to the film. There was our Director of Photography's aka the one and only Kiddiepunk's reaction to the film, which was super positive, hooray. Zac and I asked someone we hugely respect to watch the film and give us his reaction, and he was supposed to watch it on Sunday, and but we haven't heard back yet. Or I haven't. He might have called Zac, who's still out of town. Yesterday was another pretty uneventful one spent mostly here working on stuff. I was going to go out book shopping, but I didn't for some reason, and I will today instead, I think. There's this strange, small man staying here at the Recollets right now who seems like he's really into me or obsessed with me or something, and he keeps following me around and making goo-goo eyes at me and stuff. So now I'm having to kind of carefully sneak in and out of the place trying to avoid him, which is at least somewhat easy-ish because he wears an incredibly massive amount of cologne so you can smell him from quite far away. But he kind of weirds me out. What else ... I have to do a final revision of our film script now that it's pretty much in its final edit stage, because, of course, in the edit a bunch of dialogue got cut or moved around, and this new script is mostly so whoever does the film's subtitles will have something accurate to use in their translation, so I almost finished that. Yeah, it was just a day full of random stuff. Onwards and upwards into Tuesday, wherein you, mighty Kier, did ... ? ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, Gothic, the uncanny, and the Baroque, another things. That article looks interesting. Odin Biron is a nice name. ** Keaton, Pricker Frampton. Could be. There's some new mega-hostel that just opened a week ago here in the 10th arr. that's supposed to be the Ritz of hostels. I can't remember its name. Looks suave. I don't know what you mean. I should? That's weird. I actually remembered a tiny fragment of a dream I had last night, and, in that fragment, Love's 'My Little Red Book' was playing. So, you know, 'black book', 'red book', weird.  Valentines Day needs a good story, that's for sure. Love, much. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. Oh, wow, Little Caesar issues are pretty rare. I don't even have copies of all of them. Mast Books? I'll google it. Cool, glad they still look good. One of these years I'll actually figure out the right way to do the 'Best of Little Caesar' book I've been thinking of doing forever. It'll probably have to be online because getting the rights to republish all of that stuff would be a nightmare. Wow, 'Hard to Be a God' sounds pretty incredible. I'm going to rush towards it if I can find it. Nah, I haven't seen hardly a thing, new movie-wise. I saw 'Boyhood', which, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, I didn't like very much at all. I think that's all. Hope you're good, man, too. You sound good. ** Sypha, Oh, right, Amazon, okay. More snow! Uh, oh, I mean, my condolences. ** Hyemin kim, Hi. Oh, shit, you know what? Blogger's spellcheck function 'corrects' your name into 'hymen' all the time, and almost always I anticipate that and immediately correct it, but I guess I spaced out yesterday. Sorry. I think maybe we'll get some actual, maybe even hardcore snow when we go to Halle and then to Berlin starting next week, if my sense of geography plus weather patterning is correct. Bon day! ** Right. Today's post can't possibly need an external introduction, so I'll just say, See you tomorrow.

'Marie Redonnet, one of France's leading progressive writers, has called called Samuel Beckett her literary "grandfather." But she said she had to abandon his literature of eternal death and never-quite-ending endings. Like Beckett, Franz Kafka, or the present-day literature of magic realism, Redonnet's stories are extremely vague. There is no way to tell where or when they are happening, or if the plot has any sort of historical significance at all. By slipping free of historical data, Redonnet's stories become parables, like Bible stories or Aesop's Fables. But, Redonnet has said, she's tired of writing parables, and hopes that Nevermore will be her last. Instead, she is interested in the beginnings that can result from endings. She said she hoped to find away to escape the entire cycle of beginnings and endings and eventually discover a more meaningful vision of truth.'-- The Daily Nebraskan

'HÔTEL SPLENDID is one of marie redonnet’s trilogy of death — the others are FOREVER VALLEY and ROSE MELLIE ROSE. i haven’t read the last, but like FOREVER VALLEY, HÔTEL SPLENDID is a thin book packed with modern anxiety in an oddly proto-modern setting. this time we’re in a rustic hotel set amidst a sucking, sulfuric swamp. less effective for me i think than FOREVER VALLEY (possibly because the hotel is a more familiar device and thus more in danger of being used as a cliche) HÔTEL SPLENDID was still impressive for its accumulative feeling of anxiety. its main character’s desperate attempt to keep up the rotting, leaking building as well as attend to her sisters ailments and hostilities, was perfect allegory for the burden of all our constant anxieties: bourgeois real estate phobias, hypochondria and contagion paranoia, and the melancholy in seeing the flesh’s various evidence of its encroaching age.

'redonnet’s work is particularly virtuosic with time. time contracts and leaps in her writing. within a paragraph, between sentences, we can oddly jump weeks and then linger for pages on a single incident only to pass through a night in a phrase’s brief flourish. the effect is somewhat like reading an irregular diary — quickpenned and intense during moments of drama but languishing for long trials or spurted into with a feverish insight. and yet also her writing undercuts this diary-like inconsistency with its repeating, inescapable and unchanging obsessions. maybe a better comparison than diary is the fever dream, which moves forward in jumpcuts and then traps you in over-hot, looping nightmare scenes.'-- Eugene Lim

'Each [novel] in Marie Redonnet's Hotel Splendid features a commanding female protagonist trapped in her place of origin, neither able nor wanting to escape from the home that gave her life but which now threatens to destroy her. The narrator of Hotel Splendid never questions her doomed quest to keep the establishment running, the girl in Forever Valley leaves only when dam construction forces her to, and Mellie turns down several job offers on the continent and submits to nature’s call to death. Redonnet’s prose reads like the barest of poetry, devoid of description, while still managing to paint vivid pictures of the rich landscapes that play a vital role in every story. Most impressively, these three tales represent an evolution of the feminine from the alienated, sexless martyr to the prostituted prepubescent on the verge of self-knowledge to the self-loving, self-determined Mellie, who dies to give her baby a chance at a better life. To her credit, Redonnet packs these jewels with much more: Highly personal images of utopia, the importance of heritage, the necessity of burying the dead to approach the future. Like traveling a very long, very dark tunnel into a blinding bright beautiful light.'-- Kirkus



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Further

Marie Redonnet Website
Marie Redonnet @ goodreads
Marie Redonnet @ Les Éditions de Minuit
Marie Redonnet @ Editions POL
Marie Redonnet's 'Ist and Irt'
MR's 'Understudies' reviewed @ Women Writers
'Check-out time at the Splendid Hôtel: Marie Redonnet's new mythological space'
'Separation and Permeability in Marie Redonnet's Triptych
'Marie Redonnet: resistance, barbarism, and self‐satisfied contemplation'
'Entre minimalisme et quête identitaire. Le corps dans l'oeuvre de Marie Redonnet'
MR texts set to music as art song or choral works
'Writing Otherwise: Atlan, Duras, Giraudon, Redonnet, and Wittig'
'Marie Redonnet's L'Accord de paix: The question of resistance and the turn-of-the-millennium novel'
'FILLING IN THE BLANK CANVAS: MEMORY, INHERITANCE AND IDENTITY IN MARIE REDONNET'S ROSE MÉLIE ROSE'
'Material Girl: Becoming and Unbecoming in Marie Redonnet's Forever Valley'
'Marie Redonnet Un monde à part'
Buy 'Hôtel Splendid'



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Extras


Gérard Pesson / Marie Redonnet - Projet Personnel


from a production of 'Seaside', a play by Marie Redonnet



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Interview
in German




Nach der Veröffentlichung eines Werkes ist die eigentliche „Arbeit“ des Autors getan, doch die Medien und auch viele Leser haben ein gesteigertes Interesse am Autor selbst gefunden. Dieser wird dann z.B. in Talkshows eingeladen, wo neben den persönlichen Fragen auch oft eine Art Interpretation seines Werkes erfragt/erwartet wird. Was halten Sie von dieser Neugier an der „Person hinter dem gedruckten Wort“ – kommt hier nicht das Werk an sich zu kurz?

Marie Redonnet: Der Autor müsste in der Tat seine Arbeit dann beendet haben, so jedenfalls begriff ich am Anfang meine Position als Autor. Aber es braucht einen Mittler zwischen Buch und Leser. Wenn diese Mittler ausschließlich die Medien sind, welche Art von Literatur wird da gefördert?

Man sollte also in alternative Räume investieren, in denen Leser und Autor gemeinsam über das Geschriebene nachdenken, die Diskussion neu erfinden, den Meinungsstreit, die Polemik, die Passion, den Wunsch für die zeitgenössische Literatur. Ein Buch ist geschrieben worden, um erörtert zu werden, um ein Gespräch, um unterschiedliche Überlegungen auszulösen. Es muss das soziale Leben ernähren, in einem Raum des Aufruhrs, der Unordnung, der Fragestellung und der Freiheit, die ihr eigen ist. Ein Buch ist erst durch die Leser lebendig, durch seine Weitergabe, durch seine Ver- wandlungen neuer Standpunkte, neuer Formulierungen…

Es gibt Leser, die die zeitgenössische Literatur als monoton empfinden, weil Themen wie die Identitätssuche von vielen Autoren in ähnlicher Art und mit ähnlichen Figuren und Stilen präsentiert werden. Somit kommt nicht selten der Vorwurf, die „alte Literatur“ würde mehr Gehalt und Vielfalt aufweisen. Was würden Sie hier erwidern?

MR: In den Jahren 2006-2007 leitete ich in der Abteilung franz. Literatur der Universität Colorado in Boulder ein Masterseminar über die zeitgenössische franz. Literatur. Wir lasen Jean Echenoz, Jean Philippe Toussaint, François Bon, Pierre Bergounioux, Pierre Michon, Marie Ndyae, Marie Redonnet, Michel Houellebecq, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Hervé Guibert, Eugène Savitzkaïa. Ich war überrascht über die Vielfalt der Stile und Problemstellungen, die die Krisen, Unsicherheiten, Störungen und Zweifel widerspiegeln, die wir ausleben; zweifellos existiert diese mehrheitliche Literatur, sie gibt uns zu denken.

Die neue mit der alten Literatur zu vergleichen, um sich in die alte zu flüchten, die reicher, ausgearbeiteter, etc… ist, war immer ein Reflex und ein Alibi, um sich nicht in der Flucht und Unbequemlichkeit innerhalb des Neuen konfrontiert zu sehen. Die gleiche Reaktion sieht man bei der zeitgenössischen Kunst … Der zeitgenössische Leser muss auch gegen den Strom lesen, er muss zum Entdecker werden, sich nicht mit den Büchern zufrieden geben, von denen alle Welt spricht. Der Leser soll riskieren, sich eine neue Lesart aneignen, nicht das Alte im Neuen suchen, nicht das Bekannte im Unbekannten … Unsere Welt erlebt eine solche Bedrohung, einen solchen Wandel, so dass es notwendigerweise eine Fülle an Bücher gibt, die davon zu erzählen versuchen. Die Literatur ist mehr denn je an der Tagesordnung, unter der Bedingung dass es fähige Autoren, Herausgeber und Leser gibt, die das Risiko dieses Abenteuers auf sich nehmen, das nicht immer leicht auffindbar ist und das keine ausgetretenen Pfade benutzt.

