'"I have a very small cult reputation to protect," Jean-Jacques Schuhl protested to me a few months ago in Paris when he learned that he'd been nominated for the Prix Goncourt (and the four other top French literary prizes) for his first book in twenty-three years. Now that he's won the Goncourt, this avatar of Duchampian wit and encyclopedic misanthropy will just have to live with a much bigger cult. Ingrid Caven, his novel, is named for the celebrated singer he lives with, the former wife of Rainer Fassbinder and muse of Yves Saint Laurent; La Caven returned to the concert stage in November, at the Theatre de I'Odeon, in postmodern triumph, as a fictional character who sings. Ingrid Caven is not her biography, however, but a phantasmagorical riff on the social, political, and artistic history of our times, filtered through a meditation on stagecraft, the voice and attitude of the singer, the diva, the personae of history's actors.' -- Gary Indiana
'Jean-Jacques Schuhl est né en 1941 à Marseille. En 1972, il publie chez Gallimard Rose poussière, mêlant collages pop (extraits de journaux, partitions…) et fulgurances descriptives sur des personnages réels (Mao, Marlene Dietrich, les Stones…), élevés au rang de mythes uniques et pourtant tous interchangeables. Rose Poussière deviendra le livre fétiche de toute une génération. Et de celle d’après. Son deuxième texte, Télex n°1 (1976), reste longtemps introuvable avant sa réédition ce printemps chez L’Imaginaire. En 2000, Schuhl signe, après 24 ans d’absence, son grand retour sur la scène littéraire : il reçoit le prix Goncourt pour son roman Ingrid Caven, autour de la vie de sa compagne, chanteuse et actrice allemande dans les années 1960-70. Son dernier livre paru, Entrée des fantômes, est sorti en 2010, toujours chez Gallimard, à L’infini, la collection de son ami Philippe Sollers.
'Jean-Jacques Schuhl est un esthète qui perçoit les mutations de la société avec une distance délicieusement feinte, à la périphérie, celle du demi-monde. Son goût pour l’observation des décadences majestueuses ainsi que son écriture, élégiaque ou lumineuse, toujours ciselée, ont fait de lui un des auteurs français les plus précieux (au sens de sacré). Et rare. Donc précieux. On se garde bien de le lui dire, craignant de passer, comme son alter-ego face à Fred Hughes dans la nouvelle de Vanity Fair, pour « un mémorialiste complaisant » (passage qui sera coupé au fil des nombreuses discussions et corrections qui émailleront l’élaboration du texte.) On évoque ses lectures du moment : Reverdy donc, et Proust, régulièrement. Il suggère, face à notre réticence avouée, que la meilleure façon d’aborder l’œuvre de l’auteur d’Un amour de Swann consiste à laisser de côté toutes les analyses sociologiques et théoriques « assez ennuyeuses, il faut le dire », au profit des descriptions d’ambiances, des portraits et des éblouissantes associations d’idées.' -- Jean Perrier
'Jean-Jacques Schuhl was only 50 francs (about £5) better off yesterday after winning France's top book award, the Prix Goncourt, for a difficult and experimental novel based on the life of his lover. But his back manager will not be worried: Schuhl can expect to sell up to 500,000 copies of his book, Ingrid Caven, such is the prestige of the award. And the real Ingrid Caven, a German singer and actor, will not do too badly as a result of the book's success, either. She tells this morning's Le Monde that she has received several film offers as a result of its publication earlier this month.
'Schuhl, 59, is hardly a well-known writer in France, not least because Ingrid Caven is his first novel for nearly 25 years. "It's been a long time since I've written, and it's a dramatic turn of events," he told France-2 television after winning the award. "I didn't expect it." Caven was married to the film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and starred in many of his pictures. She was later a lover of Yves Saint Laurent. Caven was last seen in Britain in Raoul Ruiz's movie adaptation of Proust, Time Regained.
'The choice of Schuhl's novel is certainly a vote for French literary iconoclasm at a time when the country's literary prizes in general, and the Goncourt in particular, have been widely criticised for not rewarding literary merit but bowing to the pressures of leading publishers. But Schuhl's award was described as the "a vote for quality" by Michel Tournier, one of the judges and a previous winner of the prize. "Jean-Jacques Schuhl's novel isn't a commercial book and it won't be displayed prominently in bookshop windows," he said. That last point may well be an exaggeration, since the award of the Prix Goncourt usually guarantees huge sale, the winner's book often bought as a Christmas gift in France.' -- Stuart Jeffries
au fond, jean-jacques schuhl, c'est moi
Interview #1
from Telerama
Vous citez Kleist, l'expressionnisme allemand. Quel rapport entretenez-vous avec l'Allemagne, la culture allemande, qu'on connaît mal en France?
