DC's

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Jenny Holzer Someone Wants To Cut A Hole In You And Fuck You Through It, Buddy, 2012

 

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Sarah Bahbah Untitled, 2019
‘Sarah Bahbah, the Palestinian, Australian-raised artist crystallises the universal but rarely captured experience of oversaturated, intense feelings and imperfect relationships. Her protagonists give voice to the vast spectrum of emotion, spanning the desire for inner peace, true love, fear of commitment, playful ambivalence towards life and the paradox of wanting intimacy but craving isolation.’

 

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Dash Snow Fuck the Police, 2005
‘Dash Snow’s Fuck the Police presents a prized collection of newspaper headlines emblazoned with instances cop corruption. Each salacious story is splattered with cum and framed and mounted as a trophy.’

 

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Hito Steyerl How Not To Be Seen_ A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013
‘A touchstone of contemporary moving-image practice, Hito Steyerl’s 2013 work How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File remains as prescient as ever. Through wit and didactic parody, Steyerl probes the mechanics of visibility and disappearance at a moment when digital images increasingly shape how we are seen.’

 

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Philippe Shangti Enjoy Your Fucking Dinner (2019)
‘Philippe Shangti began his young artist career in Saint Tropez under the brasserie sky, glamour, and excitement of the French Riviera. With this energy, he spread his bold, edgy, and alive artwork. He started by dealing with themes of luxury and excess, relating the highs and the lows of the life of lavish life.’

 

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Elizabeth Jaeger Maybe We Die So The Love Doesn’t Have To, 2015
Hydrocal, latex paint and hair

 

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Tony Matelli Fuck’d, 2004

 

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Kathe Burkhart Various, 1983 – 2007
‘Elizabeth Taylor’s multiple personae–actress, vixen, Hollywood royalty, serial wife and divorcée, party girl, charitable humanitarian, entrepreneur, rebel, dominant woman–acts as a media-based mirror of contemporary female identity. For Kathe Burkhart, Taylor becomes a doppelganger in her paintings, in which tabloid, paparazzi shots and publicity stills from Taylor’s films are emblazoned with profanities that reclaim female sexuality and power. “I locate my position as oppositional on several levels: as a critique of representation, particularly that of women and also as a rupturing of idiomatic packaging/presentation devices,” notes the artist.’

 

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Miss Fuck Oups raté, 2020

 

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Mladen Stilinović Fuck the Wall, 1975

 

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Betty Tompkins Fuck Paintings, 2002 – 2006
‘Tompkins’ paintings are often described as “photorealist”. Yet she says: “My work compared to an actual photorealist is lame. They’re interested in getting everything. I’m interested in getting just enough.” She made the first of her Fuck Paintings straight out of grad school in 1969, a time when almost every female artist was ignored, whatever she was making. As for a young woman making enormous paintings of penises: “Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them or me.”’

 

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Awol Erizku Oh what a feeling, aw, fuck it, I want a Trillion, 2014

 

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Brazzers Hot sex with the girls at the exhibition of contemporary art, 2015
‘Modern Museum of Fine Ass Only the finest booties have a shot at getting into the Modern Museum of Fine Ass, the world’s biggest collection of perfect juicy butts. When Danny heard they had a gallery where any bum-loving ticket holder could poke, spank, and tickle huge, roundest white asses around. Danny got to his knees spanking, sniffing, and fondling every butt in front of him. When Julie Cash couldn’t wait another second to get some cock, she turned her face around and offered her mouth for a deep throat blowjob. Knowing there was a big hammer like Danny’s in the room, Richelle Ryan got jealous, and invited him to pound her body-painted posterior.’

 

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Miriam Cahn fuck abstraction!, 2007-2022
‘A controversial painting by the artist Miriam Cahn was vandalized yesterday, May 7, at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo. Around 3:30 pm, a museum visitor removed a can of purple spray paint hidden in a medicine bottle and defaced the Swiss artist’s canvas. In a statement to Agence France-Presse, the Palais de Tokyo described the vandal as an “elderly man” who acted independently. He was apprehended by security agents and removed from the premises by police. The painting depicts a faceless man receiving fellatio from a smaller, kneeling figure whose hands are tied behind their back. Right-wing critics have claimed the scene depicts the sexual abuse of a child, but Cahn has maintained that it was created in response to reports of murder and rape committed by Russian soldiers upon their invasion of the Ukrainian city of Bucha last year.’