In Ihren Romanen Splendid Hôtel, Forever Valley und Rose Mélie Rose spielt der Aspekt der Reduktion eine entscheidende Rolle. Die Figuren werden nur rudimentär beschrieben, die lokalen und temporalen Angaben sind vage und auch die Syntax besteht oft aus kurzen, unzusammenhängenden Sätzen, sich wiederholenden Phrasen, Kollektivierungen und Auslassungen. Das hat den Effekt, dass der Fokus auf die Sprache selbst fällt. Als Leser muss ich diese nun– linguistisch gesprochen – in ihre einzelnen Bauteil zerlegen und ihren Gehalt neu bestimmen. Ist das für Sie folglich auch eine der „Aufgaben“ des Lesers – Bedeutung zuzuordnen – und vermehrt auf das Medium Sprache zu achten, statt auf die Erzählung selbst?

MR: Was Sie den „Aspekt der Reduktion“ nennen, ist in der Tat die Schrift reduziert auf das Essentielle, die des rhetorischen Effektes beraubt ist, die mit der Tradition der französischen Sprache im schönen Stil bricht. Ich beschreibe sehr wenig, skizzenhaft. Es liegt am Leser sich anhand einiger vorgegebener Elemente [die Szenerie] vorzustellen. Die Lektüre fordert demnach die kreative Betätigung des Lesers, die Mobilisierung seines Vorstellungsvermögens, seines Denkens.

Die Zeitlichkeit meiner Romane hat sich klarer abgezeichnet und seit „Diego“ handelt sie ausschlies-slich von der Gegenwart, was die Schrift in einer unrealistischen Art zu ergreifen versucht. Der Raum ist oftmals fiktiv, doch nur um jenseits der bekannten Bilder unsere Welt darzustellen. Meine Bücher schlagen eine eigene Vision der Welt und der Gegenwart vor, erfindet Figuren jener Zeit.

Meine Syntax besteht, wie Sie sagen, aus kurzen und sehr einfachen Sätzen, doch denke ich nicht, dass sie unzusammenhängend sind. Sie erdichtet sich ihre Logik, ihre Ordnung. Ist es nicht das Essentielle einer Schrift, dass sie durch die Sprache eine andere Sprache erfindet, die zweitrangig, fremd, eigenartig eine andere Sicht und einen anderen Gedanken aufzeigt?

Der Leser, der meine Bücher liest, zwingt sich zu einer Erfahrung der zerrüttenden Sprache,was vielleicht auch zu einer ersten frustrierenden Lektüre führt, aber ich möchte, dass sie zu einer anderen Sicht führt, zu anderen Emotionen, einer anderen Subjektivität. Hingegen glaube ich, dass meine Erzählung in meinen Romanen sehr wichtig bleibt, oder vielmehr die Fiktion, weil das Gewöhnliche meiner erzählenden Texte durch meine Sparsamkeit charakterisiert wird: Beschreibung, psychische Analyse. Ich gehöre einer Literaturgeschichte an, ich habe nach einer großen Anzahl von radikalen literarischen Ereignissen zu schreiben begonnen (Surrealismus, Nouveau Roman, die Werke Kafkas, Céline, Michaux, Beckett, …) ich kann nicht schreiben, wie vor ihrer Zeit geschrieben wurde. Die gegenwärtige Tendenz, Romane zu schreiben, liegt darin, sich keine Fragen über die Literatur zu stellen, so als ob die Geschichte nie existiert hätte. Das gibt bestenfalls Bücher nach dem guten „klassischen“ Sinn, erfindet aber keine neue Vision der Welt, in der wir leben.

Ein wiederkehrendes Thema in Ihren Romanen ist der Um- bzw. Aufbruch. Sehen Sie diesen auch im übertragenen Sinne in der Literatur – die zeitgenössische Literatur sollte also die „Fesseln“ der Vergangenheit hinter sich lassen und ihre dadurch ihre eigene Stimme zu finden?

MR: Ja, das könnte ich so sagen: Sich von den Fesseln und des Reichtums der Vergangenheit befreien, um seine/ihre eigene Stimme/n zu finden, die nach dem Bild einer Welt im Umbruch notwendigerweise unterschiedlich ausfallen werden.

Es gibt Kritiker, die Ihren Romanen eine „stilistische Armut“ attestieren, weil ihre Satzabfolgen keine Psychologisierung zulassen. Statt also reichhaltige Wendungen auszumachen, findet der Leser in Ihren Werken eine quasi bis auf das Grundgerüst entkleidete Wortstruktur. Könnte man diese Sicht, diese Methode als „Urzustand“ der Sprache bezeichnen, deren eigentliche Aussagekraft die Nicht-Aussage des Konkreten ist?

MR: Zweifellos finden wir darin stilistische Armut im Verhältnis zu dem, was das „Goldene Zeitalter“ der französischen Literatur hätte sein können, die ich aber keineswegs zu erhalten oder verzweifelt wiederzubeleben versuche, da ich mit dieser im Widerspruch stehe. Was die Kunst und die Musik erfahren hat, ist auch in der Literatur erfolgt. Der Ausdruck „bis auf das Grundgerüst entkleidete Wortstruktur“ trifft es ziemlich genau.

Ich würde jetzt nicht von Urzustand der Sprache sprechen, ich verspüre überhaupt nicht diese Nostalgie, nicht den Wunsch nach dem Ursprung. Ich würde eher von einem zerstörten, verlorenen, unausgefüllten Bereich sprechen und mit diesen Grundmaterialien, also das was übrig bleibt, erfindet sich die Literatur in meinem Fall neu. Sie ergibt eine abstrakte Form, doch die konkreten Elemente sind nötig, um dem Text Leben einzuflößen.

Neben Ihren Romanen haben Sie auch eine Kurzgeschichten- und Gedichtsammlung, sowie Theaterstücke und auch eine mit Bildern von Matisse illustrierte Erzählung („Villa Rosa“) veröffentlicht. Wie wichtig ist Ihnen die Vielfalt und das Genre an sich? Sehen Sie diese Exkurse als Bereicherung, Abwechslung oder „Ausbruchsversuch“ an?

MR: Es kann sein, dass ich vor allem Romane geschrieben habe, weil meine Verleger (die auch am Markt gebunden sind) mich danach gefragt haben. Im Augenblick muss ich sie frustriert haben, weil meine Romane nicht so genau nach den Normen des Marktes verfasst wurden.

Ich liebe es sehr, für das Theater zu schreiben, dort fühle ich mich wohl. Geliebt habe ich auch die Erzählung, ausgehend der „Tafeln“ von Matisse, die eine Anfrage war. Ebenso die kurzen Texte. Auch fühle ich das Bedürfnis über das Nicht-Fiktive zu schreiben. Folglich ist der Durchmarsch durch die Genres etwas Wesentliches für mich. Ich bin keine Romanautorin, ich wage ein literarisches Experiment.

Welche Rolle spielt der (reale) Leser für Sie? Ist dieser während Ihrer Arbeit in Ihrem Hinterkopf zugegen oder ist er für Sie Teil einer anonymen Masse, die später lediglich Ihr Werk liest?

MR: Ich schreibe für den Leser, dem meine Bücher ansprechen. Aber ich mache ihm kein Zugeständnis, ich schreibe nicht, um ihm eine Freude zu machen, nicht um ihm das zu liefern, was er erwartet, also nicht für die „anonyme Masse“. Ich suche die Begegnung, den gegenseitigen Austausch.

Sind Sie als Schriftstellerin zugleich Ihre schärfste Kritikerin oder überlassen Sie diese Aufgabe professionellen Kritikern bzw. grundsätzlich anderen Leuten?

MR: Beides. Nur die Strenge erlaubt mir, über mich hinauszuwachsen. Ich benötige die Strenge der anderen, weil man vor sich selbst immer ein wenig entwaffnend dasteht, mit einem Mangel an kritischer Distanz, einer Faulheit auch, zumindest in meinem Fall.

Eine der unvermeidlichen Fragen in Interviews ist immer die nach der Inspirationsquelle. Sehen Sie uns bitte nach, dass auch wir so neugierig sind und gerne erfahren möchten, wie das Thema eines Romans bei Ihnen Schritt für Schritt Gestalt annimmt.

Die Literatur meiner Schreibanfänge hingen von einer mannigfaltigen Abstammung ab: Die Poesie, Kafka, Beckett, Duras. Dann Genet, über den ich eine These schrieb, die schließlich zum Essay wurde „Jean Genet, le poète travesti“ („Jean Genet, der verkleidete Poet“).

Doch auch das Kino, die Kinophantasie bewohnt mich und inspiriert mich womöglich mehr, als es die Bücher tun. Im Moment sind die Bilder der Welt und dem, was dort geschieht, meine Inspiration.

Können Sie während der Pause nach und vor einem neuen Werk tatsächlich gänzlich „nicht-schriftstellerisch“ agieren oder sind Sie unbewusst immer in Gedanken bei neuen Projekten und Ideen?

MR: Ich überquere lange Durststrecken. Aber ich bin immer mit der Frage beschäftigt, worüber ich schreiben könnte. Selbst wenn ich nicht weiß, was ich schreiben soll, bin ich doch immer auf der Suche. Die Suche ist beständig, der Fund ein Moment der Gnade, und anschließend Arbeit.

Sie wissen nun, wie es ist eine Schriftstellerin zu sein. Wenn Sie Ihr Schaffen beschreiben würden, ist es für Sie eher Beruf oder Berufung?

MR: Eine Notwendigkeit. Zum Teil Beruf.

Um das Werk eines Autors zu beschreiben, stellen viele Kritiker Vergleiche an. In Ihrem Fall werden z.B. Analogien zu Kafka oder Beckett hergestellt. Empfinden Sie derartige Vergleiche als Auszeichnung bzw. Ehre oder sehen Sie diese eher als unbewussten Druck, eine bestimmte Erwartungshaltung seitens der Kritiker und Leser erfüllen zu müssen?

MR: Eine Ehre vielleicht … doch weil ich nicht sie bin, und indem man mich mit ihnen vergleicht, kann ich nur enttäuschen …

Wie schon angesprochen, zeichnen sich Ihre Werke nicht durch impressionistische Bilder, Metaphern oder Aneinanderreihungen von deskriptiven Adjektiven aus, doch als Leser erhält man trotzdem ein sehr klares Bild von den Personen, Orten und Objekten. Es scheint, als ob es nicht die Worte selber sind, die zum Leser sprechen, sondern eine Aussagekraft, die hinter bzw. unter ihnen liegt und hervorleuchtet. Ist dieser Eindruck von Ihnen intendiert oder handelt es sich eher um die allzu verklärte Deutung eines Lesers?

