Author: DC (Page 99 of 1086)

* (restored/expanded)

 

‘Kim Ki-Duk (1960-2020) is the bad boy of South Korean cinema, an upstart who didn’t attend film school or serve an apprenticeship with an established director, the usual routes to helming your own picture. To hear Kim Ki-Duk tell it, he wrote a screenplay that a producer wanted desperately to buy. Kim held out, asking to direct. The producer resisted, but Kim held his ground. Eventually, he got his way. In 1996, his first feature was released. Crocodile was the tale of a man who recovers the bodies of suicides in the Han River, which runs through Seoul.

‘In the years since, Kim hasn’t wasted any time. His 10th film, Samaritan Girl, debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival, winning him a best director prize. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, his ninth film, was his first to be released commercially in the U.S. outside of New York City. It’s a contemplative parable about the link between suffering and desire, between atonement and enlightenment. Its setting is a small Buddhist temple floating in the middle of a remote mountain lake. The film’s mood of tranquillity and philosophical rumination is hardly what this director is known for.

‘Kim’s other recent films, Bad Guy and Samaritan Girl, are more naked in their examination of life’s darker sides — both revolve around prostitution, violent beatings and bloody deaths. In South Korea, Kim’s films have drifted from art house fare to commercial success, with Bad Guy a hit in 2002. In that film, a small-time gangster forces a young girl into prostitution; he becomes obsessed with her and she in turn begins to form an attachment to him. Samaritan Girl follows two schoolgirls who decide to run a prostitution scam, until one dies tragically and the other decides to “pay back” her johns as an act of remorse.

‘Kim, 43, is soft-spoken, a small, compact man with closely cropped hairand a soft voice. He continually doodles, writing bits of questions posed and of responses readied on a Korean newspaper, which he repeatedly folds this way and that to find additional blank spaces. Born to a family of farmers in a South Korean village, Kim got his only formal education at a primary school, one run by missionaries. Although this made him Christian for many years, these days, he admits, “I have my doubts.” He spent five years in the South Korean equivalent of the Marine Corps — getting in even though he had been rejected by the Army when he failed a psychological test.

‘”I thought it was unfair so I volunteered for the Marine Corps,” he says. “I made an effort and I got in.” Unfortunately, this bit of bravado turned into a trauma that troubles him to this day. “What I gained was physical power, and what I lost was my mind,” he says. “I’m still suffering from my memories of the Marine Corps service — the violence, the hierarchy.”

‘It was in France, he says, that he saw his first movie. His first movie? Well, he did watch some religion-themed movies in missionary school, but he hardly remembers. What he does remember, however, was walking into a French cinema and seeing The Silence of the Lambs. Despite the fact that he couldn’t understand the French into which it had been dubbed, he could follow the story. Most of all he was transfixed by the images and the audio.

‘”I was watching the pictures and listening to the sounds,” he says. To this day, that is what films are to him, series of images and sounds, and he likes to keep speech to a minimum. “I don’t like movies with lots of dialogue.” Thus inspired, he says, “I started to write scripts after I came back from France.” One was selected in a government-sponsored competition, another fell into the hands of an architect who wanted to produce films. After some wrangling, this man eventually gave him his first chance. Kim says that he already understood lighting, composition and angles from being a painter; the rest of it he learned by doing.’ — collaged

 

___
Stills

 

_____
Further

Kim Ki-duk @ IMDb
The Kim Ki-duk Page
Kim Ki-duk’s Movies Blog
KK-d @ mubi
KK-d Facebook page
‘The strange case of director Kim Ki-Duk’
‘Kim Ki-duk Seeks Industry Vote on Moebius‘
‘The Wordless Beauty and Brutality of Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius‘
‘Lunch with director Kim Ki-duk. . . sort of’
‘The History of Cinema. Kim Ki-Duk’
‘TIFF Day 10: Pieta x 13’
KK-d interviewed @ Filmmaker Magazine
‘Master from Orient KIM KI-DUK’
‘Cruel Beauty: The Cinema of Kim Ki-Duk’

 

____
Extras

Venezia 70 Future Reloaded – Kim Ki-duk

Four delegates fainted while watching Kim Ki Duk’s “Moebius”

“Amen…” A Short Movie Directed By Kim Ki-duk

Interview with Kim Ki-duk

Remembering Kim Ki Duk

 

_______
Interview

 

Your films deal with very extreme emotions, often times equal parts love and hatred and the similarities between the two. Where does the inspiration for making films that deal with this material come from? What drives you as a filmmaker?

Kim Ki-Duk: I believe that every person has multiple feelings. A person’s current personality of love, hatred, jealousy, rage or a murderous intent and so on is formed upon genetic elements, education, the environment and a family a person grows in.

The source of my movie comes from a theory “The white color and the black color is the same.” I try not to interpret things of the world into a single meaning. Rather, I try the opposite. For example, a man, who fights too often and too well, does so, not because he’s good at it but because he is scared.

Your films are also known for their minimal amounts of dialogue, yet you’re still able to portray so much through your movies without the need for a lot of words. Why is it that your characters are so often so quiet?

KK-D: I don’t think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.

Your films often times deal with outcasts, people who don’t fit into the norms of society – like the central character in 3-Iron or the prostitute in Bad Guy. Why the focus on more unfortunate characters?

KK-D: They should be respected as one of the contemporaries. Even though they are unhappy, it is wrong for us to judge them as unhappy. I wanted to show their frank lives through my movies.

Which of your films do you feel the most proud of and why is it that you choose that one?

KK-D: There’s none I feel proud of. The movies I will make in the future are the ones I take pride in, because they will contain the consciousness that I am not aware of yet. I am curious – with what kind of idea and thought I will live. But if you insist to pick one, I’d like to recommend Address Unknown to the American viewers. I want American youngsters to see how a youth in a third world lives.

How do you feel about film critics who think your work is too violent or too exploitative? Or towards people who feel your work is sexist and misogynistic?

KK-D: I think that is possible. They have different background and education from mine which naturally led them to interpret my movie differently. But the critics become careful now that I am internationally recognized and have won several awards. I guess they are looking back their own thoughts. I hope their point of view changes from seeing only a single thing to observing multiple stuffs, but they will need some time.

 

______________________
17 of Kim Ki-duk’s 21 films

________
Crocodile (1996)
‘Crocodile is a 1996 South Korean film. It was the directorial debut of Ki-duk Kim and stars Cho Jae-hyun as “Crocodile”. The film tells the story of a man living at the edge of the Han River in Seoul, who saves a woman trying to commit suicide. He then proceeds to rape and abuse her until an odd relationship develops between them.’ — collaged


Trailer

Excerpt

 

_______
Wild Animal Reservation Zone (1997)
‘Kim Ki-duk wrote and directed this allegorical South Korean drama about Korean expatriates on the edge of the Paris art world. The original title translates as “Wild Animal Reservation Zone.” Artistically inclined hustler Chong-Hae (Cho Jae-hyun) and his pal Hong-san (Jang Dong-jik) sign on as henchmen for a French gangster (Richard Bohringer). Hong-san and Chong-Hae both get involved with women under the thumbs of oppressive Frenchmen. While Hong-San is drawn into the milieu of a stripper, Chong-Hae takes a fancy to a Korean artist. Inspired by Camille Claudel, the talented sculptress portrayed by Isabelle Adjani in Bruno Nuytten’s award-winning Camille Claudel (1988), the Korean performance artist paints herself white and then stands nude in various Paris public squares. After she stabs her French oppressor with a frozen fish, more violence erupts. The film’s soundtrack mixes Korean pop music with Arabic rhythms.’ — Bhob Stewart, Rovi

Excerpt

 

