Author: DC (Page 347 of 1087)

 

Ashenspire
Automatisme & Stefan Paulus
Editrix
The Maghreban
Jamal Moss
Nancy Mounir
Prison Religion
Avvitagalli
Tasos Stamou
Ohyung
Osasco Dynamics
Quelle Chris
Shit & Shine
Boy Harsher
Chloe Alexandra Thompson
Pinkcourtesyphone

 

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Ashenspire THE LAW OF ASBESTOS
‘Ashenspire uses post metal reminiscent builds to hypnotize with stacked layers of chaos on their longer format excursions. Ashenspire litters their defiant world with organic oscillations, like the guest hammered dulcimer4 on “The Law of Asbestos” or Scott McLean’s beautiful Rhodes jingles that ring through the darkest moments. Dunn himself, sitting behind the kit as well, continues to provide his key ‘in the pocket’ style that cultivates with jazzy aplomb the smoldering build of abstract tracks like “Béton Brut” and “Plattenbau Persephone Praxis” (which also features truly trippy vocal layering)—every raised fist comes with a bobbing head.’ — Angry Metal Guy

 

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Automatisme & Stefan Paulus Nob (Altered Source Recording)
‘In early 2021, Paulus approached Automatisme with a proposal based on his field recordings made during numerous mountain expeditions in the Swiss Alps, the Caucasus, and north of the Arctic Circle—documenting stormy weather, high alpine winds, avalanches, and sounds emanating from glaciers and from the insides of crevices and caves. Paulus created ambient noisescapes from these recordings by splicing and folding them into hundreds of layers of sound: an analog to the geological strata of their geographic sources. The resulting audio mixes, compounding a multiplicity of spatio-temporal excursions, were then further encased in drones using the natural tone series (the traditional zäuerli or wordless yodels of northeastern Switzerland), the monotonic standing drone of Lamonte Young’s Dream Syndicate, and the mass chords of early 1970s Kosmische Musik as points of reference. Paulus sent these extended ambient/noise pieces to Automatisme as source material for the latter’s bespoke Automatisme techniques, where variable tempo and glitch systems forge more overt minimal techno/IDM works.’ — Constellation

 

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Editrix One Truck Gone
‘Editrix makes music that sounds like Lightning Bolt deconstructing Black Sabbath-ian fuzz — heavy rock and roll for trouble-making honor roll students in leather jackets. The songs on the Easthampton, Mass., band’s second album, Editrix II: Editrix Goes to Hell, are dirty, gnarled and even a bit demonic. Editrix recently got back from a tour with its spiritual forebears Deerhoof; Editrix II dwells in the same inventive, truly singular vein as the best work by that legendary San Francisco experimental pop group. Only three releases deep, Editrix has already proven that the more its restructures and warps the conventions of a time-tested genre into something innovative and unrecognizable, the more their output downright whips.’ — Ted Davis

 

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The Maghreban & Nah Eeto Got Your Number
‘Just as his dance 12 inches sound like a hip-hop producer tackling house and techno head-on, ‘Connection’ may touch on familiar tropes but approaches them in a wholly unique style and fashion. In less talented hands, this could fall into lazy homage. But it transcends any cliche, sounding dynamic and fresh as all hell.’ — Piers Harrison

 

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Jamal Moss Poisonous Effects
‘Slicing off just one cross-section of his ceaseless, holistic practice, the music here speaks to the endless variation within a theme that Jamal has made a virtue of since his nascent ‘90s productions. Where those early works with legendary mentors such as Steve Poindexter and Adonis still had Jamal’s experience of the original Chicago warehouse scene fresh in the memory, he’s come to singularly carry that flame far from the original object while never losing sight of its original reasons for being, seamlessly integrating lessons of Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz and his DJ/diggers-instinct for classic synth and industrial musicks, into a syncretic roil of ideas that simply sounds like nobody else.’ — Boomkat

 

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Nancy Mounir (with Fatma Serry) Ana Bas Saktalak
‘Mounir’s interest in working with many different sounds drives her musical practice, and Nozhet El Nofous builds on that passion by lacing her original compositions with archival recordings of early 20th-century Egyptian songs, all of which tell intimate stories. The older songs use free rhythms and microtonality—notes that lie between the 12 tones that span an octave—and they represent a freer time in Egyptian classical musical culture, one that has often been forgotten.

