'Any review of Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg must prepare the reader for the explicitness of the content; an explicitness marked even before you begin to read the book by the keyword indicators in the peritext.

'"1. Rapists – Fiction. 2. Sex crimes – Fiction. 3. Pedophilia – Fiction. 4. Victims of violent crimes – Fiction. 5. Children – Crimes against – Fiction."

'Hogg is explicitly and violently pornographic. Delany takes his readers to the limit of readability – but as long as you keep reading, you repeatedly face up to some of the darkest and most carefully hidden parts of your own desire. Presented in a similar format to the conquests of Walter in My Secret Life by Frank Harris (1890) and the narratives of de Sade, Hogg follows the encounters of the boy-narrator-protagonist in a catalogue of sexual and violent acts which he witnesses, or more often participates in, particularly in relation to the dirt-encrusted trucker come hit-man Hogg.

'Delany forces his reader through page after page of violence and abuse. As a reader I found myself varying between arousal and disgust (and occasionally disgust at my arousal), between groping my throbbing erection and plunging my hand into my crotch the way nervous children do, trying to find my shrivelled cock, which had withdrawn in horror at the narrative. Reading Hogg makes you viscerally complicit. ...

'Written in San Francisco in 1969 and revised over the next four years, Delany did not find a publisher for Hogg for over twenty years after its completion, despite a backlist of popular successes as a writer of fiction, science fiction and non-fiction. Even the editor at Olympia Press, who first published Lolita, said that Hogg was the only novel he’d ‘ever rejected solely because of its sexual content.’ When it was issued by Black Ice Books and FC2 in 1995 it was published in an edition of just five-hundred. The current reprint by FC2 is the first time Hogg has been issued to a wider readership.

'Although Hogg is not autobiographical, the unnamed child protagonist and narrator would appear, in part, to be Delany. The racial ambiguity of the narrator-protagonist (he slips between a black/white identification) could very easily be Delany himself, who has described elsewhere his ability to ‘pass’ as white. Hogg is an autobiography of the pornographic imagination. Related works by Delany include the memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988), the novel The Mad Man (1994), and the graphic novel Bread and Wine (1999). Even where there is no ‘resemblance’ to be found, the extreme nature of the content brings us back to the life of the author; we inevitably ask: what kind of guy would write this stuff? ...

'Unlike sex itself, Hogg is not more-ish. I was relieved to get to the end. But the relief was not that of dutifully completing a novel I got no pleasure from, rather it was the relief of a challenge accepted and fulfilled, an exhausting journey that made me want to consider what I had discovered along the way.'-- Joshua Sofaer



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Further

Samuel Delany Info Page
Samuel R. Delany, The Art of Fiction No. 210
Samuel Delany Autobiography (written under a pseudonym)
Errata for all of Delany's novels
"Racism and Science Fiction" by Samuel R. Delany
Samuel Delany @ Facebook
'A Conversation With Samuel R. Delany'
'Alone as a queer, young, black sci-fi nerd: then I discovered Samuel Delany'
'The Samuel Delany / NAMBLA Conversation'
'The Motion of Light: Celebrating Samuel R. Delany'
Samuel Delany's review of Kubrick's '2001'
Film: 'The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman'
'Studying the Works of Samuel R. Delany'
'A Celebration of Samuel R Delany: Aye, and Gomorrah'
'Samuel R. Delany: Another Roundtable'
'Samuel R. Delany: The Grammar of Narrative'
'When Gloria Steinem and Samuel Delany clashed over Wonder Woman'
'Sage of the Apocalypse'
'About Samuel Delany'
'Samuel R. Delany on Why Science Fiction and Literature Are and Should Be Different'
'Space Cowboy: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany'
'Opposing Forces and Ethical Judgments'
'10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Read Samuel R. Delany'



_________
Additionally


Pratt Lecture Series: Samuel R. Delany


Samuel R. Delany reads from 'Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders'


Robert Reid-Pharr interviews Samuel R Delany at University of Maryland


JNT Dialogue 2013: José Muñoz and Samuel Delany



_______
Interview




TERRY ENRIGHT: One of the few things that’s comforting about the book is that there seems to be a real acceptance of human beings—the narrator accepts them young or old, fat or skinny, hung or not. And not just every kind of human but everything that comes out of them. In addition, no one seems ever to get jealous—Hogg never tries to claim the boy solely for himself or anything. Since this attitude prevails in The Mad Man and from what I know of your autobiography, it strikes me that you might be endorsing this as a utopic vision of love and sex. Would that be accurate?

SAMUEL R. DELANY: I feel a little odd talking about a novel as “endorsing” anything. Always, I’ve felt that novels were fundamentally records—and necessarily distorted records—of things observed in the world. It would be disingenuous not to admit that some things I observe I like and some I don’t like, but the basic enterprise is to portray them—with all the distortions—in some sort of esthetic pattern. My like or dislike of them should be of secondary, or even tertiary importance.

Because, with jealousy, you feel majorly disrespected, jealousy is different from the simple sadness of not getting what you want. With jealousy, you feel you should have what you lack—as a man, as a woman, as a wife, as a husband, as a worker overlooked for a promotion, as a child who has not received a present some other sibling has gotten, as a friend who hasn’t gotten a phone call thanking you for a gift you gave or a dinner check you picked up at a restaurant.

Fundamentally, jealousy is a social emotion. People are jealous because they are brought up to feel that they have a right to certain treatment—to other people’s attention, to other people’s work, to other people’s sexual fidelity. When they don’t get it, they feel diminished, insulted, and cheated out of something they believe society marked out as their due. Jealousy is not particularly “natural”—or, for that matter, “unnatural.” Nor do I think it’s necessarily “healthy,” or “unhealthy.” I think it’s learned. When it’s extreme, often it’s a pain in the butt, both for the person feeling the jealousy and for the person who is the object of that jealousy, as well as the world around both persons. Once we learn what it is, however, in some cases—if we live certain kinds of lives—we can unlearn how to be jealous.

The vast majority of us live in our superegos, rather than in our ids or even our egos. It’s much easer to do something we think is right (even momentarily) than it is to do something only because it’s pleasurable (and, even trying, we cannot think of an ethical justification). Indeed, it takes a highly civilized person with a highly cultivated aesthetic sensibility to do something just because it’s pleasurable. And most of the time, the necessary prior cultivation has been the setting in place of a discourse that says a certain amount or type of pleasure is itself good, moral, right, and beneficial to the individual and promotes the greater good.

Only the strongest egos can occasionally break through this mental stricture—at the behest of sex, say—and even that usually leads to a restructuring of an ethical discourse. The vast majority of the “evil” perpetrated in the world is perpetrated in the name of the superego, through which, as Freud showed us, the ego and the id try blindly to live.

In your question up there, basically you’re right as far as my own feelings are concerned. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly jealous person. But because I’m a gay man who’s lived a relatively active sexual life, in many places the idea of sexual jealousy is so self-contradictory that I simply couldn’t tolerate it in myself. So I’ve worked—not terribly hard, when all is said and done—to eradicate those feelings. I’m glad I did. Yet once in a while a surge of it flares up and surprises me. Today, rarely do I feel jealousy for sexual reasons. Social attention from a friend—or its lack when I’m expecting it—is far more likely to set me off and leave me feeling the painful, angering deprivation that’s what jealousy is. Frankly, today even that’s pretty rare for me.

Still, I work on it.

A few people—often ones who have never thought of themselves as particularly deserving of anything in the first place—are astonishingly “non-jealous.” Certainly this is the case with the narrator of Hogg as well as Hogg himself. But, yes, such a lack of jealousy is one of the things a sexually active life may actually be able teach you.

It was Blake who said the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom. I always suspected this was one of the things he had in mind.

Fundamentally, I don’t think there’s anything necessarily healthier about monogamy than there is about promiscuity, either. Or vice versa, for that matter. But, yes, if you lead a promiscuous life, putting some curbs on your tendency toward jealousy is the only reasonable way to do it. Only extremely powerful—and dictatorial—people can afford to be both promiscuous and jealous.

TERRY ENRIGHT: The most disturbing element of the book—aside from particular scenes of especially gruesome depravity—is the utter passivity towards the pain of others (when that pain isn’t being actively inflicted). Even the characters who ostensibly provide contrast to Hogg and his crew exhibit a stunning unwillingness to intervene in the suffering of others. Red, Rufus, Mona and Harry all at least suspect Big Sambo of abusing and raping his daughter, but none of them does anything about it. Then there’s the narrator who seems almost completely indifferent to the suffering of the women—he seems aware of what they’re enduring and, at the urging of others, helps assault them. Is he supposed to be too young to be able to think these things out for himself? One reviewer was under the impression he licks a girl to ease the pain of the rape—but to my eye that’s a misreading of a pretty straightforward text. He prepares to lick her and as he does so, it occurs to him it might ease her pain—but they weren’t cause and effect.

SAMUEL R. DELANY: I think you’re perfectly right in that particular reading. But just as I believe jealousy, even sexual jealousy, is a fundamentally social emotion, I also believe identification with other people’s suffering is almost entirely an aesthetic emotion. When we watch real suffering occur, out on the street, perhaps, the fact is, most people don’t feel very much. The offers of help may be real. The shows of concern tend to be a variety of emotional miming. Sometimes people feel fear—and sometimes that fear can even linger. But that’s about all. To watch real suffering causes our emotions—unless we’ve had a particular kind of education—immediately to clamp down.

Think of the young people in Pride and Prejudice, girls and boys of 18, 19, and 20, who come in, laughing and chattering, from a pleasant afternoon watching a sailor publicly flogged—a sailor who, as happened in three out of five such floggings at the time, probably died over the next couple of days.

We learn compassion for others through works of art. It’s one of the ways art civilizes—it’s something narrative art really can teach. The major thrust of Aristotle’s argument on tragedy—pity, terror, and catharsis aside (they’re only the machinery through which it happens)—is that tragedy promotes compassion in the public audience for that public’s leaders, leaders who often, however inadvertently, make terrible mistakes. This compassion in the people is politically advantageous to the greater society, Aristotle argues. If they feel this compassion, they are more easily governed. (The fact that Hogg starts to make people feel some compassion for people both like Hogg and the narrator is, I suspect, what readers find most unsettling.) Aristotle also argues, in effect, that to have such compassion for ordinary men and women—the working classes, say—would be silly and socially counterproductive. There’s far too much suffering in the world and no practical way to relieve it. It would only gum up the social workings—and, for 4th Century BCE Greece, he was probably right.

But the fact that my characters don’t feel much compassion for each other—people who are being really hurt—only means that they haven’t spent a lot of time at the movies or watching TV.

That’s all.

Even by the end of the 18th Century, there was probably less compassion for the working classes among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy than there is today for the run-of-the-mill child molester. While people were proud of their own country’s soldiers killed in the line of duty, nobody felt sorry for them—unless a casualty happened to be a personal friend. Even the working classes themselves, while often they felt severe family loyalties, had little compassion for one another, as individuals or as a class. The general wisdom—which the working class itself shared—was that 95% of them were thieves and layabouts, when they weren’t retarded. Unless they were under strict supervision from overseers or army officers, they would probably rob you blind and, with half a chance, rape your daughter. (Think of all those scheming peasants in all those Balzac novels!) This was the life Hobbes described as “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short,” and thus a relief for everyone else when you were finished with it—and nobody gave much thought at all what losing it might mean to you.

In Sentimental Education (1858) Flaubert’s portrait of Dussardier is a mid-19th century analytical attempts to bring a member of the urban working class into the circle of middle-class compassion, through the aesthetic strategy of revealing what happens when that compassion is withheld, dissembled about, faked, and the bourgeois characters continue on in what at the time was their traditional manner. Dussardier’s death on the blade of Sénécal (the coldly calculating politico, Frédéric’s truly terrifying “bad conscousness”—and by implication what would be left of Frédéric were all his wishy-washy romanticism stripped away) is the moral and intellectual climax of the novel. Frédéric likes Dussardier, certainly. But he accuses him falsely of thefts to justify Frédéric himself borrowing large amounts of money (ineffectually to run after his pipe dream of an affair with Madame Arnoux), and generally abuses him shamelessly. The twin things Frédéric lacks for Dussardier are respect and compassion, and the result is that Dussardier is the character for whom the reader feels the most compassion—at least, by the calculus of 19th century melodrama that was alone available to even such an innovator as Flaubert, however flat it falls for readers today. (How could one person, for the coldest and most inhuman political reasons, Sénécal run through with a sword someone who once so good heartedly invited him to a party he gave in which he went out of his way to impoverish himself so that Sénécal might have a bottle of decent beer—that’s the question the novel asks in effect, as though writer and readers were all cousins of Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby. The argument is finally one about the value of pleasure, as are finally all arguments about compassion—its poetry, its unbiquity.)

For thousands of years, people have been saying war is a terrible thing. There have still been wars. What there hasn’t been, however, is “war movies.” Starting with Battleship Potemkin, Napoleon and Intolerance, up through The Grand Illusion, Paths of Glory, The Battle of Algiers, Apocalypse Now, The Big Red One, Saving Private Ryan, and The Pianist, those are what, in not quite a century, have helped stabilized the idea that war is terrible in a world economic order where it is far more profitable to take over a country’s functioning industrial system already in place rather than to first smash its infrastructure with bombs and troops beyond the point where it can function. Wars are relatively reasonable for conflicts between agricultural countries. Replanting a battlefield is not particularly difficult. For conflicts between industrial nations, it’s extraordinarily wasteful. I hope this awareness keeps growing.

In France the working classes weren’t even expected to marry with full church ceremonies until 1875, four years after the Paris Commune—when the first laws facilitating church weddings for the working classes came in!

In John Gay’s The Beggars Opera (1765), from 110 years before the Commune, in England, when the first possibilities for working class marriage are being considered, the bone of contention is that Polly Peachum wants to marry Macheath. Polly’s parents are not married. And while Mr. Peachum thinks it would be a fine idea because then his grandchildren would not be bastards the way his daughter, Polly, is, and many of the better off artisans are trying out the new socio-legal arrangement, Polly’s mother thinks it’s a terrible idea, because then all a legal wife’s assets are entailed to her husband. That is just not a good plan in a social milieu where women are regularly abandoned and betrayed—especially by shiftless hustlers such as Macheath.

Finally, why is life pleasant enough so that most people really do want to live it for a long time? What is the basis of pleasure which is the positive measure (after the negative measure of freedom from pain, hunger, ill health, and discomfort) for general compassion—that is to say, the yearning to relieve the suffering of others. Shockingly enough, I suspect masturbation is the one truly self-administered and self-regulated pleasure central to well over half the world’s positive pleasure—along with its attendant fantasies. (Since masturbation is such a large part of people’s lives—and has been since primates’ arms reached their current length—I really believe that the reason it has been all but repressed from political and even most public discourse is that the moment it is politicized as a positive pleasure men and women have a right to, it redefines the relationship of individual to the group from the bottom up in a way we might never recover from; today, we might not even recognize what some of those new discursive definitions of humanity could look like.) Then comes sex with other people. The pleasure of sociality, work, accomplishment, and others talking and socializing with people probably comes next. Finally the pleasures of nature fall in there—which range over those of children, small animals, greenery, good food, fine weather, beautiful landscapes, and flowers. Somewhere in there is, I’m sure, art itself—music, dancing, singing, painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, as well as history and philosophy (even though the last, as Benjamin points out, has no muse). The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful—though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering. But certainly I feel privileged to have had thirty years of them with my daughter and fourteen with my current partner, as well as a briefer stint, now and again, with various friends, with some of whom I had sexual relationships and with some of whom I never even considered it. How these pleasures finally map out in terms of which are more or less important to us, is, I’m sure, different for each individual. But most of us will recognize the basic areas. In short, pleasures are everything the poet celebrates, directly or indirectly.

As to the characters’ leave-it-alone attitude toward Big Sambo’s relationship with children, Hogg is a historical novel after all. Specifically, it’s pre-Stonewall. As is still largely the case—and it was even more so thirty-five years back, when Hogg was written—you don’t interfere with how people raise their children. Honey-Pie is a deeply depressive and wounded kid. I’m almost certain she doesn’t attend school. I doubt she has any friends her own age. Add to it that her out-of-work father uses her as a sexual plaything, and I think that’s a truly bleak existence. There’s nothing there I’m endorsing. But the fact is, at the time, the Rufuses and Reds of the world had to protect the Sambos from the otherwise well-intentioned eyes of the Harrys and the Monas in order to protect their own practices.

Today, Rufus and Red would probably have a support group with monthly meetings and trips to play with other S&M groups in near-by cities, with whom they kept in regular on-line contact—at least I’d like to think so. They might even put out some considerable effort to get both Big Sambo and Honey-Pie some serious counseling. Failing that, they might well call the police. Certainly I wouldn’t fault them if they did, even as I would prefer them to start with the former before resorting to the latter—for the child’s sake.

As far back as the middle 1950s, I first heard, on television, a noted child psychiatrist, a Dr. Schimmel, explain to the public that, in his considerable experience, in the vast majority of actual cases, however harmful sexual relations were with children, the way the police and other social institutions brought those relations to an end was far more painful and emotionally scarring to the child than the relations themselves. There was no way for the child to read his or her subsequent removal from home and other family members, the subsequent incarceration in an institution, the new lack of freedom of motion and general harshness of how, from then on, he or she was dealt with, as anything other than punishment for what she or he had done, no matter how little he or she was actually to blame. Despite the sentimentalities of post-primetime TV (when the controversial programs are aired), rarely can you prevent a child from eventually saying: “I would have been better off if I’d kept my mouth shut or at least if I’d managed to get away and no-one had ever known.” You can dismiss this as “silly childishness” if you like, but that contravenes the entire subjective set of measures by which one acts to bring the situation to an end in the first place. One of the terrible things about our society, even today, is that, in five out of six cases, the molester who threatens the child, “If you tell anyone what we’re doing, they will do awful things to you!” is usually, in the long run if not in the short, right. And that was far more the case a quarter of a century ago.

To repeat, in no way does citing such a contradiction mean that I approve of such child/adult relationships themselves. But counseling and gentler intervention is the direction that the world is going in—it just hadn’t arrived there, yet (as in only a few cases has it today), when I wrote the novel.

In the scenes on the docks, the narrator sees (with just a little nachtraglicheit) that the garbage men’s protection of Sambo is also fundamentally self-protective. Because of it, it also facilitates what he himself desires, so Rufus and Red get points in his book for it.

The novel presents the thinnest cross-section of everyone’s experience. The real test of the extremely delicate moral structure the book is trying to set up would be for the reader to come back to Crawhole after three weeks, after two months, or after a year, then see how things are going with them all.

Do you think the narrator will still be there, with Rufus and Red? Or will he have grown tired of their S&M shenanigans and run off once more?

There is just the possibility—and I think the narrator, to the extent his fantasies ever run in this direction, probably would like it in theory—that Red and Rufus will provide him with exactly what he wants as well as whatever he needs that he himself has little way of knowing in any detail. (He is eleven!)

And, who knows, they might.

But if you, as reader, tell me that you feel it’s highly unlikely, I, as writer, am certainly not going to argue with you. I know what the world is like. I think it’s pretty unlikely too.

(cont.)



___
Book

Samuel Delany HOGG
Fiction Collective 2

'Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America's most famous 'unpublishable' novels. The subject matter of Hogg is our culture of sexual violence and degeneration. Delany explores his disturbing protagonist Hogg on his own turf--rape, pederasty, sexual excess--exposing an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave book.'-- FC2



Excerpts

When I was eleven, I used to suck off a kid named Pedro behind the bottom landing of the stairs that went to the basement.

*


‘I heard him grunt. He smelled like a stopped toilet-stall, where somebody had left six months of dirty socks, in the back of a butcher shop with the refrigeration unit on the blink, on fire. The tube under his dick filled, retreated, filled again; and spilled enough spunk for three guys. “Pissin’ in you now boy….” Not like Pedro’s or his pop’s shotglass leakage. I swallowed five times (he was still pumping into my face), and I couldn’t hold no more. Piss spurted all over his fly – I could see pee between the zipper teeth. Piss ran down my chin. He got my head – like I saw this really big-handed nigger hold a basketball, once, and turn it upside down without dropping it – and with his other hand wiped hard around his chin and face, smearing piss. He rubbed his balls with wet fingers, pulled at them, while I leaked piss out of my lower lip. “Yeah… I’m gonna drown you, cocksucker!”’

*


‘His cock, hanging wet from his fly, was wormy with veins. So were his big, big hands. His broad nails were bitten so far up they were three times side-to-side as from thickened, dirt-lined cuticle to bulging, grease-rimmed nub – which, on his thumb at least, went on another horny half inch. His fingers were immense and chiselled, the upper joints clouded in yellow. He was a big man, with the start of a gut. Yellow hair tufted between the missing buttons at the bottom of his shirt, and all up around a neck thick as a scrub pail. Watching him, I got the thought that maybe a month ago he’d been on his back under a car and hadn’t bothered to wash since. His hands and forearms, under the gold fur that burned in the four o’clock sun striking up the alley, were grease-gray. His face was like sunburned brick, smeared and streaked over.’

*


He smiled. “You cut me, lady…” He licked his bloody palm. “You cut me, lady, and I’m going to cut you now.” His other hand brought the knife out of his pocket. “I’m going to cut a hole in your belly and f*** it, lady. I’m going to cut your leg up like a Virginia ham and fry the slices for lunch. I’m gonna hack out a piece of your gut, poke out the shit, and wear it for a ring…”

*


She tried to push the nigger away, gasping and crying out and biting off the gasps. She had a lot of black hair on her cunt. The nigger yanked up one leg; you could see the raw pussy hanging through like skirt steak. The wop grabbed her other leg--and even though he still had the knife, she struggled pretty hard. The nigger, his mouth wide, squatted, grabbed her over the other leg, and pushed his face into her. I saw the muscles tighten along the back of his jaw.

She screamed, loud, and flung her head back and then down, and beat his head, clawed his ears, her head flopping, around, back, and forth, her mouth still wide and all the breath running out. She roared in more air, and screamed again, beating his back with her heel.

Hogg's dirty fist turned on the head of his dick. Urine welled over his knuckles and dripped. Some ran down his testicles, making a dark, shiny tongue along his right pants leg.

*


“You know what I think, Ray-?” That was Hogg again. Him and the bartender were ambling around the crowding bikers. “I think I ain’t never met a normal, I mean normal, man who wasn’t crazy! Loon crazy, takem ‘em off and put ‘em away crazy, which is what they would do if there wasn’t so many of them. Every normal man-I mean sexually normal, now-man I ever met figures the whole thing runs between two points: What he wants, and what he thinks should be. Every thought in his head is directed to fixing a rule-straight line between them, and he calls that line What Is.” ….

“I mean it, now: I think about things like that. And thinkin’ about it, I think I got it figured out. That’s what a normal man thinks is reality. On the other hand, every faggot or panty-sucker, or whip jockey, or SM freak, or baby-fu*ker, or even a motherfuc*er like me, we know-“ and his hands came down like he was pushing something away: “We know, man, that there is what we want, there is what should be, and there is what is: and don’t none of them got anything to do with each other unless-“…”unless we make it,” Hogg went on…





*

p.s. Hey. So, like I said yesterday, I'm moving to my new apartment this morning and for the rest of today. I'll have to catch up with you guys tomorrow. For now, please think about Samuel Delany's 'Hogg' for the duration, won't you? See you tomorrow morning (my time).

________________

stargatefreak, 22
I want you, adore you, my name boby, a mindless 'it', flog me as bastard who does not to listen your orders, just talking to a masculine dominant type guy makes me leak, I like smell you foot, I love to shout on bed, ALL SORT OF POPPERS ARE AVAILABLE HERE, my phone is about to die, kay bye.







_________________

Yourslave4thesummer, 21
I think; Therefore, I am tired.

I'm coming to this worthy site, late; not only well into my 21st year, but also very late at night. -Hence, the first sentence. The photographs depict a few important things about me.

I'll prepare an astounding profile soon.






______________

Blot, 24
french sub (living in france) - hiv+
slave to kidnappp, sell for 24-7 enslavment underground no return
seek no more human, no more paper
i go this step before i'm too old to be wanted badly
you just look for one hole, no limit, cute face, no talk?
great you truck me somewhere, i'm yours to starve, destruct ...
and smear my real asshole all over the world

Blot's comments

Anonymous - 18.Apr.2015
Olivier!?! The world is not so big.
***I dated it for +/- 7 months until early Feb '14***
***It is at minimum 32 years old***
***It lied about its HIV status and infected me!***
You finally GOT it. You finally, FINALLY fucking GOT IT!!!
Ill send JS around to collect you. Let's finish this!!!!
***Ill shove a grenade up his poz ass and blow him into pieces***








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Tightchoke, 24
My neck is ready for your tightest grip in the literal sense of the words of this matter.
★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀ •★★★★★★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++ ★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++
★☀⚬❋⚪⚫ᴑ✽❋☀+++





_______________

247slave4sale, 18
The slave is a healthy 18 yr-old Vietnamese slave who is kept mummified in total confinement.

You need to have facilities to keep it imprisoned.

Is extremely horny.

Is sold to highest bidder.

Minimum 1450 dollars.






________________

This_just_in, 20
⭕️DONATION PROGRAM START! MY SLAVERY SAVE HOMELESS'S RETRY!⭕️

I chose to be a slave to make better world.
I really want to support this NPO and the homeless to give hope and chance and strength to live life again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a6VVncgHcY

1 For 1 month(start now) I will charge masters to use me.
1 I will donate 5percents from each session fee.
2 Tip is 50percents to donation.
3 50 percent donate each session after my month goal is reached.

I am hot and always intelligent.
Originally Finnish, I kept all the features except that coldness so well known.

This_just_in's comments

Anonymous - 15.Oct.2014
CRAP,FAKER,EVIL,MONSTER.






__________________

ElasticBoy, 19
Deepest Widest Sloppy Pussy in the Bay Area

I have possibly the biggest, deepest asshole in the US

My hole is huge and supple enough to take an entire 14 inch by 9 inch diameter cock plus balls (see the video)

I am addicted to huge huge oversize cock. My dream to get fucked and bred so deep inside me I can taste the cum in my mouth (I'm only 5'1", so I think it's feasible)

If you are huge, and no one has ever been able to take you all the way to your balls, hit me up. I love love love love huge hung

Are you a daddy with a massive cock? Consider yourself laid






________________

Sit, 22
Hi all I am Sit sit Sit all I'm Sit sit Sit all I'm Sit sit Sit all I'm Sit sit
If you are looking a stupid dog for Sit sit Sit I'll be just perfect for you








_________________

devon4247, 23
i am just try to find who I am can you help me with this??

is it possible find rifht master to become full life slave no of the bullshit where u talk for weeks on end and nothing happens

Devon4247's comments

spermmaster - 02.Feb.2015
I think it would be fantastic for you to be my slave for sex, and to get hot and horny blowjobs from you everyday!
Nice if you can be my slave for sex, and if I would shoot my sperm in your face many many times

Anonymous - 19.Jan.2015
I auditioned him for 24/7 life ownership on Skype

+
not as staggering beautiful as his photos
not enough for lifetime commitment
very drunk and confused
almost sold me on his perfect ass
offer him $$$ to meet and smell it but he want 24/7 only
good ass opening
good view inside, so i just jizz my cum at his wide opened hole
good cummer

-
The telefone ring and he answered the phone, he was talk on strange language about 3 mins. He didnt ask me if i allow him to do that.
But it was ok, he did presented me about hour of his asshole after that.

Anonymous - 01.Dec.2014
Can't wait to taste your cum someday!!

Anonymous - 01.Dec.2014
When I look your fotos i imagine strangling you and cumed a lot and had a very intense orgasm.

Anonymous - 03.Nov.2014
I imagine my experience with him would be very deep, emotional, like a healing expierence...

Anonymous - 01.Nov.2014
hi,wood you pleeze let me smash pierce tattoo destrooy you beautyfool face?

TGBoysgesucht - 12.Aug.2014
I want true deep insights into his pussy and swallow his semen many times so much but I live in China :(

Anonymous - 22.Jun.2014
Me again
A little earlier, I wrote some lines about the very special cocktail you are.
You would bring this cocktail to perfection and I know you would change me into an alcoholic. But a very happy alcoholic.
Hugs from the Lake

Anonymous - 18.Jun.2014
Hey there!
The opportunity to use and abuses boys and a beautiful boy are one thing. But when both is combined with a huge amount of charm and style, it turns out to be a very special cocktail.
Take care of this cocktail, I hope one day to take a sip from it.
Kind Regards from the Lake







__________________

invalidusername, 22
I know I'm very cute, but I want to spend the rest of my life wearing a hood. The ones with no eye holes, just mouth holes. I want the whole world to look at the shape and the features made by the tightly wrapped masked on my face and wonder what I look like. Only my master will know about the very cute face under there in his memories. Once hooded, I can do all you want except kiss because I hate it the most.






________________

your_target, 19
_____________
Point of Views
______________
IF you ARE WISE ENOUGH..
you should know being OPEN about your SEXUALITY
is far too different from
YOU being LOUD as GAY.
I would never let go If I can still hold on..
but I would never hold back again,
once I've decided to let go.
I hate everything that is wasted in ANY FORMS.
For those who where "humane",
get lost..
A beautiful face without substance is NOTHING,
but a beautiful face with a substance is a "TRASH".
Having sex doesn't make you a whore,
just like being a virgin doesn't make you a saint.
Do you know why sunset is a lot more colorful than sunrise?
That's one of the ironies of life.
"There's actually something good in goodbyes".
"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good,
is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.”
Right now, my goal is to destroy my stress which I obtain from
my pointless life.






________________

Sex4Best, 18
I want to have sex with somebodey who will fuck me with a big dick and tear my little ass hole apart and cum all inside of me and then cum all over me and then love me forever because the sex was good





______________

Insaney, 24
I want to be honest right away
I can not speak English.
I have only one picture.

I love sugar daddy.
I do not love salty daddy.
Life is really simple,
but we insist on making it complicated.

Once a month, I like to slm and go crazy.
Can I invite you to my show?
YOU CAN BE THE DIRECTOR OF MY SHOW.

Insaney's comments

gentle_date - 20.Apr.2015
Watch out for this guy he has HIV positive virus. Wants to take revenge by spreading the virus through the site. he was kicked-out from the boytoy for hire group due to the fact that he was positive of HIV virus. You won't really regret and forget for the virus will be with once you mistakenly having sex with him. Be careful many of the boytoy group died last year due to HIV virus. He is one of them who allows to be fucked anywhere even in the public CR. He was caught in Starlytes Cubao and other bars in the city being fucked at the CR. He's a whore that's why he's got the HIV virus.





_________________

joseOrlando, 24
I LOVE my NEW bro, KEVIN. Please stay alive. I pray for you every minute.

I am looking for a Sadist Master because I was a whoreboi & betrayed my previous Asian Owner. Anyone sees me on the streets please spit on my face then rape me in public, in your car, in anywhere to punish me on behalf of my ex owner.

I hope my ex owner will forgive me and take me back.
No mercy. I was such liar bad whoreboi slave.
Who knows where I live then come to house and ask my parents to release me to you?
"Catch me if u can"
U must be at my ex owner's kinky level otherwise kiss my ass.
My ex owner is AsianMasterDom. Please tell him to forgive me please







_________________

fuckeduphole, 18
Hey, sooo... I'm Ryker. I want to get raped. I'm a hetero senior in high school. I'm the fandom kinda nerd as well as the academic kind.

I'm seeking guys who understand what a rape victim needs, and isn't afraid to rape. Give me coke and specialk, put everything together and rape.

Brutal guys who would enjoy repeated rapes of a guy in his home, nowhere for him to run, and no power to escape the inevitable rape.

Any guy in possession of a keyword should be able to knock walk in and rape.

Guestbook of fuckeduphole

Bitch-4-Young - 22.Apr.2015
I am very proud to inaugurate your guest book my pig ^^
What an honor to have such a generous hetero guy on this website
DARK, MAKE CALLS HIM
I am the president of your fan club ^^
I raped him today






________________

Birthdaycake, 21
Hello Moscow!
I am genderfluid.
Hello. I am, yeah.
I am happy with my biological body however.
I repeat I AM HAPPY WITH MY BIOLOGICAL BODY.
I do not want a sex change.
Who wants to own me?
Cough up the greens.
(ONLY FOR BILLIONAIRES)






________________

secret&uncomplicated, 19
You will be surprised by my permance in bed.

My two favourite quotations:
"I simply trained myself to like older men, and it was
the smartest thing I ever did." -Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany's

"Life's a grave, dig it." -Wednesday 13

I don't really know if I can say much about myself, because I don't really want to go deeper. It can be hard to get to know me, I guess. But that's what makes me a good slave, right? I often take hikes through our little forest near my village. It's a very, very little forest, I don't even think you can call it that. But still, it's calming and I can take my mind off of stuff.

My Expertise is cumming many times, moaning your name, showing my butt cheeks, winking my hole, caressing my ass, cumming and playing with my juice.






_______________

CrushedUnderJockFeet, 19
I am a boy and if you understand what I mean by sexy I would like to convey to take a wise decision.
Young men with a mean streak want to rub their foot on the other guy, or girl does not matter.
I am week willed freak pig so I will deal with all sorts of other things too.
Can only be done when I am home alone and my parents aren't.

Also I have asperger's syndrome.







