‘A tableau vivant is a representation of a personage, character, scene, incident, etc., or of a well-known painting or statue, by one person or a group of persons in suitable costumes and attitudes, silent and motionless. Historically, tableaux vivants denoted figures posed, silent and immobile, for twenty or thirty seconds, in imitation of well-known works of art or dramatic scenes from history and literature. The phrase and practice of tableau vivant originated as medieval liturgical dramas when a mass ended in a short, dramatic series or tableaux. Although its emblematic and allegorical characteristics recall medieval drama, the “tableau” emerged as a true art form on the Continent and in England in the eighteenth century.
‘Another facet of the use of tableau vivant was the pose plastique, where the performer would imitate classical statuary, introducing the nude and transforming these larger portrayed scenes, while still portraying a decided moment. One could compare the manifestation of the tableau vivant with Roland Barthes’ consideration of the film still; both being an analysis of a pregnant moment. Barthes believes the film still has the capacity to extract the whole diegesis of a film. In The Third Meaning, Barthes cites Eisenstein’s thoughts about the film still offering us “inside the fragment.” He agrees with Eisenstein’s belief about the film still being the, “basic center of gravity.”
‘Tableau vivant’s beginnings were associated within a class structure that could not only afford time but consideration of this activity. Goethe acknowledges this by saying “Here the place is to think of still another decided hobby of the Neapolitaner …. presenting angels and kings, more or less completely, richly and preciously together grouped. Goethe believed that tableaux vivant functioned merely as entertainment (diversions, evening amusement) once they were appropriated.” One commonality to this practice is the consideration of mimesis. The term mimesis is derived from the Greek mimesis, meaning to imitate. The tableau vivant acts as an imitation; the act of copying a copy. Walter Benjamin believed it was inherently human and part of the natural order of man to imitate.
‘Before radio, film and television, tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment. Before the age of colour reproduction of images the tableau vivant (often abbreviated simply to tableau) was sometimes used to recreate paintings “on stage”, based on an etching or sketch of the painting. This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of tableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings of a “live” theatre performance. Since English stage censorship often strictly forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, tableaux vivants also had a place in presenting risqué entertainment at special shows. In the nineteenth century they took such titles as “Nymphs Bathing” and “Diana the Huntress” and were to be found at such places as The Hall of Rome in Great Windmill Street, London. Other notorious venues were the Coal Hole in the Strand and The Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. Such shows had largely died out by the 1970s.’ — collaged from various sources
VANESSA BEECROFT VB64 AT DEITCH STUDIOS IN LONG ISLAND CITY
Raft of the Medusa (100 Mile House)
tableau vivant après Auguste Rodin
Tableau vivant de majorettes
Tableau Vivant Willem
Act 2 of King Lear
Security Passing Rodin’s Age of Bronze
Tableau Vivant. Jarvis and Liam smoking
Princes Day in 3D at the Pageant of the Masters
Tableau Vivant – Jan Vermeer
Tableau Vivant – Dumbo Arts Festival – powerHouse Arena2
Tableaux vivant des élèves de secondaire 1 et 2 des classes d’arts plastiques enrichis d’Annie Saint-Vanne
*
p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! ‘The House of Hunger’ is really good, but do try to get to ‘Black Sunlight’, that’s his masterpiece, I think. After I stooped to quote Tina Turner, anything’s fair game, I figure. You do what you love, or you get arrested, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘HoH’ is really good, so yeah, but ‘BS’ is really special. Veggie fish and chips! Hm. No, that could work. A few times I’ve asked fish & chips places in London for chips only and they scowled at me. ** Misanthrope, Ugh, George, that’s so half-witted of them. And I guess you can say goodbye to your non-white and/or trans co-workers. ** Jack Skelley, Dare we hope. Yes, RIP Garth Hudson. The Band’s Brian Jones. Wow, I think I also might have seen Butthole Surfers do ‘Chest Fever’. At John Anson Ford even possibly. That rings such a bell. Is the Urban Land thing online accessible? How nice that someone named Chanel Chapters thinks you’re WEIRD, alternative & fringe. Feather in your cap. Never been to AWP. It looks like I’ll be there this year when it’s happening, but I’m not gonna pay to go. But I’m hoping some of the gathered indie lit superstars will hit the local reading venues while they’re about. Could be worse here, but I’m not sure about there. ** jay, It is incredible! I made it not very far at all into ‘ALL’, and, yes, I thought it laid the sentimentality on very thick and tried to hit all the triggering buttons with a sledgehammer. It’s warming here just slightly. It’s also wetter. You can’t have everything. Cheer up, pal! The world is your imagination’s oyster, don’t forget. ** James, You and explosives seems like a dangerous combination. Oh wait, only in your mind. Phew. I told someone the other day that I do a blog, and he said, ‘People who read blogs are like people who go shopping in antique stores.’ He has a TikTok channel, and I said, ‘You just wait.’ If you ever get to Paris I will direct you to a certain crepe stand that will change your mind. I have a headache just hearing about that Russia paper. And the rest. But do not crack. ** Larst, Hi, L! Ace about the live gig and more pertinently about the EP. I’ll be there. Everyone, The mighty and talent-exploding Larst has an improv collective that played a live show on Friday and by Saturday night he had turned it into an EP on bandcamp and, perhaps needless to say, you should seek it out. Here. Day amongst days to you, sir. ** Diesel Clementine, First, wow, thank you! Re: ‘Gold’ and generally. William Jones, nice, thank you, he’s a friend of mine. Um, well, I have been to Moscow a few times, so I do have a sense of what it’s kind of like physically and atmospherically there. And, for instance, the little park where Pieta gets picked up in the story is, or at least was, a real place. In my wandering I came upon this little park near the Kremlin with a Brezhnev statue where there were very young boys standing around in the cold prostituting themselves. And other things are based on real things I saw too. My novel ‘The Marbled Swarm’ is set in Paris, and ‘Period’ is set in some nameless part of the US south, so I was accustomed to setting fiction elsewhere to some degree. Well, Russia is very distanced to me, although my ex-boyfriend who I still live with is Russian and watches a lot of Russian YouTube channel shows, so it’s not extremely foreign to me. Why? I guess just because I found Moscow extremely grim and was interested by how gayness is quite hidden and force-repressed there and that things like underaged prostitutes, which are relegated to the dark online web in my world, were being practiced out in the open, and I guess a lot of reasons. I guess my hope is that my books will only make more sense in an increasingly likely world outside of American Hegemony while, at the same time, seeming even more niche, which I don’t mind. I don’t know if those are good answers to your questions, but that’s what degree of waking state this morning will allow me to say. Really, thank you a lot for asking and wondering. That’s amazing, and I’m honored. How are you? ** Steeqhen, I’m assuming your quiz went okay since you seem totally yourself post-quiz. Coke is the only drug I think I’d still say yes to if someone offered me a toot. Thanks for attending to the spotlit novel. Whenever you get to it, I think you’ll be glad. ** PL, Gotcha, but the chances of you meeting death in a car accident are pretty tiny, you know. Like Michigan, haha, strangely I think I can totally picture that. Not being overwhelmed with friendships can be very good for an artist. I lived in Amsterdam for 2 1/2 years, and I literally didn’t have a single good friend, and I’m positive that my isolation is what made me start writing the George Miles Cycle while I was there. I’m from LA, or a suburb of LA, so I luckily grew up with culture at my fingertips, or rather at the conclusion of a short-ish car ride. NYC isn’t that dirty. Well, parts are, but parts of Paris and LA are too. I lived there for four years, and I thought people were generally very nice and cool. You should go there and see it. It’s intense, but it’s exciting, more exciting than it is scary by far. ** Tyler Ookami, Build a Bear, wow, I forgot about that franchise. Strange that societal currents occasionally allow something that peculiar to thrive for short periods. I really want to go to Mall of America someday, but really only because it’s built around a rather decent looking indoor amusement park. Well, and its giganticness intrigues also. France doesn’t have malls, or not voluminous ones. They have arcades, which I guess are the equivalent. They’re charming, as Walter Benjamin thought. ** HaRpEr, It’s true, I guess Influencers are performance artists. I don’t follow any with much attention, but it doesn’t seem like they’re out to blow people’s minds or fuck with their viewers other than in a frat boy pranking kind of way. It seems like a very capitalist art, if you want to cut them the slack of being artists. I don’t see any Chris Burdens crawling naked through broken glass kind of Influencers. Most of them seem like they want