‘Throughout Nozhet El Nofous, Mounir uses her menagerie of instruments to accompany the solo voices that appear on the unearthed recordings. Piano, strings, and more swirl around the fervent singing, following their wandering tonalities and rhythms. There’s a murky quality to the aging recordings, and Mounir’s crisp orchestrations bolster them, highlighting their underlying meaning and forming a bridge between the past and the present.’ — Vanessa Ague

 

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Prison Religion Torn Up Body
‘Prison Religion has produced a bruise on the surface of perfect space, a perfect page, a tilt in the balance of sonics, a reconfiguration of structure pieced together with a sound mind, a smudged blemish on the blue note, a cacophonous polyvocalic swell inside those distinct undergrounds and non-spaces. Spaces on shelves, spaces between each other, spaces within ourselves. It stands strong as an album symbolic of some tossing of a cup of acid on the canvas and laughing as it blackens, a testament to the tarnishing of universal truths, a disintegration of hegemonic dog food, and a celebration of a more relevant, a more real, revelatory truth found once more within communities, within cracks. In turn revealing a bloom of new shapes, a changing of the paradigmatic guard, and an invitation to explore new potentials and methods of getting there. The pair of them look on as brain-death dressed as entertainment, as maximum cost for minimum value.’ — Ryan Walker

 

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Avvitagalli Stay Anonymous
‘Debut outing for Valentina Magaletti and Pino Montecalvo’s Avvitagalli project. Variegated percussion + wtf jams inspired by an abandoned & torched palazzo somewhere in southern Europe. None Corsa explores presence and absence, purpose and chance. The push-pull between Pino’s toys, records, radio & instruments with Valentina’s arsenal of percussion and production techniques takes in elements of modern composition, jazz, dub and post punk.’ — Bleep

 

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Tasos Stamou No breath to breathe
‘During a decade of sound performances and recordings, Tasos Stamou has developed a unique style of live electroacoustic composition. Long and continuous pieces are created on stage or in the studio using a “portable electroacoustic music studio”. His gear consists of acoustic (prepared zither, reeds, recorders, objects) and electronic instruments (handmade electronics, modular synthesizer systems and live processed feedback loops). Based on sustained tonal textures and free improvised instrumental solos, his live compositions create a particular and unique atmosphere of ritual noise.’ — Cafe Oto

 

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Ohyung Symphonies Sweeping!
‘The brilliance of OHYUNG’s compositions — apparently achieved through a series of rehearsals and finalized in a gamut-running 72-hour recording session — is how they interrogate structure in fascinating ways. While the unending drones of “releases like gloves!” are of a specific aesthetic caste, tracks like “my hands hold flora!” subtly shift and change, introducing new chords and waves of sound amidst lightly clattering speaker fuzz. When a bright new tone comes in after the three-minute mark, it sounds akin to a ray of sunlight stabbing through clouds, shining a light on all that follows it.’ — Evan Sawdey

 

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Boy Harsher Autonomy (feat. Cooper B. Handy)
‘For those of us who have seen Boy Harsher’s self-directed The Runner, the music video for “Autonomy” is an extension of that. Clips of Coopers’ part in the film are cut in and out while fellow characters dance in the off-white alternate reality. The idea of movie characters hanging out with the musical artists was not uncommon for 1980s OST soundtrack hits—think about the Brat Pack hanging out in the music video for John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” video—and this nod to the past has always been Boy Harsher’s modus operandi (including the nice touch of Muller’s unplugged Ensoniq synthesizer).’ — Ani Harriman

 

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Osasco Dynamics Cascata de Serotonina
‘This music is playing, replaying and relaying over the neural laces, the unserviced connections mangling the signals beyond recognition from listener to listener. Meditation music sounds off for a few seconds before being drilled into abstraction, the next recognizable bit ranging from anything to 80s Goth-Pop to dream pop, evangelical content now warped beyond salvation. The signal-to-noise ratio varies from lace to lace and the excitement is in finding from where/when each nugget of meaning and melody comes from.’ — problemas dos outros

 

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Quelle Chris & Chris Keys Sudden Death
‘Unique artist, committed, whose artistic identity does not accept any concession dictated by the air of time, Quelle Chris has gratified us in 2019 with one of the best rap album according to most music prescribers of good taste. Active since 2011, he has accustomed us to various experiments through his multiple projects filled with cynicism and black humor. On his latest album “Guns” released on the prestigious label MelloMusicGroup, Quelle Chris decided to tackle this time the issue of carrying weapons in the United States. A delicate subject that represents the daily life of the rapper from Detroit. Because since always, in Hip Hop, the gun fascinates but kills, is it a reason to live with it?’ — Periscope

 

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Shit and Shine Dividrleedoth
‘For Texas-based Shit and Shine, curveballs are very much the name of the game. Veering from mucky noise rock dirge to gurning slabs of techno, Craig Clouse is uninterested in the self imposed restrictions of genre. Across Shit and Shine’s output he’s proven himself as equally adept at twisting melons as dislocating limbs.’ — Oliver Cookson

