'In music feature/biopics, the pressure to dramatize every microscopic detail of a short visit with a total stranger is inherent to creating story—what editors want. In my own experience of music journalism, this contrivance began as a fun challenge and has come to drive me nuts. I’d rather just invent stories of my own. This is where my appreciation for Camden Joy begins. In light of the prerequisite that one must pressurize nonfiction to establish somewhat artificial tension up front to carry intriguing and suspenseful delivery of “facts,” a piece of good music journalism can come to feel like a Jane Austen novel—that is to say fictional. With any subjective interpretation of the mise-en-scene, genre boundaries slip away—this is what invites me as a reader into the excitement of the “story,” and what attracted me to music journalism in the first place. But I find that need to deliver facts or an “angle” according to some other person restrictive & repellent, too prone to misrepresentation and divergence from the artist’s POV. ...
'Post-swagger in New Journalism is where Tom Adelman, aka Camden Joy, finds lineage, namely with the Manifestos and personal essays collected in Lost Joy—with the impetus to 1/ depressurize reportage in favor of author’s lived adventure driving story, and 2/ insertion of author as character into the storytelling; both in the vein of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Koolaid Acid Test. Next, to disconnect from the narrativity of actual event completely in favor of total artifice, loosely constructed upon heaps of pop cultural reference. Adelman’s novels do this. But historical fiction does this, too—nevertheless it typically doesn’t deal so much in contemporary cultural referencing. Fictocriticism, or fiction that develops setting and character through musical referencing—in the vein of Joan Didion, Michael Taussig, Lynne Tillman, Dana Spiotta, Dana Johnson, Darcy Steinke, Ben Greenman, Jonathan Letham, Dennis Cooper… Joy’s brand of irony finds architecture here, but pushes even this trajectory. His novels are closer relatives to countercultural dystopian satire—think Ken Kesey—contaminated with what Raymond Federman in 1973 called Surfiction: conceptual projects that seek to expose the artifice of fiction as a process. In both genres, the politic is not simply implied in the content—it’s engrained in syntax, sentence construction, concept. Joy’s critiques of music in the novels aren’t explicit, then, but embedded in their reclamation of pastiche and in the seamless dedication to the conceits he sets in each story. The concept is high artifice, possibly camp per Sontag’s definition, crossbred with the exploitation of transparent metaphor.
'To underscore irony, though, is the sincerity evident in the accuracy of the music lore, the obvious fandom implicit to each text’s concept. In Joy’s work, music journalism saves the day. Gathering facts and slavery to veracity—odious, dull, and rote back then to burgeoning New Journalists—what compelled rebellion and invention of new genre—experiences through Joy’s writing a fiery reversal. Weirdly, the more conceptual Joy’s novels are, the more journalistically accurate they feel to me. Maybe it’s because they convey, through the juxtapositions of hyper-specific (journalistic) musical fandom with poetic license to fictionalize—what Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth.” I’d call this “ecstatic truth” poetry through allegory, after Goethe’s adage that links allegory to poetry by differentiating them.'-- Trinie Dalton
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Further
The Camden Joy Website
'VARIOUS OCCASIONS DEDICATED TO REVISITING THE GREAT LOST WORKS OF CAMDEN JOY'
'"Like Trenton But Without the Thrills: The Writing of Camden Joy" by Ben Bush
Camden Joy interviewed @ Glorious Noise
Podcast: Camden Joy's 'How Sinatra Affects Us' on This American Life
Camden Joy's 'Fifty posters about Souled American'
Camden Joy @ Facebook
'Majesty of Impulse: On the Great Lost Works of Camden Joy'
Matt Flaming on 'Lost Joy' @ Word Riot
'Camden Joy: Fiction as Criticism'
Camden Joy interviewed @ metroactive
'The Sound of Camden Joy Reading'
Camden Joy @ Twitter
Camden Joy @ bandcamp
The lost manifestoes of Camden Joy
'Stalker Fiction'
'Local green guru Tom Adelman recycles music skills for concert series'
Verse Chorus Press
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Related
2013 MMLA Keynote Address by Camden Joy "How Much is True? I Wonder"
Camden Joy and his Presidential Coin Album
Channel 53 Presents: "Finding the Advertocracy", a filmstrip by Camden Joy
Adam Wilson MMLA 2013: Ode to Joy
David N Meyer MMLA 2013: Ode to Joy
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Interview
from Loud Paper
I don’t know whom I am talking to. Am I talking to Camden Joy?
