The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Category: Uncategorized (Page 18 of 1102)

Jean Rollin’s Day

—-

 

‘French director Jean Rollin had a career-long fixation on deeply sexual, hideously gory vampire films, suffused with delicate, dreamy poetry that claimed him a niche audience of committed fans. His pictures are an odd, uncommercial blend of pornography and Gothic horror, entrancing and addictive to the select few. A listing of Rollin’s film titles hints at the strange images on display in his movies–but it only hints. Within the films themselves, a bounty of exotic, sadistic perversities awaits: lovers are sealed in a coffin that drifts out to sea, a marriage ceremony weds a pair of vampires, a female vampire frantically slices open her arm and drinks her own blood, a coven of vampires chain women victims to the walls of a dungeon, a crew of pirates tortures the survivors of a shipwreck, upper-class women convene at a chateau for ritualistic blood drinking, and that’s just for starters.

‘The low-budget independent film industry in 1970s France was a sex industry. The liberalisation of censorship gradually opened up to hard-core porn, which soon dominated the slates of exploitation producers. Rollin, personally obsessed with his own visions of erotic vampires, cleaved an idiosyncratic path. He did his share of straight sex pictures, and often cast porn stars in his horror epics (since they were used to performing in the nude, whatever their thespian abilities), but he spent most of his producers’ money on deeply personal films with little regard for their commercial prospects.

‘From 1968’s Le Viol du vampire (Rape of the Vampire) onwards to the present day, Rollin has exercised what Tim Lucas calls “one of the purest imaginations ever consecrated to the horror genre.” Rollin improvised one picture in its entirety—Requiem pour un vampire (Requiem for a Vampire, 1972)—which was the only one of his films to get a US theatrical release, thanks to sexploitation master Harry Novak who distributed it as Caged Virgins. And Rollin’s Les Raisins de la Mort (Grapes of Death, 1978) was the first notable “gore” film made in France.

‘But of his oeuvre, Fascination (1979) arguably ranks as Rollin’s finest work. An excellent-and of course heavily sexual-psychological thriller, Fascination presents a group of rich socialites who indulge in the drinking of bull blood as a cure for anemia—only to develop an insatiable taboo thirst for the human stuff. They sate this thirst in elaborate ritual gatherings to which they “invite” male victims. Thoughtful, sensual and lushly photographed, Fascination is a unique production, and undoubtedly the most accomplished work ever made with a porn-star cast.

‘Rollin’s movies combine pulp imagery with the plot mechanics of serials. You’ll find American models combined with the classic French serial tradition of Louis Feuillade, as epitomized by Les Vampires and Fantomas. In contrast to his enticingly hyperactive subject matter, Rollin’s approaches storytelling with a cool, dispassionate eye. Whereas directors such as Jose Larraz (Vampyres) and Jess Franco (Succubus) indulged in intensely emotional subject matter and images, Rollin preferred languid, morbid contemplation. So while his subject matter involved comic book aesthetics, Rollin filtered his storytelling through a high art sensibility.

‘Inspired to be a director by a childhood screening of Abel Gance’s Capitaine Fracasse (1942), Rollin also cites Georges Franju’s Judex (1963) as a major influence; and by extension, a line of influence can be traced all the way back to Louis Feuillade himself. Rollin also took a great deal from his mentor, the surrealist Ado Kyrou. Admits Rollin, however, “You know, there isn’t really a French tradition of fantastic cinema. I don’t think it can be said that I am a representative of French fantastic culture per se.”‘ — collaged from various sources

 

____
Stills














































































 

______
Further

Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience
The Official Jean Rollin Website
Jean Rollin @ IMDb
The Films of Jean Rollin
The Jean Rollin Society @ Myspace
Jean Rollin page @ Facebook
‘Jean Rollin Sucks Retarded Turtle Dick’
Jean Rollin Memorial Page @ mubi
Jean Rollin DVDs @ Amazon

 

______
General


Documentary: Jean Rollin Cinéaste de nulle part 1


Trailer: Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin


Trailer: Très Outré: The Sinister Visions of Jean Rollin


Jean Rollin interviewed in 2006 (in French)

 

_______
Interview

from Kinoeye

 

Vampires burst from grandfather clocks, lovers are speared on the same stake—you are noted for your imagery, not your narratives—is this a fair comment?

The answer is this. The imagery in my films is certainly more important than the story itself. But the stories are done to provoke such images. In a certain way, the stories are “mad love” stories and the images are surrealist visions. The mixture of both makes my films.

You have been roundly condemned by critics for your excursions into pornographic/hardcore films—what is your response to such criticism?

I shoot X-[rated] films to have sufficient money to be able to live. I don’t like the films but to make them can be amusing. I remember that period with pleasure. I liked the people I was working with, it was always one- or two-day shoots, very funny, a good friendly atmosphere. But no interesting films, that’s all I can say.

What influence did the likes of Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel have on your career?

It’s the same kind. Buñuel shot visions like Trouille did paintings, or Magritte. We can take some images off the film, those images speak for themselves. They are independent of the story, they are the voice of Buñuel himself. So, in a film so banal in appearance like Susana (1950) or even Él (This Strange Passion, 1952), everything is shown by the vision of the artist. Personally, I am jealous of an extraordinary vision I saw in one of Buñuel’s last French films. I don’t remember which one but: a man closes a coffin, and some gold hairs from the dead girl inside are visible.

Such imagery leaves me full of exaltation. There are many such imags in Buñuel films. Franju is the author of the greatest film of the genre, Les Yeux sans visage (1959). Perfection of the script, of the actors, of the light, of everything. I was haunted during many, many years by the end, Edith Scob walking in the park with her face covered by the white mask, and the white birds and that music… I have tried to find that atmosphere of dream, poetry and madness in many of my films.

