'The year is 1950 and I was nine. Just about everyone else in the housing project where we lived in West Virginia consisted of garden variety Snopes and Joads . . . except for une certaine Jerry Miller. To adolescent me, he seemed to be more like the people from the outside world that you caught glimpses of on early television and heard on the radio. I can not recall what he did for a living after being mustered out of the service, but in World War II he'd been a staff writer (!) for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. This struck me as improbably glamorous. The die was cast. It was good to be a writer.
'Flash forward a couple of decades and in 1970 I sold my first article to a national magazine article, Rolling Stone. Even at that somewhat late date, RS was not the corporate monolith that it would eventually become, and so I was able to slip a spec article "over the transom." Of course, it helped that I was writing about some unreleased Bob Dylan recordings I came across while rummaging through the closet of a Woodstock crash pad. None of the material was known to have existed beforehand, so it was basically a case of Stop the Presses . . . Film at 11. A scoop as it were.
'However, this was not quite my first professional writing job. A few years earlier, I had been plucked from anonymity to fill a full-time position at one of the country's most prestigious medium-size newspapers, the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette. The somewhat Ruby Keeler-esque circumstances surrounding my hiring were as follows:
'In my first 1963 “The Misanthrope” column for my college newspaper, "The Yellow Jacket," I had written something that was clearly an homage to widely praised local columnist-gadfly L.T. Anderson. After all, how better to skewer the noxious jingoism of the right wing theatrical review Up With People, than in the style of Anderson. Two days after the article appeared, I received a phone call from The Man Himself—Anderson—offering me a job at the Gazette as a Civil Rights reporter!
'Showing up for work a few days later, in classic newspaper fashion I was set to work rewriting obituary notices sent in from funeral homes. Almost immediately, however, things began to go south when it became apparent that my "Up With People" column was a fluke. I really couldn't write my way out of a paper bag. The second week, Anderson called me over to his desk to get to the
bottom of things.
'"For a journalism major, you sure do make a lot of errors," he said.
'“But I'm not a journalism major."
'He seemed unfazed: "Oh well, just come to see me every day after we put the paper to bed and I'll teach you everything you need to know about writing for a newspaper in no time."
'He kept his word— "Young Reed, it's time for your lesson"—and I remained in good standing at the Gazette for the rest of the year, before moving into my Jack Kerouac period and hitting the road. And it wasn’t until the subsequent above-noted fluke of the discovery of the Dylan acetates that I began writing again. And it's been pretty much business as usual ever since. Initially I became a part of what fellow writer Richard Meltzer once deemed "the record industry food chain"; continuing to write for the "Stone," and soon branching out to other now long-forgotten rock rags of the period, "ROCK,""Fusion,""Zoo World," etc.
'In the 1960s, while nearly all my rock crit brethren had the good sense to direct their energies toward writing about such trendoid outfits as Martha Proud and the Birth of God, AxeMeat, Urban Sprawl, the Desi-Rays, and the Triftids, etc., I had the "bad fortune" to be deeply strung out on the supremely uncool Beach Boys. I was flacking for the BB's at a time when they couldn't even get arrested. Pre-Beatles, they were the hottest thing in American pop, but by the time of the so-called Summer of Love they were considered a joke. A 1969 concert at the Fillmore East had been a near disaster. They came on stage decked out in ice-cream colored suits. Fillmore habitués liked their groups grungy, raw and au courant, and the Good Humor apparition on the stage couldn't help but bring out their sadistic side. By the end of their set the Beach Boys were reduced to goosing each other and acting like panicky circus ponies. The "Boys" were so desperate for coverage of any kind, that I received their full cooperation during this period on numerous pieces I wrote about them. For “ROCK" I had the opportunity to do a phone Q & A with the then-notoriously reclusive Brian Wilson.
'Brian: Have you ever talked to Mick Jagger?
'Me: I never have. Why?
'Brian: Are you going to?
'Me: I'd sure like to. But I don't foresee it in the near future. Why?
'Brian: I think you should.
'Me: What do you mean?
'Brian: He's in this movie Performance where he's dressed like a girl, and I think he'd make a really interesting rap.
'Me: Uh . . . okay.
'Brian Wilson at his charmingly looniest.