to be unofficial school teachers. I don’t know. But, yeah, I see your point. It’s a great novel. ‘BS’, I think you’ll really like it. Sure, that’s why I always keep my random writings that I put down in a flash because I will go back to them later and at least find some good sentences or the kernel of goodness. For sure. Congrats, by the way! ** Bill, Hi. Jury duty: you’re doing it. Good for you. I’ve always just immediately thrown my jury duty summons in the trash, and, as far as I know, I’m not on some enemy list. If you get to London, get to Paris, for goodness sake. It’s just a hop, skip, and jump further. ** Uday, Cool that you know Marechera’s work. ‘Prayers’ that the guy you like is bonafidely liking you back. If there’s a way to show the film there, we will. We’re looking for a sales agent who could and would figure out how to do that. I hope your tiredness gets the hell out of Dodge. Wow, I’m such an American. ** Callan, Read ‘Black Sunlight’. You won’t be sorry. It’s fantastic. I don’t know Billy Woods, but I’ll find him. I guess I was hoping that Thewlis was the kind of actor who wouldn’t be fulfilled by big paychecks, but I do tend to get romantic about stuff. Have a very good day. ** Okay. Today my galerie returns to present you with an array of tableaux vivant, and … what do you think? See you tomorrow.
‘While I was writing Black Sunlight I was reading books on intellectual anarchism to reinforce my own sense of protest against everything; I was reading Bakunin and Kropotkin. Intellectual anarchism is full of contradictions in the sense that it can never achieve its goals. If it achieves any goal at all, then it is no longer anarchism. And so one has to be in a perpetual state of change, without holding on to any certainties. And that element I put across very seriously as well as in a very frivolous vein.
‘At the same time a very heavy element in Black Sunlight is this idea about sexuality. Everything political becomes personal, everything personal becomes political, but the four are in a state of continuous tension, and therefore almost everything one says or does reeks actually of sex. A bullet can be a heavy sexual image. A bomb can be like the eruption of sperm in the womb. Most of the people I was living with were people who rejected traditional sexual roles and accepted sexuality as a liberating force in itself. As you know, I provide no answers, except only a rigorous re-evaluation, especially of western intellectual thought.’— Dambudzo Marechera
‘Today we remember the extraordinary and explosive life of Dambudzo Marechera, the Zimbabwean ‘enfant terrible of African literature’ who on this day in 1987 died homeless, penniless and sick from AIDS on the streets of Harare at the age of thirty-five. Tragically for Marechera, even the greatest genius cannot flourish if through the misfortune of their awful circumstances they have become sociopathically programmed to deride contemporaries, to show absolute nihilistic contempt for academic and literary institutions and, at all opportunities, to bite the hands that attempt to feed them. Unfortunately, as the culture of Marechera’s war-torn birthplace had for the previous century been systematically used, abused and ultimately destroyed by White rule, such a brutal finale appears to have been the destiny of this perplexing figure – this simultaneously sensitive and insensitive Poet Brute whose task was always to question, provoke and even endanger all kinds of authority figures whom he would encounter in his too brief life.
‘Deadly aware of his ‘problem child’ reputation, Dambudzo blamed his mother for ‘cursing’ him with a first name that had traditionally been given to girls, and which means in his own Shona language ‘the one who brings trouble’. Little wonder then that this brilliant outsider would grow up seething with resentment. Born into extreme poverty, in 1952, Marechera as a young boy found his escape from his violent surroundings through reading, after obtaining his first book – a Victorian children’s encyclopaedia – from a rubbish dump. His homeland was at that time still named Rhodesia after the dreadful Victorian adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, whose gold and diamond mines had turned most of the population of former Matabeleland into his private slaves. Now still governed by the racist white minority under Prime Minister Ian Smith, Rhodesia was by 1965 boiling over with bile and antipathy, and Marechera was forced to enter his teenage years in a country mired in civil war – one that would not conclude until the creation of the Republic of Zimbabwe in 1979. His country’s instability, its permanent turmoil – these were the factors that most informed his art and his future lifestyle. And though Marechera’s singular if vexatious brilliance emerged soon afterwards, so too would the signs of an unstable personality that would persistently and ultimately sabotage his life.
