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'All serious art presents a challenge to its interlocutors, resists paraphrase and frustrates interpretation. The strange richness of Peggy Ahwesh’s filmmaking throws us up against the paucity of our own language. “Do I have words for what I am seeing?”: watching and re-watching her films provoke this question – the spectre of ineffability. This experience seems ever more curious when we consider the place granted to language in the films themselves. The films often cite (or even recite) any number of literary, theoretical and philosophical texts. Yet this practice of citation, appropriation and allusion, of folding language into, or asking it to hover above, the image is predicated on an understanding of the shortcomings of language itself. For Ahwesh’s work proceeds first from the act of seeing, or more accurately, looking – at the world and the bodies that inhabit it.
'Ahwesh was reared in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania, in her own words, “one of those sad industrial towns” near Pittsburgh. She went to school at Antioch College in the 1970s where she studied with Tony Conrad (“a father figure”) and was introduced to radical artists and filmmakers like Paul Sharits, Carolee Schneeman and Joyce Wieland. She returned to Pittsburgh after school, threw herself into its burgeoning punk scene and started shooting Super-8 films that documented, quite idiosyncratically, the things, people and places around her. In organising a film series at an art space called The Mattress Factory, Ahwesh decided to invite as her first guest George Romero, a Pittsburgh filmmaker himself, whose native city had paid him little notice before Ahwesh’s invitation. Their meeting led to Ahwesh’s working as a production assistant on Romero’s Creepshow (1982). The immersion in Romero’s phantasmagoria seems so uncannily fitting, given the trajectory of Ahwesh’s career, as to be nearly over-determined, yet, as anecdote (Ahwesh recalls that she was “assigned to entertain Stephen King’s son and played ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ with him”) it manifests the unstudied and nerdy cool of Ahwesh’s films themselves.
'Ahwesh creates a kind of renegade arte povera ethnography of the everyday, approaching culturally complex issues and individuals with disarming simplicity and intelligence, and with risk-taking vulnerability, humor and abandon. Most often drawn to the immediate and the personal, Ahwesh's films combine hanging out and acting out with serendipitous occurances and telling details. Her characters are outspoken and the films talk back to the muffling zeitgeist.
'Ahwesh's films are unparalleled documents and beautifully distilled essays about ruptures in human continuities. In the contrasts posed between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, we experience the beauty and pain, the consequence of knowledge and the submersion into the social. Ahwesh's films penetrate to the heart of American ritual in an unprecedented way. Some of the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne were able to reach into the transfiguring moments when an ossified Puritanism spilled over into shocking carnival-- exposing the hidden order of things and the true nature of it's celebrants. Ahwesh comes at similiar concerns from a unique perspective, unearthing the subterranean roots of sandbox antics, doll playing, bedroom dalliance and tantrums, tourist attractions, social gatherings and the S/M rodeo of love relationships.
'Ahwesh's films act as semi-guided tours that break all the rules of protocol--charting the off handed moments of impact--both the civilizing and transgressive elements that contribute to our social construction and private sense of self. The films identify and unglue some of our notions of romance, sexuality, violence, language. The bind that they leave us in is the bind of our own bodies, our inherited histories, our status as a partially occupied territory within the prevailing culture. These films celebrate also a truancy from that culture, a blistering that leads to disruption and self definition."'-- collaged
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Stills
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_____
Further
Great Directors: Peggy Ahwesh
Peggy Ahwesh @ Wikipedia
Peggy Ahwesh @ Ubuweb
Peggy Ahwesh's Vimeo Channel
Peggy Ahwesh @ Video Databank
Peggy Ahwesh @ FELIX
'Vertov from Z to A edited by Peggy Ahwesh & Keith Sanborn'
Peggy Ahwesh @ Underground Film Journal
'Peggy Ahwesh responds to NOT BORED!'s posting'
Christopher Higgs on Peggy Ahwesh’s 'The Color of Love'
Audio: Peggy Ahwesh and Barbara Ess's 'Radio Guitar'
Review: 'Kissing Point' by Peggy Ahwesh at Microscope Gallery
'A Shimmering Analog Memory: Artists' films in Pixelvision'
Leo Goldsmith on Peggy Ahwesh's 'Nocturne'
'Corpse, Corpus, Contingency: On Peggy Ahwesh's 'deadman' trilogy'
'… And Peggy Ahwesh as Burt Reynolds'
'Experiments In Film: She Puppet
'ENACTIONS AND DISRUPTIONS OF IRIGIRAY IN THE FILMS OF PEGGY AHWESH'
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Additionals
New York Underground Film Festival '08 Trailer by Peggy Ahwesh
Episode 1 Module 5 - Peggy Ahwesh Interview
'Dubai Fountain' by Peggy Ahwesh
'the ape of nature' by Peggy Ahwesh
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Interview
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You take pride in your Pittsburgh background, in part, I assume, because it’s been important in experimental filmmaking, with Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Field of Vision, the scholar Lucy Fischer at University of Pittsburgh. Also, it’s Warhol’s hometown. But maybe on some level it’s most of all George Romero. Is it true that you worked on George Romero films?