'In the same publication, after penning a slightly uncharitable piece about bubble gum music purveyors, Buddah Records, I received a phone from its president, Neil Bogart, with what essentially amounted to threat of bodily harm. It seems that I had deemed most of their product . . . Mafia Rock. Big deal. It was the Sixties. I could write anything I wanted to . . . couldn't I? In the end, however, the rock rag printed a retraction notice.
'Eventually I began to write more— shall we say—"grown-up" material for non-rock publications such as: Variety, the L.A. Reader, the San Francisco Examiner, International Documentary, and a number of others. For a short while, I even wrote for TV sitcoms, namely the hit series One Day at a Time. Yet another fluke . . . do we detect a pattern here?'-- Bill Reed
____
Further
people vs. dr. chilled air
Bill Reed @ Twitter
'Positively Eighth Street'
'THE LEONARD REED STORY: BRAINS AS WELL AS FEET', by Bill Reed
'Early Plastic', by Bill Reed
'Hot from Harlem: Profiles in Classic African-American Entertainment', by Bill Reed
'A Fine Romance: My Lifelong Affair With Jazz Singing and Singers', by Bill Reed
'Rock on Film', by Bill Reed and David Ehrenstein
Buy 'Shared Air'
____
Extras
from drchilledair
Sampler: 'FROM CALIFORNIA WITH LOVE', produced by Bill Reed
LEONARD REED & AMATEUR NIGHT AT THE APOLLO THEATER
Excerpt: 'My Lee Wiley', narrated by Bill Reed
JOHNNY HOLIDAY 'THE COFFEE SONG', produced by Bill Reed
gladysb
___
Book
Landfill Press
'Shared Air is an overview of the many noted personages with whom the author has had direct contact over the years in all manner of circumstances . . . both colorful and everyday.
'"Dramatis Personae" include: Charles Laughton, Robert Blake, Little Jimmy Scott, Nico, Severn Darden, Tim Hardin, Dusty Springfield, Chris Connor, John F. Kennedy, Lizabeth Scott, Joe Franklin, Elizabeth Montgomery, Djuna Barnes, Myrna Loy, Billy Wilder, Shelley Winters, Chet Baker, Jo Stafford, Charlie Mingus, Carl Van Vechten, Frank Zappa, Salvador Dali, Dame Joan Collins, Barbara Stanwyck, Neal Cassady, Chuck Berry, Blossom Dearie, Miles Davis, Gore Vidal, Sally Marr, Charles Manson, Johnny Carson, Dave Frishberg, Van Dyke Parks, Annie Ross, Sarah Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Bette Midler, Walter Shenson, Tuesday Weld, Barbara Harris . . .and dozens more.
'Bill Reed is a journalist and writer whose articles on show business, the arts, and popular music have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Examiner and International Documentary. Among his books are Hot from Harlem: Profiles in Classic African-American Entertainment, Brains as Well as Feet, Early Plastic: A Memoir, and Rock on Film (with David Ehrenstein). He has also been employed as a video jack-of-all-trades for the Criterion Collection, and produced many jazz recordings for Japan. He has written for the TV series One Day at a Time.'-- Landfill Press
_____
Excerpts
ROBERT BLAKE
Lena Horne wasn't the only celeb I made haste to avoid . . . but for entirely other reasons than my above-noted flight from.
Bonnie Lee Bakley was not the first time Robert Blake ALLEGEDLY killed. For after completing production on the film originally saddled with the hopeless title Hamster of Happiness, whenever Blake went on the Johnny Carson Show while the film was in its "protracted" can (for various reasons), he joked about how awful it was. It was an act almost unheard of in the biz . . . and unforgivable. In other words, Blake killed its chances of ever being given a decent critical or box office start when and if it ever WAS released.
Some background on the film:
"Hearts," begun in '79 but not released until '81, was held up for so long not because it was a bad film per se, but due to the fact that the company that made it was being sold. This is a film that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been available on VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, or any media as yet to be determined in the known universe. So you'll just have to take my word for it that this is a little jewel of a film. Besides . . . any movie with Barbara Harris, Blake's co-star in the film, can't be all bad. Does anyone else remember her singing "Painting the Clouds With Sunshine" in "Who is Harry Kellerman and etc."? Be still my heart! (Harris, by the way, has the distinction of being in the last shot of the final Hitchcock film, Family Plot.)
I can recall being told by Tony Holland, Harris' old Second City comrade, about his being phoned by one of Second Hand Hearts' producers asking him to try and talk her out of her Texas location dressing room and onto the set. For right or wrong reasons, Tony said, Harris was terrified of Blake.
