DAMN! I was going to feature Providence in this edition of Le Petit Mac-Mahon, but it's been taken down. So we'll go with another Alain Resnais masterpiece instead.
Written by science-fiction novelist Jacques Sternberg, Je t'aime Je t'aime concerns a decidedly shady group of scientists who rescue an attempted suicide (Claude Rich) and give him another chance at life through a machine that will operate on his memories providing him to relive his past. Chris Marker's La Jetee clearly comes to mind. But Resnais' vision is far more fragmented than Marker's, and far darker. It is, however, among other things the best film ever made about cats. Be sure to look for Alain Robbe-Grillet in a cameo.
(Je T'aime Je T'aime)
_____________________
(Geraldine Chaplin in Remember My Name)
Remember My Name is the best albeit the most obscure film by ...
(Alan Rudolph)
... Alan Rudolph, a protégé of Robert Altman who over the years has constructed a cinema all his own in the often perilous fields of indie production.
Jonathan Rosenbaum has been among the most eloquent about the film and its evocation of both Joan Crawford and Jacques Rivette.
(Remember My Name)
A special poignancy proceeds from the fact that it's the only film Tony and Berry Perkins made together.
(Tony and Berry Perkins)
He died of AIDS in 1992, and she was in one of the planes that hit the World Trade center on 9/11/2001.
___________________
In 1981 Orson Welles screened his 1962 film version of Franz Kafka's The Trialfor an appreciative audience at USC. He filmed the Q&A that followed hoping to make a film of it along the lines of Filming Othello
Welles and his cinematic amanuensis Gray Grave died before the results could be properly edited. Nevertheless -- here it is. I can be seen (sitting next to Meredith Brody) commenting on the fairy tale aspect of the characters that Welles and Akim Tamiroff play in the film. IOW - I was in a Welles movie!
(Orson Welles' Filming The Trial)
And here's the movie we're talking about.
*
p.s. RIP: Reg Presley. Hey. Le Petit Mac-Mahon is back with one of its always killer line-ups, so please hit the lights and let the filmic wash over you. Oh, I can confirm that, until I did my usual pre-launch post maintenance check last night and found gray rectangles where there had been primed imbeds, you were set to see Alain Resnais' 'Providence' today, which I was excited about since it's one of my handful of favorite all-time films, but, oh well, and its replacement, 'Je t'aime Je t'aime', is no slouch. Anyway, blah blah, enjoy and talk to David, thank you, and thank you majorly, Mr. E. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ah, cool, great! A happy partner to your Acid House Day, indeed. Really glad you dug it, Ben. ** Misanthrope, So, like, kid-sized wheels sort of? I'm happy that you and the Bowl got along so well, and I hope your last night's bout of sleep wasn't anywhere near as shitty. ** David Ehrenstein, An in-person thank you and hugs across land and sea for the great post today, David. ** Grant maierhofer, Hi, Grant! Awesome that you dug the post, and, yes, if you're game for a zero-year birthday party for your book, I would only be honored to provide the house and home. I'm ready when you and it are. Great day to you! ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Cool, my pleasure. The marriage thing, right. Don't think Texas will be throwing parades for married same-sexers anytime soon. Publishing is just the vehicle. Its power structure, and its subjectivity that thinks it is objectivity, are a huge drag, but it's still just the car that gives your work a ride to where it's going. The gym, I've heard of that. It's kind of like a publishing world for your body except that, luckily, it's totally DIY. ** Billy Lloyd, Hi! Yeah, I have yet to find the state of mind where I would want to live outside a big, hopping city. The vacation home idea has gotten more appealing over time, but my bank account hasn't swelled enough to get the pipe dream aspect out of its allure. Hm, I guess some cliquey-ness would have be in operation in Iceland, but, on the other hand, when a place is small and tight like that, there's also the phenomenon of scenesters and artists being especially hungry for outsiders and for as much influence as possible, so, hm. Never read the 'PoBaW' book. It's good, eh? I'm looking forward to and excited about a lot of things right now. Too many to try to list, both in the arts and in life. It's a great and really front-loaded time, and I think this is going to be an especially incredible year. I'm going to Amsterdam soon to see the retrospective of the great artist and my friend Mike Kelley and have a blast in the company of a dear friend, and I'm really looking forward to that, as far as maybe the most immediate thing. You? ** Tosh, The book fair sounds so great, wow! What's the new project you're working on? ** 5STRINGS, Hey! Really good to see you! You doing all right? Really suave prose/comment there. Spontaneous or from something you're working on or ... ? Squidbillies, ha. Ockham's Razoir, whoa! You're reading 'Triptych'? Sweet! ** Sypha, Well, yes, if you want my opinion, more listening to Pan Sonic sounds like an excellent idea. ** Bollo, Hi, Jonathan! Yeah, I kind of thought of Pan Sonic that way, and I checked the 'experts' here and there online, and it does seem that they/he have been officially contextualized in the Minimal Techno arena. That's cool of that artist to quote me on Bresson. Interested to check out his stuff. Let me know how it is. I didn't know that Nayland is up at Mathew Marks. That guy is everywhere at the moment. Nice. Still haven't listened to the MBV. I want to give it a bunch of time and peace of mind, and that didn't happen yesterday. Today, I think, probably, for sure. Thoughts when I have them. All is great with me, thanks. Would love to see you more, very obviously. ** Flit, Hi, Flit! Oh, absence is okay when necessary, you know. I'm kind of way into the soup we're dancing in at the moment, yeah. Porter Ricks, sure, you bet. Good add. It goes really well with me these days. And with you? ** Trees, Hi, T. Great, thank you, about the post's pleasure and relevance. Ian Loveday: hm, maybe I'm not familiar. The name just rings a bell basically. I'll hit those links ultra-shortly, and thank you a lot, man. I saw Kevin's pic of you and Mr. Hsu on FB yesterday. Lookin' good, ha ha. Ben Mirov is really terrific, so that's a good reading to have been at. Were you on your best behavior, and was there indeed a very good reason for you to have adopted that behavioral mode? ** Bill, I was just telling Trees that I saw that money shot of you and him on FB yesterday. Sweet. That Voight track is typical of some of his work. He's kind of all over the place. I think his 90s stuff is more interesting than the stuff he's doing now, which feels a bit more, I don't know, polluted or something? But his 90s Minimal period is mostly quite good and dark at its best. You're back into sound-based work! That's really exciting, Bill! I'm so curious to hear what you come up with. Do share when things feel shareable. Sound on its own, or sound in combination with visuals, or ... ? