Month: May 2023 (Page 5 of 13)

 

‘As a writer Rosalyn Drexler enjoyed considerable success during the 1960s and ’70s. Her many novels were critically well received, she won Obies for three of her plays, and an Emmy for a Lily Tomlin special. As a visual artist, however, Drexler was less successful, unfortunately experiencing what George Kubler would have called a “bad entrance.” In The Shape of Time (1962} Kubler explains that an individual artist’s success will often depend less on temperament, talent, and training than on luck, on where in the artistic tradition “his biological opportunity coincides.” The artist whose temperament coincides with the early stage of a tradition is luckier than the one who follows later. With regard to timing, at least, Drexler would appear to have been very fortunate. She began using popular imagery late in 1961 at precisely the same time as Warhol, Lichtenstein, and the other celebrated pioneers of the Pop movement. Although Drexler is mentioned in the early histories of Pop, she received little serious attention at the time. As Robert Storr so nicely put it in a recent reappraisal of her work for a Rosenwald­ Wolf Gallery catalogue, “It is the fate of some artists to arrive at the station on time, and still find themselves being left on the platform as the train pulls away without them.” Drexler’s problem was two-fold. Firstly, her work was not consistent with period taste.

‘Her themes were hot in an era of cool. And what was perhaps worse, her works evoked narratives at a time when the art world seemed to have accepted critic Clement Greenberg’s judgment that stories belonged to literature, not the visual arts. Her second problem was gender. In the sixties art was still a male domain, as the pronoun in the Kubler quote above will attest.

‘Drexler’s bigger problem, as it turned out, was that she was too early. The train on which she belonged would not arrive at the station for another two decades. This train would not only welcome women passengers as a result of the feminist movement of the 1970s but had a special car for the Metro Pictures stable of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Robert Longo whose interests were very similar to Drexler’s. Longo’s Men in the Cities series, in particular, closely resembled her early work and was often mistaken as such. It was in the context of these developments of the 1970s and early ’80s that a serious reassessment of Drexler’s pioneering work was not only possible but mandatory.

‘Drexler began making visual art in the early 1950s while living in Berkeley, California, where Sherman was finishing his art degree. An early and unrecognized participant in the assemblage movement that would shortly blossom in the Bay kea, Los Angeles, and New York, she began producing art with trash found at home and in the city streets in order to create a kind of true-to-life museum in her home. In 1955-56 she and Sherman had a two­ person exhibition at the Courtyard Gallery. Unlike the well-known Bay kea assemblers, such as Bruce Conner, whose use of junk represented an implicit rejection of American postwar consumerism, Drexler had no social agenda. Nor was she even aware of the budding San Francisco Renaissance centered at the City Lights Bookstore, although she knew its most famous participant, Allen Ginsberg. “If there was a burgeoning counterculture in the SF area,” she claims, “I didn’t know about it. I wasn’t part of anything. I was a loner.” On the subject of her work, she said at the time, “I perform rescue work (in memory of the death of the Little Tin Soldier who was lost forever in a sewer). I peruse the sewer with wonder and love.”

‘In order to accentuate the fragile, messy lives of her poignant incarnations of the human condition-such as Pregnant Princess and Grown-up Lolita Doll, both late 1950s-she began adding touches of raw plaster and crude color.

‘In 1960, shortly after her return to New York, she showed her sculpture at the recently opened Reuben Gallery, where Allan Kaprow and his Rutgers colleagues in Fluxus exhibited. Drexler was given an exhibition on the recommendation of the critic-turned-dealer Ivan Karp, whom she had recently met at an exhibition and who was arguably the best-informed observer of the avant-garde scene in the city at the time. Through Karp, Drexler began socializing with a number of the established and emerging artists of various stripes, from Elaine de Kooning to Donald Judd to Andy Warhol, who made a small series of silkscreen paintings after a Polaroid he took of her dressed as a wrestler.

‘Drexler gave up sculpture in 1961, despite the encouragement and recommendation of David Smith, partly because “it became too difficult to lug that stuff around.” She turned, instead, to painting themes borrowed from popular culture. “I was very guilty about it,” she later admitted, “achieving something not out of your [own) head. Little did I know [this technique] would become so hot.” As her remarks indicate, she began to appropriate popular materials not because of the contemporaneous examples of artists such as Lichtenstein and Warhol-to which Karp introduced her shortly after she began working with similar sources-but because of the same confluence of art-world influences that led them and others almost simultaneously to recognize the value of popular imagery as a lingua franca, most important of which was the permissive examples provided by Rauschenberg and Johns. And for Drexler, the use of “what I, a homemaker, had available in the house: magazines, posters, etc.” was a natural extension of her approach to sculpture.

‘Drexler clipped images from magazines and newspapers, attached them to canvas or board and then selectively painted out details with acrylics to emphasize the essential action, which she ordinarily set against a contrasting, largely empty monochromatic ground. She soon learned how to enlarge copies on paper, which she also attached to canvas and overpainted. This also meant that she could consider a larger range of source materials, which now included books on Hollywood and photographs borrowed from the library.’ — Bradford R. Collins

 

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Further

Rosalyn Drexler @ Wikipedia
Rosalyn Drexler: Wrestling Feminist in the Pop Art World
Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?
Rosalyn Drexler: An Imagination at Work
Prudence Peiffer on Rosalyn Drexler
Rosalyn Drexler’s Noir Paintings
Caught Up in Rosalyn Drexler’s Dramatic Moments
Rosalyn Drexler Does Not Look Back
Rosalyn Drexler with John Yau
‘Dear’, by Rosalyn Drexler
Rosalyn Drexler: Varieties of Reclamation
Rosalyn Drexler @ goodreads
Rosalyn Drexler: “You couldn’t have known my work. How could you?”
Sad and Bad and Mad: The Fiction of Rosalyn Drexler
ROSALYN DREXLER IS PRETTY GREAT

 

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Extras

Artist Talk: Rosalyn Drexler

Seductive Subversion: Rosalyn Drexler

Excerpts from an interview with Rosalyn Drexler

 

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The novels
from The Reading Experience

 

‘Perhaps it is because her most lasting accomplishment may turn out to be her paintings that Rosalyn Drexler is now so very little known as a writer of fiction. Although she did attract attention with her novels in the 1970s, and her plays gained notice for their association with the “theater of the ridiculous,” a kind of variation on theater of the absurd, it seems safe to say that for most current readers and critics Rosalyn Drexler has almost no name recognition. Perhaps the novels to an extent seem dated, their cultural references and lingo too stuck in the 60s and 70s (although ultimately they are not at all trying to “capture” their era in any direct way). Or perhaps Drexler has simply been overshadowed by the already established experimental writers of her time, most of whom are male, even at a time when efforts are regularly made, by academics and publishers, to maintain attention on neglected women writers.

‘Still, that little effort has been made to refocus our attention on the fiction of Rosalyn Drexler remains rather surprising, for her novels are indeed singular achievements, adventurous works that are entirely worthy of comparison with the other heterodox writing of the period that has persisted in the cultural memory. Moreover, while Drexler’s work is not feminist in a directly political way, it most assuredly does provide a representation of women and their circumstances that feminist critics ought to find deeply resonant (something that could be said about Drexler’s paintings as well). And if many of the novels do indeed reflect the social and cultural tendencies of their time, they also use those tendencies to render more broadly and enduringly relevant accounts of women freely expressing their own versions of their lived experience and in the process freeing themselves of the versions imposed by others.