Second-Hand Hearts is a film of which I am quite fond, but apparently no one else has a kind word to say for it. Critic Leonard Maltin, for example, deems it a “Bomb” in his various movie guides. But I love this little seriocomic movie about a country singer wannabe, Dinette Dusty, her bottom feeder boyfriend, Loyal Muke (Blake) and her brood of kids making their way from Texas to California for a better life. The End. It contains Blake's immortal reading of the line, "The longer it [i.e. the sunset] takes, the beautifuler it gets."
An internet capsule biography of Barbara Harris describes her as an actress, singer, and "religionist" (?). They might have added "brief superstar," for Barbra Streisand once said, "I am not a star. Barbara Harris is a star." Could religion be the reason why the ex-Sandra Markowitz has fallen entirely beneath celebrity radar? She's not made a film or any other kind of professional appearance in years. The last Harris was heard from, she had moved to Phoenix and was learning how to scuffle.
And so . . . what I would like to propose to Blake as his first job (?) since becoming a free man again is for him to record an audio commentary for a proposed DVD release of Second-Hand Hearts. One that would also contain a second separately recorded simultaneous track by Harris. Then, one could switch back and forth Rashoman-fashion between the two versions of the events surrounding Hamster/Heart's director Hal Ashby's Waterloo as a filmmaker. Alas, I'm afraid that only in a far, far better world than ours could a lunatic project such as this one come to pass.
I once interviewed director Reza Badiyi for the now long-defunct L.A. Herald Examiner. He is a friend of Blake's and when I happened to mention to him, one time, how much I liked Second-Hand Hearts, he asked me:
"Oh, can I give Bobby [Blake] your phone number? I think he'd be interested in talking with you." Long before his arrest on a murder charge, the former Little Beaver of the Red Ryder movie series already had quite a rep as volatile kinda guy. "Uh. . .no, I don't think so," I replied. For I had no interest in trying to disabuse Blake of his loathing for the orphan film.
As chance or fate would have it, or as Erik Rhodes observed in The Gay Divorcee—“Chance IS the fool's name or fate”—I became more than a tad freaked out when the very next evening at a screening I found myself standing close enough to share the same air with none other than—cue the Twilight Zone theme music, please—Robert Blake. Needless to say, I moved as fast as my little paranoid feet could carry me in the opposite direction. The last time my path somewhat crossed Blake's was around 2005-or-so. A jazz singer friend was appearing the music spot upstairs at Vitello's, and I was excited to be checking out the famous Robert Blake hot spot where his wife ate her last meal before being murdered a block or so away from the place. I had only been there for a short while when I began to notice revolving groups of customers seated at a table whilst a waiter took snapshots of them with their camera. After witnessing a similar occurrence take place several times, I asked the maitre d' what was transpiring and he explained that tourists came into the restaurant all the time and requested that snapshots of them be taken at the infamous table where Mr. and Mrs. Robert Blake had dined that fateful night. Right up there with the footprints at Grauman's Chinese Theatre!
NICO
The first time I met this Inscrutable Marlene Dietrich from Mars was in the late sixties in the approximately 25 x 40 caretaker quarters of actor John Phillip Law on Hollywood's Miller Drive just above the Sunset Strip. The alleged superintendent of the premises, my friend Roberto Pompa, wasn't so much as taking care of the place as he was running a crash pad. His employment, as such, was one of the great sinecures of all time. For although he received a stipend and a warm place to crash, I never saw him so much as rake a single leaf in the nearly half-a-year that I bore witness to the “scene” that was going down there.
These lower depths also functioned as a locker room and shower for the Tiffany Theater just down the hill on the Strip. Thus you had everyone who was in the cast of The Committee, the improv presentation playing there at the time— such as Howard Hessman, Peter Bonerz, Rob Reiner, et al— running in and out with soap and towels, and a change of clothing. At all hours of the day and night, one might also come across the likes of Warhol's Patrick Close (star of Andy's Imitation of Christ), Tim Hardin, the hippie Hog Farm's hovering guru Wavy Gravy, and (Otto and Gypsy Rose Lee's) Eric Preminger. As for the owner of the property, the closest I ever came to actor Law—during the time I crashed there in '68—was an occasional glimpse of him I gained whilst looking out through a basement window and seeing him strolling about the back patio of the premises in his skivvies with nightie-clad girlfriend Barbara Parkins. I doubt that Law had any strong sense of the utter madness taking place down below in this crash pad crossed with shooting gallery cum locker room. And . . . as pickup stop for movie extras for the, Skidoo, inasmuch as John Law's brother, Tom, had been hired as the hippie wrangler for that film.
