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'If you do not know what ecstasy means I can show it to you if possible': DC's select international male escorts for the month of May 2016

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No_LimiTs19, 19
Valencia

I need a more interesting sex life. Who is free now? I need to see a man now.

Dicksize M, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Sportsgear, Rubber, Underwear, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 80 Euros
Rate night 500 Euros



______________




I_need_a-father, 19
Landkreis Böblingen

If you're rich and lonely you want to have a gay son.

(I want to know about you and I care as long as I'm inside our deal.)

Dicksize No entry, Uncut
Position No entry
Kissing No entry
Fucking No entry
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Client age Users older than 40
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



______________



twink_hole, 22
Havana

22 years old, smooth Cuban bottom boy excited to welcome American gay men back to Havana after 30 years the only way I know how. I love giving Americans complete pleasure, sucking, rimming, getting rimmed, ass fucked, mouth fucked, piss, spit, drinking piss, eating cum...all kind of pleasure at the service of only rich people.

Well, dont bother small earning Cuban people, who are just juggling with their monthly budgets, I know you dont have enough money to pay. Your jockey underwear with faded black color in the background of your display pic tells me a lot about what you're capable of financially. i could donate some money to you.

Dicksize M, Uncut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Consent
Fucking No entry
Oral Bottom
Dirty Yes
Fisting No
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Underwear, Boots, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans
Client age Users younger than 53
Rate hour 100 Dollars
Rate night 200 Dollars



_____________






Hexagram, 18
Bucharest

How to begin? I’m not even sure I count as an escort by the standards of this site. Regardless, I have this thing about money and I seem to need to be paid for any sexual activity or it doesn’t work for me. Nothing particularly huge, but apparently too much money for most guys to do. Pretty much anything in the high two figures could be an option.

Ultimately I’m looking for something long term. It’s just that I’ve been sexually incompatible with every guy I’ve dated so far because randomly selected men tend to balk when I ask them to pay me first.

Turn-ons: This isn’t traditionally a dating site, I know, but maybe it’s easier to find a sexually compatible date mate in the population of paying individuals than the other way around. For the most part I’m into cute twinks, but I’m not super fixated on that.

Turn-offs: I hate beards. Strong body hair – especially on the torso – grosses me out. Can’t help it. Also, smoking. And if you tickle me I will stab you. (ง •̀_•́)ง

About Me: I'm Finnish. Other than getting paid, I’m into cosmology, classical literature, using too many en-dashes, putting the cornflakes in before the milk, and K-pop. I'm a student, writer, non-binary, neurodivergent, extropian, Hufflepuff, aspiring rationalist. (If any of these words mean nothing to you, they’re not all that important. I just didn’t want to copy-paste my OkCupid profile, so this serves as a summary.)

It may not come across, but in real life I’m terribly shy. Basically a Victorian Puritan. If you think you can help me with that, go ahead, but just don’t expect sex before you’re actually paying.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing No entry
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No entry
Fisting Active / passive
S&M No entry
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 70 Euros
Rate night 350 Euros



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Alex7, 20
Rouen

Want to get raped for E150 in a public toilet tmorrow morning about 9:30

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Consent
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
Dirty Yes
Fisting No
S&M Yes
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 150 Euros
Rate night 150 Euros



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Tanveer, 21
Vijayawada

Here's I'm Tanveer. I'm very well known in Vijayawada to some Gay's & Bi-sexual's. I'm a MEN and I'm Straight.! I love to meet new People's. I Doesn't Make them to leave Alone. the best part About me is wherever i goes My Friends will Follow me and me& My Friend's had a Group Sex at Vijayawada. My Friends and i are Drunk and High on Drugs. We are a Group and we will meet single or Group. As the persons Decision. I'm not a Bitch no i never come alone. Not always high I do have job.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position Top only
Kissing Yes
Fucking No
Oral No entry
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Rubber, Underwear, Boots, Formal dress, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night 2000 Dollars



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matthewdutch18, 18
Berlin

18 yo dutch teen with great eyes. First time im doing anything for money i really need it. Im looking for some deal. I do everything. I offer primarily anal. I do have a rule that you must be hung at least 11 inches, 13 inches even better. You must cum multiple times. Prefer fucking with condom the first time for money and getting fucked raw the second time that price open for discussion. Im sorry for the rule but Im Catholic if that explains it.

Guestbook of matthewdutch18

matthewdutch18 - 19.May.2016
O ... yes that will be acceptable. Why didn't I think of that before? :0

Uwehome - 18.May.2016
Hi Matthew. You're very beautiful and I want you very badly but I'm not even close to as hung as you require. I do have a dildo that large. Would you accept my dildo instead of my cock. Cumming multiple times is not a problem. Thank you. Hoping, Uwehome

Dicksize XL, Cut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Yes
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
Dirty Yes
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Underwear, Uniform, Jeans
Client age Users between 18 and 50
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_____________




Sexwithmeisamazing, 21
Geneva

I have always been an achiever; be it academics when I was in high school or professional life when I had weekend or summer jobs or sports when I kick the ball around with my friends or sex whether it's with a girl I like or a with man who offers me something I need or any other field in my life. I believe in success through dedication to what it takes to get ahead. My motto in life is to ‘If you want something, work hard & you will achieve it; there are no short cuts’. Please name your desire, then let me fulfill it, which will mark you for the rest of your life.

Guestbook of Sexwithmeisamazing

searcher48157 - 11.May.2016
Sexwithmeisamazing has asked me to write a recommendation for him. I have had paid sex with him on numerous occasions. He is, as he states, a hard working, people pleasing, dedicated partner. During sex, he makes his face and body fully available, and they are both as pretty as in his pictures and as delicious as you would hope. If I were to venture a criticism of his performance, I would say he is an overachiever. Sex with him is like hitting the jackpot yet it lacks mystery. If you are a top who craves usage of his assets, you will come away more than satisfied. If you seek an emotional connection with him, I would probably steer clear.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position No entry
Kissing Yes
Fucking Bottom only
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Fetish Leather, Boots, Lycra, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



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Salopeenchaleur, 22
Paris

Mostly into aggressive top guys under 40. But never met an aggressive top elderly guy before, that could be hot

Guestbook of Salopeenchaleur

City-Carre - 17.Apr.2016
Looking forward to pamper your ass to tomorrow

Anonymous - 03.Apr.2016
CAUTION THIS BOY IS A GROSS

coloquinte - 03.Apr.2016
a piece of trash....

VICES_SEVICES - 03.Apr.2016
- I practice it for several years in France and abroad.
YOU WILL BE SATISFIED 100%
And you have doubt? lol

coloquinte - 03.Apr.2016
this guy sucks a shit
too old peaks; He has over 30 years now, stinks of cigarette; lives as a homeless
No not even kiss and just watches you jerk off
really more than disappointing ... pathetic

Dicksize L, Cut
Position No entry
Kissing Yes
Fucking No entry
Oral Versatile
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



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BoyWithWomanVoice, 18
Marseilles

Boy with totally woman voice :)

40 Euro hour

*2 hour 60 Euro

+ Massage (+ 30 Euro)

+Woman Voice (+ 50 Euro per hour) -- It would be very special experience

Dicksize S, Cut
Position More bottom
Kissing Consent
Fucking More bottom
Oral Versatile
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 40 Euros
Rate night ask



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Be_my_gay, 24
Palm Springs

I just came out after breaking up (with a female). Sex with men is intensely better. I was made for sex with men. Here's why. The ancient Greeks used inbreeding to breed pleasure boys for the Royal Baths. I am Greek. I am also inbred. At puberty I saw a Beverly Hills specialist because I could not lift my legs up to the side like other kids. I have a very unusual tightly bound rectal anatomy with extra muscles on the inside and missing on the sides (a form of hip dysplasia caused by inbreeding). The result is an extreme bubble ass and a hypersensitive hole that is thick at the entrance. My Boi Pussy. In the few times I've been rimmed I orgasmed continuously way more intensely than I ever did fucking females. I never made noise during sex with females and it felt forced, requiring effort to get hard.

When a man licked my hole for the first time he filmed me on live cam. When he started licking my hole I tried to not get hard because I didn't want to look like a bitch in front of all the people watching, about 800 on live cam. But it felt better than anything I ever felt in my life. I moaned uncontrollably for the first time in my life during sex and my cock was rock hard and I was cummng all over my tummy. My cock is 5" long and my balls sit high above my cock because they didn't fully descend. The sight of him fucking me turned me on beyond my wildest dreams. The contrast between us: him, big and hairy with a big cock throbbing for my Greek Pussy Ass; Me, slender smooth pretty boy with my little dick that felt rock hard but stuck out only an inbch or two which I discovered is what happens when I get fucked.

My throat is half the diameter of normal too. The first time a guy rammed his 8" cock down my throat as he came I could feel how tight it felt as I swallowed and how I knew it made him feel made me shoot my load without even touching myself. I climax just at the sight of a cock throbbing for my full soft lips and my sweet ass. I want to be a part time prostitute for men who would enjoy filming me getting fucked and so forth for the Inbred Sexual Abomination that I finally realize I was born to be. Hail to my future clients. You don't have to be big and hairy. Just enjoy the way I lust for your throbbing cock to be rammed balls deep down my tight little throat and up my painfully swollen hole. I ride cock like a rodeo cowboy rides a bull. I put Mostly Bottom instead of Bottom cause I want to Fuck a guy too.

Dicksize No entry, Cut
Position No entry
Kissing No entry
Fucking Mostly bottom
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 120 Euros
Rate night 600 Euros



______________



ELIO, 18
Bonn

I love the smell of a cunt as much as I do of a boy's hairy anus and I am great to hang around with! Everywhere!

Dicksize XL, Cut
Position Top only
Kissing Consent
Fucking Top only
Oral No entry
Dirty Yes
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Lycra, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Drag, Worker
Client age Users between 18 and 18
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_____________




Mystic, 20
Zurich

I drew a smile on my face to paper over me.

Ching Ching
Bling Bling
Cut the Chatter
You ain't talking money
Then your talking don't matter
I want my riches to be filthy
cause with everytime it's fun
I get done til I'm 60

. .. .. / |.. / | _
.. , ../.. 7` ´.. ../_
._. `. ´. , - ..-.. .. +_
.` ,.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. , -
.. _7.. . O.. .O.. .. Y_
.( _.. .. .. (_) .. .. .. _ )
.. .. .. ___o___ ,. /.
.. .. ..` ., - ../., ´
.. .. . / `. === ´ .
.. .. / - | - - - - - -
.. . / - -|- - - - - - - |
.. _ 7 | - - - - - - - -|
. ( _ , .. - - - - - - /
.. (_ / - ´=====|
. _ j __ , - - . , - .. .- .
. ( l l /.. .. .. ) ..____ )
.. ` - — — ´

Sex is like an art that many waste.

Love Justin
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Position More bottom
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty WS only
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Boots, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 120 Euros
Rate night ask



_____________







OxY_OxY, 22
Berlin

SEX WITH ME.
Back agin after trying the sugar daddy monogmous trip. Money was hot but I'm not deep enough for that shit. Back agin with new sugar daddy who like to share my ass wth one or you or many. I'm still Spanish teen fuckhole hornyer than evver for your dicks and most extreme fantasis. Sugar daddy is not attractive he is more like you probly. 3ways wiht us only. I like geting rough bit I'm ok with passion. Cash only.

SERVICER (ASK for PRICES):
-You watch I get kissed rimmed fucked hard (no rubber) fistd by sugar daddy
- Masage lick kiss suck rim me
-Bondage hit me whip me (no marks) watchd or helpd by sugar daddy
-Death (mine) play talk (my specilty)
-Eat my shit and piss
-I have Toys Peppers and Latex

If you are a horny personal and you want have some greate time in my company just say I'm waiting for your badness. What you see is what you get, Don't ask for more! Kiss OXY

Guestbook of OxY_OxY

Anonymous - 16.May.2016
HIS AAAAAASSSSSSSSSS!

Anonymous - 16.May.2016
the most beutifull ass i saw in my life . really NO COMENT....and no only cheek , all inside is a candy ..... but........always prety nasty....

tomy30x - 16.May.2016
His ass is kindly, sexy, hot and clean.
His ass is so sweet and generous and maybe the best in Europe.
He is a bottom proud of his amazing ass and he know exactly how to spread it.
His ass is a free bitch baby!
.... It is the one !

Anonymous - 15.May.2016
SOO NICE ASS....

enjoybcn1 - 14.May.2016
Best ass in WORLD!

kobe8 - 13.May.2016
Wonderful ass ... it gives you all you need!

germanffaust - 12.May.2016
ass is amazing
do its best to please you, personnally i whipe his ass really hard and he let s me do to please me ten fuck ass fist ass a nd breed ti......
definitely the best bottom in Germany

k-a-i-l - 12.May.2016
has this comment box been infected by malware? seriously ..

welter150 - 12.May.2016
the most beautifull ass i have ever seen...

Anonymous - 11.May.2016
Definitly the most beautyfull ass in the world !!!!!!!!!!!!

TRISTAN-WHITH - 10.May.2016
very very sexy hot ass :-)

Anonymous - 09.May.2016
the best ass in Germany... and you can very fuck him hard, his ass is amazing, a dream, a fantasy, slimmy and crazed to get big cock

sebastiaobcn - 08.May.2016
He has, no doubt, the best ass in Berlin. It can take it really well. You won't regret it, you just won't believe it. I must repeat as soon as possible.

k-a-i-l - 08.May.2016
Ok now where is all this "ass" stuff suddenly coming from? Confused.

Anonymous - 08.May.2016
A very sweet, stunning, hairless, skinny, hungry ass!

malebuttlover - 07.May.2016
Your ass so fucking delicious, I couldn't believe it...

Anonymous - 06.May.2016
he is perfectly ass....you wont stop doing sex with this ass...

OxY_OxY - 27.Apr.2016
ooooop !! HAHAHAHAHA :O

diavolettobuono - 27.Apr.2016
hi guys, some of you know me from our interactions here on the site and know i talk straight. my curiosity got the best of me and i hired OxY last night. the simple answer to the "catch" is some of you are missing the word "talk" in "death play talk". if my experience is a judge, he whoresplained that i could "death talk", no sex, no touching. first i thought as a prelude to sn*ff play but no, he just listened and laughed. i think he likes the "talk" the way children like ghost stories. turned us both on then he bottomed for me, very hot, "rough vanilla" i would call it. just saying other than fantasy talk you'd be murdering someone with all the consequence. also didn't see the "sugar daddy," think that might be bull.

abschlucker_sn - 20.Apr.2016
catch is he's lying roma garbage. other catch is comments are probly by him or his roma garbage friends.

k-a-i-l - 19.Apr.2016
This boy is far too hot to be real, whats the catch?

maiasini - 14.Apr.2016
I spent the second night with you.
you are fabulous bottom!!!!!
unforgettable!!!!!!!

OxY_OxY - 07.Apr.2016
i luv u :)

Anonymous - 07.Apr.2016
if i was going to spend the rest of my life in prison or running from the police i wouldn't just to kill some romanian whore piece of shit. if someones going to off him though i hope he films it, id pay to watch this bitch die.

Anonymous - 04.Apr.2016
I spent with you on the night of Friday, April 1.
you are a fabulous bottom
I hope to see you again

OxY_OxY - 08.Mar.2016
that wld cost u ;(

azazz - 08.Mar.2016
I live in Croatia but my fantasy is to slam fuck and fist OxY for hours then shove a Khlebnikov up his gaping hole and splatter the walls with him

Anonymous - 23.Feb.2016
A street boy, no manners, but clean inside and out, cold and unfriendly, but in intimacy 'a war machine, a hole to ram without equal and never in reserve. The only his suffering 'was suppress the screams for the pleasure I gave him.

youngxlover - 18.Feb.2016
I remember when you were "Italian"

OxY_OxY - 14.Feb.2016
life happenned

DoN_SNeAKoss95 - 14.Feb.2016
I remember when you were a top only dominate boy, what happened?

MILANOSEI - 10.Feb.2016
Describe OxY's ass, you can not, because it has so many qualities that I would not know where to start.

OxY_OxY - 01.Feb.2016
u shlouldve ;p

Anonymous - 26.Jan.2016
picking up on SlimmyBoysfun, i hired OxY maybe a year ago, he billed as a "total Top", i got him wasted, took his ass by force, i was pounding him, choking him, he just lay there, i couldve, who would've cared if i did, no one.

OxY_OxY - 18.Jan.2016
try i might like it ;)

SlimmyBoysfun - 17.Jan.2016
you new pictue sitting on balcony is great

you look super on this picture

i wish i can slip knock out pill in you orange juice..fuck you untill you brains squirt out you nose

i fuck you even when you are dead you hot whore

really the best

Andreas

Dicksize L, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing Yes
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Skater, Rubber, Lycra, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 130 Euros
Rate night 600 Euros



_____________



benderer, 21
Hamburg

Hi, Im looking for cocks and why not for a relation with someone who can be kind and generous !!!
Im Daniel, from Bulgaria, and i will be here in Hamburg for almost one week looking for a ton of cocks because Im here for modeling !!!
I'm around the clock cool with whom I like to entertain interesting types me something ! I speak English !!!
I have recently started getting spanked ! However, the outcomes have been disappointing !! Looking to find a guy on introduce me to serious spanking !!
Thanks and don't forget sex it's everything !!!

Dicksize M, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Consent
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting Active
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Boots, Lycra, Uniform, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Drag, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



______________



whatwhatinthebutt, 18
Glasgow

Hey my names greg, iam a teenager, iam loose sexually and into earning money. Basically gay so top bottom, doesn't matter. I love getting wasted and anything goes in the clouds. If your in your teens or twenties and in scotland and horny and can spare some money then feel free. Maybe we can do an exchange.

Guestbook of whatwhatinthebutt

whatwhatinthebutt - 12.Apr.2016
Way!!!

derma2014 - 12.Apr.2016
Bitch no way!!!! Hot!!!!

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Consent
Fucking Versatile
Oral Versatile
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M No
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Rubber, Underwear, Boots, Uniform, Formal dress, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Worker
Client age Users between 18 and 26
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



_____________





DeadBunny8, 19
Manchester

I offer my boy toy for rent, open to 1, couple or group and very open to do everything.
He is a Dutch rubber boy bottom with little common sense.
His ass is tight and I hate it.
Survival of the fittest!

He had another profile on here (Bunny8) but that was before he was my rubber bottom boy toy so delete his previous account.
He doesn't do safe anymore. Cum where you desire.
Simple as that.

Dicksize No entry, Cut
Position No entry
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 ask
Rate night ask



______________





slurp_that_spunk, 20
Las Vegas

My girlfriend lets you in. I am training my biceps and you go directly on your knees and start sucking my dick. I am young, cute and my 22x6 completely fill your moth. Also..

- pissing (in huge quantity, giving my piss in every place you want

- being sucked while drinking a cocktail

- humiliate you

- phone sex

- you as my cleaning maid, fetch items from market

- e-cig smoking

- deciding into your life, your deeds, your decisions,

I am a cute guy so forget its that you will never see my face again!

Dicksize XXL, Cut
Position Top only
Kissing No
Fucking No
Oral Top
Dirty Yes
Fisting No
S&M Soft SM only
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Rubber, Underwear, Boots, Lycra
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 130 Dollars
Rate night 700 Dollars



_____________





Swedishbae, 21
Botkyrka

There's a reason why if you ask the world's most elite tops and connoisseurs of youthful tail to name the most precious and sought after boy-pussy in the world, nine times out of ten they'll name someone Swedish.
The Nazi government had a secret squadron of undercover agents assigned to Sweden whose mission was to kidnap the prettiest Swedish boys and bring them to Berlin to give as prizes to Hitler's favored minions. I know this because my grandfather was one of these boys.
There is no boy more Swedish in every regard than myself. Towering in height, exquisitely boned from my head to my toes, with cold, riveting blue eyes, a large cock that is as pale and smooth as the rest of me, a sublime ass that can change from chiseled masculine perfection to girlishly soft and moist in a heartbeat, and just as important a personality that is impeccably reserved and unknowable inside a body that is as open as any book.
For a price we will discuss I can be your anything, your trophy boy companion filling everyone around you with envy and disbelief, or you can pull my pants down, shove it in and start hot sex right away, or all the realms in-between.
As it's far easier in my Swedishness to express deepest feelings to others from a "safe place" such as writing, I will confess to you now so you will remember and be assured that I dearly love having sex with men. As unknowable as I will seem when I am yours, never forget that the reason why I'll draw my feelings deep inside when we are having sex is both self-preservatory and my gift to you, to keep you wanting, seeking, searching me for my untenable essence.
Ultimately I'm looking for a long-term daddy who can wife me up. In that case preferably Italian and very wealthy.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing Consent
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Versatile
Dirty WS only
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Yes
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Skater, Rubber, Underwear, Skins & Punks, Uniform, Sneakers & Socks, Drag
Client age Users younger than 80
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



______________




Hyperbolicboy, 24
Oxford

Looking for assholes to objectify me. Pay me until I'm nothing more than an object in your bedroom, and enjoy speechless interaction with your new belonging. I'm really into butt play, but willing to try most things. I wouldn't mind finding a guy around my age (early 20s) who'll fuck me me then possibly be my boyfriend. I like to think I'm open minded but I have been surprised/shocked a few times. So be sure to ask, especially if it's something weird you came up with.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position Versatile
Kissing Consent
Fucking No entry
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Fetish Leather, Sportsgear, Rubber, Underwear, Boots, Formal dress, Techno & Raver, Sneakers & Socks, Jeans, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



______________





SLUTTYASS69, 19
Bangor

Hi, if you think I'm like everyone else. No.
I am Slutty Ass on duty for just about anything, but you have me first convince them that you are a sympathetic picture.
I'm not a piece of meat, just my ass, as you and your cock are.