Same reflections about Judex (1963). It’s a serial, like a serial. For me, where the cinema is near the surrealist poetry, near the primitive mind of childhood, it is the serial. My remembrance as a child is of the serials I saw after school every Wednesday—Zorro Fighting Legion, Mysterious Docteur Satan, G-Men Versus the Black Dragon, etc. I think I personally have shot two serials: Le Viol du vampire and Les Trottoirs de Bangkok (Sidewalks of Bangkok, 1984). Here a critic said, “Rollin has done with Bangkok the same film as his first one, Le Viol, 25 years after.” And it’s true! Bangkok is a kind of “Fu-Manchu” and the film was improvised to a great degree like Le Viol. When I was shooting it, I was in the same mind that I was for Le Viol. I was 20 years old again!

Your first fantasy film Le Viol du vampire was considered daring for the time and was released during a turbulent period in French history—in what way did this film and the critical reaction to it shape your future career?

Le Viol was a terrible scandal here in Paris. People were really mad when they saw it. In Pigalle, they threw things at the screen. The principal reason was that nobody could understand the story. But there is a story, I swear it! Now, after such a long time, I think the principal reason is that the film was supposed to be a vampire story. The audience knew only Hammer’s vampires and my film disturbed their classical idea of what such a film had to be. And outside it was the revolution [1968], so people were able to exteriorise themselves. The scandal was a terrible surprise for me. I didn’t know that I had made such a “bizarre” picture.

For me, it was so simple! In all the country, throughout France, the film was a scandal. In my area, a little village, the priest said to his audience in church that they must not see the film on release at their local cinema… I was the devil. And even the fans of such films were disillusioned and the critics wrote horrors about me. A great newspaper, Le Figaro, wrote: “this film is certainly made by a group of drunk people, probably medical students. It’s a joke.” I thought that my career was finished. But many people came to see that scandalous film, and the producers asked me to do a second one. La Vampire nue was not so delirious.

 

____________________
16 of Jean Rollin’s 49 films

________________
The Rape of the Vampire (1968)
‘As potentially problematic titles go, The Rape of the Vampire (an accurate translation of the French original, Le viol du vampire), the debut feature from French genre director Jean Rollin, is something of a peach. Quite aside from its teasingly ambiguous nature – is the vampire in question the rapist or the victim of rape, or perhaps even both? – the use of the word ‘rape’ in the title of a fantasy horror film would absolutely be frowned upon today, and with good reason. We have, I would hope, come a long way since the “I like rape” gag in Blazing Saddles and the “Been out raping, lad?” exchange in Yellowbeard, and the sensitivity with which the subject is now rightly treated could potentially create its own problems for a film that is much more than this sensationalist sounding title might suggest.’ — Slarek


Trailer

Watch the film here

 

________________
The Nude Vampire (1970)
‘One night on a deserted street, Pierre (Olivier Martin of Rollin’s LA VIOL DU VAMPIRE) runs into a scantily clad mute young woman (Caroline Cartier) who is being pursued by men in tuxedos and bizarre animal masks who kidnap her and take her back to a townhouse that belongs to Pierre’s father, industrialist Georges Radamante (Maurice Lemaître) who warns Pierre to mind his own business. Pierre sneaks into the townhouse for one of his father’s parties and witnesses a woman playing Russian Roulette shoot herself and the mute young woman drinks her blood. Pierre delves deeper into the mystery and has to fight off his own father’s thugs while Georges and his associates squirrel the young woman off to an isolated country house. Pierre then meets the Grandmaster (Michel Delahaye) of a large group of bizarre looking and acting hippies – of whom the young woman is one of their number – who lay siege to the country house with his help to rescue the girl who it turns out has an unusual connection to Pierre.’ — dvdbeaver


Trailer


Excerpt


the entire film

 

___________________
Requiem for a Vampire (1971)
‘Jean Rollin has remarked that he wrote the script for Requiem for a Vampire in three days. He started with images- two clowns being chased, a woman playing a piano in a field, and the went from there. His approach to writing the script was similar to that of the surrealists in their methods of automatic writing; he just jumped from image to image without censoring his subconscious. Even while shooting, he refused to change anything from his original script, it had come out of his head that way so he insisted on keeping it that way. Somewhat surprisingly, it turned out fantastic (and not only in the fantastique way). The plot follows two beautiful young girls as they escape from something unknown, and fall into the clutches of a renegade group of individuals protecting the last vampire. There is little to no dialogue for the first hour of the film, another factor that Rollin was very proud of. It’s very fast paced, and never really drags, all the while remaining beautiful, mysterious, and a tad melancholic.’ — Esotika Erotica Psychotica


Trailer


Excerpt

 

____________
The Iron Rose (1973)
‘A bit of a departure from his previous films, Jean Rollin’s THE IRON ROSE has no vampires, zombies or lesbians. Instead its minimalist plot sounds more like the outline for an independent film from a young suburbanite, who has borrowed the family camcorder, grabbed a group of buddies and ran off to the local cemetery to shoot. Featuring two main actors, one set, little dialogue, bad poetry and a random clown, this film should not work. Yet somehow, through the lens of Mr. Rollin, it does. Eerie and thick with gothic atmosphere, THE IRON ROSE may be short on dialogue but it is long on mood. The film’s main set piece, a cemetery located near Amiens, France is a gothic dream of seemingly infinite rows of tombstones, crosses and cherub statues. From the first frame, the film is awash with an unnatural fog and overall damp feeling, making it very much a mood piece. Jean Rollin effectively captures the feeling of being secluded and unfamiliar of one’s surroundings; as graves and crypts seem to run on endlessly, with the entire facility overgrown with fallen decaying leaves and winding moss. The film’s score is used as modestly as the dialogue, but is more than effective at raising a hair or two.’ — dvddrive-in