One might be forgiven for not recalling this 1968 Otto Preminger film, an alleged comedy about a retired gangster forced into dealing with problems cropping up from his mobster past. That is until his daughter's hippie friends come to his rescue. Today a guilty pleasure for even the most hard-core of Preminger fans, Skidoo numbers among its many delights: Jackie Gleason on LSD, and Carol Channing singing a Harry Nilsson song about free love.
Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch weren't ready for Skidoo back then. And they probably still aren't. That apathy has since propelled the film up towards the top of the list of box-office bombs of all time. Another of the film's featured players was super-model from out space Donyale Luna. As a result, she could also be found hanging at chez Popma-Law. And inasmuch as Tim Hardin and Luna were two close friends of Nico, the latter could often be found in that subterranean domicile. “Nico, who?,” you might might ask these several decades later. If so, you, here's a brief precis on the part of my good friend and constant traveling companion of the last 45 years, David Ehrenstein:
“She is known for both her vocal collaboration on The Velvet Underground's debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, and her work as a solo artist from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. She also had roles in several films, including a cameo in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), as herself. She was related to Hermann Päffgen, who founded the Päffgen brewery in 1883 in Cologne.
Standing 5' 10", with chiseled features and porcelain skin, Nico rose to prominence as a fashion model as a teenager. After leaving school at the age of thirteen she began selling lingerie and was soon spotted by fashion insiders. A year later, her mother found her work as a model in Berlin. She soon became one of the top fashion models of the period. She died in July 1988, as a result of
injuries sustained in a bicycling accident.”
Ehrenstein and I saw Nico perform “live” at the Sunset Strip's Whiskey a Go Go a decade-or-so before she died. To her credit, when our sängerin intoned Hitler's more-or-less theme song “Deutschland Uber Alles,” and some punks in the audience gave her the Nazi salute Nico halted until their arms were once again at their sides.
Her “special guest” the night we attended was down-on-his-luck singer Tim Hardin, now fallen from his, at one time, rather high perch as a recording star. Looking at the Whiskey like a Teddy Bear with half the stuffing pulled out, her old junkie pal seemed to be a total stranger to the punk-dominated audience. That night, Hardin sang like an angel, but only a few weeks later he was found dead of an overdose. Most likely a “hot shot” administered by a vengeful dealer. But the cops didn’t care. One junkie less. A short while after that Nico, too, had gone to the place that writer Eve Babitz describes “The last word in people having fun without you.”
At the time Nico's friend, model Donyale Luna, was filming Skidoo in '68, the latter was being put up at the rather infamous (?), (notorious?), (dare I say, “legendary”) Chateau Marmont which was just down the strip a piece from the JPLaw encampment. Thus, Nico could also be found hanging with her old buddy Donyale at the Chateau whenever the latter was not needed on Preminger's set.
Otherwise she tended to gravitate toward the Pompa encampment. And when she couldn't be located there, you might find her at the digs of . . .
DJUNA BARNES
I worked at the world's great book retailer, NYC's Eighth Street Bookshop, for ten years (circa 1962-'72). We didn't sell scented candles, T-shirts, gewgaws, coffee mugs, tote bags, etc. Nope. Just books. The best ten years of my life. Miss it every day.
Almost every time you turned around at Eighth Street found you rubbing the literary stardust out of your eyes. I even enjoyed shoveling the snow off the sidewalk of a Winter morning before we opened!