Peggy Ahwesh: Yeah. I moved back to Pittsburgh after college. I went to Antioch from 1972 until 1978. I studied with Tony Conrad, who I still think of affectionately as a father figure, the elder statesman in the field who bequeathed upon me the esoteric knowledge of initiation that propelled forward . . . [laughter] whatever. I also studied with Janis Lipzin. And Paul Sharits was there. Cecil Taylor was artist-in-residence. Jud Yalkut had a radio show that I listened to a lot. There was a lot going on.
I particularly remember a show Janis organized: Joyce Wieland, Carolee Schneemann, and Beverly Conrad did presentations. It was a major event for me to meet these women and hear them talk about their work.
I’m from a little coal town down river—Cannonsburg (famous for Perry Como and Bobby Vinton), one of those sad industrial towns. But I loved Pittsburgh and still have a lot of nostalgia for it. I found it very freeing, artistically; I felt like it was mine; the landscape was mine, the people were mine. Everything about it was up for grabs. I liked that it was "nowhere." It was not overdetermined as an art melieu like New York.
I got very involved with the punk scene there in the late Seventies and made a lot of great friends overnight. We documented the punk bands, and we were all making Super-8 sound films, and there were all these crazy characters to put in your movies.
My first job was at this place called the Mattress Factory, which was just opening in the north side in what’s called the Mexican War streets, a rough-and-tumble working class neighborhood with slight gentrification. I’m sure that neighborhood has changed. The Mattress Factory was this big art warehouse, and I ran a film series there. For my first guest I decided to call George Romero. He told me that no one in Pittsburgh had ever invited him to show his work locally. I was the first. I couldn’t believe it.
He came with his wife, and we showed The Crazies [1973] and Night of the Living Dead [1968]; one program at the Mattress Factory and another in a local high school. It was great. He was so friendly, open, vulnerable, not an egomaniac in any sense. I also knew a lot of people who worked in his movies, including several of the guys who were the red-neck bikers in Dawn of the Dead [1979]; they were George’s lighting crew and worked locally.
I worked on Creepshow [1982] as a production assistant, but I did all kinds of bizarre jobs--like I was Adrienne Barbeau’s assistant at one point, which basically meant going out and buying her specialty foods because she had very particular tastes. And for about a week I was assigned to entertain Stephen King’s son and played "Dungeons and Dragons" with him. I had a walk-through in a shot where Adrienne Barbeau gets shot in the head at a lawn party. And I worked with the camera crew in the scene where the guy finds this meteor and the green stuff gets all over his place. People had to make the green stuff and dress the set, and I helped the camera people get the right amount of out-of-focus green stuff in the foreground and in the background.
I had a very flamboyant best friend, Natalka Voslakov. She’s in some of my movies, and I shot some of her movies. She was one of the staples of my Pittsburgh years, an incredibly striking woman. Of course, she got a much better job with Romero than I did [laughter]—she was first assistant to the assistant director. My friend, Margie Strosser, who I’ve worked with over the years, was an assistant editor. We all got to know each other.
At what point in this history do you start making films?