Trailer


the entire film

 

_____________
The Demoniacs (1974)
‘On some unspecified shore, a band of four “wreckers” lure ships to the rocks and rob the empty carcasses once they wreck. The film begins with an introduction of the four main dramatis personae, the Captain (John Rico), his two henchmen Le Bosco and Paul, and the gorgeous Tina (Joëlle Cœur). The narrative misleadingly characterizes them setting up the stage for nonexistent conflicts. Very funny. One night, as they pillage the wreckage of the latest unfortunate ship, the four stumble across two survivors, Demoniac #1 (Lieva Lone) and Demoniac #2 (Patricia Hermenier). The wreckers quickly wreck them also, and ineptly try to murder them. There’s so much gratuitous nudity by Tina that one cannot concentrate on the supposedly wicked goings on. Rollin followers have already seen this film. For the indiscriminating fan, it may be a little too much, although the rampant full frontal nudity and the delicious Tina will certainly keep men and lesbians glued to their seats. There isn’t much to recommend otherwise. I happen to like Rollin, and this is one of his better films. You have been warned. Unrated. Fun for the whole family.’ — gotterdammerung.org


Trailer

 

_____________
Lips of Blood (1975)
‘Elegantly roaming from castle ruins to the streets of Paris, the wanton vampires in Jean Rollin’s bloodsucking classic are ethereal visions of eros.’ — MUBI


Trailer

 

_________________
The Grapes of Death (1978)
‘From the get go, it’s a bit of a leap to really call the zombies in The Grapes of Death zombies. If anything, they’re more reminiscent of the infected populace from George Romero’s The Crazies (only with the ability to recognize what they are doing and whatnot) and the pseudo-zombies from Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City. The film does hold a social conscience not unlike Romero’s work though, especially when it comes to ecological and environmental issues. The “dead” here are not the real villains. Sure, they kill, torture and maim with zeal, but the true villain in Grapes is mankind itself, in particular it’s ignorance and arrogance towards the environment. Apart from that, this has many of the hallmarks of that has made Rollin’s work so revered among horror fans and students of the genre. It’s got the Gothic atmosphere (the use of a very creepy blind girl, the countryside is used effectively as a place were death lives) and the sadistic violence (including nasty moments such as an impalement with a pitchfork and a nasty beheading), but it lacks in the erotic beauty of his other works. That’s just fine though, as it’s still one of his best works, as well as one of his more straightforward films.’ — Talk of Horrors


Trailer


Excerpt

 

_____________
Disco Sex (1978)
‘A disco band shows up at a studio to make a new album, but they are badly mobbed by a bunch of female groupies. A big orgy breaks out that postpones the recording session.’ — Letterboxd

Watch the film here

 

__________
Fascination (1979)
‘Jean Rollin’s 1979 opus, Fascination, is an interesting and bewitching take on the idea of craving blood that is coupled with the director’s superior visual style and erotic nature. It is an intriguing tale set in 1905 that begins with mesmerizing visuals that captivate and draw the viewer in, before the story unfolds. At the start, we are treated to the lovely sight of an antique phonograph set on a bridged pathway over a body of water where two women in white (Brigitte Lahaie and Franca Mai) are enjoying a ballroom style dance. Elsewhere on a different day in a bloody butcher house, high society women in fancy dress stand around and participate in the “latest fashion” of drinking ox blood as a therapy for anemia, which I felt to be an interesting take on vampirism, and also feels like a mockery of sorts for wine tasting clubs. The beautiful but grim sight of these ladies drinking blood from a wine glass standing in a pool of blood is a darkly poetic visual done in a way only Rollin could, and is an image that will stick with you forever.’ — At the Mansion of Madness


Excerpt


Excerpt

 

________________
Night of the Hunted (1980)
‘Despite working with a miniscule budget, Rollin captures some haunting images in this film. Never has Paris looked as desolate as in this movie. One of Rollin’s trademarks has always been his own fascination with architecture and, as a result, the cold skyscraper where Lahaie is held prisoner almost becomes a character itself. I’ve always considered Jean Rollin to be horror cinema’s equivalent to Jean-Luc Godard and, with its images of a sterile city run by passionless autocrats, Night of the Hunted brings to mind Godard’s Alphaville. The film’s most haunting image comes at the end and it is this image that brings tears to my eyes every time. Whatever flaws the film may have, Night of the Hunted has one of the best final shots in the history of cinema. Even if everything preceeding it had been worthless, this movie would be worth sitting through just for the stark beauty of the final shot. Night of the Hunted ends on a note that manages to be darkly sad and inspiringly romantic at the same time. It’s an ending that makes Night of the Hunted one of the most romantic films of all time.’ — Through the Shattered Lens


Trailer

Watch the film here

 

______________
Zombie Lake (1980)
‘Surely a film about Nazi zombies couldn’t fail in their grubby hands? Well Zombie Lake not only fails but fails like never before. In all my years of watching horror, I can’t recall a film which borders on the incompetent as much as Zombie Lake. Even the extremely gratuitous and frequent naked women are wasted in this appalling mess which comes off like some man’s perverted pet project.’ — Andrew Smith


Trailer


Excerpt

 