Il se trouve que je vis depuis trente ans avec une musicienne et interprète allemande, Ingrid Caven. A travers elle, ses amis, j'ai un accès concret, physique, vivant à la langue allemande : je l'entends, même si je ne la parle pas. Mais cela fait bien plus longtemps que je suis sensible au romantisme, au cinéma expressionniste allemands. Comme l'ont été, à leur époque, les surréalistes, héritiers directs du romantisme allemand. En matière cinématographique, les surréalistes aimaient Chaplin, à cause de son côté mécanique et burlesque – de nouveau, on n'est pas loin de la question du mannequin, de la marionnette –, et la noirceur du romantisme allemand. Moi aussi, j'aime les deux, et j'espère que cela passe dans mon dernier livre. Ce que je voudrais faire, c'est parvenir à entre-tisser d'un côté Broadway, les Chorus Girls des Ziegfeld Follies et Charlot, et de l'autre la noirceur de Caligari.
Un drôle de mélange des genres...
Je regrette que, dans la littérature française contemporaine, il n'y ait pas justement davantage de métissage, d'alternance. Prenez, au cinéma, Chaplin ou Godard : ils alternent le comique et le tragique, le burlesque et le drame, ils mélangent les genres. C'est un peu la définition du baroque. Mais le baroque nous est tellement étranger en France ! On préfère la linéarité, on refuse les ruptures de ton, les changements de registre. Personnellement, je n'aime pas les développements : ni d'une histoire, ni d'un style, ni d'un ton. Lorsque j'écris, j'ai besoin de passer très vite d'un registre à un autre, besoin d'une brisure. Tout en gardant le fil, bien sûr. Car autant j'aime la variété, autant je ne supporte pas le pot-pourri, les mauvais collages. Il faut un fil, que les divers éléments soient reliés à ce fil et, par là, reliés entre eux. Cette idée renvoie à Baudelaire, qui écrivait : « L'imagination est la reine des facultés. Mais l'imagination n'est pas la fantaisie, elle n'est pas non plus la sensibilité [...]. Elle est une faculté quasi divine qui perçoit les rapports intimes et secrets des choses, les correspondances et les analogies. » Vous voyez, on est loin de l'imagination telle qu'on l'entend trop souvent, comme quelque chose de flou, de vague. Il faut que les choses aient un rapport entre elles.
Cette idée renvoie aussi à la technique du « sample », que vous dites pratiquer en construisant vos livres. Qu'est-ce donc ?
« Sample », littéralement, cela signifie échantillon. Le sample, ce sont les bandes-son de Jim Jarmusch, dans lesquelles il fait coexister un rap, un lied de Mahler, un flamenco et de la musique électronique : c'est plein de ruptures de ton, et en même temps cela va ensemble, parce qu'il y a un fil. Le sample, c'est un tableau de Rauschenberg, où cohabitent un fragment d'un Napoléon peint par David, un morceau de une du New York Times et un bout de radiographie ; tout cela assemblé avec une sorte de grâce, car cela tient bien ensemble, on sent qu'il y a un rapport. C'est cela, le bon sample. Et j'essaie, à ma mesure, de faire cela quand j'écris, c'est même ce qui me plaît vraiment dans l'écriture, ce montage d'éléments divers, avec toujours ce fil qui tient l'ensemble. Ce fil, c'est l'artiste, ou l'écrivain, sa pensée, sa sensibilité.
Pourquoi diagnostiquez-vous notre époque comme nihiliste?
Je ne suis ni historien ni sociologue, mais romancier, peut-être un peu poète, donc je ne suis pas là pour établir des considérations générales sur l'époque. J'espère que ma façon de percevoir le présent passe, dans mes livres, à travers des détails, mais pas de développement relevant de la sociologie de comptoir. Cela dit, j'ai risqué un jour cette approximation : il me semble qu'au tournant des années 80 on est entrés dans une nouvelle ère, que j'appelle, peut-être abusivement, la nouvelle ère glaciaire. Pas seulement un changement de période, ou de siècle, mais véritablement une nouvelle ère, marquée par la disparition des mots, la toute-puissance des technologies, la communication, la mondialisation. Mais je n'ai aucun outil pour analyser cela, aller plus loin que cette simple impression.