Ahwesh: I made Super-8 movies before Pittsburgh, at Antioch and elsewhere, but when I landed in Pittsburgh, everything sort of came together. I was very involved; my boyfriend was a filmmaker--all my friends were filmmakers, musicians, photographers. The punk scene was us and various hangers-on. We would document the bands, and the bands would play at the clubs where we showed movies—we were our own on-going entertainment.
In 1980 at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, I did a big group show of local filmmakers. I was hot on the idea of group shows because they got everybody involved.
I did some shows where I’d put people’s names in the calendar and make up titles for films they hadn’t made yet. For one particular show I announced "Wrapped in American Flags" by one person; "Dreams Congo" by another. But often people did make films to go along with these titles. That wasn’t a thing you could sustain, but it was fun as a programming concept. We had a good time with it. It was a kind of cinematic match-making that went hand in hand with the parties and general flirtations among us.
Were you a movie-goer as a child or an adolescent?
Ahwesh: I was not a movie-goer. I was horrified by most movies. I thought they had bad gender politics, bad cultural politics, and were a waste of time. I was a hard-core idealist as a youth. My relationship to music was much more profound and organic, which is still the case. Basically, movies came second to music, but I did abhor popular films.
Even early in your life?
Ahwesh: Yes. I only started to be able to watch film in college and only unconventional films. I remember going into Kelly Hall at Antioch to see my first experimental film, Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray [1961], and the week after that, Masculine Feminine [1966, Jean-Luc Godard], but these films I did not understand. I was tortured by them, and found them completely infuriating--but they stuck in my craw. I couldn’t figure them out, but couldn’t forget about them either.
Of course, allowing myself to be turned onto them was a large area of growth for me. I come from a working class background. My parents are small-town, fairly conservative, church-going people who never cared about art.
When you told me you’re the same age as Su Friedrich, I was shocked—I think of you as a generation younger than Su.
Ahwesh: Actually, I’m a little older than Su. In Hide and Seek [1996] Su puts young girls in a narrative film where they’re playing with records and reproducing a Sixties girl party. In my movie, the vision machine [1997], I have adult women pretending to be girls, who smash the records and have a big fight and pour beer on the record player. It’s a very similar terrain, except that my imagistic and symbolic relation to experience is inverted. Su and I are friends and we think very similarly, except that my work shades one way and hers shades another.
Yours shades toward Jack Smith; hers, toward Frampton.
Ahwesh: Totally. I make a pastiche of many things. If I had to pick an experimental filmmaker whose philosophical method I borrow, it would be Jack Smith, although he’s one of the most irritating performers and filmmakers I’ve ever known. Just unbelievable. For years I did in Super-8 a lot of the things that he did. I would let people go on for hours and then turn the camera on, and they’d already be on the floor drunk and not able to function: "I thought we were gonna make a movie!" Or I would shoot all this stuff and just use the last roll. Or I’d rearrange the rolls in a way to make what I shot less coherent but more provocative.
Allowing something to erupt out of a nothingness--I love that. And that was already there in those first Pittsburgh films. Nothing was happening in Pittsburgh; we were just hanging around. "What can we do today?""Let’s put on weird costumes and dance around. Let’s make a movie." And things would just erupt out of seeming chaos. And films would get shot. Of course, editing was an entirely different part of the brain. As an editor, I was always interested in the things that were happening right in front of me that I didn’t recognize, but that I was involved in on some level.
In my personal relationships; I like people in transition. I’m most comfortable, I think, with people who are going through something—they’re having an ecstatic time, or a bad time, or a lot of things are happening and they’re overflowing with changes. I’m attracted to that.
When I talked to Ken Jacobs about the Nervous System pieces, I was saying that one of the difficulties with those pieces is that I can’t take notes: what’s happening is performative and so evanescent that you can’t really hold onto it. Now with your films I can take notes, but I stay mystified, partly because the films seem so open-- though when you talk about Martina’s Playhouse, it all seems very obvious.
Ahwesh: I think you have resistance to my work—perhaps you simply don’t like it. Is it possible that the problem is that it’s so much a female point of view--which includes that openness? There are people who don’t like the film because there’s no explicit authority telling them how to think about the images or structuring the material in a way that reduces it to formality. I refuse to do both those things. I just refuse.