For example . . . novelist Djuna Barnes. Her 1934 novel Nightwood, had as much if not more influence on a newer generation of women writers in the 1960s than when it was first published. She lived only a short distance from the bookshop, and the mythology of this modernist-feminist hovered over Eighth Street as much as it did over the the rest of Greenwich Village. Barnes, however, was curiously absent from the streets of the Village. Since the early 1940s she had lived in a one-room apartment at 5 Patchin Place, a quaint, gated mews off of Sixth Ave. Next door at number 4, until his death in 1962, resided e.e. Cummings. But as cruel legend would have it, the most one ever saw of Barnes was her occasional hand reaching out the door of the Patchin Place gate to retrieve deliveries of gin left by the local liquor store. Then one winter day in 1974 Tom Farley, a co-worker at Eighth Street, spotted a very aged crone, stooped and barely able to make it to the top of the second landing steps. Tom recognized her at once as the elusive Djuna, and he moved from behind the counter to help her up the last couple of steps. As he reached out to assist her, I heard: "Welcome to the Eighth Street Bookshop, Miss Barnes." I flinched: the unexpected success of Nightwood when it came out so freaked Barnes she was barely able to write anything after that. I feared this Garbo of avant lettres might turn around and hobble right back down the stairs. Instead she replied: "However on earth did you recognize me?""Why from your photo on the back of Nightwood, of course," Farley explained, referring to the famed Stieglitz portrait that adorned the back of the paperback edition. "Do you realize that picture was taken long before you were even born?," Barnes said in amazement. It had been shot nearly forty years before. "Well you haven't changed a bit," Farley replied. Barnes blushed like a young school girl.
MILES DAVIS
Shortly after jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and I met in 1965, I attended the opening night of an engagement of his at the popular and long-running Village Vanguard. In the middle of his first set, who should walk in—looking very unlike his late period Electoid From Planet Ten self of later years—but a natty, dapper and Saville Rowed Miles Davis. All eyes left Cecil on stage and turned to focus on Miles and his still somewhat socially taboo blonde date as the two made their way to one of the club's postage stamp-size tables. They sat down in front of the bandstand, downed one drink apiece, stayed for all of five minutes, then when Miles gave the signal to his date, they split.
I was there again the next night when, at nearly the same time, Davis came in once more, this time with a different, but equally stunning Aryan number, and proceeded to do exactly the same thing: five minutes, and gone! Cecil later told me that this jazz equivalent of a head-on clash between Godzilla and Rodan took place for several more nights running!
Davis' obvious rancor probably stemmed from feeling that Cecil's improperly uncloseted homosexuality, unlike his own more discreet gay ways (including a rather torrid affair with a North American reggae singer), reflected badly on the macho image of jazz. Or maybe he just hated Cecil's off the charts AND walls musicality. It's not just the bitchy world of opera that has its divas.
***
On the other hand, both times I experienced interpersonal exchanges with Davis, he was friendly enough . . . albeit, admittedly, a skosh dour. The first time was with my old friend Jean Bach (Great Day in Harlem) one Sunday afternoon when Miles was splitting a bill there with Blossom Dearie (ah, the good old days). After his set, Davis came over to the table and Jean introduced us. All was fine until a fan approached and said:
"I've got a great idea, Miles. Why don't you do a concert at Carnegie Hall, record it, and release it titled it something like 'Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall.'
"Okay, man," Miles said, waved the man away, then just shut down and glared off into space.
The problem was that Davis had done just that very thing, with the results being released only the week prior. No wonder he was such a world-renowned bringdown.
The next time I encountered Davis was a few years later. I looked up to see him seated next to me in customs. We had both just winged in from Paris. He had flown coach; I, first class. Um, come to think of it, 'twas the other way 'round. Of all things, aloft I happened to be reading a book about Buddy Bolden, historically recognized as THE first jazz musician and a trumpet player to boot. Who could fail but mediate upon the irony: Talk about synchronicity in everyday American life! I handed Miles the book, and said, "Here, this really belongs to you.""Thanks, man," he replied, without so much as even looking at the title. I stood up and walked off.
There was some kind of hangup in customs. An hour later we were still there. From the steerage of coach immigration, where I now found myself, I gazed down and espied Miles devouring the contents of the book I had just given him.
