1. The Fall are an English post-punk band, formed in Manchester in 1976. Named after the English translation of Albert Camus’ novel, La Chute (The Fall) (1956), they are notable for their idiosyncratic and innovative music, leader Mark E. Smith’s enigmatic lyrics and drawling delivery, and for their subtle influence on several generations of musicians. Formed during punk rock’s rise, The Fall never quite fit into that movement or its post-punk/new wave offshoots. For over a quarter of a century, The Fall have continued to produce music which varies richly in both character and quality. The abrasive lyrics and instantly recognizable half-droned, half-ranted vocals of frontman Mark E. Smith provide the one consistent note through more than three prolific decades of dizzying personnel changes. An interview with Smith in May, 2004 reported “49 (band) members, 78 albums and 41 singles,” and also quoted the opinion of their longstanding fan, the legendary English DJ John Peel: “They are always different, they are always the same.” 2. Mark E. Smith sculpture
3.Acknowledged influences from: The Monks, Link Wray, The Seeds, Can, Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, The Residents, Van der Graaf Generator, The Velvet Underground. 4.Acknowledged influence on: Sonic Youth, Suede, Wu Tang Clan, Pavement, Radiohead, Buck 65, DJ Shadow, Mobb Deep, Nick Cave, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, LCD Sound System, Clinic, etc., etc. 5.Official Fall Website 6.Unofficial Fall Website 7.The Pseud Mag: The Fall Fanzine 8.The Fall Gig Repository 9. Drawing by a 13 yr old Fall fan
10. Watch Mark E. Smith receive the NME Godlike Genius Award
11. In January 2005, The Fall were the subject of an hour long BBC 4 documentary, The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith
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Five explanations for #10
‘Smile / 2×4’ live on The Tube, 1983
‘Bombast / Cruisers Creek’ live on The Tube, 1985
‘I Am Damo Suzuki’ live at the Hacienda, 1985
‘Mr. Pharmacist’ promo clip
‘A Lot of Wind’ on MTV’s 120 Minutes, 1991
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Extracurricular
17. ‘I Am Kurious Oranj’ (1988) Music: The Fall. Choreography: Michael Clark
‘The last thing most Fall fans expected the group to do in 1988 was provide music for a ballet, but in fact this is what they did. Of course, it helped that the Michael Clark company of dancers were some of the most avant-garde at the time in Britain and were inspired originally by the Fall’s “Hey! Luciani” single. The concept, very loosely, centers around William and Mary of Orange, and finds Smith arranging William Blake’s “Jerusalem” for the band, adding his own lyrics (“It was the fault of the government,” providing ironic contrast to the self-sufficiency espoused in Blake).’ — Answers.com
Watch a clip from ‘Hail the New Puritans,’ Charles Atlas’s documentary about the Michael Clark/Fall collaborations
18.‘Hey! Luciani’ (1986), Mark E. Smith’s play
“‘Hey! Luciani’ lasts about 100 minutes and features new Fall music themes for each of the play’s main character, ‘Have Found Boorman’ (for the all-girl Israeli commando group who appear as a mysterious but vital connection in the thickening plot), ‘Sleep Debt Snatches’ which has a reggae atmosphere, a machine heart and spine cracking drumbeat, and ‘Informant’ which, fittingly in view of posthumous revelation of the cheeseburger being a narc is “the Elvis Presley type number.” Apart from The Fall, there’s Trevor Stewart as The Pope, Lucy Burgess as the ballet dancer and Pope’s right hand girl, Michael Clark has a brief role and Leigh Bowery, star of the excellent Smith-directed video for ‘Mr Pharmacist’, is head of accounts at The Vatican. ‘The play is a simulation of the conspiracy theory around Luciani Albino, Pope John Paul 1, says Smith. ‘The middle bit splits up other things – South America and Britain, for instance. No way is it a factual indictment of Catholicism or even The Vatican. People think when they hear it’s about the pope that it must either be a ‘rock musical’ or anti-religious statement or something. Which is a sad reflection on the way the theatre is viewed in this country. I chose the setting because the characters appealed to me and hopefully it makes good drama.'” — from NME, December 13, 1986
Watch Mark E. Smith discuss ‘Hey! Luciani’ with Jools Holland on The Tube, 1986
The Fall ‘Hey! Luciani’, promo clip (1986)
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Sans music
19. In 1989, the NME decided to host a ‘Rock Summit’ for their end-of-the-year issue.’ So they put Mark E. Smith, Nick Cave, and Shane McGowan together in pub, plied them with drinks, and recorded their conversation.