I think it’s just that you don’t like my movies—not that you don’t get them.
Even when I don’t like your films, I still want to understand them.
Ahwesh: Also, my work has an under-achiever, self-deprecating quality and maybe that’s deceptive in some sense. You know, working in Super-8 is a devotion to the minor, to the low end of technology, to things that are more ephemeral and have less authority in the world. I am on the very edge—another Jack Smith tradition—of a whole enterprise that’s on the verge of collapsing.
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11 of Peggy Ahwesh's 25 films
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Bethlehem (2009)
'Interior and exterior spaces are transformed into mystical places in Peggy Ahwesh‘s lyrical meditation of an experimental short film, Bethlehem. While the film is mostly about general states of being, she does manage to tie in two actual Bethlehems: The most famous one in Jerusalem and the other one in mid-east Pennsylvania, which is Ahwesh’s home state. Ahwesh also alternates between inside and outside spaces, as well as between populated locations and people-less ones, giving all the same mythic quality through, obviously, the lyrical score, but also how the mostly non-moving camera soaks in its subjects through obtuse angles and framing. Many shots, particularly of Ahwesh’s human subjects, are from below or in intense close-up, granting them an element of grandeur even though they are occupying fairly mundane spaces.'-- Underground Film Journal
the entire film
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The Third Body (2008)
'An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations, among them a human hand shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conducting a virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky headgear navigating virtual spaces. As the title suggests, cyberspace adds to the Genesis legend a third possibility, a virtual existence that challenges natural and social definitions of gender and morality. Ahwesh writes, "The tropes of the garden, the originary moment of self knowledge and gendered awareness of the body (what is traditionally called sin) is mimicked in the early experiments with virtual reality. The metaphors used in our cutting edge future are restagings of our cultural memory of the garden. Wonderment regarding the self in space, boundaries of the body at the edge of consciousness and the inside and outside skin of perceptual knowledge."'-- Electronic Arts Intermix
the entire film
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Beirut Outtakes (2007)
'Composed entirely of film scraps salvaged from a closed Beirut cinema, Beirut Outtakes is a collage of sensational visions. Ed Halter writes in the Village Voice: "Outtakes appears to be a ready-made, albeit one tailor-made for Ahwesh's career obsessions, pre-filled with her signature elements: gleeful disruptions of high and low, affection for decayed textures, a peeping eye for lurid sexuality, and a fascination with unlikely images of the Middle East. Just one sequence of a go-go-booted belly dancer wriggling in an Arabic-language cinema advertisement for home air conditioners alone has the power to shatter more stereotypes than 500 pages of Edward Said.'-- Ubuweb
the entire film
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w/Bobby AbateCertain Women (2004)
'CERTAIN WOMEN is based on the novel of the same name by populist Southern genre writer Erskine Caldwell (written in 1957). Caldwell´s ´pulp´ storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatization are a distinct vision of the condition of women -- specifically working class women. There is little redemption in the tales of Erskine Caldwell, but there is over-the-top despair, social criticism and the reality of human wickedness. Bobby Abate and Peggy Ahwesh shot in a variety of low-end video formats, including spy-cam, VHS and DV. The cast is comprised of non-professionals chosen by the directors for their unique personalities, stock character looks and on-screen magnetism. Both directors participated fully in all aspects of the video´s making including production design, cinematography, sound design and editing. This cautionary tale of four heroic yet ordinary women is fashioned out of the past but relies on the filmmakers´ observations of the present historical moment and its political reality.'-- collaged
Excerpt
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The Star Eaters (2003)
'The Star Eaters is a 70-minute narrative video. The story of The Star Eaters merges the enigma of the night sky, its intoxication and desire, with the exhaustion and emotional decay of the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The film is told from the point of view of a woman adrift in the gambling joints and false-glamour of Atlantic City and her relationships with various hustlers, the ocean, her ex-lovers, and her own memory. The themes of the film are gambling, risk taking, transgression, and the quest for meaning.'-- Creative Capital
the entire film
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She Puppet (2001)
'Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality. Trading the rules of gaming for art making, she brings Tomb Raider's cinematic aesthetics to the foreground, and shirks the pre-programmed "mission" of its heroine, Lara Croft. Ahwesh acknowledges the intimate relationship between this fictional character and her player. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique of the problematic female identity, she enlarges the dilemma of Croft's entrapment to that of the individual in an increasingly artificial world.'-- Electronic Arts Intermix
the entire film
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Trick Film (1996)
'Activities at home with Mistress and her naughty pet.'-- PA
the entire film
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The Color of Love (1994)
'The film of Ahwesh’s that most determinedly takes on the subjects of sexuality and vision is undoubtedly The Color of Love (1994). Essentially it is a found footage film. According to Ahwesh, a friend dropped off a load of old film canisters that had been left outside, prey to the elements. Inside one canister Ahwesh discovered a Super-8mm pornographic film of two women making love to each other and to a man who appears to be dead or unconscious. The film had become degraded and decayed which gave it an amazing richness of color and texture. Ahwesh “did an improv on the optical printer”, “slowing some sections down and speeding others up a bit, repeating some things, and elongating the cunt shots”. Then she added a score of tango music. What resulted is one of the most beautiful and provocative artefacts in film history. The use of the tango music seems a clear nod in the direction of Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1928). Like its surrealist predecessor, The Color of Love is an assault on the norms of vision. It is explicit; it shows too much. The seductive surface of the film (if ever there were a case for haptic cinema or embodied vision, this is it) draws us into a pas de deux of attraction and repulsion.'-- Senses of Cinema
the entire film
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The Scary Movie (1993)
'The Scary Movie is another collaboration with Martina Torr, who by the time the film was shot, was some years older than she was in Martina’s Playhouse. Shot in wonderfully high contrast black and white with very low key lighting, the film is one of Ahwesh’s most beautiful and most light-hearted; it is also the most reflexive of her many nods towards the horror genre. The film features Martina and co-star/playmate Sonja Mereu. While Martina is costumed in cheap girls’ dress up clothes, Sonja has a fake moustache, black gloves and prosthetic monster fingers. The first shot is a repetitive and jerky hand-held pan of a hand drawn music score while the sounds of Psycho-like violins play on the soundtrack. So begins what might be called an anatomising re-reading of the horror genre. The entire soundtrack is a pastiche of music and sounds native to the horror film – screams, strings, squeaking doors, footsteps, etc – although with a few corny phrases and sound effects that sound as though they’ve been lifted from a Warner Brothers cartoon. At various points a prosthetic rubber hand (obviously manipulated by a human extending from offscreen space) reaches mock-eerily to caress Martina who pretends to be asleep. Sonja probes/assaults Martina with kitchen tongs and later stabs her repeatedly with a tin-foil knife, and in turn is stabbed by the rubber hand wielding a similar weapon. In the middle of the film’s duration, Sonja holds up a poster announcing the credits (she is credited as the “Doctor/Killer”, Martina as the “Patient/Hand Lover”). Then we see the girls screaming, then dancing. They seem to have escaped their outing into the horror genre. The film ends.'-- Senses of Cinema
the entire film
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Martina's Playhouse (1989)
'In Martina’s Playhouse everything is up for grabs. The little girl of the title oscillates from narrator to reader to performer and from the role of baby to that of mother. While the roles she adopts may be learned, they are not set, and she moves easily between them. Similarly, in filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh’s playhouse of encounters with friends, objects aren’t merely objects but shift between layers of meaning. Men are conspicuously absent, a ‘lack’ reversing the Lacanian/Freudian constructions of women as Ahwesh plays with other possibilities.'-- Pacific Film Archives
Excerpt
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w/ Keith SanbornThe Deadman (1987)
'Charting the adventures of a near-naked heroine who sets in motion a scabrous free-form orgy before returning to the house to die--this film combines elegance, raunchy defilement and barbaric splendor.'-- Jonathan Rosenbaum
the entire film