 

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Chloe Alexandra Thompson Nocturne Voice
‘Thompson is a Cree, Canadian, interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound. Using audio programming software, computational processing, and acoustic instruments, Thompson’s work seeks to create connection by guiding audience participants through these augmented experiences.’ — Working Consortium

 

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Pinkcourtesyphone Drained By The Very Nearness
‘Enacting a sort of perpetual dusk of the LA mindset, here we find Pinkcourtesyphone’s most succinct snapshots of glamorous, noirish decay. Proffered as “catastrophe muzak”, the sound of sympathy amplified, leaving the room” the imposed stasis of lockdown lingers of proceedings, with a particularly isolated opener ‘that intangible object of contempt / the tenderness of …’ setting a bleakly damaged tone that glacially resolves across the long string sighs of ‘’drained by the very nearness’ and finds its softer, sentimental centre in the fleeting dark bliss of ‘out of an abundance’, and pools into gorgeous, gloaming Lynchian feel of ‘comfortable predictability’ and ‘wistful wishful wanton’, where we can almost hear the medics peering over our prostrate fleshly vessel, searching for a heartbeat behind the shut eyes and blissed expression.’ — Boomkat

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! So, I looked to see where I could get a Túró Rudi in Paris, and it seems that my only chance will be at something called Marche de Noel Mission Catholique Hongroise which will only take place December 2nd – 4th, so I’ll have to be patient and hope I’m still here then. Otherwise, the only other place you can get it in France is in Strasbourg! Yes, it was definitely extremely interesting what was possible under hypnosis and, well, what wasn’t. Maybe I should do it again, but only if one of my friends secretly knows how to do it. My friend with the split tongue says kissing and eating are really weird, and not in a good way. Yesterday was hellish outside, but I think we’re doable today. So far anyway. I just had a flash of seeing people walking Minecraft dogs down the street, and I liked it! I have to remove the stitches in my forehead wound today myself because all the clinics are closed for summer break, so all I need for love to do for me today is to transplant a nurse’s hands onto my wrists for about 20 minutes, G. ** Mieze, Mieze, my old pal! It does my heart super good to see you!!! Sorry you got whomped by the Covid, but very happy you sound like you’re in clear. I still have never gotten it, and it just seems weird, but, hey, it’s not over yet even if everybody here acts like it is. As I’m sure I probably always say when I get to see, come visit Paris! I’ll be the coolest tourist guide, I swear. Lots of love to you! ** Misanthrope, That sounds like a joke only a conspiracy theorist would tell or think is funny. Ah, gotcha, on ‘Dodgie’. I guess George is hard to pronounce, or I mean it would be if your mouth is new to words. Huh. My only nicknames are pretty boring: ‘Denny’ or ‘Den’ and/or ‘Coop’ or ‘The Coop’. But the ones used behind my back might be better. Dude, I hope you don’t have the C. Even if it seems to be no big deal these days, isolation sucks. You in the clear? What’s the scoop? ** _Black_Acrylic, If you haven’t seen ‘Gummo’, that’s a must-see. How’s the Nico bio? Is that ‘the one’ to read, can you tell? I’ve read none of them. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. Yep, she had kids, and I think that was her reason or excuse for bailing on movies for so long. Hooray for your docile baby! All hail rebels, but maybe not while they’re still in the crib. Enjoy that and everything as much is feasible! ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! How’s it going? Thanks about the Manz fest. I … think I read ‘Concluding’, but I can’t remember it, so maybe I didn’t. Wow, it sounds exciting, I’ll try to hunt it down. Reading him sounds juicy at the moment. How was the Julien Calendar gig? No, I don’t think ‘Earwig’ has come out here yet. I feel like there would be a screening that I would be invited to when it does. Well, for better or worse, what you say about it could be said about her other films too, in my opinion. I like her, and she’s super smart, but I do wish she was a little less interested in atmosphere and a little more interested in, well, anything else really. The new Gisele piece is on a summer break. It’s early on and hard to tell how it’s going so far. It needs a ton of work, and I’m not yet sure what exactly she wants from the text aspect, and she has been all over the place about what part text will play in the piece so far, so I’m waiting for her to figure that out. How’s your stuff? The novel, everything else? ** l@rst, Hey, buddy! I’m essentially all right. As such things go. Right, you were going to the East Coast, I remember. We just had a one day brutal heatwave here yesterday, and … Jesus. I’ve always wanted to read that SST book. I’ve never even read ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’, shockingly. What’s on your horizon, eh? Great to see you! ** David Ehrenstein, Ah, I don’t agree, I think as great as ‘DoH’ is, he was just getting started. ** Bill, I know, that fact blew me away too. Yes, it was really, really great to get to Zoom with you yesterday. And the heatwave broke late last night. Or … I think so anyway. Excited to hear more about the project whenever the time suits, like I said. Giddy Thursday! ** Okay. I think the gig I made for you today is an especially rich and rewarding one, so please do test it out and see what you can find. Thanks! See you tomorrow.

