'Macaulay Culkin has opened the doors of his trippy New York apartment-turned-art studio. The 32-year-old former child star, who looks considerably healthier than he did this time last year, is posed inside his $2 million SoHo pad. But while most would do a little tidying up before letting cameras into their home, Mr Culkin seemed happy with the litter-strewn look, leaving cigarette piles.. alcohol bottles and half-emptied cans of Red Bull kicking around. e also decided to wear a bizarre outfit for the occasion topping off his 'artist at work' guise with a shoulder-length peroxide blonde wig and Jackie O sunglasses.
'Mr Culkin explained that he snapped up the roomy 5,100-square-foot condo, described as a 'playground workspace', because it reminded him of the 1988 film Big. "After seeing Big, I wanted a loft space with an elevator that opened directly into my apartment, just like Tom Hanks did," he said. A Nineties theme runs throughout the place with Nickelodeon game-show decor and a wacky Nintendo-themed room. Mr Culkin - who is worth a reported $15 million - isn't the only one to live at the flat and it is also home to his friends Adam Green and Toby Goodshank. Mr Green and Mr Goodshank are both former members of the indie rock band Moldy Peaches. The trio got together last February to form the art collective Three Men and a Baby (3MB).
'Mr Culkin explained at the time: "We cleared out everything, laid down plastic and went a little nuts at the art supply store." Their debut show titled Leisure Inferno included brightly colored paintings punctuated with Nineties cultural references. The cast of Seinfeld standing nude on the Wheel of Fortune; Korn’s lead singer, Jonathan Davis, playing to a surreal crowd that includes E.T. and Wally from the Where’s Waldo series; and Kurt Cobain rendered as a character from the 1995 film Hackers.
'Describing 3MB's inspiration Mr Culkin said: "We took a lot of things from our own youths, from 5 to 25 years old. It’s almost self-referential in that we’re referencing ourselves when we’re referencing Hackers. It’s essentially a box within a box." While their home-turned-studio is stuffed with bright decorations and pots of paint, the place feels conspicuously devoid of actual art. But apparently that's because most of the group’s shared creations are currently on display at Le Poisson Rouge, a bar and gallery space in Greenwich Village.
'Mr Culkin's last acting job was on the TV series Kings back in 2009 and his last film was the dark comedy Sex and Breakfast back in 2007. At the height of his fame the Home Alone star was regarded as the most successful child actor since Shirley Temple and once quipped: "I’d made enough money by the time I was 12 to never have to work again." Last February it was speculated that Mr Culkin had developed a drug habit when he stepped out sipping Red Bull looking emaciated.
'The National Enquirer reported that he was "close to death," because of an addiction to prescription medication and heroin - claims his publicist told MailOnline were "fictitious" and "categorically without merit." Now that Mr Green and Mr Goodshank have left New York on music tours, Mr Culkin is now working on his next book, a collection of non-fiction stories about his friends which will be a follow-up to his 2006 novel Junior. "I’ve been about 80 percent done with the first draft for far too long. But now I’m going to make sure it takes up some of my energy," he said.' -- collaged
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Stills
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Further
Macaulay Culkin @ IMDb
Fuck Yeah, Macaulay Culkin
Macaulay Culkin Fansite
'A Gallery Of Macaulay Culkin's Art'
'Troubled child star Macaulay Culkin's solitary lunch for one at Taco Bell'
'Step Into Macaulay Culkin's Terrifyingly '90s Hipster Apartment'
'Macaulay Culkin: Little Boy Lost'
'Don’t Macaulay Culkin Your Parents'
Macaulay Culkin: 'I'm Michael Jackson's Doo Doo Head'
Macaulay Culkin’s iPod presents A Saved by the Bell Valentine’s Dance
Photos from Macaulay Culkin’s iPod: Christmas Beach Edition
Macaulay Culkin Soundboard
Video: 'E TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY Macaulay Culkin'
Buy Macaulay Culkin's 'Junior'
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Exploitations
Macaulay Culkin Addicted To Heroin
Macaulay Culkin Attempted Suicide?
Macaulay Culkin Dead or Alive?
Macaulay Culkin Near Death Worries Now Coming From His Parents
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Junior
THE INTRODUCTION.
NowHere Near Nowhere.