_______________

ian_someralder, 21
Your dick is always ready to satisfy my ass. I am young cute boy. This ensures that you spend a nice time. Wake me up when it's all over.





_______________

shipwreck, 18
mark me with your scent.
very into being dominated by pits.
and being beaten up.
especially looking for dirty or fat guys old guys also asians.

pic is cropped because lower half has a dog in it and this site usually deletes it because of the dog.
blood in pic is mine and real.
you can cut, burn, and if you want you can......k.........i...........l...........l.................me

was trained too early on in life and now that I been legal the world is a different place and different lifestyle to get use too.
not saying that it's bad, just different.






*

p.s. Hey. Contrary to my educated guess yesterday, this will actually be the last p.s. from the Recollets. I'm sitting here in my completely emptied out room waiting for the higher-ups to come inspect the place whereupon I'll hand over my keys and exit. I'm going to have to move quite quickly through the p.s. for the above reasons, and apologies for that. ** Tuesday ** Scunnard, That's very cool. I envy you. Bigly. ** David Ehrenstein, I guess a guy who gives such volatile performances would have to be a home wrecker too, although, hm, not necessary, I'll guess. Never mind. ** Edward Cole, Hi, Edward! How very sweet to have you here. It's been ages! I hope you're doing really, really well. Enchanted Forest looks very alluring at my first glance. I'll investigate. Take care! ** Tosh Berman, Oh, I remember that. Your amusement park troubles. Totally understandable, even I'm the opposite or something. It's really true that people who aren't originally American seem to get a lot out of Bukowski. In France too. It always surprises me and makes me wish I could de-Americanize for a half an hour or something. Godard in 'Contempt, ha ha, yes! ** Steevee, Way, way curious about the Noe. Like I think I said here before, I know someone who's seen it, and he said it was completely insane and amazing. I'm with you on Kevin Smith. I have yet to be convinced about Dolan, but I still hold slight hopes for some reason. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. That makes sense. ** Kier, I think there's a really good dead park in Norway that Zac and I intended to visit on our Scandinavian amusement tour but didn't due to time issues. I'l try to find out what/where it was. Really glad the doc said your sickness will pass, but sad for the lack of a magic bullet. It's gotten even worse with the producers, but I'm too in a rush to explain this morning. Next time. My day was last minute packing, then moving with the great help of movers, then returning here to try to scrub the place back to normal, then crashing. It was a lot, but it was very uninteresting, words-wise. How was today? ** Flit, Hi, F. Yum, nice paragraph, man. ** Brendan, Wow, you did the Wooz! It even looks boring in photos, and I'm pretty big labyrinth lover. How are you, my man? ** Cal Graves, Hey, Cal! In awe, that totally makes sense. It felt awe-ful. No, they can't touch the film itself, but they can completely ruin its chances, which they seem dead-set on doing. Ha ha ha-ly, Dennis. ** Derek McCormack, Derek! The man of every hour! You're so lucky about the Flintstones place. I hope you're good, great, beyond great even. Love, me. ** Misanthrope, We did? Oh, sorry. Hateful when that happens. Ugh with a silver-lining? ** Sypha, I couldn't agree with you more. Hooray on the official birth! ** Cap'm, Yes! On the burning. Hi, buddy! ** Wednesday ** Jonathan, Hey, far-flung pal. It's in the cinema were you are? It seems like a cinema would be the ideal look out. The new place is jammed with boxes at the moment. All of its roominess gone. But that starts being dismantled today. No, I don't know Le Maison du Chou, but I will head there, maybe even today if it stops pouring rain. Love, me. ** Bitter69uk, Hi, man! Awesome to see you! Everything's moving smoothly except for me after helping make it move smoothly. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks, sir. I'm friends with him on FB too. I haven't interacted with him there, but his feed is grace itself. ** Sypha, I'm one of those weirdos who has only read Delany's experimental, non-SF stuff. ** Bill, Hi, B. Oh, happy to have hit your spot with the post. All my stuff is there in the new place, which looks like a stockroom at the moment, but that'll change. ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks, man. My only personal interaction with Delany was years ago when Martin Duberman set up this one day conference thing on Gay Lit. There were two panels. I was on the young upstart panel with Dale Peck, Michael Cunningham, Christopher Bram, and others. Delany was on the Golden Gays panel along with Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, etc. I talked with him for a short time. I don't think he knew my stuff or who I was, at least back then. He was very nice. ** Cal Graves, Hey! Yeah, I think it was brought back into print, and then it sold out again, and now it's limbo again. It's 'one of a kind'. Bearing-down-ish-ly, me. ** Steevee, Scat tolerance, of some sort is, I think a prerequisite for that thing. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Very cool about the Art101 meeting and about the possibly free 17 driving lessons! ** Misanthrope, I caused my back to be sore, but not hurt, strangely. I can still walk. Ha ha, 'Hogg's' ideal reader. That's you, man. ** Armando, Hi, Armando! I'm really glad you got to NYC and had what sounds to be a pretty swell time. More than swell, even. Great! I'm good, just exhausted and internally coated with a thick layer of dust and cleaning chemicals. ** Kyler, Well, in fact, as I read this, I am. However, the box pile is across town where I will be heading permanently once I get checked out my empty former room where I am now sitting. Cool about RS announcing your novel. Yeah, sure, you can use that again if you want. ** Okay. Very sorry again for my speeding along. Tomorrow I will write to/with you from my new place where there is no internet yet, so I hope the hotspot from my phone will be working. In any case, there are your monthly slaves, and I will see you tomorrow.

*

p.s. Hey. Greetings from the blog's new headquarters. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. It will come as no surprise that I envied that particular escort's way with words and sentence construction abilities. Cool, looking very forward to your Sacks shebang! ** Thomas Moronic, Ah! Beauties to a one! How do you do those so fast? It would take me until the next month's batch arrived to even try and fail to spin them into such quality things. Kudos! ** Steevee, Was it better than the buzz? Off I am to read your Mayles review. Cool, I didn't know he had a new film. Everyone, go read Steevee writing on the new film ('Iris') by the legendary documentary maestro Albert Mayles right over here. ** G.r. maierhofer, Grant, hey. Well, well, well, that is very fine news indeed, at its basics and its overlays! Congrats to PS even more than to you! Coolness! ** Keaton, Even if it had been me having that exact same dream, I would have dreamed of me looking at you in that persona in a weird way. Bon jour. ** Kyler, Hi. Glad you dug them. There are slaves in Washington Square Park? Then again, why not? Happy to have been a part of getting you a smiley. ** Misanthrope, I thought so too, natch. Well, interesting more than hot. Amusing with hotness as one of the humor's generators. You being conservative? No! Sympathies about your aunt. Yes, of course I remember. Fuck death. Weird coincidence there indeed. Or meaningful non-coincidence that only reads as a coincidence. Or something. As a writer for whom the difference between difference and non-difference is a subtle thing, I believe you! ** Cal Graves, Hi! Oh, actually, I really love that derivation. There's some kind of sublimity in its goofball-ness, I swear. The new place might rock once it's not a graveyard of cardboard boxes, which hopefully will be soon. Doesn't seem like it would be bad. I mean the 'like someone' thing. I just found yesterday straight from the mind and status update of Mr. Delany himself that 'Hogg' is in print as an eBook. I don't remember the publisher though. Are you going to have to couch surf for six weeks, or ... ? How's your upcoming new place? Ha ha, Enema-ly, Dennis. ** Wow, that's it? Cool. Today, gosh, I don't know. Tape deck. Idea, thoughtfulness, a 'why not' decision, make it, post it. See you tomorrow.

I’m never keen on metanarratives, so it’s quite hard for me to pick favourites. It’s not something I enjoy. But when it comes to Morrissey, I’m fairly sure that my favourite song is Speedway. And to paraphrase Mark Simpson, in his brilliant book Saint Morrissey, when he talks about The Smiths’ debut album being their greatest album and therefore The Greatest Album Of All Time, to me Speedway is the greatest Morrissey song and therefore one of the greatest songs of all time. See? I’m really not comfortable about absolutes and definitive answers. I think about it is very appropriate given my discussion of this particular song. I have told all of my friends but this is the song that I want played at my funeral and I don’t suppose it gets any more definitive than that.



MORRISSEY – SPEEDWAY





Speedway appears on Vauxhall and I, Morrissey’s fourth solo album, which was released in March 1994. Vauxhall and I is seen by many fans and critics as Morrissey’s strongest work. At the time there were rumours that Morrissey was planning on making Vauxhall and I his final album. In the years since the albums release Morrissey has said that during the sessions for Vauxhall he felt it would be his last Record and that he also felt it was an album that he would not be able to top. Obviously in the end this wasn’t the case, and Morrissey has continued to record and to tour – with his most recent album (the brilliant World Peace Is None Of Your Business) being released last year. However as it was created, it seems that Morrissey intended Speedway to be his final statement and swansong.

Viewing Speedway as a farewell adds a real power to the song. The air of finality, of ending, is palpable. And as sad is it feels it also feels glorious and impressive. In the space of a few minutes Morrissey manages to some up so much at his career and his persona and his body of work; everything is distilled perfectly, and captured precisely. The song seems to be closing and indeed compelling statement for Morrissey’s argument that pop music and rock’n’roll is the most powerful and strongest art form there ever was. In Speedway, Morrissey is triumphant, defeated, humorous, defiant, fading and immortal. If he had planned to go out this way, then he was going out in style, and in a style that only Morrissey could.



MORRISSEY – SPEEDWAY, LIVE 1995, LONDON





The words, as is common with Morrissey’s work when he is at his best, can be taken on several levels and could have any number of reasons and motives behind them. The opening lyrics, which repeat at various points throughout the song, talk about rumours, judgement, secrets, truths and untruths. The song also feels for whatever reason to me, like one of Morrissey’s most heartfelt and passionate.

Now, to pick apart a piece of art and try and force real life meanings to it and anchor it down with real-life people and real life events is not always the most helpful of activities. I know that when I write and create work, the work I make is often fuelled by compulsion to create rather than as a way of mapping out cognitive rational ideas – the work is there to articulate moods and emotions and is not literally about this thing or that thing; often I don’t know what the work is about only that I feel the need and the urge to do it and that the world just doesn’t feel right to me inside my head unless I do it. And every artist is different, I know, but to me it’s never the case that I sit down and think “today I will write about this thing in my life in this way”. I think the power of art: writing, music, whatever form it takes, is the mystery and the vagueness and that sacred thing at its core that makes an emotional sense but cannot be described with words: art is made when language and rational thought can’t get to where you need to get to (which I know is probably oxymoronic, considering that words are the thing that I create my chosen art form with – but trust me – the language I use is just a tool that I use to get to something else).

However, Having said that, Morrissey is an artist and writer who is too knowing, too skilled, two self aware and who possesses such a massive and acute understanding of pop music and the sense of drama and occasion, to not know what real life elements will be interpreted from this particular piece of music.

The lines about slamming down the hammer could refer too much publicised (and much talked about by Morrissey himself) court case where he and Johnny Marr were sued by their former Smiths band mates. They could relate to Morrissey’s long-time literary hero Oscar Wilde whose own court case, imprisonment and fate seem to bear strong emotional parallels with the tone and themes of the song. The talk of rumours could allude to the many that that have followed Morrisey from his time in The Smiths and through his solo career – rumours in the press about his sexuality (which for the record I feel he is always been completely clear about, rejecting the idea of binary sexuality and traditional understanding of gender very early in his career), about rumours of racism and other unfounded accusations that have been pointed towards, him especially from the British music media. In Speedway, as Morrissey bids farewell he has fun casting a knowing glance towards everything that he is saying goodbye to and that will remain as part of his myth and legacy.

My personal guess is that Morrissey would enjoy the confusion and the purposely-unanswered questions that the track leaves behind. Is it just coincidence but as David Bret points out in his book, Landscapes Of The Mind that Speedway is also a name given to an area when Morrissey’s beloved and iconic hero James Dean, and also Rock Hudson, used to cruise for gay sex? In Speedway, despite appearing to finally address the rumours, the listener is perversely left asking even more questions and they had to begin with. Morrissey enjoys the chase, continually dropping hints and clues to unanswerable queries. For example, on the vinyl edition of the 20th anniversary version of Vauxhall and I, carved into the plastic is the name Mrs Shufflewick – a reference to an obscure drag act from a gay bar in 1970s London – with no reason or need to explain why the reference has been made. The mystery and enigma is reason enough.



MORRISSEY – SPEEDWAY, LIVE 2013, LOS ANGELES





Now, to be specific – the thing that really makes me love Speedway and the thing that cements it as the song I want played at my funeral is the final section of the song. As the beautiful music, sculpted and defined magnificently by Morris’s long-time musical collaborator Boz Boorer, reaches it truly epic and lush crescendo and finale, Morrissey delivers verses of such straight forward and yet emotionally tangling words that match anything he has made any other point in his career. He addresses someone – and by this point forget it, fuck it, my heart is breaking, it could be anyone who you want it to be: the press, his fans, Johnny Marr, a secret lover – whatever – and he addresses this person in a plain, stark, utterly romantic and devoted way that I can’t recall being reached in any other pop or rock song …

All of the rumors keeping me grounded
I never said, I never said
That they were completely unfounded
And all those lies
Written lies, twisted lies
Well, they weren't lies
They weren't lies
They weren't lies
I never said, I never said
I could have mentioned your name
I could have dragged you in
Guilt by implication, by association
I've always been true to you
In my own strange way
I've always been true to you
In my own sick way
I'll always stay true to you



With the line “Well they weren’t lies,” Morrissey at once admits and obscures – you’ll never know what he is admitting and you don’t need to: it is a pristine moment of a piece of art making emotional sense. Even with the details and events hidden and undisclosed, I know exactly what lies at the heart and soul of the song. And the final lines completely slay me – “I could have mentioned you name/I could have dragged you in/Guilt by implication, by association/I’ve always been true to you/In my own strange way/I’ve always been true to you/In my own sick way/I’ll always stay true to you.” Morrissey realises that the truth isn’t a tangible thing – the only truth in life is confusion, the only truth of life is experiences – feelings, emotions, often things that hurt, don’t make sense – it’s all interesting, worthy, valuable, beautiful – it’s life, and that confusion is the truth, however twisted and sick it needs to be. It steers away from where other pop music always leads the listener – emotionally manipulating, telling them how to feel. With Speedway – as the final, climactic drums sound like the nails being banged into a coffin, the end of something, a farewell – the beginning of a legacy – the fact that the notion of truth is left dangling, unsaid – beautifully non-existent – is a massively important statement in a world of pop music that so often does exactly the opposite.

The words I try and attach to what this piece of music and poetry means to me will never reach where I want them to – which is kind of perfect, because they don’t need to. Morrisey has already done it for me.



MORRISSEY – SPEEDWAY, LIVE 2015, BIRIMINGHAM (AN AUDIENCE MEMBER’S RECORDING FROM THE MOST RECENT MORRISSEY GIG I ATTENDED, AS AN EARLY BIRTHDAY PRESENT FROM MY BOYFRIEND






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THE SPEEDWAY LYRICS IN THEIR ENTIRETY


And when you slam down the hammer
Can you see it in your heart?
All of the rumors keeping me grounded
I never said, I never said
That they were completely unfounded
So when you slam down the hammer
Can you see it in your heart?
Can you delve so low?
And when you're standing on my fingers
Can you see it in your heart?
And when you try to break my spirit
It won't work because there's nothing left to break
...Anymore
All of the rumors keeping me grounded
I never said, I never said
That they were completely unfounded
You won't sleep until the earth that wants me
Finally has me
Oh, you've done it now
You won't rest until the hearse that becomes me
Finally takes me
Oh, you've done it now
And you won't smile until my loving mouth
Is shut good and proper
FOREVER!
All of the rumors keeping me grounded
I never said, I never said
That they were completely unfounded
And all those lies
Written lies, twisted lies
Well, they weren't lies
They weren't lies
They weren't lies
I never said, I never said
I could have mentioned your name
I could have dragged you in
Guilt by implication, by association
I've always been true to you
In my own strange way
I've always been true to you
In my own sick way
I'll always stay true to you


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If you ever want to ramble about Morrissey with me, feel free:

twitter.com/thomasmoronic




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p.s. Hey. The generous and oh so astute Thomas 'Moronic' Moore has cast his full self upon a song by Morrissey, and I thought I would give you a weekend to unfurl it and let your brain react accordingly, hopefully to at least some degree in Thomas's presence, meaning in commentary form, obviously. Enjoy, and thank you ever so much, Thomas! Also, the blog will be having another interruption starting on Monday because I go to Halle, Germany tomorrow to work on the new Gisele Vienne-plus-me theater piece. I'll be there through next Thursday, the 7th. You'll get four rerun posts plus extremely minimal, pre-set p.s.es starting on Monday, and then new posts and full p.s.es will return on Friday. After that, I think things should run normally around here for a while. ** Keaton, Easy said, easy done, no? Wow, good luck with your move. High sympathy five. I like the Atari graveyard. I think I do a post on it here or something. Intensely private sounds promising. 'Purple Rain'? Huh, what the hell? Everyone, Keaton has gifted you guys and me too with a new prose thing over on his notorious blog, and it's called 'Purple Rain' of all things, you will enjoy reading it, I am virtually absolutely sure, so please do.** Chilly Jay Chill, Thanks, Jeff. Yeah, great about 'Out 1', etc. Finally. Jane Unrue ... maybe I don't know her stuff. No, I don't think I do. You like her work or have heard good things? I'll investigate her ND book. Thanks a bunch! ** David Ehrenstein, Naturally looking very forward to your thoughts on 'Out 1'. ** Steevee, Thank you for the report on the Techine film. ** James, Hi. I only moved two pieces of furniture. I only have two: a bookshelf and a CD/DVD shelf. This place is furnished (with thrift store-level crap furniture, but, hey, I'm casual.) So sorry about the car, but I'm glad you're already hooked up with 'new' wheels. I tsill buy cassettes when necessary, even though I don't have a cassette player anymore. You didn't ask me, but I can't remember the first CD I bought, weirdly. I remember the first vinyl LP I ever bought. Actually, it was two at the same time: 'More of the Monkees' and 'Freak Out' by the Mothers of Invention. ** Sypha, I still love cassettes. I think mix-tapes have never quite been the same again. I guess I mean making them. The cassette was somehow the idea form for the mix-tape maybe. For ,aking them. Maybe not for listening to them. ** Thomas Moore, Hi, T. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Such a beautiful piece! I'm still unboxing and so on here. Probably until tomorrow. It's kind of fun, though. Have a really great weekend! ** Misanthrope, I used to make mix-tapes all the time for people both special and not so special. They were kind of like my blog posts before I had a blog or something. You should mix that field recording of your parents with some harsh electronic noise and put it out. That kind of thing is very du jour. Bon weekend, etc., buddy! ** Cal Graves, I do, Cal, I do! Thanks. Yeah, I do like finding new places for my stuff. It's not bad. That part of it. Of course I don't think it's weird that it turns you on at all, ha ha. I'm so weird. I know it. A balcony, nice! There a kind of balcony here at my new place, but the window/door leading out to it is locked, and the landlord is being really, really vague and weird about giving me the key. Strange. You smoke too? High five! Thanks about the gif thing. Coffee at midnight? You can do that? I'd be a goner. I think, like, 8 pm is the latest I can do coffee. Blah blah. Have a really fine weekend and early week, sir. Sir-ly, Dennis. ** Okay. Back you go into the mind and taste of Mr. Moore. As previously stated, you'll get a rerun post on Monday and said habit will continue through Thursday, but leave comments for the duration because I'll catch up with them on Friday, and, uh, take care and be good, etc.

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Suehiro Maruo (1956 - ) is a self-taught high school dropout and former shoplifter who began drawing comics at the age of eighteen. His first work, submitted to the weekly manga Shonen Jump, was promptly rejected. His dark style fantasy dreams didn't fit in the commercialized, mass-market magazines. It took five more years before he started drawing comics again, this time for Ero-manga.



Besides trying to make a living out of his talents, it was also part of a quest for artistic freedom. Maruo draws nightmares. In the tradition of muzan-e (atrocity print) woodblock masters of the 19th century, he drew short stories of axe murders, abortion, rape and incest in as much graphic detail as the obscenity codes allowed.



Maruo's nightmarish manga fall into the Japanese category of "erotic grotesque" (エログロ; "ero-guro"). The stories often take place in the early years of Showa Era Japan. Maruo also has a fascination with human oddities, deformities, birth defects, and "circus freaks." Many such characters figure prominently in his stories and are sometimes the primary subjects of his illustrations. His most recent work is an adaption of the story "The Strange Tale of Panorama Island" by Edogawa Rampo.



Though relatively few of Maruo's manga have been published outside of Japan, his work enjoys a cult following abroad. His book Shōjo Tsubaki (aka Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show) has been adapted into an animated film (Midori) by Hiroshi Harada with a soundtrack by J.A. Seazer, but it has received very little release. In Europe it was marketed under the name Midori, after the main character. It was recently released on DVD in France by Cinemalta (the DVD includes English subtitles). -- text collaged from various sources






Midori, La Ragazza delle Camelie - Suehiro Maruo


Suehiro Maruo - Le Lézard Noir


Suehiro Maruo Tarot Deck & Magic Equation


lumaca (suehiro maruo - kim jun-sun)




La chenille V.1 & 2.0 - Suehiro Maruo - Edogawa Ranpo


The Strange Tale of Panorama Island


Rencontre internationale : Suehiro Maruo / Atsushi Kaneko








Suehiro Maruo's Official Website (Japanese)
Suehiro Maruo Fan Shrine
Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show
Ero-Garu: The Erotic Grotesque of Suehiro Maruo
the strange fruit of suehiro maruo
The books of Suehiro Maruo
Suehiro Maruo @ Delicious Ghost
Suehiro Maruo @ I Was Ben





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p.s. Hey. I'm away. Six years ago, Jose and I wanted to prop the work of Suehiro Maruo, and I can't speak for Jose, but apparently I still do.

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"I" die before being born. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 101)


To think the way one dies: without purpose, without power, without unity, and precisely without "the way." Whence the effacement of this formulation as soon as it is thought--as soon as it is thought, that is, both on the side of thinking and of dying, in dis-equilibrium, in an excess of meaning and in excess of meaning. No sooner is it thought than it has departed; it is gone, outside.
----Thinking as dying excludes the "as" of thought, in a manner such that even if we suppress this "as" by paratactic simplification and write: "to think: to die," it forms an enigma in its absence, a practically unbridgeable space. The un-relation of thinking and dying is also the form of their relation: not that thinking proceeds toward dying, proceeding thus toward its other, but not that it proceeds toward its likeness either. It is thus that "as" acquires the impetuousness of its meaning: neither like nor different, neither other nor same. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 39)


Presence is only presence at a distance, and this distance is absolute--that is, irreducible; that is, infinite. (Blanchot, Friendship, 218)


My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)


What calls me most radically into question? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death, but my presence in the proximity of another who by dying removes himself definitively, to take upon myself another's death as the only death that concerns me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community. (Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, 9)


"If it gets finished (the tale), I shall be cured." This hope is touching in its simplicity. But the tale was not finished. Impotence--that abandon in which the work holds us and where it requires that we descend in the concern for its approach--knows no cure. That death is incurable. The absence that Mallarmé hoped to render pure is not pure. The night is not perfect, it does not welcome, it does not open. It is not the opposite of day--silence, repose, the cessation of tasks. In the night, silence is speech, and there is no repose, for there is no position. There the incessant and the uninterrupted reign--not the certainty of death achieved, but "the eternal torments of Dying."(Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 118-119)


At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes, it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true, and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What makes me disappear from the world cannot find its guarantee there; and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This explains why no one is linked to death by real certitude. No one is sure of dying. No one doubts death, but no one can think of certain death except doubtfully, the brittleness of the unsure. It is as in order to think authentically upon the certainty of death, we had to let thought sink into doubt and inauthenticity, or yet again as if when we strive to think on death, more than our brain--the very substance and truth of thought itself--were bound to crumble. This in itself indicates that if men in general do not thing about death, if they avoid confronting it, it is doubtless in order to flee death and hide from it, but this escape is possible only because death itself is perpetual flight before death, and because it is the deep of dissimulation. Thus to hide from it is in a certain way to hide in it. (Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 95)


Impossible necessary death; why do these words--and the experience to which they refer (the inexperience)--escape comprehension? Why this collision of mutually exclusive terms? Why efface them by considering them as a fiction peculiar to some particular author? It is only natural. Thought cannot welcome that which it bears within itself and which sustains it, except by forgetting. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 67)


Yes, let us remember the earliest Hegel. He too, even prior to his "early" philosophy, considered that the two deaths were indissociable, and that only the act of confronting death--not merely of facing it or of exposing oneself to its danger (which is the distinguishing feature of heroic courage), but of entering into its space, of undergoing it as infinite death and also as mere death, "natural death"--could found the sovereignty of masterhood: the mind and its prerogatives. The result was perhaps, absurdly, that the experience which initiates the movement of the dialectic--the experience which none experiences, the experience of death--stopped it right away, and that the entire subsequent process retained a sort of memory of this halt, as if of an aporia which always had still to be accounted for. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 68)


The "I" that is responsible for others, the I bereft of selfhood, is sheer fragility, through and through on trial. This I without any identity is responsible for him to whom he can give no response; this I must answer in an interrogation where no question is put; he is a question directed to others from whom no answer can be expected either. The Other does not answer. (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 119)



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p.s. Hey. I'm still in Halle, Germany, and you're still here, Anywheres-ville, Earth, I guess, if you're here enough to read these words. Listen to Maurice Blanchot today. Thank you!

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Background:

'40 Acres is the misnomer that was given to what was actually about 29 acres of land in Culver City, California, first used as a movie studio backlot in 1926 by Cecil DeMille, after he leased the property from Italian immigrate Achille Casserini (on March 22, 1926). DeMille's production company utilized the backlot for numerous silent films, including The King of Kings (1927), for which a large Jerusalem temple and town were constructed, The Fighting Eagle (1927), The Forbidden Woman (1927) and The Godless Girl (1929), DeMille's last silent, and for which a large reform school set was built on the lot.



'In 1928, DeMille's Culver City studio and backlot were acquired by RKO Pictures, whose films which employed the backlot included Bird of Paradise (1932) and the 1933 classic, King Kong. In 1937, David Selznick acquired the property in a long-term lease, and used the backlot to re-create a Civil War-era Atlanta for his 1939 epic Gone With The Wind (after filming the burning of numerous leftover sets on the lot, including the "King Kong" gate, to depict the burning of Atlanta in the film).



'Under a variety of owners over the next two decades, the backlot appeared in dozens of films, and by the early 1950's, the lot began to appear in television productions, including The Adventures of Superman. Pictured above in an aerial view from 1963, the backlot had recently changed ownership to Desilu Studios. For the next ten years, the backlot would provide outdoor locales for Desilu's own television productions, as well as for series produced by others.



'Some of the notable series filmed on 40 Acres included Hogan's Heroes, Batman, Mission: Impossible, The Untouchables, Star Trek, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show for which the streets of Atlanta constructed for Gone With The Wind served as the town of "Mayberry." Paramount Pictures eventually bought out Desilu, and in 1968, sold off the Culver City studio facilities. As the studio continued to change hands, the "40 Acres" backlot fell out of use and into disrepair in the early 1970's, and in 1976 it was bulldozed and the land was sold to industry.'-- Retroweb.com


1972

The movies, shows, sets:

Bonanza

Land of the Giants

Gone With the Wind

Forbidden Woman

Miracle of the Bells

Attack!

Fighting Eagle

The Godless Girl

Gomer Pyle

King Kong

The King of Kings

My Three Sons

The Set Up

The Real McCoys

Tarzan

Mayberry RFD

The Untouchables

The Story of GI Joe

Mission: Impossible

Andy Griffith Show

Vigilante Force

Hogan's Heroes

The Adventures of Superman

StarTrek

Batman

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p.s. Hey. I'm still in another country east of France revising and rehearsing a new theater piece. And you? Please check out this movie studio back lot. Thanks!

Alice

'Alice lives with its owner Marie Ford in Washington state. This very haunted doll is said to whisper in a ghostly voice if you press your ears close to her porcelain lips. Her eyes will follow you around the room and her expression will change if she does not like you . "This Doll has been in my family for years it was always kept in a locked doll case," says Marie. "My grandmother said it was possessed by the spirit of her best friend Alice who died by committing suicide at the age of 13. I have captured many Haunted Doll EVP's from her and the most common statement she makes is, "I want to be left alone to suffer".'









Annabella

'In the 1970's a mother strolling along the street walked into a hobby store, and purchased a large Raggedy-Anne doll as a present for her daughter's birthday. Thus begins one of the most unusual cases of a possessed object on record. Annabelle's antics were so bad, she is now locked inside a protective glass case in an occult museum to keep her at bay.

'This incident is a terrifying case investigated by famed paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren in the 1970's. A priest had contacted Ed, and told him of two young nurses who were experiencing terrifying phenomenon in their home. While they slept, the furniture in their home was destroyed. Once they woke to the sound of a piercing, maniacal laughter, and found the doll sitting on the corpse of their pet cat, holding the cat's eyeballs in its hands.

'Today, AnnaBelle remains locked in a glass case, and is on display at the Warren Occult museum. The only one of it's kind, the museum houses haunted artifacts and objects collected from over 50 years of paranormal investigations. It is still reported that while very weak, AnnaBelle still manages to trip, pull the hair, and temporarily blind visitors who walk by her case.'









Pupa

'While real haunted doll stories are not uncommon, the case of Pupa is very unique. The original owner had it from the age of 5 or 6 (1920's) until she died in July of 2005. The doll survived World War II, and many, many close calls to it's destruction over the years. The owner cherished it always through out her long life. The doll traveled from Italy to the United States then back to Italy and across Europe and finally to the USA once again where it is now.

'Pupa is said to move by herself. Often she is said to push things around in the display case where the family who owns her keep her. Since the passing of the original owner in 2005 the family reports that the haunted doll has become very active and seems to want to be released from where she is kept in a glass display case. Members of the family, guests, and workers making repairs in their house have reported discovering the the glass of the case steamed white and, inscribed on the steamy glass from the inside of the case by what appears to be a small child's fingertip, the words 'Pupa hate'.

'Still dressed in her blue felt suit, she has also reportedly pulled pranks aplenty on those who care for her. Often, Pupa was placed differently than when the family last saw her. More than once, the family have reported hearing a sound like someone tapping on glass as they pass Pupa's display case. When they turn to look, they have seen Pupa's hand pressed against the glass. One member of the family managed to catch on video the doll rising to its feet and walking within the case, but on the three occasions he tried to upload the video onto Youtube, the video was obscured with a mysterious thick white film and the words "Pupa No!" scribbled on the film in a childish handwriting.'









Barbie

'At the shrine known as Lady Na Tuk Kong Shrine in Pulau Ubin, you will find a barbie doll occupying the place on the altar usually reserved for the statue of a deity. Even some of the offerings left on the shrines altar by worshippers are different from the norm. There are creams, lotions, rouges, powders, small mirrors and combs.

'According to Literature and History researcher Han Shanyuan, the story behind the shrine begins with a German couple and their daughter. One day in August 1914, the British army came for the German couple and their daughter. The army caught the couple but the girl managed to escape to the mountain behind her family's plantation. Unfortunately, she fell from a cliff and died.

'Locals then built the temple in order to pacify the girl's spirit. According to the temple's keeper, at first people worshipped a porcelain altar instead of the Barbie doll. The porcelain altar is believed to contain a lock of the girl's blond hair and a crucifix that is said to be the one the girl was wearing when she died.

'Three years ago, a local emigrant to Australia had the same weird dream for three nights. In his dream, a western girl led him to a shop. She then asked him to buy a Barbie doll and bring it to the"Lady Na Tuk Gong Shrine". The man followed the directions given.

'To his surprise, he found the shop and also the doll the girl described in his dream. He bought the doll and brought it back to Pulau Ubin. Today, a lot of people come to the temple to worship the Barbie doll and it is said their prayers for safety and health are answered.'









The Voodoo Doll

'A woman in Galveston, Texas bought a real haunted New Orleans Zombie Voodoo doll on ebay October of 2004, It arrived as described Bound and tied in a metal box. Believing it just to be a strange curio she decided to take it out it's small coffin and display it. "A Real Big Mistake" she says with great fear... the haunted doll attacked her, repeatedly. Afraid for her life she put it back in it;s decorated box casket but it haunted her in her dreams. Afraid to the point of mental exhaustion she tried to destroy it by burning it first, it would not burn. Then cutting it up the Knife and scissors broke and finally burying it at a cemetery. But as she tells the dolls grave was just to shallow and it appeared lying dirty on her front door step once more. She said she even resold it on ebay and the buyer wrote her that the doll had just disappeared from her home, so she sent it back to her when she found it on her door step again. The third time the buyer told her the box arrived empty. Again the evil doll was found at her door once more. The above photo was taken in 2004, right when she had first received the doll through the mail.'









Joliet

'Anna G. Says this cursed doll has been passed down from mother to daughter in her family for four generations. And each daughter was cursed to have two children a son and a daughter and each son died at 3 days old. The family believes that each spirit of the boy children is cursed to inhabit the doll until Judgment Day. Joliet is said to be heard crying in the night with the voices of several infants at once. Often is heard a piercing scream that sends chills down the spine of any mother.