‘The best illustration of this perhaps is her third novel, To Smithereens (1972), which features a lady wrestler as protagonist and is perhaps her best known work of fiction, largely because it draws on Drexler’s own experience as a wrestler before she became established as an artist. As in many of the paintings, here Drexler uses the iconography associated with this figure from popular culture to evoke attitudes and beliefs about the pervasive violence of American culture and the confused state of relations between men and women. The latter is signaled in the novel’s first scene, narrated by Rosa (later to be proclaimed “Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire”), who in a movie theater encounters a “creep” in the next seat rubbing his hand on her thigh. Rosa is duly annoyed, expressing her annoyance by lashing out at him, yet agrees to have coffee with him after the movie and then goes to his apartment, where soon she waits for him in the bedroom: “I took off my clothes and lay on top of the blanket, still as death, one arm dangling off the side of the mattress; I knew I looked beautiful that way; soft, receptive, passively offering my body. . . .”

‘The creep is (once again) named Paul, in this case an art critic, and he and Rosa are soon a couple. But while in this scene Rosa chooses to be sexually passive, throughout the novel she continues to exhibit both the aggressiveness she displayed in the movie theater (and which presumably she channels in her short career as a wrestler) and a more conventional acceptance of gendered sexual roles. (When she decides to try wrestling Rosa discovers a lesbian subculture among the women wrestlers, but she does not take part.) Still, while Paul in a sense is trying to exploit Rosa for his own enjoyment when he encourages her to try wrestling, his efforts to control her cannot succeed, as he himself acknowledges:

Rosa did not conform to any idea I had conceived of her in advance. She related to me with the same sense of immediacy and beauty that the artist experiences in relation to her material. She was molding me on behalf of the vast world of being she existed in; while I had foolishly believed it was I who was shaping her.

‘The point of view in To Smithereens alternates between Paul and Rosa (with the usual additional interpolated documents), and this provides overall a somewhat more detached perspective from which the reader can contemplate the comic verbal collage Drexler has assembled, although undoubtedly Rosa emerges from the novel a character as forceful as Paul himself finds her. The novel does not really dwell much on Rosa’s actual time in the wrestling ring (only one match is recounted at any length), preferring just to introduce us to the colorful characters with whom Rosa interacts and to create a female character who embodies in her life the “sense of immediacy and beauty that the artist experiences in relation to her material” but has perhaps not yet quite found the best “material” in which to express it.

‘The Cosmopolitan Girl (1974) is the last of the original series of novels that made Drexler known as a writer as well as an artist. (It is available. along with I Am The Beautiful Stranger and One or Another, in a volume simply called Three Novels, published by Verbivoracious Press, the only fiction by Drexler officially in print.) This might be called Drexler’s weirdest novel (an accomplishment in itself). Certainly it is the most openly surreal, featuring a protagonist with a talking dog, a dog she winds up marrying to boot. While this blending of Kafka and Helen Gurley Brown is alternately kooky and spooky, perhaps it also represents Drexler’s most faithful translation of the Pop sensibility characteristic of her paintings to fiction, provoking equal parts disquiet, amusement, and something like annoyance. It can be difficult to decide whether we should find Helen Jones a sympathetic character just attempting to find happiness in the big wide world, or an appalling freak. Perhaps she is both. The media image of the Cosmo Girl becomes not exactly the object of satire, nor is it celebrated as a fabulous icon of popular culture, although certainly Drexler does occasionally have fun with it:

At home I walk around with no clothes on at all (depending on whether the steam is up). I do not bother to pull down the shade. If someone in the building opposite wants to look, he’s welcome. If someone doesn’t like it, that’s his problem. I do what makes me feel good. . .but not always. It’s a hard rule to follow because sometimes I’m not sure what does please me.

‘The Cosmopolitan Girl can be regarded as the completion of an initial quartet of singular but aesthetically consistent novels that introduce both a thematically and formally complex literary practice Drexler continues to pursue in her later fiction but that probably is carried out most successfully in these four novels. Unquestionably it would be warranted to claim Drexler’s project as part of post-60s feminism, but the women characters in these novels are neither unequivocal champions of equality nor emblematic figures exemplifying the inherent virtues of their gender. Ultimately each of these characters is emblematic only of herself, although they do have enough similarities that they collectively comprise a kind of Drexlerian prototype: autonomous, but not without a lingering dependency, self-aware but also at times willfully capricious.’

Buy ‘To Smithereens’
Buy ‘The Cosmopolitan Girl’
Buy ‘Three Novels’

 

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Rosalyn Drexler speaks
from Artforum

 

It’s wonderful to be having a retrospective, like being a star again! Of course you also want to just run away.The show belongs to the people who created it now. It’s going to be wonderful, and then it’s going to be past, like all things. I’m going to try to be in the moment. Some of these artworks have been gone from me for fifty years. I’ve seen reproductions of them and wondered who did them, and thought, That’s pretty clever! So to see them all together will be incredible—one painting referring to another emotionally, and what was happening in my life at the time.

I don’t think my paintings were seen much back in the 1960s. It was the time for Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism; Pop was just beginning to rear its huge, glittering head. My work was a secret kind of thing. I was very close to the Abstract Expressionists, and to the women I worked with when we started Women in the Arts—but no one realized I was a painter because I was writing about painting. I was happy being productive and having good friends and being ignored. But now I’m getting angry about it, looking back!

I never thought about careers. I was even a wrestler for awhile. I learned how to look ominous and on top of things as I strode around the ring from corner to corner. But the truth is I hated it. I thought, Well, the experience should not be wasted—I should at least get a book out of it. I was also a waitress, cigarette girl, hatcheck, masseuse, anything to earn a living. And in between it all I was giving birth, writing books and plays, doing paintings, and going to parties. I met my husband Sherman when I was eighteen, married at nineteen, first kid when I was twenty and I was off to the races. I was married for sixty-nine years.

Our closest friends were Franz Kline, and Bill and Elaine de Kooning, and they used up all the oxygen in the room, they were such heavy hitters. I thought painting was serious and wonderful, but I couldn’t put myself in that class. I was divided; I must have really thought of myself as a writer. My books were doing very well, getting published and critiqued. And there wasn’t a lot of interest in my painting, so I didn’t have that same kind of encouragement that I think you need. And I had no idea that what I was doing would interest anybody deeply.

I never studied art. But my parents exposed me to it from an early age. A newspaper had a special: For twenty-five cents you could get art posters and books, and my mother bought me Turner seascapes, Dickens, Twain. And my father took me to a museum once and showed me a Chardin peach. I couldn’t understand how wonderful that peach was. Later, my husband would take me by the shoulders in a museum, and we would exchange ideas.

I’m still painting. My husband was dying in 2014, and I was with him almost all the time, and then I would go into my studio and start a painting. He was a great critic, and I was able to share the making of these works with him. And now I have to get over the mourning, the sorrow, and I suppose that will bring a whole new kind of work.

There’s a narrative thread going through all my work. It may not be seen but it’s in my head, like a kind of music. I get an idea to paint, and then I get ideas by painting. Some of the works do tell a story, but it’s not like sitting down and telling a story, or even using one word, like some artists today. I don’t use words in painting because I use words in books and articles.

My love of art—an exuberance and a feeling that I wanted to do something, that I wanted to express myself—comes from when I was young. I wanted to be a writer even though I had only written one paragraph. A friend introduced me to a publisher who said, “I like what you’ve written so far, and I’m coming back in two years—give me a novel.” To start, I told myself: Just be honest, say something that means something, and amuse yourself. Well, how do you do that? So I had to find out.