I want to make one thing clear before we begin: I am not a writer. I couldn't possibly be a writer. I have written and rewritten the words "Introduction" or "The Introduction" so many times in the past couple of years that I'm convinced I was not born to do this. Writing could not be my calling after the mess I've made of all this. This has taken way too long. The whole process of writing this book was so agonizing and ate away at so much of my time that there's no way I can't finish now. But at this rate I never will. It took me ten minutes to write this very sentence. I'm no writer. This is not my calling.
Why is it so difficult now? This used to be a comforting thing. Writing this book was fun. It made me feel better. I'm not comfortable right now. I've never felt comfortable explaining the way that I am. This (the newest in a long line of introductions) is already a failure and I've barely begun. Here I am, only on the second paragraph, and I already feel like I'm blowing it.
It's just that in the past year I have gotten way too many people involved in this project -- agents, publishers and so forth that I feel I've been disappointing with my lack of results. I'm just ready to let this go. I'm just ready to give up and say this is it and nothing more. You can have it because I have nothing left.
Not in any kind of painful way, but it's hard for me to talk about this project. It's just that I don't know what it is anymore. I could just be imagining this, but people see this book in different ways. I could show this book to ten different people and have them form very different opinions of what it is and what it means to them. Sometimes I feel like I have a dozen different people inside of me. I've always been that way and I've always written stuff down. But this is different, this is the introduction of my book. I can't just wing it.
My real problem is that after a while I decided to save this introduction for last. I figured that one of the reasons this intro was so hard to write was because I needed the book and all its parts to be in place before trying to sum it all up. And to be quite honest with you, most of the material in this book is foreign to me now.
If I wanted to be all David Copperfield about it, I could say I began this project more than two decades ago on a hot summer day in a New York City hospital, but the truth is I only became of aware of it actually becoming a book in early January of 2001. It is now crawling to the end of 2005 with the completion of this endeavor nowhere in sight. So much of it was written so long ago that I may have lost sight of what it meant, not only to the reader, but to me as well. Perhaps that is why I have found it so difficult to introduce this part of myself to the rest of the world, because I don't know what it means to me anymore.
So much has changed since I first sat down and began to write this book. I've changed. I got arrested recently and to be quite honest with you it wasn't as much fun as I thought it would be. I got a new dog and I named her Audrey. I found a girl (a real girl) that I'm in love with, and if you can believe it, she loves me back.
I'm looking at her right now, in fact. She bought me a new computer and on the desktop there's this picture of her on the beach. She and I and a bunch of our friends went to Hawaii recently. I had never been there before and I enjoyed myself very much. We had a house right on the beach. A couple of days into it, while sitting in the shade nursing my new sunburn, she decided to try surfing for the first time. And needless to say it was quite a funny sight. If you've never seen someone take their first surfing lesson before, then drop this book and everything else you're doing immediately and arrange it. It's well worth it. On one of her many tumbles into the ocean a friend of ours must have snapped a picture of her. Her butt is on the board as she's washing ashore and she has this smile on her face. It looks like you've just surprised a five-year-old with a truck full of candy. I'm talking ear to ear. Every time I turn on my computer and I see this picture it makes me happy. I know how lucky I am to have someone that makes me feel that way, believe me. I'm lucky to have her.
My point is I didn't have her or that picture when I started making this book. (I may have had other pictures, but that's a different book altogether.) I didn't have a lot of things I do today. I was just some twenty-year-old punk kid who thought he could just whip out some book when I started writing this. Now I'm a twenty-four-year-old accused felon with a dog that shits all over my house and a girlfriend that can't surf. I can't account for that person or what he wrote four years ago. I can't remember his intentions.
So I've decided (just now in fact) that I'm going to disassociate myself from this book completely. I think it's the right thing to do. Too many of the people around me are scared of it, and rightfully so. I've put my words in a position to be easily misinterpreted and used against me. So from now on this is not my book. Understood?
Maybe some visual aids will help us both. This is me. And this is my book. Get it?
Me.
My book. v There, I think that helped us both better understand that this is my book and not me. This isn't even a proper representation of the way I feel at this very moment. This is just a collection of words put together in a way of my choosing to tell some kind of story. So from now on nothing you read (including this introduction) is my fault, it's the book's fault.