'"It can be heard quite clearly", says Anna. "I lost my only son at three days old from mysterious circumstance in the hospital. My Mother lost a Son the same way as did my Grandmother and Great Grandmother. As I have been told by my mother the cursed Doll was given to my Great Grand mother by a jealous friend for my Grandmother as a toy when she was pregnant with her second child a son who also died at three days old. Each of us in my family have loved the doll and cared for our lost children to this day. My only daughter will do the same one day when she is older. We have not tried to get rid of it because we know the souls of our lost sons or trapped inside and do not want them to come to any harm. It is a haunted curse that my family bears".'









Emilia

'This over 100 year old Haunted Doll came originally from one of the royal guards to King Umberto I. Umberto I, King of Italy or Humbert I of Italy (Umberto Ranieri Carlo Emanuele Giovanni Maria Ferdinando Eugenio di Savoy), (14 March 1844 – 29 July 1900) was the King of Italy from 9 January 1878 until his death. He was deeply loathed in left-wing circles, especially among anarchists, because of his hard-line conservatism and support of the Bava Beccaris massacre in Milan. He was killed by anarchist Gaetano Bresci one year after the incident. He was the only King of Italy to be assassinated. This doll was said to be given to Ulvado Bellina one of his most trusted and respected friends and personal Captain of the Royal Guard who was also assassinated. Emilia was gift to Ulvado's daughter Marie from Humbert I.

'The doll survived WW I and WW II only losing both her arms and scalp in the second war to a bomb on a train to Udine, Italy. Because she was a prized gift To Marie Bellina from the king no matter what condition she was in the doll was rescued from the rubble. And from that day on she was haunted by the soul of the woman who died trying to rescue her self and the doll for Marie as they fled the explosion. Emilia the Haunted Doll is said to open and close her eyes, and her sound box is still heard at times in the darkness of the night crying for it's mama. Though her original voice box no longer works.'










'Robert, the lifelong companion of painter Robert Eugene (called Gene) Otto. Within months after the arrival of the doll in the Otto household, strange things began to occur. Objects would go missing and turn up broken, Gene took to the unhealthy habit of sneaking out of his window and wandering the grounds at night, and his parents began to suspect him of all kinds of mischief. If he was caught in the act, Gene would always hold out Robert and say, “Robert did it!” Soon the doll apparently became bolder. It no longer seemed to require Gene’s company to move about the house. In the still hours of the night, the servants would often wake to the sound of hollow, pattering footsteps. Too frightened to inspect the cause, they would usually cower in their beds until dawn. Weird humming and singing was heard to come from the nursery if Gene inadvertently left Robert there alone.

'It was widely believed that the death of Gene Otto in 1972 would put an end to the ghostly activity of the haunted doll. It was quickly learned, however, that true evil never dies, and while the house stood empty reports of the awful doll still continued. Many people would hear the sound of singing coming from the house at night and on more than one occasion the gruesome doll is said to have frightened school children by peering out the window in the attic turret and making faces at them. The home was eventually converted into the Artist’s House historic location as it stands today, Robert was donated to The East Martello Museum not far away. It quickly became evident, however, that Robert was still up to his old tricks. Museum workers began to report strange activity after the arrival of the doll, including one volunteer who was terrorized when the doll apparently spent most of a day following her around. Eventually, the doll was encased in a plastic display case in which it remains to this day. Still, there are those who claim that even this cannot contain the evil doll.'











Amanda

'Amanda the real haunted doll now lives unhappily in Atlanta, Georgia. She has moved around quite a lot since originally being a haunted doll sold on eBay over 3 years ago. Amanda's recent life can originally be traced back to Ebay but no further then that. Since she was sold 3 years ago she has been bought sold traded and given away more times then can be counted on two hands. The ghost that is said to possess her is very active if she does not like you. Amanda has been known to move on her own and often heard scratching on the glass class she is now housed in. If she is happy then she just sits there staring into space. But when she is ready to move on she begins to wreck havoc in the home she resides in until she is once again sent on her way.'









The Devil's Baby Doll

'Originally purchased as a haunted curio gift from a Leather maker this haunted doll with red leather skin and intense blue hot glass eyes is said to have moved on it's own and is often heard to make strange growling and gurgling noises and worse. The artist Rafael who made it explains that the doll was made for a close friend who had died. The devil baby even went to this persons funeral. The intention was to place it into the coffin to be cremated with the deceased but his family objected. And after that the doll started to take on a haunted life of it's own. The artist believes that it is inhabited by his friends soul. He heard it speak to him in his friends voice, and he had witnessed it turning it's head. Since being sold, it literally drove its two different owners insane before the doll was ultimately locked in a lead box by Rafael and sunk in a river so it would never harm any soul again.

'This is an excerpt from the first owner Tyler Durbane's diary, kept while he was institutionalized after this average school teacher was diagnosed with psychosis three months after purchasing the doll: 'My doll is quite honestly deadly, my doll is absolutely mean. My doll is the mighty Devil embodied, the evil red skinned Satan hiding unseen! He was a shadow of a whisper, a ghost in the night that came to me... calling my name and begging me to hold it, rescue it...take it ... make it real and very much alive. Each night it crept cat-like hidden into my deep slumbers... asking me to rescue it from it's eternal black prison of a hell!'





-- Texts borrowed and/or collaged from Hauntedamericantours.com, Sharon Stajda, Angelghosts.com, wetellstories,com, and Boing Boing.
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p.s. Hey. I'll be on my way back to Paris sometime today, and I'll be at the blog's helm again tomorrow. Until I am, consider some haunted dolls, please? Thank you. See you tomorrow.

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p.s. Hey. ** Saturday ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I'm not a Moz-Obsessive. Oh, wait, 'in here' probably meant the comments arena. Right, gotcha. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. ** Keaton, I miss U-Haul. I have a Wii again too. Germany was fun, yeah. ** White tiger, Math! ** Thomas Moronic, Thank you again so very much for the fun-filled weekend, T-ster. ** Steevee, Hi. ** Sypha, Hooray! Everyone, here's Sypha: 'Today I released the 5th (and final) of the Sypha Nadon archival anthologies. At 2 discs and 28 tracks, it could be the most extravagant SN release yet. Anyway, it can be downloaded/listened to here. ** Misanthrope, Sad about the tape's lack of existence. But as long as there's imagination ... Weekend was good, thanks, buddy. I want to go to Suplex City. Wait, wait, no I don't. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I saw that about The Orbit. Ugh. RIP. ** Cal Graves, No, no one had done that, and I am most grateful that you thought to. 'Weirdness is good. Weirdness is better.': That should be everything's catch phrase. My weekend was good. Work, work, work. Improvement, improvement. How was yours? Wait, it's time for the next weekend already. Weird. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-ly, Dennis. ** Bill, At the risk of seeming retro, I think so too, from a purely aesthetic point of view. What Gass? What do you think of whatever it is? Halle treated me pretty good. Was SF similarly pretty good-directed? ** Monday ** Tosh Berman, Really? Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, he's great. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Is it? That's cool. A lot of competition out there. ** Thomas Moronic, Great, thanks. Really cogent Maruo consolidating there. Yay! Everyone, here's Thomas Moronic: 'By the way, my collaboration with Steven Purtill/Mancy is now viewable online at the pretty cool NewHive. If you fancy a look, Dennis, or anyone, it's here. ** Randomwater, Hey! Really good to see you, unorganized liquid! Yay! Re: you being into Maruo. How are you? What's up? ** Brendan, The man! The man whose name starts with a B! The man whose art starts with an A+! New paintings ... mm-ness meaning yum. Lots o' love. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff. Wow, yeah, how and where the hell is Todd. Calling Todd Crimson. Check in and say hi, man. That's so strange about the weirdening robot verification thing. That new version kinds kind of really exciting. In theory. ** Kier, Kier! Oh, man, I can't believe you were still sick even on last Monday. Are you perfect again? What?! You didn't get into the art school?! That is completely unfathomable. That literally is insane. Really, that is completely bonkers and inexplicable of them. Their admittance committee must be both incredibly conservative and very, very, very stupid. Fuck. So, what now? Don't get too down about it. What about another school even out of Norway? Or an artist residency somewhere? Don't let that utter idiocy cause you to reflect upon yourself or your talent for one more second of time. How are you, now that it's Friday? Tell me, great maestro and dear friend. Vast love, Dennis. ** Keaton, Wow, you're really missing out. Everyone, Keaton greeted the Maruo post last Monday by doing a thing that is not unrelated on his blog, and, duh, it's awesome, and, duh, here it is. ** Goldshader, Hi, Goldshader! Nice to meet you. I haven't met you before, have I? Lovely thoughts and words. Hey, come back anytime, please. ** Armando, Hi. Oh, honestly, I was so busy and consumed with work I didn't even miss my normal self. I think that's a very, very good idea. I would watch it over and over, I'm completely sure. I'm good. The new flat has some issues, but I like it. No, Yury's living here too. Consider your hugs and love recycled and strengthened and returned. ** Bill, Hi. Oh, if you remember Un Certain Regard's jumbled, cramped magnificence, it's impossible to actually see anything there. But I would wager something going on a million dollars that they have some Maruo there because, if that place had an alley, Maruo would be the light at the end of it. ** Tuesday ** Scunnard, Hey, bud! Germany was a lot of work and quite productive. The move was relatively painless. Oh, shit, best humanly possible wishes to your baby niece and you. How is she doing now? This probably has no relevance or resonance, but when I've felt the way you described feeling, and, boy, have I, it always ends up being some really great, if contemporaneously confusing reset. ** David Ehrenstein, Truer words hath ne'er been spoke. ** Steevee, Hi. Cool. Everyone, here's'A Buddhist Pedestrian in Paris' aka Steevee's review of Tsai Ming-liang's JOURNEY TO THE WEST. ** Thomas Moronic, Yep, so true. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Everyone, here's _Black_Acrylic: 'My friend Scott found this on YouTube, an amazing Vietnamese Italo cover that I can't stop watching.' ** Keaton, Your thoughts on Blanchot were strange and received mixed results in my heart. Wow, 'It Follows' is that bad? But then you just kind of trashed Blanchot, so I don't know whether to believe you or not, ha ha. ** Misanthrope, I sure did. And now I'm back. But not in black because even black organic clothes give me an allergy. ** Tuesday ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Me too. Big time. And the loss of virtually all of the the Fox backlot is quite painful. ** James, Hi, James. The hotel was sort of neither here nor there. The only interesting thing about it was that it was combination hotel and senior citizen retirement home. ** Steevee, Morning, Steve. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Well, I'm writing on the day after the election, and it looks to have been a very depressing result. It's so incredibly fucked that conservatives, who can pretty much be defined as people operating out of fear who are scared selfish by people who don't seem as afraid of everything as they are, will do whatever it takes to frighten people who aren't sufficiently scared into fearfully giving them power, and that it so often works. Or something. Sucks. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi. What I just said to Ben, I guess. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. It didn't turn out too good. The theater piece grew and improved gradually, and, while there's a ton left to do, I think we feel pretty confident that it's going to rock. Halle's quiet and small and pleasant in small doses. Good place to work. ** Derek McCormack, Yay, Derek! Ha ha, I do want a part! Any part. Except maybe Gomer. Wait, no, even Gomer. I might make a really good Gomer, come to think of it. Or Gomer's cousin. Didn't he have a cousin? Interstellar love to you! ** Wednesday ** David Ehrenstein, That's kind of totally true, isn't it. ** Steevee, More of/by you! Excellent! Everyone, here's Steevee's interview with Bertrand Bonello, a normally very interesting film director, mostly about his new one 'Saint Laurent', which, and not that you asked, I personally thought was a really terrible film, but don't let that stop you because I could be wrong, even though I'm pretty sure I'm not, ha ha. I hope you feel much better more than pronto. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey! The project is Germany is going quite well and excitingly, I think. Yeah, the best collaborations are long-term things, I think. The collaboration morphs and mutates because Gisele's pieces morph and mutate a lot, especially in the case of this new piece, which is really, really not like anything we've done before. Really excited for the Bookforum piece! And, of course, for your writings on Jeff's book! In text form from me? Mm, not soon, but I am about to get back into my dormant text novel and hopefully finish it. Talk soon, indeed, I hope. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi. Yeah, the election, ugh. First the Netanyahu thing, and now this. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I hope people use it to rise fucking up in some very useful way. ** Keaton, Hi. I want a 'pouting boy' doll. I think a lot of Gisele's mannequins pout. Truman Capote? I don't understand, but I like the way that feels. ** Misanthrope, It was safe. Thanks, man. ** Okay. We are now caught up. Onwards. Uh, ... oh, I made another thing out of gifs. I think this might be the best gif thing I've made so far, but then that's not for me to say, is it, and it's weird of me to say that, isn't it, so never mind. Enjoy Friday. See you tomorrow.

'When Michael Stipe is fucking me I will whisper the words fuck me kitten because “Automatic For the People” was the first CD I ever bought when I was 8 years old. Three days a week I wake up with a boner and I instantly start thinking about Michael Stipe fucking me. I get on my computer and type “Michael Stipe fucking me” into google image search as quickly as possible. Sometimes the results are disappointing but if I continue to click “load more images” I eventually find something satisfying.

'When Michael Stipe fucks me and I whisper fuck me kitten we will both pause and laugh. Even though we have the same first name, when Michael Stipe fucks me it won’t be like masturbation at all. When Michael Stipe fucks me I will have to come to terms with the fact that something I had imagined many times before is really happening, and when fantasy meets reality my body will float into the air and Michael Stipe will float into the air with me and as we’re fucking in the air I will be closer to a concept of God than I’ve ever been before.

'When Michael Stipe fucks me I will think of an image I’ve seen of Michael Stipe standing in front of enlarged cover of Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal. In turn, I will think of Michael Stipe covered in dirt and sweat, fucking me in the French prisons of the early 20th century, our desperation met equally with violence and pleasure.

'When Michael Stipe fucks me I will smile and let my face continue pounding into the wooden desk that my body is laid upon and I will clench my ass as tight as possible to make sure Michael Stipe experiences unmitigated levels of pleasure.

'When Michael Stipe fucks me I will let him come into my ass without a condom because celebrities are fantasy and in the world of the unreal nothing bad can ever happen.

'Michael Stipe’s come is a message to future generations.

'Michael Stipe’s come will coat my insides with the warmth.

'Michael Stipe’s come will enable me to see the future.

'Michael Stipe’s come will save the world.

'When Michael Stipe is fucking me it won’t take long before he hits my prostate perfectly and my eyes blank out and the only sound I hear is the sound of a collapsing building. When Michael Stipe is fucking me I won’t believe that I’m a real person because to be a real person is to be in pain and I will have absolutely no conception of pain.

'When Michael Stipe is fucking me a BBC World newscaster will announce that Michael Stipe is coming 20 minutes before he has actually come. In the future nobody will be able to figure out how the newscaster was aware of an event that hadn’t happened yet. I will know the answer. The answer is that the newscaster knew ahead of time because Michael Stipe fucking me was inevitable.

'When Michael Stipe fucks me America will crumble because his orgasm is a bomb against the American values that are hidden deep inside of my body, accessible only through my ass.'-- M Kitchell



____
Further

TOPOLOGY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Solar Luxuriance
Impossible Void Design
The Haunted House
Esotika Erotica Psychotica
the impossible ghost @ Twitter
“We remain in the Night that is in the Night: Laruelle’s Experimental Texts”
M Kitchell's writings @ Entropy
'Masturbating Over Ghosts': Blake Butler on/with M Kitchell
Review: Slow Slidings, by M. Kitchell @ Heavy Feather
'POSTPAROXYSMAL EVENT SPACE'
'The Pouring'
'25 Points: Variations on the Sun' by Robert Alan Wendeborn
'sky by m. kitchell republished without permission'
'M Kitchell's "Variations on the Sun" is successful because ...
'The poems in M Kitchell’s Variations on the Sun are the subtle camera movements ...
Book: 'Apart From'
Jared Baxter on 'Apart From'
Babyfucker Blog Project: M. Kitchell
On 'The Final Abdication of Elisa Lam' by M. Kitchell and Sean Kilpatrick
'I HATE PEOPLE WHO LIKE MOVIES'
Sound: 'Mixtape: M Kitchell/(Don’t) Shampoo Your Hair in the 1900s'
'Mike Kitchell - a book that should be filed in stores under ...
'A FORM OF FEAR (Musick for APART FROM)'
Free eBook: 'Exquisite Fucking Desire' by M Kitchell
Buy 'SPIRITUAL INSTRUMENT' @ CCM



_____
Video by


SPIRITUAL INSTRUMENT by M KITCHELL


FURTHER BENEATH THE EARTH by M KITCHELL


EYES OF LAURA MARS by M KITCHELL


THE TEXT OF DEATH by M KITCHELL


VARIATIONS ON THE SUN by M KITCHELL



__________
Expanded Literature Part 1: Internet Literature
by M Kitchell




While eating breakfast the other day, I thought it might be funny to go to ask.com and pose the question, “What is internet literature?” I thought it’d cause a few giggles, and I thought that perhaps it would result in something I could screen-cap to submit for Internet Poetry. I mean, the fact that I typed “askjeeves.com” into my browser alone I found to be ironic, because when I think of AskJeeves, I think of 2002.

Well, AskJeeves is now just Ask.com, I guess, and it turns out that the first search result actually proved relevant. The page is from February 18th, 2004–by now this should read as antiquated, right? The speed of technology arguably renders us far further into the future; between 2004 and now–than any time before. But despite a few caveats, the definition here seems to me far more interesting in consideration of capabilities than anything that would seem to actually define “internet literature.”

The page suggests the following list as a definition of hypertext literature:

(cont.)



_____
Video of


M Kitchell « Live at 851


HUMAN CONTACT INTERVIEW: M. Kitchell


Mike Kitchell @ Cool Dogs in Dekalb, IL


M Kitchell + Dean Smith « Quiet Lightning + Studio One


M Kitchell « Live at 851



______
Interview




Jackson Nieuwland: Yo Mike is it cool if I interview you?

Mike Kitchell: totally

JN: Sweet I’ll just jump right in then.

Two books are coming. Are books, to you, sexual objects or architectural objects? Or neither? Or both? Or something else entirely? Or just books? Have you ever fucked a book? If not, would you? Would you fuck a building? Didn’t a woman marry the Eiffel Tower once or something? Books being architectural makes sense: we fuck in buildings and so we must also fuck in books. RIght? Or wrong? Doesn’t everything we do outside of books eventually find its way between the pages? Can the same be said for houses? What can be said for the books you have coming out?

MK: Three books, actually, if you count Land Grid, a “chapbook” that I’m self-publishing. It’s the first thing Solar▲Luxuriance is releasing that I actually paid a printer to print & didn’t print and bind myself, so I count it. [Jackson: Land Grid has been released since this interview took place.]

I would say that books are not quite sexual objects to me, but some of them are certainly fetish objects. In parallel to my sexual fetishes, the object of my fascination has to be particular. I think, if we regard a narrow definition of what ‘fetish’ actually means I would have no actual fetishes, but that’s narrow. No one likes narrow. Similarly, I don’t think all books are architectural objects. Some of them, yes, in that they build, whether conceptually or literally. Artists’ books that turn into boxes or hallways, literal architecture. I am a snob. I am picky. I don’t think reading for the sake of reading is anything better than watching TV. What counts is what you’re reading, what you’re watching, what you’re building with. What you’re getting off to. Of course, who am I to judge what someone’s getting off to. I like books that hold sex. I like books that are conduits to sex. In this case they are sexual objects, I suppose, beyond fetish objects.

Are we using fucked in the sexual sense? I’ve never literally stuck my dick inside of a book, no. I’ve perhaps fisted a book. The future is less phallocentric, so maybe, yes. Where do you hold your libido. I’d fuck a building. I fuck buildings in everything I write. I either want to fuck or suicide the world. I’m not in control. I think we fuck inside of everything. Books are books are objects are books are conduits are books are zones of affect are the future are the past are nothing are irrelevant what even is a book, fucked.

Houses.

There are three books. The first, already mentioned, Land Grid, is three short stories that are somewhat thematically linked. The longest story, which was originally the titular story of the collection (until I changed the title), is very narrative, almost straight forward, diverging from the rest of my work. It’s still me though, it couldn’t not be. It’s about a boy and his brother who go to stay at their Aunt & Uncle’s house one summer. The boy discovers a secret underground world, built in the basements of suburban houses, all holding parts of a miniature golf course. There is a lot of abject sex in here. Another story is about a hypnotist at an abandoned carnival. The last story was a story where I told myself I wanted to write about the materials of earth, glass bricks, and snuff films. So I did, that’s what that story is about. All of them hold a whole, I can’t write about anything but death. I can hardly write a sex scene without someone breaking down crying at the end, someone discovering they’re actually god. There are some photos too. The second book, Variations on the Sun, is coming out from Red Lightbulb’s LOVE SYMBOL PRESS. I think I’m technically the first book, though that’s sort of an accident. All of my manuscripts are already laid out as books, like as pdfs that are formatted and shit, because I’m a control freak and have to do everything myself. Someone told me it was poetry once. I don’t think it is. I mean, I don’t care what you call it. It’s fragments about a group of nomadic children. There are a lot of photographs in it. It’s a strange whole. There is no sex on the page, only between the pages. Russ asked me to find people to blurb it and I suggested he get a group of 12 year olds to read it and have them blurb it. That might not work though, it’s dark, because, yeah I don’t know how to write about anything but death. Questions about death. Maybe by death I mean god and maybe by god I mean the impossible. What are you looking for? The final book is the big one for me, because it’ll have an ISBN and everything, it’ll be the longest, the fullest. It’s coming out on Blue Square Press, a division of Mud Lucious. It is another book where parts add up to a whole, but the parts are not fragments, they’re arguably self-contained stories. But wherever there is an “I” (everywhere) you can hold the same protagonist throughout. Everything I write is basically horror. Everything I write is basically me trying to re-appropriate 70s & early 80s euro-horror, to queer it, to fuck with it, to make it question. Every narrative of mine is a quest. There is always loss and sadness and the impossible.

JN: Is Land Grid a sign of things to come for Solar▲Luxuriance? Are you renovating/expanding the publishing house? Are you knocking down walls? Are there doors to be knocked on? Do you think of it as a publishing HOUSE? Do all the books and writers living together happily inside of it, getting along like a house on fire? Or is it a broken home? When does a building die? When does a book die? What is death? What isn’t death? When will you die and how do you envision it?

MK: Land Grid might be a sign of things to come. I’m working SECRETLY with a SECRET ACCOMPLICE in considering moving S▲L away from being such a micro-micro press and more into the realm of “actual” micro-press. Some things will stay the same, some things will change. I’ve been questioning the place that yet-another-“publishing house” has in the world. There’s a surplus as it stands, so why do I need to add to it? I’m trying to figure that out. I’m also in the process of examining my own relationship to this realm of so-called “indie lit” as it stands, because I fear things that move into a hegemony, and with there being so little that has surprised me in a good way lately, I’m afraid of staying so connected. The only way to overcome fear is to fight through it, abandon it (alternatively, one can obsess over it and use narrative to break it apart). I am nomadic and the press is too. I want to re-articulate the relationship between art and writing in the world. What is the best method for this? How can I figure that out? The only way is to experiment. See what fails and what doesn’t fail. Lately I am more excited by things happening at publishing houses related to critical theory and philosophy and art. But fiction, whatever fiction means, is important to me. Poetry is becoming more important to me, but only poetry that moves like the sun and warms my body. The sun that permits excess. Of its thirteen releases, the only authors from S▲L that I have met in the flesh are me and two others. The rest exist to me only immaterially. That might change one day, it probably will. Everything is decentralized. Nothing is broken because there is no home. Books can die. Books are already dead. We are already dead. I used to insist that I will one day die in the ocean. Now I’m not so sure.

JN: What other SECRETS can you tell us exist without revealing entirely? Why do you hold SECRETS? What power does a SECRET hold? Are there too many SECRETS or not enough? How many people must know a SECRET for it to cease being as one? Let’s move from SECRETS to secretions. Which is your favourite? Which is your least? Which do you produce the most of? What is the difference between a tear and a bead of sweat? Is hair a secretion?
[18 days pass]

JN: Are you SECRETS so SECRET that this interview is over because I asked about them?

MK: uh yeah idk i guess i’m done for now lol
hope dat’s enough hehe



___
Book

M Kitchell SPIRITUAL INSTRUMENT
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'Instead of fiction, Spiritual Instrument offers rituals and instructions, photographs and phantom topologies, obscured words and dream narratives, black pages and secret portals. M. Kitchell is doing nothing less than conjuring and charting new spaces for literature.'-- Jeff Jackson

'Asserting an architecture of the page and an architecture of the body, Spiritual Instrument disassembles narrative to reveal its secret rooms. Then it haunts them: with disorientation, with lust, with the abstracted, illusive subject; with the ghosts of dead dreams and VHS tapes. Language as ritual, language as spell: M Kitchell invites us to trance, only to rouse us again and again.'-- Megan Milks

'M Kitchell’s Spiritual Instrument ritually enacts its martyrdom, in language, in a difficult and abject interrogation of imagination and spirit that spills and dissolves with its own heat, its own ghosting. This cry with its architecture of despair, its secret technology of desire, will make you break down and cry. Like the mind’s corners. Like the weather of the internal animal. The real, here, is hyperpresent and it is not a freedom we have, nor a choice. With great tenderness, the queertext opens up a mouth of hysterics & mystery that closes the distance between self & other, inside & outside, sun & violence, life & haunt of death. Its heterogenous structure makes it an observer: the omens of what we could find beautiful are here.'-- Monica Mody

____
Excerpts
































*

p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog is giving itself over to a scroll-able, clickable, ready-to-go introductory celebration of the brand new and really great new book from author, editor (LIES/ISLE, a.o.), publisher (Solar Luxuriance), designer, and longtime d.l. (magick mike) M Kitchell. Please immerse yourselves in this interpretation of its birth for whatever amount of time you can spare between now and Monday, and, should circumstances allow, I highly recommend that you score the book itself. Thanks! ** David S. Estornell, Hi, David! Lovely to see you. Of course I'm gonna read it. I already did, in fact. And I will watch the thing you kindly linked me to later this very day. I hope you're doing great. ** David Ehrenstein, That is one heck of a poem, for damned sure. Yes, new Ashbery book! I can not wait! Fashion isn't in ruins. YSL kind of is, though. But that's what they get for hiring Hedi Slimane five years after his imagination ran out of gas. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, yeah, definitely worth talking to. I like the earlier films of his that I've seen, which is partly why I found 'SL' so surprisingly crappy. I hope dinner restored you. ** Tosh Berman, Thank you very kindly, Mr. B. ** Cal Graves, Ha ha, hi, Cal. Hey, if you combine our names, you get Decal. Or you can. I like decals, don't you? Thank you very much for the kind words re: my poems. 'Working on stories and poems' isn't 'nothing mostly'. I mean, what else is there? Okay, there are a few other things. But not many. Oh, shit, I'm sorry about the as-yet jobless status and your apartment's fucking suckiness. Yay for telling off that conservative prick. You probably saved his life. Mm, I feel like I'm mostly making stuff right now and not taking very much in. I have some books I'm excited to read on the way. Watching ... nothing, I don't think. But, with the apartment move, my TV works again for the first time in about four years, so I'll see what it will allow me to watch. What about you? What's being inputted? Reactivatedly, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, Ben. Yeah, even I, way over here, spent many daylight hours reading all the latest and opinion-ing about that gruesome election. Fight, fight! As I hardly need to tell you. Excellent about you joining that panel! That's great! Bon-nest weekend you can manage! ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks. Yeah, I think it's important both not to ignore stuff at the top of your location's power structure and to use your forced alienation from that stuff in the most useful way you can, personally, artistically, etc. Artists always have a way out. We're very lucky. ** Sypha, Hi. Only one typo is kind of a miracle. Maybe you should let it live for the same whatever reason that Persian (?) rug makers leave a flaw in their things. I'm going to pretend you didn't say that you want to read the Kim Kardashian book. Luckily, I have a big imagination, so I can do that. Hm, you are kind of enigmatic, James, now that I think about it. Huh. ** Kier, Dendoid is such a pretty word. I'm so almost tempted to change my name legally to that. No Cooper, just Dendoid. Should I? I don't want to belabor the completely bewildering effect of that school's enrollment officials' complete idiocy, but I do have this weird belief in fate, but not in a spiritual way or anything, and it could be that that particular school wasn't right for you. Maybe it was an interesting idea that made sense theoretically, but, ultimately, it will seem like a weird idea to you. You know, 'It's so weird that I wanted to go to that school. (chuckle, head shake).' A school is a pre-set system, and, except in rare-ish situations, art and artists are antithetical to the kind of assimilation that systematic institutions demand. I mean, Kier, you're fucking great. You're an amazing artist. Anyone who's ever seen your work who hasn't been conservative or stupid has been blown away by your work. The thing is to find a situation where you can do that work in as much peace and with as much support as you can. Maybe a residency will be the fit. (Obviously, the Paris locale of possible residency made my ears perk up.) Or something else. I know it will get sorted out. It will. I'm glad your health is noticeably better. I'm glad you got back to the farm! Halle: Uh, basically the four days I was there were spent either in a theater rehearsing the new piece or elsewhere rewriting the script based on what happened in the rehearsals. Zac was there too giving Gisele advice and ideas and stuff, and he and I were also studying the piece re: the puppet TV show that Gisele wants us to write for her. Yeah, Jonathan C. is in the piece. He's the only the only non-professional ventriloquist in the piece, although he's very good at ventriloquism. That Muppet-y looking puppet is the puppet of his 16-year old 'son', another character in the play. No, I'm getting close to getting back into working on the text novel, but it's a long way from being finished, I'm pretty sure. First I want to get a semblance of a solid script down for Zac's and my next film so we can find and approach possible producers, and that's what I'm concentrating on now. Friday, I ... mostly just further cleaned my new apartment, worked on the film script, did some revisions on the Gisele script, made blog posts, and ... yeah, hardly anything else. How was your weekend, dear pal? ** Rigby, Hey, Rigster! Thank you. Yeah, the tragedy, I heard. Scary. That's the spirit. Go for it, man! And say hi to Esther for me if she goes too. You quoted me? Oh, I don't remember what I wrote, but, yeah, it's okay, sure. Love to you and yours too to say the least! ** So, yes, M Kitchell. Get into the spirit, please? Thanks a bunch. See you on Monday.

'The New Hollywood movement was primarily a male, auteur-led phenomenon. But the contribution of performers as adventurous and vital as Karen Black should not be overlooked. Black was electrified as well as electrifying: her tornado of hair, her fearless physicality and those indelible feline eyes combined to create a woozy and unapologetic sexual energy. She looked offbeat, and she knew how to use that. "I couldn't have been an actress in the 1930s," she said, reflecting on her role as a movie extra in The Day of the Locust (1975). "My face moves around too much."

'It was in the late 1960s and 70s that she became one of the great character actors of US cinema in a series of performances in key New Hollywood works. Partly it was that she exhibited qualities outside the skill set of a conventional female lead – she could play volatile and nerve-jangled, or maligned and wounded, without ever approaching caricature, and suddenly these talents came to be much in demand from countercultural film-makers. "Could actors such as Ellen Burstyn, Karen Black, Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, with their neediness, blankness, oddity, have become leading players in any other decade?" asked Adam Mars-Jones recently in the Guardian. But if her skew-whiff style and appearance were well-suited to a cinema not guilty of undervaluing the marginal, then the humanity she brought to those characters would surely have been recognised in any era or art form.

'Her career overlapped with several key figures of New Hollywood: she made her screen debut in Francis Ford Coppola's own first film, You're a Big Boy Now (1966), and collaborated more than once with Jack Nicholson, who cast Black in his 1971 directorial debut, Drive, He Said, after co-starring with her in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). She was also a favourite of Robert Altman, who directed her in Nashville (1975), for which she and many of the cast wrote and performed their own songs, and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982). Playing herself in Altman's The Player (1992), she was one of many such celebrity guest stars in that overpopulated satire to be left on the cutting-room floor.)

'These parts were strikingly different from one another, but they had in common Black's knack for conveying her characters' rich and troubled inner lives, their cramped or thwarted dreams. The consummate example could be found in her Oscar-nominated performance as Rayette, the Tammy Wynette-loving girlfriend to Nicholson's discontented antihero Bobby Dupea, in Five Easy Pieces. There was a comical but achingly sad intellectual gap between the two. Bobby resented her. Crucially, the audience never did. "I dig [Rayette], she's not dumb, she's just not into thinking," said Black in 1970. "I didn't have to know anybody like her to play her. I mean, I'm like her, in ways. Rayette enjoys things as she sees them, she doesn't have to add significances. She can just love the dog, love the cat. See? There are many things she does not know, but that's cool; she doesn't intrude on anybody else's trip. And she's going to survive."

'She was born Karen Blanche Ziegler in Park Ridge, Illinois, daughter of Norman and Elsie Ziegler, the latter a children's novelist. She studied at Northwestern University in Illinois from the age of 15, then moved to New York at 17 and took odd jobs and off-Broadway roles. In 1960 she married Charles Black. She was nominated for best actress in the Drama Critics' Circle awards for playing the lead in The Play Room (1965); Coppola, who was in the audience, cast her in You're a Big Boy Now. From there, she met Henry Jaglom and Dennis Hopper, both of whom were, like Coppola, part of the coterie of up-and-coming film-makers and actors benefiting from the patronage of Roger Corman. Hopper cast her in Easy Rider as a prostitute who has a bad acid trip in a New Orleans cemetery; Jaglom, who was brought in to help edit the film, insisted that improvised scenes of Black which had been cut should be put back in. Jaglom would continue to help her career as late as 1983 when he gave her the lead in his underrated romantic comedy Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?

