Category: Uncategorized (Page 214 of 1086)

* (Halloween countdown post #6/restored)

 

‘As a filmmaker, Herschell Gordon Lewis was a businessman above all else, and his 12-year movie career was spent either chasing or creating trends. But the one trend that he is directly responsible for — the splatter film, where Grand Guignol theater is translated to the screen for the sole purpose of allowing the viewer to ogle the dripping viscera of the human body — has endured, inspiring an entire new genre of film and breaking down the barriers of what is allowable in onscreen violence. All of Lewis’ artistic choices were made for strictly mercenary reasons, and retaining a competitive edge over Hollywood was prime consideration. In simply showing more onscreen than other filmmakers would dare, Lewis inadvertently created a monster that still stomps messily among us and influenced American culture (popular and otherwise) forever.

‘His film career began one day when he was complaining to an associate at his ad agency that the only way to make real money in the business was to shoot features. When the man asked why he just didn’t make one, Lewis realized he didn’t have an answer, and the seeds for The Prime Time were sown. Lewis produced but did not direct this inaugural project, a mildly sleazy melange of juvenile delinquency and beatnik jive, and his experiences with the film encouraged him to take the reins of further productions. He was dismayed by what he considered to be unnecessary wasting of time and resources while the picture was made, and he was determined to trim every financial corner in hopes of larger profits. He debuted as a director with Living Venus, notable primarily for introducing Harvey Korman in his first feature film role.

‘Around this time he went into partnership with David F. Friedman, an ex-carny and road show man who had the background and instincts to help exploit Lewis’ films to their utmost potential. They wasted no time in jumping into the nudie film business, producing low-budget product for display at striptease clubs. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre cost only 7,500 dollars to make and was a hit, a silly burlesque-style rip-off of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas. The pair then turned to nudist colony films, one of the few ways that filmmakers could legitimately show skin in those stringent times. Their films were successful enough, but both Lewis and Friedman were hungry for something that could separate them from the rest of the pack. While watching a gangster film one night on television, Lewis noticed that a character’s bullet-riddled body barely bled, and a brainstorming session with Friedman led to a whole new genre of film.

‘While blood had been shown onscreen before in other non-Hollywood productions, no one had devised a film that would focus directly on the carnage, with scene after scene of graphic, stomach-churning mayhem as the sole point of the show. The gimmick was something that might give the filmmakers an edge over their competition. After wrapping up their nudist colony epic Bell, Bare and Beautiful, the two were inspired by the Egyptian facade of the hotel they were staying at and developed a script on the spot about a sinister caterer who collects body parts for use at a feast designed to raise an ancient Egyptian goddess from the dead. Blood Feast was completed in two days and was a hit in 1963, filling drive-ins and outraging decent citizens. Lewis and Friedman had found their cash cow and were determined to milk it.

‘They would continue down the exploitation path with 2000 Maniacs, Color Me Blood Red, Alley Tramp, Monster a Go-Go!, Sin, Suffer and Repent, and Moonshine Mountain, and even tried his hand at two children’s films: Jimmy, the Boy Wonder and The Magic Land of Mother Goose. Lewis explored a number of exploitation subjects in the latter half of the 1960s, usually following proven trends in an effort to strike while the iron was hot. She-Devils on Wheels arrived early in the popular surge of motorcycle action dramas, while Blast Off Girls was a belated attempt to exploit rock & roll. Suburban Roulette was an uncharacteristically tame story of wife swapping, and Something Weird’s plot included LSD use along with witchcraft and extra sensory perception.

‘While Lewis may have been playing the field, he hadn’t given up on the gore genre completely. The bizarre horror comedy The Gruesome Twosome arrived in 1967, as did his lengthy vampire epic A Taste of Blood. But his final two horror features helped cement his legacy as the creator of gore films with an enthusiastic exclamation point. 1970’s The Wizard of Gore is a surrealistic, confounding tale of a mysterious magician who uses sleight of hand and mind control to physically tear his victims limb from limb. Even more grotesque, though, was The Gore Gore Girls (1972), a jaw-droppingly tasteless nudie-horror-comedy that found Lewis outdoing every outrage he had ever perpetrated on the audience. While the effects remained as cheap as ever, the audacious brutality and mutilations (set against corny humor and an inappropriately jolly musical score) earned The Gore Gore Girls the first X rating given solely for violence.

‘The film turned out to be the voluntary end of Lewis’ movie career. He had kept his advertising agency throughout his filmmaking years and it was flourishing, as was his expertise with copywriting. Finding it harder to outdo his fellow exploiteers as well as the more liberal Hollywood features of the time, he gave up the grind and went on to a very successful career in direct mail marketing and copywriting; indeed, the instructional tomes he’s produced on the subjects are considered essential reading for many professionals. Lewis ended up losing the rights to his films after putting them up as collateral for a car rental business venture that failed. He didn’t mourn, thinking that they weren’t worth much, but when home video exploded in the 1980s, Blood Feast found a whole new bloodthirsty audience, and as the years have progressed, Lewis’ films are more popular than ever. After years of musing over returning to the slasher genre he created, Lewis finally began production for Blood Feast 2 in 2001.