See how I got myself off the hook? A real writer wouldn't have done that. I am not a writer. I am a fraud, and you can quote me on that. I can read the headlines now. "Young man uses connections to get book published." The reviews nearly write themselves. In fact, I wouldn't be very surprised if these last couple of sentences are the most quoted of any other. I'm a sham, a fraud, and a failure all at the same time. And this introduction proves it.
One of the things I hate most about this book is that it is all about me. Much like anyone with too much time on his or her hands, I feel as though I am the most important person on earth and everything I do is relevant. I say the most charming and inspired things when no one is around. I think I might have something to say and that everyone in the entire world wants to know about it. Almost everything people do is artistic. That doesn't make it art. I may be being too hard on myself but that is the reality of my world and I'm letting you know how aware of it I really am. I'm not trying to pass this book off as something it is not. This is just a bunch of stuff I put together and someone said
"Hey, you should write a book," so I did. It might not be your cup of tea. You might only get a couple pages into it and throw it in the trash. You might not even give yourself a chance to read this very sentence. But who knows, you could be one of the people out there who might actually like it. You may be able to say all the things about it I can't say for myself. But then again, I'm not a writer.
So here it comes, the book. You can say anything you want about it now. It's not mine anymore.
the end . . .
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16 of Macaulay Culkin's appearances
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John Hughes Uncle Buck(1989)
'In this cheerful, lightweight comedy, excruciatingly clumsy, disorganized, and messy Uncle Buck Russell (John Candy) becomes the screens most unlikely babysitter since Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty. While their parents are away, eight-year old Miles (Macaulay Culkin), six-year old Maizy (Gaby Hoffman) and their teen-aged sister, Tia (Jean Kelly) are left in the care of Buck. Surprisingly, the very inept Uncle Buck entertains the younger children who come to love him and earns the respect of Tia when he rescues her from her worthless boyfriend. However, in doing so, Buck nearly loses his long-time girlfriend Chanice (Amy Madigan). John Candy is delightful in the leading role giving a touching and notable comic performance.'-- Allrovi
Excerpt
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John Hughes Home Alone(1990)
'Home Alone was set—and mostly shot—in the greater Chicago area. Other shots, such as those of Paris, are either stock footage or film trickery. The Paris-Orly Airport scenes were filmed in one part of O'Hare International Airport. The scene where Kevin wades through a flooded basement when trying to outsmart the burglars was shot in the swimming pool of New Trier High School. A mock-up of the McDonnell Douglas DC10 business class was also put together in the school, on the basketball courts. Some scenes were shot in a three-story single-family house located at 671 Lincoln Avenue in the village of Winnetka. The kitchen in the film was shot in the house, along with the main staircase, basement and most of the first floor landing. The house's dining room, and all the downstairs rooms (excluding the kitchen) were built on a sound stage. The house was built in 1921 and features five bedrooms, a fully converted attic, a detached double garage and a greenhouse. "Kevin's tree house" in the backyard was built specifically for the film and demolished after principal photography ended.'-- collaged
The original trailer
The screams
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Howard Zieff My Girl(1991)
'To cut to the inevitable: Yes, Macaulay Culkin, the towheaded young megastar of Home Alone, kicks the bucket in My Girl — and no, the big event won't be nearly as devastating to little ones (at least not to those over the age of 8) as, say, Bambi's mother getting gunned down by hunters. This will come as a relief to many parents, but it's also a testament to the emotional level at which My Girloperates. The movie unfolds in TV Land, that clean, well-lighted place where life comes in episodes and there isn't a tragedy that can't be resolved in 17 minutes. If only the movie didn't pile on conflicts like a Freudian layer cake. By the time Culkin's character dies, it happens so casually that it's almost as if he'd moved away.'-- Entertainment Weekly
Excerpt
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John Landis Michael Jackson's Black or White(1991)
'Michael and I had an understanding about my father. He knew what that was all about. He'd lived it. It's not like I can just bump into people on the street and say, Oh! You too! It doesn't happen that often. Michael's still a kid. I'm still a kid. We're both going to be about 8 years old forever in some place because we never had a chance to be 8 when we actually were. That's kind of the beautiful and the cursed part of our lives.'-- Macaulay Culkin