'She attracted attention for those groundbreaking films with Hopper and Nicholson, and for numerous other fascinating oddities including Cisco Pike (1972), with Kris Kristofferson as a musician turned dealer; a 1972 adaptation of Philip Roth's comic novel Portnoy's Complaint; and a foolhardy film version of Ionesco's absurdist Rhinoceros (1974), with Zero Mostel. But she was not averse to the mainstream. She played the doomed Myrtle in the Coppola-scripted adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1974); she was the flight attendant who must land a plane single-handed in the efficient but much-parodied disaster movie Airport 1975 (1974); and she played a kidnapper in Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976). She also became a darling of the horror genre after taking on three roles in the television anthology Trilogy of Terror (1975) and starring in movies such as Burnt Offerings (1976), Invaders from Mars (1986) and House of 1,000 Corpses (2003).

'Pickings became steadily slimmer in the 1980s, though her dynamic turn as a post-operative male-to-female transsexual in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was singled out by Pauline Kael of the New Yorker as Black's finest work. Kael highlighted her "spectacular tawdry world-weariness" and commended her for "keep[ing] the mawkishness from splashing all over the set. I think this isn't just the best performance she has given on screen – it's a different kind of acting from what she usually does. It's subdued, controlled, quiet – but not parched." Black worked continuously until becoming ill in 2009. She had a small role in George Sluizer's Dark Blood, best known now as the film River Phoenix was making when he died in 1993. Illness prevented her from attending the world premiere of a salvaged cut of the film last year in the Netherlands.'-- Ryan Gilbey



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Stills







































































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Further

Karen Black Official Website
Karen Black @ IMDb
Karen Black's
The Real Karen Black @ Facebook
'Mort de Karen Black, la fille d'à côté du Nouvel Hollywood'
Roger Ebert interviews Karen Black in 1975
'Karen Black Movies List: Best to Worst'
'Celebrating the Late Karen Black at BAM'
'Karen Black: an appreciation' @ The Dissolve
'Karen Black, Strange And Lovely, And Always Game'
'Remembering Karen Black as actress, friend, spouse'
'Karen Black and Death in Scientology'
Karen Black @ The Criterion Collection
'Watch Karen Black Speak of "The Unknown" in Final Interview Clip'
Video: Karen Black's sketches on Saturday Night Live
'Karen Black: Learnt Offerings'
'Karen Black: Perfectly Misunderstood'
Video: 'Karen Black and L7 Perform "Bang Bang" on Public Access Show: Decoupage! 2000'
'Karen Black completed memoirs on eve of her death'
'Living Doll: Karen Black and "Trilogy of Terror"'
'MY RECENT DINNER WITH KAREN BLACK'



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Extras


Karen Black Memorial Montage


VICE Meets: Karen Black


KAREN BLACK wows SOLD OUT CASTRO THEATRE


Karen Black: On Acting


Karen Black in 'Trilogy of Terror' (1975)



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Interview




You grew up in Park Ridge, IL. What did Dad do?

Karen Black: He was in charge of sales for the Ed Filkins Company. They would build factories and figure it all out. He was also a violinist, and his father was Arthur Ziegler, who was the first violinist for the Chicago Symphony. He was a great guy: very robust, humorous, extraordinarily handsome as a young man, before I knew him. And my mom is an award-wining novelist, Elsie Reif Ziegler, although she’s not writing anymore because she’s getting elderly. She’s very brilliant, very beautiful, a redhead. I have a sister, Gail (Brown), who was on Another World for many years. She’s a blonde, but we look a lot alike, and I have an older brother, Peter, who isn’t really working anymore. He married the daughter of the governor. He’s a sweet boy.

When did you know you were an artist?

KB: I don’t think it’s something you cognate on, because it’s something you are, so you are it. Whitney Laux, who’s in the play with me, and I were talking about how we like to wear sunglasses when we go out, and just observe people. Nobody understands that, except those who write, direct, and act. It’s just about being enthralled by people: how they think, how they talk, how they gesture, the relation between them all. It has a great meaning, a great cause and a great purpose, which is there are ways of viewing things aesthetically. You don’t view them pragmatically or functionally. And after many years of being enthralled by watching people, which I loved to do, I realized I was putting them on stage. There’s that scrapping, arguing family sitting in a restaurant at the airport. And were you to put them on stage, they would be the greatest actors in the world. Were they on stage? If you’re looking at them like that, it’s incredible. How can they be so natural? How can they be so real? And that’s why we get so excited, because we’re viewing it aesthetically. So you take all that, and you put it in your movie, or put it in your script, and that’s why the people sound like they’re really talking, because you’ve heard it, and you’ve learned it.

And nobody captured what you’re talking about better than my hero, Robert Altman, who you got to work with twice.

KB: Thank you so much. Absolutely right. Yeah, we worked together three times, actually, because I was in The Player briefly. He had such confidence. When you’re creating something, I think you have a certitude about it. It’s present and it doesn’t really compromise, and it’s not self-reflective at all, in fact there’s no ego. You just see it a certain way. And that’s how he was, like all great directors. He also believed in idiosyncrasies and audacious, inadvertent events. If you made a mistake, he loved it. He embraced it. During Nashville, everyone was miked. I was miked on my inner thigh, forgot it was even there, and you never saw the cameras. It was like they were up in the rafters, or something. So you weren’t self-conscious in any way, so you just improvised. It made you feel very safe, because everything was going to work if even mistakes were wonderful. I don’t know how many lines we had going into sound, maybe 24, so we could all talk simultaneously.

It’s funny, when I interviewed him and asked about how he got all that overlapping dialogue in MASH, he said it was all due to the sound mixer, and said “If that guy didn’t win an Oscar, he sure deserved a citation from God.”

KB: Yeah, on the other hand, it’s really his concept. He was a good friend. He’d always call back, and we’d have conversations. The other thing is that he represented a way of working, he was sort of like a symbol of the values and the structure of independent filmmaking. We have so many independent filmmakers in America, and I think they all felt supported by Mr. Altman. He was very important to all of us in that sense, and in that sense, I think he’s still there.

You entered Northwestern University at 15, and studied in its renowned speech and drama department.

KB: I would say that the college training was very lousy, and I don’t think that people learn by being invalidated. I think people get some idea along the line from their analyst, who evaluates for them based on other people’s journeys that they’ve studied who have nothing to do with you, and then you have to buy that evaluation. That’s utterly appropriate. Acting teachers, not all of them but many, seem to think that beating up their students and invalidating them will make them better, which I think is completely wrong. And at that age, you don’t realize that this sick person is really projecting all their neurosis onto you, you think that you’re the one who’s damaged. So I think that Alvina Krause would not validate and would not allow. I think she had favorites, and you could never figure out why you weren’t a favorite, and it never made any sense. The thing you have to remember is that if a person is making you feel bad about yourself, that person is going to be in his or her own world. They are lost in their own universe. If they can’t grant you who you are, they’re locked in their own nutty universe, and they’ To bring this to the present, the director of this piece, Angela Garcia Combs, never evaluated and never invalidated any of us, and it’s been such a joy working with someone like that.

What was it like working on Easy Rider, arguably the film that helped launch the American independent movie?

KB: It was insane! (laughs) I have never really done drugs. I’m against them, all kinds. I think I smoked grass twice. Toni Basil, who is still my good friend, doesn’t do drugs either, so we were in another universe from these guys (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper). Time was very slow for them. (laughs) We’d get in the Winnebago, and we never found the Mardi Gras parade, and there’s not a single shot of us in it. Dennis would see some guy outside the window and say “Hey man, you see that guy outside the window? I’m gonna get him!” And he’d go running out, and lose track of time…It was NUTS! He was NUTS! (laughs) But, that said, Dennis is also a genius and Easy Rider was his masterpiece. He would’ve done anything to get it made. He had a great vision, was very driven, and made that movie with great belief in the way that certain people were living at that time, and loving it, and having a real affinity for it. It holds up very well.

Five Easy Pieces is one of the great American movies.

KB: Did you know it was shot in sequence? Not one shot was done out of sequence.

No, I didn’t know that. What was (director) Bob Rafelson like to work with?

KB: Great guy. He laughs a lot. He’d weep sometimes when we were shooting. He’s a passionate person. He believes in what he believes in. He’s maybe too passionate for Hollywood. The last time I saw him he said “I’m leaving. I’m getting out of town.”

Your portrayal of Rayette was really amazing, because she’s one of those characters that would have been easy to turn into a cartoon, but you made her very three-dimensional. What was it like being Rayette?

KB: If you look through the eyes of Rayette, it looks nice, really beautiful, light, not heavy, not serious. A very affectionate woman who would look upon things with love, and longing. She wasn’t a person who would tear things apart or recompile them, or asses or evaluate, none of those things. A completely uncritical person, and in that sense, a beautiful person. When Rafelson called me to his office to discuss the part he said “Karen, I’m worried you can’t play this role because you’re too smart.” I said ‘Bob, when you call “action,” I will stop thinking,’ because that’s how Rayette is.`

You worked with Alfred Hitchcock on his final film, Family Plot, in 1976. What was he like?

KB: Overall, very avuncular, although he did kiss me one day in a very sexual way, but the rest of the time he was very avuncular. He was funny and shrewd, and knew exactly what he wanted and knew if you were creating that. He thought I was too sympathetic (in my portrayal). So he said early on that he wanted me to be less sympathetic and to speak in a mid-Atlantic accent. But the truth is that I wanted the other part, the one that Barbara Harris played. I told him, and he said “No dear. That character is too low class.” (laughs) I thought to myself “This guy hasn’t seen Five Easy Pieces.” He was just great. We used to read each other poems and limericks and he tried to catch me on my vocabulary. He once said “You seem very perspicacious today, Miss Black.” I said, ‘Oh, you mean “keenly perceptive?’ “Yes.” (laughs) So I got him this huge, gold-embossed dictionary that said “Diction-Harry,” at the end of the shoot. And I have to say something about him that I think is remarkable and stunning and obvious, yet I’ve never heard anyone talk about it. We all know people who make storyboards, and they go shoot the movie, and their storyboard goes all to hell. But his movies were the storyboard. He storyboarded with really, really seeing the finished movie, so he didn’t make any mistakes. And nobody has done it before or since. I think he was kind of bored on the set, as they say, because everything in his mind was done.

Around the same time you played what I think was the most tragic character you’ve ever played, Faye Greener in Day of the Locust. It just breaks your heart.

If you have one, and I’m not sure that Nathaniel West (author of the book) did. That was not a fun experience, making that film. It was just horrible. I wish quite heartily I’d never made it, because I’d have had a much longer career in Hollywood. I’d have been making major movies for many years, had I not done that film.

Why did that film kill your career?

KB: It was a very troubled production, and I became the scapegoat that everyone blamed. People kept getting sick, getting fired, and it was just a horror, an absolute horror. Seven months. There were all these rumors that people made up…and I wound up being the center of it. Poor (William) Atherton walked off and didn’t do the final scene, because he couldn’t take it anymore and, oh my God…awful. Gossip-mongers are often very convincing, and there were all these people making things up behind my back, and it really hurt me. It hurt me a lot.



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18 of Karen Black's 198 roles

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Francis Ford Coppola You're a Big Boy Now (1966)
'Time has granted Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) the uncontested title of representative coming-of-age film for a generation, but my favorite entry in cinema’s “pain of growing up” sweepstakes is this delightfully offbeat comedy from a young (27) Francis Ford Coppola. You’re a Big Boy Now was Coppola's first film for a major studio as well as his master's thesis submission to the UCLA film school, and as such, displays an engagingly youthful lack of discipline and over-fondness for camera trickery...two things that don't exactly get in the way in films that came out of the 60s. Although You're a Big Boy Now has not been widely seen nor is it particularly well-known, Elizabeth Hartman and Geraldine Page were both nominated for Golden Globes for their performances. Best of all, the film gave Karen Black her film debut.'-- DREAMS ARE WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...



Excerpt



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Dennis Hopper Easy Rider (1969)
'A box office smash with a $60-million intake, of which $41.7 million was domestic gross, it became the third highest grossing film of 1969. Along with Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, Easy Rider helped kick-start the New Hollywood phase during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The major studios realized that money could be made from low-budget films made by avant-garde directors. Heavily influenced by the French New Wave, the films of the so-called "post-classical Hollywood" came to represent a counterculture generation increasingly disillusioned with its government as well as the government's effects on the world at large, the Establishment. Although Jack Nicholson appears only as a supporting actor and in the last half of the film, the standout performance signaled his arrival as a movie star, along with his subsequent film Five Easy Pieces in which he had the lead role. Vice President Spiro Agnew criticized Easy Rider, along with the band Jefferson Airplane, as examples of the permissiveness the 1960s counterculture.'-- collaged



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KAREN BLACK Q&A ABOUT EASY RIDER



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Bob Rafelson Five Easy Pieces (1970)
'The solitude. Of men, sometimes women, who refused to settle on a place, a role, a “stable” identity. They walked through my life for a few years when I was a boy—carpenters, child-care workers, counselors, psychiatric patients. Some of them were my teachers. Five Easy Pieces was and is a great film because it gives us such a clear and unobstructed view of this particular type of American exis­tence, brought into being at a certain interval in our history when the expectations of class and family carried more weight than they do now—“Auspicious beginnings—you know what I mean?” Film production is a cumbersome and lengthy affair, and the finished product, no matter how good, almost always lags behind or stands apart from its moment. Occasionally, though, when the conditions allow, movie and moment are one. Like Warner Bros. at the dawn of sound or Preston Sturges at his blindingly brilliant peak, Five Easy Pieces speaks with eloquence and simplicity from and to the America of its time, from melancholy opening to ineffably sad closing shot. In 1970, it was a revelation. Today, it remains a shattering experience, in part because it contains an entire way of life within its ninety-eight minutes.'-- Kent Jones



Trailer



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Ivan Passer Born to Win (1971)
'Ivan Passer's Born to Win is a good-bad movie that doesn't always work but has some really brilliant scenes. It opened last week under cover of darkness in several neighborhood theaters, and that's probably just as well. If they'd given it the big hype at first-run prices, people might have felt uneasy at a tragicomedy about dope. But at neighborhood prices, we can relax and remember George Segal running through the middle of Manhattan in a fluffy nightgown. Passer presents the whole up-down trap of heroin addiction in one unforgettable series of scenes. Segal, having scored, feels great and is sure he can kick the habit this time. Karen Black drives him west out of the city: The whole world, drenched in sunshine, is before them, and they will always be in love. The scene is balanced with a cold and desperate one a little later. He needs a fix and they drive back to a cold, sunless Manhattan with its despair and its pushers.'-- Roger Ebert



Excerpt



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Bill L. Norton Cisco Pike (1972)
'Cisco Pike is a 1972 drama written and directed by Bill L. Norton. It stars Kris Kristofferson as a musician fallen on hard luck who turns to dealing marijuana as a means of income. The film also stars Karen Black, Harry Dean Stanton, Antonio Fargas, Gene Hackman, Viva, and Texas musician Doug Sahm. This film was not widely embraced by audiences on its initial release but has become a cult movie. Much of its cult status comes from fans of Kris Kristofferson and Doug Sahm, but it also carries a cult status because of its dated (and unintentionally funny) take on the subject of drugs, dealers, and the lifestyle they lead.'-- collaged



Excerpt



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Luke Moberly Little Laura And Big John (1973)
'Fifth-rate 1920s crime spree with Fabian Forte cast as real-life Prohibition-era crook John Ashley who, along with his girlfriend Laura and assorted pals, preceded even Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in the bank robbing field. It is inconceivable that rising star Karen Black, having already earned attention for her performances in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces (for which she was Oscar-nominated), should appear in such a low-rent production. Black and Forte are really the only cast members with legitimate acting experience (Forte had recently portrayed 'Pretty Boy' Floyd in 1970), yet their performances are just as lousy as everyone else's (like the script, perhaps they were simply confused as to how to proceed). The early scenes give hint that maybe Moberly was onto something with his approach, but he loses his footing quickly--and the movie doesn't so much crash and burn as it does disintegrate on impact.'-- moonspinner, IMDb



the entire film



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Tom O'Horgan Rhinoceros (1974)
'The short lived American Film Theater in its few years of existence produced and preserved so many good theatrical works that might never have gotten filmed they deserve the gratitude of all who appreciate the best in plays. One of the best and most interesting preserved work is French playwright Eugene Ionesco's absurdest work, Rhinoceros. It's a very funny work with a strong moral message about individualism. Rhinoceros ran for 240 performances on Broadway in 1961 and starred Zero Mostel and Eli Wallach in the part that Gene Wilder plays in the film. The casting of Wilder was obviously done to exploit the chemistry Mostel and he demonstrated in Mel Brooks's The Producers. Mostel like in The Producers by dint of his stronger personality tries to get Gene Wilder to change his ways. Wilder is a mousy little man who has a dead end job in a newspaper, can't get to first base with the object of his affection, Karen Black, and likes to drink a little too much more than is good for him.'-- bkoganbing, IMDb



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Jack Clayton The Great Gatsby (1974)
'This version of The Great Gatsby makes the 1949 version and the 1926 version before it (as far as I can remember it) look like twin pinnacles of art. Every single aspect of the new film is bad. Even Robert Redford, fine actor and attractive man, presents a Gatsby who is a dopey mooner instead of a subtle, large exponent of an American tragedy—a man for whom the romances of Money and Romance are inseparable, a compulsive feeder on illusions insisting that they must be true because the facts of his worldly accomplishments are true, and, saddest of all, a believer in “the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” If Redford fails, then failure is too kind a term for Mia Farrow as Daisy, a skeleton in amour; or Bruce Dem as Tom, supposedly a well-bred gentleman who despises his parvenu neighbor but who looks and sounds like a nervous shoe clerk; or Lois Chiles as Jordan, another cover-girl trying to be an actress; or Karen Black as Myrtle, a writhing gargoyle; or Sam Waterston who looks right enough as Nick but whose voice is stultifyingly boring.'-- New Republic



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Jack Smight Airport 1975 (1975)
'Airport 1975 is very interesting to watch. Unlike Airport, the action happens much faster, and at last, a real plane is used for the air-to-air scenes. The mid-air collision is very surprising. It is supposed to be a dramatic movie, but I’ll admit that the second time I watched it, I was amused by some reactions of the passengers, particularly that lady behind Sid Caesar that stands up and yells like a maniac. I was also amused by Erik Estrada, trying to seduce the flight attendants, and Karen Black panicking on the radio. The rest of the dramatic scenes really get you stuck to your seat. I give Airport 1975 a good grade: 8 out of 10. At first I thought it was better than Airport. It sure has a lot more action. But on second thought, nothing beats the “classic”.'-- Air Odyssey



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John Schlesinger The Day of the Locust (1975)
'Behold one of Hollywood’s greatest and most forgotten films, John Schlesinger’s 1975 Day of the Locust, a cynical and panoramic view of depression-era Hollywood and the “locusts” who populated that sun-scorched landscape. Schlesinger, who gave us Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man, both starring Dustin Hoffman, didn’t fare well by the critics and Day only won two Oscars, one for Burgess Meredith for supporting actor and one for Ann Roth for her costumes. Karen Black won a Golden Globe for her work. But in the years since, Day of the Locust has found a permanent perch on the dais of great American films, and has become a cult film with cinema fans, one that features a stunning performance by Karen Black who plays the wannabe “greatest movie star in the world,” Faye Greener.' It ranks among the greatest of Hollywood epics, featuring the filming of a frightening and brilliant collapse of a major studio set, and the unforgettable breathtaking final scenes that revolve around the cataclysmic riot at the movie’s premiere, where the locusts, enraged by the vicious murder of a child, turn the streets of Hollywood into a flaming war scene. With palm trees aflame, people being trampled, Schlesinger gives us an apocalypse, with a symbolic crucifixion of one of the main characters.'-- Central Maine



Trailer


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Robert Altman Nashville (1975)
'Robert Altman's Nashville, which was the best American movie since Bonnie and Clyde, creates in the relationships of nearly two dozen characters a microcosm of who we were and what we were up to in the 1970s. It's a film about the losers and the winners, the drifters and the stars in Nashville, and the most complete expression yet of not only the genius but also the humanity of Altman, who sees people with his camera in such a way as to enlarge our own experience. Sure, it's only a movie. But after I saw it I felt more alive, I felt I understood more about people, I felt somehow wiser. It's that good a movie. The movie doesn't have a star. It does not, indeed, even have a lead role. Instead, Altman creates a world, a community in which some people know each other and others don't, in which people are likely to meet before they understand the ways in which their lives are related. And he does it all so easily, or seems to, that watching Nashville is as easy as breathing and as hard to stop. Altman is the best natural filmmaker since Fellini.'-- collaged



Trailer



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Dan Curtis Burnt Offerings (1976)
'Dan Curtis, director of TV's Dark Shadows series, directed this eerie haunted-house thriller about a house which draws energy from its inhabitants and selects its own "keeper" from the family of Ben and Marian Rolf (Oliver Reed & Karen Black), who rent the strangely-affordable house one fateful summer then find themselves slowly succumbing to its creepy powers. The photography is suitably moody, and many of the standard haunted-house cliches are used to decent effect -- particularly a violent scene in which the surrounding woods form a barrier to prevent the family station wagon from escaping the area -- but the pace is too leisurely overall, climaxing with the type of grim ending employed by nearly every mainstream horror film in the late 70's. Black's spooky looks are used to maximum effect, but are never quite as chilling as the final shot of Curtis's TV movie Trilogy of Terror from the previous year.'-- collaged



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Alfred Hitchcock Family Plot (1976)
'And so we come to Family Plot. Released in 1976, 51 years after Alfred Hitchcock directed his first feature length motion picture, The Pleasure Garden, this final film was Hitch’s Opus number 53. Hitchcock did not know it would be his last picture, and it is a slightly odd note to finish on, as it is, in a way, a dark romantic comedy about two criminal couples: One, essentially bumbling con artists, the other, ruthless kidnappers. It features Hitchcock’s usual sharp script, several interesting set pieces, and very appealing performances by some young talent. Like Frenzy, this was the new Hitchcock: Its script was fully of salty language, and its characters were adult in every sense of the word. In the era of the MPAA ratings system, sex had finally and unabashedly entered Hitchcock’s work. Where the sex in Frenzy had been violent, here, in Family Plot, it was more benign, as two unmarried couples carry out their criminal activities while continually crossing paths as though they were in a farce. The two couples are Madame Blanche, a low-rent psychic played by Barbara Harris; her boyfriend, George, an actor and cab driver, played by Bruce Dern; Arthur Adamson, a sociopathic criminal played by William Devane; and Fran, Adamson’s accomplice in kidnapping, played by Karen Black.'-- The Hitchcock Report



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Robert Altman Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982)
'After directing a celebrated New York stage production of Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, legendary filmmaker Robert Altman (Nashville, 3 Women) gave the play the full cinematic treatment. Actresses Sandy Dennis, Golden Globe-nominee Cher, Karen Black, and Kathy Bates all reprised their stage roles, and the results are a magical convergence of theatre and film. A group of James Dean devotees reconvene at their teenage hangout, a rural Texas drugstore, twenty years after the death of their beloved idol. But much has changed in the intervening years, and the reunion provides them one final opportunity to expose the secrets and heal the emotional wounds that have lingered among them for two decades.'-- Olive Films



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Tobe Hooper Invaders from Mars (1986)
'Tobe Hooper’s Invaders from Mars is one of those films that must’ve traumatized a good percentage of the kids who watched it upon release. Even before it hit video, I remember kids a few classes ahead of me talking about how scary it was. Catching it a year later on VHS, I recall sharing that sentiment. This was a notoriously troubled production for Tobe Hooper. The middle film in his “Cannon Trilogy” (bookended by Lifeforce and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Invaders from Mars saw its budget slashed in the wake of Lifeforce’s financial failure. Producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus reportedly micromanaged Hooper every step of the way, perhaps explaining why this one never manages to find the right tone. It attempts to capture the spirit of its predecessor (and follows the narrative closely) while delivering a modern-day Hollywood spectacle. Instead it gets lost somewhere in the middle, failing to deliver on either front. The usually reliable Karen Black turns in one of her worst performances here, punctuating most of her dialogue with a thud.'-- Dread Central



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George Hickenlooper Dogtown (1997)
'George Hickenlooper once made a fine documentary about Peter Bogdanovich, and Dogtown, with its collection of small-town losers, lost dreams and even a crumbling old theater marquee, clearly aims to be his Last Picture Show. The tribute pales by comparison to its model, and while a largely excellent cast keeps viewer interest from flagging, this occasionally amusing low-key melodrama has too soft a center to suggest much of a theatrical future. Pic does mark a step up for Hickenlooper from his previous feature, The Low Life, although his fictional work thus far remains far short of his accomplishments in docus, which also include Hearts of Darkness, the documentary he co-directed about the making of Apocalypse Now.'-- collaged



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Lynn Hershman Leeson Teknolust (2002)
'Academy-Award winner Tilda Swinton plays four roles in this award-winning Sci-Fi about Rosetta Stone and her three Self-Replicating Automatons, (S.R.A.'s) which she cloned from her own DNA. Though they look human, the S.R.A. cyborgs were bred as intelligent machines and are immortal. In order to survive, they need sustenance of male Y chromosome, found only in sperm. Their task is to harvest sperm in the old fashioned way, which leads to a quest for love. This film won the Alfred P. Sloan award for writing and directing and features Karen Black, Thomas Jay Ryan and Jeremy Davies. It also is the first feature film shot on 24p Hi-Def with HD graphic conversion.'-- collaged



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Rob Zombie House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
'House of 1000 Corpses is a 2000 (released 2003) American exploitation horror film written, co-scored and directed by Rob Zombie, and starring Chris Hardwick, Rainn Wilson, Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie and Karen Black. Zombie produced a sequel in 2005, The Devil’s Rejects. The plot focuses on two couples who are held hostage by a sadistic backwoods family on Halloween. Zombie’s directorial debut, the film drew from a multitude of influences, particularly American horror films of the 1970s, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. Filmed in 2000, the film was originally purchased by Universal Pictures, and a large portion of it was filmed on the Universal Studios backlots, but it was ultimately shelved by the company in fear that it would receive an NC-17 rating. The rights to the film were eventually re-purchased by Zombie, who then sold the film to Lions Gate Entertainment. It was released theatrically on April 11, 2003.'-- horrorpedia.com



Trailer


Excerpt




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p.s. RIP Chris Burden. Very great artist who never stopped adventuring and being great. Huge loss. Death really fucked up by taking him. Here's a post I made about his work last year. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, nice one. Mm, it's at least a little different here in Paris on the fashion front. Goodwill style isn't a thing here. And, yeah, I get you about the utterly banal Red Carpet, 'Fashion Police', etc. Again, maybe because I'm over here where those things are smirked about, I distinguish fashion from that, rightly or wrongly. ** David S. Estornell, Hi, David. Well, I can say the very same about you. Let me get my thoughts together about the Land Stories thing, and I will. That's very exciting news about The University of Cincinnati! Wow! Congratulations to them, and to you too, of course! Cool, man! ** Bill, Thank you about the poem stack, sir. Oh, 'In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,' early Gass. I haven't read that in ages, but, when I did, I was really blown away by 'The Pedersen Kid'. Oh, wow! New stuff by you! Awesome! I'm going to imbed it at the bottom of the p.s. and also watch it the very second I finish up here. Everyone, the amazing artist and d.l. Bill Hsu has made a new piece in video form. I've imbedded it at the bottom of this p.s. for maximum access. This is a rare pleasure, and Bill's work is relentlessly fantastic, so do click the designated triangle and watch it. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. It's a crazy great book. Mike's, obviously. No, I hadn't seen the Ashbery thing. I'll have to see if I can find a bootleg of the whole piece somewhere. Thank you! Yeah, really, really sucks about Chris Burden. Such a great artist, and he has been in one of his peaks lately. I knew him a little. I was really lucky that the three years I 'taught' in the UCLA graduate art department were when Chris was a professor there, so I got to talk to him and watch him work with the students and stuff. Really a big loss. Really, really sad. ** White tiger, Hi, Math! Oh, that's so great, pal, about the immediate force for ultra-good of the testosterone! That's so happy-making! Lots of love! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey, Jeff. I double, triple, etc. your props re: Mike's book. Thanks a lot about my gif poems. The script for the new Gisele piece is pretty much solid and tight now. The only reason we'll make more than tiny cosmetic changes is for length. We haven't done a full run-though of the piece yet because Gisele is working on it in sections and moments, but we're guessing it'll run as is about about 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 hours, which is longer than we had planned and would be our longest ever piece. If it earns that length, fine, but we'll have to see. She's still working on the piece in Halle, and I think she's going to do the first full run-through today. It's to the point where it will be very hard to cut the script down in a more than detail-y way, but we'll see. Thank you for asking. I've heard mostly very good things about 'Clouds of Sils Maria'. I want to see it. Oh, I thought the new Saint Laurent film was pretty bad in every respect. It's very conventional and non-smart, and its low-grade stylishness doesn't disguise that, and it presupposes that the viewer already knows why YSL is great, and it presupposes why we're supposed to be interested in watching him and the other characters do drugs and party and fuck around constantly in a very predictable, faux-exotic way, which is very annoying, and the performances are weak by pretty much every actor, especially, surprisingly, Louis Garrel, who I usually really like, but who is irritating and almost unwatchable in the film, which is not necessarily his fault. The script is very unsubtle. I really wouldn't bother with it. ** Magick mike, Hey, Mike! I'm really glad you were okay with the post. It was a total honor and big fun to put together. The book fucking rules! You fucking rule, maestro! ** Keaton, Hi. Thank you, I try. I'm going to see 'IF'. Actually, I think its already gone from the theaters here. Oops. Formalist and Casualist are a great combo. Or I hope so 'cos I'm kind of in that camp too maybe. Now that I've moved in, I don't miss U-Haul anymore. I guess that was a fling. ** Scunnard, Hi, J. Good, good. A bit better is where better starts to get its mojo. Not caring is so often the key, which is strange. Man, you have had a very rough week. I'm so sorry. Shit. I hope everybody ends up being really okay. Germany was good. Got a lot of work done. Halle is pleasantly boring and, thus, a good workplace. ** Kier, Hi, Kier. Oh, shoot, I'm so sorry that your weekend was a bad one. Do you want to say why? If so, you know I'm really interested. Fierce but not damagingly fierce hugs galore to you. My weekend was heavily spent working on the script for Zac's and my next film. I think it's getting really good. I hope so. I'm going to send it to Zac, who's out of town, today and find out if I'm on the right track or not. On Saturday, I got interviewed for Purple Magazine by this art curator Donatien Grau. And I looked at a show he curated. And I had lunch prepared for me by this guy who was apparently a very famous fashion designer in the '80s and '90s, I think, and maybe still is: Azzedine. He was nice. And I did some further cleaning and organizing of the new apartment. I'm getting to really like this place, which is good. And ... I can't remember what else. Was Monday a whole lot better to you than the weekend was? I really hope so. I send you a very large amount of love, my friend. ** Steevee, Hi. I still haven't seen the new Andersson, but I'm very excited to. How was it? I'm glad to hear you're feeling perkier. Mm, ... no, I don't think I've heard that Holger Czukay album. I definitely like what he does. So I'll go hear it. Sounds most curious. Thank you, Steve. ** Nemo, Hi, J! Oh, okay, I'll send you my address. I think Joel's pretty good, yeah. I'm sorry you've been sick, my friend. Are you on the upswing, I sure hope? Much love, me. ** Misanthrope, Good to know. About Suplex City. So the grass isn't green and the girls aren't pretty? I want to see LPS getting DDTed by your niece. Or listen to it, depending on what you meant by record. I don't remember the name Cameron Dallas, but then that name is so 'in one eye and out the other'. Hold on. Oh, right, I've seen his face here and there. His face is kind of 'in one eye and out the other' too. But I know people like that kind of face. Huh, he's from San Bernardino. That's kind of interesting. Don't think I'll try his video/song. But more power to it! ** Okay. I haven't done a post about Karen Black before, and I thought I should. So simple. Check her stuff out, watch Bill's video just below these words, and I'll see you tomorrow.