*
p.s. Hey. Today the blog takes great pleasure in contributing to the ushering into the world of the new book by author, journalist, music producer, and occasional contributor to and d.l. of this blog, Bill Reed. Thus, a day of enlightenment, fun, and scoop is yours in the form of a foregone conclusion that, ideally, will ultimately land your finger on the link leading to the purchase point of the book that was your pleasure's source. In any case, enjoy. In every case, thank you very kindly for the honor, Mr. Reed. ** Liquoredgoat, Hi. Ah, The Melvins live is one of life's greatest all time things. They are gods, pure and simple. Le Butcherettes, okay, cool. I definitely will do. Thanks! ** H, Hi. Thank you about the maze. Whatever the specifics of the results, they will wow. Guaranteed. ** David Ehrenstein, That is a gif, actually. Actually, it has become hundreds of gifs. I could do a whole post just stacking them up and letting their minute differences trip everyone out. Yeah, I agree, about 'Full Metal Jacket'. It seemed quite confused, and I can't think of another instance in his oeuvre where that's the case. ** Damien Ark, Hi, D. I'll try to find that Oxbow video, clearly. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve. Wow, it's total windfall of things by you today. I'll line them up and then get knocked down by them. Everyone, you have beaucoup opportunities to engage in the fine mindedness and related prose by Mr. Steve 'Steevee' Erickson today. To wit, to begin, here @ The LA Weekly is his review of Ryan Jaffe's new comedy 'This is Happening.' Then here @ Slant Magazine is his interview with the great filmmaking auteur Guy Maddin and Evan Johnston, co-director of Maddin's (and his) new film 'The Forbidden Room'. And, finally, here @ Fandor is his review of Jafar Panahi’s much talked about film 'Taxi'. Go nuts! Well, I absolutely for sure need and want to see '88:88'. That sounds truly extraordinary! Thank you, Steve! ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Yeah, I guess the filter in/of 'FMJ' seemed very confused/non-committal to me, and I never was convinced that the confusion/vagueness was purposeful or had any kind of point or determined non-point. But of course I want to try it yet again. I didn't feel rage from it at all, at least so far. Thank you very much about the maze. I don't know if the filmmaking affected the gif work. I would say not since Zac directed the film, and I just conferred with him and had editorial input when he needed it. It doesn't feel like the two are connected, other than through Zac's general and great influence on me. ** Sypha. Hi. I have no idea where that gif came from. When I found it, I had to watch it for a while to believe what was happening in it was actually happening in it. Nuts. Oh, PZB retired entirely? Gosh, I would love to talk with him and see what's what in his life and thinking about work these days. ** Krayton, You're Krayton again! Thank you very, very much about the maze, man. Life in Paris is busy as fuck at the moment, but everything is ultra-good. And you and in your midwestern life? Did that link just lead to a new story by you? Do my eyes deceive me? I think not, and joy has thusly ensued in my brain pan as well as elsewhere. As soon as my brain is not maxed out, I will read that with big, clanging Krampus bells on! Thank you! Oh, and another thing, pictorial. Yes! Everyone, Krayton had added two new things to his always inspiring and crucial blog. Here's a new piece of writing by him, yum. And here is a lovely little string of imagery entitled 'Let Me See That Thong'. Go to those places post-haste. ** Schizoscription, Thanks, sir. Oh, wow, yeah, it would really interesting to talk at Brown, and, like, a big honor. I've never been to Brown, but it's super-mega in my mind and in my related experiences. So, yeah. Thanks! I didn't read the New Yorker thing on Kenneth Goldsmith. I sure read a lot of the usual but refreshed outrage and extremely opinionated blah-blah about him occasioned by that article in my Facebook feed. I've found his work to be really interesting. I never actually saw/read that Michel Brown piece that made a swatch of the poetry scene designate him as Satan. So, yeah, I'm interested in his work and in his thing, and I've found a lot of the p.c. policing of his work to be kind of exploitive and really generalized and self-serving. I love Guyotat a lot. Especially the really 'difficult' works, and especially 'Eden Eden Eden'. Favorite film directors? Robert Bresson is my personal god. Otherwise, I really love Malick, James Benning, Grandieux, Rohmer, Carax, Noe (except for 'Love', which I really didn't like), ... oh gosh, lots. I haven't seen anything, film-wise, in the last months or so that knocked me out. Or I can't remember anything that I thought was great. Who are your favorite filmmakers? 