The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Month: May 2020 (Page 13 of 13)

Ghosts

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Darja Bajagić Mollys (2016)
UV printed aluminum-brushed Dibond with motion activated liquid mechanism and shaped MDF frame container / acrylic paint, canvas

 

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Lu Pingyuan Ghost (2016)
‘A pub’s owner is requesting the return of a ghost, after its famous specter was captured by a Chinese artist. Lu Pingyuan claims to have captured the ghost of James Stanley, the seventh Earl of Derby, who is said to haunt the Ye Olde Man and Scythe, in Churchgate, Bolton, Greater Manchester. A sealed metal canister supposedly containing the spirit went on display this month at the Center for Chinese Contemporary Art, unbeknown to the pub’s owner, Richard Greenwood, after the artist became captivated by the story and traveled from Shanghai to Bolton to catch the ghost.

‘And after discovering that the town’s oldest pub is now missing its favorite phantom, Mr Greenwood is determined to have it returned to its rightful home. In a letter to Mr Lu, he said: “I would have liked to have been privy to your actions and indeed to the exhibition before the ghost of James Stanley was taken out of Bolton, his ties to the town and to Ye Olde Man and Scythe run very deeply. “I feel very strongly that James Stanley’s ghost should remain in Bolton and at Ye Olde Man and Scythe to preserve the natural order of things. That said I do believe that your exhibition should travel and be seen by many people around the world and I would like to contribute to this as long as at the end of your exhibition it returns home.”’

 

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Korakrit Arunanondchai GHOST:2561 (2019)
‘“The starting idea for ‘Ghost:2561’ came from my feeling of always wanted to start some kind of platform to do research in Thailand, where I’m from,” Arunanondchai told me. “I wanted to work with this idea of ghost-host and possession, a kind of animistic framework that is very present throughout different layers of social fabric there.”’

 

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WOH & CO Ghost of a Chair (2010)
‘The Ghost of a Chair is handmade from a single 4mm transparent polyester sheet. Each sculptural free-form chair is unique and created using a combination of high- end technology and craft. Each piece is a one-off. The unique translucent effect creates the illusion of the chair disappearing beneath a hidden sheet.’

 

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Natasha Tontey The Cautionary Tales (2015)
The Cautionary Tales is a performance by non-actor and actor located in public area of Sie Kee Gie Junction on 6th and 7th June 2015.’

 

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Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus Gue(ho)st House (2017)
‘The artists transformed an existing building that was once a prison, then a school and then a funeral home into a “ghost house” using a cloak of polystyrene and paint.’

 

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Ryan Gander Tell my mother not to worry (ii) (2012)
‘As an absolute muse, Gander’s daughter – who inspired Tell My Mother not to Worry (ii) – becomes the leading actress of a game, frozen and replicated in marble thanks to the medium of sculpture. Not just a phantom of blindless actions, the little girl is an unrevealed subject to whom Gander entrusts all the ghosts in his wardrobe.’

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Angela Singer Ghost Birds (2007)

 

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Gary Hill Viewer (1996)
‘In the multiple-channel video projection «Viewer,» blatant watching becomes the sole activity. The installation is neither interactively conceived, which would allows us learn more about the performers through their actions, nor does it allow the presentation mode to refer to either a context or story. The juxtaposition of those watching and those being watched—just as easily understood in the reverse—refers to a zero point unable to be bridged with any narrative content.’

 

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Adam Fuss My Ghost (2001 – 2007)
‘« My Ghost » is the title of a series of photographs Adam Fuss began 8 years ago. All of them express a feeling of silent grief and loss. Rising smoke suggests the trace of a beloved person, who is not part of our life anymore; whose body has been retrieved from the earth but still remains present on an emotional and spiritual level. The intention of the artist is personal and references to his own past.’