 

‘After Days of Heaven, five-foot-two Linda Manz played Peewee, a diminutive tough in The Wanderers (1979); she was cast in the TV film The Orphan Train and a handful of other early-eighties roles, and finally in Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, as interpreted for Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre. It’s a shame and a mystery that more parts didn’t come her way then. “I kinda got lost in the shuffle of being in the movies because I didn’t have an agent at the time and things were slow and . . . I dunno,” Manz said in a Village Voice interview with Nick Pinkerton in 2011.

‘In the intervening years, she moved to California, married cameraman Bobby Guthrie, and had three kids. In 1997, when Harmony Korine brought Manz back on-screen for Gummo, her performance was weird and fearless and funny and gruff, a jumpstart moment, reintroducing her to a new generation. Korine rightly called her “one of the top five screen presences of all time—right up there with Lillian Gish and Gena Rowlands.” But after Gummo and David Fincher’s The Game, Manz disappeared from the public eye almost as quickly as she’d reentered it.

When I tracked her down in 2014, Linda Manz was living in a small community in the mountains north of Los Angeles, a shrimp-puff-cooking young grandma with rebellious irreverence intact. She didn’t make it into LA much. She told me she was teaching her three-year-old granddaughter how to tap dance the way she had been taught as a child (“a tomboy learning to tap dance!” is how she remembered her own first lesson), the way she had done in her movies. “We were tapping all over the place yesterday!”

‘A Chihuahua barked in the background. She was surrounded by her movies. “I got ’em all right here,” she said proudly. She could still recite her best lines. From Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue, playing the Elvis-worshipping Cebe (pronounced CB), hollering at passing trucks: “Subvert normality!” or “I saved your life today.” “How?” “I killed a shit-eating dog.”

‘So much can be said of Manz’s voice, but she was an expressive and captivatingly physical actor too. When she visits her father (Hopper) in prison, she presses her face to the glass with such intense feeling and force you imagine she could launch herself through it; when Richard Gere’s character is shot in Days of Heaven, an uncontrollable shake courses through her body like an electric shock. In her best scene in Harmony Korine’s Gummo, tough and bizarre and tender, she descends into a junk-strewn basement in hot pink short-shorts, pulls a gun on her silent, unyielding son (“If you don’t smile I’m going to kill you!”), tap dances and chicken struts and poses in too-large men’s shoes.

‘Of all her characters—that tap-dancing mom, the tiny gangster Peewee in The Wanderers, the wannabe “mud doctor” Linda of Days of Heaven, and others—Out of the Blue’s Cebe remained her favorite. (A new restoration of the film was set to debut at South by Southwest in March.) When filming wrapped for Gummo, she gave the custom jacket she’d worn in it, embellished with Elvis’s name on the back, to costar Chloë Sevigny. She modeled Cebe after James Dean, she told me. “James Dean, James Dean, James Dean, he was it for me! I’ve always been a tomboy. I’d wear jeans, white shirts, rolled up with the cigarettes right under the sleeve!”

“How much of Cebe was you?” I asked her.
“Probably 100 percent.”
“How so? Would you have described yourself as punk?”
“Not at all, I was into disco!”
“But Cebe’s whole mantra is ‘Disco sucks’!”
“Hahahaha!” I loved Linda’s laugh.
“So maybe you were 99 percent Cebe?”
“Hahahaha!” she cracked up again.
“’Cause Cebe was into Elvis, Johnny Rotten . . .”
“I loved disco. Donna Summer, the Bee Gees! I loved Barry Manilow! Barbra Streisand!” Manz said. “I used to go to discos all the time. I went everywhere. I went to Studio 54 . . . I got in because they got me in.” She didn’t recall who “they” were, but around this time pictures appeared of her with Brooke Shields and with Matt Dillon (who’d just made his own debut as sleeveless punk Richie in the suburban teen rebellion movie Over the Edge). Her version of punk—what she transferred to Cebe—was a feeling: “Attitude,” she said. “Just strong-willed, strong emotion.”

‘When Linda added me as a friend on Facebook, I felt a little starstruck and was compelled to log in more often. Sometimes we exchanged messages there. She reliably posted songs by Barry Gibb, but Barry White was another perennial favorite, as were Al Green, Laura Branigan, and clips from Soul Train—dance music. On her profile she listed her education experience as the School of Hard Knocks, and the University of Life, and I could picture her laughing as she did it, and it was also true. She was online frequently, but having a physical copy to hold in your hand still means more and she asked if I could send her the piece and I said I would. I made color copies and mailed them to her address in California. I imagined maybe I’d get to meet her there someday.