_________________
The Living Dead Girl (1982)
The Living Dead Girl leaves behind all of the signature trademarks director Jean Rollin has become known for. Besides the bright daytime settings common to many of his films, Rollin injects several surreal dreamlike qualities to his imagery and characters. He also mixes sex and violence in even measures, but while there is plenty of gore, it is offset by the beauty and innocence of the undead Catherine. Catherine is an extremely sad and tragic character that often reflects Shakespeare’s Ophelia through visual references and tone. She is by no means the typical cinematic zombie popularized by Romero or Fulci, nor is she in any way a reincarnation of the familiar Gothic vampires from the Universal or Hammer productions. She is quite plainly a girl brought back from the dead by no will of her own that only wishes to return to her grave after realizing that she must drink blood to survive. She has no purpose or meaning after being brought back, and she is forced to give into to her baser instincts. Catherine is assisted by her childhood friend, who seduces young women back to their secluded mansion in an attempt to save her deathly companion. This also drives the lesbian subtext common to many other Rollin films. Much of the dialog reads like poetry, with beautiful exchanges about life and death that make up for the lack of realism in rich romantic fantasy. Blanchard handles the role very well, with a dull, lifeless, and penetrating stare and angelic white robes that give her an ethereal appearance. LIVING DEAD GIRL is not your average undead Horror film by any means whatsoever, and while the slower pace and strange characters are sure to turn off many fans, it is these same unique elements that others will enjoy most.’ — Carl Mane


Excerpt

Watch the film here

 

______________________
The Sidewalks of Bangkok (1984)
‘Rollin combines kinky sex, Fu Manchu, cliffhanger adventure and sloppy martial-arts action in this pulp-inspired spies, sex and sadism thriller. Diminutive Asian actress Yoko stars as the innocent caught in the web of warring spies and a secret society of deadly female agents, suffering at their hands in every scene, like a kinky, soft-core Perils of Pauline dropped into an espionage drama. It was reportedly Rollin’s biggest hit, no doubt due to the long sequences of strippers and hookers strutting their stuff in meaningless detours from the limp plot.’ — parallax-view


Trailer


Excerpt

 

______________
Lost in New York (1989)
‘Nostalgic and lugubrious. Hazy 16mm dream of the city as liminal domain, two spirits dislocated in space-time, desperately pursuing a reconnection. Snapshots of childhood, stories left hanging on the vine to ossify and grow obscure; a network of riant feelings stratified in memory, petrified synapses, whose egress has sealed over forever, like an abandoned warren, mossed over, lost and invisible to the present, concealed by an expressionless mask. Les Yeux sans visage. Running through the dark labyrinth of skyscrapers, following the ribbon of azure, faint river of light overhead; the cemetery at twilight, and the beach we always return to, bloodless water beneath a nubilous sky, rolling inexorably over ancient groynes, sea-bound sentinels, lapping at the shore of mortality, slowly carving tide-lines in ligneous, aging flesh. Reconciled at last, we prepare for a final journey.’ — WraithApe


Trailer


the entire film

 

____________
Killing Car (1993)
‘Jean Rollin’s KILLING CAR, stars Tiki Tsang as “The Car Woman”, one of the most enigmatic, eerily seductive characters in any film. She’s ruthless, relentless, and lethal. The opening junkyard scene, involving attempted car theft and murder, is both absurd and astonishing. This leads to the fast, desperate chase through a carnival, where she engages in a running gun battle with prostitutes. The car secured, she continues her murderous rampage. It’s obvious that anyone who comes in contact with this woman is doomed.’ — Dethcharm


Trailer


the entire film

 

___________________
Two Orphan Vampires (1997)
‘Returning to the Vampire genre after taking a twelve-year absence from it – Fascination 1979 being the last one – there certainly are many things that Rollin could have done here to make Two Orphan Vampires feel like a rehash of vampire clichés. But instead he avoids them and actually takes a complete different path. Normal vampire lore and the rules associated with it are discarded in favour of other strenghts and weaknesses. Where the girls are completely unaffected by the crucifix – they actually start off by living in that catholic orphanage surrounded by nuns, and hide out there when the real world proves to fearsome – they can also wander in the otherwise deadly ultraviolet rays cast down by the sun. But they do have one trait that keeps them somewhat restraint, they cannot see in the sunlight, which has them blind at day and in search of blood at night. Two Orphan Vampires is a meditative, tender and delicate piece of film which firmly finds it’s place amongst Rollin’s canon, and is definitely worth checking out if you enjoy the older films of the great Jean Rollin.’ — CiNEZiLLA