‘Marechera won a scholarship to the University of Rhodesia but was expelled after his participation in campus riots in the summer of 1973. Shortly thereafter, he won a scholarship to Oxford University: a life-changing opportunity! Marechera, however, did not adapt well to British culture and in particular the rigid Oxford educational tradition. Alcoholism now fuelled his inherently rebellious nature; after numerous disruptions, his final act at Oxford was an attempt to set fire to the university’s New College. Given a choice between psychiatric treatment and expulsion, Marechera made his decision: “I got my things and left.”
‘Three years later, these six words would form the opening sentence of his extraordinary book, The House of Hunger – a collection of eight stories and two poems. After quitting Oxford, Marechera had chosen to live a shadowy existence in a tent by the River Isis in London where he wrote and drank. The House of Hunger was a semi-autobiographical account of violence, squalor, political upheaval, cultural and racial divides, and personal torment as viewed through the eyes of a Rimbaud-like boy-brat visionary – it found immediate acclaim, in 1979, going on to win the Guardian Prize for First Fiction. Marechera however rejected the plaudits in favour of self-sabotage: he arrived at the award ceremony wearing a flamboyant red poncho and proceeded to throw china, chairs and accusations of hypocrisy at his fellow participants. Marechera returned to the newly liberated Zimbabwe shortly after the publication of Black Sunlight, his surreal novel about revolution set in his nation’s violent landscape. But the author’s itinerant and recklessly provocative lifestyle continued in Harare, where his reputation, talent and future prospects were just not enough to prevent him from self-destructing. In the words of his biographer and champion, Flora Veit-Wild, Marechera’s “major quest in life and work was to fight any form of pretence, to unmask all forms of oppression of the individual’s freedom and rights.”
‘Dambudzo Marechera’s untimely vagabond death in no way reflects fairly the vivacious life of this extreme, almost heroically contrary figure. But it does aid Marechera’s legacy as his role as an African literary hero continues to gain momentum. In 2009, even stuffy Oxford University celebrated the life of their would-be arsonist!’ — On This Deity
Alle Lansu interviews Dambudzo Marechera about Oxford
Dambudzo Marechera (late) on his visit to Zim after 8 Year in UK
______________ Constructed Interview
Tinashe Mushakavanhu: Where does the problem lie in Zimbabwe? Who is to blame for the crisis in Zimbabwe today?
Dambudzo Marechera: We in Zimbabwe know who the enemy is. The enemy is just not white, he is also black. The police force, the army in Zimbabwe are three-quarters black. They have always been. And for me…I believe that to see the Zimbabwe struggle as merely a black versus white struggle is stupid and naïve. And hence, in most of my work, there’s always a mistrust of politicians, no matter who they are.
TM: Zimbabwe has been constantly in the news as a kind of hell on earth. What is the actual state of affairs in Zimbabwe?
DM: The rich are getting more powerful and richer and the poor are getting poorer. Any writer worth his name cannot write about that, the publishers are afraid of Government attitude towards anything they publish which may not be considered patriotic.
TM: What is your opinion on the present leadership?
DM: This is a weird world of mechanical speeches; lullabying the povo with mobile horizon promises (what is Zimasset?). They are quick to mend legislation; so the world is what they make it for us who are passive, we who they shamelessly claim to have liberated from the white man. With that as their pretext, they weigh their grievous lot on us day in day out. All we hear are empty slogans.
TM: In the past three decades, the ballot has failed to effect political change. Is it better for Zimbabweans to resort to violence?
DM: I am against everything, against war and those against war, against whatever diminishes the individual’s blind impulse.
TM: What is your comment on the historical domination of Zanu (PF) in post-independence Zimbabwe?
DM: I am afraid of one-party states, especially where you have more slogans than content in terms of policy and its implementation. I have never lived under a one-party state, except under pre-independence Zimbabwe, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, which was virtually a one-party state. And what I read about one-party states makes me, frankly, terrified.
TM: After 36 years of misrule and dazzling corruption, do you think independence is a reality for the majority, or just an illusion?