So trust yourself, calm down and write to me.
I am skinny, the one like it, the other not. As everyone wants.
If you do not know what ecstasy means I can show it to you if possible.

Please do not be sad, when something does not work or I have to do.
We will find a solution! My price is quite high, I know,
but who should get to know me no later than after knowing why.
Time wasters kindly your keep distance or I am gonna make your life a living hell and I mean it.

Dicksize XXL, Cut
Position Bottom only
Kissing No entry
Fucking Bottom only
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No entry
S&M No entry
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 1 Dollars
Rate night 2 Dollars



_____________





monster-ass, 21
Cairo

a warm welcome from monsterass

my monsterass skin feel - you are allowed to
my monsterass massage - you are allowed to
fotos of my monsterass - you are allowed to
the monsterass lick - you are allowed to
playing with the monsterasshole - you are allowed :-)
kiss from the monsterass - you are allowed to
book me as an accompaniment to my monsterass- you are allowed to
fuck my monsterass until you spurt - you are allowed to
eat of my monsterass - you are allowed to
....

the list would be endless ye may like to believe

Dicksize L, Uncut
Position More bottom
Kissing No entry
Fucking Bottom only
Oral Passive
Dirty No
Fisting Passive
S&M No entry
Fetish Sportsgear, Skater, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 100 Euros
Rate night 400 Euros



______________





fiavoluntau, 20
St. Louis

I found myself. I never understood what I felt or why I was a tish bit different from others; until I found men like you. I love sex and yes I will do anything I honestly do not judge and I find It funny watching people freak out because I will do sex that's against what I look like...But hey, thats me! I love the dark power villains in books give off and I can't help but fantasizing about being villainized in the stories. I find art and beautify in unglorified sleazy slutty smelly sex scenes. I love the isolation and beauty in weird sex that make people uneasy and I love teasing them about it even if it causes people to shy away from me. I love drugs especially the ones that give me perplexing visuals that don't make sense but leave me uneasy or just in wonder. I love playing roles where I birth characters that become an extension of me but sleazier and sluttier. I hate just not being desired by people. I don't like it when someone refuses to fuck me because I look or like different things. I'm fine with it and I don't do much but in my mind i am like "your a meanie" (just more vulgar) And I hypocritically I dislike people who are overly enthusiastic about having sex with me (unless I am pumped with sugar) I LOVE EATING CUM OMG AND OTHER BODY SWEEETS CX DRINKING MEN'S SALIVA OMFGGG Yes I am weird but here I feel at home!

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



______________



gabbie18, 18
Sukkur

i love thse people who treated me a one of them coz and i believe anyone of a gay deserves to be happy and i deserved to be respected and most of all deserved to be happy and to be loved because my simplicity makes me simply the best.

Dicksize L, Cut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Yes
Fucking Bottom only
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting Active / passive
S&M Soft SM only
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour ask
Rate night ask



______________





champagne&caviars, 23
Nottingham

Thanks all of u for the love and support u have given me and I have been in this field for the past 5 yrs ,

I am looking for stable guys to bang me for money , I am not into many random guys, exception if u are veeery handsome .

Anyway, u can always try to buy me .

SOME CLIENTS WITH ME LAST 4-5 YEARS BCZ I AM A INCREDIBLE FUCK WHO RESPECT UR SATISFACTION .

I love to suck arab dick.

Dicksize No entry, Uncut
Position Bottom only
Kissing Consent
Fucking No entry
Oral No entry
Dirty No entry
Fisting No
S&M No
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 250 Pounds
Rate night 1000 Pounds



_____________






LIME, 18
Beijing

Hello People,

I'm an American teenager who will be traveling with my parents to China next week on a family holiday and I will be able to slip away from them sometimes while I'm there to have some hot sex and great time. I'm a very adorable teenager. I like doing almost all of the things. Don't worry about your satisfaction.

I know what sex with someone as young as me should be worth especially in China where I will become a dream come true and I cannot be afforded by most of you people. So, if you cannot afford paying eight hundred dollars for a session, please do not even try. (Let's make it as simple as possible).

(- I DONT HAVE ANY HAIR ON MY ASS -)

Just so you know my favorite place to cum is in a man's mouth, but I respect that I don't know Chinese men's boundaries and desires. My favorite thing is to be above a man, squatting or kneeling and using his mouth and getting my ass deep rimmed by him, while he lies on his back.

I'll stay at the north east part of the city so as traveling in Beijing takes a lot of time due to traffic or some other reason I estimate it will take me around an 45 minutes approximately to reach near the airport or in the center of town.

(-: IM ALREADY HORNY TO SIT ON CHINESE FACES :-)

Dicksize XL, Uncut
Position Versatile
Kissing Consent
Fucking Versatile
Oral No
Dirty No
Fisting No
S&M Yes
Fetish Underwear, Uniform, Jeans, Worker
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 800 Dollars
Rate night 800 Dollars



_____________




USSOLDIER, 25
Kansas City

Hello, my name is Hunter and I am a REAL U.S. soldier, served 3 tours and just returned from my final deployment in Afghanistan.

If you are interested to hire me, do not hesitate to hire me. You will do what I need you to do and I can do for you what you need me to do and especially we will talk about money.

Dicksize M, Cut
Position More top
Kissing Consent
Fucking More top
Oral Bottom
Dirty No
Fisting Passive
S&M No
Fetish Sportsgear, Underwear, Uniform, Formal dress, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 10 Dollars
Rate night 150 Dollars



______________



LOVE2RENT, 18
Philadelphia

Hello I prefer oldest mans from anyway of world. All the way SEX only. I can suck cock, taking deep throat fuck for long hours nonstop until u get tired. U can sit over my chest and fuck my 18 years old czech mouth till u cant recogknize my red saliva spermed face. Offering services in The States as I backpack through them. Hopefully this is the best place a man can get easily everything. My name is Clark and I am cool.

Why I get so much stupid chat from u!!!?!!
Don't ask for my ass!
Don't lost my time!
Don't ask for xx pictures because only u are horny and use my pic only for jerk off and u not gonna meet me !!!!
IF U ARE CHEAP NOTHING CAN CHANGE U!!!!
ANYWAY HOW MUCH MONEY U HAVE !!?!!!!?!

Dicksize M, Cut
Position Mostly bottom
Kissing Consent
Fucking No entry
Oral Top
Dirty No
Fisting No entry
S&M Passive
Fetish Sportsgear, Underwear, Formal dress, Jeans
Client age No restrictions
Rate hour 50 Dollars
Rate night 100 Dollars




*

p.s. Hey. So, starting on Monday, I will be away from Paris and the blog in San Francisco to show 'Like Cattle Towards Glow' through next Saturday. What that means on your end is that you will be getting rerun posts for the duration as well as pre-set, brief p.s.es that basically just intro the posts and say hi. Also, I will be launching the rerun posts from SF, so they'll appear here roughly nine hours later than they usually do. Please feel more than free to leave me comments or talk to each other in the comments arena next week because I will catch up with and respond to every comment that appears here when I return with a new post and the usual full-fledged p.s. again on Monday, the 23rd. And if you're in SF by chance, please do come see Zac's and my film and us in person on Wednesday. Here's the scoop on that. Thanks! ** Dóra Grőber, Hi Dóra! Cool, I hope you like the RE post. It's oldish, but maybe it'll still be fun? Yeah, it's amazing how different things were back then. It's weird to think that the world outside your own city was only available through landline phones and the post office. And yet it's also weird how, for such huge differences, life doesn't feel all that different, at least to me. It's harder to get bored is kind of the main difference. I don't know. Yeah, it does seem totally possible that you could get a job that's an actual positive addition to your life and not just the time-consuming chore necessary to pay the rent, etc. I hate pre-trip stress, it's so silly, but I always get it until I'm actually on the plane or train, and then I just surrender. I hope you got to write enough and that your pictures met your dreams for them. What are/were they? My Friday was just continuing to work and blah blah. I think I'll finally hit the work endpoint today. Well, I'll miss talking with you this coming week, but let me know what's going on, and I'll try to remember the highlights of my trip, and we can fill each other in 'in person' a week from Monday. Take care, my friend! ** Jamie McMorrow, Shiver ye timbers, Jamie! Thank you massively again for the amazing post. It was and is -- since posts keep getting visited for all eternity, -- a true honor. The viewing figures yesterday were quite stellar, in fact. You had a giant if silent outer audience. Did you get any thunder or anything? We got one approx. 7 second rolling thunder moment. Really interesting about your work to de-drag the song. It really sounds a lot like writing fiction, or how I write fiction. And maybe even more like how I make the gif fiction, which really is a lot about using gifs in combo to create interesting rhythms and energies. See what you think of Aarhus. I really liked Denmark in general. Anyway, it must be really exciting and intense to play for a festival audience. All those people you can't see very well and all that outdoors. Sounds exciting. Do you get nervous before you play live, or maybe I mean especially nervous? Our amusement park book has been on hold for a while because we've gotten caught up in making our films and working on the TV series thing, but we're thinking we might get back into it and finish it if possible before we start shooting our new movie. The book will be photos, videos and audio (on disc), and a series of fairytales set in the theme parks we visited that I'm writing. Might be good. My work is finally petering out by necessity since it has to end by force on Sunday whether the powers that be like it or not. My weekend will just be wrapping up the work, prepping for the trip, and hopefully hanging out with friends or doing something else, I guess. And yours? Hey, have a really interesting next week! I'm definitely excited to hear about the festival and your time there and everything else. And thank you again a ton, Jamie. Take care until next we confer. Lots of love back to you, Dennis. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank for staying that, sir! I hope you have a perfect next week! ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. Thank you for speaking re: the work to Jamie. Have a lovely week ahead! ** MANCY, Hi, Steven. Thanks for speaking to Jamie. I will check it out, today I'm pretty sure. I see a window. Mary Clare Stevens! I've met her a few times and been at post-opening dinners with her, but I've never really talked with her much or hung out or anything. But, yes, she's tight with a lot of LA artists and curators who are friends of mine, and everyone has always spoken really highly of her. I think she's doing great work with Mike's foundation. That's great that you're going to meet with her. Say hi to her for me if she remembers me. That's very cool, and she should be knowledgeable and helpful. Let me know what happens, okay? And take good care of yourself while I'm indisposed p.s.-wise next week! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! Ha ha, that flesh-themed kit is kind of okay. Huh, I know The Phantom Band, but I didn't know he's a visual artist. I'll see what I can see of his out there. Oh, gosh, that Andrew is ... I best not say. God and Satan willing, everything will be wrapped up well before I get to talk with you next. Post the news, if you don't mind. I'll be reading the comments while I'm away. And have the best next week possible, pal! Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve! Oh, you saw that Hardtalk. I totally agree with you. There's some fascinating about that host. While I watch that show, I always find myself trying to figure him out. I hope you have a fine next week, my friend. See you soon. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G! Whew, good news about your niece. It's kind of sad that my nephew's first concert was with bands that he was into at that age but now kind of roll his eyes about. But still. You have an excellent weekend extended through the week ahead and through next weekend as well, okay? Let me know the haps here. I'll be reading, I'll just be temporarily gagged by my trip. Love, Dennis. ** H, Hi, h! Nope, I leave very early Monday morning. Katz is worth investigating, I think. And he was tight with a lot of the New York poets. I used to see him at a lot of readings and literary parties in NYC in the '80s. Take good care of yourself next week please. ** Right. So, due to the verities of time and space, I leave you for now with escorts. I hope you'll stick around to check out the reruns next week and will type a little to let me know how you all are doing whilst I'm away. Have a sterling, productive, and pleasure-stuffed week, everybody. The blog will see you on Monday, and I will see you again in my talkative form exactly a week from then.

Rerun: Jello Day (orig. 01/12/12)

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March 12, 1994

Today I made Jello with Mom. It was green Jello. I licked some of the Jello dust off of my finger. We poured it in the Jello bowl with the warm water. Now we have to leave it in the refrigerator until the morning. It takes a very long time.

I hope it has a good skin on top. The skin is my favorite. I like to eat all along the outside of the bowl and the top part.

Sometimes Mom takes the skin off and throws it away. She says that it is no good, because that part is too old. But that is my favorite part. I like the way it feels on my teeth, like rubber sugar.

When the Jello was done I walked through the woods. It was very muddy. I found the stream and crossed it on the rocks. I saw the blackberry bushes, but they do not have blackberries yet. They don’t even have leaves. I hope they have leaves in time for my birthday. My shoes are covered in mud when I get home. I am almost seven.

-- Joe Riina-Ferrie






Jello's story

'Gelatin, a protein originally produced from collagen extracted from the boiled bones, connective tissues, and intestines of animals, was popularized in the Victorian era with spectacular and complex "jelly moulds". Gelatin was sold in sheets and had to be purified, which was very time-consuming. It also made gelatin desserts the province of the relatively well-to-do.

'In 1845, industrialist Peter Cooper (who built the first American steam-powered locomotive, the Tom Thumb), obtained a patent (US Patent 4084) for powdered gelatin. Forty years later the patent was sold to a LeRoy, New York-based carpenter and cough syrup manufacturer, Pearle B. Wait. He and his wife May added strawberry, raspberry, orange and lemon flavoring to the powder and gave the product its present name in 1897. Unable to successfully market their concoction, in 1899 the Waits sold the business to a neighbor, Orator Francis Woodward, for $450. Even Woodward struggled to sell the powdered product.

'Jell-O remained a minor success until 1904, when Genesee Pure Food Company sent enormous numbers of salesmen out into the field to distribute free Jell-O cookbooks, a pioneering marketing tactic at the time. In 1923, the newly rechristened Jell-O Company launched D-Zerta, an artificially sweetened version of Jell-O. Two years later, Postum and Genesee merged, and in 1927 Postum acquired Clarence Birdseye's frozen foods company to form the General Foods Corporation.

'New flavors continued to be added and unsuccessful ones were removed: in the 1950s and 1960s, apple, black cherry, black raspberry, grape, lemon-lime, mixed fruit, orange-banana, pineapple-grapefruit, blackberry, strawberry-banana, tropical fruit and more intense "wild" versions of the venerable strawberry, raspberry and cherry. During this same period, 1-2-3 Jell-O, a gelatin dessert that separated into three layers as it cooled, was unveiled.

'In the mid-1970s, it was discovered that bone marrow was a sufficient ingredient to make jello, and gelatin manufacturers ceased using ingredients culled from animals' tissues and intestines. Until 1987, 1-2-3 Jell-O could readily be found in grocery stores throughout most of the United States, but the dessert is now extremely rare. In 1989, General Foods was merged into Kraft Foods by parent company Philip Morris (now the Altria Group). New flavors were continually introduced: watermelon, blueberry, cranberry, margarita and piña colada among others.

'In 2001, Green Jell-O was declared the "Official State Snack" of Utah. As of 2008, there were more than 158 products sold under the Jell-O brand name and about 300 million boxes of Jell-O gelatin sold in the United States each year. In 2009, a food researcher discovered a process whereby jello could be successfully produced in its characteristic wiggly form and at lower cost to manufacturers by using the gelatin substitute Agar Agar, which is derived from seaweed vegetation. Jell-O began a limited use of Agar Agar in their gelatin products in 2010, and are expected to begin producing exclusively vegetarian jello in the year 2012.'-- collaged










Amber absinthe and Black Sambuca jello shot


'In high school, you had a friend who decided the very first time he was ever going to take acid was the day of his Geometry final…You asked him how he was doing. He said he was fine except he was a jello horse.'-- Matthew Simmons


'Erica is in the kitchen making Jell-O chicken mousse for dinner. She does things with Jell-O that take people's breath away. Even as she prepares the mousse, there are nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. They are tilted to accommodate layers of different colors and flavors. Doing things with Jell-O improves Erica's mood, and she is oddly gloomy today.

'One of Erica's favorite words is "breezeway." It connotes "ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not." She also loves "crisper." Erica can call her creation Jell-O chicken mousse or chicken-mousse Jell-O, because Jell-O is "a push-button word ...the way the whole world opened behind a button that you pushed."'-- Don Delillo



______
Galeria


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Gelatinas

'Mother Nature doesn't make them; Rosario Gamboa does. The process makes the outcome seem all the more remarkable. Trained hands can create a blossom in less than 10 minutes. (Check out the "gelatina artistica" video on YouTube.) Working in a palm-size hemisphere of freshly set gelatin, Gamboa uses hypodermic needles - some straight, some bent into a U - to inject colored mixtures of gelatin and sweetened condensed milk. It is done while the gelatin is inverted, so it's a little like sculpting a figure from the feet up. Each stab or swath is instantly encapsulated, forming a leaf or petal or stamen. Slight corrections can be made if you're skillful enough; otherwise, it's art without a do-over option.'-- The Washington Post









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Jello bowling ball






___________________
Jello cheeseburger & fries

'Rachel Morrison's "Cheeseburger in Paradise" simulates a cheeseburger, french fries, and a coke. It features a vanilla and walnut flavored Jell-O bun, pistachio flavored lettuce, cherry and cherry cream Jell-O tomatoes, chocolate and chocolate mousse flavored Jell-O burger, orange-lemon Jell-O cheese, lemon-lime Jell-O pickles, and coconut flavored Jell-O onions.'-- Eat Me Daily









____________
Jello false teeth






_________________________
Working/playable jello toy piano








_________
Jello bullets






__________________________
Liz Hickock's Fugitive Topography

'I create glowing, jellied scale models of urban sites, transforming ordinary physical surroundings into something unexpected and ephemeral. Lit from below, the molded shapes of the city blur into a jewel-like mosaic of luminous color and volume. The gelatinous material also evokes uncanny parallels with the geological uncertainties of a city's landscape. While the translucent beauty of the compositions first seduces the viewer, their fragility quickly becomes a metaphor for the transitory nature of human artifacts.'-- Liz Hickock


San Francisco earthquake


Marina Tidal Wave


Rain storm in North Adams, Massacusetts



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Jello amphetamines'
*
* they work





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Jello party olives






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Jelloware

'Sculpting gelatin into new shapes can result in new uses. Jelloware is the name for drinking glasses made out of agar agar (a vegetable-based gelatin) that can hold liquid and can be eaten, too! If they aren’t consumed, these glasses are biodegradable.'-- Mental Floss







____________________________________
Neon Jelly Chamber & Architectural Punchbowl

'British artists Bompas & Parr create fine jellies or jellos, craft bespoke jello moulds and curate immersive food installations. Aming the works that the self confessed jelly-mongers and experience-extenders have devised are a scratch ‘n’ sniff event for Peter Greenaway’s The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover which was introduced by the director, the Architectural Punchbowl in which a building was flooded with four tonnes of punch and guests ferried across it in rafts to indulge in further edible & quaffable revelry – and an expansive glowing installation of black and gold leaf prosseco funeral jellies for San Francisco’s MOMA.'-- random specific













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Broken Glass Jello

'This is one purty purty dessert. My MiL from Hawaii makes this for alllll the parties. It’s surprisingly easier than it looks! This makes for great party food. The colors are so pretty your guests will be impressed, like you took hours to make it!'-- Food Librarian











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Deviled jello eggs






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Jello corn cob






_______________________________
Jello Dianetics e-meter (with blueberries)






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The Glass Ceiling






____________________________
Green Tea & Apple Juice Finger Jello

'Heat slightly more than 2 cups of juice to a near boil. Steep one decaf green tea bag (or one serving of loose leaf tea) in the juice for about a minute, then remove. Pour 1 cup cold juice into a 7 x 11-inch pan. Sprinkle 3 packets of unflavored gelatin (.25 oz each) over the top of the juice in the pan. Let stand for one minute. Pour the hot juice/tea into the pan (sans tea dregs) and stir until the gelatin is dissolved. Stir in 1 Tablespoon of honey. Refrigerate uncovered until firm, about 2 or 3 hours.'-- DashingBean





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Han Solo in Grape Jell-o Carbonite

'Han Solo in carbonite is legendary, so I thought it’d be a fun party centerpiece to have him ‘frozen’ in grape Jell-o. Mix up the Jell-o according to package directions. Pour it into a 9×13 pan and set Han in there nice and gentle like. Chill and serve.'-- justJENN recipes







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untitled






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untitled






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Jello Worms

'Here’s the premise – you stuff as many bendy-neck straws that have been straightened out into a container that can hold at least 4 cups of liquid. Pack them in there as tight as can be (see the step-by-step pictures below). Then, pour the jello gently into and over the straws, refrigerate until set, and then delicately squeeze the worms out of the straws.'-- Mel's Kitchen Cafe







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Jello chicken stuffing and eggs







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Jasper Johns Jell-O Surprise

'Shelly Sabel pays homage to her favorite artist Jasper John's and his infamous 1958 light bulb piece. It's flavored with sweet jalapeno Jell-O because "light bulbs get hot". Sabel's invention won a runner-up prize at the 2010 Jell-o Mold Competition.'-- gastronomista







_________________
26 pound Gummy Bear

'Need an epic centerpiece for your next party? Look no further than the Party Gummy Bear. This 26-pound candy beast ensures that your shindigs have no equal. Imagine the shock of your party goers when they realize that your 32,000-calorie gummy bear also features an integrated one-liter serving bowl! Serve punches, candies, or even more gummy bears from within this seventeen-inch-long confection. The Party Gummy Bear is hand made in the USA, features a 1-year shelf life, costs $200, and is available in a variety of delicious flavors: cherry, orange, green apple and blue raspberry.'-- Vat19.com






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*

p.s. Hey. Today I'll be flying to San Francisco and then stumbling around there in a jet lagged haze. Or that's my guess. You are invited and welcome to think about jello courtesy of this post from the past. Thanks!

