‘Su Friedrich’s films achieve a unique synthesis of formal structures and human experience that solidifies her position as one of the most important contemporary experimental filmmakers in America. Her body of work articulates a complex feminist and lesbian analysis of social and cultural discourses, rituals, institutions, and power structures. Friedrich’s films probe these concerns through intimate perspectives of emotional experience: dreams (Gently Down the Stream [1981]), sexuality and religion (Damned If You Don’t [1987]), marriage (First Comes Love [1991]), break-ups (Rules of the Road [1993]), adolescence (Hide and Seek [1996]), relationships to parents and family (The Ties That Bind [1984] and Sink or Swim [1990]), and, in her most recent work, health and illness (The Odds of Recovery [2002]).
‘From her beginnings in the American feminist movement of the late 1970s, Friedrich has articulated the slogan “the personal is political” with innovative language and narrative forms. Intense and specific personal experiences sound out striking resonances with larger social, political, and sexual structures. As Friedrich puts it, “You get to something universal by being very specific […] I think you have to start at home.” But while the emotional textures of Friedrich’s work are personal, they are also highly mediated, influenced by the modernist legacy of the “structural” filmmakers of the 1970s. Her work is innovative and accessible—and beautiful (she is renowned for her expertise in black and white cinematography and optical printing).
‘Friedrich’s ability to synthesize the stylistic and conceptual legacy of avant-garde film practice with an analytical sense of human experience makes her exemplary of the evolution of American experimental film practice from the 1980s to the present. In this era film artists freed themselves from the often doctrinaire politics of 1970s avant-garde film practice to pursue new directions of both formal and social invention.
‘Friedrich’s films, as a whole, centralize images of women’s bodies and unreservedly exhibits the aesthetic seductiveness of female flesh and movement. Close-ups of body parts, even as they offer fragmented glimpses of women, are associated with moving bodies engaged in dancing, clapping, rowing, playing cards or swimming, to name but a few examples. The effects of this aesthetic treatment of women’s bodies is not to “[turn] the represented figure…into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous,” but simply to appreciate the beauty and strength of these women and their movements. Friedrich discusses her commitment to the creation of cinematic pleasure in her interview with Scott MacDonald: “There was a period when I thought it was important to deny myself everything, including all kinds of film pleasure, in order to be politically correct and save the world, but I think if you do that, you deplete yourself and then have nothing to offer the rest of the world.”
‘A valuable element of Friedrich’s “reappropriation of pleasure … for women” derives from her reappropriation of mainstream productions that seemingly deny the existence of lesbian desire. One interview subject in Hide and Seek talks about how she was able to ‘play’ with conventional media images as a child in order to make the scenarios conform to her own same-sex fantasies. While they watched the television show “The Monkees”, the woman played out the scene with her girlfriend. They pretended that one of them was Davy Jones and the other was a woman he was kissing. The two girls would then enact romantic encounters by packing suitcases and imagining that they were going to a hotel together, and then cuddling, naked, on the bed. By overlaying the dialogue with images from the television show, the film simultaneously emphasizes the tremendous power of media depictions of heterosexuality and attests to the even greater flexibility of human imagination.