‘Herschell Gordon Lewis has never regarded himself as a great filmmaker, and it isn’t false modesty on his part that prevents him from making such a claim. His interest in a motion picture career was predicated solely on making money, something that he has always cheerfully admitted. Whether or not he succeeded to the extent that he desired is only for him to decide, but one thing is for certain, his work opened up avenues for a legion of hucksters and con artists to make millions off the cruel desires and tasteless urges of audiences.’ — Fred Beldin

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Herschell Gordon Lewis Official Site
HGL @ IMDb
‘The Cinema of Herschell Gordon Lewis’
‘Why the Godfather of Gore came to Calgary to make his latest film
Download HGL’s films @ Something Weird
Review: ‘The Eye Popping Sounds of Herschel Gordon Lewis’
‘Herschell Gordon Lewis Returns with Anthology “BloodMania”‘
‘Splatter auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis: “I’m no artist”‘
‘Herschell Gordon Lewis and the Corpse Reviver Shot’
‘Scum of the Earth – 7 Herschell Gordon Lewis Films’
‘Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore’ @ Slant
‘Well, life is full of surprises. For all of us.’
‘Herschell Gordon Lewis may not be one of the two greatest filmmakers of all time’
‘Gore Pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis Gets His Due’
‘Dream – Herschell Gordon Lewis’ @ Arte
‘Herschell Gordon Lewis: Exploitation with a goblet of gore’
‘Master Of More Than Gore’
‘Bad Biology and Herschell Gordon Lewis’

 

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Extras

Trailer: ‘Herschell Gordon Lewis: The Godfather of Gore’

THE LOST FILMS OF HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS

The Eye Popping Sounds of Herschell Gordon Lewis

Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Holiday Marketing Tip

 

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Interview
from Bright Lights Film Journal

 

Your background in academics was quite different from that of your partner David Friedman. Was this difference an advantage in that it allowed for two widely differing viewpoints, as far as how to market or sell a film?
The disparity of backgrounds was a heavy asset. I brought a sophisticated knowledge of advertising and communications; Dave Friedman brought a carnival barker knowledge of how to motivate people. The combination worked, and we learned from each other.

Did you ever think when you were making the now classic Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs that future filmmakers, not only those in the exploitation market, would cite your films as being influential?
I hadn’t anticipated being a footnote to motion picture history. I did realize we were producing a film of a type no one had produced before. The question was: Would any theatre play it?

Was there a particular film or even a particular scene in one of your films that really outraged the public and incurred the wrath of decency groups?
The infamous tongue scene in Blood Feast was the watershed gore scene.

Did it surprise you or does it surprise you when certain films, novels, or artworks come under fire from decency groups for containing what they consider to be extreme violence?
Decency groups don’t bother me as long as they proselytize their own followers. When they try strong-arm tactics in the mainstream, I’m very much opposed.

What did you think of the gore films of the mid-1970s and 1980s that came after Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs?
Most of the follow-up films were formulaic. I don’t sense a great deal of difference among the various Halloweens and Amityvilles and Screams, although certainly their effects far transcend any I was able to include.

Was the dialogue in your films improvised or was there always a complete script that you adhered to?
After Blood Feast the films were scripted. This was self-protection to assure minimal film wastage.

When looking back to your films, are you ever surprised that you were ale to get so much from relatively small budgets?
I’m not at all surprised that I could get so much from a small budget. My rules were absolute: 1. Don’t shoot a rehearsal. 2. Make do. 3. Don’t quit for the day until you’ve shot every scheduled scene.

Did the small budgets inspire you to become more creative in the setting up of scenes, camerawork, special effects, etc.?
Yes, small budgets were the driver, forcing us to substitute imagination for dollar expenditure.

Does it surprise you when serious, or if you want to use the word “highbrow,” film journals such as Cahiers du Cinema discuss or profile your career and your films?
I once was nonplussed that serious publications took my work seriously. I no longer am, because I see the profound effect our early films had on film production.

Do you see filmmaking as an artform, as something to be taken seriously?
I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an artform and spends money based on that immature philosophy.

Do you think that all works of art must contain exploitation elements?
Art is in the eye of the beholder. It isn’t necessary for all art to include exploitation materials, but certainly it’s necessary to include devices that seize and control attention from the target-group the artist is trying to reach.

How do you think the independent film market has changed since the days when you were an independent? Has it changed for the better?
The independent film market no longer exists. The industry is an Arabian bazaar, with nonaffiliated producers clamoring for attention along with the major studios. The successful independent invariably sells his/her product to a major company or direct to cable.

Just For the Hell of It (1968) is considered to be one of the most disturbing and violent juvenile delinquent films ever made, two years before Clockwork Orange was released. Were comparisons ever made between the two, and what did you think of A Clockwork Orange?
I never have drawn a parallel between Just For the Hell of It and A Clockwork Orange. Many feel A Clockwork Orange is pompous and obscure; I don’t…and I love Beethoven’s music.

A number of your films contain the theme or subject of psychic phenomena as well as witchcraft and magic or what you might term occult subjects. Are these subjects that are of interest to you?
I’m mildly interested in psychic phenomena but am no fanatic. I’d be delighted if some sort of proof ever came to light.