Rerun: Object Theatre --> Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller --> The Wild Duck --> Ibsen (orig. 01/01/12)

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'The term “object theatre” was first used in 1980. However, today there are still several different and somewhat controversial ideas of what object theatre is.

'Much of the confusion surrounding object theatre comes from its relationship to puppet theatre. Some theatre scholars (such as Henryk Jurkowski and Jette Lund) believe that object theatre is a part of the world of puppetry, and is merely a more modern expression of this genre, whilst others (including Anne Helgesen and Ida Hamre) utilize the term “object theatre” (or synonyms such as “figurteater” or “animationsteater”) in a broader way to classify all types of puppet theatre. Meanwhile, there are also those that that see object theatre as an independent art form (such as Christian Carrignon, Peter Weitzner).

'Direct translation of certain synonyms of object theatre, such as the aforementioned Norwegian “figurteater” and the Danish “animationsteater”, into English often adds to the confusion, as part of the original meaning of these terms is lost in the translation, and even worse some unintentional secondary meanings are inherited.

'Some of the confusion over the recognition of object theatre as an art form is related to the fact that some object theatre performances are more closely related to certain theater genres than others. On the other hand, others are less related to traditional forms and have more in common with performance art or other modern art forms such as cyborg theatre and image oriented theatre.

'For this reason, I have identified three new subgroups within the object theatre genre. By more clearly defining these individual groups it actually becomes easier to understand the broader concept of object theatre and how it relates to other theatre genres. It is also necessary to do this before attempting to define the boundaries between object theatre and puppetry and performance art, because each of the three subgroups is related to them in a different way.


'1) Animation theatre





'In spite of its name, this form of object theatre is not related to cartoons or animated films, but instead refers to the alternative meaning of the word “animate”, that is to “bring to life” or “to give a soul to”. In this form of object theatre the manipulator seeks to make the objects they work appear to be alive. It is common to use mundane, everyday objects such as chairs, flowers or glasses, although the objects can also be more abstract things such as sculptures or art objects. The manipulators themselves are, however, hidden from the audience by using a screen or black clothes. The attention of the audience is therefore focussed on the object, rather than the on the manipulator. This form of object theatre is more closely related to puppet theatre than the other two. Examples of this type of object theatre include works by Puppet Beings Theatre Company and TamTam Objectentheater.


'2) Theatre of things





'In the theatre of things, it is again common to use everyday, ready made objects. However, the manipulator does not seek to make them appear to be alive as they do in Animation Theatre. Instead the objects often have some symbolic or metaphorical meaning, and the illusion of them being real is more in the mind of the audience than in the way that they appear on the stage. This can be illustrated by an example where there is a small toy car on the stage and the actor acts as though he would be driving this car. The toy car does not look like a real car, but the audience imagines that the car is real and that the actor is actually sitting inside it.

'The other key difference between the Theatre of Things and Animation Theatre is that the actor is the centre of attention and not the object. The actor makes no attempt to hide himself or his emotions, and may even deliberately exaggerate them as part of the performance. There is also a more direct communication between the actor and the audience than in Animation Theatre. Due to the importance of the role of the actor and his acting in this type of performance, it is easy to see how this type of object theatre is more closely related to dramatic acting than the other two. Examples of this type of object theatre include performances by Christian Carrignon, Lasse Åkerlund and the performance Storre Stemme directed by Geirdis Bjørlo and Preben Faye-Scjhøll.


'3) Figure Theatre





'The final subgroup of object theatre is the most contemporary of the three subgroups of object theatre. It can be characterised by the human actors being disguised using masks or costumes in a conceptual way makes them to no longer appear to be a human being, but instead a lifeless object. In some cases, the actor inside the costume “animates” the object which they are performing, for example by playing a life size marionette. In other Figure Theatre performances, however, the object created by the actor may be a part of the scenography, such as a door or a piece of furniture, or they may form a part or the whole of a visual image. The actor in figure theatre balances between acting and non-acting as it is hard to say that someone is acting when they perform the part of a “door” or a part ofthe scenography. The visual image or visual impact is also a very important aspect in Figure Theatre, as it is in performance art, which is closely related to specifically this type of object theatre.

'It is more difficult to find concrete examples of this subgroup of object theatre, however, one recent performance that could be classified as “Figure Theatre” is Vildanden by Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller.' -- Svein Gundersen, ÅRGANG 28



________________

(Little pieces of) Vegard Vinge & Ida Müller's Vildanden







































'Through a genre-crossing berserk race Osvald Alving stages his ongoing dissolution as a Syphilitic Gesamtkunstwerk. With Nietzschean megalomania the artist untangles the bandage of the canonised work he is personally chained to, revealing the open wounds in a search of the stinking sewage underneath the stage floor. Illness and avoidance as salvation in the intersection between child-like genius and forcible inheritance. The ragnarok of Ibsen. A ritual and Odyssean journey towards the sun and the final liberation.'-- Vegard Vinge/Ida Müller

'Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Vildanden, part of a cycle of Ibsen plays, presents a radical view of the Norwegian psyche through their vibrant and highly subjective productions of their national poet. Here in a hand-painted universe where everything – landscapes, buildings, people – is freshly-decorated in bright colours, deeper and darker forces lurk which will soon undermine this happy, shiny surface. Vildanden is presented from the perspective of the Helmer family children – human dolls or puppets - who find themselves imprisoned in a world of money and disease. Vinge and Müller’s uncompromising and unique theatrical vocabulary mixes opera, splatterfilm, puppet-theatre, cartoon and performance. It is theatre as ritual and exorcism.'-- DOPPELGÄNGER

'Ibsen probably enjoys himself, but do we? No, this can't be called enjoyment. It is perversely fun, it is interesting, it is sickening, it is annoying, it is fun, it is embarrassing, it is genius, it is long, it is much - but it is far from nice. Possibly this is such a complete overload of a production it has people turn around and leave in the door. Let us hope not, for either you like this work or not, it reeks of manifestos, will and distinct character. The references to avant garde traditions are strong, and it almost strangles itself in a scream after a theatre revolution.'-- Elisabeth Leinslie, Scenekunst



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Henrik Ibsen's Vildanden

'Ibsen's Vildanden (The Wild Duck) enacts the story of Gregers Werle's descent from Høydal and his intrusive mission into this environment of the insulted and injured. Long suspecting his father responsible for the fall that reduced Lieutenant Ekdal and his family to social disgrace and dependence, he decides to right the injustice. The family, however, is reconciled to its fallen condition, retreating from reality to live on Haakon Werle's largesse. The merchant controls this world, supplying even the wild duck, - the central feature of the Ekdals' imaginative world. Believing truth will set the Ekdals free, Gregers unwittingly destroys Hjalmar's belief in his own identity as husband, father and family breadwinner.

'To overcome the crisis that results, Gregers suggests Hedvig sacrifice her most precious possession, the wild duck, to demonstrate her love for her father. When they believe this is what she has done, Gina and Hjalmar are reconciled and the marriage is saved. But out of view in the attic, Hedvig arrived at her own mysterious decision. We know the moment of her action: Hjalmar's rhetorical question whether Hedvig would be willing to sacrifice a prospective new life for his sake: but this does not explain why her response was to kill herself. Was it a defiant suicide like that of her namesake, Hedda? Or an act of despair? Or of love? Her death is the element of the unpredictable in human affairs – an ‘uncertainty principle' that bedevils attempts at the reformation of the human spirit.

'The realist art of The Wild Duck dictates its scale and type of action; the characters' social class; the furniture and costumes; the stage directions for the actors' gestures and even the pitch of their voices. The demand for meticulous plausibility realism is expected to meet greatly increases the difficulty of the artistic act when the dramatic intention is as ambitious as Ibsen's. He needed to devise a dramatic method to circumvent the restrictions he imposed on his art, to make it do more things than its text seems to allow. The play's expanding circumferences of action encompass individual and family histories, social divisions, the surrounding natural world of retreating forests, lakes and marshes inhabited by the wild duck and its fellow creatures and, beyond these, perspectives of human history and culture stretching back centuries.

'By the multi-perspectival or contrapuntal aspect of his dramas, Ibsen's realism still performs the function of his poetic dramas: of embedding universal perspectives within the particular details of his art. This, of course, is true of most major literature and especially of dramatic art. To create his poetic realism, Ibsen devised a bi-focal strategy that requires the reader or viewer to see and hear beyond the immediate events presented to an order of archetypal implications they have been devised to evoke.

'In an effect reminiscent of Gestalt images or the pictures of M.C. Escher, what you look at gradually becomes a different image. Something like a Gestalt effect, I believe, is in the very title of the play, Vildanden, which to Norwegians, suggest Vildånden (wild/free spirit). Optical references are sounded throughout the text of The Wild Duck; of failing eyesight; seeing and failing to see; of eyes “not always clear-sighted”; of opening someone's eyes to the truth; of perhaps seeing too much like Gregers, who converts reality into parables and symbols, and who asks Hedvig if she is sure the attic is an attic. And there is the presence of the camera, a neutral, inadequate recorder of reality.

'Each character in the play sees reality from a unique point of view; voiced in old Ekdal's superstitions, Hjalmar's sentimentalism, Gina's literalism, Relling's cynicism, and Gregers' mystical idealism. These competing voices surround Hedvig, whose tragedy might be as much provoked by this Babel of voices and views as by any other cause. The play's closing lines, after the senseless suicide, are a bitter disagreement between Gregers and Relling as to the import of what we have witnessed.'-- Brian Johnston


























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'The state must be abolished! In that revolution I will take part. Undermine the idea of the state; make willingness and spiritual kinship the only essentials in the case of a union -- and you have the beginning of a liberty that is of some value. The changing forms of government is mere toying with degrees -- a little more or a little less -- folly, the whole of it.'-- Henrik Ibsen

'To live is to war with trolls.'-- HI

'Do not use that foreign word "ideals." We have that excellent native word "lies."'-- HI

'Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; days of joy, but not peace and happiness.'-- HI

'One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.'-- HI

'Some day, youth will come here and thunder on my door, and force its way in to me.'-- HI
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p.s. Hey. Someone, I can't remember who, requested that I relaunch this particular post the next time the blog went into reruns, which is now, obviously. I hope whoever asked and the rest of you enjoy. Presumed greetings from San Francisco.

Rerun: Richey Edwards' Uncontrollable Finale (orig. 01/04/12)

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1991

15 May: Steve Lamacq, a writer for the NME, interviews Richey Edwards backstage at a gig. Lamacq expresses concern that the Manic Street Preachers' cartoon image will drag them down. He concludes by saying that "some people might regard you as just not for real". After the interview, Richey asks Steve if he has a minute and they stand talking at the side of the stage. During their conversation Richey picks up a razor-blade and, as he talks, begins, slowly and deliberately, to carve something into his arm. Lamacq is dumbfounded as the words 4 REAL appear in striated red slashes across Richey's skin.

'He was so calm, absolutely calm, and didn't look in any pain whatsoever. One of the things that was so strange and frightening about it was that he was so calm. You didn't even feel like he was making a point. He could almost have been writing it in biro.'-- Steve Lamacq





1992

February: The Manic Preachers finish recording and release their first LP Generation Terrorists. The process is enormously stressful. In the studio Richey indulges in every kind of abuse. He cries a lot. He smokes 40 cigarettes and drinks a bottle and a half of vodka a day. It is rumored that he didn't play a single note on the album.





1 June: single, "Motorcycle Emptiness" is released. It is the band's biggest hit while Richey is a member.






1993

October: Manic Street Preachers tour Japan and Germany. In Japan, there is supposedly an incident between Richey and a female fan.

'While shivering outside a London gig one day, my friends and I had met 2 Japanese girls who loved the Manics so much that they had flown over to England just to watch them play for one night. When the Manics set off to tour Japan, our friends were just so excited. One of the girls asked if we thought she should sleep with Richey. Naturally, we told her to go for it. The next evening this girl called back, and told us that the Manics had played and that she had met Richey. He had invited her back to his room. She went to his room and then changed her mind but Richey did not listen to her. Afterwards he told her that he was sorry. He couldn’t help himself, because all men are worthless pigs. After she left, she had to go to hospital, but she didn’t go to the police.'-- Tracy Sharkpool




In Germany, Richey goes through a self-admitted "bad period". He begins to stub out cigarettes on his arm, and his drinking increases. The band send him to a health farm (for the second time), when they return to Britain.


November: single, "From Despair to Where" is released. Fearful that asking for Richey's release from the health farm even for an afternoon to shoot the video will occasion a set back, the video is recorded in a wing of the hospital.





7 December: Manic Street Preachers' manager, Philip Hall, age 34, dies of cancer.



1994

8 April: Kurt Cobain, a favourite artist of Richey's, is found after killing himself approximately three days earlier.


22-23 April: Manic Street Preachers play two shows in Bangkok, Thailand. The second night, Richey is given a set of knives by a fan, which he uses to cut his chest before the show. He also stops eating around this time. Richey is sent to a health farm (for the third time), when they return to Britain. The band will see, in retrospect, the Thai concerts as the beginning of the serious trouble with Richey.





April: Richey's friend from university, Nigel, hangs himself.


31 May: single, "Faster/PCP" is released.







June: Richey is interviewed at the Brat Awards by MTV





July: Richey disappears for 48 hours. Shortly after he returns, following two days of drinking and self-mutilation, in an apparent suicide attempt, he is committed to Whitchurch hospital, Cardiff, then the Priory Clinic, Roehampton, for ten weeks of rehabilitation.


30 July: Manic Street Preachers honour their commitment to play at the T In The Park and Reading festivals, without Richey.


8 August: single, "Revol", is released.





Early September: Richey checks out of the Priory Clinic.


7 November - December: Manic Street Preachers tour in Europe, as the support act for Suede. Sometime during the tour, Richey buys a meat cleaver, apparently intending to chop off his fingers, so that he doesn't have to play onstage, in emulation of Steve Clark, guitarist for Def Leppard. The cleaver is taken away from Richey before he can use it on himself.


24 November: Nicky Wire of the Manics discovers after a show in Amsterdam that Richey has cut himself vertically down his chest, an injury which requires 36 (by some accounts) stitches.


29 or 30 November: the last TV interview with Richey is recorded in Stockholm for a Swedish TV channel.







1 December: Nicky finds Richey outside the group's hotel in Hamburg, Germany, repeatedly banging his head on the wall, blood streaming down his face. The European tour is ended, despite several more shows on the schedule.


19-21 December: Richey's last three shows with the Manic Street Preachers, at the London Astoria. The group smashes their equipment at the end of the last show.






1995

January: Manic Street Preachers begin rehearsals for their fourth album. Richey takes £200 a day from his bank account for the two weeks before his disappearance, for a total of £2800.


14 January: Richey and his sister, Rachel, bury the dog they had for 17 years, Snoopy. It is the last time Rachel sees Richey.


Mid-January: Richey attends a show at TJ's in Newport. This is the last time he is seen at a public event.


23 January: Richey gives his last ever interview, for the Japanese magazine, Music Life, with Midori Tsukagoshi who also photographs him in his home.





23 January: Richey sees his parents for the last time.


31 January: Richey talks to his mother for the last time.


31 January: Richey and bandmate James Dean Bradfield check into the London Embassy hotel on Bayswater Road in London in preparation for leaving for their promotional tour of America the next day.



Richey's room at the Embassy Hotel


1 February: 7 AM (GMT): Richey checks out of the Embassy hotel, and is never seen again. It is certain that he drives to his apartment in Cardiff where he leaves some things before driving away again. By some accounts, he does not enter Wales for eight hours after leaving the hotel. Meanwhile, James goes on to America, believing Richey might return after a few days.



Richey in his apartment, January 1995


February: sometime during the two weeks following his leaving the Embassy Hotel in London, Richey is supposedly spotted at the passport office in Newport. Edwards' local bank is contacted. They reported that Richey had not used his account since January 31, though he had withdrawn £200 a day on the 14 previous days.


5 February: David Cross, a fan from Mid-Glamorgan, supposedly sees Richey at the Newport bus station.

'I got off the bus alone and I usually buy the Sunday papers from a newsagent's shop which is a very short distance from the bus station. As I approached the newsagent's I saw Richey James Edwards. He was stood alone near to a silver grey coloured car. I approached him as I was going to the shop. Although I do not know him, I said to him: 'Hello, Richey, I'm a friend of Lori's.' And he said, 'How is she? How is she doing?' I said: 'She's fine.' He looked at me and said: 'I'll see you later.' He was wearing a dark, blue-coloured jacket.'-- David Cross


Newport Bus Station


7 February: Anthony Hatherhall, a taxi driver from Newport, supposedly picks up Richey from the King's hotel in Newport, and drives him around the valleys, including Blackwood. 'He requested that we go via the scenic route and not along the motorway because he said he was always driving along the motorway. The fare was £68.'


8 February: German Manics fan Monika Pommer claims she received a postcard from Edwards postmarked London February 3, 1995. As 'proof', she sent police a copy of a postcard which Edwards sent her from Cardiff on December 13, 1994. The card, a portrait of Egon Schiele's 'Sunflowers' from 1913, read: "Thanks for all the presents, the coffee especially, take care of yourself, be happy, love Richey."


17 February: Richey's Vauxhall Cavalier is reported abandoned at the (Aust) Severn service station. Apparently, Richey has been living in it for a time. The battery is run down, and burger wrappers and pictures of his family, which were taken the month before, are found in it.



(Aust) Severn service station


22 February: Cardiff Police are told that Edwards is staying at Henlow Grange health farm in Bedfordshire. Biddulpshire detective DC Billy Greenwell contacted the farm, which said a quiet, withdrawn musician was staying there. However, further checks revealed him to be a Londoner.


late February: Sinead O'Connor claims that Edwards is visiting the Hereford home of a schizophrenic fan. Edwards and O'Connor had previously spoken by telephone and O'Connor had told him about the fan, who spends most of his time writing to her. She read about Edwards' disappearance in NME, then contacted police with the information that Edwards has sought refuge in Hereford. However, a police check turned up yet another blank.


July: 16-year-old Lucy Winters, of Gargrave, near Skipton, North Yorkshire, said she saw Edwards walking the streets, looking haggard and unhealthy, carrying a yellow and green rucksack type bag which was "tacky".



1996

28 February: Vyvyan Morris, a lecturer from Neath College in South Wales, supposedly sees Richey in a hippie market in Goa, India.

'Morris was on holiday in Goa with his girlfriend and had seen Richey at Anjuna outdoor market, a popular hippy and backpacker hangout. He had momentarily lost his girlfriend, who had their camera, when he spotted the man who he believed to be Richey sitting opposite him in a café. He recognised him, but couldn't quite place his face. Just as he realised who he was, after about five minutes, the man stood up, went outside and boarded a minibus - which is the reason Morris gave for not being able to speak to him. Morris described the man as "wearing a kaftan top and jeans" with "quite matted longish hair" and that he was "fuller" than the "amphetamine gazelle" he remembered from before. He also said he was "sunburnt and a bit out of it". Immediately afterwards, Morris asked a hippy sat nearby if he knew who the mystery man was. The hippy, Jeff Reid, originally from Bath who had been in Goa 20 years, told Morris that the man was called Rick, a 'newcomer' who had been there for 18 months. Morris asserts he is certain that the man he saw was Richey, as he had met him at a gig in Singleton Park, Swansea, in August 1993. Police interviewed Morris over the phone on March 3 and told him his story "rang true".'-- NME


the Goa hippie market


15 April: single, "A Design for Life", co-written with Richey but recorded after his disappearance, is released.






1998

November: Tracey Jones, a British-born barmaid on the island of Fuerteventura, supposedly sees Richey in the Underground Bar in the town of Corralejo.