MR: Ich finde ihre Analyse sehr zutreffend. Sie berührt mich gerade sehr. Meine sehr einfachen Wörter, meine Sätze sollen in der Tat von einer heimlichen Ausdruckskraft beseelt sein, damit der Text zu Literatur gemacht werden kann, ansonsten muss er als misslungen angesehen werden. In diesem Sinne ähnelt es einem poetischen Experiment. Ich gehe ein wenig über ein Seil, ein Schritt daneben und der Text kippt ins Nichts. Es ist ein riskantes Spiel.

Welchen Bezug haben Sie zu Ihren eigenen Werken? Auf der einen Seite sind Sie das Produkt Ihrer Fantasie, auf der anderen Seite kommentieren, kritisieren und interpretieren die Leser allerlei Aspekte in sie hinein. Wie viel Nähe bzw. Abstand haben Sie selbst zu Ihren „Kreationen“?

MR: Sie entfernen sich von mir und ich hoffe, dass sie stückweise zum Leser übergehen, die sie sich aneignen und sie mit Leben füllen. So ähnlich begreife ich die Beziehung zu meinen Büchern. Das einzige Buch, das mir wirklich nahe steht, ist jenes, an dem ich gerade arbeite.

Wenn Sie selbst lesen, wie lesen Sie – als „normale“ Leserin oder doch als Schriftstellerin, die über Stil, Inhalt und Figurenkonstellation nachdenkt bzw. diese vielleicht kritisiert?

MR: Ich bin nicht unbedingt eine große Leserin. Es gibt Autoren, die ich mag, doch nicht unbedingt weil ich mich an ihnen messen möchte, vielmehr weil sie mir eine starke ästhetische Emotion verschaffen. Also vielmehr die großen Autoren, die sich an einem radikalen Schreibexperiment gewagt haben. Sie treiben mich an, über mich selbst hinauszuwachsen, mir etwas zuzutrauen, zu etwas, das man als wahres Schreibexperiment ansehen könnte; sie sind die „Leuchttürme“ im Baudelair’schen Sinne.

Ich lese meine Zeitgenossen ohne mich ihnen immerzu nahe zu fühlen.

Sie dürfen ganz offen sein: Welche Frage (von Lesern bzw. in einem Interview) können Sie nicht mehr hören bzw. welche finden Sie besonders ärgerlich und/oder amüsant?

MR: Natürlich mag ich mit Lesern reden, die sich bemüht haben, meine Schreibversuche zu hinterfragen, als jene, die völlig abwegige Fragen stellen.



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Book

Marie Redonnet Hôtel Splendid
University of Nebraska Press

'These three short novels are the first works to appear in English by a remarkable contemporary French author, Marie Redonnet. Born in Paris in 1947, Redonnet taught for a number of years in a suburban lycée before deciding to pursue a writing career full time. Since her volume of poetry Le Mort & Cie appeared in 1985, she has published four novels, a novella, numerous short stories, and three dramatic works.

'In translator Jordan Stump's words, these three novels, "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common. Redonnet sees the three novels as a triptych: each panel stands alone, and yet all coalesce to form a whole." Each is narrated by a different woman. Hôtel Splendid recounts the daily life of three sisters who live in a decrepit hotel on the edge of a swamp; Forever Valley is about a sixteen-year-old girl who works in a dance-hall and looks for the dead; Rose Mellie Rose is the story of another adolescent girl who assembles a photographic and written record of her life in the dying town of Ôat.

'Redonnet's novels have been compared to those of Annie Ernaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Samuel Beckett. She has since acknowledged the crucial influence which Beckett's work has had upon her literary work. And yet she is also notably different from the great master of modern literature. "Where Beckett's characters slide almost inevitably toward extinction, resignation, and silence," Stump points out, "Redonnet's display a force for life and creation that borders on the triumphant. . . . [They] retain even in the darkest situations a remarkable persistence, openness, and above all hope, a hope that may well be, however unspectacularly, repaid in the end."'-- University of Nebraska Press


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Excerpt

The Splendid is not what it used to be since grandmotherdied. The lavatories always need unblocking. The wallpaper is peeling off the walls because of the damp. The Hôtel Splendid is built over an underground lake. It's grandmother's fault. No one had ever built a hotel on the edge of the swamp. Having her own hotel had always been her dream. She wanted to do things properly. She had lavatories installed in all the rooms. There was not another like it in the region back then. She was proud of the Hôtel Splendid. There is a photo of her taken the day of the opening. She is standing very straight, with a cane. Her cane was for effect, because she always walked well, up until the end. The photo still makes an impression in the foyer. But the Splendid has lost its reputation. My sisters keep themselves up in spite of their isolation here. Adad yes her hair, and Adel's is still very black. Of the three of us, I am the youngest but I look the oldest. Ada spends hours making herself up. It makes her look healthy. You would never think she was so unwell. She has always been unwell. She faints often. Adel can't bear the sight of Ada when she has fainted. I am the one who helps her back to consciousness. Afterwards, it is as if she didn't know who I was. I have no will. She takes advantage of that. I do everything she asks. That amuses her, I am sure. She complains about the food. She has bruises all over her body because of her bad circulation. Her nightstand is covered with medicine and jars of makeup. She wants me to wash her. That's hard for me because she has an odor that makes me queasy. She has never worked. Mother used to support her, and now I do. I inherited the Hôtel Splendid. But in exchange, I owe an allowance to my sisters. They chose to come and live at the hotel instead of taking the allowance. Here they are housed, fed, and served. Maybe I should not have agreed to this arrangement. Ada and Adel left the hotel very young with mother. They never came back until mother died. I am the only one who never left the Hôtel Splendid. But now that they have settled in, they are not about to leave. They have made themselves at home. They have taken the two nicest rooms, but that does not prevent them from complaining about the Hôtel Splendid's poor condition and lack of comfort. I should not let them get the better of me. I keep them alive, thanks to my work and the hotel. But the Splendid brings in less and less. It needs repairs. I don't have the means. Grandmother left a great many debts when she died. She never finished paying her bills. Mother said it was up to me to pay them, since I was inheriting the Hôtel Splendid like grandmother wanted. She left me to get by on my own. She never took an interest in the hotel. The Splendid brought in a lot back then. But all the money I earned went to paying off grandmother's debts. Grandmother hoped the hotel would increase in value. She thought the railway would transform the region. But the railway is still under construction. That's bad for the hotel. The guests are not the same. It isn't a vacation hotel anymore. I had to lower the prices. What can I do? Grandmother should not have built the hotel so near the swamp. They warned her, but she was stubborn. The Splendid is harder and harder to keep up. The guests are careless. The lavatories are in bad condition. Little by little the Splendid is becoming unrecognizable. When you look at the photo in the foyer, you would never think it was the same hotel. It has kept only its name, Hôtel Splendid, which still shines at night when the neon lights are on. I do everything I can to run the hotel as well as grandmother did. I have no room of my own. I want all the rooms to be available for the guests. When there is an empty room, that is where I sleep. When the Splendid is full, I stay in grandmother's little office where I keep my belongings. The mattresses are bad in all the rooms. The bedding needs to be changed. The guests complain that they don't sleep well. You can hear everything through the walls. Grandmother was careless about the walls. They are much too thin, and hollow as well. The lavatories are noisier and noisier, especially the flush valves. I get up every night to make sure Ada doesn't need anything. She sleeps with her mouth open. She seems to have trouble breathing. She wakes up with a start every time. She gives me a resentful look as if I were disturbing her on purpose. But I am only there to remind her to take her medicine. Her kidneys do not work well. She says it's starting up again, like at the clinic. She has spent her life going from clinic to clinic. I open the window to get rid of the smell. She thinks I am trying to give her a chill. She is coughing louder than she used to. The hallway light is acting up. I run into things as I walk down the hall, and I have bruises like Ada. Back in my bed, I can't manage to fall asleep again. I think about Ada. Her cheeks are becoming hollow, in spite of all her eating. Nothing does her any good. Every morning, I unblock the lavatories in all the rooms. The drainage is worse and worse, in spite of my work. The guests are careless. It is because of them that everything is becoming blocked up little by little. The light is on all night in Adel's room. And yet I told her she must not waste light. What can she be doing all night with her light on? She cannot be rehearsing her lines at night. Even though she has retired to the Splendid, she has not given up on her theatrical career. She writes to theater directors to ask about parts. She doesn't have much of a voice for an actress. She has never played anything but small roles. She has never had the chance to play the big roles she rehearses in her room. She says she must not lose her talent no matter what. I know nothing about the theater. In her room, there used to be a suitcase full of her old costumes. I threw them away. They were moth-eaten and crawling with vermin, a real breeding ground for disease. Adel never goes to see Ada. She never asks after her. She can't complain about her room. It is the only room on the ground floor. She has plenty of privacy to rehearse her lines. She doesn't bother the guests. Her lavatory is like new. It was grandmother's room. It could have been my room when grandmother died. But I didn't want to live in it. I left it empty until Adel came, and never rented it. That's why the lavatory is in such good condition. It is the guests who damage them. Ada can't complain about her room either. She has the only room with two beds in the hotel, at the end of the hall. It was Ada and Adel's room when they were little, back when they lived at the Splendid. Mother left all of a sudden with my sisters, leaving me alone with grandmother. She never came back. When mother sensed she was dying, she wanted Ada to go back to her old room so she would not feel lost. But Ada says she no longer remembers the room. I am sorry she took it because it was the guests' favorite room. Ada sleeps in the same bed as when she was little. Now Ada and Adel live at opposite ends of the hotel. Adel's old bed is empty next to Ada's bed. Sometimes I sleep in it when Ada is worse and needs me to be with her all night. Ada is afraid at night. At the clinic, there was always a night nurse at her bedside. Mother insisted. She paid extra. According to grandmother, mother always put Ada in the most expensive clinics. Apparently she ruined herself for Ada, she killed herself working to pay for clinics that were beyond her means. Ada never got better. She always needs something. She is never happy. All she does is complain about the damp in the Hôtel Splendid. She says it's the Splendid that is making her unwell. But she doesn't know where she would go if she left the hotel. The Splendid is really very near the swamp. The heat is becoming unbearable. When you go into the garden, you can already smell the swamp. It spreads a little every year. In grandmother's day, it was full of hunters. During the season, they stayed at the hotel. The canal that runs along the far end of the garden leads to the swamp. The Splendid has direct access to the swamp thanks to the canal. Now the hunters have changed swamps. There are many swamps in the region. I never stop mending the mosquito nets. The nets are torn everywhere, and the guests complain about the mosquitoes. Ada says she was bitten on the eye. Her eye is all swollen. She can't see clearly. But it might not be because of a mosquito like she thinks. It might come from inside, like everything else. The nets keep out the mosquitoes less and less. This heat is bad for Ada. Her spells are more frequent. She also smells more strongly because of the sweat. She complains that her make up will not stay on. I put cold compresses on her forehead. Having the swamp so close makes her nervous, especially on these hot days. Ada hates the swamp. Mother used to criticize grandmother for not thinking things through before she bought this land. She thought it was grandmother's fault that Ada was unwell. But even away from the Hôtel Splendid, Ada never got better. So her sickness is not caused by the swamp like mother thought. You can see the swamp is spreading because the far end of the garden is becoming marshy. It was not that way in grandmother's day. The gardener used to put his prettiest flower beds at the far end of the garden. Grandmother's gardener has been dead for a long time. The garden is in an awful state. It isn't even a garden anymore. Grandmother knew the swamp well. I know it well too. I taught Adel about it. That made her happy. But she never forgets about the theater. She is waiting for answers to her letters. She has not given up on getting a part. She doesn't think her career is over, probably because her career never really began. She never had any training. Maybe that is why she never got any real parts. That's what Ada thinks. Ada is worried about Adel. She asks after her. She says mother was always very concerned about Adel. She really wanted her to have a wonderful career. Adel is developing a stoop. It is not good for an actress to be stooped. I don't like Adel's voice. It is not an actress's voice. How could she have had a career with a voice like that? Ada has a beautiful voice. She is the one who should play Adel's roles. There is a piano in the foyer. Grandmother knew how to play it. She always played the same songs. She tried to teach me to sing so I could accompany her. I never could learn. I don't have any kind of a voice. Adel knows how to play the piano. She plays the same songs as grandmother, the only ones she knows. But she doesn't like the piano. Her voice is on key. I like her voice better when she sings. She was angry when I told her she should sing instead of rehearsing her roles. She has not touched the piano since. She says it's worthless and out of tune. Grandmother always said it was an expensive piano and that it must be taken care of. It still makes a good impression in the foyer. It's a shame it is always closed. Grandmother used to say there should always be music in the Hôtel Splendid. That was why she played the piano, not because she loved music. The guests were happy. The hotel was lively back then, and busy. Now, none of the guests are unhappy to see the piano closed. The guests are not interested in music. It's a stroke of luck that they are building the railway. They say it will run along the edge of the swamp. All the guests come from the work site. They would rather stay at the hotel than sleep in the tents thecompany gives them. Even if they complain about the state of the lavatories, the Hôtel Splendid is a blessing for them. I do all I can to be pleasant towards them. I pay particular attention to the lavatories in their rooms. Especially with this heat, you have to make sure everything is flushed away. The workmen are grateful. I need them. It isn't like that with my sisters. I could do very well without their presence. I have never lived with them, and now here they are sharing my life. It was mother who asked them to come back to the Splendid, a little before she died. She never asked me what I thought. She wanted me to look after my sisters because she would not be there to look after them anymore. But I would rather look after the Splendid's guests than my sisters.