'Possession' is wonderful, yeah. I like Roy Andersson's films a lot too. Oh, really, I don't find responding to comments here tedious or anything at all. I don't know why I would have said that. Must have been in a bad mood. No, I like doing the p.s. It's taxing, for sure, but it's a great gift. Don't hesitate to comment, in other words. No, I haven't read the Acker correspondence book. I feel weird about it. I knew Kathy, and I'm not at all sure she would have been okay with that being published. I don't know for sure, of course, but that feeling has kept me away from reading it so far. It's a real pleasure to get to talk to you! This is great! Keep it going, man, if you like! ** Weaklings Project, Maestro! The man with the plan! Hi, Chris! Holy moly, I'm so excited! By everything you said! This is, like, a total long shot, so take it as such, but the only show I could possibly get to is the Bradford one, and I'm going to see if there's any way I can, 'cos I want to badly, but I don't know that my longing is reality-based. I'm going to scheme/try. Thank you about my labyrinth. Oh, man, that's amazing and horrifying about what you saw. Holy god. And you made it pop. And, being the person I am, I am grateful to have been popped by you. Yikes. I'll send you the Duvert pdfs as soon as I get out of here. Oh, do, please, keep me posted! (Google just corrected posted into poached. Keep me poached too.) Big love, me. ** Jack Judah Shamama, Jack! Holy jesus, this is awfully, awfully great to get to see you! How are you? What's up? What's on the up and up, man? Oh, shit, you may know this already, but ... you remember that porn film I wrote seven years ago or whatever? Well, after having been pretty extensively revised and revamped and denuded of most of the porn, it is now a film called LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW created by my comrade/friend Zac Farley and myself that just had its world premiere here in Paris and is now heading around to festivals internationally. So, amazingly enough, that project actually came to fruition, albeit very different than originally planned. How about that? I hope your nostalgia keeps you around here a while, if your current life and interests suit. Love, me. ** Jamie McMorrow, Hi, Jamie! My weekend wasn't too shabby. Oh, Nuit Blanche kind of sucked. I mean, it's fun because you walk all over Paris at night with a bunch of other people looking for arty fun, but the stuff of Nuit Blanche itself, the art, the projections, the 'wildness', was kind of a let down. Oh well. Thanks about the maze. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I'm always really interested to work anime gifs into the more violent, disturbing gif works. They do this really interesting thing to them, to the tone, to the overall vibe, I guess. And, yes, I think about color re: the gif works a lot. Color, rhythm, the layout-design of the gifs, the direction of the motion in them, etc., are the big things I try to work with. I read some excerpts from Morrissey's novel, and, to be totally honest, I thought the writing was some of the worst I have read in a long time, and I just don't think I could take reading a book that's written that horribly and badly. But, if you get it, and if I'm totally off-base, you should tell me because, obviously, in theory, I would love to read what Morrissey would do with a novel. But, whoa, the bits I read made 'Fifty Shades of Gray' seem like Beckett or something. How was your weekend? What did Monday do for you? Best of the best, Dennis. ** N, Hi, N! Glad to see you here, to put it mildly! Ha ha, well, I don't even know who Nicholas Hoult is, so my genius must have laid in my ignorance. I'm glad your life is describable via the term greatness. How apt is that? Love, me. ** Styrofoamcastle, Thanks a billion, bud! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. No, actually, it's kind of interesting to have my text novel burning little holes in my preoccupied mind of late. For some reason. The TV show pilot writing is going well. It's a huge amount of work, actually, but I think Zac and I are building something really good. Gisele is enthusiastic about what she's seen of it so far. Yeah, the TV show will star one of the characters/ performers (and, most importantly, her amazing puppet) from 'The Ventriloquist Convention'. So, yeah, it's like a spin-off from 'TVC' in a way. Thank you very much about the maze, man. Def, let me know when that thing you wrote about the blog goes up. Cool, gee, thank you so much! ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks about the maze, B. Very kind. Excellent about the DVD burning and, of course, about the coagulating of your writing project! ** Chilly Jay Chill, Thanks, Jeff. It was very interesting to figure out how to make a Halloween maze out of gifs. It might have opened up new possibilities for the gif work, we'll see. Oh, wow, interesting about the late stage state of the new theater piece. Huh. I hope it's a subversively great sign of something needing up-to-minute focusing. That can be really good. Fingers crossed. Excellent about the very good reading and the mostly students' enlightened tastes. Gee, Ronald Johnson, the well-dressed poet. I honestly haven't thought about him in ages. How curious. Yeah, I was kind of into his work a long time ago. Great idea to go back to it. I'll try to get the reissue. Yeah, maybe a blog post on him. Good idea. Thanks, Jeff! Nah, too early and mushy to talk about the text novel issue, but thank you. Once it's back in my face, it'll be easier. ** Misanthrope, Disturbance is one of my middle names, they say. I think I saw that there's a message from you on FB, and maybe it will lead to your eclair shop, and maybe I will, upon seeing that, drop everything and go buy an eclair, which would be bad for my working process today, but hey. ** Right. Give your totalities of a local nature over to Bill Reed's new book, thank you. See you tomorrow.