Trailer


Excerpt
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dr. Kosten Koper, Hi! Very good to see you, sir. Yes, if Zac and I end up going to Walibi I’ll get word to you somehow. It would be swell to see you. Bon weekend. ** Dominik, Hi!!! If Carter does ever decide to make that film I’m going to have to insist we do a rewrite because it was long ago and I’m a whole lot better at script writing now to say the least. My ‘Bring Her Back’ review wil have to wait just a bit because today I have to watch or rather rewatch my assigned film (Pasolini’s ‘Teorama’) for my biweekly Zoom film/book club tomorrow. Love plucked a favorite sentence of mine there, of course, that mind reading dude. Love realising that the subject of vampires wasn’t as exhausted as I thought, G. ** jay, She’s really, really good. Not a bad dream you had there whatsoever. I don’t know enough about how AI works, but I am here wondering if AI would make it possible to visualise that dream of yours because I would absolutely watch it. I’m glad that a bruised brain lacks negative consequences. How did you know something was amiss enough with your head to get it checked up? When I was in high school I was known as the school’s arty writer/artist guy, and memory tells me that at the reunion most of the ex-schoolmates weren’t surprised that I went the route I did. If they had actually read my books, it surely would have been a different story. I don’t know ‘ANIMALIA’, but if Jamie recommended it, I’m certainly a fount of curiosity. Have a blast over the next two days somehow somewhere. xo, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you liked it. I was going to say, ‘You’re still reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’?, but then I remembered its density and bulk and realised, ‘Duh, of course you are.’ ** Montse, Tillman is always a highly worthy read. Oh, gosh, any good word you feel like putting in with the Mostra’ maestro’s hubby would be awesome. Thank you, pal. I just wish the festival wasn’t a year from now. Enjoy your weekend, my buddy. ** Carsten, Tillman is a pip. There’s no cold like desert cold. And I say that as someone who slept one night in a tent on the surface of Antarctica. The nights when we were shooting outdoor scenes for our film until 5 am were borderline murder. I’ll look into those festivals you mentioned on this very day. Thanks. Fingers crossed. Weird that France, German’s next door neighbor, has what sounds like a polar opposite health care system. Europe is so strange. ** Steve, Great, then I’m happy for the upcoming visit. New single! Everyone, Steve has dropped a new double sided single provocatively titled ‘The Cage’/’How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?’ that you can hear and/or score at bandcamp aka here. I just ended up buying a few Robert Pollard things I didn’t have yesterday. People keep saying ‘The Naked Gun’ is really funny. I guess I’ll have to try it. In my mind, Liam Neeson is no Leslie Nielsen, but … ** Steeqhen, Why does Pride happen at so many different times? That’s a rhetorical question. Seems odd. Not that all Prides happening at once would make any difference. Granted I live in Paris, but €10 seems like chickenfeed. Have a swell weekend. ** HaRpEr //, That sounds really nerve-wracking. For me money worries are the scariest thing possible. I’ve never had a proper job, and I always survived by scrambling for journalism gigs or having to beg my parents for a loan that they knew I would never pay back, and it was almost constant stress, but I was able to do what I wanted to do with my writing, and I wouldn’t revise those years if I could. I don’t hate ‘Sally Can’t Dance’, but, at the time, it’s what followed up ‘Berlin’, and you can probably imagine what it was like to rush out to buy the new Lou Reed album on the heels of ‘Berlin’ and hear ‘SCD’ come out of the speakers. ** horatio, Hi. Well, keep in mind that just because the profiles are real doesn’t mean they’re non-fiction. I think most of them are just guys fantasising in public. Thanks for linking me to ‘Tastes like Pork’. Great! I’ll hit it this weekend. I was going to say tell Connie hi for me, but I see that just below your comment I can do that in person. And you have a splendiferous weekend. ** Hugo, When I’ve been in Brussels I’ve found the underlying battle between the French and Dutch speakers interesting. When we performed one of the Gisele Vienne pieces there years ago, we used Dutch subtitles, and there was an actual boycott of the shows by angry French speakers. Efteling is my favorite amusement park in the world. Will do if we end up going to Walibi. That’s still up in the air. Sorry about your friend’s cat. Most of the dogs my family had when I was growing up got hit and killed by cars. Ugh. Peace to you too. Nice. ** Connie, Hi, Connie. Nice to meet you. Oh, with the slave and escort profiles, I do switch around the names, locations, and photos, yes, as a way of protecting their identities. But the photos all come from those contexts, not elsewhere. The fact, or the presumed fact, is that quite a number of the guys use fake photos in their profiles, so, if the photos originated on Instagram, for instance, it’s one of the slaves or escorts who swiped them from there. Your vj work sounds interesting. Is that work viewable? Thanks for coming in here. ** julian, Um, probably. Sometimes it takes a while to realise it was wrong, right? To me, yes, they’re more objectively pleasant to look at. Asses are more charismatic than genitals, I think. They provide more space to dream. I’m a big Robert Wilson fan, and I didn’t know he did something with Gaga. But of course he did. ** Bill, Hi. Yeah, his work back in the 70s and 80s was absolutely mind blowing. So true about the posters’ superiority. True as well with the films <-> posters of the blog’s weekend star. ** Right. I’m asking you guys to spend your local time this weekend with the films of France’s oddball, vampire-inclined horror (and something other) director Mr. Jean Rollin. See you on Monday.

Spotlight on … Lynne Tillman Some Day This Will Be Funny (2010)

—-

 

‘A man who lived in New York City couldn’t stand it any more. So he moved to Montana. His closest neighbor was ten miles away. The first month was great — he didn’t see anyone. It was quiet. After three months he started to get restless. After six months he was so bored, he thought about moving back to the city. A neighbor called. He invited him to a party. The neighbor said, get ready for a lot of drinking, fighting, and fucking. Great, the man said. Who’ll be there? You and me, the neighbor said.’ — Lynne Tillman

‘There may be imperceptible conflicts, actions, events – I think, thinking is an activity. An emotion may produce an action, be an action, or be a re-action. In some form the writer addresses some kind of event. In some way there is a problem, an event, an action, a thought, an issue, an emotion, to be resolved or left unresolved; there’s a problem to be solved, or incapable of solution, a problem engaged or contemplated. There’s a kind of adjudicating, whatever the writer does.’ — Lynne Tillman

‘“I cannot make love to Jews anymore,” or so said Nico, breaking off her brief engagement with insouciant wanna-be androgyne Lou Reed. Endings this pithy and crude come never to the protagonists of Lynne Tillman’s new book Someday This Will Be Funny. For their sakes, you might wish they did. In twenty-one concentrated vignettes—one of which features telling lyrics from the aforementioned Reed—Tillman captures lovers and soul-searchers at their intimate moments, as they battle their inner-demons. Tillman’s subjects range far and wide, from fictional to fictionalized: a young tennis star, a sociology professor, the son of a wealthy financier, the German artist Peter Dreher, Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, Lynne Tillman herself and John Lennon. Despite this large and eclectic cast, Someday This Will Be Funny, feels less like an ensemble piece and more like an in-depth character study.’ — Andrew Zornoza, Bomb