The hotel is full every night. It is becoming hotter and hotter. The workmen stay up late because of the heat. They talk in the garden in spite of the mosquitoes and the smell of the swamp. Adel keeps them company. She tells them about the theater. They have never been. It is a real break for Adel to have such an attentive audience. She puts on makeup and nice clothes as if she were going to a party. She wears very low-cut dresses. But she is not that young anymore, and her dresses don't do much for her. She is not afraid of showing herself. The workmen seem to appreciate her in spite of her flaws. She knows how to talk to them. The younger ones gather around her. Adel is making good use of this heat wave. She likes the long nights in the garden. She has even cleared the brush around the hotel to make the garden more pleasant. But the mosquitoes bite her. She is covered with spots. If I were her, I would not wear such low-cut dresses. I have never seen her like this before. The workmen drink a lot because of the heat. Their throats are dry. I serve them drinks until late at night. The money is coming in. I am not complaining. Ada's medicine is expensive. When I am not serving drinks, I go up and see Ada. She has trouble breathing because of the heat. The voices coming from the garden keep her awake. I fan her. As soon as I stop, she asks me to give her more air. It gives me cramps in my hands. Ada thinks it's natural that I should spend the night giving her air while Adel is enjoying herself in the garden. Adel is behaving strangely. She is the last one to leave the garden. It is as if she were waiting for something that never comes. In the daytime, when the hotel is empty, she seems lost. She comes and goes. When night falls, she shuts herself in her room to get ready. Her dresses hang loose on her. You can see her sagging breasts. She has no modesty. I can't help but look. That irritates her. When she goes to bed, there is always one of the workmen following her into her room. I should have known. It is not my concern what Adel does. I should not interfere. When the workmen talk to me, it is always to ask for a drink or to ask me to go and fix their lavatories. I am always busy with Ada. She can't bear to be left alone in her room while everyone is in the garden. Her body is clammy. I have to dry her off. She has slack, white skin. I do not like Ada's skin. I leave the door of her room open to let in the breeze. I am not like my sisters. Ada is always talking about Adel. Adel has begun performing in the garden for the workmen. They listen in silence, and then they applaud. Adel thinks she is in the theater when really she is in the Splendid. Ada also listens to Adel from her room. She isn't bored at night anymore. As soon as Adel is done, Ada has a coughing fit. It gives me a scare every time. The medicine is not helping her. I don't like the heat. There is nothing I can do about the heat or the way it brings out odors.


I have never left the Hôtel Splendid. My sisters did a lot of traveling with mother. Adel says mother never stayed in one place. She used to sing in hotels, accompanying herself on piano. The guests appreciated her. Adel is becoming more talkative. She needs to confide in someone. I don't know why grandmother never told me mother used to sing in hotels. She used to sing at the Splendid as well, before I was born. Grandmother accompanied her at the piano. Adel says mother would have liked to study voice, but grandmother was against it because she wanted her to devote herself to the Hôtel Splendid. Adel thinks mother had a pretty voice. She spent all her life with mother, much more than Ada who was ill too often to take part in their travels. Every day, mother wrote a letter to Ada. Adel is amazed that Ada is still alive while mother is dead. Now that mother is dead, Adel would like to devote herself to the theater. But she can't find any work. She is not discouraged, she still has hopes. All those letters she wrote trying to find a part. She thinks she will get an answer in the end. It is lucky for her the workmen like to listen to her perform. It gives her confidence. She perspires a great deal as she declaims. It is best not to see her too close up. She gesticulates too much as well. It would be better if she stood still. She would perspire less. She has gaps in her memory. The workmen don't notice. She is rehearsing in her room more than ever. I hear her while I am working at unblocking the lavatories. Ada is doing worse. She is taking a new kind of medicine. We have to wait. She has abscesses. Her fever will not break. It must be an infection caused by the abscesses. With this heat, the mosquitoes are vicious. Ada complains about them. The mosquito net doesn't protect her completely. But her abscesses do not come from the mosquitoes, no matter what she says. I almost never leave her anymore. I sleep in the bed next to hers. It was Adel's bed when she was little. I sleep, in a manner of speaking. Ada keeps me up, even when she is asleep. I am too afraid she will take a turn for the worse. Now Adel is the one who serves drinks to the workmen. But the men have fevers. There is an epidemic. A lot of the men can no longer work because of their fever. The work isn't going anywhere. There are unforeseen complications. That is the way it always is with construction. The company is worried. There was a leak in one of the rooms on the second floor, a hole in a pipe. The entire room was flooded. I tried to fix it myself, but it would not hold. I called the plumber. He complained about the state of the pipes. He is afraid his repair will not hold and that soon there will be leaks all over the hotel. As if it weren't enough that the lavatories are blocked. The wood of the balconies is beginning to rot. It will not be long before it becomes dangerous to walk on them. I wrote up a little notice for the guests. I put it up in the foyer, on the board where grandmother put up the house rules of the Hôtel Splendid. In my notice, I ask the guests not to go out on the balconies anymore. It is a question of safety. I also ask them not to throw anything into the lavatories, or else I cannot guarantee proper drainage. The guests didn't look happy when they read the notice. But they have got to do their part, instead of making everything dirty like they do. I have to boil the linens longer and longer to get them white. This epidemic comes at a bad time. The men don't stay out in the garden at night anymore. They go up to their rooms and try to sleep, to break their fever. Adel has a fever too. I am the only one who comes and goes. I am acclimated to the swamp. The germs could not make me sick. Everything will be better when the hot weather is over. We will have to wait. Every year it is the same. What bothers me isn't the epidemic, but the Hôtel Splendid. No matter how hard I work to take care of it, I can see it is falling apart. The materials grandmother chose are not resistant enough. All she thought about was comfort and lavatories, and she did not even notice they were badly installed. Now the Splendid is showing the flaws in its construction, now that it is too late and the harm has been done. I don't know anymore how to maintain the hygiene necessary for the functioning of the hotel. Adel has cramps. She has stopped rehearsing. She says she will never go back on the stage, she is finished, she never should have come to the Splendid, it was fatal to her. She skulks in the hallway. I scarcely recognize her. She went up to see Ada and accused her of contaminating the whole hotel with her sickness. Ada is sad, but she is not angry at Adel. She says Adel is to be pitied. The guests are beginning to leave the hotel. There are unoccupied rooms. They have stopped the construction. I put the vacancy sign back on the front door. It rains at night. That cools off the rooms. The heat is subsiding. Ada always has the same dream. She dreams she is not Ada but Adel. The guests are asking for their bills. The Splendid is quiet all of a sudden. I take advantage of the calm to clean the rooms from top to bottom. They need it. The workmen did a lot of damage. I will not miss them. It is best that they leave the Hôtel Splendid.