Camden Joy: Yes. Yes you are. It’s a pseudonym but you know my defense of that is that it is a pseudonym like Bob Dylan, like W.C. Fields, like the Marx Brothers. Like they got to change their names and no one gives them grief. I have another name.
I was attempting some sort of literary experiment when I started writing using that character and naming the pieces by the same person. The by-product a pseudonym creates is that people are not able to trust me, they feel like I am lying with everything I say. I get this strange reception, whereas if I was a rap star and I called myself whatever I did, people would just accept that and it would be fine. That doesn't answer your question though.
So where did the name come from?
CJ: I was looking for a name that had a short, compact sound, and I knew the syllable count I wanted. I had remembered that when I was writing about Trenton, N.J., someone in Trenton asked, “Why are you setting this story in Trenton?” I said I just wanted one of the darkest, saddest places in the country, and I figure that if you can find a reason to go on in a city like Trenton then that is a beacon that can carry you through anything.
And they said, “Oh, Trenton is not so bad at all, you ought to go to Camden.”
I always thought of Camden Joy as something that would carry you through the darkest times. A friend of mine and I, we had this theory that one of the things that art should do is acknowledge, never shy away from, the darkest truths. So the point is to admit, to acknowledge the dark truths and then go on. We called it “Kick Start.” That was our little artistic movement. And then we proceeded to do nothing with it. But when Camden Joy came along I was thinking that it sort of works with the Kick Start movement.
Tell me about your recent collection of past work, Lost Joy.
CJ: I have wanted Lost Joy to be published in some form or another since 1997 and it has just taken this long. It has a lot of things that I self-published, I mean, everything in there that did get published. That meant when I kept going down to Kinko’s and making more copies.
I am intrigued by the wheat-pasted posters in the chapter of Lost Joy,“This Poster Will Change Your Life.”
CJ: The thing that drew me to posters, and that ultimately ended up, by the last poster project, figuring out that was at the source of it was the way in which the street kind of mirrors the radio.
In my experience listening to radios, I am never very good at tuning in stations or figuring out what I am listening to. Usually I hear things, they grab my ear and I have no idea what they are called, where to find them or anything. I describe them to people and they have no idea and they are just lost.
I am fascinated by all aspects of disappearance and invisibility, the shadowy sorts of experiences that are at the heart of so much that we encounter. Usually we filter things out, but the radio offers an almost tangible version of those times when we either fall in love with a song for a real short bit and lose it forever and it just becomes a legend in our mind, or we discover someone and they become a favorite. There is a mystery to the radio in the way that it doesn’t have a location. I understand the science behind the way it travels, but it still always seemed extremely mysterious how it arrives in our little receivers.
When I moved to New York I was intrigued by the free use of the streets. Which is hardly free, cause the police would ticket you if they found you, but similarly I suppose if you have a pirate radio station they will find you and ticket you. And I was intrigued by the way it was entering this dialogue with a bunch of other people—you would put up a poster and it would get covered over by another poster or only slightly covered or smeared or changed by the weather or changed by people walking by who would write on it sometimes. And those were always the best—they would read it and then go and give their opinion.
And I was interested in that and that was the thing I wanted to mention to you. Just that the radio and the street seemed like similar- ___ … I don’t know what the noun is there. They are not both media, they are both canvases, I guess.
Traffic or static…
CJ: Yeah, I was intrigued by static and introducing into my own writing distortion and static. Which occurs naturally when I’m on the street but was another reason for the unreliable narrator, the untrustworthy storytelling and stuff. I was listening to Sonic Youth and I was wondering how to bring fuzz into storytelling. How do you lose the narrator behind a wall of sound?
You grew up first outside of Los Angeles and then in L.A. and then in New York. Do you think where you have lived has influenced how you write or your taste in music?