‘You never quite realize what Lynne Tillman’s done until it’s too late. She takes formal adventures in flavors of novels that had never before welcomed them. She carefully embeds details deep in her texts that others would dutifully (and dully) trot out up front. She crafts what feels like one distinctive, coherent fictional reality without explicitly connecting any of her long-form stories to one another. Published over two decades, her five novels so far build and explore what I call the “Tillmanverse” through the eyes and ears of worldly, culturally keen women (and one man), shapen or misshapen by their undeniable compulsions, obscure fixations, and grimly complex senses of humor.’ — Colin Marshall

 

______
Further

 

_____
Media


Rachel Shapiro Alderman reads Lynne Tillman


‘The Original Impulse’ by Lynne Tillman: An Electric Literature Single Sentence Animation


Excerpt: ‘Love Rose’, w/ parapsychologist Hereward Carrington voiced by Lynne Tillman

 

_______
Interview
from The Millions

You said that you would like to write like Peter Dreher paints. In Dreher’s ongoing project Tag Um Tag Ist Guter Tag (Day by Day Days Are Good), which he began in 1972, Dreher has painted the same empty water glass more than three thousand times. I am wondering what draws you to his approach, considering that in many ways you take an opposite approach to writing, where your style, subject, and narrative structure change with each book.

Lynne Tillman: I try to shake myself up, and I believe I want to keep moving and changing. But I’m pretty sure I want to avoid self-exposure also. It’s the antithesis of what Dreher does with the glass, which is why I’m so drawn to it. Thinking about the same subject again and again, approaching it slightly differently each time, I see that as peaceful and directed. Still, I’m running mentally, and want to do something I haven’t done. But you’re right, there’s something in my work that stays the same – me.

In your essay “Doing Laps Without a Pool,” you argue that the terms to categorize “experimental” writing have “lost their explanatory power.” You go on to declare that “Unquestioned adherence to any dictates … to any MFA workshop credos, or their antitheses, for a novel, story, poem, essay, will generate competent, often unexciting work, whether called mainstream, conventional, progressive, or experimental; the products will have been influenced by or derived from, almost invariably and without exception, “established” or earlier work, their predecessors.” What is your take on the state of contemporary fiction?

LT: There’s always new material around – brain-directed prosthetic hands; artificially prolonged life; YouTube, etc. Are there new narratives shaped by technology, by changed wants and needs? Entirely new emotions and motives for behavior? How does our consciousness change? That’s what I’m watching for. Transgendering: I’m not sure what will come of this, except what seems obvious already. Tools affect behavior, but basic needs for power, sex, food, and the fear of others? Of extinction and death? American English is changing in part because of non-native-born English or bilingual writers. Assimilation’s not the goal anymore, and language is dramatically affected. Sadly, I’m monolingual.

Do you think that the proliferation of creative writing programs has encouraged or increased the generation of “competent, unexciting work”? If so, how should one attempt to create something new?

LT: I don’t blame MFA programs, though I’d like to. But that ignores the world outside MFA programs, and what it’s doing to our minds and ability to conceptualize. If you carry the argument forward, all education destroys young minds, which is what some think anyway. Nothing was better for me than having a few great teachers. There’s probably more writing, and more of the same, but what’s being written is not caused by writing programs. That means students have no agency whatsoever. A writer makes choices; that’s what writing is. If you carry your teacher’s water, that’s a choice. From my POV, a writer’s work is in part resisting moribund ideas, language, complacencies of all kinds. I don’t believe in, First thought, best thought. That was Ginsberg, yes? To be hyperbolic, I might suggest that some of today’s “best literary writers” damage writing more than any MFA program. I won’t go Page Six with this.

I am intrigued by your statement, from which you take the essay’s title: “Writing now is like doing laps without a pool.” I was wondering if you could explain that image. It made me think of Miranda July’s story, “The Swim Team,” where the narrator gives swimming lessons in her apartment because there is no pool in the town where she lives. Her students lie on her floor and place their faces in bowls of water while they practice their strokes. It’s almost as if they’ve adapted swimming to their circumstances, and the purpose becomes the experience, their personal achievements, as well as the community they form. Do you think that writers currently lack a body of readers and/or a general literary culture that keeps writers afloat, or writing with purpose?

LT: Her story reminds me of surrealist Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue. People plan an imaginary expedition to an imaginary mountain. He never finished the novel; he died in the middle of a sentence. There’s no body of readers ready and waiting, ever. Hollywood spends millions for those people and produces stupendous failures. Readership is a fluid state. Right now, many of us are thinking anyone who reads is an ideal reader. A general literary culture? Fence, Bomb, Tin House, The Believer, n+1, literary websites like this one, blogs like Dennis Cooper’s, there are many, many thousands of subcultures and scenes where writing is staged. There’s no dominant aesthetic, dogma, theory, or critic determining good, bad, mediocre, right, wrong. I like that. Who trusts anyone enough anyway? But what does determine how one writes? That’s a question writers answer by and with their writing. I’m very curious about why we do what we do, and the forms we use. Writing’s boundaries are mostly artificial, like those of nation states – modernity started with nationalism and nation states. We all have our limits; they could be the limits that need to be pushed in writing. Whatever Kafka wrote about writing, he kept going. Publishing is different from writing; for Kafka, they were distinct. But along with the collapse of the private and public spheres, there’s been a collapse of that distinction, which maybe has more to do with how we write than anything else.