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Charalampos Tzanakis, Hi. Montparnasse isn’t as pretty as Pere Lachaise by far, but it is packed with greats. I used to really like the Curve song ‘Coast Is Clear’. I saw them live once, and there was something about them that made me suspicious, I don’t remember what. Wow, I hope your Crete move went very smoothly. Mm, no, I think I’ve maximised whatever LA held for me creatively, not that I wouldn’t be able to write there, but I think I’m more interested in being away from there apart from visits. But I was there for a really long time. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, as cool as the haunted house I imagine my grave would be, I’m definitely not ready to sacrifice myself for it. I want to get a text like that! All love has to do for me today is to keep reminding me to print out some tax documents and sign them and FedEx them to the guy doing my taxes for me by 5 pm, ugh, G. ** David Ehrenstein, I am, of course, in total agreement with you. ** Minet, Hi. Ha ha, my favorite Rohmer film is one you don’t like: ‘The Green Ray’. I also really like the one that most other Rohmer fans don’t like: ‘Perceval le Gallois’. It’s true, people here seem to be talking about Rohmer a lot more recently. Curious, but good. I do like Hong Sang-Soo, yes. I think he’s even said Rohmer was a huge influence on him. How was the party? Hard to imagine you weren’t a big hit there given your magnificent sounding style choice. Who doesn’t like a ’77 street hustler! ** Wheeler Winston Dixon, Hi! Oh, it’s a great pleasure and honor to have you here. Amazing, that footage, but how tragic that it’s lost. I only had the chance to meet him once. His book ‘Taylor Mead on Amphetamine and in Europe’ is so great. Someone really needs to republish that. Thank you so much for commenting. Everyone, the blog had the honor of being intersected by the great filmmaker Wheeler Winston Dixon over the weekend. I did a post about his work, here, if you don’t know his work or, of course, if you do. ** Darbz, Hi. Typing while suppressing giggles must be hard work. So, I nailed you with my first guess! What were the odds. Sounds like you might want to be the protector of that boy in the program. Either that or stay far away from him. Hard to pick. My day has just started, so who knows. If you mean yesterday, I saw friends. We drank coffee while looking at the Seine. It was very nice. Oh, I’m 6’1″ so almost everyone seems short to me. I’m a bad judge. I keep trying to talk writers I know into titling their next book ‘Dead Kid’s Ass’ because that’s what I wanted to title my second poetry book before all of my friends talked me out of it, so maybe name your snake Dead Kid’s Ass? ** A, Thomas knows how to make a post. I fact, I think I will be getting one by him very shortly. New with me? Really, I’m just in limbo waiting to start editing the film. Everything just seems hazy right now. I’ve had good Greek food in Paris. I don’t think there are all that many venues featuring it here, but I’ve been satisfied, I think. I went to Greece once in, mm, I think the early 00s. I was in Athens and then about five islands. I didn’t like Athens at all. But seeing the very pollution-yellowed Acropolis on that hill in the middle of the very polluted city was kind of depressingly profound. I liked Santorini a lot, but who doesn’t. ** Misanthrope, For a long time I thought Animal Collective just made up that name Merriweather Post Pavilion. You will be having Freddy dreams for the rest of your very short life, yes. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. Good to see ya. I’m fine. Writers I know who have kids tend to tell me it takes about two years to get totally back in full-on writer’s mode. I’ll be in Paris all summer because I’ll be editing Zac’s and my new film pretty much every day from morning til night. Well, you managed to produce a recent piece! Excited to read it. Everyone, Very fine writer Ian Townsend has a new short fiction piece up at the tragical site, and I highly recommend you hit it up. It’s here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Taylor Mead is the epitome of the term singularity. Ongoing sorriness about Leeds’s slumping. Hugs. Yeah, I was never into the Spice Girls for even a fraction of a second. ** Steve Erickson, I ran into Udo Kier a few times when he lived in LA — maybe he still does — and he was always a least a little plotzed and it was almost always at the check out counter of some store where he was shouting at the clerk ‘Don’t you know who I am?!’. Everyone, Here’s Mr. Erickson’s review of Kassa Overall’s “excellent” jazz-rap album ANIMALS. Big up re: the lightbulb! ** Jamie, Hi. My weekend was pleasant and mostly uneventful apart from a more than pleasant meet up with friends. Nice about the Luther Price screening, yes. When I was in LA during the film preproduction I saw Balthazar Clementi host a screening of his dad’s totally amazing film ‘À l’ombre de la canaille bleue’, and that was great, but it had English subtitles. Taylor Mead is great one to investigate in depth should the mood strike. Next time you’re in Paris I’m going to make you come over and make me nachos. I have to do a bunch of paperwork for my taxes today so Monday might have a fairly big dollop of the manic within it. And yours? Parsimonious love, Dennis. ** Nick., Hi! It’s me again too! What a coincidence! Oh, shit, I’m glad you’ve put yourself back together successfully. Sorry about the near-murderous interlude. But it’s good to be shaken up or to hence be made to know right from wrong better or something maybe? Did your today hint at anything great? ** Nightcrawler, Her stuff in the 60s and 70s was pretty great, but now she’s a machine. But more power to her, you know. I don’t have AC so even indoors and even with movies as a companion is not the solution, but it’ll be sorted. Warhol’s films are great. I recommend ‘Chelsea Girls’ and ‘Lonesome Cowboys’ as starting places. I didn’t hit that film screening yet, but there are still a few days left to go. Tomorrow, I’m thinking. ** malcolm, Nice about the premiere! Yes, a screener would be most welcome whenever a screener becomes a thing. I have a bad habit, or maybe it’s a time saving device, of never looking for comments on the older posts, but if Alan Boyce possibly commented I will definitely make a beeline backwards. Huh. Annie’s makes vegan Mac & Cheese? Zac is obsessed with Annie’s M&C. Whenever we go to the States, he always brings back, like, ten boxes of it in his suitcase. You can’t buy it here. There’s something in the cheese sauce that’s illegal in France. (?!) Of course I’m a million percent encouraging re: your huge love letter monument to your friend. Might the public get a peek, or is it too personal? Love is good. Wow, is that like the most uninteresting sentence ever? But it’s true. See you soon! ** Today I’m putting all the blog’s eggs in the basket of the pop-expanding painter and novelist Rosalyn Drexler who I thought you should know or at least know exists if you don’t. Be at it, please. Thank you. See you tomorrow.

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‘Taylor Mead, an underground cinema legend whose comic charm and sense of the surreal inspired Andy Warhol and other seminal figures in the alternative film world, died in early May, 2013 in Denver. He was 88. A fixture of bohemian New York who was also a poet and artist, Mead was visiting family in Colorado when he had a stroke, said his niece, Priscilla Mead.

‘Called “the Charlie Chaplin of the 1960s underground,” Mead was an elfin figure with kewpie-doll eyes who appeared, by his count, in 130 films, starting with the 1960 art house classic The Flower Thief. In a review for the Village Voice, film critic J. Hoberman pronounced him “the first underground movie star.” He later became one of Warhol’s first superstars, appearing in films such as Tarzan and Jane Regained … Sort Of and Lonesome Cowboys. He also was known for his work in Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man and Robert Downey Sr.’s Babo 73. Indie auteur Jim Jarmusch, who cast Mead in a moving vignette that closed his 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes, considered Mead one of his heroes.