'The guitarist from the Manic Street Preachers who disappeared three and a half years ago has apparently been seen alive and well in the Canary Islands.Tracey Jones, a British-born barmaid on the remote island of Fuerteventura - described as a 'Robinson Crusoe' island - in the Canary Islands, was working in the Underground Bar in the town of Corralejo. She and another customer spotted a thin man in the pub. "One of the customers shouted 'You're Richey from the Manic Street Preachers!' ," she said. "The man just started to run towards the door and within seconds he was gone."'-- The Telegraph


The Underground Bar



1999

December: As a detective in the Metropolitan police force, Keith Charles uses his rare gift for psychic detection to investigate Richey Manic's disappearance and gives some spectacular examples of his success.

'The night he left the hotel to drive west, Richey was not masterminding his own disappearance and this was far from his intention. He had a mental switch-off and set out on the first part of a trek across Europe, initially going to Holland where he settled for a while, busking and restaurant waiting to make just enough money to keep him going. I see Richey living in some poverty to begin with, in back streets, almost like a waif and stray. Then he suffered a complete breakdown and was taken in by members of some kind of religious sect who restored him to good health. For the first time in a good while, he was comfortable, well fed and well cared for. He had escaped death by a whisker. Somehow, he found his way to India - maybe through this sect - and that is where I see him now; a new person living a totally new life, probably, because of a kind of amnesia, unaware of his past life in England as a rock star with the Manics. The name "Bahktar" seems to be important, although I don't know if this is a name he has taken, or it could be the name of the place in northern India where he now lives, a town on the border with Pakistan. Richey has taken the name "Dom", so he might be called Dom Bakhtar. I just know that in the language where he is now living, the name he has adopted means "little bird". Though Richey's new life is a frugal one, he is very happy. In fact, he has never been happier. It is as though he has rediscovered himself. Where he now lives is an idyllic place; there must be water nearby because I can see boats.'-- Keith Charles



2002

January: with the seventh anniversary of Richey's disappearance near, his parents, Graham and Sherry Edwards, say they will never have their son declared dead.


4 February: The last known photograph of missing rock star Richey Edwards is been published by British magazine The Big Issue in a bid to solve the seven-year mystery of his disappearance. The parents of the missing Manic Street Preachers guitarist are hoping readers of The Big Issue - and the homeless who sell it - can find their lost son.





March: a pair of trainers, along with some bones, are found washed up by the Severn River. They are later determined to not be Richey's.


2003

21 July 21: The body of a tattooed man is found washed up off Beachy Head. Eastbourne coroner's officer Michael Davey telexes Harrow Road at 12.45pm and says: "This may be Richard Edwards, missing from here since '95, ref: 584-21-DR-95. There has been very great press interest in this as is (was?!) a member of 'Manic Street Preachers' popular music group, known very well by you, I've no doubt. Please be aware before making public." The body is identified, but it turns out not to be Edwards.



2004

October: it is reported that Lee Wilde supposedly saw Richey on Famara beach, Lanzarote.

'I know people will find this difficult to believe and that they'll think I'm some sort of crackpot, but I am convinced that is who I saw. Everyone I've mentioned it to - including yourselves - just gives me that quizzical look with a raised eyebrow, but I know what I saw and I'm totally certain of it. He didn't do anything very much, we smiled and chatted briefly - you know, just hello and some small talk. He was looking out across the water with half closed eyes because of the sun but he still watched me approach. Before I could say hello back, he just said something like "it's beautiful isn't it?" all while staring ahead. He was talking about the view obviously but I was more intrigued by his appearance - there was something quite different about him. He was incredibly thin, skinny would be a good description, a drawn complexion and greying hair. Then there were his arms. They were wrapped in leather bracelets and fabric that looked like rags - but in a fashionably untidy way, I don't think they were bandages but on the areas of his arms that weren't covered you could make out scars which looked worse than they really were because of his tanned skin. If it was him, then he's here because he wants to be here - if he wanted to be back in the UK he would be - obviously he wants to be left alone.'-- Lee Wilde


Famara Beach



2008

23 November: as of this date, Richey's legal status has been changed, by court order, to "presumed dead". His parents, Graham and Sherry Edwards, have been granted control of his estate, and the missing person case on Richey is now officially closed.



2009

18 May: The Manic Street Preachers release their ninth album Journal for Plague Lovers featuring posthumous lyrics by Richey Edwards. It is the only Manic Street Preachers album in which the lyrics for every song were written solely by Edwards.

'The lyrics are taken from a folder of songs, haikus, collages and drawings Edwards gave to bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire a few weeks before he disappeared. Edwards also gave photocopies of the folder to singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore. The band have described the Rymans folder as having a picture of Bugs Bunny drawn on the front emblazoned with the word ‘OPULENCE’. In promotional interviews for the album, Bradfield and Wire have revealed that the folder contains around 28 songs. Four of these appeared on the 1996 album Everything Must Go: "Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier", "Kevin Carter", "Removables" and "Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky". Of the rest of the folder, Wire stated: “There’s probably between eight and ten maybe that were too impossible. Some of them are little haikus, four lines. "Dolphin-Friendly Tuna Wars", that’s one, "Alien Orders/Invisible Armies", that’s one where we recorded an instrumental that takes its title from this lyric. "Young Men", which is quite Joy Division. They just didn’t feel right. We’ll probably put them all out in a book one day."'-- NME






2011

14 January:Richard, a novel by Ben Myers that imagines what really happened on the night Richey Edwards disappeared is published.

'The beck is far away below as I continue along the reptile's spine. It is nothing more than a grey wound in the earth, a meandering fissure in the earth's crust, the car-sized boulders that litter its banks reduced to jagged dots lifted down the valley during the last days of the ice age some twenty thousand years ago and randomly deposited at the beck's side – itself the last trickling traces of a glacier that must have once covered South Wales with hundreds of miles of creaking, shifting, landscape-sculpting ice. Where the beck snakes downhill, miniature oxbows have formed amongst the rocks and small shelves where the earth has been sluiced away by the flow, revealing redpeat cross-sections from which tangled roots protrude and earthworms gamely attempt to wriggle back into the wet loam.
----Across the other side of the valley, patches of flattened bracken are patterned across the hillside; great brittle burnt-orange swathes, poised for fossilization. I realize I am walking through one such crop now, a mirror image of what I can see a mile away as the crisp branches and dead leaves crunch underfoot like a frost. I am tired and I keep coughing but I intend to keep walking, even if it kills me.'
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p.s. Hey. If you're in San Francisco, you should come see LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW and Zac and me at Alamo Drafthouse tonight at 7 pm. Whether you're there and can come or not, please find out if this Richey Edwards-centric post has something in it for you. I hope all of you are well.

Rerun: 185 backstage passes (orig. 01/07/12)

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p.s. Hey. I can't remember why I decided to bring this post back. But I mean ... why not? Enjoy your sort of V.I.P. status. I'm spending my last full day in San Francisco doing something. And you?

Rerun: Spotlight on ... William Burroughs The Wild Boys (1969) (orig. 11/07/11)

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'William S. Burroughs' 1969 novel The Wild Boys introduces several themes into the author's magical universe: the struggle to escape the mechanisms of social control; the search for transcendence of the biological trap of duality, and the narrator's ability to rewrite (and thereby destroy) his own past. The Wild Boys, subtitled A book of the dead has been described by some critics as a homosexual version of Peter Pan. Set in an apocalyptic near-future, The Wild Boys contrasts the struggle between the remnants of civilisation which exist in totalitarian enclaves and the wild boys - a revolutionary tribe of youths who exist in a utopian, instinctual state. The wild boys exist outside of the conventions of civilisation, free from the control mechanisms of religion, nation, family and 'normal' sexuality. A magical universe, where rigorous training in guerrilla tactics leads towards specialised biological mutations; where the total gratification of desire creates a magical technology of liberation.

'The wild boys themselves live as a tribe - without leaders or hierarchy but with a shared group consciousness. Rather than being individual characters, they are a manifestation of all that is repressed in civilised society, in particular, the forces we know as Eros and Thanatos. In the novel, the wild boys periodically explode into orgies of wild, unstoppable violence or lust. Through the use of drugs and sex, the wild boys discover a magical technology of restoring the dead to life, and so free themselves from biological dependence on women, birth, and death. Lacking an individual sense of self, they can cross to and from the land of the dead and exist in a liminal state between the worlds. They are, within Burroughs' magical universe, a male-only version of the maenads, representing the chaotic power of instinctual desire when manifested in a living form. Also, they can be likened to the ancient Greek Pan, manifesting as the call to the wild, which reaches out to the susceptible. In The Wild Boys, the image of a smiling wild boy becomes a hugely popular media icon which spreads the wild-boy virus across civilisation, causing more and more youths to join the wild boys.

'The wild boys are a utopian (perhaps dystopian) fantasy, but that is the whole point. As an articulation of Burroughs' need to escape the confines of modern culture, he has created a beachhead into an alternative dream. The wild boys present not only a homoerotic fantasy of immediate sexual gratification, but also the potentiality to be a space where new forms of 'otherness' might develop.

'The wild boys also embody trends in modern culture that many find uncomfortable; in particular, the idea of youths escaping from social control and literally 'running riot', and anonymous sexuality. Anyone who has participated in the anonymous sex which takes place in the interstitial zones of cities - parks, alleyways, truck-stops, docklands, restrooms, etc., will recognise the group consciousness of the wild boys, where words are unnecessary and communication is based on eye contact, touch, smell; where desire is communal rather than private. Instincts and impulses are uncluttered by personalities. For Burroughs, the wild boys fucking in the ruins of civilisation, represent a return to a primal state of being, what is referred to in Tantra as Sahaja - spontaneity - the 'natural' state of a human being who has achieved liberation from artificial limitations.'-- Phil Hine



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Further


WSB's photo/scrapbook for 'The Wild Boys'
A graphic adaptation of 'The Wild Boys'
The 1971 New York Times review of 'TWB'
Blake Butler 'Fuck Now talk later: Revisiting 'TWB' @ HTMLGIANT
'Looking for the Wild Boys'
'Wild Girls: Kathy Acker rewrites Burroughs'
Mp3: Colin Bright's musical adaptation of 'TWB'
About the aborted WSB/S. Clay Wilson 'TWB' collaboration
Mp3: WSB reads from 'TWB' and other works
'William S. Burroughs - 20th Century Gnostic Visionary'
The Wild Boys Message Board




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Media



Rare footage of William Burroughs talking about'The Wild Boys'


WSB reading from 'TWB' 1


WSB reading from 'TWB' 2


William S. Burroughs 'Commissioner of Sewers'



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William Burroughs'Abstracts


'The Abstracts of 1969 are a series of seven writing experiments which William Burroughs developed in the writing of his novel The Wild Boys. He published these Abstracts that year in small-press journals and underground newspapers, his usual testing ground in the 1960s. Their unusual format of careful juxtaposition is already familiar to anyone who has read The Wild Boys. Added to the five “Abstracts” found in The Wild Boys (actually six Penny Arcade Peep Shows / Abstracts, if you include the reprint of an Abstract first published in the journal Intrepid), the number of published individual Abstracts comes to twelve.'-- The Reality Studio





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Book



William Burroughs The Wild Boys
Grove Press

'In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as pranksterish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army. The Wild Boys shows why Burroughs is a writer unlike any other, able to make captivating the explicit and horrific.'-- Penguin


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Excerpt


The camera is the eye of a cruising vulture flying over an area of scrub, rubble and unfinished buildings on the outskirts of Mexico City.

Five-story building no walls no stairs … squatters have set up makeshift houses … floors are connected by ladders … dogs bark, chickens cackle, a boy on the roof makes a jack-off gesture as the camera sails past.

Close to the ground we see the shadow of our wings, dry cellars choked with thistles, rusty iron rods sprouting like metal plants from cracked concrete, a broken bottle in the sun, shit-stained color comics, an Indian boy against a wall with his knees up eating an orange sprinkled with red pepper.

The camera zooms up past a red-brick tenement studded with balconies where bright pimp shirts flutter purple, yellow, pink, like the banners of a medieval fortress. On these balconies we glimpse flowers, dogs, cats, chickens, a tethered goat, a monkey, an iguana. The vecinos lean over the balconies to exchange gossip, cooking oil, kerosene and sugar. It is an old folklore set played out year after year by substitute extras.

Camera sweeps to the top of the building where two balconies are outlined against the sky. The balconies are not exactly one over the other since the top balcony recedes a little. Here the camera stops … ON SET.

It is a bright windy morning China-blue half-moon in the sky. Joselito, the maricón son of Tía Dolores, has propped up a mirror by the rain barrel and is shaving the long silky black hairs from his chest in the morning wind while he sings “NO PEGAN A MIO.” (“DON’T HIT ME”)

It is an intolerable sound that sets spoons tinkling in saucers and windowpanes vibrating. The vecinos mutter sullenly.

“Es el puto que canta.” (“It is the queer who sings.”) “The son of Dolores.” She crosses herself.

A young man rolls off his wife despondently.

“No puedo con eso puto cantando.” (“I can’t do it with that queer singing.”)

“The son of Dolores. She has the evil eye.”

In each room the face of Joselito singing “NO PEGAN A MIO” is projected onto the wall.

Shot shows an old paralyzed man and Joselito’s face inches from his screaming “NO PEGAN A MIO.”

“Remember that he is the son of Dolores.”

“And one of Lola’s ‘Little Kittens.’”

Tía Dolores is an old woman who runs a newspaper-and-tobacco kiosk. Clearly Joselito is her professional son.

On the top balcony is Esperanza just down from the mountains since her husband and all her brothers are in prison for growing opium poppies. She is a massive woman with arms like a wrestler and a permanent bucktoothed snarl. She leans over the balcony wall.

“Puto grosero, tus chingoa de pelos nos soplan en la cocina.
(“Vulgar queer, your fucking hairs are blowing into our food.”)

Shot shows hairs sprinkling soup and dusting an omelet like fine herbs.

The epithet “grosero” is too much for Joselito. He whirls cutting his chest. He clutches the wound with an expression of pathic dismay like a dying saint in an El Greco painting. He gasps “MAMACITA” and folds to the red tiles of the balcony dripping blood.

This brings Tía Dolores from her lair under the stairs, a rat’s nest of old newspapers and magazines. Her evil eyes rotate in a complex calendar, and these calculations occupy her for many hours each night settled in her nest she puffs and chirps and twitters and writes in notebooks that are stacked around her bed with magazines on astrology … “Tomorrow my noon eye will be at its full.” … This table of her power is so precise that she has to know the day hour minute and second to be sure of an ascendant eye and to this end she carries about with her an assortment of clocks, watches and sundials on thongs and chains. She can make her two eyes do different things, one spinning clockwise the other counterclockwise or she can pop one eye out onto her cheek laced with angry red veins while the other sinks back into an enigmatic grey slit. Latterly she has set up a schedule of “ojos dukes” (“sweet eyes”) and gained some renown as a healer though Tío Mate says he would rather have ten of her evils than one of her sweets. But he is a bitter old man who lives in the past.

Dolores is a formidable war machine rather like a gun turret, dependent on split-second timing and the reflector disk of her kiosk, she is not well designed for surprise encounters.

Enter the American tourist. He thinks of himself as a good guy but when he looks in the mirror to shave this good guy he has to admit that “well, other people are different from me and I don’t really like them.” This makes him feel guilty toward other people. Tía Dolores hunches her cloak of malice closer and regards him with stony disapproval.

“Buenas días señorita.”

“Desea algo?”

“Sí … Tribune . . Tribune Americano…”

Silently pursing her lips she folds the Herald Tribune and hands it to him. Trying not to watch what the woman is doing with her eyes, he fumbles for change. Suddenly his hand jumps out of the pocket scattering coins on the pavement. He stoops to pick them up.

A child hands him a coin.

“Gracias … Gracias.”

The child looks at him with cold hatred. He stands there with the coins in his hand.

“Es cuanto?”

“Setenta centavos.”

He hands her a peso. She drops it into a drawer and pushes the change at him.

“Gracias … Gracias …”

She stares at him icily. He stumbles away. Halfway down the block he screams out

“I’LL KILL THE OLD BITCH.”

He begins to shadowbox and point pistols. People stop and stare.

Children scream after him.

“Son bitch Merican crazy man.”

A policeman aproaches jerkily.

“Señor oiga …”

“OLD BITCH … OLD BITCH.”

He lashes out wildly in a red haze blood cold on his shirt.

Enter a pregnant woman. She orders the Spanish edition of Life. Looking straight at the woman’s stomach, Dolores’ eyes glaze over and roll back in her head.

“Nacido muerto” (“Born dead”) whispers Tío Pepe who has sidled up beside the woman.

On “sweet eye” days she changes her kiosk to a flower stall and sits there beaming the sweetest old flower lady of them all.

Enter the American tourist his face bandaged his arm in a sling.

“Ah! the American caballero wishes the Tribune. Today I sell flowers but this paper I have kept for you.”

Her eyes crease in a smile that suffuses her face with gentle light.

“Aquí señor, muchas gracias.”

The paper smells faintly of roses. The coins leap into his hand.

Giving him the change she presses a coin into his palm and folds his fingers over it.

“This will bring you luck señor.”

He walks down the street smiling at children who smile back … “I guess that’s what we come here for … these children … that old flower lady back there

Enter the woman whose male child was born dead. She has come to buy a flower for his grave. Tía Dolores shakes her head sadly.

“Pobrecito.” (“Poor little one.”)

The woman proffers a coin. Tía Dolores holds up her hands.

“No señora … Es de mío …”

However, her timing schedule necessitates a constant shift of props and character … “My sweet eye wanes with the moon” … That day the tourist reached his hotel in a state of collapse for a terrible street boy followed him from the kiosk screaming

“Son bitch puto queer, I catching one clap from fucky you asshole.”

Sometimes half her booth is a kiosk and the other half a flower stall and she sits in the middle, her sweet eye on one side and her kiosk eye on the other. She can alternate sweet and evil twenty-four times a second her eyes jumping from one socket to the other.

Confident from her past victories, Tía Dolores waddles out onto the balcony like a fat old bird.

“Pobrecito” … She strokes Joselito’s head gathering her powers.

“Tell your maricón son to shave in the house.”

With a hasty glance at three watches, Dolores turns to face this uncouth peasant woman who dares to challenge her dreaded eye.

“Vieja loca, que haces con tu ojos?” sneers Esperanza.

“Tu te pondrás ciego como eso” (“Old crazy one, what are you doing with your eyes? You will blind yourself doing that.”

Dolores gasps out “TÍO PEPE” and sinks to the deck by her stricken son.

And Tío Pepe pops out tying his pants in front with a soggy length of grey rope. Under a travesty of good nature his soul is swept by raw winds of hate and mischance. He reads the newspapers carefully gloating over accidents, disasters and crime he thinks he is causing by his “sugestiónes.” His magic consists in whispering potent phrases from newspapers “ … there are no survivors … condemned to death … fire of unknown origins … charred bodies … This he does in crowds where people are distracted or better, much better right into the ear of someone who is sleeping or unconscious from drink. If no one is around and he is sure of his flop he reinforces his “sugestiónes” by thumping him in the testicles, grinding a knuckle into his eye or clapping cupped hands over his ears.

Here is a man asleep on a park bench. Tío Pepe approaches. He sits down by the man and opens a paper. He leans over reading into the man's ear, a thick slimy whisper.

“No hay supervivientes” The man stirs uneasily.

“Muerto en el acto” The man shakes his head and opens his eyes. He looks suspiciously at Tío Pepe who has both hands on the paper. He stands up and taps his pockets. He walks away.

And there is a youth sleeping in a little park. Tío Pepe drops a coin by the boy’s head. Bending down to pick up the coin he whispers … “un joven muerto” (“a dead youth.”)

Several times the vecinos shoo him away from a sleeper and he hops away like an old vulture showing his yellow teeth in a desperate grin. Now he has picked up the spoor of drunken vomit and there is the doll sprawled against a wall, his pants streaked with urine. Bending down as if to help the man up, Tío Pepe whispers in both ears again and again … “accidente horrible” … He stands up and shrieks in a high falsetto voice … “EMASCULADO EMASCULADO EMASCULADO” and kicks the man three times gently in the groin.

He finds an old drunken woman sleeping in a pile of rags and claps a hand over her mouth and nose whispering … “vieja borracha asfixiado.” (“old drunken woman asphyxiated.”)

Another drunk is sleeping in dangerous proximity to a brush fire.