__________
Birdcage Inn (1998)
‘Birdcage Inn is the third film of Kim Ki-duk, who probably ranks as the Korean director with the most conflicted reputation. Although it was Kim’s first film which managed to attract international attention, it was a major failure at the box-office in Korea itself. The story centers on a 24-year-old woman named Jin-a, who comes to a shabby guesthouse named Birdcage Inn to replace a prostitute who previously worked there. (Some spoilers to follow…) A couple with two children in their late teens run the lodge, located in a small village right in front of the ocean. The situation of Jin-a is complicated in many ways. Not only does her pimp force her into prostitution, but the family she lives with also gives her a hard time. The daughter discriminates against the young girl because of her social background, the mother only sees her as a source of capital, the silent father rapes her and the son, last but not least, tries to lose his virginity with her.’ — koreanfilm.org

Excerpt

the entire film

 

_______
The Isle (2000)
‘The Isle is a 2000 South Korean film written and directed by Kim Ki-duk. The film was the fifth film made by Kim, and the first to receive wider international acclaim for his recognizable style. It also became notorious for being difficult to watch, with stories of viewers vomiting or passing out during the more gruesome scenes when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert, having seen the film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, praised the film for its cinematography, while commenting “This is the most gruesome and quease-inducing film you are likely to have seen. You may not even want to read the descriptions in this review.”‘ — collaged

Watch the film here

 

______
Bad Guy (2001)
‘Bad Guy, from 2001, is extremely powerful and clearly lays the roots for a lot of Ki-duk’s later work, dealing with one of his favorite themes, prostitution.The scees where Han-ki watches Sun-hwa through the two way mirror are absolutely phenomenal. The black void lighting, only broken by the embers of a burning cigarette, his face reflected in the mirror, watching Sun-Hwa’s gradual degredation. I love the way Kim’s frame create multiple planes of action. You can watch Han-Ki’s face and the action with Sun-hwa simultaneously, in the same way that a number of scenes with Han and his crew are set so that we can see Sun and her crew soliciting customers in the background, two stories happening at once.’ — Thoughts on Stuff

Trailer

The Making of ‘Bad Guy’

 

____________
Samaritan Girl (2004)
‘Yeo-jin and Jae-yeong are two teenage girls who are trying to earn money for a trip to Europe. To reach this end, Jae-yeong is prostituting herself while Yeo-jin acts as her pimp, setting her up with the clients and staying on guard for the police. Things take a turn for the worse when Yeo-jin gets distracted from her duty and the police raid the motel where Jae-yeong is meeting with a client. To avoid getting caught, Jae-yeong jumps out of a window, fatally injuring herself. After Jae-yeong’s death, Yeo-jin blames herself and to ease her own conscience, sets to return all of the money they earned to the clients while sleeping with them herself. Eventually Yeo-jin’s father, a policeman, is devastated when he discovers what she is doing. He starts following her discreetly and confronts her clients with increasingly violent results. Finally, he ends up brutally killing a client.’ — collaged

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

____
3-Iron (2004)
‘3-Iron sees Kim softening his bleak view of humanity somewhat, and removing some of the incredible viciousness which made many of his earlier works rather unpalatable for those with weaker stomachs. Although 3-Iron is still very much concerned with emotional isolation and in this case a desire to fade from the world, the director injects a sense of surrealist whimsy. Also, despite themes of domestic violence and societal control, Kim works in a number of surprisingly gentle and beautiful moments. The end result is an almost ethereal, yet truly captivating film which is fascinating and moving, and which stands amongst Kim’s finest, yet again confirming that he is one of the most talented and insightful directors working in the profession today.’ — Beyond Hollywood

Excerpt

Watch the film here

 

_____
The Bow (2005)
‘A 60-year-old man has lived with a 16-year-old girl on a boat afloat in the middle of the sea for 10 years. The old man crosses days off of a calendar and counts the remaining days to her 17th birthday. She is content with her life, helping the old man serve the fishermen who come to the boat. When a gentle college boy comes aboard to fish, their relationship begins to suffer. As she becomes more and more attracted to the boy, she begins to distance herself from the old man, arousing his jealousy. Much like other movies by Kim Ki-duk the film contains very little dialogue.’ — Han Cinema

Trailer

Excerpt

 

______
Time (2006)
‘Breaking with his formal rule of silence, Kim Ki-Duk has conceded here an unusual amount of room for the dialogues. But if speech is regained, there is still a sense of loss (of meaning, of consistency) in the dramatic scenes, which paradoxically accentuates their impact. The loss tightens the action and exacerbates the expressions of the couple, who oscillate, outside psychological norms, in the narrow margin between desperation and theatrical hysteria (not a word one should use lightly when speaking about a director accused of being “outrageously misogynistic”), causing as much violence to each other as they do to themselves. As Seh-Hee feels she failed to be accepted for what she is (“”the same boring face,” she dejectedly says to her lover) , she has this very face cut into another’s, in an intensely clinical and critical moment when her flesh becomes a malleable mask, artistic material for the recreation of her self.’ — The Korea Film Society

Trailer

The Making of ‘Time’

 

_________
Arirang (2011)
‘Arirang addresses a personal crisis Kim went through, sparked by an incident during the filming of his previous film, Dream, where the lead actress nearly died by hanging, and by the departure of a couple of close colleagues, including the director Jang Hoon. The title comes from a Korean folk song with the same title. In a heavily line-broken text released about the film, Kim writes that “Through Arirang I understand human beings, thank the nature, and accept my life as it is now.”[1] Kim produced the film entirely on his own. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, and won the top award for best film.’ — collaged

Trailer

Kim Ki-Duk sings ‘Arirang’

 

_________
Pieta (2012)
‘Pietà is the 18th feature written and directed by Kim Ki-duk. It depicts the mysterious relationship between a brutal man who works for loan sharks and a middle-aged woman who claims that she is his mother, mixing Christian symbolism and highly sexual content. The film won the Golden Lion prize at the 69th Venice International Film Festival. At its Venice press screening, it reportedly “elicited extremely mixed reactions”. Deborah Young of The Hollywood Reporter described it as “an intense and, for the first hour, sickeningly violent film that unexpectedly segues into a moving psychological study.” Young gave high praises to the film’s acting performances, however states “it’s not an exaggeration to say there’s not a single pleasant moment in the film’s first half” and “Viewers will keep their eyes closed” for the majority of the film.”‘ — collaged

Trailer

PIETA Q&A; with Kim Ki-duk at AFI FEST

 

___________
Moebius (2013)
‘After narrowly missing the Busan screening of the controversial and censorship loathed new film from master filmmaker Kim Ki Duk, I wasn’t going to miss the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival leg of Moebius. What can I say about this film? Let’s start of by a few descriptive words, namely disturbing, twisted, unbelievable, fascinating, frustrating and incestuous. Believe me, Kim Ki Duk have made some strange films, dealing with difficult and often controversial subjects (i.e. Pieta), but in Moebius, he goes further and beyond even himself. From the opening scene of a moebius wife who is mentally ill from her husband infidelity, fails to cut his penis and instead turn her attention to their son and quite frankly and literally chop off his penis. To call Moebius daring is actually an understatement, as it is more than that, it is a film that will haunt you, lingers with you and perhaps disturb you till you never think about it again.’ — HK Neo Reviews

Trailer

Watch the film here

 

____________
One on One (2014)
‘“Who am I?” is the question posed in the first closing credit of “One on One,” as if the preceding two hours of screeching melodrama and stomach-churning, rusty nail-assisted violence could have been the work of anyone but Kim Ki-duk. Even fierce admirers of the prolific South Korean provocateur, however, would struggle to suggest that he’s in top form in this turgid, rushed-looking revenge tale, in which the perpetrators of a schoolgirl’s senseless murder are methodically singled out for punishment of the grisliest variety. A significant step down from the more engaging grotesquerie of last year’s bonkers incest drama “Moebius,” this year’s Venice Days opener may struggle to match even the limited level of distributor interest in Kim’s recent work.’ — Variety

Trailer

 