Who are some of your favorite directors? And what are some of your favorite films?
I admire the Coen Brothers and like just about every film they’ve made.

In films like Color Me Blood Red (1965) and even The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (1961), you poke fun at the pretensions of art and the world of art. Are you suspicious of the intentions of filmmakers who try to package exploitation as art?
I think I’ve answered that question. Yes, I’m suspicious of filmmakers who regard themselves as artists and auteurs.

How did you respond to critics who viewed your films as bizarre, either in content or style?
I don’t regard having a film called “bizarre” as an insult. If a critic offers that comment, I’d thank him for it.

 

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16 of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 38 films

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Blood Feast (1963)
‘Groundbreaking in so many evil ways, Blood Feast is the simple tale of an insane Miami resident who kills women in putrid manners, in hopes of resurrecting an Egyptian goddess. Yes, it’s a load of narrative malarkey, yet Lewis’ one-note flick is charmingly despicable. It took some major balls to make a gross-out of this kind back in ’63, and Blood Feast doesn’t shy away from its vileness; the film’s most memorable (for all the wrong reasons) image is that of the antagonist pulling a hot blonde’s tongue right out of her throat. It’s a moment akin to the moon landing for gore-hounds.’ — Complex

Trailer

the entire film

 

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Scum of the Earth (1963)
‘The film truly belongs to Lawrence Wood, who plays Mr. Lang with such an insane joy that it’s impossible not to root for the sleazy old pornographer. Whether he’s giggling as a toy monkey somersaults across his desk or he’s politely explaining why nothing is actually his fault, Wood appears to be having such a good time that it’s just infectious. Wood’s best moment comes when Kim expresses some reluctance about modeling for more pictures and suddenly, Mr. Lang starts to shout at her about how she (and all the other kids) are hypocrites. “You’re damaged merchandise and this is a fire sale!” he shouts as sweat streams down his face and Lewis zooms in for a close up of his mouth, “You’ll do what I tell ya!” Wood screams, “Do you hear!?” It’s a scene of lunatic genius that, in the best tradition of both Herschell Gordon Lewis and the grindhouse in general, comes out of nowhere and is all the more effective because of it.’ — unobtainium13.com

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)
‘While Two Thousand Maniacs! may not be as rudely in-your-face as Blood Feast, it is a much more accomplished and effective picture, one which still has the power to make first-time viewers squirm uncomfortably in their seats. Essentially a macabre version of Brigadoon, Two Thousand Maniacs! sees the southern residents of Pleasant Valley seeking vengeance for Civil War atrocities by capturing two carloads of northerners and subjecting them to a variety of ingenious and stomach-turning tortures. Among the grisly highlights are a blonde sexpot (SHELBY LIVINGSTON) having her thumb sliced off by a muscle-bound hayseed, after which the demented townsfolk treat her wound by chopping off her entire arm! While her arm is being served up as barbecue(!), her husband JEROME EDEN is liquored up with moonshine, then drawn and quartered by four horses which gallop off in different directions.’ — Something Weird

Trailer

the entire film

 

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Monster a-Go Go (1965)
‘Director Herschell Gordon Lewis needed another movie to round out a double-feature with Moonshine Mountain. So he bought Bill (The Giant Spider Invasion) Rebane’s unfinished Terror at Halfday, added a couple of extra scenes, some new dialogue, some narration, and voila – Monster A Go-Go was born. The plot, such as it is, is that an astronaut has gone missing after crash-landing in suburban Illinois. At the same time, a monster that looks suspiciously like the lost spaceman (and is highly radioactive) has been terrorizing teenagers and scaring the pants off of the locals. Scientists work to study the monster, but he escapes into the Chicago sewers, only to disappear suddenly.’ — tvtropes.org

Excerpt

the entire film

 

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Color Me Blood Red (1965)
‘Though Color Me Blood Red is the least discussed of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s unofficial “Blood Trilogy” (which also includes Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs), it’s probably my favourite. It’s lighter on gore, but there’s hardly any boring filler, its concept is great (a mad artist using blood for paint), and it’s hysterical (sometimes intentionally, other times unintentionally). Best of all is its lead actor. Gordon Oas-Heim gives an outrageous performance as loony painter Adam Sorg. He shouts his way through the film with Zach Galifianakis-esque outbursts, bugged out eyes, and a sweaty forehead. He’s a wonderful thing to watch.’ — Dave Jackson

Trailer

the entire film

 

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Something Weird (1967)
‘Between the Blood Trilogy and 1970’s The Wizard of Gore, director Herschell Gordon Lewis explored a wide variety of themes outside the hard-gore arena while continuing to court viewers with the sensational and the exploitable. One of his most unusual offerings of this period was this category-defying tale from 1967. It would be too easy to simply suggest that Something Weird lives up to its title. What’s truly remarkable is that this exploration of psychic phenomena, criminology, drug therapy, and the supernatural actually manages to remain coherent throughout its running time! The concept began as a script by producer James F. Hurley, who later complained that director Lewis had compromised his serious vision. (Interestingly, Hurley’s original intent was reflected in his own subsequent film The Psychic in 1968, which utilized Lewis as cameraman. Viewing this film, one can see immediately why Lewis felt the story needed some “juicing up.”)’ — images journal.com