 

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Shauna Born All The Boys I’d Like To Fuck, 2012
‘Freezing in time the fleeting beauty of life, and in particular the brevity and transience of youth, has long been a concern of visual art. It’s a natural fit, understandable, bordering on the obvious, that a medium like painting be used in such a way. The ability of painting and drawing to freeze a moment in time gives it the enviable power of making immortal (and timeless) the imagery it conveys. That which is portrayed in a picture stays immutable and constant while the rest of us poor souls submit to the humbling humilities brought about by the merciless elements of time, aging and gravity. The work of Shauna Born, who up to now has focused principally on youthful portraiture, is no exception to this described desire to make the world stop spinning. Her painted portraits of pretty young things ooze with a lightness of being. Ethereal and decadent, they often appear to be contemplating nothing more than their own fleeting existence, which in turn reminds the viewer of theirs. A momento mori minus the skulls-and-spook-show imagery.’

 

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Aldo Chaparro Too Drunk to Fuck, 2009

 

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Mom and Jerry Be free fuck it all!, 2011
‘Throughout an illustrious career, starting as street artists and working their way up to the top of the international contemporary art scene, Mom & Jerry are today considered cultural and civic icons. The multi-faceted Mom, and her dirty son Jerry have a passion for art, music, parties, glitter and fashion. In addition to being artists, they consider themselves rebels, outlaws, DJs, living sculptures, talk show hosts, TV personalities, movie stars, and most recently, progressive Broadway dancers.’

 

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Özgür Kar It is all in his head, 2020
Two 4K videos with sound, 20 mins loop. Two 75” TVs, TV stands, Media players, Cord-reel.

 

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Hudinilson Jr. Cadernos de Referênci, 1979 – 2010
‘The artist Hudinilson Jr. truly transformed himself and his life into an ongoing record of his relationship with images. When he died in 2013, he left an apartment that could be mistaken for an archive, overrun as it was with artworks, magazine and newspaper clippings, notes and notebooks. He’d spent decades hoarding and editing thousands of fragments, many of which ended up glued to the more than one hundred and thirty Cadernos de Referência (Reference Notebooks), his name for the notebooks and address books of various shapes and sizes in which he worked daily. His process was singular—and nonlinear. Images clipped in the 1970s might be fished out and juxtaposed or overlapped with others selected in 2010; a page that had seemingly been finished for years could be reopened and filled some more at any given time. The limit was the utter saturation of every single page.

‘In the collages, sexually explicit images frequently coexist with news about the art world; posed portraits of local TV stars rub elbows with reproductions of religious artworks or shocking scenes of accidents and deaths. Each assemblage was guided by the power of attraction and contrast between the manipulated images. Leafing through these notebooks it is clear that, to this artist, images had a haptic nature that surpassed their referential significance or visual appearance. Images can be caressed, shaped, compressed or loosened; they have weight, taste, and consistency. One can play a synesthetic game with them, or a sensual one. This principle is inherent to Hudinilson Jr.’s practice, and that is why he was able to glimpse the act of anal penetration in a sequence of photocopies of a banana being peeled.’

 

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Harland Miller I’m So Fucking Hard–Ernest Hemingway, 2002

 

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Tracey Emin & Louise Bourgeois And so I kissed you, 2009 – 2010
‘The ‘Do Not Abandon Me’ series originated with Bourgeois, who began the works by painting male and female torsos in profile on paper, mixing red, blue and black gouache pigments with water to create delicate and fluid silhouettes. Bourgeois then passed the images on to Emin. This suite of prints was one of the last projects Louise Bourgeois completed before her death.’

 

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Liu Ding A man fucking a chicken, 2007
Marble, taxidermy

 

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Jeremy Deller Fuck You 2020, 2020
Digital print, signed in pencil verso

 

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David Wojnarowicz Fuck You Faggot Fucker (1984)
collage, acrylic and four black-and-white photographs on Masonite

 

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Bjarne Melgaard Fuck your fear (2019)
‘Bjarne Melgaard is a contemporary Norwegian artist working in sculptural assemblage. In installations that include paintings, videos, and mixed-media works, the artist explores themes of substance addiction, sexuality, and self-destruction.’