__________
Stop (2015)
‘Once again, Kim Ki-duk has shot, edited, produced and written his film, only this time it is set in Japan using entirely Japanese dialogue. His touch can still be felt everywhere, as is evident in the film’s handheld cinematography and editing, which feels very rough around the edges – emblematic of much of Kim’s work. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kim has never received any formal training in filmmaking, but his raw aesthetic is also due to the fact that he tends to shoot his films in just a few weeks or even less on a very limited budget. Kim’s films have until more recently used minimal dialogue, as evident in Moebius, where no dialogue is spoken reflecting his intent of telling a story entirely through visuals without resorting to speech. But to reverse his style in such a way as his films become less complex and more argument-driven undermines one of the traits that made his earlier films rather compelling. The points Kim Ki-duk attempts to address are relatively simple: no to nuclear power and reduce our dependence on electricity and he uses this story in putting his argument across, which is aimed at Japanese, Korean and international viewers alike. But beyond this, there’s little in the way of depth to really entice audiences.’ — Screen Daily

the entire film

 

___________
The Net (2016)
‘Kim Ki-duk’s career has often progressed in distinct waves – from the nasty sexual violence of his dark early work to the magical realism that produced Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter…and Spring and 3-Iron. Since the glorious grotesquery of 2013’s Moebius, he’s perhaps made a move into territory that nobody could have expected from a perennially bold provocateur, one of conformity and restraint. Both One on One and Stop were flawed but conventional thrillers, albeit with distinct political motivations, and the same is true of his slightly more successful new film The Net. The visuals are around the same level as One on One – a far cry from the almost unwatchable ugliness of Pieta, for instance – but it’s not Kim or his composition that are the star of this show. As Chul-woo Ryoo Seung-bum is irresistibly endearing and empathetic, not least when he scrunches his eyes closed in the car so that he won’t have seen any of South Korea when he’s questioned by the military back home. Ryoo perfectly embodies the everyman who finds himself the victim and pawn and it’s his charisma that maintains the tragedy of the situation despite The Net overshooting by almost half an hour. The fact that what is going on around him is delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer is Kim’s current forte – but it still manages to be effective.’ — Cine-Vue

Trailer

 

_____________
Human, Space, Time and Human (2018)
‘The title is in the form of a loop, as is the storyline itself. Kim Ki-duk has produced a work that is virtually biblical in scope, and whose main character is called Eve. Men, women, and gangsters take their places aboard a floating vessel. An old man tirelessly picks up dirt from the ground. Very quickly, one act of violence follows another: the weakest are murdered and the women are attacked and raped. Far from focusing on this terrible chaos, the director seems bent on telling a story of rebirth, painful reconstruction and hope. A provocative shock movie, Human, Space, Time and Human is a parable that will leave no one indifferent.’ — FEFFS

Trailer

Excerpt

 

_____________
Dissolve (2019)
‘I never thought I’d land a copy of Kim Ki-duk’s final film. It was shot in Kazakhstan and to my knowledge never had a formal release, and premiered I believe only at the Cannes Film Market to about 20 buyers who had an official invitation under a “Guest List Only” credential. The film is cheaply shot, amateurish, and digitally ugly, but when it comes to Kim’s films, I’ve always been more enthralled by how strange and symbolic they are. His final poem, while easily one of his weakest, still undeniably lifts you into that mystical, semi-abstract world that he spent 25 years building.’ — Brandon Habes

Trailer

 

_____________
w/ Artur Veeber Call Of God (2022)
‘After a lifetime spent creating outrage and offence, both on and off screen, Korean master Kim Ki-duk has left the world with this final film, finished by his friends after his death. The story of a passionate affair that curdles almost immediately into jealousy and hate – but ends on a lyrically wistful note – is a startlingly appropriate rogue’s epitaph. Call of God was shot in Kyrgyzstan, Estonia and Latvia in 2019. Kim died of complications from Covid in late 2020 at age 59; the film was assembled by Artur Veeber, his Estonia-based producer. Sexual manipulation, seething violence, spiritual yearning and the consoling beauty of the natural world – all the signal elements of his work since his debut with Crocodile in 1996 – are here. It is a minor film but, like everything he made, distinctively his.’ — Stephanie Bunbury