 

____
Book

Lynne Tillman Some Day This Will Be Funny
Red Lemonade

‘The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators—by turn infamous and nameless—shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention—stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.’ — Red Lemonade

‘Tillman’s gorgeous and potent latest finds the innovative author embracing diverse, imaginative forms in these often brief but always intriguing tales…With subjects ranging from birds to Marvin Gaye to an ex-lover who has earned Tillman’s wrath, these missives partake in an elegant, efficient use of language to challenge concepts of love, history, memory, and language. Tillman’s compact narratives shine and stand up to multiple readings.’ — Publishers Weekly

 

______
Excerpt

A Simple Idea

This happened a long time ago. My best friend was in Los Angeles, and she and I talked on the phone a lot. I urged her to move to New York, and finally she did. She drove cross-country, and when she arrived, she was told she didn’t have to worry about the $10,000 in California parking tickets she had on her car. There was no reciprocity between the two states, she was told, so there was no way her car’s outlaw status would be discovered in New York. The guy who told her said he was a cop. They met in a bar, then they had sex. Anyway, I think they did.

My friend started accumulating NYC tickets. Blithely, for a while. She shoved the tickets into the glove compartment. I suppose people kept gloves in those compartments at one time. When there was no room left, she threw them on the floor of her car. Then she decided she’d better find a parking lot. But she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for a space.

One day she noticed a parking lot near her house which was barred from entry by a heavy chain and lock. A week later she noticed a man walking to the lot. He used a key to unlock the gate. She got up her nerve and asked him if she could park there if she gave him some money. Would he make her a key? He said he’d think about it. The next day he telephoned her and said OK. So every month my friend handed the man $50 in a white business envelope. It was illegal, but she wasn’t getting tickets from the City and throwing them on the floor of her car.

She was relatively happy parking in the lot, relieved anyway, because there was one less thing to worry about. But after a while she thought some of the other drivers-men going to work in the building attached to the lot-were looking at her weirdly, staring at her and her car. Some seemed menacing, she told me. But then she was paranoid. She knew diat, so she decided not to act on her suspicions.

Time passed. Time always passes.

One afternoon my friend received a call from a man who iden- tified himself as a cop. He said. Hello, and used her first name. Sandra, and asked her sternly:

-Are you parking illegally, Sandra, because if you are, and you don’t remove your car from the lot right now-I’m giving you ten minutes-I’ll have to arrest you.

My friend hung up, threw on her coat, ran out the door to the lot, and drove her car far away. Then she phoned me and told me what happened. She was terrified. She thought the cop might show up and arrest her at any moment, she thought shed be taken to jail.

-That was no cop. I said.

-How do you know? she asked.

-A cop wouldn’t phone you and give you a warning, I answered. But I was worried that I might be wrong, and that she might be arrested.

-And he’s not going to say he’s going to give you a second chance, because you don’t get second chances if you’re doing something illegal and they find out, unless they’re corrupt, and he wouldn’t say, I’m a cop. He’d give his name and rank or something.

My friend listened, annoyed that I was calm, and she wasn’t satisfied or convinced. She thought she might be under surveillance and would be busted later. She owed thousands of dollars in tickets in two states. It might be a sting operation, something convoluted. I had to convince her she was not in danger of going to jail. I told her I had an idea and hung up.
It was simple. I’d call a precinct and ask the desk cop how a cop would identify himself over the phone. I’d learn the protocol, how cops wouldn’t do what that so-called cop had done, allay my friend’s fears, and also show her I was taking her anxiety seriously.

I looked up precincts in the telephone book and chose one in die West Village, where I thought they’d be used to handling unusual questions.

-Tenth precinct, Sergeant Molloy, the desk cop said.

-Hi, I have a question, I said.

-Yeah.

-How do police identify themselves over the phone?

-What do you mean? Molloy asked.

-If a cop calls you, what does he say?

-What do you mean, what does he say?

-I mean, how does he say he’s a policeman? What’s the official way to do it? The desk cop was silent for a few seconds.

-A cop called you. What’d he say? What’d he want?

-He didn’t call me, he called a friend.

-What did he say to your friend?

I couldn’t hang up, because I wouldn’t get the information I wanted. If I hung up, Molloy could have the call traced. I’d be in trouble for making harassing calls to precincts, which would be extremely ironic.

-He said to her . . . he said, Hello, I’m the police.

-Yeah. Then what?

-And then, then he said . . .

I didn’t want to tell him the story, give my friend’s real name, tell him about her tickets in two states, and her car being parked illegally, and her bribing the guy in the corporate lot. But I had to give him some sense of the situation in order to get the information I needed.

-He said to her, Hi, Diana. Hi, I’m the police. Then he said, he said, Diana . . . Diana . . . have you done anything wrong lately?
There was a very long silence.

-Have you done anything wrong lately? Molloy repeated.

It was weird coming from a cop’s mouth. He gathered his thoughts, while I remained breathlessly quiet.

-A police officer wouldn’t say that, Molloy answered soberly. A police officer wouldn’t say that.

-He wouldn’t, I repeated, just as gravely.

The cop thought again, for a longer time.

-Listen, I want you to let me know if he ever calls your friend again. Because a cop shouldn’t do that . . . He trailed off.

-That guy’s impersonating an officer.

-Oh, yeah. I’m sure he won’t . . . he probably won’t call her again. But if he does, I’ll phone you immediately, I promise.

-You do that, Molloy said.

-I will. Thanks, I said.

-Yeah, he said. Maybe Molloy didn’t believe any of this, but he did the whole thing straight.