 

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Valerie Hegarty Ghosts of History (2017)
‘ Valerie Hegarty builds to destroy. Her process involves copying recognized paintings and then attacking them, forging ruins; As if the canvas, eaten away, ragged, had been abandoned, over the year…’

 

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Hans Richter Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928)

 

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Alice Könitz Ghost (2008)
Polycarbonate panel and plaster

 

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Tom Palmer Ghost Mirror (2018)

 

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Apichatpong Weerasethakul Fireworks (Archives) (2014)
‘In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Fireworks (Archives), we see sculptures of mythical creatures from the Buddhist and Hindu cosmology in a garden in northeastern Thailand—a location believed to have been a communist hideout—illuminated by pyrotechnics and strobe lights, inducing a vision that violently teeters between impermeable darkness and blinding flashes. Projected onto a panel of glass, this vision seeps and oozes, with moving images leaking and refracting across the room’s seats and floor. By provoking the viewer’s senses, Apichatpong establishes a correspondence between technological media and the spiritual world, inducing visions that are disembodied or even menacing.’

 

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Ángela Jiménez Durán Sleeping bag ghost (2019)
‘I find it very beautiful to be able to approach something that is different and scary with a welcoming gesture. How would you talk to a ghost? In the end, the question becomes how do you meet someone or something that is not like you?’

 

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Duncan Mountford Ghost Library (2018)
‘At the rear of the gallery, on the top of a wall 260cm in height, is the Ghost Library. An empty library that speaks of the loss of knowledge, or the unreachable nature of arcane information. Lit only by the light from an exit sign, and the occasional momentary illumination of a window in one of the three doors, the library is barely visible, fading like a ghost seen by only a few.’

 

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Bernhard Willhelm Women (2004)

 

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Vincent Ceraudo Paris City Ghost (2015)
‘After I discovered by pure coincidence in the suburbs of Hangzhou a replica of Paris as a utopian post-modernism architectural project, I decided to live for a week in this urban simulacrum, located more than 11,000km away from the French capital. Using the drone camera technology that reminds the typical surveillance and control systems, I experienced the physical and psychological architectural limits of the place. The video documents the exploration of this ghost city, as if I was going through a double existence, in an deserted future of my own life.’

 

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Tianzhuo Chen G.H.O.S.T. (2018)
‘G.H.O.S.T is a new video work filmed in December 2016 in the streets of Varanasi, India, immediately adjacent the sacred Hindu spot where every year, millions of bodies are cremated and their ashes delivered to river Ganges.’

 

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Abbas Akhavan Variations on Ghost (2017/2018)
‘A monumental sculpture by Abbas Akhavan fills the Vide gallery at Bluecoat. Variations on Ghost makes reference to artworks destroyed by ISIS over the last decade, in particular the ancient sculptures depicting the Assyrian protective deities called Lamassu – half man, half lion. Using a technique called ‘dirt ramming’ Akhavan has recreated the claws of the hybrid deity with soil and water. Over the exhibition period, the physical appearance and smell of the sculpture will change, its surface appearing more stone-like as a grey crust develops.’

 

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Philippe Parreno & Pierre Huyghe No Ghost Just a Shell (2000 – 2002)
‘»No Ghost Just a Shell« was initiated by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe in 1999. They acquired the copyright for a figure called ‘Annlee’ and her original image from the Japanese agency »Kworks«, which develops figures (almost actors) for cartoons, comic strips, advertising and video games of the booming Japanese Manga industry. ‘Annlee’ was a cheap model: the price of a Manga figure relates to the complexity of its character traits and thus its ability to adapt to a story-line and ‘survive’ several episodes. ‘Annlee’ had no particular qualities, and so she would have disappeared from the scene very quickly. “True heroes are rare and extremely expensive …” (Parreno) Buying ‘Annlee’ rescued her from an industry that had condemned her to death.’

 

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Kunlin He Ghost face cun (2017)
‘This video work come from I climbed mountains with my friend and family in my childhood memory. In China, There have a lot of strange stone and tree named by people in many famous national parks. Most of there names are associate with local history, myth and, fairy tale. When I came to the Bay Area, I traveled to the city and landscape to evoke my childhood memories of mountaineering and topophilia. I was searching for stone and tree that shape resembled like human figure, organs, and animals in the period of three months, shooting and naming them, recording my movement by GPS and editing them for a video.’