‘Repeatedly in her films, Friedrich’s ability to balance affective and intellectual responses dramatizes the decidedly mixed reactions that marginalized spectators can have to productions that are at once appealing and alienating. Friedrich reveals, not only how political structures have the potential to oppress, but how they can be, however provisionally, overcome. Friedrich is not content to offer conclusive or facile answers. She balances mitigating circumstances, conflicted intentions, and self-reflexive hypotheses to open up the diverse and multifaceted possibilities of interpretation and growth. The agency with which it is possible to redirect one’s life is not depicted by Friedrich as capable of overcoming all obstacles; rather, small accomplishments that lead along a path of emancipation are recognized and celebrated. She does not pretend that it is not a painful process, but she encourages the indulgence of pleasures—including cinematic pleasures—that bolster and sustain well-being.’ — Senses of Cinema
___
Stills
____
Further
The Su Friedrich Homepage
Su Friedrich @ IMDb
The Films of Su Friedrich Collection
Su Friedrich @ Experimental Cinema
Su Friedrich @ Facebook
Su Friedrich on Gut Renovation
Su Friedrich @ MUBI
Su Friedrich: Reappropriations
SU FRIEDRICH: “RE:WORKING” EXHIBITION
Senses of Cinema’s Su Friedrich profile
Reinventing Lesbian Youth in Su Friedrich’s Cinematic Autoqueerography Hide and Seek
An Analysis of Found Footage Strategies in Su Friedrich’s The Ties that Bind
Fred Camper on ‘Sink or Swim’
A Conversation with Su Friedrich
Video: An Evening with Su Friedrich
“Making it through”: sickness and health in Su Friedrich’s The Odds of Recovery
IT’S ALRIGHT, WILLIAMSBURG (I’M ONLY BLEEDING): SU FRIEDRICH with Cynthia Lugo
Su Friedrich by Claudia Steinberg @ BOMB
The Hot Seat: Su Friedrich
____
Extra
Su Freidrich talks with Jim Fouratt
_____
Interview
KATY MARTIN: What first attracted you to film?
SU FRIEDRICH: When I was in fourth grade, I bought my first photo camera, a Brownie, at the local drugstore; I still remember how excited I was when I got it, and I still have it. I then studied black and white photography in college (they didn’t offer any film classes) and realized how serious my interest was in working with images, but at that time I had no idea about being a filmmaker—that seemed far too big and remote. After college, I moved to New York, which gave me the chance to be exposed to great film culture. I started seeing work by filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margareta vonTrotta, Chantal Akerman, Luis Bunuel and Akira Kurosawa, and this gave me a deep interest in the possibilities for telling stories through film.
I started getting frustrated with photography but I still couldn’t imagine that I could make movies; I still only knew about “big movies.” Also, back then, there were very few women filmmakers, so that made it seem even more remote. On the other hand, it was the time when women were really fighting to make and show work, so I feel lucky that I started out then instead of ten or more years earlier.
One day a friend asked me to go with her to a super-8 filmmaking class at the Millennium Film Workshop, in the East Village. I went and, as they say, I never looked back. It was clear to me after that first evening that it was what I needed and wanted to do. Within a short time I sold my darkroom equipment and started shooting film. The Millennium also put me in contact with the experimental film community, which I hadn’t been aware of, and I started seeing films that were very different from the “big movies.” These were films I could imagine making myself. It gave me a lot of energy and courage to see that individuals, with very little money, were making films all by themselves.
KM: Let’s talk about Sink or Swim (1990), one of your best known works. It’s a film about your father, and some of your memories are highly charged. Can you talk about the use of explicit, personal material in your art?
SF: At the time, I had already made a few other films that used personal material, including The Ties That Bind (1984) about my mother living in Germany during World War Two. So it was a direction I was already going in, and I think there are several reasons for that.
The first would be that I had a difficult time growing up. I had a mother who had been very traumatized by the war and then by her move to a new country; I had a father who was remote when he was living with us and who then left us, who left my mother to raise three children without any support; and I went to Catholic school and very soon realized that I had strong disagreements with the beliefs and practices of the church. So there were many issues I wanted to address when I finally started thinking about telling stories/telling history.
The other big reason is the influence of the Women’s Movement, which opened up a huge and complicated discussion about how we were formed by society, what the damage was from that influence, and how we could change that to something better.
And last of all, I felt that I would be most honest, or would be most challenged, if I made myself look at the experiences that were closest to me. I love to read fiction, and I admire people who can turn life into a story, but I don’t think that’s something I know how to do, so I decided that I should try instead to speak more directly about my own life and the lives of people I knew.