CJ: I grew up in an agricultural area outside of Los Angeles and I’d go see bands in L.A. and I could understand them being referred to as L.A. bands cause they would talk about local landmarks in their music. When I lived in New York every other band was described as the “New York sound.” But I had a band and my music didn’t make sense in terms of the Talking Heads, Television or whatever the New York music was supposed to sound like. Then I realized it doesn’t mean anything anymore. And that is one of the great things about radio. Radio transcends neighborhoods. It liberates the kids who didn’t have the good fortune to grow up in urban areas. I grew up listening to a great radio station that had a long signal all the way from Pasadena and reached me a hundred miles away. And that was my lifeline and where I learned things.
I figured out my two favorite buildings in Los Angeles: Dodger Stadium and the Griffith Observatory.
Why?
CJ: That’s hard to say. I was interested, once I realized that they were my two favorites, that they both share something I don’t really like, which is an almost cartoonish-ness. But at the same time they are also very useful. I think that what I really liked is that they both have a perspective on the city that is really nice. And the view of L.A. from the upper stands of Dodger Stadium and the view of L.A. from the wall around Griffith Observatory were things I never tired of. So I always went to the ball game and to the observatory and I drank in the view of the city.
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Book
Verse Chorus Press
'By the year 2000, a number of my self-published pamphlets and whatnot were scattered hither and yon. These included a series of tracts that documented my postering projects. I approached Adam Voith of TNI Books with the idea of collecting into a single volume all the remnants and reviews that just then were becoming difficult to find.
'Adam was an excellent publisher and this remains my favorite Camden Joy work. It looks beautiful and contains a range of things that had been published, with the help of Mark Lerner at Rag & Bone Shop and Steve Connell at Verse Chorus Press, throughout the mid-1990s. Titles such as:
'The Greatest Record Album Ever Told (about Frank Black’s Teenager of the Year); The Greatest Record Album Singer That Ever Was (about Al Green); The Lost Manifestoes of Camden Joy (various music screeds glued around NYC in late 1995); This Poster Will Change Your Life (painted posters “protesting” the Macintosh NYC Music Festival of 1996); Dear CMJ… Posters of Protest from the CMJoy Gang (hand-written collaborative open letters posted in public spaces in 1996); and Make Me Laugh, Make Me Cry: Fifty Posters About Souled American (ornate posters plastered around Manhattan in mid-1997).
'Despite everyone’s best efforts, the book drew little interest. It quickly fell out of print and remained so until resurrected by Verse Chorus Press for the 2015 reissue series.'-- Tom Adelman
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Excerpts
Total Systems Failure
As anybody who has flipped past Rolling Stone's editorial page to read their business section recently can attest, popular music is undergoing what those in the know like to call "really something." All the record company people who signed the good indie bands and orchestrated bringing us the very best music of the '90s are being put on ice in favor of rootless meanies who favor brand-name ballads, dance crazes, and tits. It's perhaps true when people paraphrase the Clash these days that "even if the Beatles flew in today, they'd send no limousine anyway" (although people declaring such usually forget that the Beatles seemed harmless at the start, which is how they got so big; they began as Backstreets and became Beasties). So far, in my debatably short life, I've been lucky enough to see punk fall out of fashion not once but twice (it was better the second time because effects pedals caught up with the theory, and deadpan wit entered the rhetoric; at long last, wiseasses got the girls!). We had some good times, didn't we, back when smart, sloppy groups had their shiny moment, back when the paying public seemed to've come over (at last!) to our way of thinking. Then the record companies ran out of Nirvana specialty reissues and Sonic Youth did not make another Daydream Nation and stupid Mark E. Smith assaulted his girlfriend while Elvis Costello forfeited his place in the pantheon and generation-defining classics were on the tips of the Breeders' and Uncle Tupelo's tongues when the band members turned on one another as Nick Cave and Morrissey became jokes and Bob Mould and Mike Watt continued on cluelessly and the gifted pop band Christmas came back as the utterly irrelevant smug swingers Combustible Edison and traditionally deserving dues-paying types like Vic Chestnutt and the Fastbacks could not get a commercial purchase on the popular imagination as everybody from the Posies to Pearl Jam to Archers of Loaf never figured out how to make an album entirely important from start to finish, forgetting the point of pop stardom is to bring together huge clumps of otherwise unaffiliated folks, and Pavement couldn't follow up the Pacific Trim EP with the requisite jubilant breakthrough (their Let It Be) and Catpower and the Mountain Goats defiantly clung to Dylan pre-'65 and Tom Waits was too late with The Black Rider and Yo La Tengo were inexplicably overlooked (how does that begin to happen?) and the fetish for releasing crappy home demos—whose very lack of finish lent them the steady hiss of a gradually disappointed public—succeeded only in stealing mid-decade credibility from keenly perfectionist pop stars like Robyn Hitchcock and Nick Lowe and They Might Be Giants precisely when they issued their masterpieces.