 

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Isa Genzken & TF Fuck Them All (Pit Dream) cracked phone moment (2018)
‘Pit Dream’s cosy video phone insights places you at the arena with cotton in your ears inside the bubble of strength and brotherly reflection holding hands and singing “fuck them all”.’

 

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Nikola Tamindzic Stoya fucking New York, 2016
‘Fucking New York. Is it a statement about the awesomeness of the city? Is it a whine about the city’s unapologetic cruelty? Is it literally fucking the NYC? How do you interpret this title?’

 

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Mieko Meguro Dan, Fuck kale, 2019
‘Mieko Meguro displays a variety of portraits of the public figure with whom she shares her life, the artist Dan Graham. The contrasts and contradictions of life together appear quickly from the harmless lightness of the images — an accumulation of everyday scenes shakes this narrative, then moves it to cushions, embroidered with the image of Dan Graham wearing a “Fuck Kale” T-shirt.’

 

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Bruce Nauman Seven Figures, 1985
‘For the neons, Bruce Nauman made sketches in pencil, charcoal and watercolour. For the figures, he used the outlines of the bodies of himself and his wife. The double outlines in different colours indicate where neon is to be used, and the layered figures indicate how they will appear when the neon flashes on and off. The primary colours red, yellow and blue are used for the male figures, while the female figures are represented in softer shades like pink, green and orange. The timing of the sequences is very important and is fixed and repeated in a continual loop, each figure having its own individual programme.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ricard was charismatic, for sure, charming and quite evil when he felt like it, which was most of the time (long story). ** Steeqhen, I’m so sorry to hear that about your dog. That’s so rough. I’m sorry. My rationale about that ‘God Jr.’ section is probably pretty technical, you know how I think. Thanks a lot for supporting my stuff with your friends. No, I haven’t heard the new Charli album. I’ll make a point to spin it. It’s not my normal inclination, but I am curious. That pop star realm you talk about is something I don’t know enough about to differentiate between them. I mostly just pay attention to what their angles are. The heat is pretty taxing, but I seem to be able to think and type thus far. Luck with your wave if you have one. I think you do? ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. There is apparently a documentary film about Rene in the works. The director contacted me a while back to ask if he could interview me for it since I knew Rene in the early 80s and Little Caesar was the initial distributor of his first poetry book. But I haven’t heard from him in a while, so I don’t know. Would be something though. Boy, he was colourful. ** Carsten, Hi. Honestly I’m not very knowledgeable about or interested in Burning Man, or not enough to have a heated back and forth about it. It’s more up your alley than mine. If the people who go to it enjoy themselves and get something out of it, that’s all that matters, and more power to them. I will say that constructing an ideal temporary city is what the Rainbow Gathering has already been doing since the 60s. The main difference is that it’s run by true believers, not corporate types, and it’s free, and they discourage electronics and phones so that people have to interact more personally and in the moment. I did out of curiosity check the demographics of the last BM. It was 68% white, 68.5% heterosexual. The average annual income of attendees was $80-99,999 with 22% having an annual income of more than $300,000. So it’s a mostly white, straight, well-off bunch. But, really, I don’t care that much, and I should watch that doc and get more of an insider overview before/if I say anything else about it. I was once in a solar eclipse in Amsterdam in the 80s, and everything went dark almost as night in the mid-afternoon, and the one here yesterday didn’t effect the daylight at all, so I was kind of disappointed. ** Adem Berbic, Danielle Steele? Actually I’ve never read her, so I have no idea what that means. Easy, compulsively readable with plot for days and a steamy tone? That’s a guess. I think we’re heading toward Croatia level heat today and tomorrow, so don’t move here until the weekend at least. ** James Bennett, Hey. Cool. The heat yesterday made me feel under the weather, so I just looked out my window waiting for the world to look shadowed, but it never did. So my only impression was ‘That’s it?’ Sounds like you got the best of it. ** Diesel Clementine, Hi. Ricard will take you into some interesting places. No, like I just said, I was feeling kind of bleh, so I just looked out the window and saw basically nothing. Oh well. I hope ‘MLT’ has more of an effect. And, you know, thank you. ** HaRpEr //, Me neither. Ricard’s poems are very good. Especially the earlier ones. Especially in his book ‘Rene Ricard 1979-1980’ if you can find it. Ideally you won’t have to self-publish your book, but at least there’s basically no stigma at all around self-published books anymore. Some of the most interesting books I read come that way. I self-published my first two books, and they lead to better situations. ** laura w, Hey. ‘Write from the scar not the wound’: what a ridiculous rule of thumb that is. Maybe the writing itself can be the scar? The eclipse was a non-entity, but that was my fault. Halloween can’t get here a fraction of a second too soon. ** Okay. Today’s thematic post surely needs no further introduction. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

“I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend

art from history. I will rescue art from the future,

from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative

notion that it will become more valuable with time.”

