'Things you should know (and these things will arm you, these are things you require: think of what I am about to tell you as an enormous pair of boots to help you wade through the sickening morass of shit, spew, jism and mud here): Pierre Guyotat masturbates as he writes. As such, his sentences rarely include punctuation or follow straight grammatical rules, rolling on and ever on, dreamlike (or nightmarish), insistent, perplexing. Guyotat has displayed his manuscripts (spunk encrusted telephone directories) in galleries throughout the world. During the writing of The Book and The Story of Samora Michel, he gave up eating, lost half his body weight and eventually had to be resuscitated from a near fatal coma. Guyotat is, if nothing else, somewhat driven.
'More importantly, Eden Eden Eden is viewed by those who know as a significantly biographical work, set as it is during the war between Algeria and France, a war in which Guyotat was held prisoner. Saying that, to view Eden Eden Eden as a biographical work – to approach it as a way of attempting to understand what Guyotat does – is wrong, in my opinion. You need to approach this as if it was the combination of an extraordinary piece of abstract art and a nail bomb. There is beauty here, but there is also great, savage pain. (Imagine a wounded wolf howling, and then imagine that the sound – the howling – can generate similar, equally awful, wounds in those that hear: that is the experience of reading Eden Eden Eden.)
The hero of the book is a teenage prostitute called Wazzag, and the novel follows his participation in a series of sex acts, which constantly escalate in scale, intensity and number. In his introduction, Stephen Barber says: “The book stinks of sperm and killing. It is a malignant orgasm. It is the perfect book for contemporary Europe.”
'You do not expect entertainment. You walk like a refugee through these pages. Nothing is what you would precisely deem pleasant. Sentences read like the foundation stones for the pyramids (stones that you must jar your shoulder against, stones that need pushing thirty or forty miles). This is work, work that requires a particularly distinct heroism. You are reporting from the front line. You are witnessing that which nobody else is doing, that which few others have seen. It is frantic and unpleasant, yes, but what you are bearing witness to is something brutally unique.'-- Bookmunch
'France's most controversial living writer is virtually unknown in this country, thanks to difficulties in translating his extremist oeuvre - extreme in style and in content. Pierre Guyotat is the uncompromising heir of De Sade, Artaud and Genet. He writes violent and pornographic books in his own invented language. Edmund White has called him "the last great avant-garde visionary of our century." Roland Barthes wrote an introduction to one of his books Eden Eden Eden - a work of which Michel Foucault remarked: "I have never read anything like it in any stream of literature", praising its "startling innovation". It has been labelled pornographic, a charge that Guyotat revels in. "Pornography is certainly more beautiful than eroticism," he observes. "Eroticism is ugly. Eroticism is an ideology... there is nothing more boring than eroticism, it's worse than poetry, even. I say three cheers for pornography."
'Born in 1940 in a small town in a mountainous area of France near Lyons, the son of a doctor, Guyotat joined the army while still a teenager and served in Algeria while that country fought France for independence. Guyotat instinctively found himself more sympathetic to the Algerians (one can see a similarity with Genet and Rimbaud here), and incited the Algerian conscripts to desert. After getting involved in brawls with officers, he was arrested by the military police and interrogated for 10 days before being thrown into an earth pit beneath the army kitchens where he lived in semi darkness for three months in constant fear of his life. "They threw me scraps of food, refuse," he recalls, "not fit for a dog." He managed to write on a piece of paper which he kept hidden from his captors. The link with De Sade, scribbling away in the Bastille, is unavoidable.
'Drawing partly on his experiences as a soldier, Guyotat has set many of his celebrated avant-garde novels in hallucinatory north African war zones. Soldiers rape and pillage. Bereft of narrative, and using short rhythmic phrases, he detonates sex as bestial act of power, and piles on atrocity after atrocity. With all the eidetic and visionary power of Rimbaud's Illuminations, he burns images of war into the retina. War is a monstrously glorified exchange of fluids and solids.
