Yvonne Rainer Filmmaker Day

 

‘A pioneering figure of the avant garde movement, Yvonne Rainer’s artistic career spans over five decades across both dance and film. Making use of archives, reenactments, photographs, and unconventional audiovisual techniques, her films draw on critical theory and erudite analysis while exploring deeply personal, political, and social themes. Her genre-defining work and collaboration with other artists has earned her a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and three Rockefeller Fellowships, among other accolades. Rainer is widely regarded as one of the most influential performance artists of the twentieth century; as critic J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice in 1986, “Rainer is the avant-garde’s most important woman filmmaker since Maya Deren…more likely, she’s the most influential American avant-garde filmmaker of the past dozen years, with an impact as evident in London or Berlin as in New York.”’ — Zeitgeist Films

‘Yvonne Rainer is a key figure in the field of American experimental cinema, having found herself gradually but inexorably drawn to the medium of film and the new avenues of exploration it opened up. Her artistic awakening was strongly influenced by the films of Maya Deren (1917-1961), Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987), whom she discovered at the beginning of her dancing career. From 1967 she started to interweave film and dance into her choreography and viewed her short films as an extension of her work with the body. It was however her increasing interest in the narrative as well as the treatment of emotions and the private sphere that led her to direct her first feature-length film, Lives of Performers (1972). The film, which draws a parallel between a melodramatic love triangle and the everyday life of dancers, is conceived as a choreography in its own right.

‘Y. Rainer’s ensuing cinematographic career went on to reflect a biting political and theoretical awareness, attuned to the revolts and struggles of her time. Film About a Woman Who… (1974) and Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), for instance, which portray the power games at play in romantic heterosexual relationships, highlight her proclaimed feminist agenda; The Man Who Envied Women (1985) found its inspiration in the feminist theories of the cinema but also condemned the housing crisis in New York and American imperialism in Central America; Privilege (1990) analyses the implications of menopause for women and criticises the prevailing fictions linked to race and sex; MURDER and murder (1996), for its part, questions the establishment of a lesbian identity.

‘By setting her subjective experience against historical events, Y. Rainer’s recurrent references to autobiographical elements seem to encapsulate the feminist slogan, the personal is political. Her filmmaking is never didactic but challenges and criticises political or theoretical discourse by juxtaposing an ironic parody of multiple voices and ideas. In so doing, she embraces the narrative while transgressing its codes, creating a polyphonic, non-linear collage that favours the text rather than the image and leaves her audience entirely free to fix its own interpretation. Having resumed her choreographic career in the 2000s, Y. Rainer’s complex, polysemic cinematographic oeuvre stands as a vital landmark in the history of experimental cinema.’ — Johanna Renard

 

____
Stills

 

_____
Further

The Yvonne Rainer Collection
Yvonne Rainer @ IMDb
YR @ MUBI
Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer
‘I was never interested in being famous’: dance legend Yvonne Rainer on her gloriously weird film career
Yvonne Rainer, juxtaposition radicale
A Woman Who…: Selected Works of Yvonne Rainer
Lives of Performers: The Films of Yvonne Rainer
Book: ‘The Films of Yvonne Rainer’
YR @ Letterboxd
Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer
From Objecthood to Subject Matter: Yvonne Rainer’s Transition from Dance to Film
Filming the Unspeakable: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer
Looking back on the oeuvre of Yvonne Rainer, iconoclast and artistic visionary
Yvonne Rainer and Queering Failure

 

____
Extras

Film Society Talks | Yvonne Rainer and Lynne Tillman

Yvonne Rainer: A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies; a Rant Dance

Yvonne Rainer, Where’s the Passion? Where’s the Politics?

 

_____
Interview
from The Paris Review

 

INTERVIEWER In the mid-1960s, you went through a process of gradual disenchantment with performing and being a performer, of being looked at. How did that come about?