Interview #2
Jean-Jacques Schuhl Ready-made & cut-up: on William S. Burroughs (1975)
Le cut-up existe sans Burroughs. c'est le journal. Les dépêches d'agence ont été déchirées, puis montrées. Il suffit alors de lire son quotidien sans se plier aux renvois en page intérieure (la suite, c'est ce qu'il y a à côté), c'est-à-dire comme un livre, en balayant toute la page, et en connectant les diverses rubriques. C'est un ready-made-cut-up. Pour ma part, je travaille à partir des journaux qui sont ce que reflète le mieux le discours officiel - surtout France Soir. Mais plutôt que de casser le sens, comme fait Burroughs, je préfère le miner de l'intérieur, le trahir, feindre de jouer son jeu, et le brouiller. Je prends donc une coupure de journal qui me séduit comme un beau symptôme, et la met en relation avec d'autres coupures, ou d'autres coupures (all around), ou avec ce qui se trouve au verso de la page (je découpe au ciseau la page et regarde ensuite ce qui se trouve au dos, matériellement ce qui est en rapport avec ce que j'ai voulu découper), ou en transparence à la lumière d'une lampe, pour obtenir un texte spectral (see-through). On peut dire qu'il s'agit d'une recomposition du journal, d'une redistribution de ses éléments, avec de minces jeux, des citations à peine déplacées, de légers décalages, des glissements, des transparences, des télescopages, mine de rien, d'une rubrique "sérieuse" (politique) et d'une rubrique "frivole" (turf, jeu des 7 erreurs). il faudrait qu'on y voit presque que du feu, que ce soir presque nneutre.
Le cut-up de Burroughs casse les circuits de la pensée. je préfère essayer de les pervertir doucement, de façon non-réparable.
Le réserve que je fais quant au cut-up est que c'est un peu trop cut, je préfère un démontage plus sournois où l'on mime le récit traditionnel et le mine. Glissements, court-circuits, décalages, blancs, petits grincements à l'intérieur du discours académique, plutôt que de cassures (il faut que ça ne casse rien). Exemple à suivre : Lautréamont. J'aimerais qu'on se dise : c'est ça, c'est bien ça, ce n'est que de la gentille actualité, et pourtant ! et pourtant ! Mais on ne sait pas dire ce qui se passe, d'où vient le trouble. Quelque chose comme la voix ou le geste d'un travesti, d'un robot synthétique, ou de W. Burroughs en faux clergyman anglican. J'aimerais arriver à écrire un livre avec un seul journal, à ce que ce soit une histoire qui n'a l'air de rien, qui provienne des rubriques recomposées du journal : il y a quelque chose qui cloche, mais quoi ? Évidemment, l'idéal serait de s'introduire la nuit au marbre de France Soir, et d'opérer en douce une recomposition qui, le matin, ferait dire à la ville, un peu gênée : "Il y a quelque chose qui cloche, mais quoi ?"
Mais il existe d'autre trahisons...