'"War is a situation in which one is totally insecure - sexually insecure as well as afraid for one's life," he has said. Imagine if De Sade had written about Vietnam after fighting in it, and you will get some idea of Guyotat's cultural significance for the French - both reviled and adored in equal measure.
'Eden Eden Eden is published this week in Britain. The British academic and biographer of Artaud, Stephen Barber, remarks: "It stinks of sperm and killing." It's a novel that has become legendary in its own time. Originally published in 1970, it was immediately banned by the French government until President Mitterrand personally intervened in 1981. That's also the year Guyotat famously nearly wrote himself to death; he was so absorbed in the completion of an intractable work that he forgot to eat properly and ended up being rushed to hospital in a coma. "I was mad," he says. "And at the same time I was living in a camper van. I was driving and hallucinating and getting into very extreme situations. Once I got into a fight on a road near Marseilles, and my attacker threw me off a cliff into the sea. I was covered in blood and so weak it took me a day to climb back up to my van."
'Guyotat has been described as a hermit. He has always lived in some poverty, at one time in a grim block of flats in the southern suburbs of Paris, living only on his small royalties and occasional fees from the Pompidou Centre where he goes every few years to deliver long extemporisations in the form of performance art (one photograph shows a naked man and piles of meat on a cart). Edmund White describes meeting him in his book Sketches from Memory. White says: "He has a powerful hieratic appearance and you feel you are in the presence of a priest of Baal - or perhaps he is Baal. He's stark raving mad but a very gifted writer who staked out the extreme limits of how far you can go."
'Like many Anglo-Saxons, White betrays an amused and slightly baffled interest in the French passion for the avant-garde. He describes Guyotat as stealing food from his plate at a dinner party, and how he fell asleep in one of Guyotat's two-hour improvisations. "In his language every other word sounded like `testicles', for some reason." As a biographer of Genet, White was intrigued by the Guyotat phenomena. He recalls asking a doctorate student about Guyotat's sexual proclivities. "She said his sexuality did not involve other living creatures."
'I presumed Guyotat would reject labels about sexuality and I was right. At first he was evasive: "to be homosexual, to be anti-sex, pro-sex - "to be" something does not exist." Yes, I asked, but do you prefer men or women? He laughed and finally relented. "I like both - it's very clear - and it's very difficult to like both sexes, it pulls you apart."
'He has very little time for sex; for Guyotat work is sex, and not just in the conventional "creation as sex". Guyotat is notorious for his habit of masturbating while he writes. The resulting soiled manuscripts are then shown in galleries as works of art. "Sex is the most relentless and powerful force in the world: it is all life, it is reality. It is not obscene." I asked him about scenes in Eden Eden Eden set in an Algerian boy brothel. Had he visited such a place? He seemed a little shocked. "No, no I 'ate them," he growled while admitting he had been to female seraglios in the desert zones.
'Like Rimbaud, who ended up as a gun runner and coffee trader in Ethiopia and Somalia, Guyotat is drawn by the desert. He talks of the Saharan wastes with all the tenderness of a lover; he particularly likes the intermediate landscapes between desert and pasture, the mountainous areas "that look like moonscapes but with beautifully coloured rocks" given a chance, he would happily live in Algeria (he listens to Algerian popular music with a passion). "But it's impossible." He has watched with horror the rise of fundamentalism in Africa. For him fundamentalism is rooted in an attack on the writer (Guyotat has been vocal in supporting Salman Rushdie from the "great gestures of beard and robe"). "Asserting the divine character of a text is an insult to the human writer of it - it erases him, makes him disappear. Fundamentalism is an attack on writing itself and all writers should see this."
'The British may laugh at Guyotat or be shocked by him. But his dedication to the idea of "being a writer" makes British literary preoccupations with Martin Amis' teeth and Julian Barnes' pool game seem quite banal. Though Guyotat's preoccupations with remodelling the French language and dwelling on French colonial atrocities may not have quite the same reactive effect in this country, his power as a writer, even in translation, is deadly and pure.'-- Roger Clarke
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Gallery
Pierre Guyotat (third from left) and his brother Regis (on bike), fall 1952.