Nick Cave “I think we have all tended to create some kind of area where we can work without particularly having to worry about what’s fashionable.” Mark E. Smith “Yes, fair enough. But I think there’s a lot of differences in this trio here. Nick was very rock’n’roll to me but he’s turned his back on it which was cool. Shane’s more, I dunno. To me the Pogues are the good bits from the Irish showband scene, like the Indians. You had that feel, probably lst that now. Your work’s good though.” Shane McGowan “Fuck it man. Who wants to work in a place where there’s all these people looking at you ?” MES “Are you talking about your gigs ? You should stop doing them, then.” SM “Can’t afford to.” MES “Fuck it, you could fight not to if you don’t like it.” SM “…and leave the rest of them in the lurch ?” MES “Nah, the rest of your band will always complain about not working. If you’re paying them a wage tell them to stay at home and behave themselves.” SM “It’s a democracy our band.” MES “Why aren’t they here with you then ?” SM “Cos the NME didn’t want to interview them.” MES ‘Cos nobody’d recognise them.” SM “That’s it ! They want to interview us because we’ve got distinctive characteristics. They just want to interview three high-brow loonies.” MES “In that case you should have brought your mate Joe Strummer along.” SM “I said high-brow loonies.” (read the rest)
20. Watch Mark E. Smith read out the classified football results on the BBC
21.Selected quotes
‘Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?’
‘I’ve done all these scripts for a science fiction series, actually, a British science fiction series, worked me fucking balls off on them. Six stories, really short. Did the music, everything, made it all tight as fucking fuck. And they said it was complete crap. Then The X-Files comes on. Same company, they want to see me scripts, because The X-Files is running out of ideas, or they want to use the music or something. I said send ’em back, I just need to look through them, and I fucking burned them.’
‘You should read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, that’s proper journalism. I mean, he followed fucking Goebbels around, stayed up all night doing stuff, listening to tapes of broadcasts. Nowadays, they can’t spell, they can’t fuckin’ paragraph for a start and that puts ’em right out in my book. You want to know what I read? The Daily Mail. You want to know why? Because everything is spelt correctly. I know it’s a load of fuckin’ bosh, but at least you understand it.’
‘I used to be psychic, but I drank my way out of it.’
‘Pre-cog is a Fall word.’
‘English people will go to Africa and work out all the different tribes, but they won’t look at themselves. It makes me laugh, this ashamed of being English thing, cos it’s the most tolerant fucking country in the world. We went to Wales with Super Furry Animals, and it was like the fucking ‘Wicker Mari – end of the night, they’re all pissed, singing Welsh songs, running around outside. The bouncer’s going ‘You’re English, you’d better stay in the van; and they’ve all got Welsh flags and stuff. We go back to the van and there’s like 3,000 Welshmen with fucking torches going ‘Adoobedoobedoo’. Imagine if that was fucking Germans or something!’
‘John Walters wrote me a letter and said, you know, ‘you are the worst group I’ve ever seen in the [laughs] in the history of mankind’ [laughs]. He was good like that, John Walters was. You ever meet him? No, he was f**king fantastic. He said, ‘you were the worst, tuneless, rubbish I’ve ever heard’, you know, ‘even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees’. This is what he wrote ‘you’re even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees. I didn’t believe it was possible.’ You know what I mean? [laughs] He was a gem, what a gem.’