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Joseph Ruben The Good Son (1993)
'Who in the world would want to see this movie? Watching The Good Son, I asked myself that question, hoping that perhaps the next scene would contain the answer, although it never did. The movie is a creepy, unpleasant experience, made all the worse because it stars children too young to understand the horrible things we see them doing. Macaulay Culkin's character is a very evil little boy; the movie could have been called Henry, Portrait of a Future Serial Killer. But what rings false is that the Culkin character isn't really a little boy at all. His speech is much too sophisticated and ironic for that, and so is his reasoning and his cleverness. The character would be more frightening, perhaps, if he did seem young and naive. This way, he seems more like a distasteful device by the filmmakers, who apparently think there is a market for glib one-liners by child sadists.'-- Roger Ebert
Trailer
The Making of The Good Son
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Howard Deutch Getting Even with Dad(1994)
'In Getting Even With Dad, a straight-arrow 11-year-old (Macaulay Culkin) whose mother has died gets dropped off in San Francisco with his father, an ex-con (Ted Danson) who has ignored him. The boy tries to foil his dad's final heist and fix him up with a female police investigator. Anyone who was hoping that by now Macaulay Culkin would have outgrown the Home Alone character can forget it. He may be 13, but he's still cute. He still outsmarts every bad guy, parent and cop he runs into. And the kids still think it's pretty funny. Macaulay Culkin's character was supposed to have a short haircut in this movie, but Culkin, who had let his hair grow at the time, liked his looks and did not want to cut it. His father, Kit Culkin, demanded on behalf of his son that he be allowed to keep his hair the way it was, pointing out that his character was more a rough around the edges, working class boy and not a clean-cut, prep school one. He got to keep his long hair.'-- LA Times
Excerpt
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Donald Petrie Richie Rich(1994)
'Richie Rich was Macaulay Culkin's final film as a child actor. The movie received negative reviews from critics and maintains a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 20 reviews. However, Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars saying he was surprised how much he enjoyed it and though it wasn't the greatest movie, he liked that it had style and didn't go for cheap payoffs. Richie Rich earned a Razzie Award nomination for Macaulay Culkin as Worst Actor for his performance in the movie (also for Getting Even with Dad and The Pagemaster) but lost the award to Kevin Costner for Wyatt Earp. The film also fell short of recouping its budget at the box office, with a $38 million gross in North America in a $40 million budget. It was however a home video success, with $125 million in VHS rentals.'-- Wiki
Trailer
Richie Rich in 5 Seconds (Extended)
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Harmony Korine Sonic Youth's Sunday(1998)
'"Sunday" was the loudest, most conventional rock track on Sonic Youth’s 1998 effort A Thousand Leaves, but it was the second version of the tune to be released. The first landed on the soundtrack of Richard Linklater’s 1996 film subUrbia, which itself was an adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s play. It starred Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey and Nick Zahn, but by the time 1998 rolled around, it was director Harmony Korine and Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin who were repping doomed hipsters. It still skews strange, ten years later, watching Culkin and Thurston Moore bang their heads in slow-motion. Especially since there is nothing slow about the track: It rocks holy hell. It’s an odd juxtaposition, but Harmony Korine is all about that.'-- Wired
The Making of Harmony Korine's 'Sunday'
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Randy Barbato Party Monster(2003)
'It's weird when people say [about Party Monster], "Oh you did this to get away from the work you did before." Well, that implies I'm trying to break out of some kind of box that I've been put into. The reason I took so much time off is I felt the industry defined me, and I wanted to define myself. So I had to take back my own life, and I had to go away for eight years. I was losing touch with my family and I hadn't done a full year of schoolwork in my entire life, so I had to take control of myself again. Before, I was doing things that I didn't really want to, and I lost the joy, because it became like a machine. I was being forced to do something I didn't want to do. But when I look back on it, I did truly enjoy doing it. It was just a matter of finding the joy again, and I think I have.' -- Macaulay Culkin
Trailer
Excerpt
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Brian Dannelly Saved!(2004)