1971
Pierre Guyotat on Bernard Pivot's "Apostrophes" on February 10, 1984.
1994
2012
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Further
Pierre Guyotat @ Semiotext(e)
'Art Is What Remains of History', by Pierre Guyotat
Audio: Guyotat reading his works in French @ Ubuweb
'The Multiplying Hells of Pierre Guyotat', by Blake Butler
'Eden Eden Eden' @ goodreads
'Pierre Guyotat's Formation: Childhood, Awakening and Self-Writing'
'Eden and Atrocity: Pierre Guyotat's Algeria'
'In December 1981, the French writer Pierre Guyotat entered a coma ... '
'Figuring Guyotat’s Coma: Self-Writing, Collection, and Renaissance'
'Ross Brighton on Guyotat'
'Horiztonal Text'
'About What: Pierre Guyotat'
«Je suis un musicien, je suis un alphabétiseur.»
“Quand j’écris, j’ai toute la langue française avec moi dans l’oreille”
'Preuves de vie: les SMS et e-mails de Pierre Guyotat entrent à la BNF'
'Pierre Guyotat se tord de joie'
'Le "Coma" de Guyotat, lu par Chéreau, pour boucler la boucle avec poésie et fragilité'
'Guyotat, désaxeur de syntaxe. Un livre monstre'
'Pierre Guyotat, tel quel'
'L’aventure du muttum : étude de la langue de Pierre Guyotat'
Pierre Guyotat's books @ Amazon
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Extras
Pierre Guyotat reads, April 29, 2011 | Bowery Poetry Club
SEMINAIRE SCHERER PIERRE GUYOTAT
Pierre Guyotat 1/5 – écriture & biographie
Cours Pierre Guyotat
Le Cercle littéraire de la BnF - Pierre Guyotat
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Interview
from Bomb
Noura WedellYour text, "Langage du corps," was published in English in the Semiotext(e) Polysexuality issue of 1981. In it, you explain how masturbation arose from the social fear of revealing your body as a producer of substances. The link between writing and masturbation had to do with understanding the embodied aspect of symbolic systems, the connection between body and language. It was a certain refusal of transcendence, as well as an experiment in the production of desire.
Pierre Guyotat Yes, and at the time, it took on a very exasperated form, probably because I was very far from home. I was also writing poems and prose without any carnal stimulation. Being in a foreign country increased the clandestine aspect of my practice; I was surrounded by people whom I barely knew. This raised both the stakes and risks of the game. It was also a time when I was torn between my desire for girls and my desire for boys, both desires full of adolescent tension and playful detachment. This was truly an internal rupture for me. I believe we all work with a fundamental rupture within ourselves. What is important is to dare to know, to accept and address it through artistic means. I did this fairly early on, and the north of England was one of the small theaters of my budding consciousness. There were still borders at the time in Europe, not to mention the great border between the Communist East and the so-called free West. It was probably fundamental that I be surrounded by a language other than the one I was used to in France, British English, which has very much changed since the war and postwar periods.
NWLanguage hadn't yet become impoverished as purely communicational.
PG Yes, this is especially true of the language of television. At the time, the language on both sides of the English Channel was quite salacious and evocative. There was still a proletariat and a peasantry, and a very material language with regional distinctions. The language that was spoken in the north of England was very different from what was spoken in London, or in Kent. Even in France, in the north, people did not speak the same way as they did in Paris or in the south. There were different accents, different words and expressions.
The family I was living with had been friends of my family since the Resistance. We were staying along the North Sea, in a coastal village beneath a towering, powerful maritime fort, à la Walter Scott. I fell in love with a young French girl from Brittany who was living with a family from the neighborhood. At the same time, I was resisting the incessant solicitations of the son of my parents' friends, a young blond boy, exhausted and exhausting, with whom I had a lot of fun. With the girl things were different, and I've never forgotten that young love. This book testifies to that, as it narrates and tries to explain that love.