‘A dropout from a life of privilege, Mead allied himself with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other early leaders of the San Francisco Beat scene of the 1950s before settling in New York to eke out a living as a member of its thriving arts underground. He was a familiar face on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he wandered the streets with a notebook, read his poetry in coffeehouses – often against a background of a Charles Mingus recording – and fed feral cats in the predawn hours.

‘”Taylor was a spark who inspired filmmakers, poets and artists on both coasts,” said Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, which sponsored a Mead retrospective last fall. “He saw his life as his art and his art as his life and didn’t separate them the way we do today.” He was the subject of Excavating Taylor Mead, a 2005 documentary by William Kirkley that knits the actor’s personal history with later struggles to hold on to his decrepit New York apartment and maintain his free-spirited life.

‘Born on the last day of 1924 in Grosse Pointe, Mich., Mead was the son of a wealthy businessman and his socialite wife who divorced before he was born. He floated through boarding schools and a number of colleges before his father found him a job in a brokerage house, which was not to his liking. Openly gay since he was about 12, he left the East Coast in the mid-1950s, hitchhiked to California and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse.

‘Inspired by Pull My Daisy, a short 1959 film based on the Kerouac play Beat Generation, he collaborated with Rice on The Flower Thief, a somewhat haphazardly structured film shot with a handheld camera that features Mead wandering through San Francisco coffeehouses and dives carrying a flower, an American flag and a teddy bear. “There was no plot, no planning,” he told the Philadelphia City Paper in 2005. “It was … extremely spontaneous, and all of us were just crazy anyway.” Village Voice critic J. Hoberman praised it as “the beatnik film par excellence,” with Mead playing “a kind of Zen village idiot.”

‘In 1964, before Warhol was a pop-art mega-celebrity, he invited Mead on a road trip to California for the opening of a gallery show. They wound up making Tarzan and Jane Regained…Sort Of, a spoof of Hollywood adventure movies that was Warhol’s first partially scripted feature. It starred Mead as a Hollywood Tarzan cavorting with a naked Jane in a bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hotel, exercising on Venice Beach and having a bicep-flexing contest with Dennis Hopper as a rival Tarzan. Mead would appear in about 10 Warhol films over the next decade, including a curious 76-minute piece featuring his naked rear end.

‘Calling himself “a drifter in the arts,” Mead also acted on stage, winning an Obie Award in 1963 for his performance in the Frank O’Hara play The General Returns From One Place to Another. He published poetry and three volumes of his journals, displayed his art in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and read his poems weekly at Manhattan’s Bowery Poetry Club. “His whole campaign was, stay creative, active, busy. And he did,” said filmmaker and friend Clayton Patterson.

‘He made his biggest splash in decades in 2003 in Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, a loosely connected series of vignettes with a wide-ranging cast including Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop. Critics were moved by Mead’s performance as a janitor on a coffee break who doesn’t want to go back to work. The film ends with Mead closing his eyes to the strains of a favorite Mahler song, which resonated with his colorful past: I am dead to the world’s tumult, / And I rest in a quiet realm! / I live alone in my heaven, / In my love and in my song!’ — Elaine Woo

 

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Quotes

‘Art is all a scandal – life tries to be, Taylor Mead succeeds, and I come close.’ — Tennessee Williams

‘The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy. Nothing is more attractive in a person, but it is extremely rare after the age of 4.’ — Susan Sontag

‘Taylor taught all us little punks from CBGB’s what a real “New York City Star” was.’ — Patti Astor

‘To quote Taylor Mead, the great Taylor Mead, “Enjoy your amateur status”.’ — Al Pacino

‘Once we walked downtown from an event in Times Square, stopping on 6th Ave so he could leer at bodybuilders in a gym on 17th street. Later we headed to Bowery Bar, where his presence produced a Parting of the Red Sea and afforded us entry into a snooty, vile watering-hole for young urban professionals immersed in a particularly repellant form of toxic narcissism that inexplicably enthralled Taylor. As muscle bound Ken Dolls reached around Taylor to grab their brewskies while engaging in besotted mating rituals with assembly-line Barbie Dolls exuding a noxious inbred plasticity, I asked Taylor if this was his idea of “fun.” “These are MY people!” he exclaimed. “You need to get out of the Lower East Side, Nick.” “But THIS IS THE LOWER EAST SIDE, TAYLOR!” I replied.’ — Nick Zedd

‘Taylor Mead is the Shirley Temple of the Underground.’ — Elizabeth Taylor

‘Taylor Mead looks like a cross between a zombie and a kewpie and speaks as if his mind and mouth were full of marshmallow.’ — Orson Welles

‘Taylor said the only comfort he had allowed himself as a child was the logic that even though God surely didn’t like him, that still, if He really hated him, He would have struck him dead.’ — Andy Warhol

‘I used to pretend I was Taylor Mead when I wrote songs. The whole “Blonde on Blonde” record is a Taylor Mead seance.’ — Bob Dylan

‘Oh shit — I’m a mistake.’ — Taylor Mead

 

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Nonfiction

Taylor Mead, The Lower East Side Biography Project

Quentin Crisp in conversation with Taylor Mead

Taylor Mead Remembers Jackie, Candy, & Holly

Taylor Mead, Song to Jake Gyllenhall

Taylor Mead talks about French and American Film Avant-Gardes

Excavating Taylor Mead: Trailer

 

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Interview
from Brooklyn Rail

 

As a witness of a certain time you have your own memory and then there is the history you remember. Could you talk a little about where you come from and your first memory of New York?

Taylor Mead: I’m coming from Detroit; my father was a Von Hindenburg, a Michigan political boss. My mother was high society with no money. They divorced before I was born. I went to boarding schools in Connecticut and grew up in the middle of the tracks as the expression goes. High society on one side and then a father from another background. My mother died when I was 13 and then my father took over. When I moved into downtown Detroit at the time I didn’t know what a great jazz city it was. I was used to a whole different life. I worked in a brokerage house and was fascinated by the stock market. I could have been a very good broker. But there was no nightlife and of course, I had to have nightlife. I had to have a love life. There was nothing. Detroit was a dead city as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t have a private life because my father was The Boss. So I just went away one day and began hitchhiking through the country, traveling through the whole United States and then the world, being thrown in jail and having tremendous experiences.

As I know from Warhol and Hackett’s Popism, you were influenced by Kerouac’s On the Road and by Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

Mead: Who wasn’t? My first influence was from George Bernard Shaw. People kept talking about the movie Pygmalion and I missed seeing it. So I went to the library; I found a book with a preface by Bernard Shaw on parents and children. It talked about how bourgeoisie sent their children to boarding school to get rid of them. All the schizophrenia in the upper-class families just struck me and it opened up my mind. Then I came back to Detroit in time for World War II but I didn’t go into the army because my eye droops. I was very upset because I believed in WWII. I didn’t know it was from an accident at birth because my head is so big and brilliant that the forceps slipped. I didn’t know. The forceps just couldn’t get a grip.

It is a mark of your fate. A special sign.

Mead: I hitchhiked to California and in the mid-50s, when Allen was blossoming, reading “Howl.” I forget when “Howl” came in but it was terribly important. Robert Frank came out with his film Pull my Daisy, which influenced all of us making our first films. I think I may have already visited New York then, coming down for Broadway shows in the 40s. I was afraid of New York. I wanted to go to Cape Cod and look for Tennessee Williams, but then I went through New York one hot summer day and I could see people sitting on their stoops in another world and minding their own business, and I knew that’s where I belonged.