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Recent, rare, special guests
23. ‘White Lightning,’ rare biker movie promo clip, 1991
24. The Fall with Coldcut ‘Telephone Thing,’ live in 1990
25. ‘Blindness,’ live at The Hammersmith Palais, 01/04/2007
26. ‘Wings,’ rare promo clip, 1985
27. Inspiral Carpets feat. Mark E. Smith ‘I Want You,’ 1994
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Misc.
28.Renegade: The Gospel According to Mark E. Smith (Penguin, July, 2007)
The first autobiography by the legendary leader of The Fall. Still going after thirty years, The Fall are one of the most distinctive British bands, their music — odd, spare, cranky and repetitious — an acknowledged influence on The Smiths, The Happy Mondays, Nirvana and Franz Ferdinand. And Mark E. Smith IS The Fall. For the first time we get to hear his full, candid take on the ups and downs of a band as notorious for its in-house fighting as for its great music; and on a life that has endured prison in America, drugs, bankruptcy, divorce and the often bleak results of a legendary thirst.
p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, George, Do those projects. It’s raining here too, but I’m cool with it. David sounds like a disaster-in-progress. Or like a wild oats sewer who’s going to need a lot of luck. I wish you (and him) all the positive and sobering vibes possible, man. Really stressful. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Me either: obsessiveness, not needing much to. Yeah, I listened to Chris’s Wake Island deal yesterday, and that reference was very cool. Cheers back from a rain-surrounded spot in Paris. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, I was friendly with Lucille LaSueur. In fact, here’s a polaroid I took of Lucille in 1984. ** Bill, On the … menu? Urp. You’re wild. Where do you hear about all these books I’ve never heard of, i.e. Isabel Yap’s? I’ll go hunt it. Thank you, B. ** Sypha, I’m probably showing my age in saying that I have no idea who Krang is and have never watched any incarnation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Golem there looks like a very tough boss, no? ** Dominik, Hi, hi!!! I looked to see if there were any stray videos or anything online from that piece of Ishmael’s and mine (‘The Undead’) that Sherry/Keith was in, and I found a very short, kind of blurry excerpt from part of it. Sherry/Keith is the boy with dyed blond hair kissing and hugging Ishmael stage center. Here. Oh, I did a post about ball-jointed dolls here years ago. I should find and restore it maybe. Thank you! Love being such a sloppy kisser he wins the Nobel Peace Prize, G. ** Steve Erickson, Yeah, I’ve seen the term ‘elevated horror’ around. I think ‘coopted horror’ would be more accurate. I would definitely like to see a documentary that accurately portrays David W. as the complicated, great guy he really was and not more things coopting select aspects of him with the goal of creating a queer saint. That’s tough with your friend. I guess just let him know you care and are available and hope? Unless you think it’s so serious there needs to be an intervention or something? ** Jack Skelley, Oh, man, you just murdered me, mouth-first, in the most humane possible way. Jesus. Congratulations! ** Okay. Today you get a really, really old restored post from about 14 years ago that I originally made to mark the occasion of Mark E. Smith’s 50th birthday. So he was both alive at the time and still running on all cylinders or whatever they say. There are some dead links in there, but a surprising number of them still work. Anyway, a slightly cob-webbed tribute to the great and powerful Fall. See you tomorrow.
_______________ Yoan CapoteOpen Mind, 2008 “Open Mind” is a project to build an underground park made with walls, constructing a labyrinth similar to the human brain. People become metaphors for neurons transmitting information as they walk around the maze.