'Bone Abacus Version 0.8' by Bill Hsu

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'The Glamned are a top seventies live band for hire. We are dedicated to reproducing the glam & glitz of the 70s Glam Rock era. Relive the classic live sounds from the 1970s music scene as you boogie the night away to hits from Sweet, Mud, Slade, Status Quo, T Rex, Bay City Rollers, Bowie and many more! A psychedelic light show will blow your mind as you rock on to the 70's music played completely live by a group of rockers dressed to thrill with looks to kill. Look no further, book The Glamned for your club, party, wedding or corporate event and we guarantee a glamtastic fun filled night that will have your guests talking for months. To hire a top Glam Rock band that performs the best live music and always delivers a rockin' night to remember, visit their glamorous website then email the date and venue of your gig to Rod Hammerite.'
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"A Glam Busters gig is one of the highlights of the year ... everybody gets dressed up for the occasion, and the band adds to the atmosphere by wandering amongst the audience by virtue of their radio-controlled guitars and mikes. The band are now extremely well-known in the area, and played some of their very early gigs here. Dressing up is all part of the fun, and it's compulsory for staff!"-- Landlord, Cat & Wheel, Bristol

"Outrageous glam rock covers band with musical tastes & dress sense firmly rooted in '72. This technically brilliant but disturbed band spend as much time putting on their make-up as playing."-- www.entsweb.co.uk

"My son got so excited when he knew you were coming back, I had to give him extra medication!"-- Landlady, Riverside Inn, Cheddar

Their website
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Koo Kaa Choo: Set list: 'Rock n Roll Part II', 'Mama We're All Crazee Now', 'Ballroom Blitz', 'My Coo Ca Choo', 'Shang-a-lang', 'Bye Bye Baby', 'Blockbuster', 'Get It On', 'Make Me Smile', 'Stuck In The Middle', 'Spirit In The Sky','Wig Wam Bam', 'Hi Ho Silver Lining', 'Radar Love', 'Rockin All Over The World', 'Play That Funky Music', '2468 Motorway', 'Hey Rock and Roll''Under The Moon Of Love', 'Grease Lightning', 'Tiger Feet', 'Don't Stop Me Now', Queen Medley: '(We Will Rock You, Bohemian Rhapsody, Hammer To Fall, Tie Your Mother Down)', 'Devil Gate Drive', 'Dancin On A Saturday Night', 'Tell Him', 'Juke Box Jive', 'Teenage Rampage', 'Hellraiser', 'Schools Out', '20th Century Boy', 'Cum On Feel The Noize', 'See My Baby Jive', 'Jean Genie', 'Saturday Nights Alright For Fightin', 'Leader Of The Gang', 'Timewarp', 'I Love You Love Me Love', 'Dynamite', 'Action', 'Love is Like Oxygen', 'Metal Guru'. For more information
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Lieutenant Stardust: 'Please Let me introduce myself, I'm Jean Claude Van Glam. My title/purpose in life is Stardust Media Manipulation Manager. Let me tell you how Lieutenant Stardust has changed my life and yours ... Certain bands are always associated with certain cities or towns - Liverpool had the Beatles, New York had the Velvet Underground, Frankie had Hollywood. Falkirk has Lieutenant Stardust - though sometimes they don't realise it. One day, however, the ever-youthful Mr Dust will in fact turn to dust, Chad Fever will have burned himself out, Boaby Rash will succumb to the Spinal Tap drummer's curse and Dickie Decibel will stand too close to his amp. What then? Who will future generations of Falkirk bairns get their rocks off to? Some say Mr Dust is already busy working on the problem in the labs below Stardust Mansion. No one knows what he's planning, but I've heard DNA and clones were mentioned. Or was that clowns? Anyway, who cares. Stardust will never die!' Visit their website.
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Sweet FA: 'The sun's shining (today at least), lambs are frolicking, the sap's rising (oooer missus) and Sweet FA are Rocking!! We are looking forward to bringing the best of the Glam Rock era to a venue near you soon. The band can be guaranteed put on a show to remember and play an exciting selection of the very best music of the 70's whilst precariously balanced on the most unikely platform boots and dressed to the nines in outlandish stage costumes. Shrinking violets Sweet FA are not. So dig out your wigs and makeup, your flares and platforms, paint yourself silver and cover yourself with glitter - the time has come to witness Sweet FA assault most of your senses (they try and avoid smell!) as they perform the very best of the 70's 100% live and without the aid of a safety net. Magic will be weaved before your ears and eyes.' Visit their colorful website
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'The Look were formed in 1992 to bring back the sights and sounds of a bygone age. Those who remember ‘Glam Rock’ and the seventies are in for a treat and those who are new to the sounds of this era will soon be hooked. The Look pride themselves on their professionalism, and as well as performing a range of Glam Rock classics by bands such as The Sweet, T-Rex, Slade, Showaddywaddy and Alvin Stardust, to name but a few from their wide repertoire. They also take care to wear clothes and make-up that reflect the glitz of the 1970s Glam Rock era. Highlights of their career so far include, appearing on Sky TV’s Friday night show Eat My Sports, giving a retro feel to a show which featured seventies footballing legend Charlie George and Hollywood superstar Vinnie Jones, switching on Didcot's Christmas Lights, and bringing Readings Broad Street to a standstill when performing at the opening of the Chicago Rock Cafe. Visit their website for pix, videos, and information on how to book them.'
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Glam R Us are coming soon to a pub near you! Sat 23 Jun 07 - The Castle Mayne Pub, Basildon -- Fri 29 Jun 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford -- Fri 06 Jul 07 - The Swan, Hatfield Peverel -- Sat 08 Sep 07 - The Oaklands Hotel, South Woodham Ferrers -- Fri 28 Sep 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford -- Fri 05 Oct 07 - The Lodge, Battlesbridge -- Sat 27 Oct 07 - The Castle Mayne Pub, Basildon -- Fri 02 Nov 07 - The Swan, Hatfield Peverel -- Fri 09 Nov 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford -- Fri 23 Nov 07 - The Castle Mayne Pub, Basildon -- Fri 07 Dec 07 - The Swan, Hatfield Peverel -- Fri 21 Dec 07 - The Cauliflower, Ilford. For more information, visit the Glam R Us Website.
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Cupid Stunts are coming soon to a pub near you! Sat 23 Jun 07 - The Royston Arms, Chingford -- Fri 06 Jul 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford -- Sun 26 Aug 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford -- Sat 01 Sep 07 - The Royston Arms, Chingford -- Sat 06 Oct 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford -- Sat 10 Nov 07 - The Willow Beauty, Harlow -- Fri 16 Nov 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford -- Sat 24 Nov 07 - The Royston Arms, Chingford -- Sat 22 Dec 07 - The Marne Inn, Bishops Stortford. For more info, visit the Cupid Stunts Website.
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'The glamgodz perform the definitive tribute to the Glam Rock era. The band recreate all the classic hits including “Tiger Feet”, “Ballroom Blitz”, “Hot Love”, and “Shang-a-lang” to mention just a few. From the theatrical art rock of David Bowie to the infectious foot stompers of The Sweet and Slade, all the extremes of the genre are presented with astonishing musical and visual accuracy. Dressed in authentic glittering costumes and full makeup the band are 100% live, using no backing tracks or digital enhancement. The band come fully self contained with a 3k PA system and a digital lighting rig. The glamgodz are available for corporate functions, theatre shows, holiday centres, weddings and parties, guaranteeing a dazzling night of pure nostalgia and total entertainment. So, take a look around our website and let us take you back to when Snickers were still Marathons, Starburst were called Opal Fruits, Curly Wurly’s were four foot long and Space Hoppers were toys, not a description of Jordan!'
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GlamNation: 'Do you miss Make-up in Rock-n-Roll? Well do I have the Band for you!!!! Britain's "Gift to Los Angeles" GLAMNATION!!!! The NEW GLAM Boys of Rock-n-Roll! You are about to enter into the most decadent Glam site on the earth!!! GlamNation are a L.A. Glam covers band that consists of pretty much the entire 2007 Alice Cooper touring band: Ryan Roxie, Eric Singer, Eric Dover, Teddy Zig Zag with DPM/L.A. Guns` Stephen Adika on Bass although the line-up can change depending on who`s around.'
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*

p.s. Hey. ** Michael karo, Michael! Do I remember you? Ha ha ha, what?! You are .., how to put it ... unforgettable, sir. Yay about your new Mac and its local consequences. Yeah, that scene. Anyway, excellent. Hang out, yes, t'would be great! ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, David. She is amazing in 'DotL'. I haven't seen that film since it came out, but I was pretty blown away by it back then. I remember Burgess Meredith being startlingly good in it too. ** David S. Estornell, Hi, David! ** Kier, K-Man! Oh, so that Azzedine Alaia guy really is famous? People there were acting like he was. Yeah, he made me lunch. He was very, very nice. Huh, I'll have to look up his stuff. Cool. Sure, anytime, about what I said. You being crushed and exhausted by the turn-down makes total sense. It's one of those situations where logic is no help, at least for a while. But you'll be striking out toward the future brilliantly again soon, pal. I'm sorry about the trouble with your brother. Yeah, Aspergers is very interfering, or it can be. I'm so sorry. Give it time, seriously. Hopefully a surprisingly brief period of time. Uh, the lunch thing was mysterious to me. Somehow he was drafted in to make me lunch by the curator guy. I don't know why or what the connection there was. I'll probably do some apartment decorating once the mess is fully de-messed. Right now, it's just practical stuff. Like I had to buy a little washing machine yesterday because the one the apartment came with is broken. Stuff like that. Other than buying that, I mostly worked on stuff yesterday. More ongoing irritating stuff re: our film with the producers' promotion team who are either massively stupid or liars, I can't tell which yet. But pretty quiet day, overall, it would seem. But today, who knows? I'll try to be exciting. Did your today provide increasing pleasure and happiness or interesting life details at least? ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. Yeah, really bad and shocking about Chris Burden. Such a great artist from start to finish. And for me, being an LA guy who's very in its art world, Chris was such a big personal, physical, influential presence there. It's shattering. Yeah, I'm super busy in the best way. The new film is about a guy who wants to explode. Hold on, here's the nutshell premise: 'A young guy wants to explode. He's not suicidal. He has no ideology. He's not interested in "heaven" or in going there. He doesn't want people to misinterpret his explosion as a suicide. He doesn't want people to misinterpret the explosion as his death.' Great about your writing gigging. I'd def. love to read you on rap. I saw the Apu trilogy, yes, but very long ago. Long enough ago that I remember its greatness but not it itself hardly at all. Report back, please. Take care! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. 'Artificial Womb' looks really good. And she got her funding, sweet! That piece idea for it sounds really good. The bit is being chomped. ** Keaton, Thanks. Really? I imagine you would like Burden's stuff, but what do I know. 'Titus 1999': I'm going to have to look that up. The syllables are familiar. ** Bill, Hi! Oh, gosh, my pleasure. I love it! It's not only super great, it's also really up my alley. Wonderful, Bill! Black, like a lot of the more interesting actresses from that '70s era, ended up being stuck with horror films as her work once Hollywood movies stopped being adventurously and intelligently made for a long time. She's incredible in those early films: 'Five Easy Pieces', 'Nashville', etc. ** Misanthrope, Oh, thank you about my GnR referencing thing. Only for you, bud. I can see how Cameron Dallas is very 'you'. Sorry to be crabby about his looks. His attractiveness is totally understandable. It has that 'freshly washed dishes' appeal. Oops, sorry, there I go again. Your neph' is a card. Do you know that term? Probably. Another one of those terms whose popular slang meaning makes no sense relative to the usual definition of the word. No, our film was rejected by Cannes, but we never really thought the film would get accepted. It was just, like, oh, I don't know, 'Hey, let's try to climb Mount Everest wearing only swimming trunks.' I know the Cannes Film Festival seems really artsy and daring in the US, but it's actually pretty old fashioned, relatively speaking. And we were, first, new unknowns, which Cannes does not like, and, secondly, our film is 'weird', which they only like when an already famous director goes weird. No big. ** Statictick, Hi, man! Great to see you, duh! Cool, really glad the Black and Kitchell homages had a good impact. Giggling, even inappropriately, is always good, I'm pretty sure. Don't ask me why, though. That's an instinctual opinion. I know, man, and continuing great endless hugs about Dusty. Stay strongest. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi! Exactly, about how Black's performances work in the lesser situations. Early on, the films were occasionally as great as she was. There's a cool vid out there somewhere of Black and Pfahler performing together, but I couldn't find it when I was making the post. Love to you! ** Right. You get an old, until-now-dead post today because I'm still behind on post-making due to recent traveling and general busyness. But it has its charms, right? No? See you tomorrow.

'Things you should know (and these things will arm you, these are things you require: think of what I am about to tell you as an enormous pair of boots to help you wade through the sickening morass of shit, spew, jism and mud here): Pierre Guyotat masturbates as he writes. As such, his sentences rarely include punctuation or follow straight grammatical rules, rolling on and ever on, dreamlike (or nightmarish), insistent, perplexing. Guyotat has displayed his manuscripts (spunk encrusted telephone directories) in galleries throughout the world. During the writing of The Book and The Story of Samora Michel, he gave up eating, lost half his body weight and eventually had to be resuscitated from a near fatal coma. Guyotat is, if nothing else, somewhat driven.

'More importantly, Eden Eden Eden is viewed by those who know as a significantly biographical work, set as it is during the war between Algeria and France, a war in which Guyotat was held prisoner. Saying that, to view Eden Eden Eden as a biographical work – to approach it as a way of attempting to understand what Guyotat does – is wrong, in my opinion. You need to approach this as if it was the combination of an extraordinary piece of abstract art and a nail bomb. There is beauty here, but there is also great, savage pain. (Imagine a wounded wolf howling, and then imagine that the sound – the howling – can generate similar, equally awful, wounds in those that hear: that is the experience of reading Eden Eden Eden.)

The hero of the book is a teenage prostitute called Wazzag, and the novel follows his participation in a series of sex acts, which constantly escalate in scale, intensity and number. In his introduction, Stephen Barber says: “The book stinks of sperm and killing. It is a malignant orgasm. It is the perfect book for contemporary Europe.”

'You do not expect entertainment. You walk like a refugee through these pages. Nothing is what you would precisely deem pleasant. Sentences read like the foundation stones for the pyramids (stones that you must jar your shoulder against, stones that need pushing thirty or forty miles). This is work, work that requires a particularly distinct heroism. You are reporting from the front line. You are witnessing that which nobody else is doing, that which few others have seen. It is frantic and unpleasant, yes, but what you are bearing witness to is something brutally unique.'-- Bookmunch


'France's most controversial living writer is virtually unknown in this country, thanks to difficulties in translating his extremist oeuvre - extreme in style and in content. Pierre Guyotat is the uncompromising heir of De Sade, Artaud and Genet. He writes violent and pornographic books in his own invented language. Edmund White has called him "the last great avant-garde visionary of our century." Roland Barthes wrote an introduction to one of his books Eden Eden Eden - a work of which Michel Foucault remarked: "I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature", praising its "startling innovation". It has been labelled pornographic, a charge that Guyotat revels in. "Pornography is certainly more beautiful than eroticism," he observes. "Eroticism is ugly. Eroticism is an ideology... there is nothing more boring than eroticism, it's worse than poetry, even. I say three cheers for pornography."

'Born in 1940 in a small town in a mountainous area of France near Lyons, the son of a doctor, Guyotat joined the army while still a teenager and served in Algeria while that country fought France for independence. Guyotat instinctively found himself more sympathetic to the Algerians (one can see a similarity with Genet and Rimbaud here), and incited the Algerian conscripts to desert. After getting involved in brawls with officers, he was arrested by the military police and interrogated for 10 days before being thrown into an earth pit beneath the army kitchens where he lived in semi darkness for three months in constant fear of his life. "They threw me scraps of food, refuse," he recalls, "not fit for a dog." He managed to write on a piece of paper which he kept hidden from his captors. The link with De Sade, scribbling away in the Bastille, is unavoidable.

'Drawing partly on his experiences as a soldier, Guyotat has set many of his celebrated avant-garde novels in hallucinatory north African war zones. Soldiers rape and pillage. Bereft of narrative, and using short rhythmic phrases, he detonates sex as bestial act of power, and piles on atrocity after atrocity. With all the eidetic and visionary power of Rimbaud's Illuminations, he burns images of war into the retina. War is a monstrously glorified exchange of fluids and solids.

'"War is a situation in which one is totally insecure - sexually insecure as well as afraid for one's life," he has said. Imagine if De Sade had written about Vietnam after fighting in it, and you will get some idea of Guyotat's cultural significance for the French - both reviled and adored in equal measure.

'Eden Eden Eden is published this week in Britain. The British academic and biographer of Artaud, Stephen Barber, remarks: "It stinks of sperm and killing." It's a novel that has become legendary in its own time. Originally published in 1970, it was immediately banned by the French government until President Mitterrand personally intervened in 1981. That's also the year Guyotat famously nearly wrote himself to death; he was so absorbed in the completion of an intractable work that he forgot to eat properly and ended up being rushed to hospital in a coma. "I was mad," he says. "And at the same time I was living in a camper van. I was driving and hallucinating and getting into very extreme situations. Once I got into a fight on a road near Marseilles, and my attacker threw me off a cliff into the sea. I was covered in blood and so weak it took me a day to climb back up to my van."

'Guyotat has been described as a hermit. He has always lived in some poverty, at one time in a grim block of flats in the southern suburbs of Paris, living only on his small royalties and occasional fees from the Pompidou Centre where he goes every few years to deliver long extemporisations in the form of performance art (one photograph shows a naked man and piles of meat on a cart). Edmund White describes meeting him in his book Sketches from Memory. White says: "He has a powerful hieratic appearance and you feel you are in the presence of a priest of Baal - or perhaps he is Baal. He's stark raving mad but a very gifted writer who staked out the extreme limits of how far you can go."

'Like many Anglo-Saxons, White betrays an amused and slightly baffled interest in the French passion for the avant-garde. He describes Guyotat as stealing food from his plate at a dinner party, and how he fell asleep in one of Guyotat's two-hour improvisations. "In his language every other word sounded like `testicles', for some reason." As a biographer of Genet, White was intrigued by the Guyotat phenomena. He recalls asking a doctorate student about Guyotat's sexual proclivities. "She said his sexuality did not involve other living creatures."

'I presumed Guyotat would reject labels about sexuality and I was right. At first he was evasive: "to be homosexual, to be anti-sex, pro-sex - "to be" something does not exist." Yes, I asked, but do you prefer men or women? He laughed and finally relented. "I like both - it's very clear - and it's very difficult to like both sexes, it pulls you apart."

'He has very little time for sex; for Guyotat work is sex, and not just in the conventional "creation as sex". Guyotat is notorious for his habit of masturbating while he writes. The resulting soiled manuscripts are then shown in galleries as works of art. "Sex is the most relentless and powerful force in the world: it is all life, it is reality. It is not obscene." I asked him about scenes in Eden Eden Eden set in an Algerian boy brothel. Had he visited such a place? He seemed a little shocked. "No, no I 'ate them," he growled while admitting he had been to female seraglios in the desert zones.

'Like Rimbaud, who ended up as a gun runner and coffee trader in Ethiopia and Somalia, Guyotat is drawn by the desert. He talks of the Saharan wastes with all the tenderness of a lover; he particularly likes the intermediate landscapes between desert and pasture, the mountainous areas "that look like moonscapes but with beautifully coloured rocks" given a chance, he would happily live in Algeria (he listens to Algerian popular music with a passion). "But it's impossible." He has watched with horror the rise of fundamentalism in Africa. For him fundamentalism is rooted in an attack on the writer (Guyotat has been vocal in supporting Salman Rushdie from the "great gestures of beard and robe"). "Asserting the divine character of a text is an insult to the human writer of it - it erases him, makes him disappear. Fundamentalism is an attack on writing itself and all writers should see this."

'The British may laugh at Guyotat or be shocked by him. But his dedication to the idea of "being a writer" makes British literary preoccupations with Martin Amis' teeth and Julian Barnes' pool game seem quite banal. Though Guyotat's preoccupations with remodelling the French language and dwelling on French colonial atrocities may not have quite the same reactive effect in this country, his power as a writer, even in translation, is deadly and pure.'-- Roger Clarke



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Gallery


Pierre Guyotat (third from left) and his brother Regis (on bike), fall 1952.




1971


Pierre Guyotat on Bernard Pivot's "Apostrophes" on February 10, 1984.


1994


2012



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Further

Pierre Guyotat @ Semiotext(e)
'Art Is What Remains of History', by Pierre Guyotat
Audio: Guyotat reading his works in French @ Ubuweb
'The Multiplying Hells of Pierre Guyotat', by Blake Butler
'Eden Eden Eden' @ goodreads
'Pierre Guyotat's Formation: Childhood, Awakening and Self-Writing'
'Eden and Atrocity: Pierre Guyotat's Algeria'
'In December 1981, the French writer Pierre Guyotat entered a coma ... '
'Figuring Guyotat’s Coma: Self-Writing, Collection, and Renaissance'
'Ross Brighton on Guyotat'
'Horiztonal Text'
'About What: Pierre Guyotat'
«Je suis un musicien, je suis un alphabétiseur.»
“Quand j’écris, j’ai toute la langue française avec moi dans l’oreille”
'Preuves de vie: les SMS et e-mails de Pierre Guyotat entrent à la BNF'
'Pierre Guyotat se tord de joie'
'Le "Coma" de Guyotat, lu par Chéreau, pour boucler la boucle avec poésie et fragilité'
'Guyotat, désaxeur de syntaxe. Un livre monstre'
'Pierre Guyotat, tel quel'
'L’aventure du muttum : étude de la langue de Pierre Guyotat'
Pierre Guyotat's books @ Amazon



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Extras


Pierre Guyotat reads, April 29, 2011 | Bowery Poetry Club


SEMINAIRE SCHERER PIERRE GUYOTAT


Pierre Guyotat 1/5 – écriture & biographie


Cours Pierre Guyotat


Le Cercle littéraire de la BnF - Pierre Guyotat



______
Interview
from Bomb




Noura WedellYour text, "Langage du corps," was published in English in the Semiotext(e) Polysexuality issue of 1981. In it, you explain how masturbation arose from the social fear of revealing your body as a producer of substances. The link between writing and masturbation had to do with understanding the embodied aspect of symbolic systems, the connection between body and language. It was a certain refusal of transcendence, as well as an experiment in the production of desire.

Pierre Guyotat Yes, and at the time, it took on a very exasperated form, probably because I was very far from home. I was also writing poems and prose without any carnal stimulation. Being in a foreign country increased the clandestine aspect of my practice; I was surrounded by people whom I barely knew. This raised both the stakes and risks of the game. It was also a time when I was torn between my desire for girls and my desire for boys, both desires full of adolescent tension and playful detachment. This was truly an internal rupture for me. I believe we all work with a fundamental rupture within ourselves. What is important is to dare to know, to accept and address it through artistic means. I did this fairly early on, and the north of England was one of the small theaters of my budding consciousness. There were still borders at the time in Europe, not to mention the great border between the Communist East and the so-called free West. It was probably fundamental that I be surrounded by a language other than the one I was used to in France, British English, which has very much changed since the war and postwar periods.

NWLanguage hadn't yet become impoverished as purely communicational.

PG Yes, this is especially true of the language of television. At the time, the language on both sides of the English Channel was quite salacious and evocative. There was still a proletariat and a peasantry, and a very material language with regional distinctions. The language that was spoken in the north of England was very different from what was spoken in London, or in Kent. Even in France, in the north, people did not speak the same way as they did in Paris or in the south. There were different accents, different words and expressions.

The family I was living with had been friends of my family since the Resistance. We were staying along the North Sea, in a coastal village beneath a towering, powerful maritime fort, à la Walter Scott. I fell in love with a young French girl from Brittany who was living with a family from the neighborhood. At the same time, I was resisting the incessant solicitations of the son of my parents' friends, a young blond boy, exhausted and exhausting, with whom I had a lot of fun. With the girl things were different, and I've never forgotten that young love. This book testifies to that, as it narrates and tries to explain that love.

France and England were also still empires with colonies. Both countries had just emerged from the war and were quite impoverished. The north of France had already been very impacted by the Great War, and the northeast of France had just been destroyed again. English cities had been heavily bombed. These are things we shouldn't forget. And there were important social struggles, anti-colonial struggles, "rebellions" beginning or already underway in Kenya against England and in Algeria against France, among other places.

In addition to narrating this month spent in England, the book covers my return to France, to too-familial places. My internal split resumed there, and I began to translate it into writing. The text also describes other periods of my life through flashbacks; for example, the birth of my masturbation habit in a small rural boarding school just after World War II, and my first conflicts with my father, whom I greatly admired.

NWThis moment in your adolescence was also a time in which you began to acknowledge your class situation.

PG Yes, and with it came the intensification of an awareness of social disparity that marks my entire work, from all points of view, on all levels. Since childhood I've always been more attracted to "the people," as they were called at the time, than to my own class. For me, the people represented freedom, metaphysically and physically, in terms of the body. My own family's cultural status prohibited such freedom and this caused another real rupture for me; it was not simply the luxury of a privileged kid. Although my father was a country doctor, my family was not rich; we lived at home as I did in boarding school, in a very rudimentary way.

My internal sexual rupture was an effect of my belief in Christ, triggered by the notion that he is both man and God. When you have faith, you experience this duality intensely. My family was very religious, if not overly pious. The Bible's Christian imagery, both in the New and Old Testaments, preceded all other imagery for me. When I was young, I believed in an entity that was at once human and divine, and I also believed in the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost combined in a single God—an invisible divinity, an entity without a body, without beginning or end. At the same time, I was very strongly possessed by the imagery of the crucifiction, which is unbelievably carnal and sexual. It's rather hard to top: the almost naked body, members spread wide, arms outstretched, and thighs squeezed tight. This was a concrete, finite, and limited imagery, whereas the other was abstract and infinite.

In addition, I was taught that before being my parents' son, and my father's son in particular, I was the son of God. That was my belief, and it was strongly anchored in me, through prayer especially. At home and in boarding school we prayed quite often: before eating, when we woke up in the morning, at night. They told us that prayer was the most beautiful thing in the world, which is not untrue. It gives dignity to humanity. As a child, I took all of this in very physically, in the flesh, especially since Catholicism is so physical. This is perhaps why it has endured for so long. The Church wasn't a constraint for me. I was very content in what I felt to be a protective, poetic, intellectual, and metaphysical atmosphere. The seminary instilled in us the difference between matter and spirit, framing them as different entities that were necessarily combined. Flesh was an element of knowledge, but its temptation weakened the strength of spirit and of mind. In that very Cartesian education, both the flesh and the spirit existed, and the idea was to find some kind of balance between them—which, of course, I did not want. This must have corresponded to the internal rupture that I'd later experience. But there was a great gentleness in all of this, and I was certainly well disposed toward it. I placed my revolt elsewhere. But as the son of God I did exactly what I did with my own flesh father: I provoked him, and went farther, into sin so to speak.

NWThere is another fundamental rupture that informs your work. It is within the realm of art, and it has to do with the problematic link between human creation and horror, following from a critique of humanism. I'm thinking of the relation between slavery and the development of modernism in Europe or the problem of the extreme rationality of the death camps of the Second World War.

PG I've always been revolted by existence, by the very fact of being human. There are reasons for this. As a child I knew what was going on in the adult world. A large portion of my family fought in the Resistance, and suffered very much for that. We were physically and biographically touched by the war's horror. Through what I saw in photographs and through the testimony of those who had survived, I was well positioned to feel the affront against humanity that the war enacted. Luckily, I never smelled the odor of death, the way the children in the camps or elsewhere had to smell it. Smells are fundamental. But as early as five-and-a-half or six years old I did see photographs from a book produced by two of my uncles who had fought in the Resistance. They were images of a degraded man, of a degraded body, degraded despite what a somewhat strained humanism would have you believe: that man, in all circumstances, always retains some form of dignity. The image of human grandeur disappears in a body that is reduced to itself. This made a deep impression on me.

NWYou can see it in the importance attributed to the body in your work. In fact, you have often been called a "writer of the body."

PG This question of the body has been brought up very often in regard to my work; it has been explained and re-explained. I have myself added fuel to the fire, since I have even used the term to describe myself. I am a bit removed from all of that now, and more and more so as I get older. The body is self-evident; you can't get away from it. You live through the body, think through it, feel through it. A body is inevitable, whatever it is. But—how can I say this?—I am not at all the auteur or poet of the body, as has so often been said. I find this too restrictive; my work extends beyond that question.

What I write, what I've been able to do and to experience, is a question of being. Much more than the body, being is what torments me, if I can use the word torment for this. I mean quite simply the fact that we exist. We make art not to prove to ourselves that we exist, but in order to place ourselves on the border of the circle of being. It is a circle into which we can fall, as if into nothingness. I'm interested in being and in the circle. The body is what allows and at the same time interferes with being. It impedes, torments, and even negates being. But of course I'm happy to speak about the body. My body wasn't any more affected than were the bodies of others, those of my generation who were deeply harmed by the war. You know, it is not insignificant to have been born in 1940. I always felt that I belonged very strongly to my generation. Children have a specific way of feeling solidarity with other children. Even as a child I felt very close to the children whom I saw in photographs of the war—persecuted, debased, and deprived of their childhood, as they said at the time.

The question of how we feel solidarity, and of the feeling of solidarity itself, becomes greater with age. What is it, morally, that requires solidarity? It doesn't seem to be as vital a need as eating, drinking, sleeping, finding shelter, or being taken care of when sick. Solidarity is not an irrefutable given. Art helps us ask ourselves these questions. I like to go beyond what I think are somewhat self-evident questions, dig beneath them and debunk them, to understand what they truly imply. Too many massacres, murders, and attacks on liberty have been committed throughout history in the name of so-called subversion for artists to claim to be blissful subversives. I am not a blissful subversive, and if I am one, it is despite myself.

NWViolence passes through and exerts itself on bodies. We can perhaps understand solidarity as a physical fact.

PG Very much so. It is important to understand why the human has a natural feeling of solidarity, if you will. Everyone says, "It's natural, solidarity is necessary, it's much better that way, etcetera ...." And yet, we should question the rational foundations of these supposed elementary and intangible principles, which are never explained to us as children. We are often told solidarity arose because of fear. Perhaps fear is the first feeling in history: the human is afraid, the animal is also afraid. In some sense, fear is what rules the world: think of financial greed, for example. But where does that fear come from? And when does it appear, historically? Was it when humanity was still quite young, endangered, and living in caves? This explanation seems a bit too material, too sociological even. Can we imagine an initial animality that separated into species through evolution? Solidarity might then be the regret, the nostalgia for that unity, coming from a shared body and a shared origin.



____________
Manuscript pages







____
Book

Pierre Guyotat Eden Eden Eden
Creation Books

'This, Pierre Guyotat's second novel, caused a huge scandal upon publication in France in 1970, and was later censored. Nowadays, he is regarded as one of the greatest French novelists of all time and his writing has been endorsed by Edmund White, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Extreme and obscene, Eden Eden Eden is set in a polluted zone of the Algerian desert during the civil war.'-- Creation

'A new landmark and a starting-point for new writing.'-- Roland Barthes


_____
Excerpts

Helmeted soldiers, legs spread, muscles drawn back, trampling over new-born babes swaddled in scarlet, violet shawls: babies falling from arms of women huddled on floors of G.M.C. tracks; driver’s free hand pushing back goat thrown forward into cab; / Ferkous pass, RIMA platoon crossing over track; soldiers jumping out of trucks; RIMA squad lying down on gravel, heads pressed against flint-pitted, thorn- studded tires, stripping off shirts in shadow of mudguards; women rocking babies against breasts; rocking movement stirring up scents sharpened with bonfire-sweat impregnating rags, hair, flesh: oil, cloves, henna, butter, indigo, black antimony — in Ferkous valley, below breakwater tombstones, drinks-stand, school, gaddous, fig trees, mechtas, stone walls oozing, spattered with brains, orchards blooming, palm trees, swollen in fire, exploding: flowers, pollen, buds, grasses, paper, rags spotted with milk, with shit, with blood, fruit peels, feathers, lifted, shaken, tossed from flame to flame in wind tearing fire from the earth ...

*

…. boy sleeping on side ; tarantula crawling from sticky pubic hair, climbing up onto whore’s swollen belly, distended abdomen dividing blood over chest ; body of whore shuddering, hands following steps of tarantula around right nipple : “…suck lower man…”; penis, tucked back into hollow of groin, hardening : tarantula brushing against tip of tongue poking between lips ; jissom slopping out of Wazzag’s arse, pushed back, driven out along anal passage by date picker’s member ; Wazzag stifling fit of laughter ; Khamssieh waking : tarantula, alarmed by twitching of muscles, crawling into nostril ; Khamssieh sniffing scent, stifling sneeze, pulling legs together, suppressing shivers of body smeared with cold sweat moistening dried blood, beads of sweat glistening in fresh blood over loins ; nostril swollen with jissom crushing spider ; Wazzag exploding into laughter ; tarantula stinging nostril : venom, flowing with blood, veiling eyes of whore, softening eyelid ; Khamssieh’s hand, weak, crushing tarantula in nostril : venom hardening forehead ; fingernails scraping cold blood around nipples ; pulling dead tarantula, pinching sticky legs, out of nostril, pushing crushed spider between buttocks ; exhausted elbows dropping onto heaps of floor-cloths : penis contracting into shrivelled scrotum ; odour of sodomy wafting through room ; rubbing of jeans, farts : regular in dawn silence …

*

... blood haunting bedroom, dry powdered blood running in butcher's inner ear throbbing with nightmares... jissom, milk, squirting... woman's hand palpating... woman rising from bed, walking, barefoot, through garden... kneeling, huddling, pressed back down into corner... worker, with foot, laying youth flat out on tile: crouching down, pressing two fists together onto torso, elbow digging into sexual cluster between thighs— separating, slow, cool, revealing grimy sweat in folds of groin; fists delving under torso, forcing spleen, kidney, intestines: contracted head of youth groaning, crystalline, with each compression; hand of blond worker digging down... head, mute, vibrating; whereupon, same hand, clenched, moving up over torso, forcing serrated muscle, other hand jerking, groping—fingers spread, half-closed, spread, joined—, towards source of cry, reaching aortic arch, blocking cry... nomad, hands pressed around middle of pole, pushing ... [his] inert body away from outcrop of rock: blood pearling over spear-head between curls; nomad pulling youth back onto rock, spearing body... nomad, kneeling... walking towards fire... squatting beside woman; her feverish fingers, pink over embers, diffusing blood into cinders; woman, wrinkles fixed on forehead, hand drawn out of embers covering half-open vulva, crammed with oily wet seed; ... darkness alternating with bursts of light...