The railway line is not close to being finished. The worksite is deserted. All the men are gone. Apparently the project was badly designed and they have to start over. The heat broke all of a sudden. Adel has started working on her lines again. Ada gets up sometimes. She walks through the hallway and goes into the empty rooms. She eats a lot, at any time of day. She has a sly look, it seems to me. She has stopped taking her medicine. She wastes her make up. She likes to cause difficulties. I have caught her several times throwing cotton balls into the lavatories. It is the offseason. There are not many guests. Ariel is always peering at them, but they pay no attention to her. I have a little time to myself. I use it to go to the swamp. The swamp does not change. It is larger than it looks. You really have to know the swamp to keep from getting lost. My sisters do not trouble themselves about the Hôtel Splendid. They don't care that it is falling apart. As long as they are waited on and never have to do anything. It is as if they were on vacation here, an endless vacation. I make their lives too easy. I even wonder if Adel is working seriously on her acting. It looks to me like she is only pretending. She is always going and prowling around by the work site. Maybe the future of the railway interests her more than the theater. She must not be very sure anymore of having a future in the theater. The construction of the railway has become her favorite topic of conversation. She thinks I should change the name of the hotel, and call it the Railway Hotel. But there is no talk of starting up the work again. The swamp deserves more attention. It is a real nature preserve. There is always more of it to explore. Ada seems to be convalescing. The empty hotel is good for her. Even though she has always hated the swamp, she asked me to take her there for a walk. I was sure the swamp would do her good. That is the first time Ada has asked to go out. But she was disappointed by her walk. She couldn't bear the odor of the swamp. She thought it was always the same, no matter which way you turned. She couldn't stop shivering, in spite of the blanket she was wrapped in. When we got back, she went straight to bed. She had a high fever. I had to give her a hot-water bottle. It did not warm her at all. She says her limbs are like lead. She blames the swamp for her relapse. She will never go back there again. The walk was not a success. She is staying in her room again. She calls me for no reason, because her hot-water bottle isn't hot enough. She complains that the fire will not stay lit. And yet the amount of wood she burns in her fireplace is incredible. Her blood doesn't circulate properly. Her limbs are like ice. It is cold outside all of a sudden. It's almost always like that after the really hot weather, the cold blows in violently. Ada did not take the temperature change well. Her cough is back. Adel complains about Adds cough. She says it's unbearable, and that Ada is doing it on purpose to disturb everyone in the hotel and to drive the guests away.




*

p.s. Hey. ** Styrofoamcastle, Hey, C! Okay, early April, I doubt I'll be able to make it home then, but if there's a window I'll seek a way. Well, first I go to Halle, Germany next Tuesday for 4 days (to work on the new Gisele theater piece) and then I go from there to Berlin on the 21st, and I don't know how long I'll be there yet, but at least a week and probably longer. Love, me. ** Jonathan, Hi, J! I happened to walk by your Parisian home yesterday, and I watched the passing crowds for you, but you must have been deeply in or deeply out. Oh, wow, that sounds intense. Not only next door musicians, but wind instrument next door musicians? The worst, in my humble estimation. Moaning is cool. It's one of the more experimental things a voice can do maybe. Oh, man, thanks for those links! That'll be awesome! We're here until next Tuesday afternoon. Will you be free for a meet up between now and then? Awesomeness. ** Keaton, I love that Darkness song. It tickles my enthusiasm. I didn't know that about Crowley, but, if I've ever actually read him, I would be surprised. I have a thing about not wanting to cremated. It's an irrational fear or something. I need to remember to put that in writing in case I have a stroke or something. 'On the Road of Life' is wild. I've never seen that one in the 'flesh'. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. If something can be turned into a theme park, trust me, I'll find the way. ** INVERT ME, Hi, welcome. Um, wow, that's intense. I'm seriously in favor of you becoming a girl over you killing yourself, that's for absolutely sure. Suicide talk gives me the willies. Don't do it, right? ** Etc etc etc, Hi. Funeral technology in LA seems like a ripe idea for a piece. What stopped you? Yeah, I read about that thing about how you can be turned into a gem or diamond when you die. It's cool, and it's also kind of cheesy and 'Vegas' or something. Maybe more cool than cheesy. The two times I've seen Sartre's grave it was covered with subway tickets, and I have no idea why. But people leave their subway tickets as a sign of respect. Hooray for energy. Energy = health, no? I think so. Thanks for calling the posts hits. I do try. Fine day to you, sir. ** Steevee, Well, that sucks. About that outlet's Oscars fetish or whatever it is. I haven't seen 'Maps to the Stars', but everyone I know who's seen it really seemed to like it a lot. ** _Black_Acrylic, And there you go. One more pro-'MttS' person. I should catch up with it. 'Knotty mess' is an evocative and strangely gruesome combination of words. The 'knotty' turns the 'mess' into a liquid. It's interesting. ** Kier, Ha, dendelion, I like that one. You're a kierper! I think that's right about the clasped hands graves across the wall being in gender-segregated cemeteries, if my memory is working. Ooh, exciting, your art school app! They had better fucking grab you, that's all I have to say. Well, grab you respectfully. Oh, yes, I remember the regenerators, yikes. And the searching for rifle ammo. Scary. My day was another so-so one, I fear. Hm. Worked on stuff. Figured out stuff, or tried to, re: the upcoming trip. I always give Zac treats when he goes away or comes back from somewhere, so I went out in the late afternoon and gathered those from here and there and dropped them off on his doormat. That was kind of the big event, I guess. I haven't heard back from the respected person about our film, but I'm hoping Zac did because said person is flying to Tasmania today, so it seems like it has to be now or never. After managing to avoid the little guy for a few days, he found me last night. I was out smoking my last pre-sleep cigarette, and he came back from wherever he was, and he saw me and froze. Then he lit a cigarette and came over to within a few feet of me. I walked as far away as I could. He followed me to within a few feet of me again. Wtf?! So I abandoned my cigarette halfway through and went quickly back inside the building and managed to leap into the elevator before he could follow me. I don't know what his trip is, but I'm getting very irritated with it. Um, yeah, really, it was a kind of blurry day, just working mostly and stuff. Today is my next chance to become interesting again, and I'll do my best. How was your Wednesday, my always interesting friend? ** Misanthrope, Uh, Milli Vanilli, uh, lucky you? Or ... why? I think that 'anger' consuming fear thing must be related to the widespread outrage addiction on social media. I really don't get it at all. I really almost never get angry. It takes really, really a lot to make me mad. Which is probably weird. ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks, bud! ** Okay. I did a post about Marie Redonnet a long time ago, but, at that time, there was almost nothing online in English about her, and now there's a fair amount more English language stuff re: her, so I thought I would do her again, and I have. See you tomorrow.

'Many a first date has been given an adrenaline boost as soon as each member of the dubious couple discovers that Harold and Maude is the other’s favorite film. More meaningful than merely cult popular, Harold and Maude was a spiritual experience to many an earnest college kid who thrilled to its anti-establishment, devil-may-care spirit and its macabre sensibility, set to the tune of Cat Stevens’ glorious soundtrack.

'Gloomy, ashen and nearly necrophiliac, the 20-year-old Harold Chasen, played with comic catatonia by Bud Cort, is addicted to committing suicide. Then he meets a feisty, vital septuagenarian named Maude. Under Maude’s sexualized tutelage, Harold learns to embrace life. Following her groove, Harold learns to heed Stevens’ do-your-own-thing musical creed: “If you want to sing out sing out/And if you want to be free be free/’Cause there’s a million ways to be/You know that there are.”

'When the film was released in 1971, critics panned it and it promptly flopped. Eventually it found a home at college art houses and achieved a certain cult status among motley, artsy misanthropes. Ruth Gordon, who played Maude, died in 1985. Three years later the film’s director, Hal Ashby, and screenwriter, Colin Higgins, also died, the latter from AIDS. But Bud Cort, still very much alive, was one of those young stars who aged awkwardly and never really found his niche or reclaimed his fame. And a devastating car crash followed by years of physical therapy and plastic surgery further hampered the development of his career.

'Now, with the 30th anniversary of Harold and Maude coming up, Cort is trying to convince Paramount to release a commemorative laser-disc version to go with a book he’s writing about it. Yet, with a slew of new films in the works, he is also determined to leave Harold behind.

'In 1996, the Los Angeles Times called him “a generational icon a quarter-century ago, a kind of midnight movie poster boy.” While flattered to hear of his impact on young actors and fans, Cort said that “my dream is to get that reaction for new projects, for new characters.” He called his cult status both “a blessing and a curse.” He told the Times, “I was typecast to the point where I didn’t make a film for five years after Harold and Maude. He was offered a role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which he rejected, explaining, “I just didn’t want to play crazy. I fought certain opportunities off because I wasn’t ready to be a brand name. In retrospect, I should have done everything.” And he says of his most famous film, “I’ve had my moments where I just cursed that movie and wished I’d never done it.”

'While doing stand-up at Upstairs at the Downstairs, Cort was discovered by Robert Altman and cast as Pvt. Boone in the 1970 smash M*A*S*H. Next, Altman cast Cort in the title role of the black comedy/fantasy Brewster McCloud, about an owlish egghead who dreams of flying through the Houston Astrodome. Having proven that he could do quirky and black, Cort was then cast as an angelic ghoul, a troubled rich kid, in Harold and Maude.

'The movie started out as a half-hour master’s thesis when then-31-year old Colin Higgins was attending UCLA. But it would develop into a substantive film of surprising philosophical and political scope. Wiser than merely an eccentric dark comedy that kindles rebellious, daisy-tossing joie de vivre, the movie is also an impeccably subtle (actually unspoken) exploration of the legacy of the Holocaust. In one succinct shot, the camera focuses on Maude’s tattoo keepsake from World War II — a fleeting and unequivocal clue to her grab-life-by-the-balls personality.

'Unfortunately, the critics never got it. Nor were they amused, and the film flopped at the box office and closed quickly. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby grumped, “You might well want to miss Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude.” Variety called it a “tasteless offbeat comedy [that] has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage.” Meanwhile, Film Quarterly wrote that the film is “one of the best movies to come out of Hollywood in years. It is a love story, a sentimental black comedy, a ludicrous tear-jerker, a grisly social satire.”

'Eventually, Harold and Maude would play for two years in Paris, where Cort won a Crystal Star (the French equivalent of the Academy Award.) In college towns and art houses, the film found a devoted audience among disaffected youth. While the wild ones would watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show ad infinitum, the sensitive ones watched Harold and Maude again and again. One zealot claims to have seen it 201 times. “Harolding” became part of the teen lexicon: A term morose mopes coined to describe their penchant for cemetery-dwelling. Eventually, after 12 years, the film turned a profit. Meanwhile, Cort braved his cult status, with fervent fans leaving tombstones and pictures of dead babies’ graves at his door.

'Wary of being typecast, he turned his attention toward the theater, making his Broadway debut in Simon Grey’s Wise Child. He also did Chekhov, Ionesco and Beckett. Most recently he garnered accolades as a disillusioned circus clown in He Who Gets Slapped, an adaptation of Russian playwright Leonid Andreyev’s tragicomedy.

'In 1979, Cort was involved in a terrible car accident on the Hollywood Freeway on his way back from a Frank Sinatra concert. He broke an arm and a leg and sustained a concussion and a fractured skull. His face was severely lacerated, his lower lip cut and hanging by a thread. In 1984, he told People magazine, “When I got up the nerve to look at myself in a mirror for the first time, I screamed. I looked like a monster, with my forehead, face and lip all sewn up. I wanted to die.” Cort underwent three operations for plastic surgery and remains unsatisfied with the result. “I try not to look in mirrors,” he said.