Tío Pepe drops a burning cigarette butt into the man’s outstretched hand squatting down on his haunches he whispers slimily … “cuerpo carbonizado … cuerpo carbonizado … cuerpo carbonizado. …” He throws back his head and sings to the dry brush, the thistles the wind … “cuerpo carbonizado … cuerpo carbonizado … cuerpo carbonizado …”

He looks up at Esperanza with a horrible smile.

“Ah! the country cousin rises early.” While he croons a little tune.

“Resbalando sobre un pedazo de jabón Slipping on a piece of soap se precipito de un balcón.” fell over a balcony.

Esperanza swings her great arm in a contemptuous arc and wraps a wet towel around the balcony wall spattering Tío Pepe, Dolores and Joselito with dirty water. Sneering over her shoulder she turns to go inside.

The beaten team on the lower balcony lick their wounds and plot revenge.

“If I can but get her in front of my kiosk at 9:23 next Thursday …”

“If I could find her borracho …”

“And I will have her gunned down by pistoleros…”

This boast of Joselito is predicated on his peculiar relationship with Lola La Chata. Lola La Chata is a solid 300 pounds cut from the same mountain rock as Esperanza. She sells heroin to pimps and thieves and whores and keeps the papers between her massive dugs. Joselito had a junky boy friend who took him to meet Lola.

Joselito danced flamenco screeching like a peacock. Lola laughed and adopted him as one of her “Little Kittens.” In a solemn ceremony he had suckled at her great purple dug bitter with heroin. It was not uncommon for Lola to service customers with two “Little Kittens” sucking at her breasts.

As Esperanza turns to go inside six pimpish young men burst through the door in a reek of brilliantine and lean over the balcony screaming insults at Joselito.

This brings reinforcements to the faltering lower balcony. Tío Mate stalks out followed by his adolescent Ka El Mono.

Tío Mate is an old assassin with twelve deer on his gun. A thin ghostly old man with eyes the color of a faded grey flannel shirt. He wears a black suit and a black Stetson. Under the coat a single action Smith & Wesson tip up forty-four with a seven-inch barrel is strapped to his lean flank. Tío Mate wants to put another deer on his gun before he dies.

The expression a “deer” (un “venado”) derives from the mountainous districts of northern Mexico where the body is usually brought into the police post draped over a horse like a deer.

A young district attorney just up from the capital. Tío Mate has dropped by to give him a lesson in folklore.

Tío Mate (rolling a cigarette): “I’m going to send you a deer, señor abogado.”

The D.A. (he thinks “well now that’s nice of him”): “Well thank you very much, if it isn’t too much trouble …”

Tío Mate (lighting the cigarette and blowing out smoke): “No trouble at all señor abogado. It is my pleasure.”

Tío Mate blows smoke from the muzzle of his forty-four and smiles.

Man is brought in draped over a saddle. The horse is led by a woodenfaced Indian cop. The D.A. comes out. The cop jerks his head back … “un venado.”

Tío Mate had been the family pistolero of rich landowners in northern Mexico. The family was ruined by expropriations when they backed the wrong presidential candidate and Tío Mate came to live with relatives in the capital. His room is a bare, white cell, a cot, a trunk, a little wooden case in which he keeps his charts, sextant and compass. Every night he cleans and oils his forty-four. It is a beautiful custom-made gun given to him by the patrón for killing “my unfortunate brother the General.” It is nickel-plated and there are hunting scenes engraved on the cylinder and barrel. The handles are of white porcelain with two blue deer heads. There is nothing for Tío Mate to do except oil his gun and wait. The gun glints in his eyes a remote mineral calm. He sits for hours on the balcony with his charts and instruments spread out on a green felt card table. Only his eyes move as he traces vultures in the sky. Occasionally he draws a line on the chart or writes down numbers in a logbook. Every Independence Day the vecinos assemble to watch Tío Mate blast a vulture from the sky with his forty-four. Tío Mate consults his charts and picks a vulture. His head moves very slightly from side to side eyes on the distant target he draws aims and fires: a vulture trailing black feathers down the sky. So precise are Tío Mate’s calculations that one feather drifts down on to the balcony. This feather is brought to Tío Mate by El Mono his Feather Bearer. Tío Mate puts the feather in his hat band. There are fifteen black years in his band.

El Mono has been Tío Mate’s Feather Bearer for five years. He sits for hours on the balcony until their faces fuse. He has his own little charts and compass. He is learning to shoot a vulture from the sky. A thin agile boy of thirteen he climbs all over the building spying on the vecinos. He wears a little blue skullcap and when he takes it off the vecinos hurry to drop a coin in it. Otherwise he will act out a recent impotence, a difficult bowel movement, a cunt-licking with such precise mimicry that anyone can identify the party involved.

El Mono picks out a pimp with his eyes. He makes a motion of greasing a candle. The pimp licks his lips speechless with horror his eyes wild. Now El Mono is shoving the candle in and out his ass teeth bare eyes rolling he gasps out: “Sangre de Cristo…” The pimp impaled there for all to see. Joselito leaps up and stomps out a triumphant fandango. Awed by Tío Mate and fearful of a recent impotence, a difficult bowel movement, a cunt-licking, the pimps fall back in confusion.

Tío Paco now mans the upper balcony with his comrade in arms Fernández the drug clerk. Tío Paco has been a waiter for forty years. Very poor, very proud, contemptuous of tips, he cares only for the game. He brings the wrong order and blames the client, he flicks the nastiest towel, he shoves a tip back saying “The house pays us.” He screams after a client “Le service n’est-ce pas compris.” He has studied with Pullman George and learned the art of jiggling arms across the room: hot coffee in a quiet American crotch.

And woe to a waiter who crosses him: tray flies into the air. Rich well-dressed clients dodge cups and glasses, bottle of Fundador broken on the floor.

Fernández hates adolescents, pop stars, beatniks, tourists, queers, criminals, tramps, whores and drug addicts. Tío Paco hates their type too.

Fernández likes policemen, priests, army officers, rich people of good repute. Tío Paco likes them too. He serves them quickly and well. But their lives must be above reproach.

A newspaper scandal can mean long waits for service.

The client becomes impatient. He makes an angry gesture. A soda siphon crashes to the floor.

What they both love most of all is to inflict humiliation on a member of the hated classes, and to give information to the police.

Fernández throws a morphine script back across the counter.

“No prestamos servicio a los viciosos.” (“We do not serve dope fiends.”)

Tío Paco ignores a pop star and his common-law wife until the cold sour message seeps into their souls:

“We don’t want your type in here.”

Fernández holds a prescription in his hand. He is a plump man in his late thirties. Behind dark glasses his eyes are yellow and liverish. His low urgent voice on the phone.

“Receta narcótica falsificado.” (“A narcotic prescription forged.”)

“Your prescription will be ready in a minute señor.”

Tío Paco stops to wipe a table and whispers … “Marijuana in a suitcase … table by the door” … The cop pats his hand.

Neither Tío Paco nor Fernández will accept any reward for services rendered to their good friends the police.

When they first came to live on the top floor five years ago Tío Mate saw them once in the hall.

“Copper-loving bastards,” he said in his calm final voice.

He did not have occasion to look at them again. Anyone Tío Mate doesn’t like soon learns to stay out of Tío Mate’s space.

Fernández steps to the wall and his wife appears at his side. Her eyes are yellow her teeth are gold. Now his daughter appears. She has a mustache and hairy legs. Fernández looks down from a family portrait.

“Criminales. Maricónes. Vagabundos. I will denounce you to the police.”

Tío Paco gathers all the bitter old men in a blast of sour joyless hate. Joselito stops dancing and droops like a wilted flower. Tío Pepe and Dolores are lesser demons. They shrink back furtive and timorous as dawn rats. Tío Mate looks at a distant point beyond the old waiter tracing vultures in the sky. El Mono stands blank and cold. He will not imitate Fernández and Tío Paco.

And now Tía María, retired fat lady from a traveling carnival, comes out onto the lower balcony supporting her vast weight on two canes. Tía María eats candy and reads love stories all day and gives card readings the cards sticky and smudged with chocolate. She secretes a heavy sweetness. Sad and implacable it flows out of her like a foam runway. The vecinos fear her sweetness which they regard fatalistically as a natural hazard like earthquakes and volcanoes. “The Sugar of Mary” they call it. It could get loose one day and turn the city into a cake.

She looks up at Fernández and her sad brown eyes pelt him with chocolates. Tío Paco tries desperately to outflank her but she sprays him with maraschino cherries from her dugs and coats him in pink icing. Tío Paco is the little man on a wedding cake all made out of candy. She will eat him later.

Now Tío Gordo, the blind lottery-ticket seller, rolls his immense bulk out onto the upper balcony, his wheel chair a chariot, his snarling black dog at his side. The dog smells all the money Tío Gordo takes. A torn note brings an ominous growl, a counterfeit and it will break the man’s arm in its powerful jaws, brace its legs and hold him for the police. The dog leaps to the balcony wall and hooks its paws over barking, snarling, bristling, eyes phosphorescent. Tía María gasps and the sugar runs out of her. She is terrified of “rage dogs” as she calls them. The dog seems ready to leap down onto the lower balcony. Tío Mate plots the trajectory its body would take. He will kill it in the air.

Tío Pepe throws back his head and howls:

“Perro attropellado para un camión.” (“Dog run over by a truck.”)

The dog drags its broken hindquarters in a dusty noon street.

The dog slinks whimpering to Tío Gordo.

González the Agente wakes up muttering “Chingoa” the fumes of Mescal burning in his brain. Buttoning on his police tunic and forty-five he pushes roughly to the wall of the upper balcony.

González is a broken dishonored man. All the vecinos know he has much fear of Tío Mate and crosses the street to avoid him. El Mono has acted out both parts.

González looks down and there is Tío Mate waiting. The hairs stand up straight on González’s head.

“CHINGOA.”

He snatches out his forty-five and fires twice. The bullets whistle past Tío Mate’s head. Tío Mate smiles. In one smooth movement he draws aims and fires. The heavy slug catches González in his open mouth ranging up through the roof blows a large tuft of erect hairs out the back of González’s head. González folds across the balcony wall. The hairs go limp and hang down from his head. The balcony wall begins to sway like a horse. His forty-five drops to the lower balcony and goes off.

Shot breaks the camera. A frozen still of the two balconies tilted down at a forty-five-degree angle. González still draped over the wall sliding forward, the wheel chair halfway down the upper balcony, the dog slipping down on braced legs, the vecinos trying to climb up and slipping down.

“GIVE ME THE SIXTEEN.”

The cameraman shoots wildly … pimps scream by teeth bare eyes rolling, Esperanza sneers down at the Mexican earth, the fat lady drops straight down her pink skirts billowing up around her, Tía Dolores sails down her eyes winking sweet and evil like a doll, dog falls across a gleaming empty sky.

The camera dips and whirls and glides tracing vultures higher and higher spiraling up.

Last take: Against the icy blackness of space ghost faces of Tío Mate and El Mono. Dim jerky faraway stars splash the cheek bones with silver ash. Tío Mate smiles.
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*

p.s. Hey. William Burroughs, what do you know? There's an old thing about a great book by him up there, if you're interested. Me, I fly back to Paris later today, but, because of the big 9 hour time difference betwixt SF and P, I don't arrive in Paris until late Saturday morning, at which time I will so exhausted that I would be incapable of doing the p.s., which is why you're getting one more rerun post tomorrow, if you were curious.

Rerun: Fad Gadget Day (orig. 03/05/12)

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'The early 80s saw the emergence of the electronic/dance phenomenon in Europe. At the forefront of this movement were four names: Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, The Normal, and Fad Gadget (Frank Tovey). Tovey released his first single Back to Nature in 1979 and was the first signing to Daniel Miller's Mute label. Miller (as The Normal) had previously put out his own composition "T.V.O.D." c/w "Warm Leatherette" and was thinking of starting a label when he met Tovey. As Fad Gadget Tovey played solo with a drum machine and synthesizer confusing audiences at the time used to the standard rock format. Now, obviously, the scene is radically different with electronic sounds and beat boxes being the norm.

'Fad Gadget's music was characterized by a use of synthesizers in conjunction with sounds of found objects, including drills and electric razors. His bleak, sarcastic, and darkly humorous lyrics, often layered in meaning and discussing subjects such as machinery, building construction, human sexuality, and physical violence, were sung in a droning, often expressionless voice.

'The influence of Tovey's early experiments in electronic music can be heard in the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Depeche Mode, and all the Techno/Dance Bands of the 90s. The main characteristic of Tovey's work that distinguished him from his contempories and his followers was the quality of his lyrics. Not satisfied with singing pseudo science fiction (a la Gary Numan) or crass love songs, Tovey developed a style more akin to Dylan or Lou Reed, his black humour often confusing the punters at the time more interested in style than content. His songs "spoke of the diseases and fears poorly hidden from view. They spoke for and against the little man, the ubiquitous civilian bewildered by the speed of events threatening to sweep him up or leave him behind. And they spoke in a variety of voices: dead pan, severe, sardonic, satirical and, finally, disarmingly sincere...." -- Biba Kopf '91.

'Imagewise Tovey never played the pretty pop singer role preferring to be photographed by Anton Corbin covered from head to toe in shaving foam or tarred and feathered. His stage shows were often been mad acrobatic events. Where most performers remain untouchable he would purposely goad an audience, sometimes somersaulting from the stage (before stage diving became an international sport), like a latter-day cockney version of Iggy Pop his audience passing him around above their heads before depositing him back on the stage and screaming for more.

'In 2001, after a number of years recording and performing under his real name, Tovey resurrected his old Fad Gadget pseudonym to support his former colleagues and Mute label-mates, Depeche Mode, on their Exciter tour. He continued to perform live, and was working on a new album at the time of his death. Tovey suffered from heart problems since his childhood, and died of a heart attack on 3 April 2002 at the age of 45.'-- fad gadget.co.uk



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Gallery


















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Interview 1

on German TV





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Interview 2

by Edwin Pouncey





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Further


Official Fad Gadget/Frank Tovey Website
Frank Tovey Fansite
Fad Gadget Discography
Alex Proyas' film 'Frank Gadget by Frank Tovey'
Boxset: 'Frank Tovey by Fad Gadget'
Fad Gadget @ Mute Records
Fad Gadget @ Trouser Press
Simon Reynolds 'Cult Heroics: Frank Tovey'
Frank Tovey obituary @ NYT




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Tribute






March 1 - April 8 - EXHIBITION Opening Reception, envoy enterprises (131 Chrystie Street)
March 3 - LIVE PERFORMANCES, Dixon Place (161 Chrystie Street)
March 10 - FILM, Fad Gadget by Frank Tovey, Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave)

envoy enterprises, in collaboration with NP Contemporary Art Center and Mute Records, is pleased to present FG.Ft, a three-part project series in homage to Frank Tovey – founder of the 1970s/1980s British electronic group Fad Gadget, marking the 10 year anniversary of the pioneer’s death. Summoning a diverse group of artists and musicians who have been both directly and indirectly influenced by Tovey, the series will take place from March 1st through to April 8th, 2012 featuring a group exhibition, live music performances, and a film screening. All events are free and open to the public.

Show catalog and flyer will be available for purchase along with CD released by Mute Records of rare archived material from Fad Gadget. To purchase, please contact office@envoyenterprises.com

All events are free and open to the public on a first come, first serve basis.


Participating Artist Roster: FG.Ft
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Olaf Breuning, Nick Cash, Nathan Cash Davidson, Thomas Dozol, Fischerspooner, David Flinn, Erik Hanson, Kelsey Henderson, Tom Kalin, Erika Keck, Brian Kenny, Robert Knoke, Terence Koh, Lovett/Codagnone, Slava Mogutin, Micky Pellerano, Edwin Pouncey, Alex Rose, Desi Santiago, Matthew Sims, Stephanie Snider, Gail Stoicheff, Una Szeemann, Frank Tovey, Conrad Ventur, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Liz Wendelbo, Grant Worth

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Live Performances: FG.Ft
March 3, 2012, 10:30pm: Dixon Place
Xeno & Oaklander
Ike Yard

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Film Screening:Fad Gadget by Frank Tovey
March 10, 2012, 8pm: Anthology Film Archives
Directed by Morgan Tovey Frost
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envoy enterprises



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Statement

(1984)





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Gig



'Swallow It'



'Love Parasite'



'Collapsing New People'



'Ricky's Hand'



'Coitus Interruptus'



'Luddite Joe'



'Back to Nature'



'Luxury'



'Plainsong'



'For Whom the Bell Tolls'



'Ladyshave'



Fad Gadget & Boyd Rice live at the ICA, London
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*

p.s. Hey. I'm actually launching this post from Paris, which is why you're seeing it at closer to the normal time that I launch posts. However, even though this p.s. was written last Sunday, I can guarantee you that I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to send this four year old Fad Gadget fest out to you, but I will try to right my body clock between now and Monday when the blog will be back live with a new post and a p.s. in which I will catch up with every comment you've left over the past week. Guaranteed. See you on Monday.

4 books I read recently & loved: Juliet Escoria Witch Hunt, Jack Cox Dodge Rose, Anselm Berrigan Come In Alone, Sara Tuss Efrik AUTOMANIAS

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'Juliet Escoria's poetry debut, Witch Hunt, out in May from Lazy Fascist Press, is sad and funny—but only funny if you're sad. Moving in the hollow vein of her 2013 short-fiction collection Black Cloud, Escoria navigates the tracks of symbiotic drug romance and degradation with a bleak, hilarious sarcasm. Her musings are macabre, but for a generation that regularly wonders if the kid nodded out next to us on the couch is alive or not, we find honesty in graveled humor.

'"Everything I'm working on now is a fake version of myself," Escoria tells The KIND at a closing El Pollo Loco on Sunset Boulevard. "Most of it's more recent; so it's less depressing. But I think Witch Hunt is funnier than Black Cloud."

'Juliet has just finished reading at an AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) event at Circus of Books, an iconic erotic book shop on the brink of extinction, now resembling a bodega selling porn, meth pipes, and magazines from the '90s. We retreated across the street, to a synthetic Mexican restaurant wet with ammonia.

'"It's a poetry book, which is weird. I didn't really think of myself as a poet. I started writing poetry when I was a teenager, but I stopped because I couldn't tell if it was any good or not."

'Escoria grew up in San Diego, California, depressed. Defying the highs and (mostly) lows depicted in her work, she's been sober for years, having escaped Manhattan's cocaine corridors and California's meth-bleached boredom to focus on writing/not dying.

'In 2014, Escoria married fellow author Scott McClanahan, moved to the Appalachian hills of West Virginia, a region McClanahan hails from and has chronicled extensively. "I work in the basement," explains Escoria. "My husband works upstairs in his little bedroom. Then we travel once a month, which makes me feel normal." She pauses. "At least when you get annoyed by people, they're more interesting than yuppies."

'Escoria's cool approach to poetry is unfazed by the circle-jerk formality of academia: "I was working on a novel, and I felt like I couldn't tell what I was doing. So I just started writing poetry for fun. We had a joke to see how quickly I could write a poetry book. So I did that. I wrote most of them in two months, then it took another five of me just fiddling around with them."'-- The Kind









Juliet Escoria Witch Hunt
Lazy Fascist Press

'Escoria's debut short story collection is a brazen admission of the pains of reality in a time when pretending to be happy – to make light of your sadness – is easier than ever. The tone is a combination of Denis Johnson and Joan Didion, and although the stories are focused on drugs (and a wide variety of), Escoria never uses them gratuitously. Rather, each story is a dose of potent insight on the motivations and experiences of users both active and struggling-to-be former.'-- Lauren Oyler, Dazed

'Unrelenting, violent, often scary: Juliet Escoria's debut collection of stories will likely have you begging and crying for salvation a few pages in. She's just that good.'-- Jason Diamond, Flavorwire

'Simply riveting and raw.'-- Lindsay Hunter, FSG blog


Excerpts

Contemporary Guilt

when i went home
the first time
after going off to get married
my mother begged me: please don’t have a baby.

here were her reasons:
    1) it would have problems
    2) i have problems
    3) my husband has problems
    4) all the problems would be parts of a real disaster and she wouldn’t be able to deal
so essentially she’d have to disown me

predictably, i got mad and
stormed off to what used to be my bedroom.

which is the place where
i tried to
kill myself
four times
half a lifetime before.

in the morning, she apologized
– kind of –
asking if i understood what she meant
that she was speaking
out of love but also fear.
she told me there were things
she never told me
because she had to pretend to be strong.
i think that was when i was supposed to ask
about the things i never knew
but i failed to.

a few days later, i asked her when she knew
that i’d turn out “okay”—
eighteen, twenty-two, twenty-five?
but she was honest
and said it didn’t come until i was
living in new york,
two years sober.
that she used to watch the wine bottles pile up
my skin yellow
teeth darken
and that smell.

i guess that’s a long time to be
worried
that your daughter is going
to die.