 

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Olaf Breuning Ghosts (2003)

 

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Dorothy Cross Ghost Ship (1999)
‘Cross painted a retired light ship with many layers of phosphorescent paint and moored it out at sea within sight of the esplanade of Dublin Bay. Every evening just before dusk the boat’s sides were flooded with strong ultraviolet light.

‘As the sun faded the lights were turned off. The boat remained visible as a luminous, ghostly presence between the shore and the horizon. The original purpose of the light ship as a marker of reefs and dangerous waters brings to mind the many ships that foundered in spite of every precaution. Each evening crowds of sightseers would come to the cold waterside to watch this mystery unfold and speculate about the history of the sea and of this boat in particular.

‘Cross braved the windswept channel in a dinghy one night to make a video of the glowing boat from the sea. A projection of this video was screened at dusk each night along the edge of the Mersey in Liverpool, where boats from Dublin used to moor.’

 

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Asta Gröting Ghost (2015)
‘This series comprises life-size casts of the artist‘s immediate family members since 2010. The ensemble of figures morph and change with the passing of time, some growing larger while others disappear altogether.’

 

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Miguel Angel Rios The Ghost of Modernity (2012)
‘The video Untitled (the ghost of modernity) by Miguel Angel Rios filmed on a deserted plateau high above a distant town in Saachila Oaxaca Mexico, features a set of outlined cube structures built on the site and a transparent cube that floats through the landscape with a will of its own, as if magically suspended. The moving camera establishes a dialogue with the floating and rotating cube choreographed to music composed by John Cage in 1947 for the feature of Marcel Duchamp’s roto-reliefs in the surrealist film by Hans Richter “Dreams that money can buy”.’

 

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Letha Wilson Ghost of a Tree (2012)

 

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Thomas Schütte Grosse Geister [Big Ghosts] (1996)
‘With his characteristically critical reassessment of the figurative traditions in art, Schütte here transforms the mythological hero associated with the grand sculptural tradition into a more complex character by evoking a range of figures from popular culture. As Quinn Latimer has observed of this series, “Melty, molten…figures evince both menace and levity: part Darth Vader, part Pillsbury Doughboy. Outsized, they put the viewer at a disadvantage.’

 

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Antony Gormley Blind Light (2007)

 

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Rachel Whiteread Three Ghosts (2008)
‘Three casts of a doll’s house made out of glass, ghostly and gleaming, like a miniature palaces of ice. And as if fulfilling some childhood fantasy, you can see right through the walls into every room, even when the doors are closed – looking down translucent corridors into all these shining chambers of the mind.’

 

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Ed Atkins Death Mask 3 (2011)

 

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Marike Schreiber Setup with ghost (2013)
lab stand, two high accuracy laser devices, blanket, pedestal, photo background

 

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Wendell Castle Ghost Clock (1985)
‘At first glance Ghost Clock appears to be a grandfather clock hidden under a white sheet. However, a closer look reveals a masterful deception: this entire sculpture was hand-carved from a single block of laminated mahogany. With its meticulous detail, Castle re-created in wood the contours of soft, supple cloth, then completed the illusion by bleaching the “drapery” white and staining the base of the “clock” a walnut brown. This work is the last in a series of thirteen clocks the artist created in the 1980s; like the others, it has an inner mechanism.’

 

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Biangle Studio Ghost Ship (2019)
‘The illusion is created with the help of mist fountains anchored beneath the surface of the water. The hazy sails are brought to life using lighting projected from a nearby platform.’

 

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Chulayarnnon Siriphol Ghost Orb (2007)
‘It is believed that when humans or animals pass away, they are turned into spirits lingering and drifting in the human world unseen to the human eye. However photography has been a mysterious medium that could capture more than we see. Photographs sometimes display traces of orbs on them, ranging in many shades of colors from white, red, blue, purple to green where many believe that these orbs are traces of the spirit’s entity and would often have a relationship or a special bond to the subjects in the photographs. This phenomenon is known as Ghost Orb.’