DM: I think some things have been improved. But basically our revolution has only changed life for the new black middle class, those who got university degrees overseas during the struggle. For them, independence is a reality; it has changed their income, their housing conditions and so on and so on. But for the working classes and the peasants, it’s still the same hard work, low pay, rough conditions of living. In other words, I don’t think independence so far has really made any significant change as far as the working class are concerned; especially for those who committed themselves to become fighters. They joined ZANLA or ZIPRA before they’d finished their education. Most of them are now unemployed and live in the streets. This is what I wrote about in Mindblast.
TM: Indeed, Mindblast gives a blistering account of the early years of independence. Why do you think Zimbabwe downplayed your significance as a writer?
DM: In some ways there is a certain disconnection between my profession as a writer and the needs of Zimbabwe as a developing country. A developing country doesn’t really need a writer like me. It needs teachers, it needs development officers, it needs people who will help to build a better future for the working class and the peasants. I had come back armed with a profession which is irrelevant to development.
TM: It seems contemporary Zimbabwean writers are uncertain about their stand today. Was it easier for your lot before 1980?
DM: Oh yes, it was. Because the objective was to fight racism and obtain independence. After UDI in 1965 Ian Smith deliberately created the Rhodesia Literature Bureau to promote a certain kind of Shona and Ndebele literature which would be used in the schools and perpetuate the idea that racism is for the good of the blacks. And we had writers who were writing the very books Ian Smith wanted the blacks to read. In primary school I was taught Shona literature which caricatures black people and which was in line with the specific political policies before independence. One of the main themes in Shona literature of that period was the story about a person coming from the rural areas thinking that he’d have a good life in the city. Then he or she comes to the city and goes through hardship and decides to go back to the rural areas because that’s where heaven is. Now this was in direct line with the urban influx control policy. Blacks were being discouraged by the city council and by the government to come to the cities.
In other words, even before I left the country, the literature which was being written here had no relevance to me or even to our people, to those who knew. Before independence you had two schools of thought among writers: those who participated in Ian Smith’s propaganda programme, and those who had to run into exile and write protest literature. You will find that after independence the ones who were in the first school are now the ones in high positions, and those who were part of the Zimbabwean protest literature are the ones who are having problems or who have been forced to compromise themselves. Literature is now seen merely as another instrument of official policy and therefore the writer should not practise art for art’s sake or write like Franz Kafka or like James Joyce or explore the subconscious of our new society. All that is for European bourgeois literature. And that’s why for instance my work is condemned. One of the reasons given by the censorship board when they banned Black Sunlight on August 7th, 1981, before I had come back, was that Dambudzo Marechera is trying to be European, that this book has got no relevance to the development of the Zimbabwean nation.
TM: The economic downturn has driven many people out of the country, though in your own case what drove you out of the country was the political madness of the time. Tell me, when you came back after years of exile in Britain, what kind of country did you expect?
DM: The only idea I had of what to expect was what I had been reading in the British press about the struggle here and about what was going on in Uganda, about the military coups in Nigeria and so on and so on. In other words, the idea that our own independence would be another disaster had been instilled in me very much. The first time I heard the Prime Minister’s motorcade, and there were suddenly all these sirens going, “whee, whee, whee”, I thought, “shit, another civil war has started.” And I rushed to my hotel room and just locked the door, listening hard, waiting for the gunfire. Some people here call the motorcade ‘Bob and his Wailers,’ after Bob Marley.
TM: The Third Chimurenga came up with a wholly new cultural programme meant to celebrate Mugabe the supreme leader, first secretary of ZANU PF, commander of defence forces, chancellor of all universities through musical galas, political jingles, etc. What in your view is the relationship between culture and politics?
DM: Here we have a deliberate campaign to promote Zimbabwean culture: everyone is talking about it, building it, developing it. When politicians talk about culture, one had better pack one’s rucksack and run, because it means the beginning of unofficial censorship…. When culture is emphasised in such a nationalistic way that can lead to fascism. When in Nazi Germany culture started to be defined in a nationalistic way, it meant that all other people, all other nations were stupid; it meant intellectuals, painters, writers, lecturers, being persecuted or being assassinated. In this sense, all nationalism always frightens me, because it means the products of your own mind are now being segregated into official and unofficial categories, and that only the officially admired works must be seen. All the other work we must hide or tear up.