‘Sometime after that story, the director Jeffrey Peixoto asked if I could put him in touch with Linda for a music video he was making. That video never came out, but he sent me footage he’d shot, a brief dazzle of Linda’s family shooting off fireworks in the yard, Linda holding a grandchild and smiling as embers dance past. She was in her midfifties by then; she looked older, but also timeless. By then, he said, she relied on both cigarettes (no judgment) and an oxygen tank, and gamely joked she should voice the part of a Disney witch. This would have no doubt thrilled her grandchildren, not to mention the rest of us who miss her tremendously and, in the wake of her too-early death at fifty-eight, rewatch her brief, blazing output.

‘I knew Manz had become sick and had some emergency hospital visits earlier this year. She was open about some of the heartaches in her life, especially the recent death of one of her sons, in a motorcycle accident. Still I thought she’d outlive cancer, as she had so many other things. “I’ll always be that character,” she’d told me of playing Cebe. “I’m just a tough little rebel, I guess. A survivor, that’s what you’d call me.” I imagined her escaping too, in some version of the way the Linda of Days of Heaven does, the classic knotted-bedsheets-out-the-window move. In the film, it’s cast as an inevitable event. This kid is half raised in open air; she’s just seen fire and plague and murder and she’s expected to go to boarding school? This time she brings along a young rebel comrade who lights a smoke, speaks as tough as Manz (“fuh” for “fur”). Outside, Manz cartwheels down the gray streets, instantly at home again on the railroad tracks, her words mingling with Morricone’s score as they liberate themselves, disappearing into a gray but widening horizon.’ — Rebecca Bengal

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Linda Manz @ Wikipedia
Linda Manz @ IMDb
Linda Manz obituary
‘I’m a tough little rebel’: Linda Manz, Hollywood’s anti-star remembered
Subvert Normality: The Streetwise Voice of Linda Manz
Though her credits were few, she left an indelible mark on film culture.
Linda Manz (1961-2020)
Linda Manz @ MUBI
Linda Manz: Out Of The Blue And Into The Black
Film Community Remembers ‘Days of Heaven’ Star, Dead at 58
Calling Linda Manz
R.I.P. Linda Manz
MANZ ALIVE!
Linda Mana @ Letterboxd
ON THE VOICE OF LINDA MANZ
My small tribute to Linda Manz
Why Chloë Sevigny Is on a Mission to Save the Work of Linda Manz
Secret Style Icon: Linda Manz in Days of Heaven

 

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Extras

Memorial reel

Gone With The Pain – Linda Manz

DAYS OF LINDA (published at MAI Journal, 2020)

LOS GINKAS – LINDA MANZ

 

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Calling Linda Manz
by Nick Pinkerton

 

A swaggering, compact wild-child with a fine-featured, scar-chipped face, Linda Manz was a kid star who wouldn’t get past security at Nickelodeon. With Dennis Hopper’s 1980 Out of the Blue beginning a week-long stand at Anthology Film Archives, New Yorkers can see her in her signature role.

Manz, raised on East 78th Street, today lives amid the orchards of California’s Antelope Valley, 49 years old, mother of three grown sons, two hours and a world from Hollywood (not to mention a lifetime—20 years—away from New York). Not much for phones, she took my call at a friend’s house. Her hostess even popped on the line: “I’ve seen the movies, they’re great! She was a helluva little actress!” I agree.

Manz disabuses me of the notion, easy to believe given her total veracity and lack of affect on-screen, that she was a latchkey prodigy who wandered onto a film set: “My mother had an idea of me being in movies—I never had an idea of me being in movies,” she says with a smoker’s laugh and still-strong Dead End Kid accent. “She was a cleaning woman—she worked at the Twin Towers. Yeah, she always put me in drama classes, she put me in dancing schools, talent classes, she put me in Charlie Lowe’s professional whatever-it-was. . . . I think Elliott Gould went there, too. They taught you how to sing, how to dance, how to improv . . . stuff like that.”

Manz was discovered during casting calls for Days of Heaven (1978), eventually playing Richard Gere’s little sister, “Linda,” in Terrence Malick’s Texas Panhandle–set period piece. When Malick couldn’t find his 70mm epic in the editing room, he had the crazy-brilliant idea to let his 15-year-old starlet lead the way: “This was later on: They took me into a voice recording studio,” remembers Manz. “No script, nothing, I just watched the movie and rambled on . . . I dunno, they took whatever dialogue they liked.” Laid over the images, these extemporaneous monologues abut God, the Devil, and some kid named Ding Dong (“I just made that up”) gave the movie its perspective—and a surreal humor Malick never matched.