It’s a tricky thing to work with personal material because one has to try very hard to get some distance from something one is very, very close to. Each time I’ve made a film like that, I’ve depended a great deal on the perspective of friends. I ask them many times to read the texts, watch the edit, and tell me when I’m not being honest or correct or when I’m just being stupid and sentimental. The films would be very different, and I think very bad, if I didn’t always have the criticism and advice of these viewers.
KM: Can you talk about how the film is organized, and the simple device of using the letters of the alphabet as chapter titles?
SF: It was extremely difficult to write the text. I started in the first person (“I was” and “my father”) but then understood that I couldn’t continue, it was too emotional for me, so I changed it to the third person (“the girl” and “her father”). That gave me some mental distance, because I could imagine some other girl, not myself. But I also needed to create a framework, so that I could generate more stories. The fear of speaking was strong, and I was having a hard time continuing to write. Since my father was a linguist, and language was the cornerstone of his work, I decided to use the alphabet as a structural device. This of course meant that I had to generate 26 stories, which was more than I had imagined doing, but at least it gave me an end point, a finite sum of work.
KM: How do you use the process of writing in your approach to making films?
SF: Writing has often played a major role in my films, and maybe most markedly in Sink or Swim. With the exception of Hide and Seek (1996), which included a more or less conventional fiction script that I co-wrote with Cathy Quinlan, my films have usually depended on texts I write or find, so I don’t think of myself as a screenwriter. Also, since I do all my own cinematography (again with the exception of Hide and Seek, which was shot by Jim Denault), I tend to be thinking already about shooting, or be in the process of shooting, while I’m writing or finding texts.
I say that writing was most marked in Sink or Swim because it was the first time I had written such a lengthy text for a film, and it was such a hard one to write, and I see that the film depends very heavily on the text. The images are expressive up to a point, but the film really wouldn’t make much sense if it didn’t have the voiceover.
The only other film that I wrote so much text for is Rules of the Road (1993). In most of the others I worked more with a collage approach, mixing things I’d written with interviews, found texts, etc. In recent years, with video, I’ve also been talking more directly, using the camera to record unwritten/extemporaneous speech.
KM: You reference diary, memoir, and letter writing in Sink or Swim. There is even a story of you writing something in your diary that your mother actually erased. Can you talk about art and saying what can’t be said?
SF: There are many ways and reasons to make art, and I can only talk about what I do and what I believe in doing. This means, very importantly, that I don’t think other approaches or reasons are lesser or wrong; they’re only different. I don’t think it’s better (or worse) to speak explicitly and directly about one’s personal life, it just happens to be what I do. So in my case, I would say that it was necessary for me to use art as a way to say what “shouldn’t” be said.
When I started making Sink or Swim, I looked for literature about children’s experiences during divorce. I found almost nothing, so I felt I should tell that story and should speak for, and from, the position of the child. I also found very little about “The Father”—or at least very little that saw fathers from a critical perspective. What I was doing seemed quite taboo (at the time) and I felt strongly that it was something I had to address. In a similar fashion, I started making The Ties That Bind because I felt that the story of the ordinary, non-Nazi (and non-Jewish) German hadn’t been told and I wanted to tell that story.
I think making art like this can be very useful—not just for the person who makes it and thereby has a chance to put their private thoughts and feelings into the public arena, but also for the viewer who might have had a similar experience and can finally see and hear their story being told.
KM: The stories you tell about your father are horrifying. That could not have been easy. How did come to make this film, and how did you find your way?
SF: It’s very hard to say, because I think there were so many factors at play. I started making Sink or Swim in 1988, when I was 34. I had started therapy a couple of years before that. The decision to go into therapy wasn’t easy, but at least by the time I started making Sink or Swim, I was beginning to understand what you had to do in order to unravel certain issues from your childhood. So I had a few skills, and I had somehow accepted that I had to do this, but I was still very early in the process. A critical moment came when I read the book, The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. The one thing I took from it was the idea that children don’t have a voice, that their stories aren’t told, or aren’t believed or respected when they’re told. When she articulated that as clearly as she did, I recognized the truth of it from my own experience. All my life I’ve been full or rage and unhappiness about how my father behaved in our family, and I never felt that my experience was being heard.