Whatever Useless Things

When he kissed
me there was only
one more thing
I wanted and that
was to completely
disappear.
The mornings left
my insides sore
and the outer part
of me in a dust
film broken
pieces of skin
and no dreams
remembered.
He did not regret
his wanting
although he
may have regretted
the fulfillment
but what else
is there
to say about
desire.
The answer is
disappointing.
The answer is
not much.


APRIL 24, 2012: BROOKLYN, NY

I don't really know how it happens but we are fighting in our bedroom and the mirror from the wall ended up on our bed somehow? And then it broke and shards and pieces got all over the sheets, and we were wrestling in it, wrestling for the bracelet she had given him but also for control and neither one of us could find any. It ends with him on top of me because he is bigger and stronger. We are breathing hard, our hearts pounding, and the slivers of glass dig into our skin. His face is in front of mine, his big hands on my shoulders, and I hate it that he has won. So I spit in his face.

Later, I see that me spitting is the demarcating line between what was before and the end of our relationship. But at the time it didn't seem like that big of a deal.

He gets off me, and is going out the door, and I am chasing him, but his lead is too much and I am not wearing shoes, and I have no idea where he went. Probably to one of the bars a few blocks away, but my hair is a mess and I can still feel glass in me and I am too ashamed to be in public and searching for him like a jilted woman. So I go back home.

Except besides not having shoes, I also don't have keys or a cell phone and I can't get back into the apartment. I sit on the stoop and although it's a warm night it is still April and it is cold and my feet are cold and I realize that my life with him is going to end now, that one of us will have to move out, that it will probably be me, that he won't be in my life anymore, that I am alone, that I am ugly, that we just yelled and broke things and wrestled in shattered glass on our bed, that I spat in his face, and my feet are cold, and it is cold, and I am locked out, and the world is spinning, and I am worried I am dying and the edges of things grow dizzy and black.

But then a raccoon is crawling up the fence. There is no wilderness anywhere near us, and I've never seen wildlife around here before, and seeing this raccoon here feels like something meaningful. It is perched at the top, looking at me, deciding if I am a threat, weighing its choices. We regard each other for a while. Then it hops my side of the fence and walks slowly down the street, in the direction of where the person who is now my ex-boyfriend has gone, and I can breathe, and things are terrible and ugly and I am still ashamed but I also know things will be OK without him.



Witch Hunt #1 by Juliet Escoria


Witch Hunt #2


Cut These Strings by Juliet Escoria




_______________




'I promise to retire this anecdote after one last airing, but here goes: When Dodge Rose first landed at my desk at Dalkey Archive Press, I thought it was a hoax. A trap. (It wouldn’t have been the first.)

'I showed it to my assistant editor of the time and he agreed: novels like Dodge Rose don’t come into one’s life in brown paper, humble, untrumpeted. They’re whispered of, recommended, enthused and griped about, passed around, gradually shibbolethed, forgotten . . . then reprinted with glowing intros, taught, accepted, and still never enough read.

'It wasn’t possible, we said, that a young, Australian Beckett with virtually no publications to his name had just dropped in our laps. No, there was some sinister plot in the works. A plot to—well, what? Was this some éminence grise of the mainstream cutting loose and producing the high-modernist novel he or she had been lusting to write since their teenage infatuation with Ulysses? Or could this be one of Dalkey’s own authors—or employees?—submitting a novel under a false name to see if we would be able to sniff out the imposture? It even occurred to me to worry that Dodge Rose was, Ern Malley-wise, a prank, an attempt to snare a small press known for publishing “subversive” fiction into signing on a book written expressly to parody said fiction. There had to be a catch, no?

'After all, when we sit down with Joyce, with Beckett, we sit down with the celebrity as well as the text, often instead of the text, even—you know who you are—in preference to the text. Sitting down with Dodge Rose, we were alone in the presence of Dodge Rose, and could not entirely believe the evidence of our senses, which told us, from the first gnomic sentence—“Then where from here”—that we were in the presence of the Real Thing.

'Even now, with the book finally hitting stores, and the author’s identity confirmed (supposedly confirmed), there is a soupçon of suspicion in me, as though the trap’s jaws are still waiting, out of sight, to bite. Perhaps this is because, even now, after multiple readings, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose remains something of a mystery—this is a book that demands a book’s worth of exegesis, not a brief appreciation—but its elusiveness is something I have come to treasure, and is in any case central to the book’s strategy of beguilement. It is cryptographic and disorienting in its manner of presentation, in the density of the information presented. But this is not, as they say, a drawback—it’s a feature.

'Though made up largely of dialogue, Dodge Rose eschews quotation marks, wages an almost totally successful campaign against the hyphen, and, as it progresses, empties the apostrophe, the comma, and capital letters too from its aesthetic quiver. You’ll say that these are typical modernist tics, and you’d be right, but Cox goes a ways farther than homage: this is a novel that demands of the reader that she labor continually to orient herself not only in the sentence, on the page, in the plot, but in Australian history, geography, architecture, commerce, in property law, in the properties of language and personality. The reader can never sleep, letting the comfortable mores of fiction propel her from page to page, but must ask always who is now addressing whom, where in the line or paragraph did the speaker change, the tense, the object, the tongue? And neither is there any relaxing into incomprehension—the other form of readerly slumber—because Dodge Rose is that wonderful rarity, a novel that flirts so skillfully and successfully with seeming incomprehensibility, with some private order of authorial logic, that it never once crosses the line to lapse into the mere objecthood of so much “experimental” fiction, content to be read as a blank or black page. That is, Dodge Rose wants to be enjoyed, to be entered and experienced, to be grappled with and for its subjects to be grasped, not skimmed over. Its intentions are legible, but other; its tools are familiar but wielded askew. It is a work of fiction that, despite its playfulness of diction, its successful absorption and deployment of the full compliment of modernist artifice, is committed to meticulous research and deployment of the real—the real in all its definitions: “fixed, permanent, or immovable things”—while operating in a mode nonetheless dominated by a syntax of confusion, a vocabulary of multilingual malapropism.'-- Jeremy M. Davies








Jack Cox Dodge Rose
Dalkey Archive

'Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge’s apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women’s lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.'-- Dalkey Archive


Excerpt

It dawned on me in a perfectly good manner of speaking that Dodge was dead, that Eli­za was not Dodge, I was not Dodge, that we would have to do what was undone. I was looking into the hard wet patch of my own reflection. No. Because. Though the drawers of the desk and the bookcase still hung open because we had not in fact been able to find Dodge’s birth certificate and had kept looking for it until we couldn’t put off leaving for Bernard any longer without being late, that centripetal invasion of blank space only seemed to point to a deeper reticence, a fixture as secret as the clamps in a family por­trait, even now the patch of damp carpet beneath the win­dow returning as if the shock of her death had exposed the room to an image that no matter how well you cleared the place out would come back like a photograph blooming un­der the alkalies across a furious sheet of paper.

Well said Eliza quite frankly. What do you think hap­pened to the money.

I have no idea. Maybe she never had any.

She shook her head. She must have. I can’t believe Mum took everything.

Maybe she spent it.

On what.

There used to be a lot more in here. Dodge was always going out to auctions and second hand stores when I was younger and taking things with her and bringing back more than she took. Heaps of old stuff really. It all seemed worth­less to me but you know you can’t tell with old stuff.

Eliza drummed her fingers on the back of the thread­bare sofa. What happened to it all.

We got rid of it. It’s gone. That was a long time ago now. I can’t think what she could have ever got for those trin­kets. I want to know can’t I say anything straight. Have a real cigarette. Eliza tapped up a slightly squashed Stuyves­ant from its packet and began patting the pockets of her jacket for her lighter with a rapid movement that might have been nerves and I realised also as if for the first time that in a shallow way I was falling in love and maybe she was too. Maybe it was just beginning to have a friend. I guess it must have been as lonely on the farm in Yass with no one but her mother and the surrounding sheep as it was to live exclusively for a mistress in the Cross. It was Capro­tinia the day of the. Caprio. Went under, no a loir wild fig tree. I love long life. Posh, damn short shrift high school don’t remember anything. Two figs to the captor of that pro­found navel from down here over your pretended arsehole. Who the hell gave me this extravagant education.

That night I was woken by the sound of something me­tallic crashing onto the floorboards of the dining room. At first I held still in order to put nothing between my ears and the other end of the flat as my eyes adjusted to the moon­light that fell in through the open blinds spreading pink amid the wales of my woollen bedspread, shining on the rim of my alarm clock and in the silence that followed between the ticks of its infinite helix I threw the cover off and walked carefully, I won’t say I pattered down the corridor to the living room. There was no light on anywhere and still no noise. I did not want to go any further without some kind of weapon but standing in the dark of the corridor at the en­trance to the living room I could see through the open doors of the dining room to where a faintly luminous body was bent over something on the floor. It was Eliza. Again. Who else would it be. When she saw me walking to­wards her she jumped up with the metallic object in her hands and I reached and grabbed it only out of fear that she might drop it again but as she raised her hands in surprise now two pale palms against the shimmering obscurity of the dining room that for years had been no more than a hoard­ing house for family silver if it wasn’t the effect of Fagan himself it was Jack Dawkins or the Artful Dodger coming at me for his share with streaks of ash down the thighs of his nightie and with an equally vacant reflex I swung the lidless urn to one side and out of her reach. She yelped, then recovering she said my name and asked me to turn on the light. I did, and saw that her hands too were covered in ash. What is that she said.

It’s an urn I said.

She flopped down on the floor one bare leg either side of the little pile of burnt bones and the copper lid. She seemed as half asleep as I was. Come on I said in the ata­vistic fuddle of the early morning, no use crying over spilt milk. I was not long recovering my senses though. What I asked was she doing.

She looked at me and waited, her eyes resting opaque and patient on mine until at last her mind seemed to withdraw something that it must have been almost holding out, face down as it were, and it was with the kind of disappointed but levelling calm of a card player who folds before getting in too deep that she said she was looking to see if Dodge had hidden her money anywhere and I didn’t bother to ask why she was doing it at one o’clock in the morning. O God how can I wash my hands. I suggested she rub them over the top of the urn first. She did, interlocking her fingers, rubbing the backs, making a fist of each hand and rubbing out the ash from the creases in her knuckles. She went to the bathroom then and I got a dustpan and brush. I had to feel for them in the dark in the cupboard under the sink then I took them back to the dining room and crouched and swept up the ash that had fallen on the floor and turned up the dustpan so that it ran off one corner into the urn. Thanks said Eliza through her collar as she wiped her face in the doorway.

How do you feel now.

She almost said she felt like a cigarette. I thought she was going to start drooling again. Here I said and pulled out a chair from the dining table. Let’s talk a bit before you go back to bed.

She sat down and put both elbows on the table and her head between her hands. Did she say what she wanted done with those.

No. Remember she didn’t leave any instructions.

That’s right.

It’s cheaper to cremate than bury.

How could she not have any money. It doesn’t make sense. She should have been rich.

Maybe she had an expensive habit, that can add up.

But like you said she must have had a pension or some­thing. Otherwise how else was she keeping you. And anyway it was more than two million, that’s just what Mum spent on the sheep. There must have been a real fortune between grandma’s and grandpa’s families. They were bloomin bankers and squatters. It was ying and yang. Someone’s money must be hidden somewhere.

What did you want to do with it.

Get off the farm start a business.

What kind of business.

I don’t know, travelling sales. I’d like to travel.

And the flat.

What about it.

If we sold the flat.

But you live here.

There is a law you know that it goes to your mother.

Mum wouldn’t kick you out, she doesn’t need it. Besides what about the family matinee act or whatever. You can have the flat.

We could sell it I said. We could go halves and then you could get off the farm and I could get out of here.

She drew back slowly. It struck me then that I might have taken her reserve the wrong way, that she may rath­er have doubted her good fortune from the beginning, sus­pended as she was between the files and musters, deferring even conjectural investment until she could put her hands on something concrete, afraid to find that there was nothing there but unable to admit that it was possible, as if she had been holding her breath, not daring to let herself go in case there was, impossibly, nothing to take back. But no soon­er had the idea rung out than I felt with all this outward stimulation that I recognised another kind of restraint, that Yass, whose misted hills appeared to roll about her pupils as they drifted from me over the dim walls of the dining room held her somehow locked in like I had been that she was still in some sense pinned back to that far from litto­ral shore as for thirteen years I had been by Dodge and the keys and some other illegible force, some manifestly pruri­ent though untold indenture, perhaps her false but fantas­tic interest, in the foul and motley wallpapered flat (apart from skoo l, I’ll have this coven between the covers in no time), the former’s, I mean Eliza’s eyes flying open even as I told out to myself for the last time and with the faint­est, the very faintest regret the modest changes I had brief­ly foreseen, which were I would be the first to admit rather a failure of imagination than otherwise, all more or less this side the dictates of my intangible legacy, flying open as I was saying at the sudden recovery of such a pinched square of floor space, like a stump grubber’s on still colder ground who, severed the red thread in the navel string, hoes up from the decorated threshold of an expired cult the tessera going to reveal the actual value and dispensability of the whole familiar plot, our anonymous, adverse brother, adrift in the unbounded troughs. And Eliza, I have not forgotten you, pushed up against me, cast forth before your time from the same infant quarter that might in a single blow be sub­tracted to a real escape route, through whose b darkened rooms da you, of your dried tears like the underglaze, in the French sense, were beginning to sense a way out of the vast and smothering enclosure of your immediate inheritance.

I think I’m starting to get the hang of these peripli of the mind.

As I was unequipped at the time to unload such sonnets on to her, she nodded and smiled and kept nodding equally dumbly until I suggested we go to bed and talk about it in the morning. It was not, she admitted then, referring to my earlier contribution, a shite idea.

We were woken up by the phone. I was back in the din­ing room to answer it before Eliza arrived with her pyjamas tucked into her jeans mussing her curls and resembling un­der the foreign velour of the morning light nothing so much as any other punk kid. There goes the beggar king. The morning makes us new.











________________




'Why Write? Because wrapped in machinery I confess my ashamed desire. That’s actually a line from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Why Is God Love, Jack,” a shorter A.G. poem I’ve always been fond of that uses “Because” as a line opener all the way through. I had a flash of doing an answer to the “why write?” question by stringing a lot of because-sentences together, but realized the only furtive impulse behind it other than the bogus ease of encapsulation–and the question does implicitly demand the summary axe–was gonna be figuring out where to drop the Ginsberg line for maximum impact of ambiguous nature (a form of amusement). That’s something to do with timing, and I write at this point in part to make arrangements with words, the sounds of which I love, and abhor, occasionally, and sometimes upon request, to set in time. I do not write to make images or metaphors or to reveal or to be expressive or unexpressive. I do probably write out of mad word love and also because it was something I realized at some point I could do and keep being surprised by (the doing). I wasn’t sure if I could -do- anything when I was between the ages of 12 and 18. I started writing when I was 17, for a college paper’s news desk. I started writing poems about two years later. The poems were and are the response I was looking for, and that’s always being written, that response, so I’m writing to keep at that.

'You could write because you could be good at it (and then actually become good at it, the way becoming is riskier than being, sometimes) and you could learn to make it be a filter between your consciousness and the world pouring in. That kind of thinking can contain a lot of “reasons” to write, and so may let you be various in your practice of writing. I’ve shifted to “you” to take on an affect of inclusivity and to let you in and to turn the situation around slightly, but that also makes the tonal space being constructed by this writing advice-like, and I don’t want it to be that, or be like that. I’m currently very upset with likeness. I write to have a practice I can continue and alter, and the question of how to change keeps getting raised as a result. There is entering a tonal space, building a tonal space, trying on a tonal space, stealing a tonal space, and there’s finding yourself stuck with one you didn’t realize you were in until totally immersed. There are more tonal spaces than that last sentence gets at. I do not write in order to play at or react to or fight with being contemporary or classical.

'I can legitimately say that in recent years I have written across months-long periods of time out of (this will be non-chronological): 1) a fear of being stupid; 2) a desire to stretch my ability to make and understand thought in sentences; 3) outrage, with specific regards to the ease with which this country’s general populace can be manipulated (by and through language of various stripes, in order to be rendered a weaponized generality); 4) desperation to maintain a practice in the face of life-altering changes; 5) a clear need to depressurize my practice (which meant writing poems that I didn’t think could be reproduced, thereby disarming the question of publication); 6) it’s interesting to be working very fast and very slow at the same time, all the time (I know that doesn’t grammatically connect back to “of”…what’s really at stake for that of?); 7) a recent recognition that I’ve been very serious the past thirteen years, and my body needs a break, since I’m prone to damaging it under conditions of high seriousness.

'I write because duration is so strange. “Everything lasts a certain amount of time; that’s very odd,” I heard the poet Kenneth Koch say one day.'-- Anselm Berrigan









Anselm Berrigan Come In Alone
Wave Books

'New York poet Anselm Berrigan plays with space like a painter with the prosody of a poet. Written as infinitely looping sentences around the page, the rectangular poems of COME IN ALONE act as a frame to space, outrunning thought with quickness, openness, humor, and protest. They are simultaneously inviting and impermeable, making familiar language uncanny with every turn around the page.'-- Wave Books


Excerpts













Anselm Berrigan for Poeteevee


Anselm Berrigan's Sure Shot


Anselm Berrigan reads Ted Berrigan




_______________




'Sara Tuss Efrik (is) one of the most interesting young writers in Sweden. Efrik is a writer and performance artist (and sometime writer for Montevidayo and sometime editor of Action, Yes). Her first novel is getting published this fall. I first came in contact with her when she wrote a kind of review of my book Pilot. The review wasn’t exactly a review as an amazing poem/story in and of itself, a kind of rewriting of my poems that treats through a deformation zone. And since then I’ve read a lot of her writings, including the novel. ...

'In many ways, Efrik’s work is an investigation of what Mark Seltzer (drawing on Kittler’s work) has called “wound culture,” the epoch of mass media, starting in the early 20th century in which the public arena is one of wounded bodies, mass-reproduced killers/victims (“serial killers”) and media. I also think of how this trailer shows something important: how the violence of art does not necessarily have to be what we typically think of as violence and dismemberment – hard, severe, rigorous (the fantasy of the avant-garde), but can come out making out, cuddly animals, permeation. It is an interesting spin on Bersani’s “shattering” experience of art – art can tamper with the self in other interesting ways than the “hard” kind of “shattering.” The self already contains the mutations and the art and the autoimmune disorder that will undo it and undo it and redo it and rewind it and unwind it.

'Efrik’s Automanias (are) are diary entries of sorts, but instead of diary entries, which invoke the very private take on lived experience, these diary entries are written through the experiences of art, as the texts move through other artworks. They are “automanias” rather than “autobiograhies” – they mania-ize the texts rather than biographies.

'This particular piece on the paintings of Berlin-based artist Emeli Theander as well as a kitschy painting by Efrik’s grandmother. “Chin Chin” is a series of images (from what I gather) that were grafiti–ied on various city walls around the world, translated already through various cityscapes. So already the diary is based on a reproduced images. But the poem is not “indeterminacy” in the old postmodern way, nor is it really about “reproduction” (as in a lot of art of the 1970s), but it’s about a constant tension between the many and the singular, the diary-narrative and the forces that break apart the body: she becomes not just two people (two copies without an original) but also “chin chin,” a name that evokes the realm of orientalist-freakshow-otherness kitsch (the exact realm through which translations – of say The Arabian Nights – produces the very idea of kitsch). It goes without saying that she’s “inauthentic”; she’s not worried about authenticity or mediation. For me this is about art as deformation zones.

'The rabbit is the “brand” or “symbol” of this violence; and like the tension between the one and the reproduced, like the diving in the land that produces the flood (in the statement by Teater Mutation), the speaker both doesn’t want to free the rabbit or bury it.

'It is not properly speaking a symbol because it unsettles the topographic models of the symbol: it distorts the depth that is needed in a symbol by living inside the ribcage (ie it is inside, where one is supposed to find the meaning of the symbol, but instead one finds the symbol, the vehicle) as well as outside. And unlike a conventional symbol, the concrete singular that holds together the more abstract, the vehicle that leads the way to the tenor (to paraphrase Coleridge’s famous definition), this symbol is an “epidemic” and a “coal-burning” – the singular vehicle multiplies in itself, becomes an auto-mutilation, burning itself into orphan birds. The vehicle of the symbol moves up toward the tenor/meaning, but the meaning is stuck in the insistent deformation zone (vultures ready to eat the text). ...