Then came the 50s. In North Beach I knew there was a great excitement in the air and then the police kicked me out of San Francisco because they were doing a storm trooper kind of thing, eliminating non-desirables from the streets, because they knew there was this tremendous beat movement going on. No one gave a shit when we were protesting middle class America. Everyone knew the establishment was bullshit. Before he left office even Eisenhower warned against the military/ industrial complex, the power it had, and that was exactly where I’d come from. The police were down on everybody. They would go around with a big wagon and pick up people off of the street and threaten them and put them in jail. It was horrendous. Then the beat got cool and there was money around and they let up some. And that was 15, 20 years before the “Summer of Love.” The same thing happened in here in the 80s, downtown after the 70s.

Money was around?

Mead: When Allen and Ferlinghetti won a freedom of speech thing with “Howl,” it was terribly important for writers, for artists, for everybody. So I returned and went back to New York.

In the late 50s the coffeehouses were opening. Everyone read poetry. Larry Poons, who is a famous artist who does circles, had this house where poets would read with toilet seats around their necks; they would try to get rid of the audience. They saw me writing in a book all the time so they insisted I read. I was so shy I had to sit at a table to read. Everything I read people responded to tremendously. From then on I got up on stage and couldn’t be stopped. I couldn’t get rid of the audience, so they got rid of me. No, not really!

So you never had the idea of yourself as an actor?

Mead: I was always a star. I was B.A. (before Andy), because Andy discovered me long before I discovered him reading poetry. Woody Allen and Bill Cosby and Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Peter Orlovsky, we were all reading because the poetry in New York in the early 60s was becoming tremendous. So Andy knew about me.

Do you still have any good friends from the 60s time?

Mead: Oh yeah, at funerals. So many died by the time they were 50. There was Charles Henri-Ford, lover of the painter Tchelitchev, he was 94 I think. You find out more about the person you knew at a memorial. People will give wonderful anecdotes of a phase of the person that you didn’t know. Very, very interesting. The last funeral though was for Billy Kluver. We were having a memorial for him just the other week at No Name. A delightful, pseudo ill-tempered man.

Tell us about Warhol’s funeral.

Mead: It was a major event in New York—several thousand people. The people that read were outside the Warhol circle, generally. They had no wild readers, just everyone doing these ordinary things about how wonderful Andy was and how awful we were—those 60s people. Where would Andy be without his movies?

As Jonas Mekas puts it, “What would they have done out on the streets?” He describes Warhol as a psychiatrist who kept everyone together, but without them he wouldn’t have made his movies. He was like a vacuum. One of the lines, he said, “I glued myself together before going out.” Do you know “like a moth to the light”—this beautiful song by Marlene Dietrich?

Mead: He was Marlene Dietrich. He knew what was au courant. He knew what the rich liked too. He was a conduit between the very rich and the people who bought paintings and gave him a great deal of money for his commercials. He was a conduit and he knew what was coming.

So he was a double agent in a way.

Mead: He was always photographing or recording. He was so easy to talk to. He was so demure. Oh yeah, he would talk. We had a big conversation on a plane from La Jolla, California where we made a movie called San Diego Surf. On the plane—I think it was ’68 or so—he outlined my career. 1968 was a very productive year for Andy after Chelsea Girls. We had done three or four movies that year and then I did The Secret Life. I was to be his biggest star with the use of all movie equipment, publishing my book, pushing my paintings, readings of my work. Unfortunately, two days later he was shot. I never brought up the matter of what he promised because he promised people everything anyway.

He changed after that.

Mead: The energy went out of him and he brought in the Countesses and the children of European aristocracy. He felt safer with them. We were sort of left out. We were all excluded. Then Paul and Andy were still close.

Paul Morrissey. Paul was another type.

Mead: Paul Morrissey. Well, I made my first movie with Paul. Before when I tried to introduce him to Andy, he didn’t want to meet Andy. It just happened a couple years later.

What movie was it?

Mead: Taylor Mead Sings and Dances Sort Of. I think it comes to 20 or 30 minutes or something like that, and I’m in a Rolls Royce throwing money out the window. Silly. I made a great film with Peter Beard, Jonas and Adolphas Mekas, Hallelujah The Hills, up in Vermont. It won at the Lacarno Film Festival.

So you traveled around Europe?

Mead: Yeah, my friend Jerome Hill had a villa in Cassis. Forty miles east of Marseilles on the Mediterranean and I was a guest there, along with Peter Beard who would work on putting trip books together. We all did trip books. Anyway then I went to stay in Rome for a year, and showed The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, by Ron Rice, who died at 28 or 29 years old. It is my favorite movie and it’s not by Andy Warhol. It’s B.A., before Andy. In fact it influenced Andy immensely. I showed it to Gallery Tataruga and Gallery Marlborough, to Antonioni, and Moravia wrote a big article. I was very famous in Italy for two weeks. Fifteen minutes plus two weeks.

Did you have the feeling that the Europeans were different from the Americans then?

Mead: A little more elegant. They were more elegant and they were extremely interested. At the cinemathéque in Paris they showed Chelsea Girls and I was with Jean-Jacques Lebel and all the young avant-garde French painters. They all walked out on Chelsea Girls. And I thought what am I doing in la dolce vita land? Chelsea Girls is for real.

What other projects have you been working on lately? You have a couple of films now?

Mead: Yes, there’s The Excavation of Taylor Mead—they didn’t realize that I was going to be excavated. All my things being thrown in the backyard, life is very parallel. All the movies I made came about close to the reality that we were living. These kids are doing a great job of editing. They have a hundred hours that they are editing down to two. Some big companies like Miramax and HBO have a lot of interest. We had a showing at the Angelika, my favorite movie house. And then there’s Curious White Boy by Wright Thomas, which we’ve been making for five years. It’s where I went to boarding school for 50 years because my family doesn’t know what to do with me. It’s been showing around, the most beautiful film you’ll never see. My brother says it is a biography. And there’s Jim Jarmusch’s Cigarettes and Coffee, or Coffee and Cigarettes I can’t remember which. It should be out in May. And then there’s another one made by Sebastiano Piras called Exposing Taylor Mead, or Taylor Mead Unleashed, which is a very charming film.

I find that in general, independent film has filtered into the mainstream Hollywood establishment. With all the different festivals here and there, it’s unlike the time you and Warhol and other people were doing it—when independent films was still made marginally.

Mead: We were sort of uncontrollable. We and Ron Rice were fascinated by the image of the film. His whole thing was picking people and locations and letting us loose and he’d send it to the lab and the moment it came back from the lab we would show it in a coffeehouse and get an immediate response. It was almost like being in a play. Now you work on a film and in a couple of years it comes out. I still love watching myself on screen, even when I’m not in there.

This is very interesting because the process now is much more immediate. We’re sitting here and taping you and can watch it as we are taping it.

Mead: But as a result you make 10 times more film and it takes a couple of years to edit it.