 

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Tom Friedman Ghosts and UFOs: Projections for Well-Lit Spaces​ (2017)
‘Usually, the minimum condition for projecting a video is that the room is dark or at least in semidarkness. Not in Tom Friedman’s case. The videos in this exhibition—the American artist’s first works in the medium—are conceived to be displayed in fully illuminated spaces. The projected images are mostly simple outlines of light in motion, white on white walls: an ovoid that slowly rotates on an axis (One Minute Egg, 2017); the silhouette of a man—the artist—walking (Guardian, 2017); a simulated blazing sun (Sun, 2017). Friedman contrived the unusual approach after he witnessed squares of sunshine refracted by a window onto a wall in his home. One of the most alluring works in the show, Shaky Window, 2017, reproduces precisely this phenomenon, to unsettling effect. Observing what appears to be slanted daylight, one’s first impulse is to look around in search of a window that isn’t there.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Happy weekend to you, David! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thank you for digging in. ** Steve Erickson, Hello. Everyone, Head over here at your convenience to read Steve Erickson’s take on von Trier’s DANCER IN THE DARK aka LvT’s tipping point into awfulness, if you ask me, on the something-th anniversary of its birth, and then veer over here when you see fit to read his take on the film SPACESHIP EARTH, which will start streaming next Friday. Nice seeming and timely bandcamp score. Everyone, Oh, wait, there’s more Erickson still. He, in his words, ‘commemorated surviving this dreadful month by making a Spotify playlist of the best new music [he] heard in April here‘. Bon weekend! ** Bill, Hi. Another bandcamp raider. I somehow spaced on the special occasion there, damn, and now it’s tomorrow. My day was even more of a big fat almost nothing, man, so no sweat. But, yeah, I’ll try to be interesting ‘again’ by Monday as well. ** Misanthrope, Hey. It might be interesting to make being worshipped a real challenge-type thing and act as stupid and horrible and jackass-like as possible and watch your worshipper struggle to see your silver lining. But that does sound like a lot of work as well as the synopsis of a really low brow comedy movie. Ouch, stay off that rebellious ankle, obvs. I am going to endeavor to find things that are out of the ordinary to experience and possibly remark upon on the next two scrunched days, yes. You as well. Happy you’re liking the Sebald, natch. You are a jack-in-the-box of the unexpected, yes! ** Nick Toti, Well, thank you and only you. I hope the comments materialise. Have a fine coupla days. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. Already? Ha ha, I had the idea for my new novel eight years ago or something, so a possibly doable new fiction idea is quite the long awaited sort of thing. I’m all about/into germination post-idea and pre-enactment. Totally natural and excessively (even) important. If Mozart is classical music’s Beatles, who would be classical music’s Elvis and Rolling Stones and, uh, Jefferson Airplane? Good to read that your dad’s spirits and wit are functioning properly. As always, all good wishes possible to him and you and you guys. ** Okay. Boo! See you on Monday.

DIEDIEMAOMAO Presents… 5 New Videos by Nick Toti

DieDieMaoMao is a semi-anonymous, loosely organized filmmaking collective whose most active/visible member is the Los Angeles-based filmmaker, Nick Toti. In addition to producing Toti’s recent work, DieDieMaoMao is also involved in DVD production/distribution and has hosted numerous screenings of work by DIY/underground filmmakers.

For more, please visit: vimeo.com/diediemaomao
For updates, join the DieDieMaoMao mailing list HERE

 

5 New Works by Produced & Directed Nick Toti

#1 – KILL, KOBEK… KILL!

Toti: This project came about around the time I finished another collaboration with the author Jarett Kobek. He asked if I would be interested in documenting his attempts to pick public fights with right wing media personalities as part of the promotional efforts for his new book, Only Americans Burn in Hell. We spent about three months in the fall of 2019 reaching out to conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens trying to find anyone who would be willing to have the Kobek on their shows. Would Kobek defeat his enemies on their own turf or suffer the humiliation of public defeat? Either way, it sounded fun to me. The end result is a self-deprecating exploration of the state of publishing in America, the death of democracy, and the theological values of failure. On a formal level, I was interested in making something that had the sort of dumb, self-consciously dark or “evil” aesthetic qualities of black metal. Kobek plays around with these ideas in his book too, so it seemed appropriate for this project. In fact, the whole movie turned into a kind of distillation/ rearrangement of the various themes and sensibilities of Kobek’s book.