_____________ Yeo Shih YunMind Ink Painting Machine V2.0, 2020 In her work titled “Mind Ink Painting Machine,” Yeo transforms the electrical impulses in her brain into compelling, abstract video art. Visually stimulating, the 17-minute piece showcases particles which are reminiscent of brush strokes coalescing with each other and then breaking apart, almost like crashing waves. An immersive and seemingly eerie electronic track lingers in the background. The ambient track, as it turns out, was composed by a close friend of Yeo’s, Andy Yang, a musician and artist, using the Chapman Stick, an electrical music instrument with 10 to 12 individually tuned strings that was devised in the early ’70s by jazz musician Emmet Chapman. The development of Yeo’s work involves two parts. She began with the development of the “ink” in the video, which requires a total of 100,000 particles to appear as a smooth, fluid simulation. She then used the EEG sensors to translate the human brainwaves and converted them into data for the ink painting. The raw data was processed in TouchDesigner, software for visual programming, and used to control the data stream for the simulation. Subsequently, the data from the simulation was passed into an Open Graphics Library which rendered the network to create the final digital ink paintings.
_____________ Olga ChernyshevaWaiting for a Miracle, 2000 Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats. There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti.
_____________ Don CainMens Amplio, 2013 In Oakland, California, a group of artists are building a massive, interactive brain sculpture that’s meant to be controlled by only one thing: an actual brain. The sculpture, titled Mens Amplio — Latin for “expanding the mind” — is going to be 15 feet tall and will be able to glow, flash colors and patterns, and even shoot out fire. The brain is being constructed from twirling metal tubes and LEDs, and will be housed inside of a large wireframe head. The plan is to showcase the Mens Amplio at different events, allowing spectators to control the brain by wearing an attached EEG headset, which measures electrical fluctuations on the skull as a way of indirectly detecting brain activity.
______________ Yaron Steinbergthe brain/city project, 2011 Steinberg has created a giant sculpture of his brain, as he imagines it to be: “It is basically a city inside my brain that has all this different neighborhoods working together to form the city as one thing. I tried to create a platform for me to describe my inner world. It is an object used as a personal diary, an arena were events and worlds are working in symbiosis with one another and form a texture of life”, he says. The sculpture is made out of cardboxes he found in the streets, it is 1,40m high and 1,60m long and contains an electric train, a tape recorder and Christmas lights.
______________ Jan FabreThe Artist Who Tries to Drive His Own Brain Forward, 2007 Silicone, textiles, oak and paint.
______________ Christoph KellerHypnosis Film Project, 2007 In 2006 Keller began assembling an archive of hypnosis scenes from the history of cinema. A striking number of films contain hypnosis scenes and in most of these scenes, the directors do not resist the temptation of wanting to hypnotise the audience along with the actor as it were. For Hypnosis Film Project (2007), Keller compiled an 18-minute cinematic hypnosis session from sequences extricated from their original plots and are narrowed down to their pure hypnotic principles.
______________ Jeromina Juangory brain cap, 2011 I know, I know, another caulking project from me?! I couldn’t resist, especially because it was so easy to turn a regular fitted ball cap into a bloody brain with my caulking gun. It’s best to study pictures of the human brain before tackling this project in order to best mimic the brain’s convolution patterns when caulking the cap.
______________ Jonathan LaskerBRAIN, ANTI-BRAIN, 1987 oil on canvas
_____________ Olaf MooijBraincar, 2011 ‘braincar’ is a mobile sculpture created by rotterdam artist olaf mooij, featuring a large brain-like extrusion on the back of a modified used car. by day, the vehicle captures and stores images and video from its travels. by night, this footage is remixed, projected from within the brain sculpture and visible from the outside.
_____________ Ursula DammChromatographic Ballads, 2013 Chromatographic Orchestra is an artistic installation which allows a visitor to direct a software framework with an EEG device. In an exhibition environment with semi-transparent video screens a visitor is sitting in an armchair and learns to navigate unconsciously – with his/her brain waves the parameter space of our software – Neurovision. Neurovision interacts with live video footage of the location of the exhibition and its surroundings. By navigating with his/her own brain waves the visitor can define and navigate the degree of abstraction of a generative (machine learning) algorithm, performed on the footage of different, nearby video cameras.