RAINER Well, we’re now getting into my transition to film. I guess I began to deal with the limitations of the kind of movement I was capable of, and was interested in, which was not about storytelling and it was not about metaphor—I mean, it was very much influenced by Minimalism. Feminism was coming along and I was reading all these essays about patriarchy and I began to think about narrative and film. I had followed experimental film from the 1950s when I was in San Francisco as a very young person. I had seen the films of Maya Deren at the San Francisco Museum of Art as early as 1953. When I came to New York in 1956, I was still following experimental film. By the mid-1960s and early 70s Warhol was making films and there was a movement called “The New American Cinema”, including Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, among others. I began to see the possibilities for combining some of these experimental techniques in 16 mm film with narrative fragments, which bring us to my first feature film Lives of Performers (1972). In it, a lot of things happen: you have my dance background of utmost simplicity that becomes the embodiment of the spoken story about a man who can’t make up his mind between two women. And you have a kind of disingenuousness. I came to this material with a consciousness of Hollywood melodrama, but also of a kind of absurdity—maybe from my background in theater looking at [Eugène] Ionesco and certainly from looking at [Jean Luc] Godard’s films. Throughout the film there’s no sync sound. The performers went by their own names—Shirley, Valda, and Fernando. I gave them pages from the script, which was very disjunctive, and I said, “Oh, this passage I really like the way I’ve written it, so just read it or improvise.” So, in a close-up of Valda [Setterfield], with her voice over, she improvises a story about going to John’s house, making it up as she goes along. There was a performance that preceded the film. It was concurrent with my editing of the film and a rough cut of the film was shown as part of this performance. We sat in front of it and read, or improvised from the script and that was recorded and became the soundtrack for it. You also hear the audience’s response—you hear them laugh, for instance. I could have put in a laugh track, but it’s the actual audience at the dance concert that you hear and also us laughing at certain moments. For instance, there was a previous sound taping as the performers watched themselves for the first time in a private screening. We recorded their responses and in the film, at a certain point, there’s a big close-up of Shirley where she says, “Oh, I look like an old-fashioned movie star!” She had never seen herself on film before. So I incorporated those spontaneous things into the soundtrack.

INTERVIEWER One of the principle things that happens in film and on stage is the coming together of the framing of time and the framing of space, two elements that you seem to have been working with all along. In theater the framework is however big the room is, and an important factor is also whether it has seating or not—at Judson Theater, for instance, people walked through the dance space to get to it—but the framing within the frame of the film is a different thing entirely.

RAINER Yes, you’re right. One of the things that drew me to film was framing the possibilities for a very exact framing of the body.

INTERVIEWER The framing of sound or the deframing of sound respond to the same artistic strategy. Breaking synchronization is another way of deframing sound.

RAINER Right. You can’t do that in live theater.

INTERVIEWER That brings me to other formal devices that occur in your work a good deal; namely doubling and splitting. For example, you seem to split personalities and also double them. As a result, one is never watching a fully integrating character doing a fully consistent thing. One always sees variations. How did that come about? What kind of concept, inclination or impulse led you to that?

RAINER I wasn’t interested in illusionistic conventions of narrative cinema as practiced in Hollywood, or any kind of narrative film—where sound corresponds to the lips and to what actually comes out of the actor’s mouth. When I started out, I didn’t want to use actors: they gave me either too much or too little. And I didn’t know how to direct—I still don’t know how to direct. By the time I was through, in 1996, I was using professional actors, but at this earlier time I used the people who had worked with me in dance. Some of them were trained dancers, some of them were not—for example, Valda Setterfield was dancing with Merce Cunningham at the time. I had to think about devices for telling a story and since I wasn’t interested in a plot—with exposition, development, climax, and dénouement according to traditional classical theater, I had to find ways to keep this thing within ninety minutes, with all these fragments of my experience, fragments of things I’d read, quotes and so on. I began to explore new devices and strategies. All my films—all seven of them—deal with some kind of performance or time-based activity. Sometimes the main character is a video artist, or a choreographer, or a dancer. So there are all these performances within the thread or the body of the film. In Film About a Woman Who … (1974), there are two men and two women and they refer only to “he” or “she” so you never know which one is being referred to. I kept mixing it up to create these ambiguities in terms of plot and yet the language had an air of authenticity about it. For instance, the little story in Lives of Performers is autobiographical. There’s a great deal of revamped autobiography in all my films.

INTERVIEWER Your film The Man Who Envied Women (1985) is very much about the theorization of sexuality, of identity. It is about a man who becomes a theoretical feminist and yet treats women in a way that suggests he hadn’t studied his own books. At what point does theory become a tool and when is it also a means of expression?