KM: Politically the notion of invisibility and voice is very strong. In the Women’s Movement, it’s huge—if we’re invisible, we have no voice.
SF: You know, I credit Alice Miller’s book, but as I said before, I also very much credit the Women’s Movement, in a broader way, for making me able to think that it was not only necessary but important to articulate those things. Because that’s what women had been saying for years. I started making this film long after the modern women’s movement got going, so there were years and years of women saying, I will now talk about my abusive husband, I will now talk about my experience being raped—all that— and not feel that I’m the one in the wrong. Otherwise, that’s the way they keep people silent. Once you say, no, that’s not the way I should be treated, things start to change.
KM: And I’m a witness to that.
SF: Yes, that’s crucial to me.
KM: Which comes back to the desire to witness. How does that relate to making art?
SF: There is a big difference between, let’s say, going to therapy or talking to friends, and making art. There are connections, but it’s not the same. If I’m sitting at a therapist’s or talking with friends about my father, I may be ranting and raving, I may even be crying. But if I’m sitting in a room, editing or writing, there has to be a lot of control at work. I can rant and rave on a piece of paper, but by the time it’s in a film, it has been reworked so many times that it has become a very controlled thing. I think that’s a really important distinction to make.
A lot of times people watching films about personal issues see them as a form of therapy (for the filmmaker). It may start out as therapeutic, but it doesn’t end up as a therapeutic experience because there’s so much craft involved. In making Sink or Swim, there was so much rewriting, so much re-editing. Worrying about how to cut together two shots has nothing to do with my father—it’s about composition and rhythm! And then there’s the problem of how somebody delivers their lines. I recorded many, many takes of Jessica Lynn, the girl who did the voiceover, and I had to decide which ones to use. So when she says, “When he held my head under the bathwater”—well, that may be a traumatic phrase, and when I wrote it, it may have made me throw myself on the bed and start crying, but when I was editing, I was just concerned about whether she read it articulately or whether it hit the right frame. It’s an odd thing to start out making something that’s so emotionally devastating, and then find yourself, a year and a half later, in the editing room, worrying about things like the frame.
______________
17 of Su Friedrich’s 21 films
______________
Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979)
‘Building on proverbs, metaphor, and the principles of a radical feminist imagination, Su Friedrich creates a world in which women’s private rituals become public spectacles. Filmed in super-8 on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, Cool Hands, Warm Heart works through questions of danger, attraction, violence, and ultimately the transformative power of bonding between women. Friedrich is able to draw on her training in avant-garde cinema as well as her background as a street photographer. In this work, she combines the two sets of concerns into an unusually original vision, re-imagining public space as a sort of Cool World inhabited by women of daring.’ — B. Ruby Rich
Excerpt
_______________
Gently Down the Stream (1981)
‘…her films (particularly the celebrated Gently Down the Stream) signalled an important change that was occurring with the evolution of experimental cinema….The film demonstrates Friedrich’s considerable technical talents and formal creativity as well as her canny historical sense in reappropriating the formal strategies generally associated with the “structural film.” Friedrich’s film becomes a public exorcism, one that continually exposes and infects the viewer with the psychic consequences of religious constraints, familial binds and sexual conflicts.’ — Bruce Jenkins, MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL
Excerpt
________________
But No One (1982)