 

#2 – Vive la fantaisie / Ceci n’est pas une fantaisie

Toti: My friends Lily and Simon are a married couple who perform around Los Angeles as a harp/cello duo called Strange Interlude. We had been talking about collaborating on something for a few months and eventually made this. The piece they’re playing is by Camille Saint-Saëns, though it was originally written for violin and harp. Apparently, in some classical music circles, switching instruments for a piece like this is considered controversial or iconoclastic, so I wanted to approach the video with a similarly subtle sense nose-thumbing. I liked the idea of taking imagery that’s stereotypically “French” (the colors of the French flag, the Pierrot figure from the commedia dell’arte, etc.) but then perverting it into something totally meaningless. The whole video also has this slightly disorienting quality because you can’t quite tell where the live music is coming from due to the dual screens. These little games make filmmaking (an otherwise unrewarding process full of countless disappointments, in my experience) much more fun.

 

#3 – JORDAN CASTRO READS 12 POEMS BY JORDAN CASTRO

Toti: This footage was shot the same night as Megan Boyle’s epic reading of her novel Liveblog. I happened to also record a reading by Jordan Castro (who was one of Boyle’s opening acts at the same event), which I found completely charming. I really love his deadpan delivery, and you can tell that he’s completely controlling the room despite the fact that he presents himself like he’s embarrassed to be there or something. For some reason, about fifteen months after shooting this footage, I got the idea to make this little movie. The screen-within-a-screen is actually the livestream that Megan Boyle was shooting all night from her laptop. I first added it in to help cover up some of the sound issues I had with my camera that night, but then I liked how it looked with the second screen in the corner, so I kept it. Jordan is also reading off his phone, so there’s actually three screens featuring these poems at the same time (which seems appropriate for these “alt lit” writers).

 

#4 – SO WHAT?

Toti: I went to college with a guy named Franklin Cline who’s become a pretty good poet in the time since I first knew him. His first book was published at the end of 2017, and we reconnected when he passed through Los Angeles on a reading tour. He lives in Milwaukee now, which is coincidentally a city that I’ve had to visit numerous times over the past two years while working on a documentary about the local musician Sigmund Snopek III. Franklin and I try to hang out when we can, and one of these times I interviewed him on a whim. At the end of the interview, I asked him if he wanted to recite a poem, which he did without hesitation. I made this short video from that footage while I was teaching myself the updated layout of a new version of Adobe Premiere (specifically, I was getting used to the changes in how one adds text to a video). It’s probably worth mentioning that Franklin’s book is titled So What and every poem in it is also titled “So What.”

 

#5 – RINGU: MEME ORIGINS

Toti: This is the outlier of my recent work because it’s the one that most resembles a “normal movie” (which is to say: it has actors playing characters from a script, a crew, decent equipment, etc.). We actually shot the movie three years ago, but it was only released online a couple months ago after an extremely underwhelming festival run (out of about thirty festival submissions, it only played one). The backstory of the movie is that a friend of mine–an incredibly smart/talented nonfiction writer with no prior screenwriting experience–decided to write a short screenplay. He sent it to me, and I thought it was incredibly funny in a very odd way that I had never quite seen before. I didn’t really want to make the movie myself, but I also felt certain that no one else ever would. So I decided to do it just because I wanted this thing to exist. My thought going in was that, in order to work, the movie would have to look as “competent” as possible (which clearly is not usually a priority for me). Despite my usual DIY working methods, I have a decent number of respectable film industry connections, and I exploited every one of them for this project. I love how the movie turned out, but making it was a complete drag–I much prefer keeping things as small as possible. As for the movie itself, it’s set in the same world as those Ring movies about haunted videotapes, but instead of a horror movie, it’s an absurdist comedy about memes–both in their popular online form and the more cultural/scientific usage (i.e. memetics). It has a twist ending that only a small minority of viewers seem to appreciate. This was another one of my little personal games: When the project began, the ending was culturally relevant; as time passes, the meme loses its meaning and falls into obscurity. The whole movie a a recycling of dead cultural objects.