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. I've heard a track or two from the new Villalobos. It sounded pretty interesting, but I need to listen again and more closely. Kind of dense and romantic. As I told whoever, I haven't cracked the MBV yet, weirdly, I guess. Just trying to find the most receptive moment, probably today. Excellent about the excerpt! Everyone, the first novel by the master of many universes including fiction, Chilly Jay Chill aka Jeff Jackson, is coming out this fall, and you can get a taste of it by reading a just-uploaded excerpt on the Guernica site right here. It's a fantastic novel, and you'll see that for yourselves after you've had that great taste. I hope the edits, etc. are going well. My novel is still going pretty slowly, but I'm not worried about that like I was, so it's all right. It'll pick up any day, I think. ** Rewritedept, Make that limp work for you, man. Nope, still haven't heard the MBV. Any second now. If there's headline, I'll put it in the header. My belated b'day dinner was tasty. Nachos. They were a little stingy on the beans this time, and a bit too heavy on the onions, but, hey, Parisians can't be choosers. Definitely go for that story idea. I'm piqued. Under the Haunted Mansion? I always heard it was in the secret VIP nightclub hidden away in New Orleans Square. The club is definitely there, but I think the head is long since a skull or ashes, wherever it is. Genre writing can be really good. If that's your voice's natural inclination, might as well go for it. I talk like a Valley Girl too. Except it's the San Gabriel Valley instead of the San Fernando Valley. It's a softer sound. You can make LA-speak work for you. I have, I guess. I hope your layouts acquiesced to your every desire. ** Statictick, Dude, you were in the fucking beating heart of techno's outset. Crazy. Even outside of Detroit, that was a truly amazing time. Okay, mixed possible blessings on the Lamictal dosage increases, I guess. I get jetlagged just hearing about your insomnia though. God, shit, ugh. I obviously hope that the doc is right that the increases will eventually work some kind of wonder. Yeah, I'm totally interested and I care a lot, so vent/talk/etc. whenever you like, my pal. Love from me. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. I'll do 'Yacht Rock' right after I do the new MBV. Sounds like a curious enough combo. 'What a Fool Believes' is kind of a horrifyingly perfectly constructed batch of minutes. It's almost evil. I know McKenna to some degree, yeah. Actually, relevant sort of to the post yesterday, he was the go-to 'philosopher' during the Rave Culture era. You couldn't turn your ears without hearing his voice and lectures sampled in techno and ambient tracks. I think I thought he was kind of amusing. I think I thought he had some interesting ideas, and I think I thought there was some space cadet aspects to his thinking too. I know what you mean about 'religious feeling' re: LSD. I didn't get that, but I wasn't raised with religion, and I've always thought religion was kind of like a cartoon, so my mind didn't really go there on LSD because I thought religious belief was kind of, I don't know, too locked down and conventionalized. Metaphysical experiences, maybe, but I think that mostly, when I took LSD, I was hyper focused on my biology and my brain, and I think I was interested in seeing the experience as a situation in which my brain was being unlocked and decentralized and uncensored. I think I saw being on LSD in a kind of psychedelic practical way. Everything seemed much more complex, but I didn't attribute that to the metaphysical necessarily. It wasn't like having a truth about the world or life revealed that spoke of mystical or god-like forces or meaning. It was more like having everything that I already suspected about myself or others or nature or whatever being clarified. It was more like being unlocked from my habits and fear-based selectivity or something. I don't know that TED talk, but I will watch that video today, and thank you. I definitely got that 'lack of self and ego' thing when on LSD. I do think that LSD was hugely instructive to me about the importance and sanity of being or trying to be selfless in life. But, like I said, I guess I explained it to myself in a way that gave the human body most of the credit. I never really envisioned or believed that I was a vehicle of something metaphysical and all-consuming. That might have to do with how, even when I was really young, I always approached things as possible ways to learn things that would help me be a better writer. I often thought about that when I was high, about the inadequacy of language as a conveyer of the intensely personal, and about how to find a way to work with that huge problem as an artist. I don't know. Does that make sense at all? Great to talk with you about this. You're always very inspiring, man. ** Paradigm, Hi, Scott. Thanks for continuing to talk with the blog post-smitten folks. I'm getting a bit more caught up on blog posts. I managed to write some this morning, which felt great. I think I might know the name John Kinsella, but I don't think I've read him. I will hunt him down. Thank you a lot for that tip. I've heard that about 'Django', that it sticks too closely to conventional/genre structure. That could be why the masses seem to like it more than other Tarantino movies, based on its box office. Curious to find out. I will have a good day, I'm pretty sure, and I hope you will too. ** Armando, Interesting: two 'Django' reviews in a row. Thanks for the input. I'm ever more curious to see it. You are such a DiCaprio fan. I can't get there myself, but I totally get it theoretically. Good day! ** Right. Please file back into Mr. E's movie theater now, thank you. Enjoy the motion pictures until further notice, that being until tomorrow at minimum, I guess. See you then.