‘In making this film, I wanted to investigate a formal device that I had started using in Gently Down the Stream: presenting dreams as text through the form of scratched words which have to be read rather than recreating the “look” of the dream through images. In the previous film, I used fourteen dreams. In But No One, I concentrated on a single dream, and one that disturbed me because of its seeming amorality and passivity. The text is presented with the same “scratched word” technique used in the previous film, but is handled in a more playful, surprising manner. The blunt, vernacular images, which were shot on the streets of the Lower East Side, are set in contrast to the strange images conjured by the text.’ — SF
Excerpt
_______________
The Ties That Bind (1984)
‘The film is an original: a moving and courageous tribute from a child to a mother’s beleaguered memory.’ — David Edelstein, THE VILLAGE VOICE
Excerpt
________________
Damned If You Don’t (1987)
‘Damned If You Don’t is a real prize. Beautifully shot in black and white, it blends conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voicovers to create an intimate study of sexual expression and repression. It begins with footage from a stylish old potboiler about an isolated convent, whose tale of passions leashed and unleashed provides the leitmotif for a young lesbian who watches it and the lonely nun she pursues and seduces.’ — Andrew Rasanen
Excerpt
Excerpt
the entirety
_______________
Sink or Swim (1990)
‘I regard it as one of the most intellectually lucid, aesthetically accessible, and emotionally moving avant-garde films produced in the past twenty-five years.’ — David Sterrit
Excerpt
Excerpt
_______________
First Comes Love (1991)
‘Throughout, Friedrich keeps a gracious distance, building a critique that doesn’t patronize the very real, very naked emotion she captures. A virtuoso of clarity, Friedrich recasts the personal as political, makes the public curiously intimate. In her hands, a slow pan to a discarded box of Carolina Rice is both poignant and absurd, a fit coda to a ceremony of privilege that’s at once desired and denied.’ — Manohla Dargis, THE VILLAGE VOICE
Excerpt
_______________
Rules of the Road (1993)
‘Rules of the Road tells the story of a love affair and its demise through one of the objects shared by the couple: an old beige station wagon with fake wood paneling. A typical American family car for an atypical American family, it provides the women at first with all the familiar comforts. But when their relationship ends, the car becomes the property of one and the bane of the other’s existence. Even long after their separation, this tangible reminder of their life together—and thousands of its imitators—continues to prowl the streets of the city, haunting the woman who no longer holds the keys either to the car or the other woman’s heart.’ — SF
Excerpt
______________
Hide and Seek (1996)
‘Hide and Seek is A Girl’s Own Story for lesbians. Friedrich has woven a rich and provocative tapestry that assaults complacent assumptions about pubescent desire and lesbian identity, all the while raising important questions about the representation of racial and sexual fantasy life. [The film is] thoroughly engaging from beginning to end.’ — Yvonne Rainer
Excerpt
______________
The Odds of Recovery (2002)
‘What could have been a health-care screed becomes a middle-aged meditation on mortality. ‘You frighten yourself with that fear of not being totally in control,’ says her therapist. ‘What would happen if you gave that up?’ One answer is Odds itself, which settles down into its own engagingly crafted, smoothly mellow rhythm.’ — Ed Halter, THE VILLAGE VOICE
Excerpt
_______________
The Head of a Pin (2004)
‘“The Head of a Pin” reveals the awkward ruminations of the filmmaker and her friends as they attempt to learn about nature. Starting out as an examination of the differences between urban and rural life, the film turns unexpectedly into a wry portrait of what happens when city dwellers encounter a country spider.’ — Talking Pictures
the entirety
______________
Seeing Red (2005)
‘Seeing Red is as personal as many of Friedrich’s best autobiographical films and videos, but here the diary takes on a more worldly view, informed by the wisdom of age. Su Friedrich is an angry young woman, only she’s not so young. That is part of the reason she is seeing red. Friedrich asks what it means to be an artist in a debased world, a world in which things are perpetually unfinished and incomplete, and the house is always messy. She hides herself in and behind the details of everyday life, most of which are surprisingly red. Bach, Whitman and Dickenson provide a backdrop for her desire to transcend the mundane, which she does, simply by finding the beauty of small things in the world around her. Friedrich’s sense of humour meets her existential dilemma with passion and intimacy. Don’t let her flippant tone deceive you; this is a major work.’ — Catherine Russell