I called my friend, and we stayed on the phone for hours, laughing about how crazy I was to say “Have you done anything wrong lately?” to a cop, with all its implications, and we laughed about her racing out of her house to the corporate lot, jumping into her car and driving off in search of a legal parking space as if she were being chased by the devil.

Maybe the devil was chasing her and me. Because we laughed off and on for about a year more, and then we had less to laugh about, and then nothing to laugh about. I don’t know, we grew to distrust each other, and stopped being friends. Maybe Molloy laughed later.
—-

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Robert Wilson. ‘Einstein on the Beach’ and ‘The Civil WarS: a tree is best measured when it’s down’ and other of his works changed my brain forever. ** scunnard, Ha, yes. In my ‘defense’, I went there on assignment from Spin Magazine when I was writing a big article about rave and its antecedents. So far so good with your authorities. ** _Black_Acrylic, It seems we snuck through. Two weeks until the next test. Thanks for the fill-in about Fred West. How curious. ** Carsten, Having spent two months in the desert shooting our film, I have lost much of my romanticism about that context, but it’s a singular landscape for sure. I like the implications behind the term soulful, and I’ve been known to use it myself, but, like most or all adjectives, I think it speaks to imagination of its user rather than its target. Not in Barcelona but in Sitges, which is a brief little train trip from there. I don’t know, I’ll see if I can track down a film festival in Andalusia. There are film festivals motherfucking everywhere these days. Until recently, I didn’t have heath insurance, but since I was in France surreptitiously, that didn’t matter. To get my current residency visa, I had to buy French health insurance, but it isn’t bad, roughly 300 euros a year. If my residency visa is renewed, I’ll get the wonderful free health insurance like all French people. ** Dominik, Hi!!! There must be a way. Uh, Carter’s and my project was originally going to be a pornographic web series, five episodes I think, set in Mexico with young characters getting up to all kinds of shenanigans. But then Carter decided to turn it into a feature film, and it seemed to be going well, but then that film ‘Shortbus’ came out and wasn’t a success, and the willingness to finance our similarly sexually explicit film dried up. It was called ‘Warm’. Carter still says maybe someday, but I think it’s a dead duck. ‘Bring Her Back’ got moved to possibly tonight if I’m not otherwise preoccupied. If Anita knows it, what did she think? A love who is into intox of a fag (alcohol/ pills/ Keta/ meth /poppers/ etc) is of absolute importance to me, G. ** jay, I’m pleased they pleased you. They would be so pleased. Um, your brain seems perfectly okay to me, or at least the part that can construct sentences and type, thank god. Yeah, I went to one high school reunion a billion years ago, and I talked to all kinds of former schoolmates who had seemed to so upwardly mobile at the time, and I thought, ‘oh, boy, am I glad I’m artist’. My day wasn’t terribly exciting, but it was kind of a relief, which is maybe the second best outcome? So it’s your turn to have a relieving day. Was it? ** Amphibiouspeter, Hey there! Thank you, I will listen to your demos, great! I’m happy your art is flying out of you. Take really good care. ** horatio, Hi. I don’t write those posts. They’re all found texts, actual real profiles that I just edit and sometimes refine a bit. Your friend’s film sounds super interesting. Please point me at it when it becomes public to some degree or other. I’ll see if I can find any traces of ‘Tastes Like Pork’ by Dante Dammit, Huh, thanks. The blog seems to have flown under the UK’s radar, knock on wood. You have a day like the sparkle in a jewel. ** julian, Thanks, yeah, the slaves and their adherents rarely disappoint. As someone probably well known for talking about asses in poetic terms, I have no idea why. But, hey, why not? If the shoe fits … My AI art friend is a total lefty. My impression is that Midjourney is kind of the hippie AI venue. But yes, in general, yes. ** Steve, We had one of those thunderstorms this morning, but it’s over now. Good about your cousin and spouse visiting. I mean presumably good. It is good, right? I’m semi-curious to see if ‘Taxi Zum Klo’ doesn’t seem as wildly overrated now as it did in its heyday. But, wait, I’ll read your review and find out. Everyone, For Gay City News, Steve reviewed Frank Ripploh’s 1980 film TAXI ZUM KLO, which will be re-released today. Here. Ugh about the Kalil Haddad Vimeo takedown. Zac and I use Vimeo, and they have started getting kind of weirdly controlling recently. ** HaRpEr //, Hey! Yes, all systems are still go. I guess one could respond by using that old chestnut ‘That’s the pot calling the kettle black’. But I don’t know your dad. He sounds pretty miserable from all you’ve reported. Long story short, dismiss his explosion of misdirected self-hatred aka fuck him. Easier said than … ‘Berlin’ is great, for sure. For me it and ‘Street Hassle’ are his solo bests, kind of by far. ** Hugo, Hi. Oh, I mean my writing is kind idiosyncratic always, but, with scripts, I’m also aware that the script’s first task is to seduce grant givers or whoever into ponying up with funds, so I have to be a little straightforward. Whatever anger I had towards the Dutch when I wrote ‘Frisk’, which wasn’t so much about ‘the Dutch’ as about my difficulties living there, was pretty digested, I think. But it’s true that writing can have a kind of stomach acid-like value. If that take on what you’re working on makes you want to work even harder, that’s all you can ask for. All opinions are highly subjective, which I assume I don’t need to tell you. We might go to Walibi. Efteling for sure, and Walibi’s a maybe depending on time. If we do, I’ll try to remember to give you our coordinates. The blog is still alive! ** Okay. I thought I would focus the blog on a fine book by the great Lynne Tillman that doesn’t seem to get talked about so very much. See you tomorrow.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 DC's

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