*

... fingers stroking membrane; // suspect revived in empty guard-room, cadet kneeling, untying rag ; sentry, mouth rosy in dawn fire, walking on terrace, legs bowed, fist buried inside pants ; leaning back against palm-trunk propped up by brownstone balustrade around terrace ; stiffening legs, pulling out member ; rifle, loaders, clicking at loins, masturbating, helmet pushed back over neck, jugular vein outlined in creases of throat, tongue protruding from mouth ; two children squatting, defecating against barbed wire ; soldier levelling projector-beam towards point on horizon – dawn fire looming ; woman from tents, breasts swinging in patched silk, flowery silk sticking at pubis, haunches slumped against barbed wire, fingers scraping shit between children’s buttocks, wiping fingers in sand ; red fist on white arm, slipping between wire-mesh, touching sliver of ration-bread poking from sand, intact ...




*

p.s. Hey. ** Bitter69uk, Hi, man. Nice to see you! Wow, so he is/was a big deal. He was nice. Maybe he found it refreshing or charming that I had no idea who he was. Cool about the cemetery. Did it look the same? Hope stuff is great with you. ** James, Hi. Well, at some point, for sure. Zac and I have neither control nor a lot of knowledge about how that stuff will work. There's some kind of agreement in place for a limited theatrical release in the US followed by DVD release. The film will play festivals for a while first. I'll let people here know when I know where it's playing. I don't know if I'm 'n love with the apartment, but I'm warming up to it, and maybe getting there. No, no key. The landlord is some company in Ireland that doesn't seem to give a shit about the details. So we broke the lock, oops. Happy Wednesday! ** David Ehrenstein, They're probably somewhere being and looking very un-bon-bon-like. Billy Barty was amazing in it, yes!  ** Jonathan, Hey, J-ster! I miss you, man! Ooh, interesting about the Freemason locale. Can you say what the future thing is or what it appears to hold? Hexus ... I don't know it, I don't think. I'll check it. Thanks! I still haven't heard the new O'Rourke, but I also really like the Herndon. Re: the FB thing, I don't know. It wouldn't have been Gisele posting the pic because she's not on FB. Maybe Jonathan put it up? I'll go search his feed. All's good, and I wish for allness and goodness re: you! ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, Locarno is much more interesting and risk-taking and so on. It has always been our hope vis-à-vis our film's premiere, but we'll see. As far as I know, our film has already been submitted to Locarno in its almost-finished stage. Our hope/plan is to have the film completely finished in the next couple of weeks. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Really interesting thoughts on tribute bands. Very interesting and complicated phenom, I think. I've only ever seen them by accident when they were on some bill where I was there to see someone else, but they've pretty much always made me concentrate on them and think about the layering involved, both in the whys and whats of their existence and re: what their effect, intentional and accidental, is about too. And then the mistakes in their resemblance is really kind of fascinating too. The combo of the remove and the up-close-ness of seeing them perform is quite complex. The Glam ones interested me in a more base way, I think. Their attempt to mimic the Glam look is so crude and misplaced, and the context is so unglamorous that they look scary rather than wild/futuristic, more like bad clowns or something. Hope you're doing good too! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. Melancholy for sure, I concur. Oh, wow, 'Cuddly Toys. I forgot all about that song. Cool. Thanks! ** Keaton, Hi. I've been trying to get away from the slasher ones. Were there any in the recent poems? I think I tried not to use them and ended up using one or one-and-a-half. Be careful with the shark. Or, well, don't, if you don't want to. Weird that I immediately urged caution. What does it mean? ** Misanthrope, Yeah, of course you know 'card'. Asking you is just a habit because I'm always using American terms like that here automatically and having French people's eyes go blank and having to try to explain what something like 'card' means in my sentence and how it got to be that way. I had no idea that the term had such a rich behind-the-scenes meaning(s) and history. Thanks, man. I love shit like that. Cannes is a great festival, and it's not a stupid or timid one at all, and it's not really lazier than it used to be either, unless them sticking an occasional Pixar film and a semi-bright blockbuster into their line-up counts, but it's not a festival that's about discovering the new and the unknown. It's more about fore-fronting established-ish filmmakers who it thinks deserves the kind of attention that being at Cannes provides, and it's about rewarding certain films to make a point. Like when they give the Palme d'Or to American films, i.e. by Tarantino, Van Sant, the Coens, etc., it's like they're giving the film the gift of having been taken seriously. 'Cos there's no festival in the US that confers the message that a film not otherwise thought to be high art is high art, and they know that, so it's a power play move in a sense. ** That's it? Okay. I'm focusing the blog on Guyotat's great 'Eden Eden Eden' today. Have at it. See you tomorrow.

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Indeed! ** Keaton, Hi. He might have gotten even richer without having been a woman, I mean depending on what he looked like, I guess. I think you have go to back, like, 8 generations before you can find a soldier in my family line. Apropos of nothing. Beuys was cool. Still is. Maybe very, very slightly less so. I think people should always be frowning when they eat other people. Animals too. Most people-eating animals look like they're laughing earn they eat people. Not their fault. ** Nick, Hi, Nick, buddy boy! 'Tomb' is a beast too, totally. How are you? ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron! Aw, thanks, but, you know, Cannes always seemed like a bridge too far. Or a bridge too big. Or something. No, Zac and I aren't going to the festival. Our (redacted) producers and their (more redacted) promo team are there doing the market thing supposedly on our film's behalf. I wish I could see that film you tipped me on. Hopefully there'll be another way. I'll remember the title. We've been told by our producers that our film has been submitted to TIFF, but I'm going to check to make sure. It would be really awesome, obviously, to be selected for that. Fingers crossed and all of that. Yeah, it would be great to see you there! Really nice to get to talk with you, Aaron! I hope everything is splendid with you! ** James, Hi. I didn't know you have trouble with violence in lit. You don't think the cardigans and yoghurt might protect you? I suppose that makes no sense, does it? Hm. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, cool, thank you. We will try the Vancouver Festival. I'll check to see when the deadline is. Thanks very much for the tip! Yeah, lingering colds, I hear you. Is it age that makes them turn into squatters? That's happened to me too, and I couldn't figure out why they've gotten so much 'friendlier'. I hope you feel better long before a week from now. ** _Black_Acrylic, That was fast! Awesome! You were really inspired! I'm sure it's great. Fingers crossed even so, though. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi! Cool, yeah, Guyotat is one of a kind. The last of his kind, some say. No, I was fortunate enough to attend a reading by Guyotat a few years ago, but I've never had any other interaction. They say he's pretty reclusive and unavailable. Although I keep meeting people who say they're friends with him, so I don't know. ** Okay. Quiet around here. Maybe watching jello show off its and its handlers talents will be more blab-friendly. Probably not, right? Ha ha. In any old case, see you tomorrow.

_______________





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Wolfpack&TwinkerBell, 18
Bournemouth

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Name_me_Dillon, 22
Toronto

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Belfast

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Tenerife

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MisterAssholeFucker, 18
Dachau

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-You collect pictures of prostitues.
-You have no money and yet you wanna hire a prostitute.
-Just because I'm nice to you you think you're always right.
-You wanna spend 100 euros on a callboy and haven't got 5 euros to spend on poppers.
-You request face pics and then you dissappear to jerk off on them.

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Position Top only
Kissing Yes
Fucking Top only
Oral Top
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Lycra, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_________________



Frackinghotme, 21
Nelspruit, South Africa

I think of sex as an art, therefore it needs to be exploited in a very rafined way and as deep as posible.

Sex with out love is a meaningless experience but as far as these meaningless experiences go i am feeling wowtastic.

Dicksize XL, Cut
Position More top
Kissing Yes
Fucking More top
Oral Top
Dirty No entry
Fisting Active
S&M No
Fetish Uniform
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 70 Dollars



_________________



asian4rent, 19
Chicago

If you've always fantasized about what it would be like to fuck an Asian boy, so small and thin and smooth and who cry like girl and scream so high-pitch all the time in bed, I have an Asian boy you can fuck.

I'm looking for someone who would like to help me out by renting my youngest son's Philippine friend. He and I are having a highly secret affair, and I want him to become a cock slut. You'd do me a big favor.

I would love to get him fucked by many cocks. I want him to be willing to take cock 24/7. A double penetration and fisting him would be nice, too. Just tell me where you are. If it’s not too far away, I’ll send him to you.

Dicksize S, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
Dirty WS only
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Sportsgear, Underwear, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_________________





onlyforfemales, 22
Bogota

Money matters. I need money, money, money. I just need money. Lots of it. That's why I need to do this stuff. But I do enjoy sleeping with women out there. Life is too short.

In a few weeks the semester will be over and I will be available for a unique whoring experience. I've licked pussy and fucked. I've been sucked and fucked by a strap on. For the right amount of money, I would like a longer-term, more immersive experience.

I am not a big fan of role play because I desire authentic experiences. If we discuss a scene where I am another girl or your son or the pizza delivery boy, I want to be fully in the scene and not "acting" like I am in the scene.

Dicksize M, Cut
Position More top
Kissing Yes
Fucking No entry
Oral Bottom
Dirty No
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Fetish Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Uniform, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



___________________



igiveyoupleasure, 18
Mexico City

i want some friendships with an american who literally have big dicks
i want big dick
bigger is better to destroy the ass
permanent damage ok, fuck me as extreme as you want
i will be fucked anywhere in usa
i will accept a one-way ticket and go with only the clothes on my back
will you hire me for just a couple of hours today? or one of these days?

Dicksize M, Cut
Position Bottom only
Kissing No
Fucking Bottom only
Oral No entry
Dirty Yes
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Underwear, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 10 Dollars
Rate night 15 Dollars



________________



Peanut, 18
Pittsburgh

Im really sexy.
I love shitfucking.
I like tops to fuck the shit out of me.
I like to feel my shit getting poked.
I like to feel it oozing out.
I like to feel it fall out in chunks.
I like when I start to smell it.
I like when tops compliment the smell.
I'm autistic but not stupid.
I'm small, so I'm peanut.

Dicksize S, Uncut
Position Bottom
Kissing Consent
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
Dirty WS only
Fisting No entry
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



________________





beurxxljuteur, 19
Paris

Say it do it and keep doing. Every body see me with differit eyes. Not exhausted.
Neither gorgeous nor ugly. Just right.
Active in giving dick. Passive in getting head. Live near Orly.
How much are you willing to get what you see in my photos? Send me a price and let's see.
What? You like my ass and want it? Hoho, no problem.
Highest bidder gets it.
I also speak English.

Dicksize XXL, Cut
Position Top only
Kissing No entry
Fucking Top only
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Underwear, Formal dress, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



________________



JaketheBlake, 21
London

Hello gentleman.
My name is Jake, originally from Poland, came to London 3 years ago to begin new life and perhaps adventure. Nevertheless I didn't day dream for too long and soon after my arrival, I have started university course in fashion. I also graduated at music school playing drums, cymbals and tympani. I have also strong interest in history, literature, especially romanticism and decadentism. I admire art equally, my fav are definitely : post modernism and impressionism.

Wherever you live, even on the moon, I am more than happy to pay you a visit!
I welcome my guests in my apartment in soho, where you can feel like at 5 star hotel. I provide fresh towel, tooth brush, mouth wash and drinks.

Want to kiss me - no problem
Want my drool - no problem
Want me to want yours - no problem
Want best oral sex - no problem
Want to fuck me - no problem
Want to fist me - no problem
Want nsa - no problem
Want kinky-winky - no problem
Want stinky-winky - no problem

Hope you still like me if you pay me.

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position More bottom
Kissing Consent
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 150 Pounds
Rate night ask



_________________




IDONTGETTIRED, 24
Amsterdam

I am a bulgarian boy who visit Netherland for a holiday. So I wanna stay here and you can help me. I can do whatever you want.

Handsome, kind, lovable, silent-type, yet horny. Let us talk about what is in the sore for us.

We get along, for the most part, me and reality.

So... I need new phone, cuz my is broken...maybe iPhone.

So my country where I am coming from is so poor and i am looking for good life!

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Consent
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty Yes
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Sportsgear, Skater, Underwear, Uniform, Sneakers & Socks, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 70 Euros
Rate night 300 Euros



________________




TTTTTTT, 19
Berlin

Hot new Buddhist escort in town with great ass to meditate upon and use as a conduit to God.
Hot young Buddhist escort first time in Berlin, adjustable with hot ass for great spiritual enlightenment.

I've both seen and heard of clients losing themselves to their inhibitions and I have Anxiety and OCD and I don't want, and can NOT have that happen to me.

Looking forward to make men get zen.

Dicksize No entry, Cut
Position Bottom only
Kissing No entry
Fucking No entry
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 100 Euros
Rate night 600 Euros



________________



hereusemine, 19
Liverpool

What can I say about myself, the situation is forcing me to do and this is the only way out.

Dicksize M, Cut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Yes
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Uniform, Formal dress, Jeans
Client age Users between 25 and 55
Rate hour 120 Pounds
Rate night 500 Pounds




*

p.s. Hey. There's now a page for 'Like Cattle Towards Glow' @ Facebook, if you're interested. ** David Ehrenstein, The magic words! AKA Abracadabra! You on 'Out 1'! Them's the most magic words of all! Everyone, Jacques Rivette’s astonishingly great film 'Out 1' has finally been made available in the US on DVD, and this has occasioned Mr. E writing about the film over on Fandor, and I would say, no, ... will say this is a momentous occasion that you truly must experience. Do so here. ** Keaton, Hey. I don't think I've ever had fantasies about war settings. I think they're too dusty for me. But your transcription of such a fantasy was pretty and air-freshened, kudos. I always wonder if Beuys' stuff was less moldy and gray at the time. Probably, I guess? I naturally encourage you in your dietary plans. I think I boringly like the red jello best. I don't know what it's flavor is supposed to be, which might be part of it. New thing by you. And it's big and rangy, awesome! Everyone, maestro Keaton, blog context re-inventor and max-er out-er, has a new thing for you to pore over in wonder. It's called 'I'm just gonna flip my hair and say suck my ass!', and it's exactly here.** James, I'm not sure what you man by penis-fatigue. Do you mean reading something gives you so many boners that your penis gets tired of being a boner? I don't think that's ever happened to me, if so. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Thanks about the transition, man. And then from jello to escorts, which is maybe a little too on the money? No, I don't know what's what re: 'EEE' getting reprinted. My fairly unknowledgeable guess is that the big mess that occasioned Creation going under plus the fact that Creation presumably owns the rights to the translation is crimping its and 'Tomb's' abilities to be reprinted? I don't know. It sucks. No, I don't have 'In the Deep' yet, but Semiopext(e) said they were sending me a copy, and I anxiously await it. I don't know, when I saw Guyotat read a few years ago, he read from his newest book at that time. My French is bad, but I can kind of basically understand people when they talk, and it sounded completely confusing to me, and, after the reading, the French person who accompanied me to the event said that what Guyotat had read made 'Eden Eden Eden' seem like Ernest Hemingway. I've never seen Primal Scream live, weirdly. I've never really cottoned to their stuff, on 'record' at least, meaning I've ever understood what the particularly interesting thing is about them. It's always sounded very in-the-middle to me, but I know I'm just not getting it. One of these days. ** Bill, Hi. Mm, sneak peak ... you mean a trailer? We're going to make one soon, I think. I actually will be in Halle for a week very late in June doing the final polishing of the new Gisele piece. Does that coincide? ** Bernard Welt, Hi, B! Well, I do. Re: the enchanting and, to some degree, horrifying thing about jello. I guess obviously. It feels completely logical to me, though. I even really like the way it tastes for at least three bites. Especially with whipped cream. Oh my goodness. ** Steevee, Hi. Ah, interested to read your review. Word over here is very mixed slanted somewhat towards the lower realms. Everyone, Steevee has reviewed 'Dior and I', the new documentary about designer Raf Simons, and I think maybe that prospect is very alluring, no? I'm right, right? If so, here. Very glad to hear you're on the mend! ** Thomas Moronic, It was! Incredible, I mean! ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron! I'll do a google alert thing about the film, so I won't miss the first chance. I think Nicolas Comeau's involvement means he put some money into the film. I don't know much of anything about it. Our producers are very vague with us about almost everything. Oh, and I'll watch for those other two films you mentioned like a hawk. Yeah, thanks a whole lot, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi Ben. Oh, that doesn't sound very interesting at all about the Simons film. Shit, I'm sorry they rejected your piece for pre-set rules reasons. Those are the worst, dumbest reasons. Where are you going to submit it now? Don't give up on it, man. I'm excited to read it. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Etymology is really interesting. I've always had a thing for it, but now that I'm over here where I'm forced to think about it by the confused looks of people listening to what I'm saying, it has become a ... more than a thing. A ... thingeroony? Oh, wow, about the Social Services thing. But won't that just put hopeful added pressure on her to agree to your terms? ** Kyler, Hi. Thanks about the FB page. It's a start. Eating jello is a privilege, man. No guilt necessary. Orange jello is good. So is anesthesia! ** Right. Obviously, it's the middle of the month, and, obviously, your escorts are now available for your regular delectation or whatever it is that they make happen inside you. Or/and outside you. See you tomorrow.

__________________




You grew up in and around Detroit. Has place played a role in your language/ attitude/ overall badassness?

Sean Kilpatrick: Grew up in a moderate Detroit ghetto by Seven Mile. I do scant direct autobiography. I hope to write an absurdist memoir, go after the old personal voice people fetishize. Plays an itsy roll in the language maybe. Can be fun to discuss, getting one’s ass in a continual rock-stoned and beat through babyhood. Helped humble and I recommend. I know people would benefit. A fun brag at the littlest. Maybe my blood-focus, misanthropy, and nihilism originate here. I am grateful. As a white person, I take without consequence. Luckily poetry has no consequence. It has a lot of white people trying to siphon who or who doesn’t have privilege and what that means and what what means. Who the fuck cares what any white person has to say about politics or class-systems or crossing the street? Who the fuck tittles their verse. Serious serious serious serious.

I grew up around the same area and even before the crash of ’08, it always felt like a dying thing, robust in its decay. But living in Chicago now, I find myself sticking up for the area when some yuppie fed with a golden spoon starts the dis. So for me, I feel some allegiance with the city in terms of its existence in a marginalized sense. Brunch isn’t as big there. So, besides the hopeful job getting after you graduate, any major plans?

SK: We’re in the decay club. Hard not to recognize yuppie-ness as the worst crime where we been, or anything anyone does who breathes. I hate stuff not previously exploded. Applying to community colleges now. Edited a devotional slash psychology manuscript. What do you plan after Columbia? Which future isn’t suicide? I’m writing a book with my boo Elizabeth Mikesch and another (very slowly, my fault) with Sam Pink, a poetry manuscript implicating my anus as its own race, maybe gender, and a short novel five years in.

After I finish up with Columbia teach I guess…community college instead. But I want to live in Alaska for a year, too, and get a backyard somewhere to bbq some meat and poems in this fashion and have people love me. I admire the risks you take in your writing. When you sit down to compose a piece, what is at stake?

SK: First I inflate my cushion. Pop the wine. Ponder some fashionable crit. Random book reviews loving yet stern. Insert monocle with KY. Crack each knuckle, a forty minute process. Then I endeavor to change the world by humming a thought loose. Yes, the world goes purr and I blink. Usually lost is a square centimeter of my prepuce. Really the starving find themselves full by the closer. My consecutive hugs assist. Ah, but my alphabet is the loss of everyone who’s touched me. So the groins.

Any good movies/tv/music/artists etc. that inspire you? Oooooo sorry for jumping around but I just remembered I wanted to ask you about Anatomy Courses, a collaboration with Blake Butler. How did this go down, i.e. who decided to initially start the project? What was the process?

SK: Movies get my butter. Here’s who’ve kept me alive: Gaspar Noé, Andrzej Żulawski, David Lynch, Seijun Suzuki, Luis Buñuel, the movie Little Murders. Blake Butler as well. We started talking when I submitted to Lamination Colony around 2007. He suggested we write and sent the first page. He writes fast and best. To keep pace, I bathed in meth. Lots of rewriting for the slightest approach of me to his genius. We found Satan. Cameron Pierce, Lazy Fascist Press, beautified it, amazing cover by Matthew Revert. -- Columbia Poetry Reviews








Sean Kilpatrick Sucker June
Lazy Fascist Press

'Kilpatrick’s prose is the aural equivalent of anthrax cut with ecstasy. All other writing makes me sick. Here at last is one so nasty it’s almost like there’s hope.'-- Blake Butler

'The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.' -- Johannes Goransson (on Fuckscapes)


Excerpts
from Spork Press


09/07/2009
Similarly Rented Womb Stank

Touching outside involves less god. The river where I drown for thirty miles every night, huddled zigzag between fists in an ugly tickle, crowds of men seen pummeling slant from the bank, where my sockets ruckus pure money with the ancestors of whatever sex destroys me, chewing sediment toward China, hunkering through methods that heighten the land, disappeared splash by splash, an epilepsy of hue so tight I skip myself sore around spunk buoyancies. My absenteeism is symptomatic of my being there. In the stasis my blood refrains; combing the skin above until fire. Every nanosecond fluctuates overlapping hatreds so immense—and then little glances happen and I want to get married, someone pets me and I reconsider procreation, someone stands up and I want to slit their ballsac, shivers when I brush their hair, I want to bunch off all their skin and roll around in it, gives me some laconic refusal and I want to prove the world is flat, but not really. I call my period back from limbo, back from starvation, whisper the egg out of hiding and it sits up purring without nuisance of gravity, thighs spider webbing, black months reverse. The gush heats my esophagus, revolving downward, traceable on the glow of my birth marks, stains that mean put me back in, my ribs box the revolving cramp and I flap my arms to help inch belly upside down, dilated red, lips parting reflexively, sprinkling a baby no one might be cruel enough to raise. Better in town square, or on the floors of schools disassembled by movement. I am a parasite and I miss my host. I miss not having been born yet. Their unzipped pants taste of gas. They roll me in the balled hide of a screaming animal. The drool I hover with reflects me. Horsefly stung cataracts slapped down, scooting terror, sees the grass mashed fuck to soup and me humping on it: ass and folds. Folds chasing folds shiver off, muscular system exposed, shiny fat, wrapped in our own flay and squirting dermis, whining louder with each mouthful, blood dizzy and wedged maggots feed each shivering hunk, rowed through the plaster with torn placement, our doggy blanket drying slowly. All tomorrow I sneeze Flintstones Vitamins wrapped in fur. My wrecked circulation, so many veins the light, now blue, chaws inside a mother sound fainting forward.


Baby Bitch

“Your baby bitch weakness is never as cute an unreasonable defense as you think, especially when you’re off speed. If your tricks rather called you ugly, instead of letting you, in false modesty, say it first, they would then adorn you beyond your tiny comprehension, and you’d have to fill your own cunt with substance.” He placed my wounds like a petty savior, closing one eye, staring down the still unfolding prim and slick haltered tucks of where I land. He’s sucked my clit in a thought bubble all day. Now sweat lamps our torsos, public slime, conducted chafing. He slaps an extension cord through my come. “At some point we’ll miss each other, lick the wall socket.” I leak ounces of water I’ve eaten for the last week. He stirs, punches his tongue up my ass, cooing me close to an almost throb, floating inside gooey suction, his fingers v-shaped, compressing my clit, stuck out, elastic. Wound around thick calibration, I contract and lock tight enough for him to slam pathways. Our hips ache rhythm, my legs thrown, an afterthought. We bake through so much friction the house leans. I plug my hand into my mouth and shrink, organs choking into a suffocated spasm around his cock. We let go, pulse, vision loss, screaming in our skins, his tip audibly whacking my cervix like a rewound car accident. Our hearts tamper fabulous congruities. Body language is the one form of communication I keep finding myself trapped in and liking, so saying hi is hard. I quietly become a man under the sheets. I slip into cumy boxers and do hot dog rotations, make the sheets rise like something’s there, extend my good confidence to the world, focus on the limitations of my length and how to hide. Because he stretches out my undersized panties, folded into them like an after sex magic show, I assume his genitalia, no longer accomplishing that grotesque male bounce and flap, are inch by inch retracting into egg sac. I’ll have his musk by the time he’s awake. He’ll cream himself flowery and miss my big holy penetration. My fucking him leaves an imprint, an echo of cock he reverberates in girly sing-song. He contains my puddle, flutters around, dripping me. The physical memory lasts longer than he cares to think. He is sore and angry for being sore and mocks my enormous protuberance under red sore sheets, pretending to be me before on to the next breeching, which occurs in possibly five minutes. I finish ogling transvestite me, with my Rocky Horror hands, though I disagree with leather, unless it is in my mouth. I show Canada my tits. I live in a Japanese closet. I sneeze Algerian sperm. I log online and talk about dead dogs. I make phone calls and text messages and type in the instant message hatebox. I tap a telegraph on the small of my back, spread my legs around a smoke signal, take cell phone pictures, send them to a girl who tongues my ass, a boy with gout, a child with clap, a transvestite who takes notes, people in Hong Kong circle jerking in the middle of a crowded street, posted on the blog with pubic hair font. A guy from Sacramento is crying on my voicemail. I film my feet for someone in Kansas, toes wrinkling hello. I attend a webcam orgy, choking myself with my bra. I laugh asking if father catches feast in my diaphragm. He died in childbirth. Literally, he’s negative seven years old. His prick looks like a coat hanger. Boything from Colorado wants to watch me piss on cam. Girlcreature from school asks what drugs her boyfriend stuffed me with. LSD suppositories and I got pyrotechnic groin trauma. So he shampooed your cunt for CNN? Acronyms are hot. I’ll punch your clit later. LOL. I type upside down in the hatebox, legs over the chair top like white feathers that hate themselves. I invented wingspan. I’m typing I fucked your mom over and over to my own screen name. I answer my cell and continue an online conversation mid-sentence. The television is loud enough to upset my stomach. I hold music to my ear and type with one finger and yell “What!” into the phone while performing on cam, taking another picture, switching the lights on and off with my toe.


Graveyard

I hump the graveyard so bodies fizz. Their stains grow inside me. Exhaling into the corpse dirt above each grave, a lick of something molded dry inside my thought. I kill the hot end of a cigarette on my nipple, leaving white scars dividing the pink like a second nipple failing to begin. In a minute the world can turn your crucifixion runny. My scraped tits bobbling clay, retarded putty sucked by all. I want to get my gang rape on. Fill up a small closet with my blood. Comb it out of me, enough to paint a house. I’m too far up my own rashes to hear. My genitalia need constant sensory information. It’s how I can tell where I’m going half the time. I miss the ex who smoked my vulva like a bong. He spent a lot of time down there with a flashlight, being religious. That kind of spatial misconception is common amongst the devoted. For instance, when I’m five years old, I fall down trying to grab the moon. I want to use it to shave my legs. I miss a version of the future invented for my sorry inclusion. The particular slapped-tall ostrich pounce these fuckers ritualize. I am too far splayed again by hands.



Sucker June excerpts


Sucker June


WANT A HUG?




________________



I wrote a novel with daggers that jut from the page and poke people in the eyes at appropriate moments in the plot. It was kind of a pop-up book, except with daggers.

The novel was about a man who was aware that all he was was a character in a novel. He hated his readers because he couldn’t get away from them. He had no privacy. He was like someone on a reality television show without having signed a contract to be on a reality television show. Occasionally, he would look up and shake his fist and curse at the people reading his life. And sometimes he would poke them in the eyes with daggers.

The title of the novel was Don’t Read This or You Might Get Poked in the Eye With a Dagger.

I used to hand out free copies to people at independently funded literary festivals. Aspiring authors smiled and said things like “Oh, you wrote this?” and “I look forward to reading it.” I told them, Please don’t.

My mom found out about my novel and wanted a copy. Before shipping it, I signed the inside cover: Mom, for the love of God, please don’t read this. Love, Darby.

After my book tours ended, my agent called and told me Don’t Read This … was a breakout. It was selling like crazy. Bookstores couldn’t keep them on the shelves. I said, That’s great. “Are you working on anything else?” he asked. I told him I was recording an audio version called Don’t Listen to This or You Might Get Needles Jabbed in Your Eardrums.

My fame was overwhelming me. I had to get an unlisted number. I had to remove my e-mail address from my website. I had to buy a secluded house in the woods with a long crazy driveway and an electronic gate at the bottom.

The university invited me to give a lecture on writing. As I walked up the cement steps to the lecture hall, a man was sitting on the steps with sunglasses on. An upturned hat lay on the ground next to him. I stopped to talk to him. He said he was blind. I asked him how he became blind. He said he was born that way.

Inside the lecture hall, I stood at a podium and told professors and aspiring writers what I thought about the craft of writing. I told them that you have to hate the readers who read your stories. You have to punish your readers. Readers want to feel pain. Then everyone murmured amongst themselves, “That’s so true,” and, “You should really read his book,” and they nodded in agreement and they hugged each other and they felt the happiness that agreements always bring, and then they all looked up at me with perfect eyeballs. -- Darby Larson








Darby Larson Ohey!
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'My book Ohey! became a book yesterday! It is now available from places like amazon. The writings in this collection have been published online and in print over the last 12 years. It includes some of my very first published pieces as well as work published very recently.'-- Darby Larson

'Darby Larson is a lyricist. He might be the Eminem of prose fiction, but probably not. Perhaps he’s more like Sage Francis or one of the guys from Definitive Jux, but my guess is no. Hip-hop comparisons aside, Larson’s got some skills where putting words together is concerned. He’s definitely an artist who adeptly uses literary devices such as assonance, alliteration, and wordplay.'-- Joseph Michael Owens, PANK


Excerpts

Ohey!

This is a story about a girl I'm after named Ohey! that ends with me on The Worm Gang's couch watching Jeopardy! Ohey! is a witch I'm after with benefits. I'm heading to The Worm Gang's hideout on the flip side of my fictional city and stopping at stop signs in my VW Ghia.

I get there, am let in, and it's like how it is when I go there. Ohey! is there but I can't see her. I see the rest of the gang on couches and leaning. Clev's in the kitchen cleaving. Nina's wiping the cover of a book with a cloth. Annie and Angi, the twins, sit at the couch, conjoined at the calves, and there's Ohey! peeking from the hall. I wink and she disappears.

What's cooking? I say something like to Clev who won't be bothered.

How did I even walk in here? No one sees me?

Oh, Hi Nina, how's the new job? It's fine, I'm dusting these books. Like a jacket, I offer. Solid, she says like it's her new slang. Where's, I begin but stop because there's Ohey! from the hallway again, so I venture.

The trouble is, once Ohey! and I get our clothes floored, we're no longer ourselves. We become metal-headed heroin machines. It's rocky at first but the going's rock-rupturing and nearly nauseating, like how the last full moon lasted.

But there's screaming from the kitchen. Oh god. Ohey! says this and something else. We go to the kitchen wearing what we're wearing and it's Clev on the floor with her arm severed and in a large popcorn bowl full of ice Nina's preparing like a snack. Clev's wah-wahing on the floor. Ohey! jackets herself and follows Nina and the bowl out the door. The twins pick up Clev and help her out the door, and that's the last of The Worm Gang gone. A leaf floats in on a breeze through a window and follows them out the door. A dog behind me barks. I sit on the couch. What is... Jupiter.


from Preamble

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.



Tickled Pink (for Darby Larson)


Reflexive by Darby Larson


WEIRD MK9 GAS STATION LAUGH?!




________________




Why The Green Ray as a title for your book?

Corina Copp: Long story! I started with the title as a constraint a few years ago, after opening a page in Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel to a description of a short story called “La peau de la raie” (the skin of the skate), where a play on the phrase le rayon vert ends up le crayon vert (the green pencil) — and I had just seen the Eric Rohmer film Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray: Summer) at Film Forum a few days prior, or maybe it was the other way around. The synchronicity felt like something I should follow. But I fell into a trap of inscribing Meaning into every aesthetic chance encounter from there forward, and made a constellation from the coincidences that felt very mesmerizing — but what’s the line, “if it looks like a trap it’s a trap.” So the green ray or green flash is a rarely seen optical phenomenon occurring when the sun sets over water in the “purest of weather conditions.” In Jules Verne's 1882 novel The Green Ray (I have no idea who translated this, by the way — there's no name on the English-language edition), a young woman named Helena Campbell refuses to get married until she sees the green ray. She explains it as a conductor of “true feeling,” if seen with another person. Helena and her two uncles travel the Scottish Hebrides with her two suitors, looking for it. So Eric Rohmer adapts this story loosely, with his wanderer Delphine (a Capricorn with “crippling intimacy issues”) at a total loss when her boyfriend breaks up with her and she suddenly has nowhere to go for summer holiday — the film starts with a Rimbaud couplet from a poem about “idle youth / enslaved to everything / through sensitivity.” Later I found a story by Alain Robbe-Grillet called The Shore which was originally to be called La Vue, after a 60-page Roussel poem called La Vue about a shore and a lighthouse seen through the lens of a penholder, whatever that is; and I was reading about this on my way to a lighthouse at sunset, in Point Reyes, CA, “looking” for the green ray ... I ended up traveling all last summer trying to write the title poem. It was a task I had given myself even though the manuscript was already over 100 pages long. I went to Montreal, insisting I needed to do it there. I was talking with this seven-year-old — we had just visited the Center for Canadian Architecture and saw a prototype of a catastrophe machine. So later we're sitting outside on a balcony with her dad, my friend Michael Nardone, and I’m lamenting that I haven't written the title poem for the book, and while we’re talking, she starts drawing a “catastrophe machine” with a green colored pencil. And Michael says, “Uma, remember that Corina is writing a book called The Green Ray, and Uma writes THE GREEN RAY at the top of the drawing, made of green circles, and she signs it at the bottom. Later of course Michael tells me that Uma's middle name is Hebrides. I wrote an essay for the book, finally, The Green Ray, which attempts to illustrate the connections, and others, and how I felt living in these materials or by this hand, but it's too explicit, so we decided not to include it.