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Man, that Tom McCarthy piece is so tiresome, but I've been curious about him due to all the talk of his literary adventurousness, ha ha, and it's good to know he's actually not, at least in the brain pan, so thank you much for the alert! ** Keaton, Ah, 'imagine it', gotcha. Sex's expansive effect on the imagination is probably the best thing about it. I think Spring started here yesterday. Yeah, nice here too, but winter was such a blah rip-off of a season over here. I only really like adventure/strategy games. My favorite game would probably be whatever the game equivalent of an abandoned house would be. That youtube thing was so Sypha. ** Thomas Moronic, Me too. So, so anxious to hear the album. And see them. They're playing here in April, I think. Are they hitting the UK? Really glad you dug the gig. That's awesome. Most of Jojo Hiroshige's stuff is much noisier than that track, but it's really good. ** Kier, Hi! As in wench, cool. Ooh, how about Drench! As in ... well, drench! Or as in wrench. Cool, the noose one was my favorite of the two I suggested. Yeah, let's find a time to talk or Skype when the times get right. That would be very cool. I think I know that body-depressed-when-the-head-isn't feeling. It's really strange. It seems like it should be fun or something, but I don't remember any funness. Was the psych appointment a blow out in the good way? Yesterday Zac and I sound-edited again all day into the evening. We finished Scene 5 except for this one character's voice that's a little too bass-y, but we'll need to get someone whose more of an expert in editing tech to get it where we want it. Then we started on Scene 4, and that's been easier than the other two scenes so far. We're about halfway through it. We may have found our sound mix guy, fingers heavily crossed. He's watching the rough cut of the film today, and then we'll meet with him tomorrow to hopefully finalize the deal unless he doesn't like the film. Gisele and Stephen bought a flat recently, and they're moving in this summer or fall, and right now the place is under construction and has no roof, and Zac and I wanted to go see that, but the only time we could was at 6 pm yesterday, and we were working too hard. Anyway, the editing was my day. I'm still fiddling with the theater piece script. There's one little thing that has proven hard for me to get right, but hopefully I'll figure it out today. Yeah, really, that was it, and today will likely be another day about which I'll only talk about editing tomorrow. How was your psych visit and everything else? ** Steevee, Good news about the seeming goodness of your new psych, but that does sound annoying about the pharmacy. I didn't know that pharmacies are selective about products. I thought they were all the same place with the same everything available but with just slight differences in the physical design and the employees. ** Sickly, Hi, Sickly! Yeah, me too, about the McCarthy article. I couldn't even finish it. Why is that almost always when a so-called, much touted ... I don't know, 'cutting-edge', 'adventurous' UK novelist decides to spout off about literature itself, he -- and it's always a he -- winds up revealing himself to be a reactionary, self-loving pseudo-brainiac and bore on the subject. A lot of people have recommended McCathy's fiction to me as wild and smart, but, after reading that, I'm so much less interested in reading his stuff. But enough. You're very welcome for the gig and thank you a lot for taking your valuable time with it. The version of the Wire song on the album is extremely better than that live version, but that was the only bit of the new LP on youtube, Vimeo, et. al. Really good album. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. I'll check out that Hannibal guy out for sure. Cool you looked up that 'rain' phrase. Zac and I were trying to figure out where it came from yesterday sans google. All we could think was it had something to do with farming? I love that 'falls in a straight line' reason. That's beautiful. Oh, dog residue rather than dog, okay. Man, your dog allergy is hyper-sensitive. ** Alistair McCartney, Hey A! Thank you for exploding the enthusiasm in me. It felt great. And it's still there! Or I mean here. No doubt something about the sound editing will end up playing out in my writing. It's very laborious, and I'm basically just sitting there conferring with Zac while he does the actual dirty work, but I'm finding it quite mesmerizing. I'm such an editing junkie. This year for your book's finish line, yes! Man oh man, I'm really looking forward to that, big A! Love to you and to all of your all and sundry! ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. I think that record is going to be so ace for sure. Cool that the gig unblocked writing stuff for you. Is there a better outcome even possible? Well, I guess winning the lottery and finding true love and all of that kind of stuff maybe. I'll try to use this off-question day to fine-tune my answering abilities. Have a great one! ** Okay. You guys know the work of Peggy Ahwesh? I wonder. She's a pretty interesting filmmaker, so, obviously, I recommend that you familiarize yourselves with her oeuvre to some degree or other, if you're aren't already familiar, and only if you feel like it, of course. See you tomorrow.