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I think they must google that stuff, right? I think everything’s determined by algorithms? I don’t know why google thinks I care though because I so do not care. Love has no use whatsoever for Elton John, so he would happily erase him from the very beginning, but love knows there are a lot of people who do like him, so he’s willing to compromise and erase Elton John starting after the release of his ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ album, but know that is a great sacrifice on love’s part. Love executing a perfect fouette, G. ** Lucas, Hi, L! Ditto, ditto. I’m guessing you’re home or on the bus, probably home. Enjoy all that greenery. Happy news, or potentially, about your convinced friend. I might even go. More collages, yay! Hm, I’m not fully awake yet, but I’ll hunt my mind for things that seem very ‘you’. Oh, thank you for the link! That does look really, really interesting. I’ll seek more. Love back to you with lots of curly-q’s. ** _Black_Acrylic, Knowing you, you will both devour and develop it. ** Malik, Hi. Yeah, yeah, total score on the artists for me. Family in attendance! The big time. I’m always very stressed when I have to do a reading, for instance, but then when I’m actually at the podium, it’s fine, so I bet you’ll have something similar. Only a few days now. I sure hope my ‘Flunker(s)’ have shipped. It’s almost your birthday? I’ll start psyching myself up to wish you the deserved happiness. ** Tosh Berman, You have ‘Flunker’ too? Jesus. Well, I am way over in France, okay. I hope it tickles you, as my grandma used to say. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Fuck knows about translations. I’m a prisoner. Wow, that does sound like a dramatic shoot. Good luck with that actor+ dude. No matter what, I’m sure he’ll be a piece of cake compared to our producer. Awesome, congrats, on the festive acceptance. Excited to hear. We’re waiting on two big festivals ourselves, so I’ll hope your luck is contagious. I started ‘The Mad Man’, butI gave up on it. I think I was expecting/hoping for something akin to ‘Hogg’, which it wasn’t. I should try it again. But, yeah, at the time, it didn’t do enough for me. Again, happy for your great news, and mega-luck with the edit, etc. ** Huckleberry Shelf, Hi, Huckleberry! A true pleasure to see you! Such a good novel, yeah. He’s so great. Very addictive, that guy. I hope you like ‘Flunker’, of course, and I hope mine arrives soon because right now it’s like when you’re in a dream and you suddenly realise you’re naked. I’m very happy you liked ‘Margaret Kroftis’. I highly recommend all of Mark Gluth’s novels. If you liked that one, I’m sure you’ll like his later ones. Thanks so much! I hope your writing and life are going splendidly! Take good care. ** A, Hey, dude. I’m happy you’ve gotten your writing time and impulse sorted, of course. Mm, almost no chance I’ll be in LA in July. I’m sort of held hostage here until the film is finished, which will then occasion the next LA trip, i.e. the cast snd crew screening. Things with, or, rather, around the film, are total hell at the moment. But where there’s will, there’s a … whatever. Thanks for alerting Bret to the film. He might even like it maybe. Yes, I saw an email from Filip, and I need to write back to him. My emailing skills are as terrible as ever. I will. Keep your head above summer, man. ** Harper, Hi!!! Oh, don’t get me started on Disneyland. I’m kind of a fanatic, but, yes, you should go. Ideally to the LA one, which is so much greater than the Florida one. The Paris one isn’t bad. I do know that about Wernher Von Braun, and do you know why? Because my dad was close friends with him. And proud of that fact, which tells you something about my dad. Most of the rumors are so not true. I wish, but, nah. There are some secrets behind the scenes, but they almost never get out into the public. I know scoop because my childhood best friend’s aunt was a higher up at Disneyland in the early days, and she regaled us with her secrets. Bernhard is a writer to read, for sure. One of the greats, if you ask me. And ‘The Loser’ is a good place to start. Happy day! How’s the new locale sitting with you? ** politekid, Sire, Oscar. I think it would’ve been a pretty good CD-rom game. I should dig out my plans. I hope I didn’t lose them. Those were glory days for games because they were puzzle-centric since the tech was too primitive to build convincing actions and fighting. Sigh. I suppose it’s the notoriously ugh French postal service that’s keep my ‘Flunkers’ at bay. Maybe today? Thank you a lot so far, pal. You sound good. Cultural days are the best days. Wow, a live ‘Spirted Away’. Huh, Why not? It probably won’t come there. But if it does … I of course implore you, or rather the mechanisms inside you, to veer you towards the big fiction. My fictional wheels are stuck too. Maybe it’s the world’s fault. I’m okay, but, yeah, the film situation is truly awful right now. Other than that, I’ve seen some okay art, a couple of good films, friends, but the gloom and stasis are kind of eating me. Oh, if you didn’t see, Steve said this to you: ‘@politekid–CHIME has indeed leaked. It’s available to download via worldscinema.org, although you need a paid Nitroflare membership.’ I love being able to use language in a clear and precise manner too. It’s one of life’ great joys, and so hard to do when you’re from LA. Love to you, buddy. ** Billy, Hi, Billy! Thanks a lot! And it’s even that rare X account that seems to be letting the non-X public actually look at it. It looks exciting. I’ll scroll and scroll today. Hope all’s super great with you. ** Steve, Another ‘Flunker’ handler. I really am the last to know. I remember there being a few other pretty good songs on ‘Bona Drag’, but I haven’t listened to it a long time. Why not extend the track? I don’t know, why not? There were troubles with ‘Cattle’, but nothing remotely on this level. ‘PGL’ was a relative breeze. Really, the huge, ongoing problems we’ve had with ‘RT’ can be boiled down to the fact that our producer of going on 7 years is a lying, incompetent, lazy, sociopathic, destructive, narcissistic, delusional individual who turns everything he touches into a disaster and who we are very tragically entangled with financially and legally. Making this film has been a process of trying to survive him, and, without going into details because I can’t, we are at the lowest point yet at the moment. We are desperately hoping that one of the two big festivals we’ve submitted to accepts the film, because that will force the powers-that-be to let us finish the film and finally unleash it into the world from its current captivity. If both reject the film, I don’t know what we’re going to do because these particular festivals are probably our best shot. Anyway, there you go, haha. ** Don Waters, It’s a goody, man. And not even very lengthy. I think I’ve only read ‘The Adversary’. Carrere is a huge deal here. We share a publisher. I know him a little. He’s notoriously a pretty complicated guy, but I like him, from afar-ish at least. $10 to see the undoubtedly non-existent video of you lip-syncing ‘Last…’ . Oh my god. That’s a hard one to visualise. ** Justin D, Well, I am happy that there’s at least one other person who doesn’t have ‘Flunker’ yet, although I’m sorry it’s you, although it’s not like it’s the lottery winnings or something. I can’t see a reason to not add those solar panels, no. You guys do get beaucoup sun down there. I think the gardener tit-for-tat is totally fair. I’m sure your bf owes you one. ** Charalampos, Hi. I’ve done a few ‘Flunker’ interviews, and I’m going to be on a podcast talking about it. I did see but not read about the Ariana Grande thing. People respond to the world in crisis in such ridiculous ways. Well, is there any reason not to start working on ‘GIRL’ now? I will be forced to join Instagram any month now. So friend me or whatever people do there once I have. ** nat, Bernhard’s great, seriously. And kind of the exact polar opposite of McCourt. Western Norway, yes. I traveled a bit there. My friend the artist Kier Cooke Sandvik is originally from that area. Maybe you know them? I think seeing cruise ships would be magical. I almost wish one would forage its way up the Seine except that it would turn all the beautiful old bridges into dust, so never mind. Zac and I drove from Oslo to Stavanger on a road trip, and it was most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. Well, maybe tied with parts of Iceland and the Antarctic. When you only really know the West and East coasts of the US, the Midwest is kinda of novel looking. ** Jacob, Hi, Jacob. I like Genet translations, but, then again, I have no comparison, so what do I know? Oh, I’ll look for your email. I’m bad with email, but now that you’ve alerted me, I’ll be good. Later this week should be fine and dandy. Talk soon then! ** Okay. The blog’s very old Kim Ki-duk post was in bad shape technically and way out of date, not to mention that he died of Covid since its initial appearance here, so I decided to restore and bring it up to date. That’s it. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.

‘Another common theme is Bernhard’s disgust with his native Austria which he continually berated for its Nazi past, its stupidity, sentimentality, and philistinism. In his will he stipulated that none of his works could ever be published in Austria. Paradoxically he rarely left Austria and lived quietly in a country retreat outside of Vienna (many of his characters live in country retreats outside of Vienna).

‘Despite the fact that he seemed to put himself in every one of his novels, little is known about his intimate life. He wrote a five-volume memoir, Gathering Evidence, which is quite beautiful but, as all memoirs are, unrevealing. His first biographer somehow managed to discover that he liked to masturbate while watching himself in the mirror. This is both comic and significant; over and over Bernhard presents his narrators as characters watching themselves think about themselves. In fact, his narrators seem more interested in watching themselves think about themselves than in telling the story which often seems, upon analysis, more of an occasion for baroque invention than an end in itself. Reading Bernhard one is often reminded of the American experimentalist John Hawkes who once famously said:

My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they’re elaborately structured. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme…structure—verbal and psychological coherence—is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my writing. (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 1965)

‘Bernhard’s narrators contradict themselves, digress, fall into hyperbolic rants that go on for pages, repeat themselves, and obsess, trapped, as it were, in a logorrheic paralysis. He writes whole books in one paragraph, eschews quotation marks, doesn’t mind run-on sentences, changes tense without reason, and italicizes words apparently at random. Above all he is ironic, and the reader can never be sure whether Bernhard means what he says or is joking around. And, paradoxically, when he is just joking around, he is also being deadly serious. This is very puzzling to the reader accustomed to contemporary market-based sentimental realism (make no mistake: we are in a Tea Party Lit trough these days, driven by politics, recession and the cultural terror inspired by the digital revolution), the kind of fiction that tells a story about real characters we can identify with and scenes we can recognize, the kind of novel North Americans have come to expect, and, when they write, to write. In contrast Bernhard’s characters are almost all clownishly self-obsessed, suicidal artists with lung diseases who cannot seem to tell a story straight. …

‘The Loser is very much a novel-as-performance, both image and allegory, more image than discursive thought yet very much a novel of ideas with the ideas implicit in the structure, action, and style. Besides the aesthetics of German Romanticism The Loser reflects a conception of art inherited from Schopenhauer—especially Schopenhauer’s notion that art itself is the intermediary between the supra-sensory and the merely human, that in creating or correctly appreciating great art we enter an eternal realm of Platonic Ideas (Beauty, God, or even Being in Heidegger’s sense) and leave the tawdry realm of existence behind (what the narrator calls “the existence machine”).

‘The Loser fictionalizes the European version of nostalgia for Being (the American version is a retreat to fundamentalist Christianity) and a sense of living in a fallen existential world. It presents three men whose goal is to become transcendent artists; one succeeds, the other two fail, and their psychomachia is rather a soul-unmaking or disintegration leading to paralysis and the one authentic act left, suicide. Glenn Gould is the virtuoso, the genius, the perfect instrument. Albeit, he is also unconsciously cruel and a buffoon. But there are passages in The Loser where the irony seems to lift and some deeper reality is revealed.

The second he [Gould] sat down at the piano he sank into himself, I thought, he looked like an animal then, on closer inspection like a cripple, on even closer inspection like the sharp-witted, beautiful man that he was.