Days led to roles in the cartoon Bronx of Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers, as a boxcar kid in TV’s Orphan Train, and then Out of the Blue, Hopper’s head-on collision with the brick wall of nihilist rebellion he’d been staring at his whole career. “I think I was Cebe,” says Manz of relating to her character, a punkette growing up in the blue-collar Northwest who goes out with a bang. Manz, however, faded away, never graduating from juvenile to ingénue—though the scene in Out of the Blue in which she confronts her father (played by Hopper) looking like a Balthus model makes you wonder, “What if?”

Of her early retirement: “I kinda got lost in the shuffle of being in the movies because I didn’t have an agent at the time and things were slow and . . . I dunno.” Though happy enough to recount her film career, the subjects that Manz today speaks about with the most enthusiasm are her first grandchild, three months old, and her recipe for clam bread (see below). She knows that Malick’s latest, The Tree of Life, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but hasn’t seen any of his movies since Days: “I’m not a movie buff, I don’t go to movies. . . . I haven’t been to a movie in 20 years.” (She’s been in a couple, however—playing the mother in 1997’s Gummo in a brief comeback—before withdrawing again.)

There’s a prophetic statement by the casting director who found Manz for Days in a 1979 Time profile: “I suspect that Linda wouldn’t feel bad if no more acting jobs come up.” And she really doesn’t seem to—but, oh, the difference to us.

IN HER OWN WORDS: LINDA MANZ’S CLAM BREAD RECIPE:

“Clam bread—this has everything. You take a loaf of French bread, and you hollow it out, and you save the pieces you take out and you cut ’em up like for dipping pieces. . . . And in a saucepan you put one cube of butter, two cubes of cream cheese . . . say two cloves of minced garlic, and you melt it until it’s smooth and creamy, and you pour that into the hollowed-out bread shell. You get two cans of minced clams—after you got it all stirred up, you drain the clams and you dump it into the mixture, stir it up, and then put it into the bread and bake it. Wrap it in tin foil, put it in the oven for like 15 minutes and heat it up—everyone’ll be wanting clam bread. I make it every time for Thanksgiving, Christmas, any holiday, and there’s none left at the end of the day. It’s gone. That and shrimp puffs.”

 

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11 of Linda Manz’s 14 roles

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Terrence Malick Days of Heaven (1978)
‘On set, Malick would later confess, Manz had often eluded him. “I feel like I have not been able to grasp a fraction of who she really is,” he said in a rare 1979 interview. But Malick’s instinctive way of working—the magic-hour shoots, his method of directing the crew to suddenly shift gears and film, say, a flock of birds passing overhead—was in so many ways not so different from Manz’s. She’d forget her lines, but she would also transform them, marvelously, revealing the surreal ironies within them just as Malick’s spur-of-the-moment noticings led to some spectacular cinematography. (“Every time I gave her new lines, she interpreted it in her own way,” Malick said. “[W]hen she refers to heaven and hell, she says that everyone is bursting into flames.”)

‘At an impasse two years into editing the film, Malick called in Manz and let her riff, recording as the film unspooled. He was drawing on a voice-over technique he had previously used in Badlands, which features flat, diaristic narration from another precocious teenage girl.

‘Manz’s narration, raw and direct and dreaming, supplied him with the story that was missing, its necessary humor, its fatalistic wizened edge. It pulls Days of Heaven down to earth but also hovers above it, floating in and out of the action, sometimes in the midst of it, often omniscient enough to glimpse the hidden dangers lurking on a sky-blue horizon, the fire behind the sunset, the ghosts that only a child can see. Malick regretted all he left on the cutting floor, but the result is a remarkable edit.

‘Transcribed, it amounts to less than twelve hundred words—a standalone oblique and haunted monologue that lies somewhere between the bloodshot verse of Arkansan poet Frank Stanford and the no-nonsense delivery of Mattie Ross, the young, hard-bitten heroine of Charles Portis’s True Grit. Threaded into Malick’s sublime skies and wheat fields, it becomes something else, intuiting the terror below those ecstatic surfaces. Manz knew the world and the people in it were torn (“You got half devil and half angel in you”) and she ad-libs delightfully, inventing a guy named Ding-Dong whose Rapture vision she recounts: “The mountains are going to go up in big flames. The water’s going to rise in flames. There’s going to be creatures running every which way, some of them burnt, half their wings burnin’. People are going to be screamin’ and howlin’ for help.” Her words lurk beneath idyllic footage of elk herds and clouds, but when the fires and locusts arrive, you start to wonder if maybe Ding-Dong is vindicated.