'Cort spent all of his savings on medical bills and went on to lose a $10 million suit he had brought against the driver of the other car. He found himself broke and without work. While he receives annual residual checks from Paramount for Harold and Maude, (the last one was for $28.77 ), he doesn’t get any profit from video distribution. “I get no participation from video sales — I’d be a millionaire if I did,” Cort has said. “I made next to nothing from that movie.”

'In the past 20 years, Cort has made 30 forgettable films, including playing the role of Norman Bates’ creepy proxy in the TV flick The Bates Motel. After the accident, he’d stopped being choosy and uninterested in weirdo roles. His disfigurement motivated him to go into radio, where he did a bit of voice work, including a successfully syndicated reading of The Catcher in the Rye.

'In 1991, he made his debut as a director with Ted & Venus a low-budget romance about a crazed poet on Venice Beach that he also wrote and starred in. While the film’s producer called the movie the “spiritual sequel” of Harold and Maude, the critics were not moved. The L.A. Times wrote, “Bud Cort was as appealing in the milestone comedy (Harold and Maude) as he is repellent in this film.” Variety’s Todd McCarthy called it “a highly unpleasant yarn about a lovelorn sickie who endlessly torments a beautiful young woman.” The film — with cameos by Woody Harrelson, Gena Rowlands, Andrea Martin, Timothy Leary, Carol Kane and Martin Mull, went straight to video.

'In the coming year, Cort will appear in four or five films, some of which already have pretty good street cred. He has a role in the highly controversial, much anticipated Dogma, Kevin Smith’s religious satire starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, with Alanis Morissette as God. And he will portray the strait-laced dad of Natasha Lyonne’s high school cheerleader in But I’m a Cheerleader. In the film, the girl is sent by her parents to rehab camp when it’s suspected that she’s a lesbian. He will also appear in Dwight Yoakam’s western South of Heaven, West of Hell, starring Vince Vaughn, Billy Bob Thornton and Paul Rubens. Further, Cort will be seen in Ed Harris’ bio-pic about Jackson Pollack and the Bono-scripted Million Dollar Hotel, about a murder at a skid-row hotel.

'Cort may ultimately crack his typecast. Indeed, a new generation of kids is growing up that has never heard of Harold and Maude. But for many a poetic soul, Harold and Maude is bound to stay around forever. As Colin Higgins once explained, “We’re all Harold, and we all want to be Maude. We’re all repressed and trying to be free, to be ourselves, to be vitally interested in living, to be everything we want.”'-- Salon



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Stills
























































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Further

Bud Cort @ IMDb
Fuck Yeah Bud Cort
Bud Cort @ The Criterion Collection
'A Near-Fatal Car Crash Shatters the Career of a Movie Cult Hero'
'The Long Shadow of Bud Cort'
'Harold Meets Harold'
'Trying to Have the Last Laugh'
The Harold and Maude Homepage
'BEHIND-THE-SCENES OF HAROLD AND MAUDE'
Bud Cort Merch
'Bud Cort and Groucho Marx’s tooth'
'Grouch Marx was my fairy godfather'
'BUD CORT, PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S SEXIEST MAN ALIVE, 1973'
'SF Sketchfest salutes cult film star Bud Cort'
Bud Cort interviewed @ Chud
'Bud Cort on Bud Cort Cut Short by El Niño'



____
Pluses


Bud Cort on Roseanne


Bud Cort in 'Brave New World' (1980)



Pumping Iron - Unseen Footage - Bud Cort


Bud Cort in 'Telephone' (1986)



Bud Cort in Hollywood



_____
Interview
from Train Wreck Society




You’ve had an amazing career on the screen, and equally so on the stage. If you were to only choose one, which would you say would hold a more prominent spot in your heart?

Bud Cort: Radio. I got to read the entire J.D Salinger novel Catcher in the Rye for radio station K.P.F.K. in Los Angeles. The whole book is written in the first person so it’s really the greatest monologue ever put down for an actor. A close second would be when I played Clov in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York and then in Los Angeles at the Mayfair Theater. Third would be She Dances Alone. This film is a jewel. It’s about madness and the artistic process and the great dancer Nijinsky through the eyes of his eccentric daughter Kyra Nijinsky who by looking at you would never believe she could possibly evoke her father through her own dancing. I played the director of this film within a film and Max Von Sydow narrated it reading from Nijinsky’s diaries. It’s magical.

What was it like living with Groucho Marx for an entire decade?

BC: It was a Fulbright scholarship in comedy.

Did your mother actually turn down a marriage proposal from Clark Gable?

BC: (Laughs) No, no. She worked for MGM studios in New York during the war when my father was over in Germany fighting. (His troop was the first in to liberate Dachau, (the concentration camp). They had to clean it up at its worst for the arrival of Eisenhower and his brass. My mother was a part of special services for MGM, which today would be considered the p.r. arm of a studio. She would pick Clark Gable up at Grand Central Station, escort him to the Plaza Hotel, and sit through all of his interviews for his latest film. Afterward if he was hungry or just wanted to be around people she would be his companion for dinner and dancing at the Stork Club. By the end of the week if he was fried she would drive him to a little hotel in the Poconos. Obviously both being married they had separate rooms. But anytime she spoke about him she always got a special faraway look in her eyes. I always fantasized he was my father because of my dimples and frankly I didn’t look that much like my own father. She was also great pals with Harold Lloyd.

You were absolutely incredible in your portrayal of Bill Ubell in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. And Wes Anderson is a personally hero of mine so I have to ask, how was it working under the direction of Anderson? I can only imagine a fantastic experience….

BC: Wes is a meticulous captain. He is so singular and so prepared that he can’t help but get exactly what he envisions. I’m a method actor so preparation is my middle name. Wes and I did go toe to toe on my character’s wardrobe. I thought my costumes looked like diarrhea, my own research into bond company personnel informed me that they were always a well dressed, smart and together bunch of people, but Wes was adamant on a more dweebified look. When I saw the film I was blown away by how right he was. Wes has his own, very unique genius and he just gets better and finer. I just loved Moonrise Kingdom.

You reportedly turned down the role as Billy Bibbit in Milos Forman’s adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest out of fear of typecast. Now almost 40 years later, do you believe you made the right choice?

BC: Hell no. But when I was offered it a different actor than Jack Nicholson was supposedly doing the film. Later on, after I’d turned it down, I found out Jack was now playing McMurphy. I flew to the phone to called Milos (Forman, the director) and Michael Douglas (the producer). But it was too late. Billy Bibbit had been cast with Brad Dourif who was great.

You played John Doe Jersey, a.ka. God, in Kevin Smith’s Dogma. How do you even begin to prepare to play the role of Earth’s curator and guardian?

BC: I looked in the mirror a lot. (kidding) I am a good Catholic boy, you know.

It would be naive and rightfully inconsiderate to ignore the fact that most of the people reading this interview probably know you best as Harold from the 1971 classic comedy Harold and Maude. The film was not an initial success, but grew to classic status. Why do you think this is? Is it a “story ahead of its time” sort of scenario?

BC: As I was reading the script I immediately knew it was going to be a classic film for the ages. There was no denying it. The studio was stumped on how to publicize it. The art for newspapers and theater posters was plain black, block lettering on an empty background it was more appropriate for The Ten Commandments! Truthfully, it’s success came from the people. The ground swell of word of mouth dropkicked it over so many goalposts both here and abroad- that Paramount had to re-release it.

In a perfect world, the 1991 film Ted and Venus which you wrote, directed, and starred in would receive its own following as well. Were there any personal inspirations behind creating this film, which I have heard was based on true events? And are we ever going to see an American DVD release?

BC: There is a bootleg DVD that people have tracked down online. I personally would love to have it properly re-released to DVD by the studio. I also would love to have another quick pass in editing. I shot stuff that would be wild for today’s audiences but back in 1991 the studio was, hmmm… shall we say a little reticent? Nevertheless, I got about 99 percent of what I was going for, but for me that missing one percent still drives me nuts. That also includes the title, which they made me change from Love In Venice (which I thought was a beautiful and apt take on Death In Venice) to Ted and Venus which came out of what I was told was “market research”. I found out the distributor had made three phone calls to New York and asked “what would you rather hear Bud Cort’s new film called? Love In Venice or Ted and Venus (which was obviously a play on Harold and Maude). They went with the cheesier title.

So many people have told me the film was way ahead of its time. Others have remarked that they’d seen the film and they had obviously missed it when it came out in the 70’s. That was my biggest complement because I obsessed over the look of the film, which took place in the 70’s but actually was made in the 90’s. It was based on an LA Weekly cover story that did actually happen. For some reason I was not allowed to print that at the beginning of the film. I really am proud of the film. Peter Bogdanovich told me it was the best first film directed by an actor he’d seen since John Cassavetes. Gena Rowlands was in it by the way what a superb actress and babe.

It would also behoove me to mention a film you did prior to Harold and Maude, known as Gasss! by the infamous cult filmmaker Roger Corman. I know it’s been quite a while, but was it a unique scenario working with the king of crazy, Mr. Corman?

BC: It was definitely an experience. Certain costumes on supposedly dead heroes like Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and JFK, instead of being realistic were turned into Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade caricatures. I personally was offended and didn’t want to shoot with them. But I’ve seen Roger many times over the years and he is one of the most personable gentlemen in the business.

Aside from a varied and lengthy acting career, you started out as an artist, primarily a portrait painter. Is there anywhere across the land a common observer can see or purchase work from you?
You’d have to haunt Rye, New York where I grew up, because I did so many portraits of Rye residents and their children and their dogs that I was usually walking around bleary eyed. I finally gave it up because I wanted to act full time, which I’d actually been doing since nursery school anyway. With time I realized that every part I played could actually be its own portrait.

BC: Thanks for the “legendary”! In February of this year I had a full knee replacement (They found I had no cartilage I’m sure from all the theater pratfalls and physical hi-jinx in films over the years). I’ve still got six more months of out-patient physical therapy to go – and then my surgeon tells me I should be back to 100 percent. I have some projects lined up and fortunately the creative team are able to wait for me.

What was the last thing that made you smile?

BC: Rickie Lee Jones’s new album The Devil You Know. It’s cray cray good.