‘Gould is only perfect, only beautiful (and nothing else in the novel is described as “beautiful”) when he is playing. This is the hierophantic moment, the ur-moment to which Bernhard returns throughout the novel, starting with the scene in Salzburg, when the narrator and Wertheimer overhear Gould playing the Goldberg Variations and are destroyed, and repeating (insisting) through to the novel’s close, the Goldberg Variations on the record player, the narrator alone in Wertheimer’s empty bedroom at Traich.

‘The way Bernhard distorts the facts of Gould’s death make thematic sense. Instead of dying during his sleep as was in fact the case, Gould in the novel succumbs to a stroke at “the perfect moment,” that is, while playing the Goldberg Variations. Gould achieves transcendence through his art, he goes “beyond the limit” and attains “the inhuman state”; the narrator and Wertheimer meanwhile fail, dazzled, paralyzed, crippled by fear, and caught in what the narrator calls the existential trap. The Loser is all aftermath, a narrative of disintegration, laced with transparent self-hatred, denial, and resentment, obsessively circling back on itself, always returning to the ur-moment, the fatal confrontation with genius. Having attempted to reach the heights, they fall back into the crippled world of the merely human, Kant’s phenomenal world, imperfect, ambiguous, clouded.

We look at people and see only cripples, Glenn once said to us, physical or mental or mental and physical, there are no others, I thought. The longer we look at someone the more crippled he appears to us… The word is full of cripples.

‘Every great novel possesses a mysterious flickering quality, the on/off light of irony, that conceals and reveals its moment of fidelity. The Loser presents the image of the fallen world (Kierkegaard’s “present age”) haunted by the idea of goodness, tormented by beauty, a losers’ world, a metaphoric Land of the Dead where only conditional motives and mediated relationships are possible, ruled by language and the Imaginary, where people are trapped in a relation of reflexive creation. Like Hegel’s master and slave the narrator and Wertheimer (Wertheimer and his sister) need each other in order to exist, and that relation can easily be reduced to the negative: I need to crush him in order to exist just as he needs to crush me in order to exist.’ — Douglas Glover, Brooklyn Rail

 

 

____
Further

Thomas Bernhard Site
The Unrelenting Novels of Thomas Bernhard
The bleak laughter of Thomas Bernhard.
The Genius of Bad News
On a Park Bench with Thomas Bernhard
Between the Rare Oases of Thought: On Thomas Bernhard and the Mind
Thomas Bernhard by Ben Marcus
Approche psychanalytique de l’autobiographie de Thomas Bernhard
ADMIRATION JOURNEY
The scabrous lyricism of Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under: An essay on the 10th anniverary of his death
THOMAS BERNHARD: “I AM A STORY DESTROYER”
NOTES TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF THOMAS BERNHARD
Safety Net: On Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard on Arthur Rimbaud
Taming Thomas Bernhard
Wittgenstein’s awkward nephew
A Master Set Loose in a Small Space
Thomas Bernhard’s Existence Machine
Sore Winner
Setting a Rant to Music: On Adapting Thomas Bernhard’s ‘The Loser’ for the Opera
Buy ‘The Loser’

 

_____
Extras

Thomas Bernhard – 1988

Thomas Bernhard: Three Days (1970) – ‘You talk to people, you are alone.’

Das war Thomas Bernhard – ORF 1994 (English Subtitles)

Thomas Bernhard’s House – A Visit

 

______
Interview

 

Thomas Bernhard: One never knows who one is. The others tell you who you are, don’t they? And as you’re told so a million times if you live a long life, in the end you don’t know at all who you are. Everyone says something different. You yourself also say something different each new moment.

Asta Scheib: Are there people on whom you depend, who influence your life in a decisive way?

TB: One always depends on people. There is no one who doesn’t depend on somebody. Someone, who is always alone with himself, will go under in no time, will be dead. I believe there are decisive people for everyone. I had had two in my life. My grandfather on my mother’s side and another person, someone, whom I got acquainted to one year before my mother’s death. That was a relation that lasted over thirty five years. It was the person everything concerning me related to, of whom I learnt everything. With the death of that person everything was gone. You are alone then. First you also want to die. Then you search. You had turned all people you also had in life into something less important during your life. Then you’re alone. You have to cope.

When I was alone, no matter where, I always knew, this person protects me, gives me support, but also dominates. Then everything is gone. You stand there in the cemetery. The grave is covered with earth. All that meant something to you is gone. Then each day in the morning you wake up with a nightmare. It’s not like you really want to live on. But you don’t want to hang or shoot yourself either. You think that’s not nice and unappetizing. Then you only have books. They swoop down on you with all the terrible things you can write into them. But you act your life to the outside world as if nothing had happened, because otherwise you would be devoured by the world. They are just waiting to see you show weakness. If you show weakness it will be exploited shamelessly and will be drenched in hypocrisy. Hypocrisy means pity. That’s the best term for hypocrisy.

But it is, as I said, difficult; after thirty-five years together with someone else you are suddenly alone. Only people who have gone through something similar will understand that. Suddenly you are one hundred percent more distrustful then before. Behind each so-called human utterance you suspect some meanness. You become even colder than people thought you had always been before anyway. The only thing that saves you is that you cannot starve to death. Such a life surely isn’t pleasant. Then there is your own frailty. A total decline. One only enters houses with a lift. One drinks a quarter of a liter at noon, and a quarter in the evening. Then you get somehow through the day. But if you drink half a liter at noon that night will be terrible. Those are the problems life shrinks to. Take pills, don’t take them, when to take them, what to take them for . Each month you are driven a little nearer to craziness, because you are confused.

AS: When did you last feel happy?

TB: One feels happiness each day, you’re happy to be alive and not dead already. That’s a great capital. From the person who died, I know that you love life to the very last moment. Basically, everyone loves to live. Life cannot be so terrible that you don’t keep on with it after all. The motivation is curiosity. You want to know: what will come next? It is more interesting to know what will come tomorrow then what is here today. When the body is ill the brain develops astonishingly well.

I prefer to know everything. And I always try to rob people and get everything that is in them out of them. As long as you can do so without the others recognizing it. When people discover that you want to rob them they shut their doors. Like the doors are shut when someone suspect comes near. But if nothing else is possible you can also break in. Everyone has some cellar window open. That also can be quite appealing.

AS: Did you ever want to have a family?

TB: I was always happy to survive. I couldn’t think of founding a family. I wasn’t healthy, therefore I didn’t feel like doing these things. There was nothing left for me but to flee into my mind and to start something on that basis, the body didn’t have any potential. It was empty. It stayed like that through decades. Whether that is good or bad one doesn’t know. It’s one way to live. Life knows billions of different existences.

My mother died when she was forty-six years old. That was in 1950. A year before I had got acquainted with my life partner. First it was a friendship and a very close relationship to a person who was much older than I was. Wherever I was on earth, she was the central point from which I took everything. I always knew: this person is there for me one hundred percent if things get difficult. I only had to think of her, I didn’t even have to visit her, and everything was already in order. Now too I live with that person. If I have problems I ask: what would you do? By that I’m held back from disgusting things which one might still commit at an older age, because everything is possible. She is the one keeping me from doing certain things, teaching me discipline, but also the one opening the world to me.

AS: Have you been content with your life at some moment in that life?

TB: I have never been content with my life. But I always felt a great need to be protected. I found that protection with my friend. She always got me working. She was happy when she saw that I was doing something. That was great. We traveled together. I carried her heavy bags, but I got to know a lot. As far as one is able to say so of oneself, it’s always not very much, almost nothing. For me it was everything.

When I was nineteen she showed Sicily to me, the place where Pirandello lived. She wasn’t eager to stuff a lot of learning into me. It just happened. We stayed in Rome, in Split — but then the journeys more and more often changed into inner journeys. We were somewhere in the country where one lives very simply. Where at night it snowed in onto the bed. There was the tendency to simplicity. The cows lived right beside us, we ate our soup and had a lot of books with us.