RAINER Well, Laura Mulvey’s famous essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was a kind of lodestone for me in the mid 1970s and the film that came out of that was The Man Who Envied Women playing on the penis envy that Freud propagated in relation to women’s sexuality or men’s sexuality—castration and all that. The theories about certain genres of Hollywood film affected women filmmakers and theorists of the next ten years or so. It was a critique of the way women are objectified in the Hollywood movies from the forties and fifties. So I began collecting clips from Hollywood movies in which women were complicit in being demeaned or objectified by men. These clips became the backdrop for the main character, who was in some kind of therapy, and they became his cultural unconscious. For instance, I included clips of Bette Davis in Dark Victory (1939) saying to her doctor, “I have been a good girl” and acting like a little girl. In my film Privilege (1990), I dealt with race and female menopause in the same vehicle, which was a very difficult thing to pull off. So much so that I nearly gave it up. In it, there is a white middle-class woman dealing with characters of color who are also working class. There are a lot of quotations from writers in this work of mine—a lot of printed material is read.

INTERVIEWER Maybe you can talk a little bit about the importance of text in your work. In Film About a Woman Who … there’s a scene where the camera comes in on your face and there are words being spoken that seem to have an entirely independent existence. Objectified language is an important element with which you often play.

RAINER Yes, that’s true. I’ve been compared to Woody Allen for the way in which my characters often talk—they are educated, liberal. The Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero’s horror movie, is one of the clips playing in the background in The Man Who Envied Women. I had gone to a midnight screening of that film and at the end of it, the lights came up in the theater and two guys were going at each other in the front row. The power of that kind of horror stayed in my mind. Romero’s film is about a black man defending people from monsters who have returned from the dead. They are the undead. In my piece, two actors play the same character and I ended up calling him Jack Deller. Then there’s the female character, Tricia, who has split up with him. (I should mention that, at the beginning, I chose to include a clip of Tricia Brown dancing.) In my piece I take her physical presence out of the picture. I was influenced by critiques of the oversexualization of women in Hollywood movies and so I said to myself, “Okay, I’ll take her out totally, and she’ll be a controlling voice,” since very often in film noir a man’s voice is the controlling voice. So there’s a telephone conversation she has with her brother and her sister-in-law who she doesn’t get along with—which is not my case, since I get along fine with my sister-in-law. I do have a brother and I had had this conversation with him after seeing the French film The Mother and the Whore which I found very powerful. So you hear a conversation about one film and you see another film, The Night of the Living Dead, and you see the whole audience for that film getting very riled up and fighting in the theater.

 

_____________
13 of Yvonne Rainer’s 14 films

_____________
Hand Movie (1966)
‘Rainer made this film in a hospital bed while recovering from surgery. Hand Movie would become part of the series Five Easy Pieces, which affirms the tenets of her 1965 No Manifesto: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity.” At the time, Rainer saw her films as experiments rather than completed artworks. Here, the hand movements become increasingly complex until they relax again into a flat position. Shown from all sides, the hand is treated with a sculptural approach.’ — MoMA

Excerpt

the entirety

 

_____________
Volleyball (1966)
‘A volleyball is rolled into the frame and comes to rest. Two legs in sneakers, seen from the knees down, enter the frame and stand beside it. Cut to new angle, same characters and actions. Brilliant mockery of sports which captures their inherent emptiness when all the imagined drama is stripped away. Ludicrous and intentionally boring in a way that perfectly echoes the way I feel when I watch a sport I don’t care about. Clever and absurd in its simplicity.’ — andy_chandler3003

Excerpt

 

______________
Trio Film (1968)
‘Trio Film consists of a four-and-a-half-to-five-minute sequence of discrete movements that, with the exception of walking, are never repeated. Although it appears effortless, the dance is painstaking to learn in its precise articulation of hands, arms, shoulders, feet, and legs. It is a signature work by Rainer, who in the 1960s transposed to dance the ideas that were then giving shape to the era’s Minimalist sculpture and painting, abandoning the aesthetics of classical and modern dance—which were rooted in virtuosic technique and expression—in favor of an unenhanced physicality and uninflected continuity of motion. The deceptive “ordinariness” of many of the individual movements in Trio had a profound impact on the development of postmodern dance.’ — MoMA

the entirety

 