'A novel about the life of German cabaret singer and film actress Ingrid Caven, who was once director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's star, and his wife, muse to Yves Saint Laurent, and a protege of Pierre Berge. Consisting of memories, mixing real and invented people and events, Ingrid Caven reveals the cold heart of the European counterculture of the 1970s, an era of celebrity glitz, cocaine-fueled excess, gay bathhouses, and young idealists-turned-terrorists. Ingrid Caven was an immediate bestseller in France, where it sold over 235,000 copies in its first year of publication. It has been translated into 18 languages.Jean-Jacques Schuhl is a Parisian dandy who lives with Ingrid Caven and who had not published a book for twenty years until this one.' -- City Lights
'Singing for the Führer’s troops at age five makes material for Ingrid Caven’s lifelong running gag—and the definitive event novelist Schuhl returns to again and again in recounting her life. Ingrid is a plucky girl from Saarland with a terrible skin problem and a wondrous voice, which propels her through classical training and on to accolades on the Munich stage (that’s when she meets a lonely boy in black leather who wants to make films—the Wunderkind of German film). Over the years, Ingrid will mingle with the likes of Andy Warhol and Yves Saint Laurent, and even become embroiled with the Baader Meinhof Gang. A sensational Paris debut and suddenly the “little hurting girl in borrowed clothes” becomes really famous, meeting Bette Davis and Satie, flying about the world as the wife of Fassbinder, who turns out to be a drug-using homosexual. In telling Ingrid’s story, Charles is a kind of misanthropic alter ego: he follows the singer around, has affairs of his own, reports a lot of hearsay and snatched dialogue, but provides little sense of interior life. The climax comes at Fassbinder’s untimely funeral (he was 38), when, with all his actresses linked up front as if at a premiere, a posthumous piece of paper is discovered detailing Fassbinder’s outline for a script about the life of Ingrid Caven, “the woman he loved.”' -- Kirkus
'Adolf Hitler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yves Saint Laurent -- German-born cabaret singer Ingrid Caven's life flowed around these icons of 20th century European counterculture. Caven was married to Fassbinder and starred in many of his movies; she was Saint Laurent's model and muse. At 4 1/2, she sang "Silent Night" in the barracks for the German troops. This novel, by her current lover and based on her life, is a collage of that strange postwar period in Europe of high artifice, drugs, terrorism, leather jackets and cinema. Behind the glamorous backdrop of hotel rooms, the Brasserie Lipp, the Rue de Bac, the clothing by Saint Laurent, Issey Miyake and others, you can still smell cities burning, lives decaying. Artists drape themselves over rich American producers and patrons. The "era of Potsdam and Sans-Souci ... matching plates and Meissen dancers" is over. But so is the era of cabaret, and Caven finds herself a relic: "The time of stars and divas was long gone, and haute couture was disappearing, too.... Why go on singing when all the voices have been flattened, standardized, synthesized?"' -- Los Angeles Times
Excerpt #1
The sheet of paper was 8 ×11, crumpled, spotted with splashes of coffee, wine, maybe nicotine; they found it on the ground by the side of the dead man’s bed, lying there to be picked up by anybody, the cop, the maid, the doctor. The writing that covered it was like a speech given in a single breath, no punctuation, only one real erasure, two words now illegible at the end of a correction and a little arrow for cross reference. Eighteen paragraphs in the sequence, as though he had the whole text already written in his mind, all he had to do was write it out, the words had been etched in him forever and he had only to read and copy them; but the writing was just phrases, telegraphic, not exactly literary stuff. He had jabbed the paper, gashed it, raised welts and sores, made hard signs as though with a stiletto and not a ballpoint: it was something raw and brutal. The writing was firm, but still it shook like the needle of a seismograph, shaken up, rickety, words on the slant: like a child’s writing, like an old man’s writing, each letter formed with force and great attention, as though writing was slipping away just as life was and he tried to trace the letters, especially the capitals. The words blew about, had their own life, and none of the phrases lined up neatly; these were words thrown onto paper, as you write a note when you’re in danger, page torn from a notebook, no time to punctuate or take a breath, someone is after you… Numbered 1 to 18, the paragraphs were the stages, the chapters, images, scenes, synopsis, who knows—there was no title—of the life of Ingrid Caven. What follows is a literal translation, with the punctuation and the syntax of the original:
1 Birth + hatred of mother + start of allergy (Germany needs canon fodder)
2 First song, silent night holy night
3 Allergy much loved
4 University + worsening of allergy, decision for psychiatry you need courage to live
5 End of allergy, love with psychiatrist, high-class woman in rosewood, end of love
6 Flight skilful very disheartened for the terrible chic Revolution [sic]
7 Short life alone with many stories of men
8 Plays theatre, lives in commune, electronic love (GVH)
9 Marriage, fear of marriage, divorce
10 Africa
11 Second strategy
12 First appearance at Pigall’s
13 Jean-Jacques Schuhl + some bad films
14 Catastrophe with Musical, end with Jean-Jacques
15 Time of loneliness, appeal of suicide, drugs, schnapps and boys and cockroaches in the Chelsea H
16 Attack in waiting room, knowledge of great love
17 Sex and crime and black eyes
18 Dispute fight love hate happiness tears pills death +a smile
Just a wretched scrap of paper, found and kept by sheer chance, someone might have thrown it out despite the lines scrawled on the back. On the other side of page, the ‘right’ side, there is dialogue in neat electronic typing from the script of some movie Rainer had already made—big budget, six, seven, eight million dollars, big historical reconstruction, period sets and costumes, the Second World War—he must have used this particular piece of paper because he had nothing else available in a sudden emergency, he didn’t have the strength to get up and he lived very much alone at the end. On the reverse of this big historical movie, Rainer wrote his last words: the story of his wife, real, imagined.