AS: Have you accepted your existence as a writer?

TB: Well, one wants to get better at writing, because otherwise you become crazy. That happens when you get older. The composition should always get more concise. I always tried to do something better when going on. To take the next step depend on the one before. Of course one always has the same theme. Everyone has his theme. He should move around in that theme. Then he does it well. There were many ideas. Maybe one wants to become monk, or work on the railroad, or cut wood. One wants to belong to the very simple people. That’s of course a mistake, because you do not belong. If one is like I am something like that is of course impossible, one cannot be a monk or work on the railroad. I was always a loner. Despite that one strong relationship I was always alone. At the beginning of course I thought I had to go somewhere and join in the conversation.

But since almost a quarter of a century ago I haven’t hadcontact with any other writers.

AS: Do you believe that there is an existence after death?

TB: No. Thanks God. Life is wonderful. But the best thought is that when it ends it ends forever. That’s the greatest consolation to me. But I really enjoy living. It was always like that, except those times when I thought of suicide. That was when I was nineteen, at twenty-six quite strongly, again at the age of forty. But now I love life. If you see someone who has to leave, but still is in this life, then you start to understand that.

One of the most marvelous things I experienced was that you hold another one’s hand in your hand, you feel the pulse, then it becomes slower and slower, then that’s it. It’s something enormous. Then you still hold that hand, then the nurse comes in, bringing with her the number for the corpse. The nurse wheels her out once more and says: “Come back later.” Then you are immediately confronted with life again. You calmly get up and put things in order; in the meantime the nurse comes back and attaches the number to the corpse, you empty the bedside cabinet, the nurse says: ” Don’t forget the yogurt, you have to take it too.” Outside you hear the crows — it’s like a theatrical play.

Then the bad conscience comes. A dead person leaves you with an immense guilt.

All the places I had stayed with her, places I wrote about in my books, I can no longer visit. Each of my books was created at a different place. Vienna, Brussels, somewhere in Yugoslavia, in Poland. I never had a desk in mind. When writing was going well it didn’t matter where I did it. I also wrote with the greatest noise around me. I’m not disturbed by a crane or a noisy crowd or a screaming tram, or a laundry or a butcher’s. I always liked to work in a country where I didn’t understand the language. That was stimulating. A strangeness where you are one hundred percent at home. For me it was ideal to live together in a hotel, my friend took walks for hours and I was able to work. We often met for meals only. She was happy when she recognized that I was working. We stayed up to four or five months in a country. Those were highlights. While writing you very often have a very good feeling. If in addition to that there is someone who appreciates that and who leaves you in peace — that’s ideal. I never had a better critic. You cannot compare that to a dumb public critique that never looks deep into the text. This woman always provided a very strong positive criticism that was very useful to me. She knew me with all my weaknesses. I miss that.

I still like to be in our apartment in Vienna. I feel protected there. Maybe because we had been living there together for years. Now it’s the only nest of our togetherness. The cemetery is also not very far away.

In life it’s a great advantage if you have already experienced something like it. Things don’t affect you as much after that. You’re neither interested in failure nor success, neither the theater nor the directors, nor the editors or critics. You aren’t interested in anything. The only interesting thing is that there is money on your account so that you can live. My ambitions were no longer as great as they had been earlier. After her death that ceased entirely. I’m not impressed by anything any more. One still likes some old philosophers, some aphorisms. It’s almost like fleeing into music. For hours you enter into a wonderful mood. I still have plans. I once had four or five, now I have two or three. But it’s not necessary. I don’t need it and the world doesn’t need it either. When I feel like writing I write, when I don’t feel like it I don’t. Whatever you write it’s always a catastrophe. That’s the depressing thing about the fate of a writer. One can never put on paper what one thought of or imagined. That gets lost when it is put onto paper. All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined. Basically, one cannot communicate all that. No one ever managed to do so. It’s especially hard in the German language because that language is wooden and clumsy, disgusting. A terrible language that kills everything light and wonderful. The only thing one can do is sublimate that language with a rhythm to give it musicality. When I write it’s in the end never what I had thought it would be like. That’s less frustrating with books because you think the reader has her own imagination. Maybe the flower will blossom after all, will unfold its leaves. In the theater only the curtain unfolds. Those are human actors who suffered for month before the first performance. Those people were meant to be the persons one had made up. But they are not. The persons in your head, that had been able to do everything, are of blood and flesh all of a sudden, water and bones. They are clumsy. In your head the play was poetic, great, but the actors are business-like translators. A translation doesn’t have a lot to do with the original. So the play that is performed in a theater does not have a lot to do with what the author had created. The stage, the boards were to me boards that always destroyed everything. All is trampled down. Each time it’s a catastrophe.

AS: But you continue writing. Books and plays. From one catastrophe to the next.

TB: Yes.

 

___
Book

Thomas Bernard The Loser
Vintage

‘Thomas Bernhard was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. His formal innovation ranks with Beckett and Kafka, his outrageously cantankerous voice recalls Dostoevsky, but his gift for lacerating, lyrical, provocative prose is incomparably his own.One of Bernhard’s most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould’s incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other– the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator– has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.’ — Vintage

 