– Rene Ricard

 

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Life

Rene Ricard was born in 1946 and grew up in Acushnet, Massachusetts. As a young teenager he ran away to Boston and assimilated into the literary scene of the city; by age eighteen he’d moved to New York City and where he was accepted as a protege by Andy Warhol. He appeared in the classic Warhol films Kitchen (1965), Chelsea Girls (1966), and ****  (1967), as well as in a number of other noted underground films, including Warren Sonbert’s Hall of Mirrors (1966), among others. He was one of the founders of and original performers in Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous.  Having achieved stature in the art world by successfully launching the career of painter Julian Schnabel, Ricard helped bring the artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame. Ricard was played by Michael Wincott in Julian Schnabel’s biopic, Basquiat (1996) In December of 1981 he published the first major article on the artists. The piece appeared in Artforum magazine and was called “The Radiant Child.”

In 1979 the DIA Foundation published Ricard’s first book of poems, a self-titled volume styled on the Tiffany Christmas catalogue. His second book of poetry, God With Revolver (Hanuman Books) was published ten years later. Along with a handfull of one of a kind zines, Ricard has released two other volumes of poetry since then: Trusty Sarcophagus Co. (Inanout Books, 1990) and Love Poems (C U Z Editions, 1999). In 2004, Rene did the album cover for Shadows Collide With People by John Frusciante The majority of Ricard’s poems are now achieved in the form of paintings. He is represented in New York City by the Cheim and Reed Gallery on West 25th Street. Ricard is reclusive and famously mercurial. He lives and works at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City.

 

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Looks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Words

The Radiant Child (1981)
Rene Ricard

I remember the first Tags (where is Taki?), Breaking (where you spin on your head), Rapping (where I first heard it). I know the names, but are the names important? Where is Taki? Perhaps because I have seen graffiti, then seen something else, thrown myself on the dance floor, then gone on to dance another way, I say that the reason for abandoning so much during the ’70s was that each fad became an institution. What we can finally see from the ’70s buried among the revivals and now surfacing (Tagging, Breaking, Rapping) was at least one academy without program. Distinct to the ’70s, graffiti, in particular, was the institutionalization of the idiosyncratic that has led to the need for individuation within this anonymous vernacular. This is why the individuals (Crazy Legs) must distinguish themselves.

Artists have a responsibility to their work to raise it above the vernacular. Perhaps it is the critic’s job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated it (where is Taki) and to bring them to public attention. The communal exhibitions of the last year and a half or so, from the Times Square Show, the Mudd Club shows, the Monumental Show, to the New York/New Wave Show at P.S. 1, have made us accustomed to looking at art in a group, so much so that an exhibit of an individual’s work seems almost antisocial. Colab, Fashion Moda, etc., have created a definite populist ambience, and like all such organizations, from the dawn of modern, have dug a base to launch new work. These are vast communal enterprises as amazing that they got off the ground as the space shuttle and even more, fly-by-night, that they landed on solid ground. (continued)

Bruce Hainley on ‘The Radiant Child’ (2001): Rene Ricard’s prose coordinates itself by digression, but I won’t digress: What’s at stake for anyone interested in thought’s embodiment is ecriture. Ricard writes, and–neither simply art history nor art criticism–his writing wrongs. Ostensibly, “The Radiant Child” is what some might consider an overly personal twirl by the Factory star (Kitchen; Chelsea Girls), poet (1979-1980; God with Revolver), and downtown eminence through the scenes (“communal exhibitions”; Mudd Club), modes (graffiti/tagging), and references (Warhol, Twombly) that would mark many of the soon-to-be art stars of the ’80s. But even more than being about Jean-Michel Basquiat (Ricard was the first to think about what and how his work might mean) or Keith Haring; or about graffiti and its “dyslexic development in that the second generation is capitalizing on territory pioneered by its lost innovators”; or about the slightly sickening fact that the “crass fast-turnover speculators’ market can have a deleterious effect on an artist’s future career” since “we are no longer collecting art we are buying individuals”; the essay is an attempt to theorize, via Haring’s Radiant Child, which manages to be both a tag with the “same effect as advertising” and “something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb,” how “we are that little baby, the radiant child, and our name, what we are to become, is outside us and we must become ‘Judy Rifka’ or ‘Jean-Michel’ the way I became ‘Rene Ricard.”‘ (read the entirety)