______________ Isa GenzkenMein Gehirn (My Brain), 1984 synthetic polymer paint on plaster, metal
______________ Johan DeckmannThe Hypnosis (Record Version), 2016 Johan explained that his psychological practice has great influence on his art. It not only serves as a tremendous inspiration for the content of his works but also as a constant reminder of personal responsibility. “I meet many people who suffer from a circumstance that they themselves have created but they choose not to take action,” he added. “I think it’s tragicomic that underneath our frustration and self-slavery lies this beautiful opportunity.”‘
______________ Guy VinerAxl Rose and Girlfriend Kissing Under X-Ray, 2008 Viner used a CT scan and X-ray machine to photograph the rock star couple.
______________ Ron EnglishGlass Jaw, 2021 From the mind of Ron English emerges his latest twist on reality! Weighing in at a whopping 8 lbs, standing tall at 11 inches, cast from realistically colored solid high impact resin, for the first time in the world, see a full-size brain cast inside of a perfectly recreated boxing glove… The Glass Jaw!
______________ Marvin Gaye ChetwyndBrain Bug, 2014 As the name suggests, at least part of the shape resembles a giant brain or possibly the end of a penis. And it’s main facial features bear quite a lot of resemblance to genitalia; it has quite an obscene orifice. It actually looks a lot more obscene in its source, which is the film Starship Troopers. I’ve seen the relevant scenes on YouTube and the Brain Bug is this denizen of another planet that has telepathic powers and whose sustenance is essentially the brain of others, particularly it seems unsuspecting human visitors to this planet. And the Brain Bug has a host of bug like warriors and is very much like the queen bee in a bee colony you know so everybody depends on but also protects this big thing. In terms of a sculpture its framework is almost like a rudimentary tent. The original in the sci-fi film is very slimy and visceral, while this is made out of, I guess, cotton sheets and canvas and stuffing. It’s very improvised, like all of Marvin’s sculptures and props and installations, and quite painterly, harking back to her training as a painter.
______________ John BaldessariBrain/Cloud with Palm Tree, 2019 A recurrent motif throughout his practice, a cloud was first depicted in the painting God Nose, 1965, in which the artist juxtaposed an image of the sky with an abstracted human body part. The use of isolating body parts became a continuous theme within Baldessari’s practice. Brain/Cloud takes this one step further, directly comparing the shape of the human brain to that of a cloud, exemplifying Baldessari’s proposition that unembodied physical features become newly strange, abstract, and morph into other things.
_____________ Anatoliy Kharkhurin/Tovy HarhurWhat the brain!, 2017 This video collage entertains the idea of vanity of scientific inquiry. The voice in the background lectures about the structure and functioning of the brain. The lecture is accompanied by images of the living brain and brain parts diagrams, which together represent the ‘scientific’ approach to human psyche. These images are juxtaposed with video clips of Leize Jenius artists’ performances representing potential (and rather unpredictable) content of the psyche.
_____________ Ilya FilatovFucking Brain, 2014 We are our brain. Consumption of endless information, scrolling tapes, causes “cheap dopamine”. Due to the abundance of information in our environment, the brain meets its needs, spending less and less neural connections in the cortex. Endless orgasm and pleasure. We lose the ability to think.
______________ Pierre Huyghe Of Ideal, 2019 They’ve been described as the stuff of nightmares but Pierre Huyghe’s Mental Image works are derived from the thoughts of waking subjects. Participants were asked to look at pictures or conjure thoughts of life forms, prehistoric tools, machines, artworks and other entities while their brains were scanned by a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine at Kyoto University’s Kamitani Lab. These scans were then fed to a neural network, computer software that interpreted them by comparing them to a database of pictures taken in the real world. The rapid sequence of amorphous images, reminiscent of foetal fauna or sprouting flora, that Huyghe exhibits are amalgams of the images the neural network sifts through as it attempts to match the visual information from the brain scans.
______________ Christopher WoolMaggie’s Brain, 1995 In Maggie’s Brain, the aluminum support is silkscreened, overpainted with white, silkscreened a second time, and then topped with an explosive, floral-like spray in the center. Multiple references—from the allover compositions of Abstract Expressionism to the cool, silkscreened surfaces of Pop Art—reflect Wool’s engagement with the history of painting.