France and England were also still empires with colonies. Both countries had just emerged from the war and were quite impoverished. The north of France had already been very impacted by the Great War, and the northeast of France had just been destroyed again. English cities had been heavily bombed. These are things we shouldn't forget. And there were important social struggles, anti-colonial struggles, "rebellions" beginning or already underway in Kenya against England and in Algeria against France, among other places.
In addition to narrating this month spent in England, the book covers my return to France, to too-familial places. My internal split resumed there, and I began to translate it into writing. The text also describes other periods of my life through flashbacks; for example, the birth of my masturbation habit in a small rural boarding school just after World War II, and my first conflicts with my father, whom I greatly admired.
NWThis moment in your adolescence was also a time in which you began to acknowledge your class situation.
PG Yes, and with it came the intensification of an awareness of social disparity that marks my entire work, from all points of view, on all levels. Since childhood I've always been more attracted to "the people," as they were called at the time, than to my own class. For me, the people represented freedom, metaphysically and physically, in terms of the body. My own family's cultural status prohibited such freedom and this caused another real rupture for me; it was not simply the luxury of a privileged kid. Although my father was a country doctor, my family was not rich; we lived at home as I did in boarding school, in a very rudimentary way.
My internal sexual rupture was an effect of my belief in Christ, triggered by the notion that he is both man and God. When you have faith, you experience this duality intensely. My family was very religious, if not overly pious. The Bible's Christian imagery, both in the New and Old Testaments, preceded all other imagery for me. When I was young, I believed in an entity that was at once human and divine, and I also believed in the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost combined in a single God—an invisible divinity, an entity without a body, without beginning or end. At the same time, I was very strongly possessed by the imagery of the crucifiction, which is unbelievably carnal and sexual. It's rather hard to top: the almost naked body, members spread wide, arms outstretched, and thighs squeezed tight. This was a concrete, finite, and limited imagery, whereas the other was abstract and infinite.
In addition, I was taught that before being my parents' son, and my father's son in particular, I was the son of God. That was my belief, and it was strongly anchored in me, through prayer especially. At home and in boarding school we prayed quite often: before eating, when we woke up in the morning, at night. They told us that prayer was the most beautiful thing in the world, which is not untrue. It gives dignity to humanity. As a child, I took all of this in very physically, in the flesh, especially since Catholicism is so physical. This is perhaps why it has endured for so long. The Church wasn't a constraint for me. I was very content in what I felt to be a protective, poetic, intellectual, and metaphysical atmosphere. The seminary instilled in us the difference between matter and spirit, framing them as different entities that were necessarily combined. Flesh was an element of knowledge, but its temptation weakened the strength of spirit and of mind. In that very Cartesian education, both the flesh and the spirit existed, and the idea was to find some kind of balance between them—which, of course, I did not want. This must have corresponded to the internal rupture that I'd later experience. But there was a great gentleness in all of this, and I was certainly well disposed toward it. I placed my revolt elsewhere. But as the son of God I did exactly what I did with my own flesh father: I provoked him, and went farther, into sin so to speak.
NWThere is another fundamental rupture that informs your work. It is within the realm of art, and it has to do with the problematic link between human creation and horror, following from a critique of humanism. I'm thinking of the relation between slavery and the development of modernism in Europe or the problem of the extreme rationality of the death camps of the Second World War.
PG I've always been revolted by existence, by the very fact of being human. There are reasons for this. As a child I knew what was going on in the adult world. A large portion of my family fought in the Resistance, and suffered very much for that. We were physically and biographically touched by the war's horror. Through what I saw in photographs and through the testimony of those who had survived, I was well positioned to feel the affront against humanity that the war enacted. Luckily, I never smelled the odor of death, the way the children in the camps or elsewhere had to smell it. Smells are fundamental. But as early as five-and-a-half or six years old I did see photographs from a book produced by two of my uncles who had fought in the Resistance. They were images of a degraded man, of a degraded body, degraded despite what a somewhat strained humanism would have you believe: that man, in all circumstances, always retains some form of dignity. The image of human grandeur disappears in a body that is reduced to itself. This made a deep impression on me.