 

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Six poems & a reading
Rene Ricard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RENE RICARD, FAMOUS AT 20 (1979)

… and I still expect to be deferred to
To get in free with a crowd
So I don’t go to places where I have to pay
Sure I miss out on a lot but there was a time
When every doorman in town knew me as an ornament
Wherever I stood
Even though I’m not on the A list anymore
And don’t even get invited to the B parties
I’m still treated well where being
A former underground movie star
Still carries a little weight
I can still turn on the charm
And find a small but enthusiastic audience
Where the star of a more elegant time
Is still appreciated once in a while
By the fossil hunters
I am no longer sought after by the great hostesses
The truth is I don’t care anymore
I’ve seen them come and go
The addresses change but the guest list
Remains the same
The rich are the worst
And the very rich the very worst
They only want the Nobel Prize winners
The Academy Award winners
They are like little kids when they meet someone famous
Or someone even more rich then them
Because the dreams of the poor are only exaggerated
into the grotesque by the rich
Yes those great hostesses who purport to be lion tamers
End up being nothing but head hunters
Laughed at behind their backs
But who wouldn’t
Yeah, it’s a vulgar sprint for the famous
And the nouveau cute who feed to them
All those pretty young kids thrown to the vampires
Some vanish and the lucky ones
Become vampires themselves
I didn’t – that’s all
It’s all right to joke about it
But my stomach turns when I have to wait
In line outside some posh nightspot
And watch my poor friends led like tugboats
While one of those drunken fiends
Prods them into a limousine
What will it get them?
A few grants for a pathetic art project?
This year’s pet? Society’s darling?
You think they’d say “Hi” to try to get me in
But it Le Monde, dearie
You know who you are
All you sycophants and grant hustlers
I will never apply for a grant
Let me starve!
I must look out for my biography
I may be a pariah but I am still
And always will be a living legend
I’d rather starve

 

Rene Ricard reads (2010)

 

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Performances

Warhol’s ‘Chelsea Girls’ feat. Rene Ricard

Michael Wincott as Rene Ricard in Schnabel’s ‘Basquiat’

Rene Ricard in Michele Civetta’s ‘After the Fall’

Book launch: ‘Rene Ricard 1979-1980’ in Paris on May 4, 2018

 

 

Rene Ricard speaks about the lost Warhol film The Andy Warhol Story (1966):