Trailer
_______________
Practice Makes Perfect (2012)
‘The film is primarily a portrait of Kam Kelly, who teaches West African drumming to students at various New York schools, including Intermediate School 292 in Brooklyn. One of his students, Jessica Jackson, is featured. The piece was commissioned for the “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2012.’ — SF
the entirety
_______________
Gut Renovation (2012)
‘A documentary of small changes evolves into an historical record of New York. The resulting film is a melancholy, essayistic requiem for a neighborhood and an entire way of life; it also provides a case study of the rapid gentrification of our cities. In 1989, together with a group of female friends, Su Friedrich rented and renovated an old loft in Williamsburg, an unassuming working-class district of Brooklyn. In 2005 this former industrial zone was designated a residential area and the factories, manufacturers and artists’ lofts were priced out by property speculators lured by tax breaks. Friedrich spent five years documenting with her camera the changes in the area between East River and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. She shows the demolition of industrial buildings and the construction of trendy new apartments for wealthy clients, watching old tenants leave and new inhabitants arrive. As she keeps meticulous record of developments, the extent and speed of the upheaval becomes clear. Her own tenancy agreement expires too and so her documentary images and trenchant commentary become the tools of her growing anger.’ — Outcast Films
Trailer
Excerpt
______________
Queen Takes Pawn (2013)
‘A journey through an old house by way of a mirror, a child’s storybook, and some images from days gone by. Or a journey through some old images by way of a house. Or both.’ — SF
the entirety
_______________
I Cannot Tell You How I Feel (2016)
‘I can tell you how I feel about I Can’t Tell You How I Feel: it is aesthetically unpretentious, ethically adult, and carefully crafted — and precisely as long as it should be. Its candidness about dealing with aging relatives is an engaging antidote to the usual myths, cartoons, and melodramas about aging so common in movies and on television. As participant director and narrator (in both voice-over and visual text), Friedrich is by turns wryly good-humored, self-involved and self-aware, pained, frustrated, and compassionate. For those who remember The Ties That Bind (1984), Friedrich’s breakthrough film about her mother growing up as an anti-Nazi German in the 1930s and 1940s, watching the feisty Lore Friedrich deal with moving to the strange new world of assisted living has particular poignancy.’ — Scott MacDonald
Trailer
Excerpt
Excerpt
_____________
Today (2022)
‘A country vacation. A city cookout. The loss of a loved one. The spread of a pandemic. The brightness of flowers, both real and fake. Choice morsels of documentary footage from the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, are augmented with filmmaker Su Friedrich’s wry observations and witty on-screen text in this casual, engrossing portrait of daily life.’ — Icarus Films
Trailer
*
p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi, jay. Happy you found a couple of soulmates in there. Well, ‘soul’ is probably going too far. I hope you had a solid Halloween and are non-experiencing post-Halloween depression. xo. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, J. You going to the parade today? Thanks for sending your pal to the screening. She/they wrote me a nice note. xoxo, me. ** Charalampos, I wonder too. I have the new GbV but have not heard it yet. Today. Happy week! ** Dominik, Hi!!! The screening went really well, thanks. Urgh, long story short, we didn’t get to see the haunted park because we accidentally bought tickets for the wrong night and the bastards wouldn’t let us in. Mr. Timberlake is clearly back on the sauce. I think you’re right about the ghost. I didn’t buy it, but maybe it’s on sale now. Wise love, as ever. There’s a mirror on love’s ceiling that teaches him the geography of desire, G. ** politekid, Well, happy day or two after Halloween to you! Your Halloween was so rich that I almost feel like I had one thanks to the power of your words. I didn’t even get a spooky park, but there were some inebriated Parisians