Trailer

 

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A Taste of Blood (1967)
‘Herschell Gordon Lewis is one of my favourite directors and this was a huge let down for me. The master of gore became the master of bore in this retelling of Dracula. The pacing of this film is incredibly slow. There are many continuity errors including a chase scene where at one moment it’s midday and then suddenly it’s night and back to midday…and back to night. I thought I missed something at first and went back but no. Each scene is drawn out. A lot. I had to hold myself back from skipping through scenes. It could have easily been 40 minutes shorter. I will give him credit for trying something different from what he normally does. I think that’s important in any craft…sometimes it doesn’t work out. Skip it if you’re not a fan of HGL though.’ — Nikola Night

Trailer

the entire film

 

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The Gruesome Twosome (1967)
‘This 1967 Herschell Gordon Lewis feature has the unique distinction of having one of the most bizarre openings in low-budget horror cinema history. After editing, the film was short in length. As filler, Lewis added two wig blocks with construction paper faces talking to each other during the opening. One of the wig blocks is stabbed as blood gushes out everywhere. Even after inserting this opening sequence, the film only runs 72 minutes. Crazy Mrs. Pringle and her mentally challenged son Rodney run a wig shop near a Florida college campus. The wigs are advertised as 100 percent real human hair. The shop also rents vacant rooms to college co-eds. The renting of rooms is only a disguise for Pringle to lure young women to the shop so Rodney can scalp and murder them.’ — Plan 9 Crunch

Trailer

Watch the film here

 

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The Girl, the Body, and the Pill (1967)
‘Always in search of uncharted exploitation territory, Lewis turns his attention this time to the then-controversial topic of birth control. Given the nature of the film, it is surprising that it contains practically no overt sexual situations beyond a couple suggestive dissolves. One of Lewis’s more multifaceted productions, The Girl, the Body, and the Pill follows the subject through multiple perspectives. We see a liberal high school teacher (Pamela Rhea) advocating for sex education as a means of promoting proper hygiene among her rapidly developing adolescent students. Her efforts to promote planned parenthood meet with fierce opposition from the school board as well as the parents of several of the students. Actually, one parent in particular, the hyperprotective puritanical father (Bill Rogers) of a virginal daughter whose boyfriend wants to go all the way, is the loudest voice to oppose such education. The film additionally follows the exploits of the school’s most promiscuous student, Randy (Nancy Lee Noble), and that of her considerably more promiscuous single mother(Valedia Hill).’ — Wikipedia

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Blast-Off Girls (1967)
‘Sleazy music promoter Boojie Baker convinces a pop band to come work for him. He arranges play dates, publicity, record contracts, and the band’s loyalty by getting his hired girls to exercise their feminine charms on all who stand in his way. Thus he creates the new music sensation, The Big Blast, but the band is unhappy about Boojie keeping most of the money. When they try to leave, Boojie sets them up for trouble with the law, but offers to bail them out if they sign the contract. Can’t anyone stop this scum bucket?’ — letterboxd.com

Trailer

the entire film

 

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She-Devils on Wheels (1968)
‘1968 saw no less than nine feature films from the prolific Herschell Gordon Lewis. Without a doubt, the best-remembered of the batch was this innovative girl gang mini-epic. Lewis didn’t invent the biker film, but the female “Man-Eaters” of She-Devils on Wheels (written by Louise Downe) were the first of their kind. The Man-Eaters live up to their name in all but the most literal fashion. Led by Queen (Betty Connell) and the huge, poetically-inclined Whitey (Pat Poston), they’re the terror of their community. To them, men are cattle–to be chosen from “stud lines” at their whim and to be tossed aside after use. Young initiate Honeypot (Nancy Lee Noble), however, hasn’t quite got the idea; she tends to stick to one particular “stud.” A challenge is set to the candidate: she’ll become a full-fledged Man-Eater once she proves her loyalty by dragging the beaten body of her beau from the back of her own motorcycle!’ — images journal.com

Trailer

the entire film

 

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Just for the Hell of It (1968)
‘Hear the name Herschell Gordon Lewis, and you may picture in your mind’s eye gouts of blood and gore, intestines being dangled in front of the screen and the somewhat dubious acting skills of playmate Connie Mason. There’s a non-gore stream to the directing output of the man though, and although there is some blood right towards the end of the film, Just for the Hell of it eschews the trademark gore for the most part. What we have here is a foray into nihilistic morality and hippy-beatnik violence, which ends on quite a surprising note for a film made nearly forty years ago. For those of you with a penchant for vintage exploitation, you can do a lot worse than Just for the Hell of it. Aside from any thematic concerns, you’ve got the great sixties decor, clothes and soundtrack. After these surface thrills you can appreciate the pretty confronting violence and themes. Lewis has crafted a fairly potent essay on mindless evil, despite the sometimes clunky performances and low budget.’ — Girls Guns and Ghouls