What a decade of sleights-of-hand and comic mistimings this has been, as we emerge with none of our alt-spokesmen standing, and their industry support utterly squeezed out between urban enthusiasts and country-western fans. Only a few years back you'd catch major-label A&R kids speaking like mature individuals who'd survived relationship counseling, saying that certain acts had to be nurtured, talking about honesty and commitment, that audiences required respect, that expectations had to be patiently shaped. . . . Well, such talkers are no more, replaced now by bottom-dwellers dwelling on the bottom line who treat imaginative singers and songwriters with contempt, like one-night stands. As a side consequence, not only have I been purged from the demographic that once used to nourish me, but also my demographic itself has been purged. People assure me the future is online and the underground will rise yet again, but lately my legs are cramping up, I'd like to sit down, so fuck you, how long am I supposed to wait? Should I be satisfied that Ween is nearly a household name? Am I to feel gleeful that Elliott Smith played the Oscars while resting in Celine Dion's bosom and that the money we paid for the song "Man on the Moon" now brings it back to us in movie form? I can march up and down my aisle of favorite '90s records and almost all I see are artists who guaranteed something they didn't deliver or just got screwed (the one exception, I can be persuaded, is the Beastie Boys), or wonderful acts like the Lilys and Lambchop who would've significantly altered our beloved revolutionary popscape had they been promoted, or musicmakers in possession of Dylan's head-full-of-ideas-that're-driving-them-insane like Very Pleasant Neighbor and Death Cab for Cutie who couldn't even get their discs into shops.
(continued)
from The Almost Revolution
Back before life was okay, imbeciles with feathered hair parted down the middle and no acne organized suburban dances, where everyone bumped and gloriously french-kissed while vomiting hard liquor down one another's champion throats. Stuck-up morons mocked me openly, said things like, "Scram, Shrimp!" so they could practice their routines in the boy's room. They told everyone I was cognoscenti (because I outpointed them in dodgeball), isolato (because I lacked adequate fashion accessories), and pozzolana (because of my big bones). They walked unscathed from totaled hot rods while I sat up late with Marie, my girlfriend, and together we cursed Jesus H. Christ for allowing them to live, with their muscle cars and glass packs, beauty rings, righteous Sat. Nite Fever bud, and primo levi weed, their blithe insistence that nothing mattered except the continued tingling of tanned flesh beneath their polyester wraps. We were two fifteen-year-olds. Long-faced, slack-jawed and, of course, down-hearted, unable to bear the lack of soixante-huitards and nouveaux philosophes in our resort-style neighborhood, Marie and I rode bikes down to the shopping center one balmy afternoon, hauling a boombox, angrily intent on accomplishing some protest. But our brains were very young, just fifteen years old, and putting the predicate to a subject like "transgression" incapacitated us. Soon we settled on candy. We would eat candy. More candy than had ever been eaten. The world would wonder where all its candy went and we alone would possess the answer, having eaten it all. That kind of thing. Ingesting the goods of our crass société de consommation to call Western culture on its fascination with simulacra and facsimile, blah de blah blah. Lemonheads, Mike and Ikes, Atomic Fireballs, Branch's Peanut Butter Rickeys, Hot Tamales, Licorice Stumps, M&M's, Mounds, Mars, Marathon Bars, &tc. You sense the magnitude of what we were planning. We bought, as I recall, thirteen dollars worth of candy; candy was cheaper then, this was a whole lot. We also bought a $3.99 cassette of Donovan's Greatest Hits which, displayed for sale near the cash register, seemed as indicative as anything else of what Johnny Baudrillard would've disdained about the dead-end way in which we were being raised.