in costumes stumbling about on my street which is a first! How are you otherwise, buddy? ** Justin D, Hi, Justin! What did you give the trick or treaters? Are they still alive? No, definitely not true about RT being released digitally then. It probably won’t be released in that form for a quite a while. Still just screenings for the next bit. I tried to do something on Halloween and got foiled, so I didn’t do squat. It’s fine though. I’ll be fine. I hope your chaos either lessens or fills you with a sense of high purposefulness. ** Carsten, Hi. Got Duende. It is huge, but let’s go for it, what the hell. It’ll launch this Satuday, and I’ll get back to you if I have any technical issues setting it up. It looks straightforward though. Thank you! Happy about your Halloween liveliness. Only kind of slightly lively here. Everyone, Here’s Carsten: ‘In case anyone here needs another reason to love Oregon, the latest issue of Cathexis Northwest Press just came out, featuring my poem “Dreamkeeping” (on page 18 to be exact): here.’ ** _Black_Acrylic, Sounds like it was high time, yes. I’m patting your back too! ** Laura, Wow, I hope you’re to keep your club-like pad for a while. Slaves: The texts are real, the photos are real, the names and etc. are real, but, in the real world, they’re matched up very differently. I wish they could read your lovely paragraph, not that I’m sure they didn’t. It’s tomorrow now so, … haha. ** Mitya Mayak, Hi there. Everyone, Here’s a message from Mitya Mayak: ‘Maybe just looking for people who still feel something real. The kind of ones who wear their sadness like denim, smoke too much, walk alone, and still dream. Some of you — like lostonthisshit or heythereitsme — have that strange fire I recognize. If any of you ever feel the same, you can find me on Telegram @Andmpa. ** Steve, Can you imagine? Ghent is very pretty. The screening was great. Everyone was very cool. I think there were some Halloween-related parties and club events here. There were some Halloween-y escape rooms that I presume were heavily attended. I saw people on the streets in costume for the first time ever. That was pretty much it for Paris + Halloween. New episode! Everyone, Here’s Steve. Listen up and click and spend some quality time at the end of the click. ‘My latest “Radio Not Radio” episode is out. This one features Pupil Slicer, Evoken, Sadness, Tzevaot, Atheist, Miss Grit, Black Eyes, Circuit des Yeux, Essential Logic, Maraudeur, Geese, Paranoid Style, Crass, Monaleo, TiaCorine, Sudan Archives, NMIXX, Zuchu, Michelle Ullestad, Ruth Mascelli & Mary Hanson Scott, Dexter in the Newsagent, Cici Arthur, Kali Uchis, Jazzz & Eye Traveler, D’Angelo and Rafael Toral.’ ** Bill, I thought so too. If there was any Halloween in Ghent, all signs of it had been scrubbed by the time we got there. It was very pleasant, all those canals and everything. ** Darby🦇🦇, Hi. As I told Dominik, we fucked up on the tickets so we didn’t get to do the spooky park, and it’s being disassembled now, wah. It was probably interesting, I imagine. I’ll look for videos. So great about Boris! Awesome! Uh, generally people send me guest-post stuff and I just put it together on my end, so I don’t know. Send me the thing, and we can figure it out if there are any problems. Thanks! I don’t think I’ve lit incense since my ‘hippie’ days in my teens. Candle lighting … I think I lit candles on our Buche de Noel last year, I’m pretty sure. I assume you’ve been lighting up a storm? I always just buy the cheapo Bic lighters. The big ones. I’ll watch ‘Trick or Treat’ (1969) in a bit and try to pretend it’s three days ago. Thank you! ** HaRpEr //, Ghent was really good and nice, yeah, it was great. My Halloween was blah. Yours sounds good. Haha, re: your praise riposte. Guy Fawkes night is fireworks and lots of alcohol drinking? I’ve never experienced one. ** Nicholas., Tight is might. That party does sound like a keeper (thanks to you) even to me who hates parties, but then I’ve never been to party where you were present. I never eat breakfast unless I have to go out early. Although I did partake of the free breakfast the hotel where I was staying Ghent and had scrambled eggs, bread rolls, waffles, and, uh, oh potatoes. And coffee. And grapefruit juice. November dawned in a positive fashion, but the month its still an infant. ** Right. Today please investigate the films of the excellent filmmaker Su Friedrich if you don’t mind. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