_____________
Rhode Island Red (1968)
‘Ten minutes in an enormous chicken coop. Camerawork by Roy Levin.’ — Letterboxd

 

____________
Line (1969)
‘A blond woman (Susan Marshall) in white pants and shirt interacts with a moving round object and the camera. Camerawork by Phill Niblock.’ — Monoskop

 

____________
Lives of Performers (1972)
‘Lives of Performers was made when Rainer was in her late thirties and restarting her life after a suicide attempt the previous year. On the screen, the title Lives of Performers is followed by a parenthetical, (a melodrama), and the film is centered on the troubles caused by the indecision of a man torn between two women. “Rainer is continuously searching for some invisible architecture, reasons we might move or behave in the way we do, why a thing is funny to some people, frightening to others,” writes Natasha Stagg in the Metrograph Journal. “Rainer’s feature films purposefully teeter between critique and pastiche, leveraging cliché as base to life’s acid.”’ — Criterion Collection

Excerpt

 

____________
Film About a Woman Who ... (1974)
‘Film About a Woman Who …, a landmark film that is still considered by many to be her masterpiece, is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliché and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.’ — FIT

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_____________
Kristina Talking Pictures (1976)
‘In Kristina Talking Pictures, Rainer resisted what she termed “narrative expectation” by making a disjointed film structured like a collage. A loose plotline runs through it, centered on a Hungarian lion tamer named Kristina, whose past is haunted by virulent anti-Semitism, and who has come to New York to become a choreographer. She falls in love with a sailor named Raoul, who leaves her, returns, and then leaves again. But Rainer frustrates any semblance of plot or character development, and nothing remains stable in this film: dialogues begin, only to be cut off; a single character may be played by multiple members of the cast; each scene is like a self-contained vignette, rather than a coherent segment of a larger whole; and Rainer couples the film’s visual austerity with an excess of dialogue and voiceovers.’ — MoMA

Excerpt

 

______________
Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980)
‘“Without a doubt the most ambitious, most risk-taking work of Rainer’s cinematic career.” — B. Ruby Rich. Rainer’s fourth feature, inspired by her experiences living in West Berlin in 1976 and ’77, when the activities of right-wing terrorists were at their height, offers an audacious, collage-like meditation on state power, repression, violence, and revolution. Vaulting between aerial images of British landscapes, intertitles, fragments of Rainer’s teenage diary, and one unseen couple’s debate (voiced by Amy Taubin and Vito Acconci) over the demise of the RAF, the film is illuminated by a lead performance from the late art and film critic Annette Michelson as a patient undergoing psychoanalysis, whose every gesture was choreographed elaborately by Rainer over a nine-month period.’ — Zeitgeist Films

Excerpt

 

____________
The Man Who Envied Women (1985)
‘Words as a means of individual expression can be a potent form of seduction. But words strung together as interchangeable syntactic cues towards a coded, contemporary social language can also transform the intrinsic materiality of words into an irrelevant – and incoherent – abstraction. The identification of this threshold between langue (language) and parole (word) lies at the heart of this thematically dense and iconoclastic, yet uncompromising, articulate, and fiercely intelligent film.’ — Strictly Film School

 

____________
Privilege (1990)
‘In Rainer’s film Privilege, the white-identification and Marxian/psychoanalytic dialectic of The Man Who Envied Women now gives way to questions about the relationship of gender to racism and economic class, and about the legal, scientific, and medical discourses that define, and ultimately oppress, our bodies. Some of these problems were, of course, also addressed in the earlier film, but in Privilege Rainer refuses the rhetorical indirectness and theoretical density of the previous work, spelling out these problems with uncompromising frankness and wit. She constructs a remarkably coherent pastiche, juxtaposing a fictional narrative about a menopausal heterosexual woman recounting an experience she has kept secret for 30 years with excerpts from vintage educational films on menopause and contemporary interviews with women who in real life are coping with the often painful and lonely passage into “change of life.”’ — Maurice Berger

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

______________
MURDER and murder (1996)
‘Mildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.’ — Letterboxd

 