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GLOBAL PANDEMIC BONUS PACK: 5 Older Works Produced by Nick Toti

If anyone simply can’t get enough content while under quarantine, here are some older works that Nick Toti produced (or associate produced) but didn’t direct. Most of these were made in Austin, Texas between 2012-2015. Chris Knudsen’s movie was made in New York City from 2015-2017.

 

#1 – YOU ARE YOUR BODY / YOU ARE NOT YOUR BODY
Directed by Matt Latham, 2014

 

#2 – MASTER CLASS
Written & Directed by Justin Wright Neufeld, 2015

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5:

Episode 6:

Episode 7:

Episode 8:

Episode 9:

Episode 10:

 

#3 – IT FELT GOOD TO HAVE THIS PAIN
Written & Directed by Matt Latham, 2012

 

#4 – DISENCHANTED
Directed by Galen Church, 2013
Produced by NeuSpaceChurch Productions

 

#5 – there is no god and he will kill us all
Directed by Christopher Scott Knudsen, 2017

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Those of you who frequent this location have come to know the work of the fantastic LA-based filmmaker Nick Toti given that he has generously had the world cyber-premieres of a couple of his feature films right here in my humble abode. Today he returns to give us a potpourri of short films, both his and ones he has produced, starring both total strangers and lit. superstars like Jarrett Kobek and Justin Castro. And that’s your cue to use today start working your way through the filmic gifts, and I hope you will. Thanks, all, and mightiest thanks to Nic himself! ** Milk, Hi, Milk. Well, it depends on what real means. Those profile texts and comments are real, written by them and just line edited by me in some cases for concision. On the other hand, having spent a lot of time in the slave/master sites gathering those profiles for the last many years, I think it’s very safe to say that, oh, 90 or more % of what they say they actually want and say they do or have done is just a bunch of guys fantasising aloud with and to each other because, let’s face it, if even a fraction of what they want/do/have done was authentic, there’d be tons of missing persons and dead bodies all over the place and all sorts of real world consequences, and those sites would not just be sitting out there with no outside interference. So there’s my educated guess. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, a very magnanimous slave, that one. And, yes, that accusation is well known about over here. ** Bill, Talk about creative use of the pandemic! We could all learn a lesson from those wild-brained horndogs. May your ambivalence justifiably transform you into the blushing bride of your brilliant ideas! I’ve got a couple of streaming things on the agenda for today unless I decide to end up just wasting my time as per more usual. What were yours? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Everyone, a two-bie from Mr. Erickson today. (1) He’s proud of this brief stab at writing horror movie soundtrack music. (2) He has reviewed Quentin Dupieux’s film ‘Deerskin’. Have at them! I’m telling you, the pandemic has turned the S&M set into Dostoyevskys. I’m excited for ‘Medea’. Hopefully today. ** Misanthrope, He wins yesterday’s prize for stick-to-it-ive-ness. If we don’t count the ‘successfully’ ‘snuffed’ ones. Well, what about you, George? Don’t you feel like being worshipped? Hm, dilemma there re: your invitation. Are there cops cruising the streets looking for excessively long distance drivers? Mozart! Or … Mozart?! ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Yes, the slaves are using their lockdowns as golden opportunities to burst with creativity unlike us, or unlike me at least. They should do Zoom tutorials. Huh. About the print. Yes, several years ago that print was supposed to get a theater release here followed by a Blu/Ray DVD, and I don’t know what happened. I wish I was still in touch with Guillaume des Forêts, the star, who you might recall I met and had a long amazing talk with soon after I moved here. Anyway, I haven’t dug into the rarefilmm print yet. Today. Definitely way too early to know what the fiction idea would be or if it will progress past the interesting seeming idea stage. I’m working on it though. So far so pretty good. Are you working on your novel? Yes, RIP Tony Allen. What a big loss. A serious genius, that guy. I had the massively great fortune to see Africa 70 live in Amsterdam in the mid-80s, and whoa! ** Right. Nick Toti is your go-to for today, as I explained, and give yourself the pleasure, folks, and do pass along any thoughts, even slight, to Nick in your comments should any thoughts occur to you, thank you very much. See y’all tomorrow.

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