‘Sometimes the voice is pure hobo poetry, matched to Malick’s Wyeth-esque lonesome houses and fields. “I got to like this farm,” Manz says. “Do anything I want. Roll in the fields. Talk to the wheat patches. When I was sleeping, they’d talk to me. They’d go in my dreams.”

‘“In all my movies I’m just being myself,” she told me. “I just ad-libbed everything. With Days of Heaven, I came in and did all the voice-overs. I made all that stuff up. It wasn’t hard, there wasn’t any pressure. I was just having fun.”’ — Criterion Collection

Excerpt

Excerpt

DAYS OF HEAVEN – Linda Manz Interview

 

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Philip Kaufman The Wanderers (1979)
‘Manz had a small but significant role as Peewee, the girlfriend of a New York street gang member, in Philip Kaufman’s 1979 comedic drama The Wanderers. The film was a solid success with critics and audiences, serving as a springboard for the film’s lead, Ken Wahl. Manz received no such career boost from the film’s good fortune.’ — Awards Daily

Trailer

 

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Stephen Verona Boardwalk (1979)
‘In 1979, Linda Manz appeared in a curio called Boardwalk that starred Ruth Gordon and Lee Strasberg as an old married couple facing urban blight in Coney Island. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it “a movie of unrelieved, unexplored gloom.”’ — Vanity Fair

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William Graham Orphan Train (1979)
‘In 1854, there were living on the streets of New York City over 10,000 abandoned orphaned children. Out of this desperate situation was born the orphan Train. This is a fictionalized account, based on actual events.’ — MUBI

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Dennis Hopper Out Of The Blue (1980)
‘With its dark depiction of a family mired in abuse of all kinds, the picture practically fireballed into 1980’s Cannes Film Festival, where astonished, booing audiences ensured it would slip through the net of history in the years to come. If the raging nuclear family at the movie’s core seem hell-bound, Out of the Blue has been obscurity-bound.

‘For those who did manage to see the film, Manz’s performance has been an inspiration, even a lifeline. For Chloë Sevigny, writing on her Instagram last month, Cebe is “arguably one of the best teen actresses ever portrayed on screen”; interviewed by Paper magazine back in 1995, she even said she wanted a career like Manz’s. “As for acting, I’d like to have a career like Linda Manz. She’s my favourite actress. She did three movies and all of them are masterpieces, except for The Wanderers. Now she lives in a trailer park with three or four kids, I think. But I’d rather do that than do ten movies and make millions of dollars and have them all be trashy films.” For Natasha Lyonne, herself a child star, watching Cebe as a teenager helped her feel less alone. “The world at large doesn’t always make sense to me, and there are safe havens,” she told Interview magazine in 2013. “Linda Manz in Out of the Blue is one of them.”’ — AnotherMag

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E.W. Swackhamer Longshot (1981)
‘You know this 80s cheese: a couple kids… a chance to make it big… a few set-backs… and… tournament-level foosball play. Yep, this is an attempt to invest table soccer with stakes and excitement, but finds the actual action of playing the game completely uninteresting until the very last (ridiculous) shot of the film. Which isn’t really surprising given the material. Fortunately Linda Manz (seeing her in something other than Days of Heaven brought us to Tubi for this) as the 14-year-old foos-shark runaway is pretty great, and the whole comes together as fairly adorable fluff. With a lot of original songs that sound like knock-offs of middle-of-the-road 80s pop (several sung by lead Leif Garret) and, somehow, a surprise appearance by Oingo Boingo.’ — Rock Hyrax

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Gustav Ehmck Mir reicht’s … ich steig aus! (1983)
‘The intelligent Linda, daughter of Joseph and Jane, takes a critical view of her parents’ marriage. Her father’s dominant behavior and her mother’s indifference become so unbearable to her that she decides to run away. She manages to persuade Jane to accompany her.’ — FGC

 

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Harmony Korine Gummo (1997)
‘After Out of the Blue, Manz, at around 20, stopped acting and didn’t return until Harmony Korine cast her as the mother in his surrealist 1997 film Gummo. “I kinda got lost in the shuffle,” she told the Voice in 2011, and claimed at the time she hadn’t seen a movie in 20 years.’ — Jordan Hoffman

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Gummo Trailer (rare alternate version)

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David Fincher The Game (1997)
‘Retired actress from the late 70s and early 80s, Linda Manz, had a small part in Fincher’s ‘The Game’ as “Christine’s Roommate Amy”.’ — IMDb