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Wizard of Gore (1970)
‘What WIZARD OF GORE does differently than most other magic films, especially of its time, is introduce popular technology into its trickery. The titular wizard, Montag, doesn’t only mesmerize his theater audiences but those viewing at home as well, with Lewis perhaps boldly starting a ‘fear of TV’ trend that would fully manifest in later features like NETWORK (1976) and VIDEODROME (1983). That the various slayings in the film also take place in the home rather than on the stage as they appear to – or do they? – root this almost firmly in the type of home invasion/slasher feature that would become popularized in 1978 with HALLOWEEN. What Lewis’s film may lack in subtlety it makes up for in blurring lines that were already blurry in the first place. The real spectacle isn’t all of the young women being dissected on screen and covered in – what was rumored to be – sheep guts, it is in Montag’s speeches about what we don’t know and can’t begin to figure out.’ — Brattle Blog

Trailer

the entire film

 

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The Gore Gore Girls (1972)
‘The Gore Gore Girls stands alone in the Lewis repertoire in several ways. Though no stranger to sex and nudity in his non-horror work, the director had always kept these elements a safe distance from his gore films, feeling such a blend was too risky even for him. But competition had upped the ante, so the move was finally made here (Lewis remembers less nudity than the film actually contains, incidentally). The combination of sick gore and sick humor remains as potent today as ever. Many viewers (including some horror fans) still find it unwatchable. Even Something Weird owner Mike Vraney (in his audio commentary interview with Lewis, where he’s joined once again by Jimmy Maslin of Shock Films) admits his discomfort with the film’s most extreme sequence. Lewis is neither defensive nor apologetic: he made the film, he states, for adults only; and for that matter, for adults who possessed a certain sick sense of humor. No attempt was ever made to disguise the nature of the film, and the idea that anyone would take it seriously is simply bewildering to the director. This was an attempt to once again out-“gross” what anyone else was doing; and it unquestionably delivered the goods.’ — images journal.com

Trailer

 

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Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002)
‘Thirty-nine years after making his groundbreaking independent horror film Blood Feast, director Herschell Gordon Lewis returns with a sequel. This time around, Faud Ramses III (J.P. Delahoussaye) , the grandson of Blood Feast’s protagonist, moves into his granddad’s catering shop. It isn’t long before Faud proves to be a chip off the old block, as he lures buxom young women into his lair and carves them up for sandwiches. Nobody ever has, nor could, accuse H.G. Lewis of being a genuinely good filmmaker – his career is built on lower-than-B-grade trash after all, but similar to the likes of Lloyd Kaufman, his movies must be viewed using a wholly different set of expectations than critical standard. In this sense, Blood Feast 2 is a raging success. Not only is it excessively gory (sickly, even, in parts), but it’s also legitimately funny. Visually, it looks cheap and uninspired – Lewis employs no glitzy camera tricks, displays no directorial flair, and blocks as easily as possible for an obviously quick shooting schedule. Again, being an H.G. Lewis film this is something to be expected, alongside lingering close-ups of the extreme mutilation conducted during the kill scenes and uniformly hammy acting from the cast.’ — dreadcentral.com

Trailer

 

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The Uh-oh Show (2009)
‘Originally conceived under the title of Grim Fairy Tales, The Uh-Oh Show! is gore and exploitation legend Herschell Gordon Lewis’s minimally scary second film of the new millennium. While his previous film was a sequel to arguably his most famous work, Blood Feast, this one’s a completely original idea. It blends his usual trademark extreme, absurd gore with light satire on reality TV and pop culture. The most important thing this horror comedy makes clear is that the man has not lost his sense of humor and fun in the slightest nor has he forgotten how to sling blood around or hack off body parts.’ — best-horror-movies.com