'I think that at the heart of this movie is a really good Christian message. It’s a really faith-based movie with a good Christian message, a good message over all. The basis of any religion, let alone anything Christ-related, is be a good person, be good to the people around you and accept them for who they are. And that’s it, whether you’re a Buddhist or anything like that, that’s the message. I think that’s the underlying message of this movie, which is be good, accept people for their faiths or what they believe in or don’t believe in, and you can make a family whatever you want to make it as long as you accept people for what they are, no matter what their faith is. I think overall it’s a good Christian message. I hope Christians get it, I hope they really dig it.'-- Macaulay Culkin
Trailer
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Macauley Culkin reads from his novel Junior at B&N (2006)
'Novels written by celebrities tend to be grating, solipsistic affairs. Given a choice between Ethan Hawke’s literary fiction and the veiled memoirs of glittering train wrecks like Nicole Richie, most sane people would choose television. When I heard that Culkin was now a novelist, I rolled my eyes along with everyone else, a reaction I had to suppress repeating when he prefaced our chat by announcing, “The funny thing is, I’m not really a big reader, not a big fan of books in the first place.” But Junior turns out to be oddly, unwittingly . . . compelling. A postmodern mishmash filled with drawings, epistolary fragments, personal manifestos, and public diatribes, the book is best appreciated as a piece of conceptual art rather than a legitimate novel. Tear out the pages, staple them to a wall, and you’d have a deconstructionist installation, an accidental dissertation on the crippling self-consciousness brought on by early fame. Child Actor: Fall and Rise.'-- New York Magazine
Excerpt
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Miles Brandman Sex and Breakfast(2007)
'Sex and Breakfast tries to say something meaningful and profound about sex and relationships, but the script is so poorly conceived and constructed that any message it may have had is muddled up beyond recognition. If you're looking for an enlightenment, you're likely to end up either confused or angry; if you're looking just for entertainment, look somewhere else. The movie tries so hard to be important that it never even tries to entertain, and it ends up being neither. As a result it may be one of the dullest and most forgettable movies you'll see, despite its shock value (which is much less shocking than it tries to be), the admittedly intriguing subject matter, and the competent editing and cinematography. The sad truth is that the only real draw it has is a group sex scene featuring the kid from Home Alone.'-- IMDb
Excerpt
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Orange (UK) Phone Operator Ad(2007)
'Cinema advertisement for the UK phone operator Orange and the Orange Film Board featuring 'the men from Orange' meeting former child star Macaulay Culkin on the set of a serious prison movie. The two men convince Macaulay that his serious prison drama needs an input of some 'Home Alone' style slapstick. "You've been doing this whole 'loner' thing forever. What age are you now...15?"'-- collaged
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Adam Green The Wrong Ferrari(2011)
'The Wrong Ferarri is a feature-film written and directed by Adam Green. Conceived on Green's European music tour in the summer of 2010, the film was shot entirely on an iPhone camera, with Green writing the script for the actors on index cards. Scenes were shot in France, Prague, Venice, The Jersey Shore and New York City. Green has stated that The Wrong Ferarri was inspired by Woody Allen's Bananas, Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, "Weird Al" Yankovic's UHF, Robert Downey, Sr.'s Putney Swope and the television show Seinfeld. The film contains strong profanity, sexual themes, and several scenes of nudity and is unrated by the MPAA.'-- collaged
The entire film
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Macaulay Culkin's iPod(2012)
'Last year, Macauley Culkin quietly started a new job as a New York DJ at Le Poisson Rouge, a club managed by Tabisel, also a former child actor. Each of Culkin’s parties come with its own theme, usually tangentially related to adolescence. He had a prom where he crowned his own king and queen. After the paparazzi snapped a shot of him in February, looking scraggly and gaunt on a New York street, he hosted a canned- food drive to mock the tabloids that wondered whether he had been starving himself. Tonight’s dinosaur birthday party is like a piece of performance art: a former child actor’s reinterpretation of childhood. Its actual meaning is harder to understand.'-- Daily Beast
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3MB Collective Discusses Their Gallery(2012)
'Macaulay Culkin’s not dying — he’s just embraced the path of a starving artist. Apparently, Culkin has teamed up with buddies Toby Goodshank and Adam Green to form 3MB Collective, an art group whose debut show, “Leisure Inferno,” is opening at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge (where Culkin currently hosts weekly dance parties) on September 13th. In this in-studio video, a mostly barefoot Culkin shows off the group’s ”hell-raiser disco luau” art, including a naked painting of the cast of Seinfeld on Wheel of Fortune and an homage to Kurt Cobain as a hacker of the “deep web,” and talks about the joys of collaborative art.'-- Flavorwire