The candy tasted good at first, especially since it was for a good cause. The first ten Hershey products went down fine. We consumed them while fidgeting around outside the store, heckling shoppers who rolled by with full carts, yelling (as kids will) about how we were going to teach you bastards a thing or two about fake serenity, about soft utopias, and so on.
We had the Donovan tape going on our boombox. A perfect soundtrack! As the digesting got tough, as we gagged on root beer barrels and choked back the stomach acids which rose, bewildered, in our over-sugared throats, Donovan too began to sound sick-but truthfully, didn't he always sound sick? The pain hardened in our guts, bellies pregnant with some devil offspring, civilization's fin de siècle hyperrealism made (ouch-!) concrete, but steadfast we continued to dine on candy, on candy, on candy (revolutions require strong stomachs). In fact, when (soon after) we began to vomit, decorating the shopping center walkway with festive rivers of speckled post-structuralist barf, we didn't even consider that the candy might've been responsible nor did we bother doubting our philosophical persuasions. We instinctively blamed Donovan. He sang in his fey queasy tone, he sang his inane ditties and we puked. Cause and effect. Perhaps our incipient revolution did founder on the shores of a sudden dextrose intolerance-but America, you can thank Donovan that you still have your candy, for without him I do believe our protest would've succeeded.
Rattled by the Rush
S.M. storms around lower Manhattan remembering the trees at dusk, how they once looked caramel-dipped, during those months of light and merry, and how brightly the taffy clouds of morning glowed after he and his friends determined that nothing like parents or family mattered anymore; nothing; just candy. From that, what--frenzy? addiction? liberation? a decade earlier, he and Spiral Stairs, this guy, a friend from school, had begun the rock group Pavement.
They were united in the decision to not call themselves by real names. They tried to make their first recordings seem like vinyl accidents, willful and erroneous, unhelpfully titled Slay Tracks: 1933-1969 and Demolition Plot J-7 and Perfect Sound Forever.
S.M. supposes that people think he's a bit, well...pinched, because of how well he separates himself from his words, sees his songs as being sung in character and all that. He can't help it. His speech drones, cuts, dismisses, has all the life of a dial tone. He wants to believe that he possesses "a new openness," but just try to give hundreds of interviews a year without developing a similar chilliness of soul and feeling like your every movement is monitored.
The video cameras show that his dark hair remains cut in its usual conservative manner. S.M. passes through a series of sugarhouse stalls where Chinese dogs sniff the cuffs of his pants and mop the concrete with their blue-black tongues. Spat-out candies in crinkled-up balls of plastic litter his path, open wrappers everywhere. S.M. fidgets with a candy in his front pocket but doesn't unwrap anything. He knows that when people see this they think that he likes denying himself things. This is what the fans bicker about on the Web, about this once when S.M. appeared to a certain reporter as if he weighed all of 120 pounds and was overheard musing pleasantly about our ability to survive eating only air, and subsequently all this misinformation leaked out.
He's very familiar with this part of town, where the sugarhouse stalls are now. The neighborhood was torn up ten years before by riots; he was thoroughly kind on candy that night, and he saw the coppers on spooked steeds galloping down Saint Mark's and the Argentine who owned the big sugarhouses ordering his muscle boys to drive a truckful of candimonium packs over to the squatters (just like in some Damon Runyon story) so they had bottles to throw at the helicopters.
S.M. lived right near here back then, with percussionist Bob, who had this hellish job with the transit authority at the time, driving a bus. Bob'd come home in a vulgar mood, sink into the couch and glare like an abused monkey. They'd unwrap a few candies and gratefully watch hockey players beat one another on the television set. By then the first few Pavement things had appeared to zero sales. Still, a baffling number of folks began to hear of Pavement. Nobody knew how or why. They crept into the dialogue like a good piece of vandalism, exactly as S.M. had hoped--suddenly, anonymously, full of challenging implications. For a couple reasons--mainly ignorance and poverty--Pavement had left the studio with only recordings of accidents, first takes, wan distortions, scratch vocals. To distract reporters from the bad mikings, S.M. talked as though by intention these were anti-songs, said they were committed to releasing the things that rock bands were supposed to record over. A brilliant strategy: Pavement became just as difficult to listen to as they were difficult to discuss.