Trailer

THE UH OH SHOW Movie Review

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Me? Awww. Well, the two ‘Avatar’ movies are in the top three all-time highest grossing movies list, so go figure. Zac’s and my new film has a swamp with fake alligators and fog machines, you’ll love it. I’m so sorry to hear about the Neo-Decadent writer. I don’t know his work, but I’ll go look it up. That’s really sad. Hugs, George. ** David Ehrenstein, As you well should. I saw Dusty Springfield lip-synch three songs at a scarcely populated gay bar on La Brea, I think called Pulse, in he early 80s when she was at her nadir before the Pet Shop Boys rescued her. It was pretty depressing, but I’m glad I got to see her. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Wonderful about the class. I’m very excited that you’re back to writing, and of course I’ll be greatly looking forward to the results. ** T, Hi. Me too, now that you mention it. Cherbourg! Hometown of ‘PGL’! Next week will probably be fine. We have work to do, but I don’ think we’ll be marathoning. Hit me up when you’re back and know your sched for the duration. And enjoy the sea and gulls. Have a rugby-unimpaired weekend. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. The Vollman book I spotlit yesterday isn’t so complicated if you want to start him smoothly. ‘Miracle’ is great, obviously. My fave Genet is ‘Funeral Rites’. Is Genet doing anything for you? Yes, we are forced to play that game. And the world premiere game most immediately. I do really hate how hierarchical the film world’s rollout system is. But, for now, we’re in the game, I guess. My weekend? Mm, see if I can get into a sold-out performance (by Jonathan Capedevielle, former Gisele Vienne superstar) tonight. Fiddle with some fiction. Plan out next week’s film work. Try to decomplicate a complication. Stuff like that there. April is as good a time to visit Paris as any other, for sure. It’s always great here except for during heatwaves, and even then it’s still pretty good. So the answer is yes, and an enthusiastic yes even. Enjoy your differently configured weekend. ** Steve Erickson, Timmy’s stans are getting what they deserve, sorry. Yes, I just saw that about the remix! So cool! I’ll get it and the EP this weekend. Everyone, Big double header treat. Novelist and longtime d.l. Jeff Jackson has a band called Julian Calendar, as you might know. They have a new EP out, and if that’s not good enough, the writer/ critic/ filmmaker/ composer Steve Erickson has a remix of one of the songs on said EP that he, in his own words, ‘radically reworked, influenced by both ambient and industrial music’. Must get, you surely must agree. The EP is called ‘Swimming Lessons’, and it’s right here. Spooky about band camp. Its destruction would be world destroying. My weekend’s plans were vaguely detailed by default to Corey up above. Nothing too anticipatory, at this point anyway. Enjoy yours. ** 2Moody, Hi. Vollman is very prolific, maybe too prolific, but that spotlit one is a keeper. I don’t remember my haunts having a particular overall theme. Just a scattershot of ‘scary’ motifs and things. The highlight was that we had a big walk-in, refrigerated meat locker in our basement, and the haunt ended with me in costume leading visitors close to it then shoving them inside, slamming the door shut, and forcing them to stay in the freezing pitch-black there for a couple of minutes. Nowadays I would be taken to court multiple times if I tried that. I should say that my family wasn’t involved. They didn’t like I was inviting strangers into our house. I’ve kind of sworn off writing non-fiction, but I do wish someone would write that book. I would be willing to be an advisor or something. Nice camping tidbit. Scary too. For me. Yes, your friends are freaks. I’m a million percent in agreement with you. Well, there are a wad of Lewis films in toto right up there if you wish. I think you know what to expect. May sublimity take a quick swipe at me and then head over and smother you this weekend. ** Okay. What can you say about Herschell Gordon Lewis. I would say that if you were to compare horror movies to, say, haunted house attractions, ‘The Nun 2’ and its many brethren would be the Universal Horror Nights, and HGL’s films would be the homely, well meaning home haunts. Which is obviously a compliment coming from me. Anyway, I restored HGL’s Day as the next in my series of Halloween gifts to y’all. See you on Monday.

 

‘When William T. Vollmann was 22 years old, he decided that he would write a book about the plight of the Afghan people, who were then engaged in battle against the Soviets. He planned to travel to Pakistan and document the misery of Afghan refugees, then sneak across the border and photograph the courageous deeds of the mujahideen struggling to repel the invaders. In addition to the written account of his journey, he would produce a slide show and present it at fundraising events back home in California: Vollmann’s neighbors would be so affected by the wretchedness of his subjects and the righteousness of their cause that they would open up their check books right then and there (and later place calls to their local representatives). Before leaving, Vollmann wrote former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had been one of the primary architects of the Vietnam War, for advice.

‘“How might I best, in your opinion, increase our understanding and sympathy for people of Asia and the Third World in general?” he asked. “What things will I see in Pakistan (and along the Afghanistan border), the significance of which I as an American might miss?” less than a week later, McNamara wrote a terse response on the same page Vollmann had sent him, and mailed it back to the would-be author. “Show how much the peoples of Asia are doing to help themselves,” McNamara said, and therefore “how much they deserve and will benefit from the small amounts of assistance we send to them.”

‘And so Vollmann set out for Peshawar, where he took photographs and conducted interviews, seeking information that could determine the most deserving candidates for American aid. After much wrangling, he foisted himself upon a group of mujahideen heading for the front lines, and though he came down with dysentery and had to be dragged and carried through the Hindu Kush mountains, he eventually tasted battle. In that virginal experience of combat – the commencement of a decades-long obsession with the ways in which we kill each other – Vollmann finally recognized the yawning, insuperable gap between these Muslim soldiers and himself. “They were fighting and I was not,” he writes in An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World, which was published ten years after his journey. “They were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death.”

‘What did Vollmann accomplish in Afghanistan? And in the years since – during which he has written nine novels, three short-story collections, and five works of nonfiction (including Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,500-page treatise on violence published in 2003) – what has Vollmann seen that the less intrepid, less reckless, and less painstakingly observant among us might have otherwise missed? Rather than returning home with a slide show for muhajideen sympathizers, Vollmann brought with him a clear sense of his own ignorance. The presumption that he could go to a place, gain some understanding of the people there, and represent them in such a way as to provoke sympathy for them among perfect strangers, had proved ridiculous. In An Afghanistan Picture Show, he writes of beholding a photograph he took of a woman he interviewed in an Afghan refugee camp, and remarks on his failure: “I can’t forget her, but she isn’t alive.”