Can you talk about the epigraph at the beginning of the book?

CC: The book starts with a quote from the artist Tacita Dean, who made a 16-mm film of the sunset called The Green Ray, in which she says: “So looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see.” This line feels gentler than anything I’d write, and could be misconstrued as sentimental platitude, yet it was heartbreaking how much I needed to hear it when I did. It was a total relief to come to it at the end of this process. More interestingly, Dean says in a BOMB interview that she thinks she saw the green ray by accident on her flight home from making that project, after filming the sunset every day. It’s hard to know who to turn toward as I answer this. I mean, this also relates to Rohmer and art-making by intuitive logic in general. Also, if you think decisions are arbitrary and that so much is linguistically seductive, and that some kind of central image like the green ray is going to ground you (me), you know, waking life is pretty important.

Do you see your poetry as having a relationship with cinema?

CC: I do. I'm interested in the idea that a text can be read, played, or filmed. And that objects — bad objects like love objects, or anything else seen or wanted — can reappear in other mediums. I'm interested in reappearance, I guess, which is what eventually drives me to write. And I could answer this autobiographically: I've been trying to stage film, or watch poetry, or play parts in my writing, and as a kid, for a long time, I read only biographies of Hollywood actors — I know a lot about film but never studied it really. And both poetry and cinema are forms that can be paradoxically poisonous and healing, and they make us into a better kind of collective subject, but I don’t know. Their appeal to a solitude that lacks self-sufficiency is more compelling, actually.

Returning to the Tacita Dean quote: I read your book as a response, but not acceptance, of her “belief in what you see.” For example, from “Bath Praise” (“if you don’t project a film, it’s simply not there”) or your reference of the letter from Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman in “Underpainting.” There is a constant questioning of what you see.

CC: Yes. How to answer this. The quote is wishful thinking, maybe. A balm for the fact that you’re right. Or an assurance that we’ll be OK, despite the fact that the world is on fire right now and should be, and that the poems following the epigraph want to shut it out or down or float near the unseen or are precarious and contradictory and heartbroken and desiring to. This might be me protecting my naiveté…

You mentioned “trying to stage film, or watch poetry, or play parts in my writing.” I know you also work in the theater, and are currently developing something inspired by Marguerite Duras, a writer who also made films. What would a film of The Green Ray look, or sound, or feel like?

CC: Lovely question. It might look something like the wrestling scene in front of the fireplace in Ken Russell’s Women in Love. And I’d change the palette on the men so it’s washed out. With an imposed soundscape of birds and outside and dishes and tennis and fake crying. Or is this Duras? I get our projections mixed up because I’ve been working on that piece for so long. The Green Ray is different; there’s more promise. I listened to Fairport Convention’s “Autopsy” on repeat for days while I put it together. So “Autopsy” as furniture music, it would sound like that, and there is a too-long walk to a shore, and probably a scene in a salon that looks like all the scenes in salons. I can go on and on here.










Corina Copp The Green Ray
Ugly Duckling Presse

'The Green Ray is relentless—in its syntactical and almost kaleidoscopic subversion of univocal emotion, its contrapuntal speed and delay, intimacy and pretense, security of sources and formal promiscuity. The poems both sense and want to, enacting a rigorous aesthetic engagement that never quite achieves synthesis, instead posing writing itself as dialogic longing. It is Corina Copp's first full-length collection of poems.'-- UDP




Excerpt

LA VOIX HUMAINE

It begins seductively, with the potential loss of her hands
parting in a bath O Fernet, able to close again, close enough
to his temples that his darker moments of depression
illuminate, taking on a slow neon flush of knee-
cap busting into freedom like we’d like it to
for the story. In reality, the butter did it, accompaniment
     for a lens in constant threat of expansion; plus
           it’s all over the microphones
     but like a judge-salve more than
     a ski-resort French-bread patter creaming
     the handheld Mi in ornate fumes,
and took the view that a woman I had loved
for a long while was dead, BUT did you know she’d be finally
important to you after she died. OF COURSE you knew that,
that’s why she went to so much trouble to feel like she was always
ABOUT TO DIE when she was with you, because she knew she
belonged to you much more in death than in life, already.

What are we bedrooms’
throats drenched in bromide supposed to do then
We hire someone to …
such and such a degree of independence, but they do need
you. Knee becomes nothing, calm down, stick to your
thoughts if I were you. I’d detail here a feeling of degradation
but I lack an ability to practice, much less make you feel it because of my practice, to persuade in-
side suede pink gloves what a line like that can do
without a single desire to insist
other than form itself blotching anterior paprika while you’re
  out drink
ing. I listen to La voix humaine, a woman moving from
not … a leaf to objective, as shrewd the many
forces assume to keep curt … she is thinking
I don’t want to be pissed on
all the time,
obsolete in the dark can. I leave right as Piaf
sings “Bâtarde! Bâtarde!” Overwhelm: “Le journal! Le
journal!” Her husband can’t stop reading (Algeria, PEUT
TROUT), newspaper in hands. Outshone, she
makes scenes on the telephone with scarabs
in the wrong
scone at the astron sppeed. Âllo? A virgin in Bourgogne
is still a subscriber to AMC. At some point, pause
I could not hinter Madam is not at home
  divorce
at your improductivity, deluded interior.
bragging boys over, I mean, there was nothing to do
but be honest. Coming from nothing.
How could faster wealth possibly be so inevitable
and why resolve
dangerous impulses. I turn off the glass
  fibrillator
break a, you distract the women’s
Door beneath sound of 3 accordions … nothing
I am lying, socially, I’ve only had three cigarettes today
and not one called. No one called the house.
All the day the house
persisted in its infinite artistic workings. Mine
teddy bears. THEY ARE FALLING ALSO
TO DISREPAIR.
Come lend your time to me
It’s all right, she likes it like that. She told her friend,
  For heaven’s
sake, what do I expect me to do about it? Her friend
sucked on some hard candy she got at the waxer’s at 7:00 AM.
It was pink and paraclete, pain ward
labored tirelessly, sweet, yes, an indirect salivate
Obediently beyond pink, it took on a Rosicrucian beam
inspir’d by her agape
so she’s all standing there drooling
     For a moment a Radical spiritism—
Smooth is
     conservative.
From that surface on
Amplify went flat on ice rink
onto a book, «The confusion of persons is
always the evil of the city»
Just looking for some triplicity, you?
Put your hand up,
under my black cotton turtleneck
below a celluloid collar
Earnest living



Antibody Series - Corina Copp


Corina Copp: Spring Benefit -- Epic Now: Poetry for Epic Times


Corina Copp & Miguel Gutierrez




______________




First, do you consider yourself a writer? What does that term mean, exactly?

Brandi Wells: Sure. I’m a writer because I write things. I’m an eater because I eat things. I am not a runner, because I do not fucking run places. Seems easy enough.

You seem to have no fear in writing a story in an unconventional or experimental way. For you, what’s appealing about an unconventional form such as a chart or a list?

BW: I like constraints and obstructions. I like to see what I can do with different types of spaces. Though lately I’ve been thinking about traditional linear narrative and how it’s quit feeling fun for me. Whenever I enjoy someone’s linear narrative, it’s because it’s slightly fucked in some way. I really only like things that are slightly fucked.

What’s so distinct about your stories is that they’re so in-your-face and loud, but at the same time tender and small and simple, the kind the reader can’t help but relate to. Do you think that’s true? How would you describe your voice?

BW: Sometimes I’m in a workshop and someone calls my narrator crazy or gross or disgusting. And I know, this person is not for me. Because my narrator is me. Maybe I am crazy and gross and disgusting.

An interesting question about fiction, I think: How much personal experience do you draw from in order to produce your stories? In other words, does writing inform your life or does life inform your writing?

BW: I used to base things on myself and my relationships and that writing feels different than what I’m interested in now. I don’t want to write stories about some significant other or some failed relationship of mine. I feel done with that. Now I am thinking kittens with laser beam eyes, etc. Because that’s what I want to think about.

When did you first start writing? Do you remember your first time trying to put a story together?

BW: I wrote short stories for my dad when I was a kid. He asked me why I couldn’t write happy stories. I remember trying to write happy stories. Trying to write stories that were just a group of people having a picnic and hanging out. And these were practices in descriptive writing, but very, very dull.

When you write, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to say anything? What are you looking to find?

BW: Writing is just a way of entertaining myself. It’s not very different than reading book, but I have more control. I am picking what happens, when it happens and who it happens to. At last, I have control over something.

Do you usually map our your ideas or are you open to improvisation?

BW: I NEVER map anything out. I can’t imagine working with outlines or plans. Things happen and I don’t expect them. It’s exciting. If I knew what was going to happen, it wouldn’t be any fun. But my work would probably be more organized if I mapped things out. Organized and dull.








Brandi Wells This Boring Apocalypse
Civil Coping Mechanisms

'Keen, shocking, and shockingly funny, This Boring Apocalypse glitters like a mirrorball of razors above a dance floor packed with severed legs. Each page is a grisly prism. Each page flashes with a kind of light. In tiny, honed chapters, this book creates a world where love bleeds into horror, where there is neither life nor death but a life-death hybrid, where everything exists in a state of regenerative decay. Brace yourself for these sentences. Brandi Wells knows how to take you apart.'-- Joanna Ruocco

'A novella told in miniature nocturnes, This Boring Apocalypse is violent and dazzling, brutal and mesmerizing; its melody is fatal. Wells pulls the body apart and buries it in pieces, but in her necropolis, limbs can rejoin, resurrect, return—fragments are hot-glued or sewn or soldered or just magically reattached to assuage a loneliness more formidable than death.'-- Lily Hoang

'Like if Donald Barthelme had been hired to transcribe Jeffrey Dahmer’s wet dreams for Lars Von Trier, Brandi Wells holds zero whims back in her blitzkrieg surrealist take on the Theater of Cruelty. The result is a hilariously germane Frankenstein-like idea-sprawl of gore and impulsive feeling, set in a mutative landscape where bodies are playthings, domesticity is punishment, and death, as if to match life, reigns on in brutal, fertile wonder. Strap yourself in and don’t look up.'-- Blake Butler


Excerpts

I build a fort to protect myself from the person capable of judging lemons
     I make a fort that doesn’t look like a fort. If my fort looks like a fort, the person capable of judging lemons will know what to attack and will do so quickly. I make a fort that looks like a lemon. It looks exactly like a lemon. In fact, when she comes to visit me, she eats the lemon and tells me it is delicious. I watch her for a while, wondering how safe the fort is inside her stomach. Could I climb into her stomach and still be safeguarded by the fort? But I remember digestion. Surely her digestive track is no safe place.
     I make a fort that looks like nothing. The person capable of judging lemons will never recognize it. He will never be able to attack it because it is impossible to attack nothing. But I misplace the fort that looks like nothing. For me, nothing has always been a hard item to locate. Hard to carry with me, hard to remember, hard to feel attached to. I have lost nothings before and I hardly remember those nothings or the idea of having those nothings. I lament the loss of nothing, but is a short, unremarkable lamentation, so I lament short lamentations, because remembering feels significant. Self-expression should be valued. There should be more prolonged screaming and bleeding, being born and dying, dying again, dying differently, dying in a way that is long lasting. I have seen many unimpressive deaths. Death should be more than the lack of life. Death should be a terrible event, forever ongoing. Life is so momentous. Why shouldn’t death be lauded as well?
     I make a fort that looks like tortured people. I have always been good with tortured people. It is my talent. They appreciate working with someone who appreciates them. It is the secret of the tortured. They do not want to be saved. They only want to be admired as beauties and labeled aesthetically pleasing, because of course they are pleasing. Who hasn’t tortured someone and felt that twinge of pleasure? That beauty? That something? That something-something? I am good at torture. It is a talent many possess but few are proud of. If a person has a skill, they should be praised for their skill. Their skill should be appreciated and utilized. When I go into the houses of strangers and torture them, I expect a Thank you, and a mint, and a sweater, because it has been cold lately and torture is tiring work and I do not like to be cold. I do not deserve to feel uncomfortable, because I have a skill and this skill should earn me something. It should matter.
     I abandon forts. They have not worked for me. But I dread the man capable of judging lemons, so I destroy all the lemons. I build a fire and burn them. It is a citrus burning. Nothing anywhere on Earth can smell bad. Nothing can smell unfresh. Young people fall in love. They hold hands and sniff each other, admire one another. There is mating and the production of untortured offspring who may acquire torturing later, either as a skill or as a fate.
     The world is turning beautiful and I move into the abandoned house I have longed for.


I tire of arms
     They seem far too small, insubstantial. Their accruement matters so little. I can have arms or not have arms. I can collect more or not. I develop an affinity for torsos but I always find them attached to worthless appendages. I try to convince people to bring me torsos already detached from their appendages. Detaching arms and legs and heads is hard work. Grueling and rewarding, but it would be best if everyone else would gruel while I am rewarded.
     No one brings me torsos. Not a single torso. I dream of lovely torsos against a red or purple background. Intimate table settings, candlelight flickering.
     I go out in search of torsos. No one is hiding the torsos, hoarding them like I expected. Do they not realize the torsos are delicious? Have they never tasted a torso? Licked a skin covered rib or grazed teeth against the muscle of back? But I realize everyone else is one step ahead of me. They are hiding their torsos and well. They are leaving the appendages attached to their torsos. They are leaving their torsos alive and allowing these torsos to have jobs and friends and hobbies like working on their cars or building paper mache statues. These people are smart. They have planned well. But I am on to them.
     Sometimes it is hard for me to tell which torsos are for eating. It is hard to distinguish between a person who you love and a person you intend to consume, a person you intend to de-arm and de-leg and behead. You should label those close to you. But even then, it would be a tricky business. How am I to tell a well-intentioned label from a label someone is securing to mislead me so they might hoard the torsos for themselves? So I label the people, not in a confusing way, but in a well-intentioned manner. I carry a self-inking stamp with me everywhere I go. It is double-sided. One side says Delicious. The other side says OH this one does not look so good. It does not look so good at all. The stamp is self-inking and I have added a sort of acid for semi-permanence. I would hate for the stamps to wear off, but also I do not want them to be permanent. A person might grow less delicious after a few years or a formerly unattractive person might become more delicious. Things can change. So the stamps only last a year or so, at least this is what I think. I can’t be certain because I have just begun the stamping process.











*

p.s. Hey. ** H, Hi! Nice to see you! Thanks, everything with the submitting and the moving is smooth with a tolerable rockiness. Oh, well, yeah, that would be great about the post if you have time and if it would interest you. Thank you muchly! I hope you're doing very well. ** David Ehrenstein, I think I would need a de-sketching class to do that. Really superb piece on 'Out 1'. Wealth galore. I have no leather daddy dreams, which won't surprise you, and I think I like Mr. Sacks in his scrubs best. Nonetheless, I anxiously await to the moment of reading your piece on him. Everyone, Mr. E follows up his great piece on Rivette's 'Out 1' with this no doubt also great piece on Oliver Sacks. ** James, Hi. Oh, I see. Hm, no, I don't think I've ever experienced that. I basically lose interest and stop reading based on whether the writing in what I'm reading interests me or not. What a piece of writing about is usually drowned if visible in the prose for me. It's certainly true that sex is very, very rarely written about interestingly. That's for sure. I'm trying to remember whether, back when I was younger and bought escorts a lot, any of their asses seemed to be an especially short shortcut to God. There was this one guy. Named Jimmy maybe? In NYC. I used to see him at the hustler bars all the time, but he was always with this really old man and seemed to 'belong' to him. Then I saw him on alone once, and he made himself available. I asked him why he wasn't with his friend. He said his friend had died of a heart attack while they were smoking crack two days before. Maybe it's possible that that made his ass seem like a shorter shortcut? ** Cobaltfram, Hey, John! Good to see you, buddy! You're re-ensconced in Texas again then. That's good, right? Glad you liked the PdT. If memory serves, they were having some kind of performance festival when you were there? That's a good way to experience the joint. I'm good. Film is moments away from being totally finished. Really good about your reengagement with the novel! Sweet! ** Steevee, I can only agree. Wow, a double Steevee feature! Everyone, you have the golden opportunity to read Steevee's thoughts on two new films if you like this weekend. Here's his thinking on the 'lame' French thriller 'The Connection', and here are his thoughts on André Téchiné’s 'disappointing' new film 'In the Name of My Daughter'. ** _Black_Acrylic, Good to hear, Ben. It's nothing but their loss. ** Bill, Hi. Thanks a lot about the stills. Yeah, it was pretty good month for escort texts, I thought so too. JaketheBlake just might. He seems like a real candidate. Mm, I don't have my dates for Halle yet. I might just nip your time there at the beginning of mine and at the end of yours. I'll let you know when Gisele gives me my marching orders. ** Keaton, Nice tribute to BB. To anyone else reading this, that means BB as in ... King. Not as in 'unsafe practices'. Everyone, BB King gets a tributary post over on Keaton's. Go pay your respects, please. I think that when I played as a kid with other kids, it was mostly 'cowboys and Indians.' And croquet. Discursive-ness is a sign of good health. So it is cherry? That's interesting because I hate real cherries and everything made from them. But I don't think there's an atom of real cherry in red jello. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. The 'LCTG' page signifies that festivals are considering it and that having some kind of online presence for it is a good idea, basically. Genesis P-orridge and Aaron Dilloway? Wow, that's a strange combo. Makes sense in a way but is also seems quite wack. Really nice about seeing Merzbow. I still haven't. Aching legs aside, that setting is probably more conducive. But I haven't seen him live, of course. Awesome that you're reviewing Mark's book. I think that is crazily amazing, great novel. He does still check in here once in a while, and I think he's still a regular reader to some degree. I'm in the 4th arr. Down at the very bottom, about two and a half blocks from Bastille, a block from Place des Vosges. I like the place. It's old and a little creaky, but it's sweet. Most people would say this new neighborhood is an improvement, but I actually miss the 10th. Living there is like living in the real Paris. Living here is too, but about 70% of the people on the street here are tourists, it seems like. Very happy weekend to you too! ** Kier, Kier! Yay! I liked and noticed that line too. Cool. I'm so sorry about the shitty aspects of your last days. I hope they're fading away. When I feel shitty, sometimes playing video games helps a lot, I don't know why. Maybe that? While I'm sure that it has at least a very slightly irksome side, the idea of a spoiled sheep made me happy. I hope you don't get sick. Although, another weird thing, sometimes when I get sick when I'm feeling shitty, the sickness replaces the shittiness, and then, when I get better, the shittiiness is dead. Silver lining? But I hope you don't get sick. My days ... well, I had no electricity in my apartment for almost three days. That sucked. It just went off suddenly because I guess the transition from previous tenants to me wasn't properly arranged. And everything here is electric, so there was nothing. And it was a French holiday, so it didn't get turned back on until yesterday. I bought a little clothes washing machine. I haven't had a washing machine in the place where I lived since I lived at my parents' place a billion years ago, so that's cool. I worked hard on the script for Zac's and my next film, and it's going really, really well. I met with Zac about it, and he likes it a lot and suggested changes and additions and stuff, so I'm revising it now. That's exciting. Gisele and I auditioned this dancer to fill the other newly vacant role ('the singer') in 'Kindertotenlieder', and she was great and got the role really fast, and we spent the day rehearsing the role with her. I was supposed to be photographed for Purple Magazine, but I need a haircut, so I delayed that. I think those things plus suffering to some degree inside my lightless, powerless, hot water-less, etc., apartment was the gist of my days of late. I hope you have really good weekend, pal. And I will do my best to do the same. ** Kyler, Hi. The beyond is always a good idea. ** Marilyn Roxie, Hi, Marilyn! Great to see you! Happy to have instigated your chuckling. Oh, no, that tribute CD has been o.o.p. for a long time. Maybe you can get a used copy cheap somewhere, I don't know? Yeah, I contested-off my extra copy, or I would send you one. I'll go have a look and see if anyone's selling theirs. Take care! ** Misanthrope, I would imagine your lawyer knows infinitely better than I do. Ugh, I hope it's not as complicated as it sounds. Oh, yeah, same deal here with the 'what's that word mean' thing. Funny how you know what something means but putting words to that knowledge is so difficult. But then I guess I've 'built' a whole 'career' as a writer around that. ** Cal Graves, No heyDEN was good, actually. I've been basically quite good. And you? Are you writing up a storm, hurricane, a super volcano? 'LCTG' is being promoted to film festival people in the market at the Cannes Film Festival right now. I don't know how that's going yet. New place is cool except for an electricity problem that is now thankfully solved. Is the Bastille a big tourist trap? That's sort of strange. It's a cool area, but there's nothing there really for tourists. It's just a huge roundabout with a very tall column in the middle. Huh. Where'd you go? What happened there? Drastically (in the good way), Dennis. ** Torn porter, Torn! It's been ages! Really, really great to get this chance! I moved, yep. Film's all but finished, yep. Do reintegrate here if you feel like it. Would be awesome for me and mine. Love, me (and mine). ** Okay. This weekend you get to look over and consider four books that I highly recommend. This is a particularly great foursome, so do be attentive, if you have the time and attention to spare. I will see you on Monday.

Car key of Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath)




Fake keys owned by Napoleon I.




Law enforcement officers should be aware that offenders may attempt to use this unusual weapon. This object appears to be a key but conceals a hidden blade.




Salvador Dali always napped with these keys in his hand.




Boyd & Paul Moore died when their father hammered keys into their heads and tried to "unlock" their thoughts.




One of three keys needed to open the 2nd century casket of Shah Ji Dheri. The other two keys are lost. The casket was designed to destroy itself should anyone attempt to open it by any other method.




Alexander the Great's bedroom door key.






















Resident Evil keys




The world’s most expensive car key was unveiled at the 2015 New York Auto Show. The key had its own security detail, which makes sense given that its value is estimated at $250,000. For that price you get a key made from platinum and black onyx that is covered in 40 carats worth of diamonds.




Key belonging to a man who lived secretly and undetected in the wall of a family's home for six years.




A key to make you larger.






Secret Key storage - Fake Rock




16-year-old Kayleigh-Anne Palmer was using her key to get into the house when Aston Robinson, 18, strangled her with her scarf.




Key to Rembrandt's painting studio.




Treasure Key of Earth Essence.




Ring of keys as weapon.




Key found inside the leg bone of a man who died in 1943.




Super Megaforce Red Ranger key.




Keys to Marie Antoinette's bathroom and toilet.




Oscar Pistorius's bedside table.




Front door key of J.M. Barrie.








A man from Seattle has captured a thief on surveillance camera easily breaking into his car using a mysterious electronic device. The thief in the video is shown attempting to open the locked door, but is unable to so he takes off his backpack and holds it up to the window of the vehicle, and seconds later unlocks the car.




Shawish has now created the world's most expensive USB key, which is a part of its ultra-luxurious Magic Mushroom collection. The USB flash drive has two parts: the head of the fungus has hundreds of rubies, sapphires and diamonds, and the stem is made of 18K gold. Magic Mushrooms USB flash drive offers 32 GB of memory. Magic mushrooms USB key that is crafted with white gold,emeralds and white diamonds worth $36,900.




Skeleton key fashioned from a spoon by a prisoner in 1894.




"Might he find the right key to Truth?"




What: recycled keys turned into jewelry with a word on each piece of jewelry, such as “Hope”, “Dream,” or “Create”. Prices start at $35. Who: Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Ryan Gosling. Why: The Giving Keys exist to employ those transitioning out of homelessness. Wear a key and then gift it forward to someone when you feel they need the message more.




Car key of James Hetfield (Metallica).




A toddler has been hailed a miracle after getting a set of keys lodged in his brain. Nicholas Holderman fell on his parents' car keys. One entered his eyelid and penetrated his brain.




The teenager-proof car: The MyKey limits the car’s top speed and stops teenagers turning the volume up too high on the stereo.




In the 17th century jailers’ keys were filled with gun powder to create a primitive gun that could be detonated if there was any trouble when opening a cell door.




Chris said: "I had quite a lot to drink and had no recollection of swallowing my door key. But my throat started to feel very sore and my stomach didn't feel right so my friend took me to hospital on the bus."




Cosplay Weapon Wooden Kingdom Hearts Sorami Mouse Key.




Master key owned by a first class steward of the Titanic, named Edmund Stone, for a series of cabins. Stone tried to escape along with the 15,000 others during the sinking. They recovered the key off his body later and returned it to his wife back in the United Kingdom. Although he died back then, the key was recovered and bought by an American collector for a little bit over $138,000 at Henry Aldridge in 2008. The key is the most expensive item of Titanic memorabilia.













Zelda keys.




Key that opens the front doors of The Disney Store.




*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, 'Snow White', that's a very good idea. Your wish in this case is my command. Thanks for the lightbulb. I can't remember having ever liked, in that way, a boy on a motorcycle. Might just be a coincidence though. Forefronted or emphasized masculinity doesn't interest me at all, in that way. Mostly, I seem to have liked, in that way, wussy, smart, weird guys. July is too soon, so we'll miss Outfest. Right now we're angling to have the premiere at one of a few big festivals in early fall, and we won't know if that's going to happen until the end of June at the earliest. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. As usual, my enormous pleasure to have the opportunity of helping introduce such great books. Thank you for caring, pal. ** Cobaltfram, Hi. I ended up going to that festival at the PdT the day after you went, I think. Unfortunately, the performances on my day mostly sucked, but it didn't matter because I love that space a lot, and the performances made a lot of noise that only beautified it. The film is submitted to four festivals right now, and they make their decisions around late June, so we're on the veritable tenterhooks waiting to find out if we'll make any of their cuts. Wonderful about how hooked-in you are with your novel. The best feeling in the world, I reckon. Or at least almost best. I really want to see 'Mad Max', and I definitely will. ** Steevee, Hi. I definitely will see 'Mad Max'. The hype in this case doesn't really bother me because it's just awesomely fun junk, or, well, that's the most I'm expecting. It's only the 'this is genius and important' kind of hype that wards me off. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! Thanks a lot, man. Lazy Fascist is greatness, no doubt about it. There are a ton of great presses nowadays. I think my favorite is Civil Coping Mechanisms. They don't seem to put a food wrong, as the saying goes. I think if I were a young, aspiring writer right now, I would dream passionately of being published by them the same way I dreamed passionately of being published by Grove Press or New Directions when I actually was an aspiring young writer. Big congrats on passing all your classes! Awesome! And thanks about the film images. Yeah, I'm really, really happy with the film. 100+ pages is a lot. Very sweet and exciting news right there! ** Sypha, Hi, James. That definitely qualifies as a gauntlet. I don't know Ray Brassier. I'll investigate. I do know, or, wait, don't know, or, wait, know as much as I care to know about KKW, and I won't investigate that. 'Hospice' is lovely. You'll have a very good time. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. My weekend went pretty well. Mostly working (new film script) and working well, I think. And this and that of not too much interest, reporting-wise. Your weekend was eminently reportable, and thank you for doing so. The Corina Copp book is super good and exciting. She's a pretty new discovery for me, and I'm getting a lot from what she does. My coffee is talking right now too. My coffee says hello retroactively to your coffee. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Good for you for publishing your article. Good for us, I guess I mean. Oh, it's a download? I'll get it squared away in my laptop's memory pronto. Everyone, Mr. _Black_Acrylic aka Mr. Ben Robinson has written an article with the ringing title 'Michelle Thorne, X Factor Hopeful'. Some zine for which it was intended didn't want it, the fools, so he's made it directly available to everyone without an intermediary. Well, apart from the intermediary of his blog where you can find the way to download it. That intermediary is here, and then click where it says 'Link' and then let the fur fly. ** Misanthrope, I hit on something? Cool. Oh, right, they're all dedicated to keeping parents and kids together because of the holiness of that connection, blah blah. Christian damage shit. Skip that shit if you can then, yeah, totally. Who won? Not the custody battle, the motherfucking WWE thang! ** Kyler, Hi, K. Greetings to Florida. Glad you and the birthday boy are, or, well, were at the point you commented, getting along. Rohmer's 'Le Rayon Vert' is great, I so agree. Rohmer is great, really kind of always. I got power. I'm using it wisely, I hope, Best to you! ** Okay. I made the blog into a keyring today for reasons that may or may not seem obvious. See you tomorrow.