NWYou can see it in the importance attributed to the body in your work. In fact, you have often been called a "writer of the body."
PG This question of the body has been brought up very often in regard to my work; it has been explained and re-explained. I have myself added fuel to the fire, since I have even used the term to describe myself. I am a bit removed from all of that now, and more and more so as I get older. The body is self-evident; you can't get away from it. You live through the body, think through it, feel through it. A body is inevitable, whatever it is. But—how can I say this?—I am not at all the auteur or poet of the body, as has so often been said. I find this too restrictive; my work extends beyond that question.
What I write, what I've been able to do and to experience, is a question of being. Much more than the body, being is what torments me, if I can use the word torment for this. I mean quite simply the fact that we exist. We make art not to prove to ourselves that we exist, but in order to place ourselves on the border of the circle of being. It is a circle into which we can fall, as if into nothingness. I'm interested in being and in the circle. The body is what allows and at the same time interferes with being. It impedes, torments, and even negates being. But of course I'm happy to speak about the body. My body wasn't any more affected than were the bodies of others, those of my generation who were deeply harmed by the war. You know, it is not insignificant to have been born in 1940. I always felt that I belonged very strongly to my generation. Children have a specific way of feeling solidarity with other children. Even as a child I felt very close to the children whom I saw in photographs of the war—persecuted, debased, and deprived of their childhood, as they said at the time.
The question of how we feel solidarity, and of the feeling of solidarity itself, becomes greater with age. What is it, morally, that requires solidarity? It doesn't seem to be as vital a need as eating, drinking, sleeping, finding shelter, or being taken care of when sick. Solidarity is not an irrefutable given. Art helps us ask ourselves these questions. I like to go beyond what I think are somewhat self-evident questions, dig beneath them and debunk them, to understand what they truly imply. Too many massacres, murders, and attacks on liberty have been committed throughout history in the name of so-called subversion for artists to claim to be blissful subversives. I am not a blissful subversive, and if I am one, it is despite myself.
NWViolence passes through and exerts itself on bodies. We can perhaps understand solidarity as a physical fact.
PG Very much so. It is important to understand why the human has a natural feeling of solidarity, if you will. Everyone says, "It's natural, solidarity is necessary, it's much better that way, etcetera ...." And yet, we should question the rational foundations of these supposed elementary and intangible principles, which are never explained to us as children. We are often told solidarity arose because of fear. Perhaps fear is the first feeling in history: the human is afraid, the animal is also afraid. In some sense, fear is what rules the world: think of financial greed, for example. But where does that fear come from? And when does it appear, historically? Was it when humanity was still quite young, endangered, and living in caves? This explanation seems a bit too material, too sociological even. Can we imagine an initial animality that separated into species through evolution? Solidarity might then be the regret, the nostalgia for that unity, coming from a shared body and a shared origin.
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Manuscript pages
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Book
Creation Books
'This, Pierre Guyotat's second novel, caused a huge scandal upon publication in France in 1970, and was later censored. Nowadays, he is regarded as one of the greatest French novelists of all time and his writing has been endorsed by Edmund White, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Extreme and obscene, Eden Eden Eden is set in a polluted zone of the Algerian desert during the civil war.'-- Creation
'A new landmark and a starting-point for new writing.'-- Roland Barthes
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Excerpts
Helmeted soldiers, legs spread, muscles drawn back, trampling over new-born babes swaddled in scarlet, violet shawls: babies falling from arms of women huddled on floors of G.M.C. tracks; driver’s free hand pushing back goat thrown forward into cab; / Ferkous pass, RIMA platoon crossing over track; soldiers jumping out of trucks; RIMA squad lying down on gravel, heads pressed against flint-pitted, thorn- studded tires, stripping off shirts in shadow of mudguards; women rocking babies against breasts; rocking movement stirring up scents sharpened with bonfire-sweat impregnating rags, hair, flesh: oil, cloves, henna, butter, indigo, black antimony — in Ferkous valley, below breakwater tombstones, drinks-stand, school, gaddous, fig trees, mechtas, stone walls oozing, spattered with brains, orchards blooming, palm trees, swollen in fire, exploding: flowers, pollen, buds, grasses, paper, rags spotted with milk, with shit, with blood, fruit peels, feathers, lifted, shaken, tossed from flame to flame in wind tearing fire from the earth ...