‘The mark of that experience has animated Vollmann’s writing ever since, whether in his sprawling novels, epic works of nonfiction, or relatively reined-in articles for magazines like Harper’s, The New Yorker, Spin, Playboy, and Esquire. He has chased the shadow of his failure across thousands of pages and scores of countries, from San Francisco whorehouses (his haunt of choice) to Arctic Inuk villages to Calexico drug dens to Kazakh oil towns to Yemeni fishing villages. He has become renowned for doing what writers tend not, or ought not, to do: communing with the wretched of the earth, plying them with questions, riding the rails with them, getting drunk with them, shooting guns with them, smoking crack with them, having sex with them, and oftentimes paying them for their time. Vollmann lurks insistently, whether asking alcoholic mothers in the shantytowns of Bangkok why they are poor, as he does in Poor People (2007), or nearly freezing to death in order to replicate the experience of doomed Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin, as he does in his novel The Rifles (1994). Through all this, Vollmann has not just laid bare the relationship between a writer and his subjects, but also made an art of unsettling, perverting – and occasionally perfecting – that bond.

‘The risks Vollmann has taken – both in life and literature – in order to do so have been duly rewarded: he received a national Book Award in 2005 for his novel Europe Central, and was named a finalist for the national Book Critics Circle Award, among other accolades; and before he had entered middle age (he’s now 50), he was often hailed as the most “promising” young writer in the U.S. But these risks are at times maddening, their logic elusive, their contribution to the story at hand unclear. There are baroque bursts of prose that go on for pages, great accumulations of data, narratives that meander to the point of dissolution. There are the gut- wrenching, cringe-inducing scenes of Vollmann – who, despite his affinity for handguns, battlefields, and the Arctic wilderness, maintains the persona of an overly eager, sometimes heedless, man-child – abducting a juvenile sex-slave from her Thai pimps, or taking fire in the streets of Mogadishu. The characters in his novels are almost always fashioned from historical personages or people he has met in his travels, and he approaches them with the same weird combination of attention and abandon. While writing The Rifles, one of three completed volumes in his “Seven Dreams” septet – a rewriting of the history of north American colonial encounters and their legacy – Vollmann frequented an Inuk village where he befriended a destitute alcoholic girl named Reepah, who appears as one of the story’s main characters (and is reconfigured as an Inuk goddess over the course of the novel). In the book, Vollmann himself takes on the moniker William the Blind, whose travels among the Inuit mirror those of Franklin and his party. In order to better understand Franklin’s misguided 1845 effort to find the Northwest Passage, Vollmann moved to the magnetic North Pole for two weeks. There he inhabited a forsaken weather station, hoping to “learn something about loneliness and fear.” He succeeded: The cold turned the fur fringe of his hood into Brillo, splintered the plastic of his face mask, rendered his sleeping bag useless. He began to hallucinate from lack of sleep, and eventually incinerated his sleeping bag while trying to dry it. Unlike Franklin, Vollmann was saved by a rescue plane before he died. Similarly perilous episodes populate Rising Up and Rising Down, including an incident in Bosnia when a land mine exploded under his car, killing his two companions. “I’m … trying to come up with some sort of moral calculus for [violence],” he explained pithily when the book – the culmination of 20 years of heavy reading and personal endangerment – was in its infancy. “The best way to do that is to have some case studies of wars. So I want to keep seeing them.” — Alexander Provan

 

___
Further

The Vollmann Club
William T. Vollmann, The Art of Fiction No. 163
William Vollmann @ goodreads
William T. Vollmann: The Self Images of a Cross-Dresser
William Vollman interviewed @ Bookslut
THE LUSH LIFE OF WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN
The Sympathetic Guide to William T. Vollmann
[Report] | Life as a Terrorist, by William T. Vollmann
A MODEST IMPERIALIST: William T. Vollmann
20 years after Unabomber’s arrest, William Vollmann case reminds us how mystified FBI was
William T. Vollmann: The dispassionate chronicler
Podcast: The Adventurous Life of William T. Vollmann, Writer
William T. Vollmann on Writing Poverty
Writer Without Borders (Extended)
Why You Should Know Who William T. Vollmann Is, and Go Out and Read Him Immediately
William T. Vollmann is a man of many words
Paul Slovak on the Paradoxical Task of Editing William T. Vollmann
Buy ‘The Rainbow Stories’

 

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Extras

William Vollmann Reads From His Work in 2005

The Best Way to Smoke Crack, Artist Book by William T. Vollmann

Bernard Radfar & William T. Vollmann

Susan Meiselas & William T. Vollmann

032c Issue #19: William T. Vollmann

 

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

Larry McCaffrey: You Bright and Risen Angels is a long, difficult, obsessive work. Were you aware when you were writing it that it was going to be difficult for this book to attract a large audience? In other words, is audience much of a consideration for you when you’re starting out with something, or do you just write the book you feel compelled to write?

William Vollmann: I just make the best book that I can and try to not worry about audience or if it will sell. The odds are against you, so why abuse your talent for the sake of a chimera? The only real pleasure for me in writing comes from pleasing myself. What readers think is interesting and illuminating (and it may even be correct), but that is nothing compared to the excitement of seeing a world develop. Besides, even though I like most individuals I meet, I have a pretty low opinion of people in general. So if I were to write for people in general, I would have to drastically lower my estimation of the intelligence of my reader. Rather than doing that, I write the way it seems the book has to appear. I don’t think that’s egotistic. There are often things I would like to include in my books—things about me personally and other materials—that I feel I have to leave out because they aren’t relevant to the book. I’m fairly ruthless along those lines, because I try to let nothing come in the way of what’s best for the book. If that means that the book won’t sell or that a publisher won’t buy it, then that’s my problem. I’ll suffer for that, but I won’t let the book suffer for it.