In the suburban outskirts, S.M. was satisfied to learn, Pavement attracted a host of word-of-mouth legends: it was said they were television stars recording under fake names, that they were a middle-aged academic performing a cultural survey via false identities and noise-collage experiments. Periodically someone would find Pavement quoted by some half-reliable source as speaking of the need for silence. Nobody knew where they belonged. There'd be this passed-out drummer in some smudgy zine above a caption that read, "If you were wondering what you missed when you missed last month's Pavement gig--here it is!" This was the sort of information that was getting out. For a time S.M. succeeded so well in covering their tracks it seemed his Pavemen could turn out to be anything or anybody. Some writer helped their cause when he wrote that they were building a band with the same surreptitiousness that insurgents made bombs; he went on to say that he half expected their identities to be revealed amid a predawn ATF raid, babies wailing in the background, shopkeepers telling TV crews they had no idea that their quiet, well-behaved neighbors could've been "Los Pavementos." S.M. dug that write-up.
At the time, the candimonium underground was in a disquieting state of free fall. All S.M.'s friends were throwing their papers into the air in disgust, their bodies heavy with hate. In small venues in, for example, Los Angeles, sugarbrains felt obligated to grab the stage, whether they deserved attention or not; out-of-tune Dylan rip-offs would get up there and the crowd'd boo and boo, unaware that one of these bald-stringed, big-eyed boys would soon turn into Beck. One's certainties were in turmoil; tastes were about to take a big turn; judgments changed hourly about what constituted a truly subversive lyric, a sincere rhythm. S.M.'s friends were easily moving 20 pounds of chocolate a day. The summoning of the "Alternative Demographic" was near.
(continued)
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha, yeah, you won't be at all surprised that I have Thorpe Park heavily penciled in for an asap visit. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. That's really inspired: Raymond Roussell as the king of theme park literature. I'm going to be thinking about that all day. ** Sypha, That Shire store sounds so cozy and want-able. Excellence about the USB recorder device. I excitedly await its fruits. Oh, that's okay about the La-Bas Day. Whenever you can do it, I'll be most extremely grateful and peeled. 2013, okay. I seem to have totally missed that film. I'll check around for it. Thanks! ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, serious hopes that the shitstorm either stays in its current looming, ominous shitstorm state or settles into something ugh but doable. It's out of Zac's and my hands until its and our producers make their next move. I've never been to Cedar Point either. It's one of my 'most wanted' US parks. Unfortunately, Ohio is not a place I get to or even quickly through very often. I'm glad your shitstorm ran its course. Such things are major suckage. Are you working on anything? ** Misanthrope, I don't know, but when I look at them, I want to slide game pieces all over them too. I'll put Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, VA in the lower rungs of my theme park to-do list. There was a Busch Gardens in LA when I was younger. I think I put a map of it in the post. It was bleah, which I guess is why it's an apartment complex now. Thank you about 'ZHH'. Oh, yeah, I was fully aware that I was putting your Harry in there. He's even a character in one of the buried little narratives, the one about musical performers. Sinus infection? Preempt that thing like crazy. ** Kier, Ha ha, hi! Yeah, 'ZHH' is getting around. Pretty amazing. At the moment, the shitstorm's strength is a question that will be answered when our producers respond to a simple question that I emailed to them days ago and which they seem to be ignoring, which is not a good sign at all. Oh, right, horses are vegan, aren't they? That would explain the healthy thing, although I doubt that's why that saying originally arose. Your creative malaise will pass for sure. Those malaises always do 'cos they're just phantoms, but they play super stressful mind games with you when they're happening. I hate them. Being cooped up doesn't help either, yeah. What is that magic attaching stuff? That sounds so useful. A Lukas cup! My weekend was largely uneventful, as per usual of late. The highlight was hanging out with the Z-ster on Saturday. We went to Foundation Cartier, this biggish private art museum/space here run by, yes, Cartier. There were two shows. For one, these architects emptied out the big ground floor. In one room, they put a robotic bucket of water on wheels that had a Go-pro camera in the water facing up. It scooted around the room and then would pause in certain places whereupon a drop of water would fall into it from the very high ceiling. In the other room, what the camera was seeing was shown on this