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18 of Bud Cort's 77 roles

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Robert Altman MASH (1970)
'It was while in a comedy review called "Free Fall", at Upstairs at the Downstairs in 1969, that Cort was "discovered" by director Robert Altman. Later Robert Altman cast Bud Cort in M.A.S.H. (1970)'. MASH is a 1970 American satirical black comedy film written by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on Richard Hooker's novel MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors. It is the only feature film in the M*A*S*H franchise and became one of the biggest films of the early 1970s for 20th Century Fox. The film depicts a unit of medical personnel stationed at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War; the subtext is about the Vietnam War. The film went on to receive five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. The film's only win was for Best Adapted Screenplay.'-- collaged



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Stuart Hagmann The Strawberry Statement (1970)
'The film details the life of one student, loosely based on the Columbia University protests of 1968 and the non-fiction book of the same name by James Simon Kunen. The film does not take place in New York City, at Columbia University, but in Stockton, California, at a fictional university – which is based on San Francisco State College (later San Francisco State University). The original book's author, James Simon Kunen, has a cameo appearance in the film. Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air" and numerous other rock songs are used on the soundtrack. The film won the Jury Prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, tying with Magasiskola.'-- collaged



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Roger Corman Gas-s-s-s! or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. (1970)
'This was Roger Corman’s last film as a director for American International Pictures, and his penultimate film as a director, period, for nearly twenty years. It can also be seen as a unification of two threads from earlier in Corman’s career, the scatterbrained comedies of the early 60’s (think The Little Shop of Horrors or Creature from the Haunted Sea) and the counterculture movies (most notably The Wild Angels and The Trip) which he had made over the preceding two years. Gas-s-s-s shares the latter films’ social and political perspective, but marries it to the campy chaos of the former to produce what Corman seems to have considered a cutting-edge satire on the impending death-throes of a doomed species. Unfortunately, what the combination really produces is an almost totally plotless succession of sophomoric absurdities, weighed down by a woefully misplaced faith in its own depth and relevance. The gas of the title is a chemical weapon developed for the US Army at a top-secret research station in the wilds of Alaska. As we are told in a pre-credits cartoon in exactly the same style as that which opens Creature from the Haunted Sea, the deadly vapor leaks out of its containment tanks, and quickly spreads to envelop the entire world. The effects of the gas are counterintuitive to say the least; it accelerates the aging of anybody over 25, resulting in their almost immediate demise from premature decrepitude. What possible war-fighting value the Pentagon could have seen in a chemical to which practically everybody on any given battlefield would be naturally immune (after all, the average age of a foot-soldier in Vietnam was nineteen) is anyone’s guess. But this is one of those movies that punish the application of logic and reason with both terrible severity and perfect consistency, so don’t waste your energy trying to make sense out of anything, okay?'-- 1000 Misspent Hours



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Jack Smight The Traveling Executioner (1970)
'The Traveling Executioner is a definite counter-culture film concept, despite taking place in 1918. Slightly freakish ex- conman and convict Jonas Candide (Stacy Keach) wears long hair, a top hat and dark coat as he presides over Mississippi executions with his portable electric chair, a throne-like contraption wired to a powerful generator. At a hundred dollars a sizzle, Jonas travels the state making fast money. He takes pride in his work and soothes his 'customers' with gentle talk about their next destination, "the fields of ambrosia". Jonas' specialized skills are admired by prison warden Brodsky (M. Emmet Walsh, 14 years before the Coens'Blood simple), prison Doc Prittle (Graham Jarvis) and local undertaker Jimmy Croft (Bud Cort). This R-rated curiosity of the early post- Production Code era dropped like a stone at the box office and for the most part disappeared for forty years, with the exception of a few TV airings and perhaps a VHS release (not verified).'-- DVD Talk



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Robert Altman Brewster McCloud (1970)
'Brewster McCloud concerns a young man who wants to build wings and fly (Bud Cort), a steely-eyed detective (Michael Murphy) and a tall blond who may or may not be the mysterious strangulation killer (Sally Kellerman, whom you may remember as Hot Lips in M*A*S*H). There’s also a Texas billionaire, a kooky bird lecturer, and more raven guano than you can shake a stick at. If you don’t know what guano is, don’t worry; the movie makes it abundantly clear, in word and in deed. There’s even an expert scatologist to explain. Anyway, the young man hides in the Houston Astrodome and works on his wings. The detective investigates the murders. The girl appears mysteriously whenever she’s needed to help the young man. And beyond that, there’s nothing I can tell you about the plot that would be of the slightest help. Altman’s style is centrifugal, whirling off political allusions, jokes, double takes and anything else that flies loose from the narrative center.'-- Roger Ebert



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Hal Ashby Harold and Maude (1971)
'"I walked into this room and Hal [Ashby] was the first person I saw," he remembers. "Hal made me feel so warm and welcome. He said, 'This is Colin Higgins who wrote the script, this is Chuck Mulvehill who's producing it,' and I just looked at all three of them and said, 'I'm playing this part.' And Hal laughed and said, 'I guess you are!'" Cort was equally confident on set, leading to spontaneous moments such as the creepy shot in which he breaks the fourth wall and grins at us. He threw himself into Harold's numerous staged suicides, telling Ashby he wanted him to believe that he might go through with it. For the hanging scene, he says, "I was so into it that I believed I was hanging myself to death." His method techniques sometimes clashed with the more classically-trained cast. During a scene in which his screen mother, played by Vivian Pickles, tells him he's going to be joining the army, he slowly raised his middle finger, sucked on it, then held it up at her throughout her monologue. "She finished and ran off the set. Then Hal said, 'Oh my god, Bud you can't do that! It was great, but she's pretty down, you have to apologise to her!'" Ashby later got Cort to give the finger in another scene. Cort and Ashby grew close over the production. After filming, says Cort, Paramount took control of the edit from Ashby, so Cort went to a publicity meeting with the studio and told them he'd refuse to promote the film unless they gave control back to a devastated Ashby, which they did (other than a kissing scene which Paramount boss Robert Evans hated). Cort, though, then found himself persona non grata with the studio.'-- The Guardian



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Lucio Marcaccini Hallucination Strip (1975)
'In 1975, Bud Cort, high from his recent success as Harold in Harold & Maude, decided to don a rough goatee and follow a trail of money that ended at a psychedelic passion project from a no-name director. In some ways, Hallucination Strip could remind one of the recent Under the Skin insomuch that Cort’s baby-face and mustachio combo along with his heavy Italian ADR give him the image of a well-blended alien amongst the Roman hippies. Alas, Cort scurries along with them in a battered tale of sex, drugs, and petty theft — sadly human after all. With Kino’s Raro Video division release of Hallucination Strip on Blu-ray, audiences today can experience Eurocrime cinema with Hollywood star flair ending in predictably disastrous results. Cort’s performance switches between stagnant and unusually sweaty, perhaps as a result of conflating his call-to-fame role and the new position of leading a hippie crime thriller.'-- Sound on Sight



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Rod Amateau Son of Hitler (1978)
'With black comedies like HAROLD & MAUDE and BREWSTER McCLOUD to his credit, 30-year-old Bud Cort must've seemed like the perfect candidate for a Nazi-themed laff-fest. Nevertheless, this German-made farce about der Fuhrer's secret offspring was barely released. That's because it's one of those rare, unfathomably wrongheaded projects that makes you wonder "what the hell were they thinking?" The cinematic equivalent of a 20-car pile-up, any vaguely interesting notion is quickly crushed in favor of an unsuccessful cheap laugh. 30-year-old orphan Willi (Cort) has lived in the mountains for his entire life, secluded from civilization and education, but when his beloved Uncle Fritz passes away, he finally uncovers info about his dad. His birth father was none other than Adolph Hitler, but uneducated Willi doesn't recognize the infamous name or know anything about World War II. Cort isn't too bad as this sweet and wimpy oddball, who's suddenly thrust into potential greatness-- while making Chauncey Gardiner look quick-witted in comparison. Cushing (hot off of his STAR WARS gig) plays it relatively straight, plus Anton Diffring turns up as Veleska's dad and burly Leo Gordon is Haussner's assistant. It's definitely painful, but worth a look just to see poor Bud Cort shuffling about with a classic Hitler haircut, looking understandably uncomfortable with this gig.'-- Shock Cinema Magazine



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Jeff Werner Die Laughing (1980)
'"Oddly enough, I had a job waiting for me when I got out of the hospital. It was a role in Die Laughing that I had been scheduled to do before the accident. Jon Peters, the producer, called me in the hospital. My leg was up in the air, my arm was in a cast and my face was torn up. All I did was concentrate on breathing. I was sure he was going to have to fire me, but to my amazement he said, 'Well, you're playing the villain anyway. I'll put back the start date. It'll be perfect. Think about how good it will be for the character.'"-- Bud Cort



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Andrei Konchalovsky Maria's Lovers (1984)
'Imagine that you're watching Maria's Lovers with subtitles, for it approaches its grand passions with a woozy, rapturous seriousness associated with foreign films. Yet it is an impeccable piece of vintage Americana, right down to the slang, for all the Russian soul of its distinguished director, Andrei Konchalovsky. The juxtaposition takes some getting used to--but it is also what makes the film finally seem so special and rewarding. Indeed, Konchalovsky has succeeded where Eisenstein failed, becoming the first Russian citizen, as opposed to emigre, to direct a Hollywood production. Cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia's lighting brings to Maria's Lovers a naturalistic, as opposed to realistic, glow that is reminiscent not just of Konchalovsky's own epic "Siberiade" but of the films of his director-brother Nikita Mikhalkov and of Andrei Tarkovsky. (Konchalovsky has worked as a writer for both.)'-- The LA Times



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Danford B. Greene The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud (1984)
'Supposedly focusing on the life of Sigmund Freud by means of a fictional secret diary, this attempt at satirizing the man from his childhood through his first forays into psychoanalysis is weak on laughter, especially since it is difficult to tell whether a scene is serious or not. Freud (Bud Cort) is portrayed as being too nauseated by blood and physical anatomy to make it through medical school, and because he misunderstands what practicing medicine is all about, he accidentally starts psychoanalyzing his patients. His Ultimate Patient (Dick Shawn) provides him with the theories that would make him famous. Presented as a series of nearly disconnected vignettes, this story about the relationships between Freud and a nurse (Carol Kane), and his mother (Caroll Baker) and a doctor, are meant to be funny, but are not quite.'-- Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi



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Tobe Hooper Invaders from Mars (1986)
'Famed genre director Tobe Hooper is known for several classics, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist, and Salem’s Lot, as well as lesser-known cult favorites like The Funhouse. One film of his that has gone mostly under the radar is his 1986 film Invaders From Mars, which is a remake of the highly rated 1953 film of the same name. This marks my first time seeing the film, and I can say that I enjoyed it. In the 1980s John Carpenter struck gold remaking a 50s film (The Thing), and while Hooper’s redo failed to receive the same notoriety it still gave me what I wanted to see from one of the genre’s most notable directors. With his town under siege by alien invaders who have taken over the minds of his parents and others in authority over him, a young boy enlists the help of a school nurse and the U.S. Marines to send the enemy back where they came from.'-- John of the Dead