*
p.s. Hey. ** S., S. is good. It also looks kind of like a reared-up snake about to strike a little round thing. Okay, good, if all of that seems good. You sound better. ** David Ehrenstein, Yeah, Fourier, curious cat. Did some looking around. Interesting. I think that guilty verdict re: the 'cannibal cop' is a travesty, at least from what I know about the case, which isn't everything, of course, but still. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. Thank you, ditto. Oh, yeah, I read 'The Recognitions'. It's fantastic. I've read a bunch of long novels, I am just less in the mood or something for them now than I was. Your Billfold thing is up! I'll read that today, naturally. Cool! Everyone, the one and only writer and d.l. John Fram aka Cobaltfram has a no-doubt key and ultra-enchancing new article over at The Billfold called 'How Not to Write, Market and Sell a Supernatural Romance Novel' that you really want to read, I'm pretty sure, so just do that then, why don't you, okay? I like Pierre Boulez a lot, but I'm not sure if I've heard 'Pli Selon Pli'. The Mallarme connection will get me all over it, in any case. Thank you for the alert. My plate contains, let's see, novel attempts, planning for my next trip in a bit less than two weeks, final checking of the French translation of 'The Pyre' text before it gets sent to the printer and made into a book, strategizing and prep for a couple of projects, fun, adventuring, etc., off the top of my head. I thought it was interesting that his acne intensified until he plead guilty whereupon his skin smoothed out again for whatever reason. Okay, I'll check that John Adams thing, thanks! ** Steevee, I think I need a couple of more listens to the Bowie to make up my mind about it. I'm of at least two minds so far. Fingers crossed that your editor is good with your no doubt perfect decision about needs to be in the 'Badlands' piece. Excited. ** Statictick, Hi, N. Oh, you think it's epilepsy-related. I guess that makes sense, at least from way far away where I am. Well, God, I hope there are no more incidents until the 18th when hopefully somehow they can't be killed in their cribs. Man, your toughness is something else. Major love and all else to you. ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, Billy! Very sweet to see you! Oh, that's okay, I was away from here too. So the non-stop doing stuff is the really good kind of doing and non-stop, right? I got that vibe. Well, and now having read an additional one of your sentences, I see that you yourself proclaim what's happening as exciting, so, so much for my instincts. Tell me more when you feel like it. I'm real good. I was traveling, working, and enjoying everything since I last saw you, I think. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. 'Pola X' is terrific, right? Really glad you got to see it. Did you see 'Holy Motors', I forgot? I saw your email in my box, yay, and I'll get to it hopefully later today. Thanks! ** Sypha, Hi, James. Oh, man, you obviously really need to get that endoscopy, unpleasant as it and the prospect may be. Ken Baumann has Crohn's, as I think you probably know. He wrote a fascinating piece about it that I can try to find for you if you didn't read it already. Anyway, dude, get that done and let me/us know what happens, okay? I saw that typewriter of yours in my FB feed. Sweet looking thing. I can not imagine ever voluntarily using one of those things again. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh. Who, me? Thanks. Yeah, I don't know. I think I have some kind of eye for visual things, but, when there's motion involved, I think I would get a little lost, but I'm talking with someone who has an amazing eye for visual motion about collaborating on a movie or movies, and our ideas are extremely synced, and I'm pretty sure that'll happen at some point. And I'll keep you in my mind for some kind of eye-popping visit when the time comes, sure. I'm of course really glad to hear that work is going okay. That seems like a pretty good par for the course. ** Misanthrope, Right, aw, Antonio's entreaties, yeah. Jesus, fuck death. Luckily, the bus topple was more embarrassing than devastating. I'm down to some ribs pain and a semi-swollen thumb. I'm a klutz. I think Self is a pompous prick in his writing too, but, hey, that's as legit an angle as any other, and if it works it works. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Oh, cool, about how the post grew on you. Yeah, differently organized than the stack posts for sure. Definitely more linear and respectful of the thing. Yeah, I see, and, yeah, hopefully on the Spielberg. I don't know. I guess I'm still not convinced re: why that should happen. I took a short break from the Hell memoir for no reason other than busyness on my end, but it's riveting and a lot of fun. I think you'll dig it. ** Will C., Hi, Will! I'm doing great, thank you. That Seattle move sounds really good. It's pretty nice there, as I'm sure you well know, and being there certainly doesn't seem to hamper the writers I know who live there or around there. When will that happen? Mm, I don't like Will Self's work. Just a taste thing. The guy can write, obviously, but there's a pretension/superiority thing and related attitude in his work that just irritates the shit out of me. Although I've had personal encounters with him, and I found him quite unbearable, so I guess that impact can't be discounted. And even though it shouldn't make a difference and hopefully doesn't, he really dislikes my work, so there's that going on. ** Alan, Thanks, Alan. We'll see, but, at the moment, I'm hopeful. Oh, you know, Jeff should probably explain 'unworking', if he cares to 'cos I think that was his (?) term to describe the Blanchot idea. I think he explained it a bit in the initial comment in which he brought it up, but I can't remember where that comment is exactly. Chilly Jay Chill, If you can/want, could you give Alan a thumbnail description of 'unworking'? Thanks! I was responding to 'unworking' by just thinking about Blanchot's central notions of language. Hold on. This is a long quote, sorry, re: Blanchot's ideas, but I think it's maybe a good, helpful one although kind of basically put: 'Blanchot draws on the work of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in formulating his conception of literary language as anti-realist and distinct from everyday experience. 'I say flower,' Mallarmé writes in Poetry in Crisis, 'and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.' In the everyday use of language, words are the vehicles of ideas. The word 'flower' means flower that refers to flowers in the world. No doubt it is possible to read literature in this way, but literature is more than this everyday use of language. For in literature 'flower' does not just mean flower but many things and it can only do so because the word is independent from what it signifies. This independence, which is passed over in the everyday use of language, is the negativity at the heart of language. The word means something because it negates the physical reality of the thing. Only in this way can the idea arise. The absence of the thing is made good by the presence of the idea. What the everyday use of language steps over to make use of the idea, literature remains fascinated by, the absence that makes it possible. Literary language, therefore, is a double negation, both of the thing and the idea. It is in this space that literature becomes possible where words take on a strange and mysterious reality of their own, and where also meaning and reference remain allusive and ambiguous.' ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! Great to see you! And right after a Blanchot reference coincidentally. I'm doing very well, thank you. Great news about your writing progress and your curious and nice sounding advisor. I understand your house dream. I've been dreaming aloud and not just dreaming of chateau/ castle living, and actually thinking how it can be feasible, but not doing that alone. That would be too much for me. Of course your questions will be fantastic! That is a given if there ever was a given! Me too: face to face is infinitely better. Love to you. ** Chris Dankland, Of course there's not a clear way to feel about someone who did what he did, but the mechanisms of the law, and the completely subjective and arbitrary decision to, say, try him as an adult when he was not an adult purely out of bloodlust and vengeance, and of the thoughtless, kneejerk public opinion re: what he did, which generalizes it into something that ends up having nothing to do with what he did and why, ... it's those kinds of things that make me the angriest of all. Yeah, I think I'm with you if you're saying that the exploration of marketing and promotion in the Alt Lit scene is more of an aesthetic exploration of the mechanisms of publicity and of the cult of personality than an actual climber strategy. There's a lot of ambiguity there in any case, and it's fascinating. Interesting about the Heiko Julien thing. I wonder if that's true. Why not, I guess. I see his work as something that could transition into 'the book' and work very well there. The really interesting part of the transition will be when/if publishers start fishing around for writers whose work isn't immediately comfortable in some way in 'the book'. Heiko Julien presents a very interesting possibility. It's interesting and exciting that Matt Bell and Amelia Gray and Michael Kimball and others are making the transition, but their work seems, at least in theory to me, to have 'the book' as a hoped for destination or something. It gets trickier and more intriguing if, oh, seriously internet based writers like H. Julien or Guillaume Morrisette or Walter Mackey or ... on and on, are presented with that cusp. I haven't read STD's piece on AWP yet. I'll go do that. Thank you! Yes, the Malick and the Korine are out in theaters here. I might be seeing the Malick today, in fact. We'll see, but I'm very excited to see both of them. You take care too, man. ** Okay. We've got MC in the spotlight today, so have at it, and I'll see you tomorrow.