 

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19 of Taylor Mead’s 53 film roles

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Ron Rice The Flower Thief (1960)
‘Experimental filmmaker Ron Rice, whose 16mm $1,000 feature film The Flower Thief (shot in 1959; released in 1960) is one of the signature works of the New American Cinema. Ron Rice was one of the original wild men of the New York underground film scene; working with the brilliantly gifted Taylor Mead, Rice improvised the entirety of The Flower Thief on location in San Francisco, shooting the film on 50 ft. cartridges of outdated, surplus World War II aerial gunnery film donated by none other than Sam Katzman, the most notoriously cost-conscious producer in Hollywood, at the absolute last minute. The finished film is raw, anarchic, and utterly assured, all at once. Rice uses very inch of film available to him, and Mead’s Chaplinesque everyman is the perfect artistic collaborator for such an enterprise; the film gets its title from a hastily staged sequence in which Mead “steals” a flower from a street vendor, and then, imagining that the police are after him, makes good his “escape” in a child’s Radio Flyer truck down a San Francisco street in blissful slow motion. As Rice said of The Flower Thief, in the program notes for the film’s premiere, “in the old Hollywood days movie studios would keep a man on the set who, when all other sources of ideas failed (writers, directors) was called upon to ‘cook up’ something for filming. He was called The Wild Man. The Flower Thief has been put together in memory of all dead wild men who died unnoticed in the field of stunt.”’ — Frame by Frame

Stolen Flowers (for Ron Rice)

 

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Adolfas Mekas Hallelujah the Hills (1963)
‘HALLELUJAH proved clearly that Adolfas Mekas is someone to be reckoned with. He is a master in the field of pure invention, that is to say, in working dangerously – ‘without a net.’ His film, made according to the good old principle – one idea for each shot – has the lovely scent of fresh ingenuity and crafty sweetness. Physical efforts and intellectual gags are boldly put together. The slightest thing moves you and makes you laugh – a badly framed bush, a banana stuck in a pocket, a majorette in the snow. He shows life as defined by Ramuz: ‘As with a dance, such pleasure to begin, a piston, a clarinet, such sorrow to be done, the head spins and night has come.’ — Jean Luc-Godard

Excerpt

 

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Ron Rice The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (1963)
‘As the title characters, Winifred Bryan and Taylor Mead are a comic-strip Adam and Eve in a distinctly non-Edenic industrial wasteland. Made shortly before his death in 1964 at age 29, Ron Rice’s magnum opus also features an all-star supporting cast: Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Judith Malina, Julian Beck and many others, including Rice himself. Mead’s performance exhibits the charm and impish physicality of the great silent comedians. His Atom Man is no superhero but rather a Cold War-era everyman at play. Unfinished at the time of Rice’s death, Mead created the present version from available footage and added a soundtrack in the 1980s with the assistance of Anthology Film Archives.’ — Harvard Film Archive

Excerpt

 

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Robert Downey Sr. Babo 73 (1964)
‘Downey saw Ron Rice’s 1960 film The Flower Thief (“The beatnik film par excellence,” according to J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Midnight Movies), which starred Taylor Mead, a stockbroker turned Beat poet and performer extraordinaire (he would eventually become a featured player of Andy Warhol’s). Captivated by Mead’s sincere and eccentric persona, Downey tailored a role to his oddball talents, casting him as the president of the “United Status” in his first long-form film, the bonkers, all-purpose political satire Babo 73. Mead’s President Sandy Studsbury, whose qualifications include having majored in hotel management at Millard Fillmore University, presides over an administration of ne’er-do-wells like Chester Kitty-Litter (Studsbury’s “left-hand man”), Lawrence Silver-Sky (“The fascist gun in the West”), and Phillipe Green (who “majored in self-flagellation at the University of Hard Knocks”). They conduct important Cabinet meetings from folding chairs on a deserted beach, kill the prime minister of Luxembourg, discuss ways to combat contraceptives produced by “the Red Siamese,” try to forge a disarmament agreement with Albania, and make inspiring declarations like “Every man has a right to be a bigot!” Though much of Babo 73 takes place in a ragged nowheresville—on that beach, along desolate highways, in and around a crumbling Victorian house with a caved-in roof, known as the White House—Downey and his intrepid crew also shot all over Washington, D.C., capturing Mead and his cronies scrambling around on the Capitol steps and in front of the real White House. (Luckily, Downey has said, President Kennedy was in Europe, so security was loose.) At one point, Downey even filmed Mead insinuating himself into a real-life military parade.’ — Michael Koresky

Robert Downey Sr. and Paul Thomas Anderson on ‘Babo 73’

 

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Andy Warhol Taylor Mead’s Ass (1964)
‘According to Watson’s Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, Taylor Mead had achieved a degree of fame that “inspired a backlash.” One example was a letter to the editors at The Village Voice in August 1964 which complained about “films focusing on Taylor Mead’s ass for two hours.” Mead replied in a letter to the publication that no such film was found in the archives, but “we are rectifying this undersight.” Two days later, Warhol shot the “sixty-minute opus that consisted entirely of Taylor Mead’s Ass, during which Mead first exhibits a variety of movement, then appears to “shove a variety of objects up his ass.” The film was Mead’s last for Warhol “for more than three years”, at the end of 1964, “Mead felt betrayed by Warhol for not showing the film.” The film was described as “seventy-six seriocomic minutes of this poet/actor’s buttocks absorbing light, attention, debris” by Wayne Koestenbaum, in Artforum. In his book, Andy Warhol, Koestenbaum writes “Staring at his cleft moon for 76 minutes, I begin to understand its abstractions: high-contrast lighting conscripts the ass into being a figure for whiteness itself, particularly when the ass merges with the blank leader at each reel’s end. The buttocks, seen in isolation, seem explicitly double: two cheeks, divided in the centre by a dark line. The bottom’s double structure recalls Andy’s two-paneled paintings . . . “.’ — Wikipedia

LIVE PERFORMANCE OF TAYLOR MEAD’S ASS (excerpt)

 

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Andy Warhol The Nude Restaurant (1967)
‘Andy Warhol shot two versions of The Nude Restaurant on the same day at the Mad Hatter restaurant in October 1967. The original concept was to edit both versions into a final one. One version contained footage of an all nude all male cast and was never released publicly as an independent film. The other version, with both actors and actresses wearing G-strings, was shown at the Hudson Theater on West Forty-fourth Street as one of Warhol’s series of sexploitation films or “nudies” as Warhol liked to call them. The all male nude version is often referred to as Restaurant but should not be confused with the film of the same name from 1965 that starred Edie Sedgwick. The nude footage may also have been included in Warhol’s twenty five hour movie, **** (Four Stars) as Allen Restaurant.’ — warholstars.com

Excerpt

 

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Andy Warhol Lonesome Cowboys (1968)
‘An outrageously funny spoof on the Western film, in the Warhol tradition, this film is immediately historic for several reasons. It is like a synthesis of Warhol’s most recent sorties into the New York underworld, but much more humorous and with closer adherence to a nonsensical plot. The film was photographed in Arizona, in a ghost town where (somehow) two of Warhol’s superstars are discovered. These two incongruous mountebanks happen to be Viva, as chic and sarcastic as she was in Bike Boy, resembling a displaced model for Hound and Horn, and she is accompanied by Taylor Mead. Mead is the zany of our time, reminiscent of the ghost of Jimmy Savo, and when five mysterious cowhands saunter into town, the hilarity commences. The cowboys are an odd assortment, a bit androgynous and city-wise, and they interact with the two in varying attitudes of lust and indifference. Since both Viva and Mead are not averse to erotic suggestiveness, some of the episodes are inspired set pieces of film comedy. Often, Lonesome Cowboys reaches the ultimate in surrealist imagery: Taylor Mead in cowboy deputy’s outfit, performing the Lupe Velez Twist, his own choreographic distortion; one of the cowboys performs ballet exercises at the hitching post and Viva’s languorous seduction of the most innocent-looking among the cowboys is actually a satirical comment on sexual artifice. This erotic, sagebrush comedy has its cruel edge, and one feels that Andy Warhol attempts to make some statement about the nature of brotherly love and the impossibility of virtue rewarded in these times of fallen idols. However, put the film in the category of a Zane Gray idea, written by Aristophanes and performed by recent inmates of De Sade’s stock company Charenton: It is, in short, a total gas.’ — Albert Johnson