______
Excerpt

Suicide calculated well in advance, I thought, no spontaneous act of desperation.Even Glenn Gould, our friend and the most im– portant piano virtuoso of the century, only made it to the age of fifty-one, I thought to myself as I entered the inn.Now of course he didn’t kill himself like Wertheimer, but died, as they say, a natural death.Four and a half months in New York and always the Goldberg Variations and the Art of the Fugue, four and a half months of Klavierexerzitien, as Glenn Gould always said only in German, I thought.Exactly twenty-eight years ago we had lived in Leopoldskron and studied with Horowitz and we (at least Wertheimer and I, but of course not Glenn Gould) learned more from Horowitz during a completely rain-drenched summer than during eight previous years at the Mozarteum and the Vienna Academy. Horowitz rendered all our professors null and void. But these dreadful teachers had been necessary to understand Horowitz. For two and a half months it rained without stopping and we locked ourselves in our rooms in Leopoldskron and worked day and night, insomnia (Glenn Gould’s) had become a necessary state for us, during the night we worked through what Horowitz had taught us the day before. We ate almost nothing and the whole time never had the backaches we habitually suffered from with our former teachers; with Horowitz the backaches disappeared because we were studying so intensely they couldn’t appear. Once our course with Horowitz was over it was clear that Glenn was already a better piano player than Horowitz himself, and from that moment on Glenn was the most important piano virtuoso in the world for me, no matter how many piano players I heard from that moment on, none of them played like Glenn, even Rubinstein, whom I’ve always loved, wasn’t better. Wertheimer and I were equally good, even Wertheimer always said, Glenn is the best, even if we didn’t yet dare to say that he was the best player of the century. When Glenn went back to Canada we had actually lost our Canadian friend, we didn’t think we’d ever see him again, he was so possessed by his art that we had to assume he couldn’t continue in that state for very long and would soon die. But two years after we’d studied together under Horowitz Glenn came to the Salzburg Festival to play the Goldberg Variations, which two years previously he had practiced with us day and night at the Mozarteum and had rehearsed again and again. After the concert the papers wrote that no pianist had ever played the Goldberg Variations so artistically, that is, after his Salzburg concert they wrote what we had already claimed and known two years previously. We had agreed to meet with Glenn after his concert at the Ganshof in Maxglan, an old inn I particularly like. We drank water and didn’t say a thing. At this reunion I told Glenn straight off that Wertheimer (who had come to Salzburg from Vienna) and I hadn’t believed for a minute we would ever see him, Glenn, again, we were constantly plagued by the thought that Glenn would destroy himself after returning to Canada from Salzburg, destroy himself with his music obsession, with his piano radicalism. I actually said the words piano radicalism to him. My piano radicalism, Glenn always said afterward, and I know that he always used this expression, even in Canada and in America. Even then, almost thirty years before his death, Glenn never loved any composer more than Bach, Handel was his second favorite, he despised Beethoven, even Mozart was no longer the composer I loved above all others when he spoke about him, I thought, as I entered the inn. Glenn never played a single note without humming, I thought, no other piano player ever had that habit. He spoke of his lung disease as if it were his second art. That we had the same illness at the same time and then always came down with it again, I thought, and in the end even Wertheimer got our illness. But Glenn didn’t die from this lung disease, I thought. He was killed by the impasse he had played himself into for almost forty years, I thought. He never gave up the piano, I thought, of course not, whereas Wertheimer and I gave up the piano because we never attained the inhuman state that Glenn attained, who by the way never escaped this inhuman state, who didn’t even want to escape this inhuman state. Wertheimer had his B~isendorfer grand piano auctioned off in the Dorotheum, I gave away my Steinway one day to the nine-year-old daughter of a schoolteacher in Neukirchen near Altmunster so as not to be tortured by it any longer. The teacher’s child ruined my Steinway in the shortest period imaginable, I wasn’t pained by this fact, on the contrary, I observed this cretinous destruction of my piano with perverse pleasure. Wertheimer, as he always said, had gone into the human sciences, I had begun my deterioration process. Without my music, which from one day to the next I could no longer tolerate, I deteriorated, without practical music, theoretical music from the very first moment had only a catastrophic effect on me. From one moment to the next I hated my piano, my own, couldn’t bear to hear myself play again; I no longer wanted to paw at my instrument. So one day I visited the teacher to announce my gift to him, my Steinway, I’d heard his daughter was musically gifted, I said to him and announced the delivery of my Steinway to his house. I’d convinced myself just in time that personally I wasn’t suited for a virtuoso career, I said to the teacher, since I always wanted only the highest in everything I had to separate myself from my instrument, for with it I would surely not reach the highest, as I had suddenly realized, and therefore it was only logical that I should put my piano at the disposal of his gifted daughter, I wouldn’t open the cover of my piano even once, I said to the astonished teacher, a rather primitive man who was married to an even more primitive woman, also from Neukirchen near Altmiinster. Naturally I’ll take care of the delivery costs! I said to the teacher, whom I’ve known well since I was a child, just as I’ve known his simplicity, not to say stupidity. The teacher accepted my gift immediately, I thought as I entered the inn. I hadn’t believed in his daughter’s talent for a minute; the children of country schoolteachers are always touted as having talent, above all musical talent, but in truth they’re not talented in anything, all these children are always completely without talent and even if one of them can blow into a flute or pluck a zither or bang on a piano, that’s no proof of talent. I knew I was giving up my expensive instrument to an absolutely worthless individual and precisely for that reason I had it delivered to the teacher. The teacher’s daughter took my instrument, one of the very best, one of the rarest and therefore most sought after and therefore also most expensive pianos in the world, and in the shortest period imaginable destroyed it, rendered it worthless. But of course it was precisely this destruction process of my beloved Steinway that I had wanted. Wertheimer went into the human sciences, as he always used to say, I entered my deterioration process, and in bringing my instrument to the teacher’s house I had initiated this deterioration process in the best possible manner. Wertheimer continued to play the piano years after I had given my Stein-way to the teacher’s daughter because for years he thought himself capable of becoming a piano virtuoso. By the way he played a thousand times better than the majority of our piano virtuosos with public careers, but in the end he wasn’t satisfied with being (in the best of cases!) another piano virtuoso like all the others in Europe, and he gave it all up, went into the human sciences. I myself played, I believe, better than Wertheimer, but I would never have been able to play as well as Glenn and for that reason (hence for the same reason as Wertheimer!) I gave up the piano from one moment to the next. I would have had to play better than Glenn, but that wasn’t possible, was out of the question, and therefore I gave up playing the piano. I woke up one day in April, I no longer know which one, and said to myself, no more piano. And I never touched the instrument again. I went immediately to the schoolteacher and announced the delivery of my piano. I will now devote myself to philosophical matters, I thought as I walked to the teacher’s house, even though of course I didn’t have the faintest idea what these philosophical matters might be. I am absolutely not a piano virtuoso, I said to myself, I am not an interpreter, I am not a reproducing artist. No artist at all. The depravity of my idea had appealed to me immediately. The whole time on my way to the teacher’s I kept on saying these three words: Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist! Absolutely no artist! If I hadn’t met Glenn Gould, I probably wouldn’t have given up the piano and I would have become a piano virtuoso and perhaps even one of the best piano virtuosos in the world, I thought in the inn. When we meet the very best, we have to give up, I thought. Strangely enough I met Glenn on Monk’s Mountain, my childhood mountain. Of course I had seen him previously at the Mozarteum but hadn’t exchanged a word with him before our meeting on Monk’s Mountain, which is also called Suicide Mountain, since it is especially suited for suicide and every week at least three or four people throw themselves off it into the void. The prospective suicides ride the elevator inside the mountain to the top, take a few steps and hurl themselves down to the city below. Their smashed remains on the street have always fascinated me and I personally (like Wertheimer by the way!) have often climbed or ridden the elevator to the top of Monk’s Mountain with the intention of hurling myself into the void, but I didn’t throw myself off (nor did Wertheimer!). Several times I had already prepared myself to jump (like Wertheimer!) but didn’t jump, like Wertheimer. I turned back. Of course many more people have turned back than have actually jumped, I thought. I met Glenn on Monk’s Mountain at the so-called Judge’s Peak, where one has the best view of Germany. I spoke first, I said, both of us are studying with Horowitz. Yes, he answered. We looked down at the German plain and Glenn immediately began setting forth his ideas about the Art of the Fugue. I’ve encountered a highly intelligent man of science, I thought to myself. He had a Rockefeller scholarship, he said. Otherwise his father was a rich man. Hides, furs, he said, speaking German better than our fellow students from the Austrian provinces. Luckily Salzburg is here and not four kilometers farther down in Germany, he said, I wouldn’t have gone to Germany. From the first moment ours was a spiritual friendship. The majority of even the most famous piano players haven’t a clue about their art, he said. But it’s like that in all