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Obnox Carmen, I Love You
'It’s hard to not read too much into Obnox’s upcoming LP, Know America. A concept record that has Obnox and crew highjacking the feed of Radio 420 AM WEDE in order to see their records finally spun, it’s clear that the record is about the current state of music, about race, about the integrity of musicians and the businessmen that make music their racket. Tired of being pigeonholed, ripped off, cheated, exploited, or — worst of all — neglected, Obnox is taking matters into his own hands, forcing his brand of punk on America. The great irony of it all is that Obnox’s Lamont Thomas chooses to place this within the confines of a radio station. Surely, Thomas understands the diminishing place that radio — even more humorous that he chooses an AM station — plays in the most of our lives, so doesn’t this give the record a sort of antiquated nostalgia? I’d argue against this. Much like radio, the musical landscape has changed. For all of the advantages that digital platforms and social media have brought to music, I think that Thomas has highlighted an important idea: that with the so-called death of the radio did the social role of music in our lives diminish as well? One thing is for sure, if only half the artists out there had even a fraction of the talent and drive of Thomas, music would be better for it.'-- Noisey






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Oil Thief Under The Sand
'Even if you’ve never heard of a band before, if they’re on Chondritic Sound, you know what you’re getting…sort of. Truth be told the label trades in just about all manifestations and sub-genres of electronic noise, making Oil Thief, the new project from LA’s Lee Landley, a perfect fit. Power electronics, death industrial, classic Gristle noise, and a hint of the hypnotic proto techno that’s been worming its way into noise in recent years all slowly cycle through Obsolescence & Monality. Landley’s screeched vocals, which sound like they’re coming from the bottom of a well, act more as a secondary rhythmic device than anything, adding nuance to long and incessant deathmarches. “Under The Sand” is as emblematic as anything on the LP, with repetitive pressure valve clanging and wheezing juxtaposed against more organic and loping textures. For something with an ostensibly dirge-like mood, it’s a remarkably busy and dynamic track (and record on the whole), with plenty of elements oozing in and out of focus. Things close strongly with “Homesickness”, in which a driving beat and harmonic pads seem to be at war with high pitched static and sine waves, almost determined to push through the chaos and impose order.'-- I Die You Die






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Prurient Dragonflies To Sew You Up
'After over 15 years of releasing material as Prurient and ventures into experimental dance music as Vatican Shadow (not to mention Exploring Jezebel, Fernow’s implied involvement in Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, and outings with JK Flesh, Cold Cave etc.), Frozen Niagara Falls feels like a reflection not only on past experience, but also on the styles of music that helped to create them. The album is dripping in homage to power electronics, harsh noise, and ambient synth music; it’s a combination of influences that have been explored to varying extents throughout his back catalogue, and it’s been done here to impeccable effect. The resulting tracks make for a celebration of the most diverse city (the atmospheric synths on “Every Relationship Earthrise”) and a lamentation of its curse (the bludgeoning dirge of “Cocaine Daughter”). The album plays on the unknowable possibilities that one might encounter in a metropolis — it fucks with any expectations by combining unexpected instrumental techniques (“Wildflowers (Long Hair With Stocking Cap)”) with the crushing dominance that was ramified with harsh noise on And Still, Wanting. These subtle contrasts are brought to the fore from the opening track onward, where cool synths and building percussion allude to a precious state.'-- Tiny Mix Tapes






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Blood Ma Monaco
'James B Stringer took the name Brood Ma from his favourite China Miéville novel, Perdido Street Station. A classic of New Weird fiction, it paints a Tolkienian fantasy grown urban, strange and sprawling. “There’s a plasticity to the world, a civilisation that’s gone mouldy and organically adapted”... For the past few years, Stringer has been running his own free digital-only online label, or collective, or “whatever Quantum Natives is”, together with Awe IX, who provided its first release as Yearning Kru. The pair met at a London art school in the mid-2000s, where they became frustrated with the art world and academia. They were interested – especially after Stringer’s “crap” paintings were all stolen – in digital image-making, then peripheral and derided but now fashionable. But Stringer and Awe IX were (and are) not interested in the clean, cold aesthetics of so much contemporary net art. They also turned to music, especially the messy power of noise and grime. “Grime made garage seem dangerous. You go from gloss to realism. It was created in a very functional way, quite immediate in its expression, and it was the same with noise.'-- The Wire







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James Blackshaw Summoning Suns
'A decade ago, James Blackshaw emerged as a leading young stylist for instrumental acoustic guitar music. He’d started as many of his peers have, offering knotty revisions of songs with "blues" or "rag" appended to the title. But he soon assimilated new influences (Van Dyke Parks, Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny, Joanna Newsom, Harry Nilsson, Elliott Smith) into his six- and 12-string songs, from a classical grandeur borrowed from romantic composers to immersive atmospheres that seemed to reflect an interest in mysticism. Between 2006 and 2010, he issued a string of impossibly beautiful records in that vein, epitomized by his cascading Tompkins Square debut, The Cloud of Unknowing. Droning chords provided ballast beneath fluid fingerpicking, gilded sometimes by coruscating piano and strings. Blackshaw had transcended those formative blues to reposition existential sadness and spiritual wonder as self-made sanctuaries of sound.'-- Grayson Haver Currin






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Inga Copeland Miss Understood
'Inga Copeland flexes a new moniker and altered palette in the surreal chamber pops of RELAXIN' with Lolina. At an avant intersection of R&B, dancehall minimalism and electro-pop, Lolina creates her own world of sonic oddity and nursery rhyme delivery. The self-titled opener sounds like Autechre's 'Piezo' given a lo-fi baroque pop make-over, while the MIDI keys and grubby bounce of 'Miss Understood' warp like a funfair mirror version of a Palmistry riddim. Most unsettling of all, 'Relaxx' hits stranger pleasure centres with deliciously discordant piano and disconcerting vocal reminding us of Carole Caroompas. It's really kinda genius.'-- Boomkat







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Félicia Atkinson Against Archives
'The strangest and strongest album we've heard yet from avant-garde traveller, Felicia Atkinson. Arriving from Oregon, USA, via the French Alps base of Shelter Press - the publishing platform she runs with Bartolomé Sanson - it unfolds a highly visual sonic topography built upon collaged and randomly selected texts taken from her 2014 publication, Improvising Sculpture as Delayed Fictions, plus Rechereche de la Base et du Sommet (René Char, 1955), and Madame Edwarda (Georges Bataille, 1937). We're informed that the production is DIY, recorded with super basic software on a laptop, yet we wouldn't describe it as lo-fi in the usual, gritty sense; it's more a surreal and poetic arrangement of jarring elements - pulsing ambient techno noise and drowsy vocals in 'Against Archives'; crisply roiling doom scapes at whsipered erotic texts in 'LOeil'; tactile bass tones and Lynchian chamber space in 'Carve The Concept And The Artichoke'. Colour us enchanted.'-- Boomkat







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Akufen 1 1 (Thomas Brinkmann Remix)
'Marc Leclair, better known by his stage name Akufen, is a Canadian electronic musician. His music is electronic music that is often described as minimal house, minimal techno, glitch, or micro house. His 2002 release entitled My Way introduced his concept of "microsampling", which was essentially a way of using extremely small and short clips of samples he had randomly recorded off of FM radio broadcasts as a key musical element. Leclair's pseudonym comes from the French word for tinnitus (ringing of the ears), acouphène, and he has also gone under the pseudonyms Horror Inc., David Scott, Nefuka, and Anna Kaufen.'-- collaged







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Holly Herndon Interference
'Holly Herndon works in a post-human mode that's become customary in electronic music, yet remains abstract in realms beyond. Voices figure heavily in Platform, her follow-up to a breakthrough album in 2012, but they're spliced, diced, dissected — too processed, in any case, to suggest origins in a fleshy human being with dynamic feelings and moods. That doesn't mean dynamism is absent, though. From the start, Platform draws drama out of changes in speed and texture and many little parts that work together to make a sort of musical machine. Not music by a machine or for a machine ­— it's music as a machine itself, with working orders and operating procedures that make for different kinds of effects. Some of those effects prove surprisingly human in the end. "Interference" opens with a stuttering, strobing display of many of the techno-minded sounds enlisted throughout; the track has a gentle sense of propulsion suited less for a dance club than a movie scene in which a forlorn protagonist drives down a highway at night.'-- Andy Battaglia






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Lotic Slay
'There are familiar ideas in J'Kerian Morgan's music, but they're rarely left undamaged. Rather than working within existing genres, Morgan takes templates and smashes them against the wall, letting the resulting splatter form a sort of musical Rorschach pattern. As Lotic, he shares a penchant for destruction with his fellow residents from Janus, a roving Berlin party that emphasizes weirdness and otherness. Initially known for his love of R&B and pop, Lotic's music took a darker turn around the time Janus's monthly event ended, resulting in the tortured 27-minute collage Damsel In Distress. Morgan described the free release as a "cry for help" and a "clean slate," and his debut for Tri Angle follows in its footsteps. Heterocetera is a confrontational EP. Opener "Suspension" is laced with antagonistic tones, as if in listening to it you've triggered an intruder alarm. The title track turns the infamous Masters At Work "ha!" (a ballroom staple) into a cloud that hovers over hissing gaskets and turning gears, while the rat-at-at attack of "Phlegm" is just as erratic. "Slay" and "Underneath," both of which bring to mind fellow Tri Angle newbie Rabit in their use of blank space and reverb, offer a zero-gravity respite, though they're still crunchy and foreboding.'-- Resident Advisor






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Elvis Depressedly N.M.S.S.
'Elvis Depressedly’s New Alhambra is a dark horse contender for the best album of the year. It’s a record full of lush, sedate, synth-heavy pop music that weaves in samples of televangelists and professional wrestlers, each side essentially functioning as its own extended, multi-part song. The songs conflate worship and entertainment,fire and brimstone and hell in a cell, a choir in a cathedral and entrance music over a tinny PA. It’s an engrossing listen, by turns tranquil, terrifying, heart-rending and inspiring. The specter of Chris Benoit — the pro wrestler who, suffering from brain damage brought on by repeated chair hits directly to the head, killed his wife, son, and himself — hangs over the album. The lyrics seem concerned with the point where ring violence becomes real violence, where biblical wrath becomes personal tragedy.'-- Flavorwire






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Raketkanon Herman
'Raketkanon blaast, spuwt en knalt alles en iedereen op zijn doortocht aan flarden. Met een bezetting bestaande uit een handvol gevestigde muzikanten Pieter-Paul Devos, (Kapitan Korsakov) en met vertakkingen naar Waldorf en Tomàn. Voor de opnames van hun tweede langspeler RKTKN #2 wist de groep niemand minder dan Steve Albini te strikken. Deze legendarische producer was in het verleden verantwoordelijk voor onder andere albums van Nirvana, PJ Harvey, The Jesus Lizard en The Pixies. De bedoeling was om de plaat zo live mogelijk te laten klinken, en dat is blijkbaar gelukt. DaMusic heeft het zelfs over een "hyperkinetische concertervaring". Ook elders niets dan lof: "Als we het onszelf makkelijk willen maken, dan zouden we er de recensie van 2012 bijhalen en er nog wat superlatieven aan toevoegen, want nummer 2 overtreft nummer 1 toch wel." - Enola. "En Raketkanon smaakt zo explosief lekker, dat je daar sowieso vrolijk van wordt!" - Cortonville.'-- DEMO






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Blanck Mass Detritus
'Benjamin John Power’s first official recorded venture away from his fellow Fuck Button Andrew Hung, under the name Blanck Mass, felt instantly familiar, but a particular absence nagged in places. On Dumb Flesh, containment is a central theme. The title alludes to how humans are limited by the imperfections of their bodies. For all the supposed evolutionary advancements and achievements of the human mind over civilization’s lifespan, there are more ways to get cancer than ever before, and death still awaits us all – at least until Google figures out how to upload our consciousness to the cloud. Powers puts the body at the forefront of his audience’s mind is by suggesting that they move it. In a U-turn from the cerebral escape of Blanck Mass, Dumb Flesh stretches tautly over gnarled techno bones. Like a shiny new penny left submerged long enough in Coca-Cola, the elements of dance music corrode here in Power’s hands. Like Fuck Buttons, Dumb Flesh doesn’t deconstruct electronica, but it does repurpose it, skeptically questioning its motives. Unlike Fuck Buttons, Power isn’t interested in creating immovable monoliths on Dumb Flesh. The cyborg groan of the opening “Loam” is about as close to Blanck Mass as the album gets, though its surface is craggier. From there, first single “Dead Format” erupts without notice, throbbing fully formed and foreboding, as if the second half of all those tracks from the debut had been found after all. “No Lite” makes a similar first impression, throwing the listener into a cacophonous whirl. Instead of raging on, it simmers down to a few remaining wisps, then finds its slalom and builds back up in a completely different form.'-- Pop Matters






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Palace of Swords Ringstone Round
'Palace of Swords are an experimental /garage/ visual band based in Aberdeen, Scotland. Formed in July 2010, the band consists of a shifting line-up overseen and orchestrated by multi-instrumentalist Peter Lyon. Palace of Swords’ music has been variously described as ‘medieval dirge’, ‘pop art gothic’ and ‘space-minimalism’. Their cited influences include Erik Satie, Kenneth Anger soundtracks, The Fall, Felt, Neu! and Nico.'-- collaged







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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Mm ... I don't think I know it. I should, post-haste, I gather? And will do. Well, your Sacks piece was superb, if I didn't so say so before, so a ton and half just sounds like justice to me. ** David S. Estornell, Thanks, David! ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Thank you. That sounds familiar about Louis the 16th. I'm going to hunt that down. ** Bill, The gun key was sweet, right? I don't know 'Locke and Key'. I wondered where that came from. Super good book haul there. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Oh, okay. Yeah, I've never investigated Ligotti other than reading one book of his fiction whose title escapes me but which I thought was quite good. I'm with you on 'Hospice'. If you knew how much work it takes to keep Harry Styles away from this blog as much as I have thus far. ** Cal Graves, Top of my morning and maybe even yours (?) to you, sir! Insanely high is good. No apologies necessary. I even like insanely high commentary. No, I mean ... I think there are a fair amount of tourists who don't realize that the infamous Bastille prison, which is what the place was originally named after, burned down centuries ago, so you do see a bunch of foreigners standing around there wondering what the big fuss is all about. I can't wait for our film to be out too! I hope you fixed the writing thing, as planned. Oh, wow, your blog is full of heavenly looking stuff by you. Awesome! Should I read it from the beginning, or should I read it backwards, blog-style? Everyone, Cal Graves, d.l. and, much more significantly, writer supreme, has finished a writing project called 'The Daily Assignation' whose location is his blog, and I highly, oh so very highly, urge you to go here, which is where it is, and then either start devouring it right now or else bookmark the thing pronto for imminently future reading. Do that, okay? Trust me. Yum! Err, pristinely, Dennis. ** Brendan, Ha ha ha! Yay, Brendan! ** Steevee, Hi. Well, I still haven't seen 'Mad Max', but if all it takes to be important and genius is making wise character and casting decisions, that seems kind of crazy. It seems like a 'whoo-hoo' might suffice? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I agree. Well, I've never made a DJ mix, so I can't agree authoritatively, but that seems very right. Everyone, before we consign the keys thing yesterday to history, how about adding some sound courtesy of _B_A, and, more rootily, Klaus Nomi's 'Keys of Life'. ** Kier, Hi, Kierageous! Cool, I'm glad you liked it. It was fun to make. It was National Day of Norway? I think Zac and I were there on that day a couple of years ago. Is it the day when people dress up in ancient Norwegian garb and walk around all day. In Oslo, at least? Two new lambs, awww. I wish I could see a video of your deftly walking feet surrounded by hungry, excited chickens. Wtf about your farmer boss! He's just a sour dope. Fuck him! With the Eiffel Tower! I hope your psych things do everything you want them to. Yesterday I think I mostly -- yeah, I did -- worked on the script of Zac's and my new film. It's getting really close to being a finished first draft. I kind of really like it. I'm going to talk to Zac about my latest adds and revisions and ideas today and see if I'm on the right track or not. So that wouldn't have been too exciting to watch, and it isn't colorful enough to talk much about, but it was really good. Otherwise, mm, more film stuff. We were told we have to get a bunch of stuff together for 'LCTG' right away. Like, in addition to finishing the special effects and doing the last color correcting, French subtitles and also English subtitles for this short part in the film that's in French, and other stuff. We'll be planning all of that today. Not much else. Tell me how today treated you, okay? ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. It's semi-uber touristy. But I'll get accustomed to that, I guess. There are a fair amount of artists making very good noise stuff nowadays, in no small part due to Merzbow's pioneering. But I am kind of easy with noise. It's rare that I hear noise music that I don't find a lot to like about. Sort of like I am with horror movies or disaster movies. Yeah, yeah, 'The Infernal' is incredible. It seems like it has been received well, but it deserves to be hailed and dissected a lot more than it has been, so I'm excited for your in-depth look. I wasn't very into 'House of Leaves'. I liked the concept a lot, but not the thing itself so much. Yeah, I exchanged some emails with Ira just the other day. He seems like he's doing well. He's restless, but he has always been restless, and that's part of why he's great. Bon day! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Thanks, man. It is completely mindboggling how much extremely good fiction is being published with amazing speed right now. Like I've said a bunch of times, I've never seen anything like this before. A total, maybe unprecedented American fiction renaissance. We take it for granted, but, man, this is an important and amazing time. I'm glad you're at least getting hiccups of work in on your novel. Mine remains in waiting for me. Hopefully soon. I'm really fired up about the new film that Zac and I want to make, so I'm concentrating on that right now. The new Gisele piece is, I think, written and all but finished, writing-wise, apart from toying and a bit of fiddling, so it's not so consuming anymore. That's weird: yesterday I came across an article claiming that Dal Solstag is Norway's greatest living writer, and I bookmarked it to read, hopefully today. Handke and Davis being fans is obviously a big lure. Exciting possibility, it seems. Thanks, Jeff. ** Misanthrope, Oh, my charm, that old thing? Glad to hear it's still humming. Ha ha. Jesus Christ, now she's in jail?! Dude, it sure doesn't seem like it's going to be all that hard to emancipate LPS. Not that even an easy emancipation isn't a massive headache, I'm sure. That's nuts. I'm so far out of it on WWE these days. I don't even know 80% of the names you mentioned. I only know Orton, Kane, and Cena. The next Undertaker? Wow. Bray Wyatt, you say? Okay, I'll get all over that/him. Gracias. ** Michael_karo, Thank you kindly, Mr. Karo. I do remember when you showed me yours in SF. Wow, memory is so interesting. I remember that distinctly in all of those details. Dude, you have so many photos. It's nuts. Very good nuts. ** Okay. So, today I give you the latest gig made out of some of the latest music I've been into in a positive fashion recently bordering on now, and now you will do what you will do with it. Listening/watching at least some of it would be a very good way to deal, for instance. But, yeah. See you tomorrow.

'When Donald Barthelme took popular characters (Batman and the Joker) and placed them in unusual, postmodern situations in his short story “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” (1967), he was doing something new: taking an old, familiar story and turning it inside out. He did something as daring when he reinvented the story of Snow White in his 1967 novel of the same name.

'The importance of these literary experiments can be seen in the influence they have had on generations of writers. Now reinventions of popular stories (such as the inversion of the superhero comic in Alan Moore’s Watchmen) and retellings of fairy tales (like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked) are as common as a cold, but when my paperback edition of Snow White was reprinted in 1971, the experiment was unusual enough to warrant this statement on the back: “Donald Barthelme’s Snow White is not the fairy tale you remember. But it’s the one you will never forget.”

'“She is a tall dark beauty,” the book begins, rather predictably, but then quickly veers off into strangeness, “containing a great many beauty spots: one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down:

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The hair is black as ebony, the skin white as snow”.

'We recognize the dark hair and white skin, but what of these birth marks, represented in my edition, not by asterisks but by thick black dots with a white spot in the middle, all in a perfectly straight column that would have been impossible on the curvaceous heroin? This odd reliance on typographical symbols on the first page of a novel, draws our attention to the markings on the page, in much the same way that Laurence Sterne drew our attention to the ink, letters and symbols on the page in his novel Tristram Shandy, published two hundred and fifty years earlier.

'Nothing else appears on the first page. This strange bit of text is only a fragment and we must turn the page to get the next, unexpected line: “Bill is tired of Snow White now. But he cannot tell her. No, that would not be the way. Bill can’t bear to be touched. That is new too. To have anyone touch him is unbearable. Not just Snow White but also Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem or Dan”. Bill and the other six men are obviously the dwarfs, although there is never any mention of short stature in the novel. In early versions of the Snow White tale, these dwarfs did not have names, but thanks to Disney, now they do, cute names like “Dopey” and “Sneezy.” Rather than these, Barthleme gives us common, everyday names, pulling the fairy tale out of the realm of unnamed myth and cute Disney characters into the mundane reality of the modern world.

'Not only are the names plain, but we learn that “Bill is tired of Snow White.” How could anyone get tired of Snow White? What kind of fairy tale is this? Bill also has become adverse to any kind of human touch. This is a psychological problems, rather than a mythical conflict between good and evil. ”That is a peculiar aspect of Bill, the leader,” we read, “We speculate that he doesn’t want to be involved in human situations any more”. This “we” introduces another mystery of the novel. The narrator refers to the group as “we,” but he never uses the word “I” and refers to each character in the third person. The narrator cannot be pinned down to any single persona in the book. The narrator, then is both part of the story and apart from the story, a character in the story and an uninvolved spectator, troubling the role of the narrator in telling a story either from within or without the main events.

'This unknown narrator even interrupts the story at one point to quiz the reader with questions like “Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( ).” He also tests the reader’s understanding of the story, asking, “Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince figure?” Such a question is less comprehension check, however, as it is help from the narrator in understanding the parallels between the fairy tale and this novel.





'However, the narrator leaves the hardest work up to the reader: “Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( )” and then asks, “What is it (twenty-five words or less)?” This last question is one of the most metafictional elements in any piece of metafiction, as the narrator is directly asking the reader to participate in the writing of the novel. The reader is supposed to pencil in an answer and actually add to the text. Whether the reader actually does this (I didn’t) is irrelevant. The invitation to become a coauthor (which is what Roland Barthes called the Writerly Reader) is undeniable. The narrator is inviting the reader to participate in the production of meaning. As for what that meaning is, I wouldn’t presume to take over your responsibility! The rest I will leave up to you.

'In short, the book is not so much a retelling of the story of Snow White, as it is an examination of relationships, especially the relationship between the writer, the text, and the reader. Nowadays retellings of fairy tales are as common as a Hollywood, but few have managed to do them with such intelligence, insight, and wit as the great Barthelme.'-- Metablog on Metafiction



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Further

Donald Barthelme's barthelmismo
'DONALD BARTHELME’S SYLLABUS'
'The Beastly Beatitudes of Donald B.'
'Preface to an Introduction to Donald Barthelme and “The School”'
'Heteroglossia and collage: Donald Barthelme's Snow White'
'Fatigue, Indolence And The There Is, Or, The Temporal Logic Of Collage In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White'
'Language and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White'
'Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme's Snow White'
'BEYOND FRAGMENTATION: DONALD BARTHELME AND WRITING AS POLITICAL ACT'
'The Pirate and Rogue in Donald Barthelme's Anti-Fairy Tales'
Podcast: 'Donald Barthelme, The Collective Shrug'
'Interview by Donald Barthelme with Larry McCaffery'
The Donald Barthelme Archive
'Saved from Drowning: Barthelme reconsidered'
'Game', by Donald Barthelme
'Donald Barthelme on the Art of Not-Knowing and the Essential Not-Knowing of Art'
'The Balloon', by Donald Barthelme
'The Indian Uprising', by Donald Barthelme
'DONALD BARTHELME NARRATES THE PROGRESS OF THE REINDEER'
Buy 'Snow White'



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Extras


Donald Barthelme interviewed by George Plimpton


Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme's 'I Bought a Little City'


Donald Barthelme reading 'I Bought a Little City'


Donald Barthelme reads 'The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge'


Donald Barthelme and Narrative Appeal


Donald Barthelme & Stephen Banker, 1978 interview


Barthelme's Snow White is Awesome



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Towards an Aesthetic of the Aesthetics of Trash:
A Collaborative, Deconstructive Reading of Snow White
by Larry McCaffery

















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Interview
from The Paris Review




You’re often linked with Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and others of that ilk. Does this seem to you inhuman bondage or is there reason in it?

BARTHELME: They’re all people I admire. I wouldn’t say we were alike as parking tickets. Some years ago the Times was fond of dividing writers into teams; there was an implication that the Times wanted to see gladiatorial combat, or at least a soccer game. I was always pleased with the team I was assigned to.

Who are the people with whom you have close personal links?

BARTHELME: Well, Grace Paley, who lives across the street, and Kirk and Faith Sale, who live in this building—we have a little block association. Roger Angell, who’s my editor at the New Yorker, Harrison Starr, who’s a film producer, and my family. In the last few years several close friends have died.

How do you feel about literary biography? Do you think your own biography would clarify the stories and novels?

BARTHELME: Not a great deal. There’s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there. The passage in the story “See the Moon?” where the narrator compares the advent of a new baby to somebody giving him a battleship to wash and care for was written the night before my daughter was born, a biographical fact that illuminates not very much. My grandmother and grandfather make an appearance in a piece I did not long ago. He was a lumber dealer in Galveston and also had a ranch on the Guadalupe River not too far from San Antonio, a wonderful place to ride and hunt, talk to the catfish and try to make the windmill run backward. There are a few minnows from the Guadalupe in that story, which mostly accompanies the title character through a rather depressing New York day. But when it appeared I immediately began getting calls from friends, some of whom I hadn’t heard from in some time and all of whom were offering Tylenol and bandages. The assumption was that identification of the author with the character was not only permissible but invited. This astonished me. One uses one’s depressions as one uses everything else, but what I was doing was writing a story. Merrily merrily merrily merrily.

Overall, very little autobiography, I think.

Was your childhood shaped in any particular way?

BARTHELME: I think it was colored to some extent by the fact that my father was an architect of a particular kind—we were enveloped in modernism. The house we lived in, which he’d designed, was modern and the furniture was modern and the pictures were modern and the books were modern. He gave me, when I was fourteen or fifteen, a copy of Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism, I think he’d come across it in the Wittenborn catalogue. The introduction is by Harold Rosenberg, whom I met and worked with sixteen or seventeen years later, when we did the magazine Location here in New York.

My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

Music is one of the few areas of human activity that escapes distortion in your writing. An odd comparison: music is for you what animals were for Céline.

BARTHELME: There were a lot of classical records in the house. Outside, what the radio yielded when I was growing up was mostly Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys; I heard him so much that I failed to appreciate him, failed to appreciate country music in general. Now I’m very fond of it. I was interested in jazz and we used to go to black clubs to hear people like Erskine Hawkins who were touring—us poor little pale little white boys were offered a generous sufferance, tucked away in a small space behind the bandstand with an enormous black cop posted at the door. In other places you could hear people like the pianist Peck Kelley, a truly legendary figure, or Lionel Hampton or once in a great while Louis Armstrong or Woody Herman. I was sort of drenched in all this. After a time a sort of crazed scholarship overtakes you and you can recite band rosters for 1935 as others can list baseball teams for the same year.

What did you learn from this, if anything?

BARTHELME: Maybe something about making a statement, about placing emphases within a statement or introducing variations. You’d hear some of these guys take a tired old tune like “Who’s Sorry Now?” and do the most incredible things with it, make it beautiful, literally make it new. The interest and the drama were in the formal manipulation of the rather slight material. And they were heroic figures, you know, very romantic. Hokie Mokie in “The King of Jazz” comes out of all that.

Are there writers to whose work you look forward?

BARTHELME: Many. Gass, Hawkes, Barth, Ashbery, Calvino, Ann Beattie—too many to remember. I liked Walker Percy’s new book The Second Coming enormously. The weight of knowledge is extraordinary, ranging from things like how the shocks on a Mercedes are constituted to how a nineteenth-century wood-burning stove is put together. When the hero’s doctors diagnosed wahnsinnige sehnsucht or “inappropriate longings” as what was wrong with him I nearly fell off my chair. That’s too beautiful to be real but with Percy it might be. Let’s see . . . Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, Márquez.

Even Autumn of the Patriarch?

BARTHELME: After One Hundred Years of Solitude it was hard to imagine that he could do another book on that scale, but he did it. There were technical maneuvers in Autumn of the Patriarch—the business of the point of view changing within a given sentence, for instance—that I thought very effective, almost one hundred percent effective. It was his genius to stress the sorrows of the dictator, the angst of the monster. The challenge was his own previous book and I think he met it admirably.

It’s amazing the way previous work can animate new work, amazing and reassuring. Tom Hess used to say that the only adequate criticism of a work of art is another work of art. It may also be the case that any genuine work of art generates new work. I suspect that Márquez’s starting point was The Tin Drum, somehow, that Günter Grass gave him a point of departure . . . that the starting point for the essential Beckett was Bouvard and Pecuchet and that Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King is a fantasia on the theme of Hemingway in Africa. This is not the anxiety but the pleasure of influence.

You don’t, then, believe in entropy?

BARTHELME: Entropy belongs to Pynchon. I read recently that somebody had come forward with evidence that the process is not irreversible. There is abroad a distinct feeling that everything’s getting worse; Christopher Lasch speaks of it, and so do many other people. I don’t think we have the sociological index that would allow us to measure this in any meaningful way, but the feeling is there as a cultural fact. I feel entropy—Kraus on backache is a favorite text around here.

Do you see anything getting better—art, for instance?

BARTHELME: I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it’s a horizontal line, not a vertical one. Similarly the notion of an avant-garde is a bit off. The function of the advance guard in military terms is exactly that of the rear guard, to protect the main body, which translates as the status quo.

You can speak of political progress, social progress, of course—you may not see much of it, but it can be talked about.

Well, you’ve established yourself as an old fogey.

BARTHELME: So be it.



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Book

Donald Barthelme Snow White
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster

'An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale provides an incisive and biting commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life.

'In Snow White, Donald Barthelme subjects the traditional fairy tale to postmodern aesthetics. In the novel, the seven dwarves are men who live communally with Snow White and earn a living by washing buildings and making Chinese baby food. Snow White quotes Mao and the dwarves grapple with low self-esteem in this raucous retelling of the classic tale.'-- Simon & Schuster


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Excerpts


Baby Dim Sum

It is amazing how many mothers will spring for an attractively packaged jar of Baby Dim Sum, a tasty-looking potlet of Baby Jing Shar Shew Bow. Heigh-ho. The recipes came from our father. “Trying to be a man about whom nothing is known,” our father said, when we were young. Our father said several other interesting things, but we have forgotten what they were. “Keep quiet,” he said. One tends to want that, in a National Park. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting. A canned good is more interesting. When we sing the father hymn, we noticed that he was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explicitly commented upon, in the text.


Dirty Great Poem

Now she’s written a dirty great poem four pages long, won’t let us read it, refuses absolutely, she is adamant. We discovered it by accident. We had trudged home early, lingered in the vestibule for a bit wondering if we should trudge inside. A strange prehension, a floating of some kind. Then we trudged inside. “Here’s the mail,” we said. She was writing something, we could see that. “Here’s the mail,” we said again. Usually she likes to paw over the mail, but she was preoccupied, didn’t look up, not a flicker. “What are you doing their,” we asked, “writing something?” Snow White looks up. “Yes,” she says. And looked down again, not a pinch of emotions coloring the jet black of her jet black eyes. “A letter?” we asked wondering if a letter then to whom and about what. “No,” she said. “A list?” we asked inspecting her white face for a hint of tendresse. But there was no tendresse. “No,” she said. We noticed then that she had switched the tulips from the green bowl to the blue bowl. “What then?” We repeated. We observed that she had hauled the Indian paintbrush all the way out into the kitchen. “Poem,” we had the mail in our paws still. “Poem?” we said. “Poem,” she said. There it was, the red meat on the rug. “Well,” we said, “can we have a peek?” “No,” she said. “How long as it?” We asked. “Four pages,” she said, “at present,” “four pages!” The thought of this immense work...


Royal Blood

At times, when I am ‘down,’ I am able to pump myself up again by thinking about my blood. It is blue, the bluest this fading world has known probably. At times I startle myself with a gesture so royal, so full of light, that I wonder where it comes from. It comes from my father, Paul XVII, a most kingly man and personage. Even though his sole accomplishment during his lack of reign was the de-deification of his own person.


Mr. Quistgaard

Although you do not know me my name is Jane. I have seized your name from the telephone book in an attempt to enmesh you in my concerns. We suffered today I believe from a lack of connection with each other. That is common knowledge, so common in fact, that it may not even be true. It may be that we are overconnected, for all I know. However I am acting on the first assumption, that we are underconnected, and thus have flung you these lines, which you may grasp or let fall as you will. But I feel that if you neglect them, you will suffer for it. That is merely my private opinion. No police power supports it. I have no means of punishing you, Mr. Quistgaard, for not listening, for having a closed heart.


Three-Pronged Assault

“I had in mind launching a three-pronged assault, but the prongs wandered off seduced by fires and clowns. It was hell there, in the furnace of my ambition. It was because, you said, I had read the wrong book. He reversed himself in his last years, you said, in the books no one would publish. But his students remember, you said.”


Bill

BILL has developed a shamble. The consequence, some say, of a lost mind. But that is not true. In the midst of so much that is true, it is refreshing to shamble across something that is not true. He does not want to be touched. But he is entitled to an idiosyncrasy. He has earned it by his vigorous leadership in that great enterprise, his life.


MOTHER

“MOTHER can I go over to Hogo’s and play?” “No Jane Hogo is not the right type of young man for you to play with. He is thirty-give now and that is too old for innocent play. I am afraid he knows some kind of play that is not innocent, and will want you to play it with him, and then you will agree in your ignorance, and then the fat will be in the fire. That is the way I have the situation figured out anyhow. That is my reading of it. That is the way it looks from where I stand.” “Mother all this false humility does not become you any more than that mucky old poor little match-girl dress you are wearing.” “This dress I’ll have you know cost two hundred and forty dollars when it was new.” “When was it new?” “It was new in 1918, the year your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I’ll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.” “Mother I know Hogo is thirty-five and thoroughly bad through and through but still there is something drawing me to him. To his house. To the uninnocence I know awaits me there.” “Simmer down child. There is a method in my meanness. By refusing to allow you to go to Hogo’s house, I will draw Hogo here, to your house, where we can smother him in blueberry flan and other kindnesses, and generally work on him, and beat the life out of him, in one way or another.” “That’s shrewd mother.”




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p.s. Hey. We owe today's post to a suggestion from Mr. E. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you again for giving me the idea for today. I hope the post is okay. I used to see Ishikawa's films, gosh, in the '70s, early '80's? Back when LA had that rich array of repertory movie theaters. I'd love to revisit them. Thanks, sir. Excited for the new Weerasethakul, obviously. If tradition holds, it may open in France very soon a la a lot of the films that premiere at Cannes. ** Damien Ark, Thanks a lot, man! I'll go find your ratethatmusic review. The new Prurient seems way up there in his canon. Yeah, wait to sort the publishing thing out when you're finished. That calculating will just put useless stress on the writing right now, I think. I've never heard that Heiko Julien is homophobic. That doesn't seem right to me, but I don't know him. My advice would be to believe about negative 1 percent of the controversies that grow up around any post-'alt lit' writer at the moment. There's a lot of bizarre hysteria and craziness and totally unsubstantiated accusing going around in that scene at the moment. It must be a pretty hot sex scene to take three days. Lucky you, and, eventually, us. ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks, Mr, T. The Lotic EP is awesome, yeah, for sure. The Prurient too. It's more precise than his last couple, which I think serves his work well. New Blanck Mass is excellent, yes. Nice that we're on some same wavelengths. Shit, I need to get that new O'Rourke. Today. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hi, Jeff. Cool, always nice to luckily give you some potential adds. I heard one track from the Heroin in Tahiti album and really liked it. I'll score it. Thanks, buddy. ** _Black_Acrylic, The Herndon is very good. I've DJed on radio. Or, let's say that back during my brief stint at university, I was a DJ on their radio station for that year. I loved it, even though they gave me the 6 - 10 am slot, yikes. I daydream of being able to DJ again all the time. I think maybe doing it live in front of a crowd might be too stressful for me. Also, my set probably wouldn't be all that dancey. Dude, that DJing Day would be amazing and would receive massive gratitude as well, if you don't mind. Thank you, thank you! ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, really almost all by download at this point. I do check out the couple of pretty good record stores here, but I generally only buy CDs -- I don't have a turntable here -- when the packaging is especially cool. ** Misanthrope, I think most of the music in that gig is probably not up your alley. But I would recommend trying the Elvis Depressedly track. It's great, and it might be in some realm, albeit possibly an outer one, of your pleasure zone. LPS's mom sounds like she's toast, legal-wise, no? If so, what would 'toast' entail? Jesus. I watched a little clip of Bray Wyatt. He did catch my fancy and seem like potential-central. Huh. I'll try to keep an eye on him. Thanks, man! ** Sypha, Yeah, it was 'Teatro Grotesco'. How did you know? Is that most read/known one? So interesting that Penguin is going to publish him. That seems like a really good thing. ** Okay. If you haven't read Barthelme's 'Snow White', here's your chance to find a reason to do so. If you have, share your opinion, etc., please, if you feel like it. See you tomorrow.