The big budget project was pushed to the shadow side of the page, hidden away, the kind of production that he complained at the end was keeping him prisoner: and on the new ‘right’ side, these words he had scrawled, almost cut into the paper with such force and application, the life of the woman he loved. It was almost nothing, but only almost: a simple sheet of paper… just like fifteen years earlier and the cut of the Yves Saint Laurent dress, Ingrid Caven claimed the ‘wrong’ side, the second side, the reverse of the black satin cloth and now the paper, its secret side turned round, the dark, forgotten, secondary, shadow side of things turned to the front. That was where he wrote her ‘life’ and where she too had ‘written’ her life, not on the grand, fixed side of things but rather on the rootless side which she made grand with her songs.
Once again it was like the cloth you turn over because it’s the back side that counts, and you don’t know any more which is front and which is back, the Moebius strip, everything changes and comes back, what’s noble becomes vulgar and comes back, cloth that shows its lining, flags that beat in the wind. On what was once, and is no longer the ‘right’ side of the page, this scrap of dialogue: But, tonight, in front of the men, it will work, I am sure, and then I will realize something you desire. Something that you desire…
It was a troubling page because episodes 1 to 13 referred to facts and events, but 14 to 18 were entirely from his imagination. He saw her life as tragedy, a melodrama from an airport novel, and he had finished it. He did it as if she, too, were finished, deciding even her violent, scandalous, ignominious ending,; but Rainer was the one dying that way, sometimes he was found alone, outside, stark naked in front of his door on the landing, asleep in his shit, full of alcohol, drugs, sleeping pills, and at the height of his fame. In 14 to 18, was he taking revenge or playing tricks or just assembling the threads like a skilled writer for the screen? Or like a fate that he was trying to ward off with his words? She had got away, and on his deathbed he invoked her, he evoked her, took her back with words, with this skeleton story of her life. It was extraordinary: he wrote the life of the woman he loved, part real, part imagined, part elliptical, and on the way he made a picture of himself, and then he died.
Fascinating, worrisome, even very worrisome: you think about it, it couldn’t possibly be a film project. How could he shoot Ingrid’s disastrous end, her terrible fall and ignominious death while she was still living, and more alive than many others? He could have filmed 1 to 13, but not 14 to 18. Never. So what was this thing? A malevolent prediction, tempting fate like the voodoo priest pricks the doll with needles; but Rainer’s needle was a ballpoint pen.
Excerpt #2
It wasn’t the sight of the saucepans, it was the noise they made that seemed so unholy, such a vulgar noise for a singer and such a seedy noise, too, as though her whole past was dragging behind her, and above all the sound was so entirely out of place, nothing at all to do with the luxurious and old-style setting – carpets, wall hangings, such well trained staff: the hotel was like a ventriloquist’s dummy, letting out a cry that didn’t belong to it, something irritating, agonising, making the brain falter. Maybe Ingrid also remembered Sundays at home, her mother cooking in the kitchen with a clatter of pans that mixed with the Liszt, ‘Hungarian Rhapsody,’ that her father used to play over and over in the next-door drawing room. That, too was in her mind, making it tilt like a pinball machine. A saucepan bumped up against one of the metal bars on the stairs, and came to rest, dumb.
There’s a photograph of Marlene Dietrich, which she once gave to Hemingway (1): She’s all legs, sitting, like in those famous shots for the Blackglama furs, her head is down, so all you can see is the line of nose, mouth, chin: enough to identify her at once like a logo, a Chinese pictogram, a coat of arms, and, alongside those long, bare famous legs that were insured for $5 million at Lloyds, she’s written: ‘I cook, too.’ Were they lovers, friends, loving friends? The old story keeps the crowds agog: the writer and the actress, or the singer, D’Annunzio and la Duse, Miller and Monroe, Romain Gary and Jean Seberg, Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange, Phillip ‘Portnoy’ Roth and Claire ‘Limelight’ Bloom, the marriage of word and flesh, intriguing, puzzling, riotous.
Hemingway? Maybe, if it comes down to it, the picture wasn’t dedicated to him at all but to one of her other men – Erich Maria Remarque, or Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin? Jean Gabin, perhaps? Or to Mercedes d’Acosta, that exotic lesbian? Or just to some nameless fan? Doesn’t matter, it’s all ancient history, the young woman with the saucepan is also a chain smoker, but she uses a common black plastic cigarette holder, Denicotea, only twenty-five francs from your neighbourhood tobacconist.