*
…. boy sleeping on side ; tarantula crawling from sticky pubic hair, climbing up onto whore’s swollen belly, distended abdomen dividing blood over chest ; body of whore shuddering, hands following steps of tarantula around right nipple : “…suck lower man…”; penis, tucked back into hollow of groin, hardening : tarantula brushing against tip of tongue poking between lips ; jissom slopping out of Wazzag’s arse, pushed back, driven out along anal passage by date picker’s member ; Wazzag stifling fit of laughter ; Khamssieh waking : tarantula, alarmed by twitching of muscles, crawling into nostril ; Khamssieh sniffing scent, stifling sneeze, pulling legs together, suppressing shivers of body smeared with cold sweat moistening dried blood, beads of sweat glistening in fresh blood over loins ; nostril swollen with jissom crushing spider ; Wazzag exploding into laughter ; tarantula stinging nostril : venom, flowing with blood, veiling eyes of whore, softening eyelid ; Khamssieh’s hand, weak, crushing tarantula in nostril : venom hardening forehead ; fingernails scraping cold blood around nipples ; pulling dead tarantula, pinching sticky legs, out of nostril, pushing crushed spider between buttocks ; exhausted elbows dropping onto heaps of floor-cloths : penis contracting into shrivelled scrotum ; odour of sodomy wafting through room ; rubbing of jeans, farts : regular in dawn silence …
*
... blood haunting bedroom, dry powdered blood running in butcher's inner ear throbbing with nightmares... jissom, milk, squirting... woman's hand palpating... woman rising from bed, walking, barefoot, through garden... kneeling, huddling, pressed back down into corner... worker, with foot, laying youth flat out on tile: crouching down, pressing two fists together onto torso, elbow digging into sexual cluster between thighs— separating, slow, cool, revealing grimy sweat in folds of groin; fists delving under torso, forcing spleen, kidney, intestines: contracted head of youth groaning, crystalline, with each compression; hand of blond worker digging down... head, mute, vibrating; whereupon, same hand, clenched, moving up over torso, forcing serrated muscle, other hand jerking, groping—fingers spread, half-closed, spread, joined—, towards source of cry, reaching aortic arch, blocking cry... nomad, hands pressed around middle of pole, pushing ... [his] inert body away from outcrop of rock: blood pearling over spear-head between curls; nomad pulling youth back onto rock, spearing body... nomad, kneeling... walking towards fire... squatting beside woman; her feverish fingers, pink over embers, diffusing blood into cinders; woman, wrinkles fixed on forehead, hand drawn out of embers covering half-open vulva, crammed with oily wet seed; ... darkness alternating with bursts of light...
*
... fingers stroking membrane; // suspect revived in empty guard-room, cadet kneeling, untying rag ; sentry, mouth rosy in dawn fire, walking on terrace, legs bowed, fist buried inside pants ; leaning back against palm-trunk propped up by brownstone balustrade around terrace ; stiffening legs, pulling out member ; rifle, loaders, clicking at loins, masturbating, helmet pushed back over neck, jugular vein outlined in creases of throat, tongue protruding from mouth ; two children squatting, defecating against barbed wire ; soldier levelling projector-beam towards point on horizon – dawn fire looming ; woman from tents, breasts swinging in patched silk, flowery silk sticking at pubis, haunches slumped against barbed wire, fingers scraping shit between children’s buttocks, wiping fingers in sand ; red fist on white arm, slipping between wire-mesh, touching sliver of ration-bread poking from sand, intact ...