the arts, I said, just like that in painting, in literature, I said, even philosophers are ignorant of philosophy. Most artists are ignorant of their art. They have a dilettante’s notion of art, remain stuck all their lives in dilettantism, even the most famous artists in the world. We understood each other immediately, we were, I have to say it, attracted from the first moment by our differences, which actually were completely opposite in our of course identical conception of art. Just a few days after this encounter on Monk’s Mountain we ran into Wertheimer. Glenn, Wertheimer and I, after living separately for the first two weeks, all in completely unacceptable quarters in the Old Town, finally rented a house in Leopoldskron for the duration of our course with Horowitz where we could do what we pleased. In town everything had a debilitating effect on us, the air was unbreathable, the people were intolerable, the damp walls had contaminated us and our instruments. In fact we could only have continued Horowitz’s course by moving out of Salzburg, which at bottom is the sworn enemy of all art and culture, a Iicretinous provincial dump with stupid people and cold walls where everything without exception is eventually made cretinous. It was our salvation to pack our worldly goods and move out to Leopoldskron, which at that time was still a green meadow where cows grazed and hundreds of thousands of birds made their home. The town of Salzburg itself, which today is freshly painted even in the darkest corners and is even more disgusting than it was twenty-eight years ago, was and is antagonistic to everything of value in a human being, and in time destroys it; we figured that out at once and took off for Leopoldskron. The people in Salzburg have always been dreadful, like their climate, and when I enter the town today not only is my judgment confirmed, everything is even more dreadful. But to study with Horowitz precisely in this town, the sworn enemy of culture and art, was surely the greatest advantage. We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing, and to that extent one can absolutely recommend Salzburg, probably like all other so-called beautiful towns, as a place of study, of course only to someone with a strong character, a weak character will inevitably be destroyed in the briefest time. Glenn was charmed by the magic of this town for three days, then he suddenly saw that its magic, as they call it, was rotten, that basically its beauty is disgusting and that the people living in this disgusting beauty are vulgar. The climate in the lower Alps makes for emotionally disturbed people who fall victim to cretinism at a very early age and who in time become malevolent, I said. Whoever lives here knows this if he’s honest, and whoever comes here realizes it after a short while and must get away before it’s too late, before he becomes just like these cretinous inhabitants, these emotionally disturbed Salzburgers who kill off everything that isn’t yet like them with their cretinism.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. A lot of wondering, for sure. Someone is probably AI-ing Elegabulus and feeding them to 4chan as we speak or, wait, type. ** _Black_Acrylic, Those Dundee statues are nice. I haven’t seen any odd statues here. They’re all very stolid. Did France win? I haven’t checked yet. Wait. Hm, I checked my French site and they don’t say anything about it. Hm … ** Dominik, Hi!!! I often use the google news site because it’s a news consolidation place, and I swear every single day there’s a news item about what Kanye’s West’s wife wore the night before. The least interesting news possible. Thanks, and, yeah, love’s help is greatly needed, and I hope he comes through. Ha ha, maybe I’d quit smoking if love could pull off that statue relocation. Nah. Love erasing Elton John, G. ** nat, You’re Norwegian. Did I know that? I went to the Vigeland sculpture park, and, yeah, flashback. Norway is so beautiful, as I’m sure I needn’t tell you. And it has one of my top five amusement parks, Kongeparken. (Great amusements parks are a big deal to me). If you could do the videogame, yeah, do, obviously. Thanks for the link. That does sound super intriguing. But I’ll keep my finger near the FF button. Happy about your acquisition of the McCourt books! He’s so sadly under-read. Good deal. Cruise ships … so where are you exactly? ** Don Waters, There are a billion reasons to visit Japan, or almost. I went to see the mermaid statue in Copenhagen. It’s so nothing. Given all of its fame, I was shocked. I’m going to try to find an odd statue in Paris because, I swear, every one I’ve seen is so predictable that it was like a parody of a boring statue. No, not a big fan of Morrissey. I only ever kind of liked The Smiths’ first album, but I thought ‘Meat Is Murder’ was meh, and then I stopped caring. I do like one solo song of his called ‘The Last of the Famous International Playboys’. I haven’t met him, but I did go bowling once and he was bowling a few lanes away, or, rather, pretending to bowl for some photo shoot. Thanks for reading ‘Flunker’. I still haven’t seen a copy yet. That second story was going to be part of ‘I Wished’ when it was going to be a much more linear novel, but it got cut, and I revised it. Anyway, thanks, pal! ** Uday, You’re good. I used to like post offices. I guess if I went in one I probably still would. So, you’re traveling! Or you have already traveled perhaps. I think that Daily Mail Ronaldo statue wins the booby prize. So, are you now where you were headed yesterday? ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, most of them need their backstory to truly pop. I saw the Golden Poo by accident when I was there last time. Aw, sad. In person it looked more Dairy Queen than poop. The Unko Museum is now sort of vaguely near the top of my must-do Tokyo list. Jeez those colors. If color could kill. ** politekid, Hey, hey, O! How are you, buddy? I have mixed feelings about the doomed CD-rom game idea. For the obvious reason. It wouldn’t be now what I had intended it to be because the graphics would now evoke nostalgia and perhaps ridicule, which was definitely not my goal. No, I didn’t get so far in the thinking it out. Too many people reminded me of how fast tech evolves and dies, and I eventually believed them. No, nothing like the haunted house game we made. It was going to be this super avant-garde meta-game where everything was a puzzle within a puzzle and stuff. You have ‘Flunker’ too. I don’t have ‘Flunker’. I still haven’t seen it. Where is my motherfucking ‘Flunker’?! That Prince Philip statue is absolutely hilarious! Oh, my goodness. I worship it. I do. You good, my friend? ** Nika Mavrody, No sorrow necessary whatsoever. ** Malik, Hi. Sure, happy to. Haha, I remember that ‘Pecker’ line, yeah. Good old John. Those Emilio Rangel sculpture are news to me. Wow. Thank you. I’m going to pursue his work. And that Irene Nordli statue. And what a perfect name it has. Thank you again. I’m going to have to do a Statuary 3 post clearly. How’s your week going? Are you consumed with anticipation? ** Steve, Hi. It’s not at that point yet, but we’re in danger of getting to that point, and we’re desperately trying to figure out how to avoid it. I’ll check The Quietus list, thanks. ** Harper, Hey. Maybe you’d like Disneyland. They have what seems like a thousand statues of fictional characters, and they’re not bronze. I’m glad you wrote. And ‘In Youth … ‘ is dreamy with its impeccable prose and non-impeccable undercurrents. Great luck with the submissions! We’re going through that with our film, and I feel you. Thanks about the French election. The Far Right is going to have more power than ever almost no matter what happens, but collective effort and will could keep them from having a majority. That’s the giant hope. Yes, your Conservatives likely being trounced is a bright spot for us all. ** Lucas, Hi, Lucas! It was so, so great to see you and get to hang out! Much more of that, I hope. You head home today, right? I hope the trip is a lot easier on your back. Cool that you sent something to ellie’s zine. I’m looking for something to send too. And thank you for the prayers. I don’t believe in prayers, but it’s getting to the point where we’ll gratefully take anything. Sending love back to you!!! ** PL, Hi. I did talk to her. She’s on the committee that chooses the Prix Sade literary prize. I won it once for ‘The Sluts’, and I was nominated (but didn’t win) for ‘The Marbled Swarm’, so I met her at a pre-Prix reception. Uh, I have funny stories about encounters I had with Britney Spears and Bono here, but they’re too long to recount in this context. Eek, about the film student. I guess it’s technically possible that one could be a good director without knowing anything about filmmakers, but it’s awfully unlikely. When I used to be in poetry workshops, there was always an aspiring poet or three who prided themselves on the fact that they were pure poets who didn’t need to read other poets. Of course they were shockingly untalented. I hope your melancholy takes a hike. ** Darbyzzz 😴🛌, Oh, I knew you were joking. I think I might be bad at communicating that I’m understanding a joke. This week can only be better than the weekend. My car, which is in LA, is 1989 Toyota Corolla, champagne colored (they say). Still runs well. Toyotas are king. I wish it was Mini-Cooper nonetheless for synchronicity sake. I have a friend whose dog is named Sir Master Blaster. I might eat noodles tonight. I hope your week is way more than okay. ** Justin D, Hi, Justin! Me too. Our game will probably get finished one of these days. We’re still looking for some funds. We don’t need all that much. Maybe $10k. Thanks about the film. It’s really hell right now. We’ve beaten hell a bunch of times already, so hopefully we will again. What’s percolating around you in your world? ** Oscar 🌀, Hey. Haha. You’re a tough collaborator. The good kind of tough. Um, I met John Lennon once, and I asked him, ‘Are you really saying ‘I buried Paul’ backwards at the end of the Beatles’ song ‘Number 9’? And he said, ‘I won’t tell you, but I’ll give you a clue. Listen closely. Racsoih.’ And for years and years, I had no idea what he said until I met you. And now I know, but I still don’t know what he was inferring. Thank you for the ‘Riven’ nudge. I need encouragement. It’s literally nothing but puzzles. Moving around from puzzle to puzzle. I like those kinds of games. I don’t like games where you have fight things and other characters. I run away from them ‘screaming’. Thanks for hoping that today and yesterday are improvements. They haven’t been so far, but Tuesday still has hours and hours of life left in it. I hope your week has begun hassle free. ** Right. Today I spotlight the great Thomas Bernhard’s great novel mostly about the great pianist Glenn Gould. A triple header. See you tomorrow.