Excerpt

Taylor Mead and Tom Hompertz interviewed by Claire Clouzot

 

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Andy Warhol San Diego Surf (1968)
‘A characteristically informal narrative, San Diego Surf concerns an unhappily married couple (Taylor Mead and Viva), new parents who rent their beach house to a group of surfers. Filmed with two 16mm cameras by Warhol and Paul Morrissey in May 1968, San Diego Surf was the first movie Warhol made in California in the five years since Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of…. It was also one of the last films in which the artist had direct involvement; in June 1968, Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, after which his work behind the movie camera came largely to an end. San Diego Surf was only partially edited and never released. In 1995, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. commissioned Paul Morrissey to complete the editing, based on existing notes and the rough cut.’ — MoMA

Trailer

Freak Show: Andy Warhol in La Jolla, 1968

 

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John Schlesinger Midnight Cowboy (1969)
‘In Midnight Cowboy, I had a magnificent scene coming down a winding staircase in drag singing “I’m flying” from Peter Pan. Schlesinger said, “Do you want to rehearse it or wing it?” I said, “Just do it.” At the bottom of the stairs, Viva is a movie newsperson who tries to interview me and asks, “How is show business?” I pull out my fake breasts and my wig and throw it at the camera and say, “Show business is easy, it’s when you reach the stage door that things get rough.” The set exploded and the grips and everyone came up screaming, “Now we have a movie, now we have a movie!” And they didn’t invite me to the screening of it. The old queen Schlesinger cut me out. I hear he’s dying now. Well, good luck John! But I loved his pictures. I love Midnight Cowboy. When they restored the movie, I asked Jon Voight, “Is my scene back in?” and he said, “No, no.” I think they couldn’t get the rights to the song as sung by me. It was too much and Schlesinger wrote some scenes that he hated to cut but they unbalanced the movie. The real Factory unbalanced their idea of the Factory. Andy was very upset about that—as much as he could be [snort]. He thought it was the only scene that reflected the Factory, when the Factory was trying to make a party scene.’ — Taylor Mead

Trailer

 

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Wynn Chamberlain Brand X (1970)
‘Brand X was born on a snowy weekend in early 1969 in Staatsburg, N.Y., where Mr. Chamberlain and his wife, Sally, had a weekend cottage. Sally recalls, “We couldn’t get out; the only thing to do was watch television, We hadn’t watched much daytime television, and Wynn was immediately struck by its banality and superficiality.” Mr. Chamberlain was by then an established Pop-realist painter and a fixture in the New York art scene, with work in the Whitney Museum of American Art and what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a social set that included Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and John Cage as well as Warhol and the Factory denizens. He was also, like most of his friends, enamored of the counterculture and dismayed by the conservatism of mainstream culture, as embodied by the television he watched that day. He wrote a script, cast Mr. Mead as his lead and cobbled together $10,000 from supporters. Much of the rest of the cast came together by osmosis. The film was shot over several months in the spring and summer, in and around places where the Chamberlain family lived and worked: Bard College, where Mr. Chamberlain taught art history; the Staatsburg house; a loft in the Bowery building where he kept a studio. A distribution deal was signed with New Line Cinema after the initial run, and Brand X went on to tour several college campuses.’ — Sam Shepard

Trailer

 

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Anton Perich Candy and Daddy (1972)
‘Candy and Daddy stars Taylor Mead and Candy Darling, who is best described as “a riotous satire of Park Avenue life.” Mead plays a pervert and increasingly drunk father of Darling, who, with her boyfriend (Craig Vandenburg), has just thrown a wild party and destroyed their Central Park West apartment that is filled with large Marilyn and flower paintings by Warhol. Within this tranquil domestic setting, Daddy attempts to seduce his daughter and her boyfriend.’ — Purple

the entire film

 

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Anton Perich The Aging Rock Star (1973)
‘In The Aging Rock Star (1973, 30 minutes, B&W;), a gaggle of “ladies” and one highly cute gent all try to seduce Mead’s retired songster, who claims he only has $500,000 of the $6 million dollars he earned at the height of his career. Totally adlibbed, plot lines and facts keep getting confused as Candy Darling and others can’t remember if they’re one of Mead’s wives or daughters. But it doesn’t matter when Mead intones, “I’m thinking of going back on speed . . .” and Darling responds, “Don’t do that! It destroys all the vitamin C.” Some time passes and Darling notes for no reason at all that she was “the only blonde in darkest Africa,” Mead, after sniffing a shoe, accuses her of murder, “You killed Wally Cox!” Verbal mayhem ensues. For example, after being told he has varicose veins, Mead admits, “Drugs destroy your toenails.” Then the game cast that also includes Darsea D’Wilde and Nancy North all break into song.’ — Culture Catch

the entire film

 

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Eric Mitchell Underground U.S.A. (1980)
‘Underground USA is a satire of contemporary New York “scenemaking” in the form of an update of Sunset Boulevard, Underground USA is both a personal triumph for its creator, actor-director Eric Mitchell, and a further indication of the importance of New York’s new-wave film movement. New-wave filmmakers like Mitchell have emerged to challenge both commercial movie making and the avant-garde. Shown in rock clubs and lofts, these loose, free-form super-8mm narratives quickly gained a loyal cult following for their witty explorations of hip urban life and times. In a style combining amateur enthusiasm with sophisticated visual know-how and a sharp sense of social and political observation, these films are the diametric opposite of the staid formalism of the ’’experimental’’ establishment. … Underground USA is, on the surface, less political than these other films, but in moving the super-8 underground into the 16mm big time, Mitchell has managed to remain true to his “outlaw” origins while at the same time bringing the New Wave movement to the attention of a larger public than it has ever enjoyed.’ — David Ehrenstein

Excerpt

 

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Alyce Wittenstein The Deflowering (1990)
‘The Deflowering by Alyce Wittenstein is not not exactly anti-sex, but it proposes that full body condoms and test-tube babies are the way to go.’ — collaged

the entire film

 

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Rebecca Horn Buster’s Bedroom (1991)
‘Buster’s Bedroom is a 1990 independent German comedy film directed by the renowned visual artist Rebecca Horn. The film follows a young woman with an infatuation for Buster Keaton. The film was shown at the Marché du Film of the Cannes Film Festival in May 1990. Later that year it was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles together with Horn’s exhibition. The objects of the exhibition were connected to the film, as themes, character references and props. The film was released in Germany on 9 May 1991. The film stars Amanda Ooms, Donald Sutherland, Taylor Mead, and Geraldine Chaplin.’ — Wikipedia

Excerpt dubbed into Russian

 

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John Gutierrez Doses of Roger (2006)
‘Taylor Mead stars in a short film where a scientist’s manufactured memories become his ultimate addiction.’ — collaged

the entire film

 