______________
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002)
‘The immediate source of After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid is the 35-minute dance piece Yvonne Rainer pro-duced for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project in 2000, in which he and five other performers appeared. Since the transition away from choreography to filmmak-ing early in her career, Rainer had always shown a recombinant streak, with her first films incorporating elements of dance and stagecraft drawn from live performance. But it’s an effectively alchemical conversion Rainer conducts in moving from After Many a Summer Dies the Swan to After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid. Its title from Tennyson by way of Aldous Huxley’s Los Angeles novel, Rainer’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan consisted of original choreographic movement as well as invocations of her own earlier work from the Judson Dance Theater period, accompanied by recitations of deathbed utterances—last gasps—from individuals both well-known and obscure, and other musical and textual elements, including three poems she’d recently written.’ — Wexner Center

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. Ginsberg basically hit on every young poet, so it’s not even a feather in my cap. I know that Bruce Boone essay. Yeah, it’s brilliant. He so regularly is, and nice that he foresaw me doing worthy things as a poet even though I ended up kind of bailing on the genre. You should come walk in Paris. It’s the ultimate walking city, should you ever ask me. I’ve been curious to read ‘Fuccboi’, but I never have. I remember its response was extremely mixed, always an intriguing sign. Flaubert’s letters must be nice. I didn’t know that about Sartre hating Flaubert, much that he wrote a whole book of Flaubert hatred. Very interesting. I’ll see if it’s gettable. Me too re: my hopes for you. I think I’m pretty much following your hope’s narrative. Thanks, man. ** Charalampos, Hi. I’m sorry to hear of your lonesomeness. Bad state, usually fades out though. I wrote ‘Closer’ between 1984-1988. I was experimenting on it long before then, but that’s when it finally gelled. So, I was in my early-mid-30s. I guess a very, very fetal version was in my mind since I was 15 because that’s when I started thinking about writing what ended up being the Cycle. I hope you get to perk way up, friend. Love’s vibes from where(ever) I am. ** Jack Skelley, Hey Skelley. Announced! It looks like we’ll both be July book birthday boys together. Everyone, The great scribe Jack Skelley has a new book forthcoming on July 2nd called ‘Myth Lab’, and I’ve read it, and it’s spectacularly great. Here’s where you can read about it and even preorder it. Highly recommended that you do so. Cool descriptive paragraph, written I assume by you? Of course, a ‘welcome’ post for your book is a no brainer. Hit me up with the stuff when the time’s right. Sabrina has a copy of ‘Fun To Be Dead’ for me, and I need to retrieve it. See you in mere days. Yours, Anyone on earth other than Joni Mitchell. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, I think my longing for Halloween has officially begun. I keep looking and looking with futility for our mouse’s entrance hole(s), and I swear to god I think he/she/they can pass through walls. Too long a story re: the producers. I think we’re talking with them today, if they don’t yet again blow us off. Well, I can offer you a Guided by Voices song that has literally been stuck in my head for five months if not even longer if you’re feeling brave. If so, here. I even named a story in my new book after it hoping it would leave me alone, but that didn’t work either. Love relocating this roller coaster from where it’s being built in Saudi Arabia to Parc Asterix, G. ** Joseph, Oh, heck, let’s just give them the Nobel Prize and get it over with. ‘I Saw The TV Glow’ has yet to pop up on my favorite illegal site, but it’s sure to any day now, and I will happily key you in once it’s ensconced there. Yikes, the cicadas’ hell on earth. I appreciate the imaginative access. I guess they must exist here? So much more workable than the hundreds of itsy bitsy flies that have suddenly decided my bathroom is Mecca. ** _Black_Acrylic, Americans aren’t what they used to be. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Will Ferrell movie, weirdly, but he was quite funny back when he was on SNL, and he obviously has fine taste in futbol teams. Congrats? ** Bill, Hey. Ooh, that Bali thing looks awfully fun, doesn’t it? I don’t think Michael has any ‘in’ with the American market but I know he’s trying to get his film some kind of life there. Surely it’ll get streamed somewhere over there. I’ll ask him what the latest is. ** Nick Toti, Hello, Nick! Congratulations on the birth! I would be happy to host its official online premiere, of course. Tell me how that can be accomplished. Or, wait, I’ll check my email. Great. ‘Room Temperature’ is finished except for a few days’ extremely minimal special effects work. It’s in submission to two festivals atm, and we’re waiting anxiously to hear if either will fly. The producer nightmare will never die, but it’s at a less horrifying stage for the moment, at least. ** Steve, Hi. Oh, no, the haunt in our film is rather wholesome relatively speaking. ‘Not Like Us’ is a catchy thing indeed. I haven’t heard ‘Euphoria’ yet. I heard one of the Drake diss tracks, and it was shit, but I think he’s kind of shit generally. ** Brightpath, Hello, Brightpath. What a friendly name you have. I’ve only seen the 2015 Hell House LLC movie, the first one, I think. I did find it quite charming. I am super extremely easy when it comes to haunted house-related anything. I’ll go watch the sequel or sequels now. Thank you very much. What’s going on with you? ** Darby🎱, I’m sure I read that Gacy book. I read all of the Gacy books back in the day when I was a wannabe serial killer scholar. Wild: your association with its author. I think sharing perogies counts. Yeah, I’ve come across obviously faked animal rescue videos, and they’re pure evil. Phone calls can drain one. I just had one of those. He’s cute alright. Awwww … à bientôt! ** GrabBag and Greeny? Why?! :/, His description is promising, of course. Well, be careful then. His description is also dangerous. Virtually in the sense of nearly, almost. Here’s an experimental filmic kiss, the best kind. ** HaRpEr //, Hi. Nice, your name looks like a roller coaster. I’ll try to get and have some anise on hand in case of emergency. Me too, I have a very hard time with people who use the possible hierarchical structure inherent in a job’s build as a way to wield power. We’ve had this with the film where the people who are technically ‘in charge’ due to their title but who actually don’t do shit try to act dictatorial. Anyway, I hear you, and all hopes that the next gig you take is collaborative. That does sound like a super stressful period you’re in. Like you said, you’ll get through it, as daunting as it feels, I’m sure. Hm, about preserving your load. I suppose there’s a why not, who knows aspect, but if you’re sure you don’t want to sire someone, then why? My mom was a really terrible alcoholic for years, and I’m sure my disinterest in that liquid and my discomfort around people who are getting plastered is explainable thereby. As for London, I had the shit kicked out of me one night in the early 90s by a bunch of very drunk football lads whose team had just lost, so I do feel a little spooked there once it gets dark. ** Justin D, Hi. Coincidentally, my mouse friend just caught him/her/themself in our benign trap this very morning, and they are now accustoming themself to new lodgings a couple of blocks away. So, it’s good I didn’t name them. Okay, that’s pleasant reasoning behind the pet names. I think parental projection is a serious plague, so I’m guessing you’re right. The cover of ‘I Wished’ is by a Norwegian artist, Kier Cooke Sandvik. He also did the art supposedly made by the main character in our film ‘Permanent Green Light’. He’s great, yeah. Thank you. I hope your watch emptied that popcorn box. ** Thomas H, Hey! Oh, that book does sound intriguing, I’ll head over to Internet Archive in a bit. Thanks, bud. Be forewarned that my recommendation can do as much harm as good seeing as how there are as many people who see my name as a flashing red light as an attribution. But I’m game, yep. ** Nicholas(Nick), Really, it was the volume not the cheese. I will click in minutes from now as my instincts are peaked. Oh, gosh, I have so many go-to sites and apps, I wouldn’t know where to start. Oh, in my last ‘best of the year’ post I listed some faves there. Here. I want those cookies. There must be a way. Later gator. ** Oscar 🌀, You just made it! We are on the same page re: pubs and cinemas. I’m determined to go the cinema today. I will soon be in search of a friend who feels similarly. At least in the States, there’s a huge industry of Halloween decorations-selling businesses that pop up every October, and, needless to say, they are infinitely more pleasing to stroll within than the similar Xmas pop up ventures. May today offer you free hugs galore without the icky emotional part. ** Right. Are you familiar with the films of the great choreographer/filmmaker Yvonne Rainer? If not, welcome to your encounter with them, and, if so, welcome home, I guess. See you tomorrow.