______________ Jinah RohMater Ex Machina, 2019 Media artist Jinah Roh’s Mater Ex Machina (2019) travels into the realms of the brain and its power and its interface with human culture via a creepy robot (a green-eyed bald head with puttylike skin on top of an armour-plated, female-breasted metal torso; limbs absent) that looks like the stuff of nightmares.
_______________ VariousHorror’s Brains, ?
_______________ Anne Lindberg Old Brain, 2005 Thread, 650 pounds, 28′ x 5′ x 8″
_______________ Eva Lee and Aaron TrocolaDual Brains, 2018 “Dual Brains” is an OpenBCI real-time brain data-driven performance, conceived for Art-A-Hack collaboration and led by Eva Lee. Inspired by neuroscientific research which indicates that human brains are fundamentally hard wired for empathy, especially under conditions of duress. The performers’ brain data is visually presented while they focus their minds on emotionally charged memories, first without physical contact and then while holding hands. Sound created from EEG and ECG data. Performance duration, 3 minutes.
______________ Hannah Hallam-EamesSpilled brains / synthetic circuits, 2016 I once watched this bizarre TED talk where a surgeon was attempting to perform a head transplant. It was very Frankenstein. In my mind, I pictured brains spilling out of the patient’s head like spaghetti. I thought about how then, as though cybernetic, the soft matter would be mashed together with electrical wires then fused together to allow the body’s circuit board to function. I thought about the clunkiness of motherboards on computers and how they operate much like bodies do.
Eames melted these pieces of plastic and mixed their contents together by hand. The plastic orbs were attached to a beam on the ceiling and moved in a clockwise direction through a motor. These kinds of motorised sculptures can be temperamental and often come together through a process of trial and error with the outcome often being a surprise to the artist. Yet this particular work seems to represent the illogical nature of power structures, which have somehow been deemed ‘logical’.
_______________ Jean-Michel RollandBRAIN MUSIC, 2017 The raw data of a Neurosky Mindwave EEG is used here to play generative music. Incoming raw data from the EEG is divided into 512 samples covering brain waves from 1 to 50Hz. These 512 samples trigger piano notes when their values are beyond the decided limit. As the performer enters into meditation, his brain waves cool down and thereby, he’s able to increase their amplification. The musical score and its rhythm are certainly depending on his mood and on the environment, but the performer’s real challenge is to focus his mind entirely on the registered sounds, in order to enter into a closed musical loop where his brain waves – translated into sound waves – become the reflection of the registered notes and so on.
_______________ Roger HiornsUntitled, 2011 Roger Hiorns’ wall sculptures consist of metal racks acting as receptacles for dark-brown bricks that turn out to be bovine brain matter. It has been rendered down, freeze-dried, injected with chemicals. Hiorns is interested in brain matter, mainly because of its incomprehensible structure. The fact that human beings try to fathom the structure of the brain, with their own brain, is a paradox. Hiorns visits the cows at the abattoir and talks to them immediately before they are killed. This way, through their memory of the meeting, Hiorns becomes encapsulated in the structure of their brain.
_______________ Refik AnadolMelting Memories, 2018 Media artist Refik Anadol’s work Melting Memories combines data paintings, light projections, and augmented data sculptures to visibly demonstrate how the brain recalls memories. The installation was created with a custom 16 x 20 foot LED media wall and CNC milled rigid foam, and was shown earlier in 2018 at Pilevneli Galleryin Istanbul. In the work, seething swirls move across the work’s surface, resembling cresting ocean waves, blossoming flowers, and shifting sand. o generate the data, Anadol conducted experiments at the Neuroscape Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. An artist statement describes the technical process: “Anadol gathers data on the neural mechanisms of cognitive control from an EEG (electroencephalogram) that measures changes in brain wave activity and provides evidence of how the brain functions over time. These data sets constitute the building blocks for the unique algorithms that the artist needs for the multi-dimensional visual structures on display.”