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Jonas Mekas January 6, 2007 (2007)
‘Mekas’ film The Brig was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1963. Other films include Walden (1969), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), Lost Lost Lost (1975), Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990), Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992), As I was Moving Ahead I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), Letter from Greenpoint (2005), Sleepless Nights Stories (2011) and Out-takes from the Life of a Happy Man. In 2007, he completed a series of 365 short films released on the internet — one film every day — and since then has continued to share new work on his website.’ — JM

the entire film

 

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Lloyd Kaufman Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV (2000)
‘Citizen Toxie is Troma’’s most ambitious and successful movie. When the notorious Diaper Mafia take hostage the Tromaville School for the Very Special, only the Toxic Avenger and his morbidly obese sidekick Lardass can save Tromaville. However, a horrific explosion creates a dimensional portal between Tromaville and its dimensional mirror image, Amortville. While the Toxic Avenger (Toxie) is trapped in Amortville, Tromaville comes under the control of Toxie’s evil doppelganger, the Noxious Offender (Noxie). Will Toxie return to Tromaville in time to stop Noxie’s rampage or is he doomed to remain a second-class citizen in Amortville forever? How did Toxie’s wife Sarah become pregnant with two babies from two different fathers? Will Tito, the Retarded Rebel, ever get over his teen angst and become a productive member of society?’ — Troma

Trailer

 

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Jim Jarmusch Coffee and Cigarettes (2003)
‘Coffee and Cigarettes is the title of three short films and a 2003 feature film by independent director Jim Jarmusch. The film consists of 11 short stories which share coffee and cigarettes as a common thread, and includes the earlier three films. William “Bill” Rice and Taylor Mead spend their coffee break having a nostalgic conversation, whilst Janet Baker singing “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder appears from nowhere. William Rice repeats Jack White’s line, “Nikola Tesla perceived the earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance.” It is possible to interpret the relevance of this line to the constant recurrent themes throughout the seemingly unconnected segments.’ — collaged

Excerpt

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! A madness with an expiration date at least. Yes, we’re editing in Paris at least to begin with and probably for the whole time. ‘That was weird’ is a good gravestone epitaph. I liked the one in the post that just said ‘See you’. Well, this won’t be remotely a surprise, but I’d like a walk-through haunted house attraction to be built over my grave, and of course my coffin would be one of the props. Not the centrepiece, just one of the props in one of the rooms you walk through. Love selling you the first ticket, G. ** Jamie, It’s going good. It is nice to think that when you’re about to die you spend your disintegrating energies trying to think up the perfect death joke. Uh, the plan/hope is to finish the film by mid-fall so we can submit it to the Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals. If it’s the usual drill, it’ll play at festivals until the options run out, and then it’ll get released/screened in places and then end up online for streaming. I don’t know the when’s though. We are going to screen it in Paris early on at The Pinault Collection because they gave us some dough to help make it in return for showing it early. Surely needless to say, the premise for your novella is very highly intriguing. Freaking people out is definitely a high goal. Well, for fiction, maybe not, like, personally. I know, the scale model novel, I’ve been wondering how one could do that ever since the idea tripped off my fingertips yesterday. I’m just trying to write and catch up on a ton of emails and get out some. Friday … worked and dinner with pals that was supposed to be at Hard Rock Cafe (nachos!) but was downgraded to a nearby Indiana Cafe (no nachos!) due to HRC’s 90 minute wait for a table. What did your weekend do to you precisely? ** Misanthrope, Yeah, I guess just ask him? Although you do risk finding out if he supports Putin or not. Might be better to leave that dog lying and sleeping if he’s going to be under your clothes. I’m on PlanetRomeo but only because they have an excellent escorts section that I can fish within for post fodder. That’s quite a meta dream. It’s very Freddie Kruger, so you better watch out. A hair metal band playing at a tiki bar … now I’ve heard of everything. And KIX, no less. They’re breaking up? Oh my god, no, no, no! No!!!!! ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, the Caufield, yes indeed. You’re still on that taxing sleep schedule and battling with your toe? Shit, sorry, Ben. I hope the iodine is magic. The wrapping too. Oh, interesting that Cragg book. Let me know how much fun it is. ** Mildred, Hello, Mildred. It’s a fine thing to see you. I still have a lifelong fear of being cremated, but I think maybe it’s gradually fading away. I still have this lifelong feeling that I’m immortal, but I think that’s gradually fading away too. Ooh, how soon do you think you’ll have that Mildred album public? Or the demos, worst come to worst? I do really like The Legendary Pink Dots, yes. I think I did a gig post featuring just them a long time ago. One of my all-time favorite band names too. The Teardrop Explodes is another one. TLPD on mushrooms, sure. Worth the vomiting, maybe. Little Joy is in Venice Beach now? What?! ** A, Congrats on the Aussie promo reception. I can confirm from afar that your will is strong. Oh, god, summer, make it go away. Use your famous will. ** Steve Erickson, Yes, that’s the film. Seeing it in a theater is twice the fun or weirdness factor, I imagine. I hope the electrician is in your apartment fiddling productively as I type. Your Schrader review looks very interesting. I look forward to reading it. Everyone, Steve lends his brainpower to the new Paul Schrader film here. ** Minet, Hi. I think he was ghost. Don’t ask me why I think that because I don’t know why. I actually am planning to go to one of Paris’s famous cemeteries (Montparnasse) any day specifically because Rohmer is buried there. I will tell you once I’ve read them, yes! I’ve mostly been reading poetry lately (see: my next 5 books I loved post coming soon). I really, really want to read the ‘new’ book by Agota Kristof that just got translated into English for the first time, but I haven’t been able to find copy in the stores here yet. I’m so happy you liked ‘Fable’. Yes, I need to remember to order that new, expanded edition of Sotos’s ‘Predicate’, like, today before it sells out. Have a splendid weekend yourself! ** Nightcrawler, Hi. Yeah, I saw a Kusama infinity room here in Paris, and it was so crap. They’re obviously made to be selfie backgrounds on TikTok, etc. Warhol’s films are great. That’s where his genius most lay, if you ask me. I dread summer because I hate hot weather so much, but oh well. The only film I saw in a theater recently was ‘Skaza’, which was trippy and odd. I’m going to try to see something projected this weekend but I’m not sure what yet. I’d really like to see this, so maybe I’ll do that. Great weekend to you and yours! ** malcolm, Hi, malcolm! I was just thinking about you and wondering how you are. So, what’s the plan with your short, i.e. when can it be seen? Thanks, yeah, the film shoot was great, and now we’ll see what we can build out of it. We want to finish it by the fall to submit to Berlin and Rotterdam. That’s the initial plan. For me, ‘TFU’ was Araki’s peak kind of by far. You saw ‘Pickle Surprise’ when you were 9 years old? Wow. I’ll see that new Almodovar, but I don’t think I’ve read any reviews of it or anything. It’s a short, right? So I wonder how one will get to see it. I’m really, really excited to see that last short Godard film that’s premiering at Cannes soon. It’d be great if you could hang out here, for sure. How was dinner? What was it? I ate something called a Green Burger and french fries and a tiny cheese quesadilla that was too tiny. ** Bill, I have a stinking suspicion that the Louise Bourgeois spider grave was a photoshop job, but I didn’t check. No, I’ve never heard of ‘W the Whore’. NYRB published it, how interesting. I’ll try for it. Good weekend? ** Okay. I decided to restore this post so you can spend a fun and enlightening weekend or portion thereof with the legendary and singular Taylor Mead, and I hope you will. See you on Monday.