giant, horizontal screen that was hung upside down close to the floor, and you lay down on these very low-to-the-ground gurney-like things and rolled yourself underneath the screen to watch. It was funnish. The other show was their 30th anniversary show, a group show of artists who've shown there over the years curated by some artist I didn't know. It was kind of blah, and the curating artist had more work in the show than any of the other artists, which was gross. The highlight was four works by the sublime, extremely great artist Vija Celmins. The low point was a piece by the curating artist that was his imagining of 'David's Lynch's living room', but it was just a stupid giant room with a badly painted faux-red-curtains motif all over the walls and a couple Lynch's dumb paintings, and some 'strange' furniture, and a stupid 'secret passageway' that was neither secret nor spooky at all, and the sound in the space was Patti Smith reading some completely lame long 'spiritual', 'eerie' poem or something that I guess she wrote and delivered in her 'Patti Smith' voice, and that was just tiresome. So, yeah, but it was fun to be there anyway. Then we ate Mexican food, and that was yum. On Sunday, I mostly worked on stuff. I kept getting really great responses to 'ZHH', and that was really happy-making. Oh, a really cool member of a really cool band who'll need to remain nameless for now asked me if Zac and I would be into working on a possible project with his band, a film or video maybe, and we of course said, 'Yes, please', and I don't know if that'll happen, but it's an exciting possibility. But I was mostly home just working on this and that all day. But, finally and definitely, we restart editing the final cut of our film this morning again, and I'm very, very looking forward to that. Are you feeling and doing better today, my pal? What happened? ** Gary gray, Hi. Yeah, as I said, I'm totally with you on 'Adieu au langage'. It really, really inspired me and upped the ante and all of that great stuff. More than cute, man. I'm definitely excited to get to see how that Rubaiyat project pans out. I went to the MGM Grand park too, and, yes, the map is a hundred times better than the park was. No, I don't collect theme park maps. I should. It's weird that I don't. I think the only Halloween ones I have are a handful from Knotts Scary Farm. I always keep those when I go there 'cos that place/event is god. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. Thanks a lot about 'ZHH', man. Thanks for taking the time to get into it. It's our producers whom we're battling with, and, yeah, thank you. It's kind of on the cusp of either getting much worse or settling down a bit at the moment. I love Merzbow, of course. But he does so much and is so prolific, and that's the reason why I think maybe it would be more interesting and surprising and stuff to work with someone who hasn't done a million collaborations before. Which isn't to say that if he offered to collaborate, we wouldn't be excited and interested. What ended up being your rainy day distraction? It rains here all the time right now. I'm still 'praying' for at least one dusting of snow. ** Steevee, Hi. That's strange, I was just reading about GIUSEPPE MAKES A MOVIE this morning over my coffee. Those kinds of stories are always so great to think about, and to see too, I guess. It made me curious. ** _Black_Acrylic, Aw, thanks a lot, Ben. Really, thank you for that! ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Thank you, man. I try to make the loops that the blog throws at you guys, when it throws them, loopy. Terrible sentence construction there, sorry. Um, yeah, what we've made does not fit into the realm of what those people have produced before at all. We thought they would find that refreshing or exciting or something, but, so far, they're acting like they think aliens have invaded earth through our film or something. Sucks, but we'll see. Thanks a lot, my friend. How's stuff with you? ** Hyemin kim , Hi! I'm really glad you liked the post and 'ZHH" too, of course. Thanks very, very much. You take care too. ** Thomas Moronic, I'm so dying to go to Alton Towers. Z and I are going to the UK to go to Diggerland before too long, and I think we'll try to swing up or sideways or down or whatever which way to AT while we're there. Yeah, totally about the theme park maps vis-a-vis game maps. I miss the days when they used to publish print versions of video game solution guides all the time. I always wanted to write a novel in the form of a video game solution guide. Bon Monday! ** Right. Do you guys know the fiction and nonfiction of Camden Joy? He sort of stopped writing books ten years ago or so, but they were and are wonderful things, and they're being reprinted now, so I thought I'd pay tribute, in this case to his non-fiction book, mainly because it was the only one with online excerpts that I could use, but his fiction, i.e. 'The Last Rock Star Book, or Liz Phair: A Rant', 'Boy Island', and '3 by Camden Joy' are all very worth checking out. See you tomorrow.