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Adam Simon Brain Dead (1990)
'Brain Dead – which should not be confused with Peter Jackson’s zombie splatter comedy Braindead (1992) or the subsequent Brain Dead (2007) – is one of the better dream/reality intrusion films that came out in the late 1980s, attempting to copy the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Brain Dead was produced by legendary B-movie producer/director Roger Corman. The director was Adam Simon, who went to direct Carnosaur (1993), also for Roger Corman, and The American Nightmare (2000), a fine documentary about the modern horror film, as well as write the scripts for Bones (2001) and The Haunting in Connecticut (2009). In fact, Brain Dead is one of the best of all A Nightmare on Elm Street clones. Most Elm Street copies, indeed most of the Elm Street sequels themselves, flip back and forward between reality and dream illusion with such regularity that the dividing line becomes like wet paper and in so doing diminish any real effect. So does Brain Dead but the reality flips are nested in a script filled with startling and clever reversals. Bill Pullman cures Bud Cort’s paranoid hallucinations but then with disturbing regard starts to see them himself. The film keeps putting the screws on the situation until Bill Pullman is in a psychiatric institution having become Bud Cort’s wife-killing paranoiac and being told that his identity as a neurosurgeon is an hallucination.'-- Moria



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Bud Cort Ted & Venus (1991)
'HAROLD AND MAUDE was initially trashed by critics and ignored by audiences before it went on to become the beloved cult classic that it is today, so why not give a second (or first) look at Bud Cort’s directorial debut, TED AND VENUS? Upon its 1991 direct-to-video release, it was dismissed by critics who uniformly compared the film unfavorably with HAROLD AND MAUDE. The irony is that these critics would have probably been the same ones disparaging that film if they had been around then. It’s fitting that many of the negative comments made by critics about HAROLD AND MAUDE upon its initial release mirror those made about TED AND VENUS — unsympathetic protagonist, lack of character motivation, too weird, too self-consciously quirky, etc. Or, to quote the Variety review, “HAROLD AND MAUDE has all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage.” And the resemblances between HAROLD AND MAUDE and TED AND VENUS, besides the obvious reference in the title’s male first name and female first name pairing, are not merely superficial. There’s a good reason why Cort dedicated TED AND VENUS to Ruth Gordon, Hal Ashby, and Colin Higgins — respectively, the co-star, director, and screenwriter of the film that was both a blessing and a curse for Cort. What makes TED AND VENUS interesting is exactly what critics of the film objected to: how it sets up expectations only to completely obliterate them.'-- The prone gunman's Weblog



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Kevin Smith Dogma (1999)
'"Dana Shapiro: You've had some interesting parts recently. You played God in Dogma, a movie that inspired a lot of protests from outraged Catholics. But you actually go to church every Sunday. Were people mad at you for making that movie?" Bud Cort: "In my own little church in my neighborhood, they were badmouthing it, but they didn't know I was in it. And I keep a real low profile in the church."'-- NY Times



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Wim Wenders The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)
'If you're looking for a defining Wenders image, try starting with the gloomy angels in overcoats in Wings Of Desire. The Million Dollar Hotel plays like a sop thrown down by a genius who imagines his every pensée is both precious and engagingly satirical. I can't think of very much to say about this film. The cast list reads like a who's-who of irritating actors: Amanda Plummer, Julian Sands, Bud Cort, etc. Mel Gibson looks very uncomfortable as a G-man investigating a suspicious death, and not just because he's wearing a neck brace and is supposed to have had spinal surgery. Jeremy Davies plays twitchy and annoying very well, but who wants to watch that? Wim Wenders creates some magical visuals but the central murder-mystery, which ought to drive the film, is completely underwhelming.'-- collaged



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Ed Harris Pollock (2000)
'As adapted from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's book by Barbara Turner and Susan Emshwiller, Jackson Pollock is portrayed as a simple man, an unknown artist and alcoholic leaching off his family in New York City until fellow painter and future wife Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden, Space Cowboys) took on the burden of selfless caretaker and nurturer. Krasner put her own career on hold to promote Pollock's because she believed in his genius. She had the connections he did not and was able to first get the attention of Howard Putzel (Bud Cort, in an endearing performance) who led to the all important sponsorship of Peggy Guggenheim (Harris' wife Amy Madigan, almost unrecognizable). Krasner also got Pollock away from the bottle and the city, moving out to an old Long Island farmhouse where Pollock stumbled upon the splatter technique which would become his defining style.'-- Reeling Reviews



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Wes Anderson The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)
'"I did train extensively for the role, because Bill (Murray) said I would be in the water doing a lot of swimming. I swam every day. I would get up at 4 a.m. and got in excellent, excellent shape. During the film I dieted and lost 50 pounds for a sequence but they kept pushing back this kidnapping scene. When I finally left Rome at the end I was a toothpick. I was to speak the lines in Indonesian, and I had mastered that when Wes called and said “We can’t find any Indonesian actors here (in Italy). Could you learn the part in Filipino?” The languages could not be any more different. Wes said “Look, you just write (the lines).” So I had something like five pages of dialog. It was very political, concerning the state of the ocean, the destruction of the coral reefs, etc. Wes said he loved it but the Producer asked me to take out the political stuff. Still, you don’t see many fish in the film, which I think is pretty honest. One of the divers we worked with said the area (Anzio) used to be full of fish, and now there’s just nothing out there."'-- Bud Cort



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*

p.s. Hey. If you're interested, Blake Butler interviewed me about 'Zac's Haunted House' over on VICE today. ** Keaton, I believe you about Crowley. All kinds smart folks like you whom I know savor his writings. I guess the underground celebrity stuff has warded me off. Type O Negative, wow. Blast from the elsewhere. When I take over France, ha ha, uh, Rims it shall be. I mean I'll have to poll the locals first but I'm sure they'll be down with it. ** David Ehrenstein, Merci! And, yes, congratulations to you and the equally legendary Bill! Awesome and very sweet! Happiness! ** Tosh Berman, Redonnet's trilogy in which 'HS' is the first volume is probably the best place to start with her, if you do. I don't remember that gravestone. Sounds amazing. Is it in PL? That place is such a maze, there's a never ending supply of wild ones popping up. I'll treasure hunt that one. ** Sypha, Did I? Possibly. I think it was relative to the others or something? But sure, why not. Cool that you're dedicating yourself to working on 'Trinity'. Yeah, I think 1,015 pages will still count as an epic. ** Magick mike, Hi, Mike! Me neither on her poetry. Well, I did read some here and there when I was making the post. I couldn't get a handle on it, on first reading. It did seem very her in some as-yet to be figured out way. ** Kier, Hi! That is a score, and cleaning someone else's place is always fun for some weird reason. I can't remember the last time I played a game when I didn't have a good walk-through and cheat site lying open on my desktop at the same time. My day ... Oh, yes, the highly respected person whom Zac and I asked to watch 'LCTG' had, as I'd hoped, called Zac, and apparently he really loves the film and was very positive and enthusiastic, and we are, as you can imagine, very happy about that. We're batting 1000 so far, as they say. So that happened. Yesterday was mostly spent prepping for the post-production in Berlin, which means figuring out and starting to do what we need to do to be ready for that, which is a fair though doable amount. And since the blog will be going into reruns while I'm there, I've been dragging up old posts and reconstituting them in their new spots, which is kind of labor intense in its own way, so I started doing a bunch of that. I had a jones to go book shopping, but I wanted a companion for that venture, and no one seemed to be around or free or interested, so I didn't. Yeah, another day of staying home and doing things of interest that wouldn't translate into an interesting, sufficiently non-nerdy report. But I think Zac and I are going to maybe go see some art or stuff today, so that might help tomorrow's play-by-play. Sorry for this recent spate of blah reports. And you? And ... wait, what day is it? Thursday! And you and Thursday? ** Brendan, Hi, B! Dang, if I had made the book shopping tour I just mentioned to Kier and that I had hoped to get under my belt yesterday, that was the #1 search item. I'll get there. Sounds pretty interesting. Maybe I can catch up. Yeah, new theater piece. It stars 7 world famous German ventriloquists -- really, they're like the top, most respected ventriloquists in Europe -- plus Jonathan Capedevielle, who's a not too shabby ventriloquist himself. The setting is an annual ventriloquists convention. It basically is the convention. So, you'll look in on famous ventriloquists having a very strange, hopefully amusing and moving and enlightening convention onstage. It's not like anything Gisele and I have ever done before, except for the ventriloquism topic. It's not conventional, for sure, but it's the closest to an actual 'play' that we've ever done. World premiere is next July in Germany, and then a big world tour. I think, if Im remembering right, it already has a gig in LA set up, maybe at LACMA? ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, shit, so much for strangly crossed fingers. Yeah, that 'can he afford it' thing is a fucking bitch. When I had my apartment here for a while, I had to pay 8 months rent up front to get the place. Ugh. Yeah, work every angle, and I hope they drop their wariness. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, okay. See, that's what I anticipated about the film, but then I was surprised by all the positive I heard about it. I'm not a massive Cronenberg fan to begin with. Okay, good to know, thank you! ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Is she translated in German? I don't see why not. That bookstore like a complete jewel. Awesome and envy. I haven't seen 'TIHYWD' in a while, and Gisele always fiddles with her pieces, so it's possible. There's a new main performer now because Margret couldn't do the role anymore. That changed the piece. She has a completely different look and body. I saw one of the first shows with the new performer in it, and I felt like she wasn't quite there yet, but Gisele says she's totally there now, and I know Gisele surely tweaked the piece to match the particular talent of the new dancer, so maybe that's it? ** Misanthrope, Hi. Oh, wow, I don't think I have the whatever to read 'The Turner Diaries'. Well, obviously there are people who express outrage in social media about things that clearly and truly outrage them, and that's different. But I meant the people whose 'outrage' is like a perpetually hungry lion and to whom whatever happens in the world, big or small, important or trivial, are like a bunch of deer standing in a nearby field. So it doesn't seem to matter if the thing is Kanye/Beck or the murdered Muslim students or Brian Williams or the killed ISIS hostage. They all get the almost exact same level of outraged sharing and ranting. That's why the fifteen minutes of uninformed, squalling 'outrage' about the Charlie Hebdo drove me up the wall. It just seems like an addiction to me, and FB, for instance, is just like their shooting gallery. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark! Yeah, goddess she is. I still hope to meet her one of these days because she shares my French publisher. Awesome about the 'Goners' post! I'm excited! No, I haven't had a chance to dip into the pdf yet. Things are a bit overly busy here, but I will, hopefully today. Thanks! ** Bill, Hi. She's worth climbing those cliffs, I think, but see how it goes. I haven't seen Egoyan's 'Speaking Parts'? Should I? I don't even know if it's recent. I kind of gave up on his recent films, but maybe unfairly? Ooh, the new Kelly Lynch. Awesome! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! She's pretty great. I think you'll like it, man. Thanks! ** Okay. I somehow found my way into thinking about Bud Cort the other day, and about how awesome he is, so I put together this overview thing, and I hope it suits whatever purpose you have for my blog today. See you tomorrow.