*
p.s. Hey. ** Bitter69uk, Hi, man. Nice to see you! Wow, so he is/was a big deal. He was nice. Maybe he found it refreshing or charming that I had no idea who he was. Cool about the cemetery. Did it look the same? Hope stuff is great with you. ** James, Hi. Well, at some point, for sure. Zac and I have neither control nor a lot of knowledge about how that stuff will work. There's some kind of agreement in place for a limited theatrical release in the US followed by DVD release. The film will play festivals for a while first. I'll let people here know when I know where it's playing. I don't know if I'm 'n love with the apartment, but I'm warming up to it, and maybe getting there. No, no key. The landlord is some company in Ireland that doesn't seem to give a shit about the details. So we broke the lock, oops. Happy Wednesday! ** David Ehrenstein, They're probably somewhere being and looking very un-bon-bon-like. Billy Barty was amazing in it, yes! ** Jonathan, Hey, J-ster! I miss you, man! Ooh, interesting about the Freemason locale. Can you say what the future thing is or what it appears to hold? Hexus ... I don't know it, I don't think. I'll check it. Thanks! I still haven't heard the new O'Rourke, but I also really like the Herndon. Re: the FB thing, I don't know. It wouldn't have been Gisele posting the pic because she's not on FB. Maybe Jonathan put it up? I'll go search his feed. All's good, and I wish for allness and goodness re: you! ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, Locarno is much more interesting and risk-taking and so on. It has always been our hope vis-à-vis our film's premiere, but we'll see. As far as I know, our film has already been submitted to Locarno in its almost-finished stage. Our hope/plan is to have the film completely finished in the next couple of weeks. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Really interesting thoughts on tribute bands. Very interesting and complicated phenom, I think. I've only ever seen them by accident when they were on some bill where I was there to see someone else, but they've pretty much always made me concentrate on them and think about the layering involved, both in the whys and whats of their existence and re: what their effect, intentional and accidental, is about too. And then the mistakes in their resemblance is really kind of fascinating too. The combo of the remove and the up-close-ness of seeing them perform is quite complex. The Glam ones interested me in a more base way, I think. Their attempt to mimic the Glam look is so crude and misplaced, and the context is so unglamorous that they look scary rather than wild/futuristic, more like bad clowns or something. Hope you're doing good too! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. Melancholy for sure, I concur. Oh, wow, 'Cuddly Toys. I forgot all about that song. Cool. Thanks! ** Keaton, Hi. I've been trying to get away from the slasher ones. Were there any in the recent poems? I think I tried not to use them and ended up using one or one-and-a-half. Be careful with the shark. Or, well, don't, if you don't want to. Weird that I immediately urged caution. What does it mean? ** Misanthrope, Yeah, of course you know 'card'. Asking you is just a habit because I'm always using American terms like that here automatically and having French people's eyes go blank and having to try to explain what something like 'card' means in my sentence and how it got to be that way. I had no idea that the term had such a rich behind-the-scenes meaning(s) and history. Thanks, man. I love shit like that. Cannes is a great festival, and it's not a stupid or timid one at all, and it's not really lazier than it used to be either, unless them sticking an occasional Pixar film and a semi-bright blockbuster into their line-up counts, but it's not a festival that's about discovering the new and the unknown. It's more about fore-fronting established-ish filmmakers who it thinks deserves the kind of attention that being at Cannes provides, and it's about rewarding certain films to make a point. Like when they give the Palme d'Or to American films, i.e. by Tarantino, Van Sant, the Coens, etc., it's like they're giving the film the gift of having been taken seriously. 'Cos there's no festival in the US that confers the message that a film not otherwise thought to be high art is high art, and they know that, so it's a power play move in a sense. ** That's it? Okay. I'm focusing the blog on Guyotat's great 'Eden Eden Eden' today. Have at it. See you tomorrow.