'I love all these explorations of gothic artifice, engagements with tensions and violent eruptions and disruptions, performances of distortions and multiplications. Greenberg famously objected to kitsch for its visceral impact: Here we get the symbol (that redeemer of Art) but its consumed by itself, turned into visceral kitsch. When people talk about using “kitsch” it almost always seems to be with the gloves of irony, thus reaffirming the division between true art and kitsch. In this poetry, the kitsch is visceral, it doesn’t have that ironic distance.'-- Johannes Goransson










Sara Tuss Efrik AUTOMANIAS
translated by Paul Cunningham
Good Morning Menagerie

'The winner of our 2015 Chapbook-in-Translation Contest, Automanias turns autobiography into a one-way mirror. When Efrik digests the work of Lars Von Trier, Alejandra Pizarnik, or Shakespeare, she transforms herself into a valve, collecting the violences of influence into a self that is aggregate, submerged, subversive, and emergent. Paul Cunningham's English translations have masterfully preserved Efrik's disturbing, and captivating, diary-like manias into language that is both hallucinatory and without boundaries.'-- GMM


Excerpts











Automanias: Selected Poems by Sara Tuss Efrik


PERSONA PEEP SHOW (2013) english subs


I LOVE MUMMY (2011)




*

p.s. Hey, everybody! ** Saturday ** Dóra Grőber, Hi Dóra! I hope you liked it (the Richey Edwards thing). Maybe you said later. I'm glad the self-portraits worked out well. I hope you had fun and lots of productive stuff this past week. How are you, how were things? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Thanks, and thank you so much for that amazing review! Zac and I are just thrilled and so grateful! The Cinematheque printed the review and gave it out as the 'program' for the showing. Everyone, if you haven't read David Ehrenstein's great article about Zac's and my film 'Like Cattle Towards Glow', and if you want to, you can do that by pressing down softly on these words. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. It was so great to get to see you and to hang out a little. Thanks so much! Love, me. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Huh, I don't remember that Robin thing, but it does seem plausible, although the boner itself was probably more conceptual than a real thing. Thanks for buying my book. How have things been? ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! My brain a little lagged-out this morning, so I'll save my powers of invention, if they exist, for tomorrow's initial salvo. Me too, re: unpredictable levels of nerves pre-readings or I guess pre-film-related talks lately in my case. Strange stuff. Oh, on the Scandinavian theme park book, at this point, I think the audio would just be on-site field recordings, but we haven't put our minds to the audio aspect yet. That was the initial idea: field recordings. How were Gluck and Kraus? Maybe you say later. I haven't read the future comments yet. Great to see you, Jamie! Love, me. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve! The Russian government seems very into being unfairly slighted. It seems like an addiction. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G! Trip went really good. Whoa, you are pervert! Holy moly! Ha ha. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi, Douglas. The Mormon ones are rarities. It's actually very rare that I'll find any American escort ads that are useable. American escorts' profiles tend be very boring and by the book. How's it, buddy? ** MANCY, Hi, Steven! Everything on the trip went great, thanks! How are you? ** Monday ** Brendan, Hey, B! I didn't get to LA after all, as I guess you realized due no alert from me. We had to get back here for some film stuff. But I'm planning a decent, longish visit home, probably in July. How is everything? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Thanks, Dora. It was good. ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, ha! ** Unknown, Hi, ... uh, Bill? How did you get unknown? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! I watched the Eurovision Finals, and I immediately thought Ukraine would win. It was a weird or rather unweird one this year, I thought. Lots of so-so to bad catchy pop and not nearly enough dated, overblown theatrical shenanigans. ** MANCY, Hi, thanks! ** Tuesday ** Unknown, You're unknown again! Yeah, we had a nice dinner instead of a stressful meet-and-greet = much, much better. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you again! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I think San Francisco got a little rocked. Cicciolina! I have never actually heard Cicciolina until this very moment. Is that weird? ** Wednesday ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, indeed, I read it the very second I heard it was up! ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien, That's okay. I was elsewhere anyway. Save your shit giving for the work itself, basically. 'Journal For Plague Lovers': I need to retry that. On my initial listening back when, there was something that bothered me about the post-humous illustrating thing or something. Good to see you, pal. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Cool you did like it, yay! ** Thursday ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The SF screening went really well. The crowd was healthy, and the feedback was excellent. Nice theater too with a giant screen. We'd never seen the film at such a huge scale. It almost looked like a real movie. ** Bill, Hey! Great seeing you too! I wish I could remember the tidbits and back stories. I think there were some. I really should take notes or something. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Like I just told David, the screening went really well. We were very happy. ** Marcus Pyotr Mamourian, Hi, there! Whoa, good to see you! We're still trying to set up a screening of our film in NYC, although our luck has been really bad, but, if we can, I'll definitely be there for that. Otherwise, I'd like to. We'll see. Cool that you'll be there. What are you doing there? ** Friday ** David Ehrenstein, Interesting take on 'TWB'. Huh. ** Steevee, Hi. Look forward to the interview. Everyone, Steevee has interviewed director Roberto Minervini about his much-discussed documentary film 'The Other Side', and you are invited to indulge. Oh, a review too! Everyone, you can also read Steevee's review of the new documentary about Anthony Weiner by clicking this. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. 'The Wild Boys' is my favorite Burroughs, I think, maybe. Wow, interesting about the Best PhD thesis. And interesting that he wrote one. There'a link. Everyone, _B_A links everyone up with a download of Philip Best's PhD thesis if you like. Here. ** Bernard Welt, Hey! I hope the event went really well. Philip Clark left me an FB comment to that effect. Possibility of a description? I hope everything is going okay. Are you back in DC? ** James, Hi, man. I did make it back home safely. Jets-lagged, duh, but in one single piece. The screening went great. No, not a packed house, but it was a huge heater, and we were very happy with the turn-out. Otherwise in SF, Zac and I mostly looked around, visited the new SF MoMA, galleries, city in general stuff, saw some friends, saw the documentary about Chantal Akerman, ate some superb sushi, etc. Didn't hit City Lights, no. Never got over into that area. It was a pretty quick trip. ** Bill, Hi. The flight was long. The lag is ... we'll see. Semi-bad so far. Saw a bunch of plane movies. I don't know if I can remember. Um ... 'Deadpool' (what makes it fresh also makes it annoying), the new 'Star Wars' (fun), 'Shutter Island' (terrible, maybe the worst ever Scorcese), 'Paranormal Activity: The Ghost' (weak), 'The Revenant' (boy, is that maybe the most overrated movie ever; boring, badly written, phony-feeling), ... I'm forgetting the others. That William Davenport event/film does sound really good. Johanna Went! ** New Juche New Juche, Hi, welcome to this place, and thank you coming in. I think it's my favorite Burroughs too. Josef Winkler? Hm, no, I don't think I know him. Okay, I will go try to find those two books by him today. Thanks a lot, sir. How are you? What's going on in your world? ** Saturday ** _Black_Acylic, Oh my god, it's up, it's real, at long last! Hooray! I'll imbed it. Everyone, the third, extremely long awaited episode of Ben Robinson's exciting and already legendary web series 'Art101' is finally in the world! This is sufficiently momentous news that I am going to imbed Episode 3 right down at the bottom of this p.s., and please click where its arrow is and fully enjoy. Can't wait to watch it, Ben! Fantastic! ** David Ehrenstein, He was indeed. ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! Cool, I'm glad the reruns were still alive. The trip was great, all we had hoped. The screening went extremely well, yes. We're very happy. Here's hoping about my jet-lag. It seems kind of sneaky so far. Of course, you're back from Aarhus! So the performance went well? Did you see any other music or anything else that you particularly liked? I'm spaced too. I hope you got all the catch-up sleep you needed. Talk to you more and better tomorrow. Lots of love, Dennis. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, god, ugh, I hate that. I hope your new card gets winged to you lickety-split. ** Okay. We're caught up. Sorry for the effects of my jet lag on the above. I should be brighter in the morning. In the meantime, please consider these four books I loved. Thanks! See you tomorrow.


ART101 ep. 3 - death lolz

Philippe Grandrieux Day

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'The films of Philippe Grandrieux pulsate. They pulsate microcosmically: in the images, the camera trembles and flickers so violently that, even within a single, continuous shot, no photogram resembles another. And they pulsate macrocosmically: the soundtrack is constructed globally upon unidentifiable, layered, synthesised, ambient noises of breath or wind, sucked in and expelled, which underlie the entire film and constitute its disturbed heartbeat, returning to our ear when all other sounds have disappeared. In the very beginnings and endings of his films, over the credits, there is nothing but this strangely bodily sound.'-- Adrian Martin, Kinoeye

'There is something profoundly new about Grandrieux's plastic exploration of violence, but also something very contemporary. His approach is not based on such editing and framing effects one finds and admires in Hitchcock and Ray, nor in an exploration of excess as in Tarantino. He works on the inside of an image, on the special relation between the luminous content and the vibrant and fragmentary representation.'-- Christa Bluminger, Parachute

'Grandieux's films carefully try to understand the exact inner-working of one’s psychic, and more especially the part that deals with desire and transformation. How does desire work? What are the elements that this energy-matter is using to expand its empire? What are the social repressions that desire has to face? Unlike Pasolini who is really interested in the way that society is theatrically transforming the ceremony of predating into a show, there is here an experimental cinema; it is true; that is trying to register, thanks to the camera, what humans eyes would never be able to see in order to deconstruct and analyze reality. Grandrieux’s films are analytical films, like a microscope, that give the viewer the possibility to see more accurately what is movement, emotion, sensation, colour, darkness and the emergence of the image (either material or thought). What is the process that enables something to become an image in the dark? Why can this process only be seen as a threat?'-- Jean-Claude Polack

'In his films, Philippe Grandrieux has revealed his startlingly corporeal vision of a world in which the body and its drives remake cinematic form and content alike. Often compared to the work of Stan Brakhage, Grandrieux’s films similarly reject representational cinema in favor of a mode of filmmaking that, in Brakhage’s famous phrase, realizes “adventures in perception.” In Grandrieux’s case, this approach entails a radical reworking of the frame, offscreen space, lighting and even focus, at times edging the image towards the barely perceptible. No less radical is Grandrieux’s approach to sound, which is often distorted and accentuated, with dialogue kept to a careful minimum and music alternately ambient and blaring. Grandrieux’s is a cinema of vibrations and tremors in which image and sound seem to pulsate with a kind of furious life.

'The subjects of Grandrieux’s first two features, Sombre and New Life– a serial killer and sex trafficking, respectively – quickly gave him the reputation of being something of an enfant terrible. Yet, while Grandrieux’s vision is very dark - literally and figuratively - it is never gratuitous but rather an extension of the French fascination, from Sade to Bataille to Genet, with the body’s potential to undo subjectivity in the gaps between social order and animality, where the body/corporeality itself becomes radically refigured not as the vehicle for consciousness but as flesh with a life of its own. Even those who, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, have reservations about the sexualized violence of Grandrieux’s first two films will appreciate the originality and gravity of their formal audacity.'-- Harvard Film Society

'Grandrieux’s reflection belongs to the body’s modernity – the modernity of Sigmund Freud, Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, to name only a few – and thus returns the anthropological need for representation to a state of immanence. The image is no longer given as a reflection, discourse, or the currency of whatever absolute value; it works to invest immanence, using every type of sensation, drive and affect. To make a film means descending, via the intermittent pathways of neuronal connection, down into the most shadowy depths of our sensory experiences, to the point of confronting the sheer terror of the death drive (Sombre), or the still more immense and bottomless terror of the unconscious, of total opacity (La Vie nouvelle).'-- Nicole Brenez



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Stills



































































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Further

Philippe Grandieux Official Website
PG @ IMDb
PG @ Wikipedia
PG interviewed by Nicole Brenez
Magick Mike on PG's 'Sombre' @ EEP
PG's 'Un Lac' reviewed @ Screener
PG @ Facebook
PG @ the Harmony Korine Website Forum
Video: PG interviewed (in French)
PG Torrent Search
PG interviewed @ Rouge
'Film Comment Selects: Philippe Grandrieux Films'
'Malgré la nuit' page @ Facebook
'La caméra haptique de Philippe Grandrieux'
'Propos de Philippe Grandrieux'
'Entretien: Philippe Grandrieux [critikat.com]'
'Dans une langue étrangère" Un lac de Philippe Grandrieux'
'ARTIST IN FOCUS: Philippe Grandrieux'



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Extras


Philippe Grandrieux / films by / extracts


Alan Vega ‎– Philippe Grandrieux's "Sombre" Soundtrack


Cápsula 04 - Philippe Grandrieux


Oscuro - Philippe Grandrieux


MARYLIN MANSON / Putting holes in happiness // Directed by Philippe Grandrieux


Cinéastes par eux-mêmes - Philippe Grandrieux



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Interview




I was wondering about the dimension of politics in your work. In former films like SOMBRE or LA VIE NOUVELLE you have political references and now with portraying Masao Adachi, one of the most radical and well known activists and filmmakers in Japanese history, of course you created a very explicit context. Do you consider the film as a political film?

Philippe Grandieux: Well, it’s trivial to say that, but all our acts involve politics. You couldn’t be here without thinking about politics. It is much more than ideology; it’s decision in fact. Politics means making decisions about your own life: How you act in the world and how you want to be. So it’s really something very important. In SOMBRE for instance there wasn’t any morality – no good, no bad. It is a decision, a very political decision to let the audience face their own desire, their own unrest. LA VIE NOUVELLE was more or less the relationship between the chaotic historical post-communism in Bulgaria and the chaotic psychic world. You drive inside of it. So ADACHI is politics but a very sensual movie at the same time, I hope. It’s based on emotion and sensation, as my movies generally are. Making movies, like life, is a path. So you’re following your own path as much as you can. Sometimes you’re weaker and sometimes you feel energized. This is always more or less the same question I’m working on.

I noticed as well that you link, in a very interesting way, the portrait of Adachi itself and the formal strategies of the feature films you did before, for example the dissolution of the images which are mirrored in the landscape of Tokyo that you depict repeatedly. I have the impression that the connection of this real political background with your artistic style gives your work a new layer.

PG: You’re right, yes. It’s true.

Do you intend to further follow this direction?

PG: The movie I’ve just finished now is called WHITE EPILEPSY and it’s supposed to be a kind of a tryptich on the question of unrest. This movie is very particular, because for me it’s a feature film, but it’s done out of a very radical position: the frame is vertical. The question of storytelling also became very important to me, in order to understand how I want to work with it. In WHITE EPILEPSY there are no more questions of characters and the psychological map of the characters throughout the movie, of how the story grows out of these characters – instead the question is more about the event: something happens. Questioning the event is rather in the centre of the movie itself compared to the development of the story. This is something that I really want to work on. I also want to further pursue the relation between sensation and emotion. They are two different issues, but not so far from each other. I try to explore the same possibilities over and over through cinema.

I’ve heard that after Masao Adachi you and Nicole Brenez are planning to portray other radical filmmakers as well? Will you be directing?

PG: No. We try to provide the possibility for making other movies but I’m not going to do the other ones myself. Other filmmakers will. We have a project on René Vautier, a french filmmaker. A very strong guy: at 15 he was a part of “La Résistance” in France, after which he fought against the colonization, in Algeria too. Now he’s old, maybe 80-82, but he is an incredibly strong filmmaker. We also plan a project on newsreels in America. Well, we’ll see, because for this series we haven’t got any money yet. We don’t want to write things to get money so we try to keep it very, very free. Because I think this is very important. This movie – ADACHI – as I went to Tokyo, I was facing the possibility that there might have been no movie at all in the end. So it was not necessary to finish something. This gives you a lot of freedom.

Since you were mentioning the money aspect: This is of course closely linked to the fact that depending on your work it is not easy to reach an audience. I have the impression that you’re a filmmaker who seeks to address people through cinema and move something in their way of perceiving the world. Being fairly well known now, is it easy for you nowadays to reach new audiences? Are you actively trying to reach out?

PG: I would like to try to expand the possibilities of cinema with my next feature film. It’s not necessary to reach huge audiences. Maybe the audience will be more important than the other movies had, but I can’t think in terms of that. I really try to follow my own steps.
I’m very interested in actors, stars. I think it could be very interesting to make a movie with no money at all but with very well known actors. Because this is also a part of what ‘cinema’ is. It’s about political problems, agents, lawyers, distributors and sellers. About these very well formed industrial systems and I think they offer a huge possibility for working. I would like to try something alike next.

I’m interested in the relationship between emotion, sensation and intellectualization. How has it changed over the years in your personal view and in the reception of others, in their approach of others towards your work?

PG: I think it depends on where you are, because when you are making movies – as Adachi says at the end of the movie – there is an intellectual aspect, but in the end it must be about the sensation itself. Because sensation is life in a way: something you couldn’t control, that you couldn’t put inside any kind of system. Even if the systems are very, very clever and very powerful. Think of Leibnitz or Kant – even with all these very strong philosophers we couldn’t reach the real point of knowing what life is. Maybe ‘odd’ is a possibility. Maybe it’s the only one. Sometimes I think like this, when I am in a positive mood.

To answer your question: When you do a movie, you organize things, you write, you scout, you cast, you think a lot, you take notes, you write the script, you prepare everything, it’s a very intellectual process. But when you shoot it’s something else. It’s really back to sensation, pure sensation, pure feelings, and pure intuition. A beautiful aspect is that time is an editing process, an intellectual process. You cut things and put them together, and after a while sense appears. But sensation is something else. It’s intuition, pure duration. It’s not any more the time that you can cut into discrete seconds; it’s an eternity inside of yourself. It’s a big question. Maybe the same question as: If you are thinking too much in terms of intellectuality and sense, you’re thinking in terms of immortality. If you’re thinking in terms of duration you’re thinking in terms of eternity. It’s two different ways to be and to me art is really part of these eternity feelings, which are a part of us.

What about the reception that comes from the outside, from theorists or critics? Do you still find something useful, when they interpret your work in a highly intellectual way?

PG: Well, it’s not helpful at all to make movies. It’s helpful for me to be inside of the world. I mean to be with my… I don’t know what to say. It’s helpful, because you see that what you are trying to do is not just ‘nowhere’. Of course it’s important. But after a movie is done, one can write a thousand pages. It’s strange; it’s really something completely different.

And what about beauty? Is this something you are searching for? Have you got a concept of beauty or is it pure instinct? For example Bruno Dumont says that he tries to avoid beautiful images, but that is something I can’t believe.

PG: It’s not beauty at this level; it is not the question of beautiful images. The beauty is something much stronger. When Dostojewski says that the beauty saves the world, the question is not about doing beautiful things. Beauty is a political decision in a way. It’s to be alive with your own self, strongly alive. I mean not under submissions. Beauty is the possibility to feel ‘la force’, the strength of the things, the reality and the real. So beauty is very important of course, but it’s not at all about beautiful pictures.

What about melancholy? When I saw UN LAC it seemed to me that for the first time in your work appeared a very strong sense of sadness. Do you think sadness is a proper way to react to this world?

PG: I think it’s impossible to be untouched by melancholy. We are dealing with time, memories and our childhood. We can’t escape from this and I think these melancholic dimensions are very important. It’s also in terms of politics: All the organizations are transforming more and more into paranoid systems in which you fit in. You fit in via computer, cell phone or Facebook – it’s a paranoid organization of our feelings. Melancholy is something else. Melancholy could be dangerous too, as a tendency you may incline towards. But it’s very important.

Maybe it’s kind of subversive to be melancholic.

PG: I think so, yes. You know these systems to control the streets? If somebody stops walking, after two or three minutes, the computers signal that somebody stopped walking. Something happened. Someone stopped in the middle of the street, but the person shouldn’t be immobile. This is a very interesting conception of your destiny [laughs].

You mentioned that you try to dive further into this field of pure sensation. Now you did WHITE EPILEPSY. I heard it is very focused on bodies. I wonder if it is very important for you to find a certain body. Would you cancel a project if you couldn’t manage to find a certain professional or non-professional?

PG: Absolutely. For this project I worked with a dancer, Hélène Rocheteau. We worked together on what we can call choreography, although I’m not a choreographer. It was a piece of twelve minutes; it was shown in Metz in France and was very interesting. It was a cycle and featured a loop of Joy Division music: a ceremony. We worked on insect movements, on the way insects are completely limited to their instinct. For them there is no possibility to escape their instincts at all. There are very few needs, but these needs are accordingly intense, there is no doubt. We tried to work on these kinds of movements and I was very impressed by her body, how she can move each muscle with such intense possibilities, like Butoh dancers. An when I was thinking about WHITE EPILEPSY I had this idea of this naked body, that I can be with her in this kind of very, very strong relation: very strange way of movement, human but not completely human.

Being a critic and writing about film, I’m more and more doubting that people take out a lot with them, when they leave the cinema. I’m a bit pessimistic about film and the way that it fails to activate something in audiences. Many seem to use these two hours in order to separate themselves from their lives. I would love to contribute to them connecting more to film and I’m trying to do my part through writing. Since we talked about bodies, do you think that using the body and its physicality expands the possibility of cinema to reach people more intensely?