I made a film with Edie about nine months after she left the Factory. Andy suggested, ‘Let’s do a movie with you as me in it. The Andy Warhol Story. I really hated Andy by then. I realized his was a passive exploitation – that it could be humiliating and horrible. He had been asking me to do this for a long time and I had refused. But one night I took an Obetrol – a very powerful twenty five milligram amphetamine pill, the best. They were very hard to get, rare and very good. It’s a good high, very gay, very lovely speed. That night we were making this Tiger Morse movie, part of a twenty-four hour four-star movie in which I was supposed to be an extra. ‘Don’t do too much talking’, I was told. Well, the pill got me hysterical and I was amazingly good at it. Andy fell in love with me for it. Once again he said, ‘Oh, you’re so good tonight; let’s do that movie I’ve wanted you to do.’ So I finally said okay. The only reason I agreed to do his film was to get even with him. I said, ‘Okay, let’s go to my place and do it.’ I was living in a very beautiful apartment on Fifth Avenue with Avery Dunphy, who was being kept in this luxurious place by a doctor who was mad for prissy Wasps. Mirrored coffee tables, a huge white silk-satin couch.Beautiful, right? What Avery wanted to be was chic -which was all anybody wanted at that time. Having Andy Warhol make a movie in that apartment, even though it wasn’t his, was very chic. I called Avery and told him what was happening – that we were on the the way. I told him, ‘I want orchids. I want the place filled with orchids.’ He asked, ‘Well, where am I going to get orchids at this time of night?’ I told him about a place in the East Sixties that’s open until mid-night. I figured I’d do it right. Right? I didn’t have any money, but at least I could have orchids. Besides, I was trying to get even with Andy. So Avery went out and bought the most exquisiteorchids you’ve ever seen. He bought orchids to die over. I know the difference between good orchids and vulgar ones, and these were expensive and good – from Hawaii or Vietnam, which is where Paris gets its orchids. When we all got to the apartment, Andy asked, ‘Who do you want in the film with you?’ I said ‘I only want Edie Sedgwick. Who else is there in your life but Edie Sedgwick?’ Andy said, ‘I don’t know if we can get her.’ I said, ‘I won’t do it without her.’ I took another pill and I got wired. Wired! There’s a point when you take speed when you talk a lot, and yet there’s also a point where you take too much and you don’t talk. That’s the point that second pill got me to. So Andy got Edie on the telephone and offered to pay for her taxi, and about three hours later Edie turned up. I didn’t want to make the movie when I saw her. She was wearing a dirty blond fall. She looked like the cheapest piece of filth. Here was my Edie, my Edie, and I was making a movie with her – co-stars! No longer was I an extra, and she looked like hell! She was wearing a kind of Marimekko type dress, and mean! She, too, hated Andy at that point: she had been eighty-sixed. When she was with the fairies, she was on speed and she was Edie, she was ‘on’. When she was with Bobby Neuwirth, who was a hetero, she was on downs, and Edie on downs was not pretty. Well, when she arrived at the apartment, the cameras started rolling. I had my own personal vendetta against against Warhol, and so did she. And I was playing Warhol. So I played him the way he behaved to the people under him. She played herself according to how she felt about him then. The things she said to me were horrible. I don’t remember them. I don’t even remember what I said. I was awful. I have nightmares about what I did in that movie… saying things about Andy that were true, how he disposed of people. Paul Morrissey, who was behind the camera, was white with rage. I went through the paintings… how Andy doesn’t actually do the paintings himself. Stupid things like: “Gerard get me an egg. Do you want to know howI paint my pictures, you people out there?’ I’d crack the egg in a glass and then I’d say to Gerard: ‘Cook it!’ That’s how I paint my pictures.’ We did one reel and stopped. Then Andy in his sick, masochistic, dreadful way – after all, here were these two people on camera saying the most ghastly things about him – said ‘Let’s do another reel.’ He had been standing holding his fingers in his mouth, which he does when he’s anxious, and he was loving it… getting the truth. So we did another reel, and in this one it got violent. Edie started it. At some point I gave her some orchids. I said, ‘You’re not dressed up enough for this movie. So do something. Take these flowers.’ She took them and crushed them. I got very upset. And I – me, Rene Ricard, not the Andy Warhol me – was just made demented by that. I love orchids. It was a personal thing from me to her. I said, ‘You really need to fix yourself up, my dear. Put them on you somewhere.’ She cried out, ‘I hate them! I don’t want to be beautiful!’She wrecked the flowers. Edie was hating me. We were both hating each other because of the roles we were playing… I loved Edie, but I couldn’t stand being in a movie with her the way she looked. She was horrible in the movie, and mean. The things I was saying were so horrible. Paul Morrissey suddenly reached out from behind the camera and ripped my clothes off me – a new white silk shirt and new pair of white linen pants. He ripped them. The camera was turning. Paul was out of the frame. I guess he was livid because of the things I was saying about Andy. So we finished the film – two reels. Edie rushed home. I didn’t care about her at that point. My clothes were a ruin. I was a mess. I was wiped out by the pills. Dazed. You’ll never guess what happened then. Andy Warhol at that point was close to a guy called Rod La Rod. He was handling the sound on this film. They asked me to see the rushes in the Factory. I sat there watching it – Paul, Andy, Rod and a few of the other serfs were there -and I saw what they had done to it. Edie’s voice is there, but when I speak, you can’t hear it. They were in glee.