*All the responses are actual quotes from Dambudzo Marechera.
___ Book
Dambudzo Marechera Black Sunlight Penguin Classics
‘“I really tried to put terrorism into a historical perspective, neither applauding their acts nor condemning them. The photographer does not take sides; he just takes the press photographs.” In an unspecified setting the stream-of-consciousness narrative of this cult novel traces the fortunes of a group of anarchists in revolt against a military-fascist-capitalist opposition. The protagonist is photojournalist Chris, whose camera lens becomes the device through which the plot is cleverly unraveled. In Dambudzo Marechera’s second experimental novel, he parodies African nationalist and racial identifications as part of an argument that notions of an ‘essential African identity’ were often invoked to authorize a number of totalitarian regimes across Africa. Such irreverent, avant-garde literature was criticized upon publication in Zimbabwe in 1980, and Black Sunlight was banned on charges of ‘Euromodernism’ and as a challenge to the concept of nation-building in the newly independent country.’ — Penguin
______ Excerpt
*
p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Back to the real then. It seems to me that the post-inauguration hell is already raining down quite heavily. ** jay, Hi. Yeah, strange thing to say, but a lot of hetero guys’ thinking about and approach to women’s bodies is a foreign and very interesting thing to me too. Mm, I’m glad I didn’t sit through that play but it does sound very curious. I’m not a fan of that book, I guess I should say. You’re making that ‘Castlevania’ game sound very tasty indeed. I’ll at least go watch part of a YouTube play-through vid. We’re supposed to get a couple of added degrees today, but that certainly isn’t apparent this morning. How did you spend your more temperate hours du jour? ** _Black_Acrylic, I entirely agree with you, mister. ** Jack Skelley, I just hope the breakage is permanent. Yeah, I’m going to dig into your reading assignment today, I believe. The air still sucks? Wow. So sorry. Ours just has the mixed blessing of turning our breaths into little clouds and making our toes into things that could be dropped into a glass and drowned in whisky. ** PL, I know people who have the kind of relationship with their parents where they could ask them something like that, isn’t that bizarre? How was the double birthday? What did you get? Well, the work of yours I saw was terrific, so awesome if you think you’re even better now? Of course I’ll be curious to see. I drive but my drivers licence expired years ago, and I never renewed it, so I drive illegally when I do, only in LA. I love driving, been doing so since about age 13 like a lot of people who grow up in LA. I never worry. I’ve only been in two hardcore accidents in my whole life, and nobody ever got hurt even in them. My guess is that once you start driving it’ll get demystified, and you’ll do a duck-to-water taking to it. A guess. ** Steeqhen, Oops, mushed brain with a tight deadline, although I’m sure you foraged through. I like coke because it’s so nothing-ish. Or I did when I was drugging. It was like a chemical acquaintance as opposed to a friend. Hallucinogens rule, but you do need to make the time for them and be sure you’re not repressing all kind of fears and things that the hallucinogens will inevitably wrench to your surface. I’ve never had socials on my phone. I only use my phone for calls, texts, and photos/videos. That’s it. It makes life outdoors remarkably peaceful. ** James, And always in CAPS. EXPORT. Thanks as ever for being so attentive and meticulous. You’re the dream blog recipient. I put on socks and they were still cold. The US equivalent would probably be taco trucks or those mobile trucks serving made-on-truck food. At least in LA, that’s where people gather and hang and drink and carouse to the degree that LA people carouse. I guess the closest Paris equivalent would be crepe stands or shawarma stands. Russia paper in what sense? Not written in Russian, I’m assuming. Hoping your brain is still percolating. ** Lucas, Oh, pal, I’m so sorry you’re going through the double ringer. But at least your body’s cooperating. Well, Kathy reconciled herself with all the confessional stuff partly because she framed it as cooptation of found texts, and often it is found/re-contextualised, but it’s just kind of twisted into vehicles that she can exorcise through or something. Well, first thank you so much about my work helping you, and, obviously, I use fiction as my personal protector. Not that people don’t read my autobiography into my fiction, and I can say you’re being reductive, and it’s true, but the