PG: That’s an interesting point of view, the question how cinema is moving inside of us. We never know; it’s strange. Maybe cinema is less powerful than years ago. But I couldn’t really think in those terms, because I don’t like glorifying the past. We are here, just here and now, and we are dealing with our reality. This is nice and it’s strong and I like it. I have no regrets about anything – no regret about the 35mm, no regret at all. I like numeric cameras and if tomorrow there are no more cameras, ok. Then there are no more cameras; who cares. But the question you rose, how the movies are inside of us, or what we can call movies today, I think this is very important. Because I’m sure it is still operating, it is still strong. I mean you are still undergoing a certain experience when you go see a movie. If it’s pure entertainment, you get a good moment with your friends, you have a beer and that’s it. Why not? We shouldn’t be dogmatic in this aspect of the things. But you know, there are some kinds of movies that move you very deeply and sometimes even influence all of your live. Of course, this is what I would like to try to catch with my work. I don’t know if I have success. I would like to put one human being in front of these pictures, inside of this sound, inside of this world to get the possibility to feel something within itself. No words, just the feeling of being alive and of the complexity this situation achieves.



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7 of Philippe Grandieux's 10 films

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Sombre (1998)
'Philippe Grandrieux’s first full length cinema film has unleashed a storm of controversy since its showing at the Locarno initernational film festival in 1998. It had critics solidly divided into two camps – those who regard it as an obscene, unwatchable mess, and others who rate it as a sublime masterpiece of the psychosexual thriller genre. It is clearly a film which is acceptable only to certain tastes, and many will find the film very hard to stomach. Certainly, Grandrieux’s extremely minimalist photography, much of which involves jerky camera movements and hazy out-of-focus images shot in virtual pitch-blackness, makes few concessions to traditional cinema audiences. To his credit, this unusual - and frankly disorientating – cinematography serves the film well, heightening the menace in the killer and the brutality of his murders by showing little and prompting us to imagine much more than we see. The idea presumably is to show the world as the obsessed killer sees it, through a darkened filter with periodic loss of focus.'-- James Travers, filmsdefrance



Excerpt


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La vie nouvelle (2002)
'Since its premiere screenings in late 2002, Philippe Grandrieux's second feature La Vie nouvelle (The New Life) has been a cause célèbre. On its theatrical release in France, it was savaged by a large number of prominent newspaper and magazine reviewers. But the film has many passionate defenders. Grandrieux's work plunges us into every kind of obscurity: moral ambiguity, narrative enigma, literal darkness. La Vie Nouvelle presents four characters in a severely depressed Sarajevo who are caught in a mysterious, death-driven web: the feckless American Seymour (Zach Knighton), his mysterious companion (lover? friend? brother? father?) Roscoe (Marc Barbé), the demonic Mafioso Boyan (Zsolt Nagy), and the prostitute-showgirl who is the exchange-token in all their relationships, Mélania (Anna Mouglalis). Eric Vuillard's poetically conceived script takes us to the very heart of this darkness where sex, violence, betrayal and obsession mingle and decay. Grandrieux feels freer than ever to explore the radical extremes of film form: in his lighting and compositions and impulsive camera movements; in the bold mix of speech, noise and techno/ambient music (by the celebrated experimental group Etant Donnés); and in the frame-by-frame onslaught of sensations and affects.'-- Adrian Martin, Kinoeye



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Philippe Grandrieux, à propos de La Vie Nouvelle



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Un lac (2008)
'How to sum up Un Lac? It’s no easier than with Sombre or La Vie nouvelle, the two last films by Philippe Grandrieux. Suffice to say that Grandrieux has been hotly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as one of Europe’s most innovative and uncompromising filmmakers, his visionary films testing the very limits of screen language. This minimalist new work is at once Grandrieux’s most accessible film and his most abstract. The vestigial narrative takes place in a frosty Northern landscape of forests and mountains, where young woodchopper Alexis lives with his sister, their blind mother and a younger brother. Then one day a younger man arrives on the scene... Grandrieux doesn’t make events easy for us to follow, often shooting in near-darkness, with sparse dialogue sometimes pitched barely above a whisper. But narrative apart, the film is distinctive for the unique, self-enclosed world that Grandrieux creates with a palette reduced almost to monochrome: a world of stillness and near-silence, of forbidding yet alluring landscapes whose affinities are as much with the Romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, as with the cinematic ilk of Alexandr Sokurov, Bela Tarr and Fred Kelemen.'-- Jonathan Romney



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Making of Un lac



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Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution - Masao Avachi (2011)
'This tribute to the radical Japanese writer-director Masao Adachi is the first in a series of documentaries that Philippe Grandrieux wants to dedicate to deeply political filmmakers. For decades, the eccentric Adachi was a member of the extremist Japanese Red Army. French director Philippe Grandrieux (Sombre, 1999; A Lake, 2009) wants to make a series of portraits of politically committed filmmakers. His film about Japanese avant-gardist Masao Adachi (1939) is the first in this series. In the 1960s and 1970s, Adachi was a prominent film critic and underground filmmaker, with experimental films such as Sain (1963) to his name. He often collaborated with his contemporary and ally Nagisa Oshima, wrote scripts for Koji Wakamatsu and made films in the pink genre. Disappointment with the political direction of Japan made him join the the extreme left-wing Japanese Red Army in the early 1970s and he started making films in Beirut. Grandieux engages in sometimes cryptic conversations with him about film, art and politics and films him in his characteristic style: sometimes out of focus, sometimes under or over- exposed. With a few clips from Adachi’s work, such as The Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War from 1971.'-- IFFR



the entire film



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White Epilepsy (2012)
'Philippe Grandrieux's work has often invoked the world of Francis Bacon, but in this almost purely experimental piece it is even more pronounced, as he takes Bacon's fascination with the triptych and the body and insists on utilising only the middle section of the frame. Here are bodies in primordial states, fully formed as muscle and flesh, but as if unformed in the nature of their desires and subsequently somehow closer to nature. Utilising a dense soundtrack that both suggests the internal organs (lungs, larynx and heart) and the extended sounds of the forest, Grandrieux has made a film that isn't easy to watch but equally not easy to forget. It is a strategy that has worked wonderfully well for him in the past with moments from Sombre (for example, the Punch and Judy contest), La vie nouvelle (the scenes filmed with a thermo camera) and the misty lake in Un Lac all examples of the cinematically unforgettable. Perhaps the images here are too abstract and sculptural to fascinate us fully, without that soupçon of story that can make Grandrieux's work maddeningly suggestive, but this is is still a film by a modern master.'-- List Film



Trailer



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Meurtrière (2015)
'The film opens on the body of a naked woman, lying on her back. Only her flesh, muscles, curves and hollows are thrown into relief against the surrounding darkness. Her face remains invisible. Slowly, to a rhythmic soundtrack of muffled, raspy breathing, other bodies appear, their faces also masked and their nudity on full display. In slow motion, arms, legs, bellies and breasts intertwine, collide, latch together, submit or hold still in a resolutely static and vertical frame. As each scene flows into the next, throbbing and relentless, the atmosphere grows threatening and disquieting. Cinema in its most stripped-down form becomes a pure sensory experience, the stock-in-trade of French director Philippe Grandrieux (Un lac). The second movement of his performance triptych Unrest after White Epilepsy, Grandrieux’s exploration of worry, Meurtrière is a striking tableau vivant reminiscent of Goya and Francis Bacon and populated by the bodies of four dancers: Émilia Giudicelli, Vilma Pitrinaite, Hélène Rocheteau and Francesca Ziviani. Graceful yet ruthless, obscene yet mystical, monstrous yet sublime, the film fascinates by virtue of its hypnotic, unsettling tone.'-- Festival du nouveau cinéma



Trailer


Behind the scenes



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Malgré la nuit (2015)
'Early in Philippe Grandrieux's Malgré la Nuit, Lenz (Kristian Marr) encounters a friend (Lola Norda) in a dark, abstract space illuminated only by a faint copper-toned light as smoke billows around them. They call each other out in diaphanous whispers enhanced by the absence of any diegetic noise, until their hands touch. She asks him what he's doing back in Paris, to which he plaintively responds, “I'm searching for Madeleine,” crystallizing the film's axis of conflict: the regaining of a lost love. It's an unusual start coming from a filmmaker who routinely eschews anything that so much as resembles plot markers or sentimentality. Then again, no one accustomed to Grandrieux's penchant for disruption should be too surprised by this. Since his startling debut feature, Sombre, Grandrieux has become one of cinema's most audacious chroniclers of society's underbelly, maybe even its best articulator of heightened sensations; despair and ecstasy erupt from the fabric of his films with a blistering, almost physical intensity. While Grandrieux's fourth fiction feature continues his usual investigation into the limits of experience and range of cinematic possibilities, there's also a strong willingness here to work along a more traditional narrative scheme. Not that Grandrieux has totally softened up. Malgré la Nuit still plays out like a sordid nightmare straight out of Georges Bataille's imagination.'-- Film Comment



Critics' Talk: Philippe Grandrieux (Malgré la nuit)




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p.s. Hey. ** Jonathan, Hello there, Jonathan. They do contain awesomeness to a one, it's true. What were the odds? Wow, say hi to Ariana for me, if you bump into her. Nice sounding lit fest. Ooh, do link us/me up with those sounds you're making. I really think I need that. All's good here, and the lag has been strangely almost tolerable. xx, Dennis. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, he is the progeny of Ted and Alice Notley. And his brother Edmund, Red and Alice's only other progeny, is a poet too. Yeah, exactly, about 'Shutter Island'. Very strange. Personally, I really wish Scorcese would get over his Leo thing or rather would have many films ago. I can't say that I've ever understood what that's about. I don't know what that news blackout thing is. That site seems a little hysteria-tilted? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Nice to be back. Well, a new writing project is pretty exciting, I must say, so that qualifies. Eek, job urgency. That pressure is the worst. I'm good, just kind of predictably hazy, but good. Well, we're about to jump back into the new film, or rather figuring out when and how we can make it. And I hope to get back into my long dormant novel. That's my ideal. We'll see. How was Tuesday on your end? ** Jamie McMorrow, Rock n roll, Jamie. Me too. On lag's dissipation. Really, it's not so bad relative to how bad my version can be. The trip was really just film-focused. and the rest was just wandering around almost aimlessly. I won't press you on the horrible band's identity. I'll just hope that I don't accidentally wind up in their audience one day. The festival experience sounds really nice, yeah. Cool, I'm glad the loved books were a little infectious. I love 'Richard Yates'. I'm a big fan of Tao's writing. I haven't done too much since getting back, mostly trying to get ahead of myself with blog posts. Today stuff starts happening again: meeting with Gisele re: TV series, photo taken for an upcoming article here on my 'Le Fol Marbre', trying to ace another 'LCTG' screening, stuff. And your Tuesday? How was it? Love, me. ** Steevee, I'm with you, as I just said to David. I just saw 'The Revenant' on the plane, which is supposed to be Leo's big bonanza performance, and I didn't buy a lick of what he was performing. A review! Everyone, eminent Steevee has reviewed Chris Hegedus'& D. A. Pennebaker's animal rights documentary film 'Unlocking the Cage', and that news is your clue to click. ** Sypha, Hi, James. No surprise that I don't know any of those writers you mentioned. One of these days I need and want to get to know those Decadent guys. Sadly or not, if there was ever a blog that wouldn't work in book form, it's this one. Oh, well. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. It is very fine. As is the new Art101! I might be my favorite one yet. Very worth the wait as waitful as the wait was. Congrats! Yep, the Cicciolina track is going to have to be a grower for me, ha ha. Nicely wack though. Great about the letter of support! What now? ** Bill, Hi, Bill! It does seem to be fading fast-ish, yes, weird. Ha, those two books are worthy, I'm sorry. I'm going to try to find 'Blood'. Oh, thank you a lot for that 'LCTG' insight. Yes, thats going on in it. Awesome. We're 'Pick of the Week'? Could it be that they're actually seeing our film as more than a waste of their time? ** New Juche, Hi! I'm glad you came back, awesome. My great pleasure on being able to intro those writers. I got an initial bead on Winkler yesterday, and I hope to actually score something in the next day or so. Thank you again very much for that. I didn't know about that Genet book. Huh. More and more intriguing. I thought it was hard to get books I want here in Paris, but, yeah, I can only imagine how tough it would be in Bangkok. How do you like living there? Do you write yourself? What are your interests, and what do you do there? If you don't mind. Very nice getting to know you. Have an awesome day! ** Okay. I did a Philippe Grandieux Day here some years ago, but it's hopelessly out of date now, and he's one of my favorite directors, so I made a brand new version. Enjoy. See you tomorrow.

Trigonometry

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p.s. Hey. ** Jonathan, Hi, J. I saw that you sent me a thing, and I'll get to realize it today. Thank you! I don't think that's Laura Dern, no. Pretty sure not. But yeah. Philip Clark, who did/does the Donald Britton page, did/is doing an amazing job, yeah. A bunch of photos there that I had never seen before. Have a great one. ** Jamie McMorrow, Good on you, Jamie, mate. Yeah, his films are hard to see, it sucks. They rarely get theater releases and barely even then. Even in France. It's strange. I think MUBI has a bunch of them if you want to join MUBI. It's a great site. Cool, thanks for the report on Gluck and Kraus. It's weird: there are biographies of Kathy Acker in progress at the same time, hers and this guy Jason's. I don't know if they're, like, competing bios with different agendas or what. Tuesday was okay, no huge shakes. Catching up. Our proposal for the TV series finally got submitted to ARTE yesterday. I guess we'll have some very initial reaction in a week or so. Nerve-wracking. And the photo thing. I don't mind having my photo taken, I just hate seeing the photos themselves. I have some kind of disconnect with the way I look, and whenever I see photos of me, it kind of freaks me out. All I can think is, That's what people look at when I'm talking to them?! That's what I look like when I'm with people?! It's weird. Did you get to fill in the blank with music? Later, gator. Love, me. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! His movies are hard to see. I think his films have gotten better and better. If you get any chance to see the new one, 'Malgre la nuit', I think that's my favorite. Among the other ones, and among the ones that are at least relatively available to watch, I recommend 'Un Lac'. It's incredible. Yay! The way that new writing project of yours is happening is the ideal way writing happens! That's very exciting. I really hope I can get back to my novel very soon, I really hope so. That's the plan. Re: the new film, we're about to meet with our producer (on Friday) where we'll try to rough out the budget so we'll know how much money we need and how little we could realistically make it with, worst comes to worst. Also, we'll find out how soon we can start working on it. Zac and I are really jonesing to start working on it. Otherwise, our producer is in the process of applying for various film grants from the French government and other places right now. We have maybe a third, or possibly more than that, of the money we'll need already raised, but we need more. Thank you for asking! Your optimism has a very good record of predicting outcomes, so tentative congratulations! Have the finest Wednesday possible! ** Damien Ark, Hi. I think you particularly will really like the new one, 'Malgre la nuit', when you ever get the chance. It's very intense. You have a good day too! ** David Ehrenstein, It seemed outlier-ish to me, yeah. It just seems really strange that Scorcese sees Leo as a vessel in which to project himself. The result has been an ongoing string of lesser films. I don't get it at all. ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, I remember that about your friend. He sound awfully uptight. Total agreement about Leo, or at least post- maybe 'Romeo and Juliet'. And about Scorcese. For while after his great run, I thought there were flashes of his genius in some films like 'Casino', for instance, but lately I just don't see it anymore, or the flashes have gotten tinier and tinier. Very best of luck, not that you'll need it hopefully, about the meet up with the guy from the theater. ** Sypha, Hi. Yes, I do remember you waiting about Lorrain. I meant to get something of his and then just spaced or something. Bloy sounds very curious indeed. Huh. Okay, I'll see if I can find 'The Woman who was Poor'. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi. 'Sombre' is really good, but he got better later. He started backpedalling plot elements after that, and the work got stronger. As I told someone up above, I think some of his films are on MUBI. Awesome about the Phoenix move. When do you go? You have a place to live there lined up? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Good morning! ** H, Hi. Thank you, nice to be returned. 'Uncertain, normal and strange' can be a fine combination if the balance is right. I met Katz once or twice, but I never talked with him. My friends who knew him said he was kind of a difficult guy, or could be. I can't remember why, though. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Oh, jeez, man, about the ER and hernia repair issues. Eek, man. Any temperature lessening between yesterday and today? Take care, buddy. ** New Juche, Hi, Joe. I would definitely like a link to your site, yes, please. And excited to read the new pdf, and, well, the old one too. What drew you to anthropology? That's probably an impossible question, but I'm curious about that. I've seen pictures of Chaing Mai. I've never been to Thailand. My friend/collaborator Zac and I travel a lot, and we were talking recently about going to Thailand sometime soon if we can manage it. Apichatpong Weorasetakul is incredible, for sure. I would try bothering him if I were you. Well, actually, I would be too shy, but, if I weren't, I would. I've been living mostly in Paris for, wow, maybe 12 years now. I go back and forth to my other home LA, but I've gone to LA less and less in the last few years. Have you been to Paris? I really love it here. I dreamed of living here since I was a little kid and, very weirdly, it has totally lived up to my fantasies about living here. Thanks, Joe. Have a superb Wednesday. ** Right. Today's kind of an odd post, I guess. I just got on this jag of interest in trigonometry gifs and was very surprised to discover there are tons out there, and so I got this idea stack them up and see what happened, for better or worse. See you tomorrow.

Please welcome to the world ... Robert Glück Communal Nude (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

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'In her 2000 essay "Writing/Sex/Body," first published on the Buffalo Poetics Listserv, Dodie Bellamy describes her practice as "a writing that subverts sexual bragging, a writing that champions the vulnerable." This constantly changes her relationship to her audience, her community—and to the text: "No way I can stand in front of an audience reading this stuff and maintain the abstraction of 'author.'" She "stiffens" herself in the performance of her "I" and "invades" her own privacy. In reading, she freezes herself into a corpse, a "not a body": Is this a problem? In his response to Bellamy, "Writing Sex Body," the poet and novelist Robert Glück writes: "Why write about body and sex unless they are problems?" He argues that these categories and their performance, the thing that "stiffens" us, allow for a beginning—of an argument, of an exchange. And they are problems, of the body and of sex, and of the communities of those bodies and sexes, that are central Glück's own work, from his novels to his critical essays, which have been collected for the first time in Communal Nude (Semiotext(e) 2016). "This is the goal," he states from the outset of the collection: "to unframe writing about sex and the body, to derail the mechanisms that make a unified position."

'Communal Nude is the first new collection by Glück in over a decade. A founding member of San Francisco's New Narrative movement, a loose collective of writers that included Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, and Bruce Boone, Glück's best known for his novels, including Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe. The latter—perhaps his best—imagines a contemporary romance between two gay men fused across the gulf of history into the medieval story of the Christian mystic of the same name. Nude opens with his important essay "Long Note on New Narrative," which articulates a history of the group and its gossipy "hybrid aesthetic," which approached narrative in such a way that put the self "at risk by naming names, becoming naked, making the irreversible happen—the book [as] social practice that is lived," and lived specifically within the community where it is placed: namely, San Francisco in the late 1970s and 1980s. It is a writing that asks, against the backdrop of Language poetry's aversion to narrative, "What kind of representation least deforms its subject? Can language be aware of itself (as object, as system, as commodity, as abstraction) yet take part in the forces that generate the present? Where in writing does engagement become authentic?"

'In Glück's work, theory mixes with porn mixes with fiction mixes with memoir, genres he borrows and dispenses with freely in order to paste together narrative collages that cycle through local gossip and world historical events, the doings of gay men in pre-AIDS San Francisco, and the blender of identity politics: a changing "I" that both obtains the look and feel of Bob/not Bob, body/no body. ...

'In a moment when autobiographical fiction—autofiction—has proliferated, Glück's essays and fiction broaden the history of the form, tracking its development in the late 1970s to now. Communal Nude adds considerably to the breadth and range of the critical heft of this work, and partially maps a history of experimental autobiography that necessarily includes poets and novelists who developed this mode long before it made the pages of the New York Times Book Review. This is important, dutiful work, and its importance isn't lost on Glück, whose best essays—and there are many—articulate a poetics of the memoir that acknowledges the genre's porousness, the tears in memory's fabric, its frayed edges. He often excels at this when he's writing about himself, the subject he doesn't quite know best (otherwise why write about it?) but which he is determined to understand better. And in him, us: "Here's Bob, he's a writer, he lives in San Francisco," he writes toward the end of "Writers are Liars," a lecture given at a literary conference in 1997. "Here is Bob's stupid love life, blow by blow. Here are his friends by name… I try to approximate the irreversibility of a performance—something you can't take back, some nakedness, some shame, some detail too intimate, something I make my body do, something that happens to it." He ends the lecture by describing a conversation he had with Eileen Myles about the then-surging interest in memoir and whether or not this had anything to do with "truth."

'"All this anxiety about the truth, and interest in the truth, seems to focus on the truth of abjection. This display of true misery has an element of theater. The heroin of The Red Shoes can play the dying swan into infinity, but the locomotive that actually kills her is delivering news from the real world."

'Glück makes sure we're on the train.'-- Andrew Durbin, BOMB



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Further

'Long Note on New Narrative', by Robert Gluck