She’s still laughing in the elevator and when, with the manager going ahead, she enters her suite, she’s amazed by what she sees: white lilies, on the night table, on the desk, the vanity, in the bathroom, in the entrance hall, everywhere white lilies. Yves paid tribute to his queen with a suite in white. After saucepans, lilies, after the hausfrau, the vamp. Pans and lilies – a good title if one day she wrote her memoirs; Eva Gabor, sister of the more famous Zsa Zsa, called her book Orchids and Salami.
From the ridiculous to the sublime, could be one of those surprising productions of her friend Werner Schröter whose nickname – but why on earth? – was ‘The Baron’: Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, The Death of Maria Malibran ... she was bound to arrive in Paris under this particular sign, because, truth to tell, her real range of mind is more from lilies to saucepans, if you see what I mean, just as at the end of some exquisitely turned sentence – like this one – you need a break, but even the break is still too exquisite, those lovely rhetorical cadences I never quite escape. On stage with a flourish of her hand followed by a broken wrist, a back kick in the air that was a wink at flamenco, she knew just how to break up all that virtuosity, that panache, to do it neatly and dryly, to cut things short, never to make them too rich, yes, that was it, heading for the world of lilies and orchids, then turning back abruptly to saucepans and salami. Lupe Velez was engaged to Johnny Weismuller, but she fell out with Tarzan, wanted to kill herself, but looking lovely, image before everything, even when dying, hours and hours of fixing her makeup and her hair. She had no luck at all, pills and booze upset her guts and so it was that they found her, in her loveliest frock, immaculately styled, powdered, bejewelled, virtually embalmed, but stifled on her own vomit with her head down the toilet. That’s the art of breaking a mood, a right-angle turn of mood, art upside down, the leftovers restored, and anyway a kitchen utensil is always handy: John Cage wrote a concerto for mincer and beater.
4 Ingrid Caven songs in one video
Ingrid Caven 'Alabama Song'
Ingrid Caven 'Polaroid Cocaine'
Ingrid Caven 'The Wonderful Widow of 18 Springs'
Further
Jean-Jacques Schuhl Website
Buy J-J Schulh's 'Ingrid Caven'
'Jean-Jacques Schuhl, mythe majestueux'
'Telex n°1, come-back du mythe signé Jean Jacques Schuhl'
'Profonde superficialité'
J-J Schuhl 'Apparition de Werner Schroeter'
J-J Schuhl 'JLG, rapports secrets'
Video: 'Jean-Jacques Schuhl - "Entrée des Fantômes"'
'Laure Adler reçoit Jean-Jacques Schuhl, écrivain'
Jean-Jacques Schuhl Facebook page
*
p.s. Hey. ** L@rstonovich, Hi, Larsty! It's weird you dreamt that because I was just singing the praises of driving over cliffs for relaxation the other day. Nah. It gave me spooky house construction ideas, though.Which I need. Which is good. Sweetness itself to see you, buddy. ** _Black_Acrylic, I have a friend who has this whole really thought out theory/argument about the genius of Pat Benatar. I didn't recognize a single track on your 90s playlist. Wow, where was I? Probably wallowing in some self-imposed lo-fi heaven or something. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, I knew you were going to pick that song, it's weird. ** Steevee, Oh, right, Slipknot's 'Snuff', that was good or 'good' or both. I can't get with Rush. Some of these things seem like they're generational specific or something. Look forward to your Wiseman review, cool. Everyone, here's the critically impeccable Steevee writing on/about the new Frederick Wiseman film 'At Berkeley' ** Lee, Your link lead me to an announcement that whatever you linked to does not exist. Non-existence is a great guilty pleasure if ever there was one. I saw the email, and I'll get to it today, thank you! That was a beautiful mental image of you with tiny lungs. ** Tosh Berman, Is 'Get Lucky' a guilty pleasure? I unashamedly think it was pretty terrific single. I'm still avoiding the new Arcade Fire thing as far as I know. It's supposed to be sort faux-Glam or something, isn't it? ** Keaton, Dude, I'm not going to fall for your attempt to rile me twice. I'm just going to be 'Death Sentence's' silent bodyguard. Or, okay, I'll move my lips just enough to say that nothing is the point, and now, handshake, let's proceed. I'm always confused, I think. Sometimes I'm confusion's excellent choreographer, and sometimes I'm its stress bunny. I guess when I'm here doing the p.s., I'm mostly its choreographer. I guess that's why I seem unconfused maybe. Leaving out so much stuff: oh, yum. Sounds like my kind