scary, weird stuff gets out. I think you know you can do that too and have been doing that already with power and impeccableness. I hope you slept well and rose feeling stronger. xoxo. ** Dan Carroll, Thanks, Dan. We would love to show the film Chicago, and hopefully we’ll find a way. Zac went to university in Chicago, so he’s very attached to the film having a presence there. Observing the fear and need to escape of the other people was part of the incentive of wanting to stick around at the TG show. It was quite an interesting spectacle. No, I never met EXPORT. That would have been a boon. I found that ‘Pussy King of the Pirates’ starts really well and excitingly then kind of runs out of gas at a certain point and just continues on expectedly. I think that’s a bit of a general issue with Kathy’s later novels, but they have their champions. ** HaRpEr, I guess that’s true about current performance art now that you mention it. I just put together an upcoming post about Downtown NYC performance art in the 80s, and I was re-excited by how wild the work was back then. I used to practically live at performance spaces in those times. I wonder if there is really challenging work still going on but that the venues that purport to present exciting new performance work are afraid to contextualise it. That’s certainly the case with a lot of other art forms. I’ve never understood the high rating and revering of Oasis. I don’t see or hear anything in them that warrants that. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that Alex James was supposed to interview me about ‘Guide’ when it came out for a big magazine, but then he freaked out about 30 minutes before the interview and cancelled. And then the Melody Maker and NME ran little news squibs about him being a chickenshit about the book, and I’m sure that only made him freak out about the book even more. ‘What would happen if you gave William Blake LSD’ sounds pretty enticing to me. Good luck getting the work done in time today. Maintain heavy self-belief, no doubt extraordinary warranted. ** Steve, Hi. No, your first volley didn’t register. I hope you worked things out with your dad. Freezing-ish here too, but supposedly on the rise today, we’ll see. I have the Louise Weard film cued up, and I just haven’t had the time to watch it yet. Your mention is incentive. Very curious about it. ** Tyler Ookami, No, your comment was a singularity. That is/was a visually lively looking mall. RIP. I haven’t personally been to The Spectacle, but of course I know it, and it showed Zac’s and my last film ‘Permanent Green Light’, so I’m obviously a fan. ‘We Don’t Care About Music Anyway’ sounds worth hunting out, but Japanese noise is interesting enough to me in general that I’ll take what I can get. Thanks for the reference. Yeah, when ‘Guide’ was published, it caused kind of a biggish kerfuffle in the UK because of the Blur stuff. To the point where, as I just said to HaRpEr, Alex James was assigned to interview me about my novel’s ‘sexual abuse’ of ‘him’, but, as I said, he bailed. Thanks a lot for the Conner O’Malley links. I’ll check those out. Great, thank you! ** Justin D, Hi. There seems to be at least the beginnings of a fight back starting up over there. It’s hard not to feel fatalistic about it all though. Sex Week, interesting. Thanks a lot, my friend. I’ll push Play once I’m in the post-p.s. clear. How is/was your day today? ** Callan, Hey, Callan! Export being an antithesis of Paglia is a really interesting way to think about them. Cool, thank you. I agree about Leigh. I started with ‘Naked’ too. I sometimes think about how strange and presumably disappointing it must be to David Thewlis to be given such an astonishing, god given role and opportunity as an actor at the start of his career and then to never be given a role that even remotely allows him to explore and max out his talent ever again. Let’s compare notes on ‘Hard Truths’ once it’s under our respective belts. I’ll look for an opportunity on my end. ** Okay. Today I’m re-instituting my blog’s spotlight on this amazing novel by Dambudzo Marechera, a novel bewilderingly under-known considering how exciting and great and ever relevant it is. It’s one of my favorite novels, so an examination of its spotlit being is highly recommended by me. See you tomorrow.
FLUNKER, six fictions, 124 pp., coming from Amphetamine Sulphate in July. US, July 4: Preorders open. UK/Europe, July 19: Preorders open. Cover by Michael Salerno.
* POSTPONED: May 27 – 31: Paris @ Théâtre du Châtelet: THIS IS HOW YOU WILL DISAPPEAR * POSTPONED: October (dates TBA): New York @ Brooklyn Academy of Music: CROWD
Dambudzo Marechera Black Sunlight
Now available in North America 
*