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p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Hi. Yeah, it seems to be getting hairier up here in Europe in general. Fucking hell. But you’ll be fine, obviously. Good luck getting things spotless painlessly. ** Misanthrope, Hi. It could be worse, which isn’t to say it doesn’t suck and that I’m not putting on the best face about itlike I tend to do, but, yeah, super high hopes that it doesn’t get harsher. Diva kids tend to grow up productive and successful and all that stuff. So, cool. Not so cool about your slurring and unsteadiness, but it sounds like a little keeper for the memory banks. ** _Black_Acrylic, Great, congrats! Ben the Phoenix! That’s what I like to hear. ** David Ehrenstein, Indeed. And the trippy parts of ‘The Right Stuff’ too. I thought you were referring to Joe LeSueur. I was friends with Joe in his later life. What a funny, lovely guy. ** Sypha, It takes a big man to admit that, ha ha. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, I feel like there’s something going on with BE that has stamina and a future, but we’ll see. Champagne and fireworks about killing your deadline! I don’t know how well known Jackie Beat is outside of LA. I know she and Sherry Vine and doing a lot of duo stuff these days. Sherry was one of the stars of a performance piece I made with Ishmael Houston-Jones back in 1989 when she was still a young guy named Keith Levy. I don’t know how much early Jackie Beat is online, probably not much, but she used to be mean as hell. Ha ha, I would eat that Buche lickety-split even though, mermen, yikes! Love giving every male escort in the world a shaved bubble butt that shoots confetti every fifteen minutes like a cuckoo clock, G. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Gotcha. Maybe someone will curate that post. I might, but I’m not feeling it, right now at least. ‘Elevated’ is certainly putting a positive spin on that new horror genre. New reviews! Everyone, Mr. Erickson has given his thoughts about and spin to two items. First, an older Ken Loach film called ‘Black Jack’ here, and then the new serpentwithfeet album here. I haven’t heard Meemo Comma’s new album, and you have definitely intrigued me. I will approach it both excitedly and warily, thank you. ** Danielle, Hi, Danielle! It’s been ages, or it feels like ages, and it’s so swell to see you! Whoa, you read ‘I Wished’? That is sneaky, ha ha. I think you’re only the fourth person (that I know of) aside from my agent and publishing people who’ve read it. Eek. Wow, that’s so amazing to hear. Thank you so much. That’s really, really moving, what you wrote. And what I dared hope for. Yeah, it was a tough and intense novel to write. Anyway, yeah, I’m so happy, thank you so very much for telling me that. I’m totally happy to Zoom or whatever whenever you like. I seem to be stuck here in Paris for a while yet, and I’m just futzing around and working inside the confinement. Gosh, Danielle, really, thank you, that really means a lot. Bear hugs for days. ** John Newton, Hi. Glad you liked his films. Happy b’day to your mom! Tim D. was a pretty energetic and extroverted and fun and highly smart person exactly as his poems seem to indicate. No, ‘I Wished’ has been fully written for a long time. I’m not writing poems, no, I wish I was. I’m co-writing a novella with my friend and collaborator Zac Farley and doing early think/note work on a new theater piece I’ll be writing for Gisele Vienne. Golnoosh, If you read this, John Newton said something to you and asked you a question in yesterday’s comments if you didn’t see it. Happy day. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. They are lovely. Or I think so. Art galleries were the only up to date cultural input there was in Paris these days, so losing them is a very tenable deprivation. Obviously, I second your urge to hit SFMoMA et al ASAP just in case. The plan is that the ‘Jerk’ film will play festivals. It’ll get released here, but I doubt elsewhere since it’s a glorified filmed play, and Gisele decided to shoot it in the French version so Jonathan would give the most nuanced performance. But maybe it’ll stream in the US or something? ** Right. I nerded out and decided to do one of my thematic posts about the brain, and you see what resulted. See you tomorrow.
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