of guy/thing/what-have-you. ** Sypha, Ha ha. ** Bill Porter, Oh, wow, you made my brain do an unsuccessful backwards flip and break my neck with that Sting choice. That is some serious, serious guilt-swamped pleasure you've got going on there, ha ha. Yeah, Saunders, it's weird to me that he has become such a huge god to so many people or writers or whatever. I saw an email from you, and I'll get to it today. It's your new piece, cool! Is it just for me, or should I share it with the masses via the blog in some fashion? Thank you! ** Rewritedept, 'Coming to America', the movie? I don't know. When I saw way, way back when it was brand new, I thought it was meh bordering on really bad, but I literally don't have a single memory of it, so who knows. Thanks again for the popular, provocative post yesterday, man. Sweet. ** Boxofmirrors, Hi, James, you're back, cool! Nice confessional list. I think a case could be made for 'Smooth Operator' being a legitimately great track maybe. 7 years old, really? God, I guess so. That's so weird. It's kind of scary to think about for some reason. Bon Bon Land is super unique and uniquely fulfilling. I don't know, I think that sounds great about you as an impending high school teacher. Are you still writing? I guess you still really like London? ** Dom Lyne, Ah, I see about the name. Cool, re: the definite if as yet untimed Paris sojourn. I really, really liked looking through your scrapbook yesterday. It's really, really good. I say that as a scrapbook attempter myself. It gave me ideas and new ambitions. That's great about the book and publisher. For sure let me know the progress about its birth, please. Love from me. ** Etc etc etc, Hey. Wow, that Len track, whoa. I get the sneaky addictive thing though. Oh, man, the LB w/LB thing is seriously grim. I've heard some things and pieces from the new Kanye West. I'm not really that on board with his stuff. I think he's canny and clever and makes dynamic quilts. I think he's good at giving the impression that he's ahead of the curve, but what's at the center of his work doesn't interest me or seem out of the ordinary, so it's hard for me to listen to him without rebelling against the lionizing of his stuff. I love Death Grips, though. I totally believe in them and think they're probably going to keep ending up in very exciting places. ** Paul Curran, Keep your eye on the ball of that year-end surge, man, for sure, please. Thanks about the experiment. Yeah, something very interesting to work with is happening with the HCA/me meld. There's something in his stiff, awkward writing that I'm excited to respect and destroy, and the fairytale mode is one I've never entered before, and it's riveting to maybe have found my way inside it, I don't know. And it's interesting to find a way to proceed with and develop the discursive thing I was working with in 'TMS' without that lushness. Anyway, yeah, thanks, Paul! Do please report on your thinking and progress whenever the jones to report surfaces. ** Chris Dankland, Kenny Loggins, man oh man, my head hurts just filling in the blank of those two words. He played at my high school prom back when he was in Loggins & Messina. If you say you love 'House at Pooh Corners' I think I will literally jump out the window, and I'm on the second floor, so it wouldn't kill me, just cause damage, so profess love for that song, if you have any, with foresight. KL did write 'What a Fool Believes', which is a great guilty pleasure song. The interviews were really, really good, man. Have a great ... what is it ... Friday. ** Creative Massacre, A guest bed, yeah, nice. I'm working on this new theater piece for Gisele that'll feature eight real ventriloquists, and I'm thinking up the puppets for them to use, and Gisele wants me to do one that is a dead person in a coffin. I'm well, thanks, and I hope you are too! ** Misanthrope, 'Radioactive' ... I don't know that song, do I? What is it? Do I even want to know? I hope you slept straight through the night and woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed. ** Bill, The first Cars album is really good. Is that a guilty pleasure? I'm way more than okay with you using my text. It's very exciting. Oh, I love that Vimeo taste of your new piece. That guy's music is really nice too. I'm going to imbed it in an upcoming post, if you don't mind. Basil Twist ... that name sounds so familiar. I'm going to google it. Awesome day to ya, B. ** Right. Oh, the post today started out as a rerun intended for my vacation stint, but I ended up changing and enlarging the original post so thoroughly that it ended up being a new thing. So, there you go. See you tomorrow.