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Mark Hanlon Buddy Boy (1999)
‘Dark and quirky film about a real introvert that stays home to take care of his mother. He’s extremely lonely and frustrated by his life and spends his time spying on his attractive neighbor. Sounds like a creepy film and it is but Susan Tyrrell who plays his mother is just terrific. Her performance elevates this film from a throw away to a real curio! Tyrrell has made a career out of playing these incredibly offbeat roles and no one does it better. One of the frustrating things about the story is when Emmanuelle Seigner’s character is somehow attracted to Aiden Gillen and he doesn’t seem to appreciate it. Then his paranoia starts to take over and he thinks she’s a cannibal. Film has one of those ambiguous endings and its up to each viewers taste as to how you’ll react to this. But Tyrrell is a standout. Former child actress Linda Manz (Days of Heaven, The Wanderers) appears in the film as well.’ — rosscinema

 

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Nick Ebeling Along for the Ride (2016)
‘Whether or not you’re already a passionate defender of Dennis Hopper’s commercially doomed 1971 Easy Rider follow-up, The Last Movie, which long ago acquired cult status, first-time feature documentary-maker Nick Ebeling’s Along for the Ride will surely make you curious. This rip-roaring tribute to a maverick artist trips along like a surreal odyssey, punctuated by lively reminiscences, choice clips and superb photographic material. The whole enterprise seems remarkably true to the spirit of an anarchic life often driven by booze, blow, women and guns.

‘Blue Velvet gets its due as one of the films that revived Hopper’s career as an actor, with David Lynch praising his work ethic while acknowledging that something inside Hopper made him spark to the character of sexually twisted sociopath Frank Booth: “Dennis was Frank. He knew all about Frank.” But of the handful of later films Hopper made as director, only 1980’s Out of the Blue receives much attention, via recollections from Linda Manz, who played his daughter.’ — Variety

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p.s. RIP Vin Scully. Genius. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, pal! I’m sure I’ll be passing along what’s going on with the film when it goes on. Túró Rudi sounds extremely interesting. I’m going to do a google search and see if there’s anywhere in Paris where I score one. Surely there’s some Hungarian-inclined patisserie out there. Yeah, I reminder when I was hypnotised, my friends would say, you know, ‘Sing a song’ or ‘Do a striptease’ or whatever, and I was just, like, ‘No.’ I remember that when hypnotised, I had no sense of humor. I’m usually kind of humorous guy in person, but under hypnosis I was very calm and robotic. The memory thing was weird. Also one time my hypnotist friend gave me a post-hypnotic suggestion. It was the late 60s, and he said that when I heard a song by King Crimson playing I would think it was Pink Floyd. (I knew those bands really well and wouldn’t have mistaken them.) Then, sure enough, later on when I was post-hypnotised, he played King Crimson’s ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ and what I heard was Pink Floyd’s ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ and identified the song as that. Strange. Do you know anyone who’s had a tongue split? I had a friend who had that done back during the ‘Modern Primitive’ fad in the ’90s, and, boy, is he sorry now. Apparently you cant really undo that modification. It’s going to be 36 degrees here today so for the next 24 love can be anything he fucking as long as he’s ice cold and cuddles with me, G. ** Misanthrope, Glad you enjoyed. He’s great. Mm, I suppose it’s not impossible that Alexander’s secretly buried there. That sure would completely alter history yet again. And, let’s face it, history is starting to get a little predictable until you’re a conspiracy theorist. How or why did you get the nickname Dodgie? With an ‘ie’ even. ** JJ Stick, Hi, welcome! Thank you for coming in. Me too, re: Mathews. What’s your favorite of his? Mine kind of shifts around but fairly often it’s ‘The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium’ for some reason. Take care! ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, indeed, I agree. I’ve never heard of ‘The Voids’. Huh. I’ll seek it out, sounds fun. Thanks, buddy. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, right now we’re about to make cuts and trims to our budget to get it down the amount we have. We have to cut 50k out, which is quite a lot considering our small budget. When we have our final budget, we’ll know what we can pay people and can start hiring them. Then Zac and I will go to LA, either in late August or very early September, and do early pre-prod work. There are some people we’ve Zoom auditioned for the crew who seem really promising, so we’ll meet with them. Same with some potential actors. We need to nail down the film’s main location where 85% of the film takes place. There are prospects, but we need to visit them to be sure. So that’s next, and hopefully by the end of that trip we’ll be at least fairly prepared. Then we’ll travel back and forth to LA a few times to work and nail down the cast and rehearse, etc. before we shoot the film probably right after Xmas. Thanks for asking, man. Yeah, I cant say Lovato holds even the tiniest interest for me, but they sound very market savvy. Interesting to write (and read) about at least. ** Okay. I’ve never done a Linda Manz post, and obviously I should, so I did, and now I have, and there you go. See you tomorrow.