 

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Visuals

p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Many, many heads are opened up in ‘Ice Cream Man’. Brains are eaten. The whole shebang. Length is determined in the heat of the moment, no? Or it usually for me. So you’re back in Blighty or almost. Three hellish days, mostly tomorrow and Friday, and then a fainting act, or that’s our prognosis. Luck. ** _Black_Acrylic, Harper obviously answered your question. I’ll just add that the local element is that I proudly published that book through my Little House on the Bowery imprint. ** Carsten, Like I said, I haven’t watched that doc, but I think calling BM alternative is really pushing it. It’s for largely heterosexual people willing to pay big bucks to set up a tent or situate their SUVs in a parking lot in the scorching desert and hang out with other ‘open minded’ people for a few days. I know of no impact it’s had in culture, politics, society, etc. It’s like a cross between a glorified campground and a convention except that instead of fans of comic books or sc-fi they’re fans of ‘alternative lifestyles’. The people I know or know of who go to BM are homeowners who still mourn the demise of the Grateful Dead and see it as a way to ‘get their freak on’ once a year. To me it seems inert and self-satisfying pretty much period. But, again, I haven’t watched the doc. ** Bill, His work has been here in various contexts for sure. I’ve had Paul Thek’s work in the thematic posts, but maybe I haven’t done a whole post about him. I should. He’s great. He’s trending right now, so maybe I’ll wait until he’s marginalised again. Me too on the heatwave. At least it’s short. And tonight is the solar eclipse which Paris gets 90% of, so that might be a good distraction. ** Hugo, A fellow ‘donc’ fan, cool. ‘Hogg’ will take you somewhere special. Other than the jetlag, I find plane flights kind of invigorating, or at least after I’d had my first post-flight cigarette. I’ve been mostly my usual self, and I think things are moving along. Nice: the Cioran translating. ** James Bennett, Hi! Derek M is who turned me on to Altmejd’s work. Pretend apartment scams have become a thing? I guess that would happen. I think when I last moved I looked mostly through what was available on established realtors’ websites? Urgh, sorry, man. I should be around until Zac and I go to Stavanger, which should be close to the end of the month. Hit me up post-swelter. Thanks a lot about ‘God Jr.’. Oh, I think to try to explain to myself and to you why its last section is my favorite thing I’ve written will take more concentration and time than the p.s. allows me. In person? Thank you, sir. Are you going to look but not look at the solar eclipse today? I’m not sure how to do that, but I think I’ll try. ** Diesel Clementine, Hi. It’s weird but a lot of the dark rides, etc. I thought were kiddie shit when I was a kid seem sublime to me now. Not sure how that happened. I think I’ve looked at Temu and AliExpress maybe once, so I don’t know what the vibe is there. I’m so not a good consumer. Other than books, clothes, food and cigarettes, I have almost no interest in buying things. My apartment looks like a gallery between exhibitions. Condolences about the break up, but you seem to be making the very best of it. ** laura w., He and I had a long talk, but I can’t remember it in detail to lay it out. After ‘FNoaD’, he ended up working for Bresson for the rest of Bresson’s life, helping with the making of the films and stuff. He had nothing but good to say about Bresson as a guy. I wish I could remember the buts and bolts. The heat is rising here rapidly, but at least it’s not humid so far. I’ll have to turn on my shitty AC any minute now. Other than the heat, things are smooth here, maybe even too smooth. Hang way in, pal. ** HaRpEr //, I didn’t tell anyone I was writing a novel cycle until I was sure it was going to work, which happened when I finished ‘Guide’. Tricycle! I like it. I predict an enlarged dictionary definition of the word. ‘Red Desert’ is really great. Those early Antonioni films need to be more seen and talked about than they currently are. ** Steve, Meaningcore, haha, nice. Uh, I’ll need to pop outside for food and cigarettes and maybe a solar eclipse peek, but I think the indoors will suffice. You overheated there? I’m forgetting where all the waves currently are. ** Thom, Happy that you dug it, man. Fun times for sure on your end, it sounds like. Over here, August is anti-productivity — inhabitants having fled, venues taking a summer snooze, etc. Well, I guess unless one is in the middle of writing a novel, which I’m not. I am determined to make the next three violently hot days fly right by. Let’s see if determination lives up to its reputation. ** Right. I thought I would mark the occasion of the solar eclipse by bringing back this Rene Ricard post. See if that makes sense. And see you tomorrow.