LM: Obviously there are a lot of differences between The Rainbow Stories and You Bright and Risen Angels, not so much thematically but in the more straightforward manner of exposition you use in The Rainbow Stories. Was that a conscious shift?

WV: Somewhat so. In The Rainbow Stories I was aware of not wanting to use pyrotechnics when they weren’t appropriate, whereas in Angels, particularly in the first half, pyrotechnics was the whole purpose of the book. I wrote Angels to enjoy myself by letting myself go to invent whatever I could come up with. That pyrotechnic or improvisational approach created the book’s own structure, in effect—although, of course, once I let things loose, I would then go back and try and impose some kind of a story structure on it. But with Rainbow most of the time I was working at something which had a predefined structure, not just something that was creating its own form. For instance, since I was working from a structure of fact with the documentary pieces (which for some reason the reviews have generally focused on) then I wanted to present the fact in a certain way; and I couldn’t take such liberties as to obscure the fact. Even the non documentary stories were also more focused and limited simply because they were stories. The reason I wanted to write The Rainbow Stories after Angels was partly a matter of my wanting to create these discrete artifacts as opposed to something like Angels, which used a sort of “writing by-the-yard” approach and could easily have been ten thousand pages longer.

LM: In all of your books so far you transport readers fluidly from different worlds, times, and reality zones. It’s almost as if you want readers to recognize that their own worlds are more open-ended and more fluid, temporally and spatially, than they realize—that they’re not just sealed off.

WV: People would be better off if they realized that their own particular world is not privileged. Everyone’s world is no more and no less important than everyone else’s. To have as many worlds as possible that are invested with interest or meaning is a way of making that point. I’ve gradually begun to see that I can use even my footnotes and glossaries and other sorts of materials to create some of this sense.

LM: This idea of forcing people to recognize that their worlds aren’t the only ones—and of creating contexts that bring together different perspectives and world views—seems like one of the underlying impulses behind The Rainbow Stories. That is, nearly all the stories deal with people who have been radically marginalized in one way or another (prostitutes, homeless alcoholics, murderers, underground guerilla artists like Mark Pauline and the Survival Research Lab, and so on).

WV: In The Rainbow Stories I wanted to create a context so that people in these different worlds could see each other. I originally had more hope about that than I do today. Now the most I would hope is that people reading the stories would have a moment of thinking, “Oh, they’re people too, and this is kind of nice.” I’d hoped originally that somehow maybe if I described them well enough, then a few people would say, “Oh, they’re people and maybe I should even talk to them.” But I don’t really have that belief or hope anymore that any work of literature can do that.

LM: No matter how well it was written?

WV: No.

LM: What changed your mind?

WV: Getting a bit more experienced. Seeing the way people treat each other. Younger people like to hope that maybe somehow they can change the world—and not just change it in the sense of moving it from one random state to another (which is what is always going to happen), but somehow to make the world better. But at a certain point you see more clearly that the world is obviously no better now than it ever was. My current thinking is that literature isn’t enough to bring people together to produce real understanding. Some sort of action is required, but right now I don’t know what that action might be or how it would work. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it’ll never be any better than it is now. Given that, all anyone can ever hope to do is either change a few specific things in a few specific ways (which will probably change again after you finish tinkering with them), or else help yourself and other people accept the fundamental viciousness and inertia of things. Religion does that, for example. Literature can too.

LM: It’s a little like psychotherapy—sometimes it isn’t able to help you change the way you are, but it helps you accept the way you are or at least know yourself, so you don’t feel so bad about it.

WV: And that’s all you can ask really. Being able to change yourself isn’t necessarily going to make you happy. You might be less happy if you could change, who knows? The people in The Ice-Shirt aren’t necessarily happier when they have the power to change from human to animal. King Ingjald wants to be manly so they give him the wolf’s heart to eat; even though that experience changes him, he ends up being this terrible, horrible person. He probably would have been better off if he’d just said, “Well, nothing I can do will ever make me be manly—but that’s all right.”

LM: Even if literature can’t really change the situations you’re describing, or even produce a deep understanding between people, isn’t there some real value in simply opening a window on these other worlds?

WV: If literature is valuable in and of itself (which is something I’m not sure of) then opening windows is one of the most valuable things that it can do.

LM: But of course, these aren’t just any worlds you’ve chosen to open windows onto—most of these realms are going to strike your readers as being particularly grotesque, violent, disturbing. Do you think there’s something particularly useful about confronting readers with things that aren’t just unfamiliar to them but which will likely seem ugly or repellant?

WV: Absolutely. Because in doing that, you’re raising the stakes. Just getting people to accept anything that’s different without being disturbed is a step forward. But it’s a far braver step to accept the presence of dignity and beauty and most of all likeness or kinship in something that is ugly. If more people could do that the world would be a better place.

 

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Book

William T. Vollmann The Rainbow Stories
Penguin Books

‘From a writer who has won comparison with Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs comes thirteen unnerving and often breathtaking stories populated by punks and angels, skinheads and religious assassins, streetwalkers and fetishists–people who live outside the law and and the clear light of the every day. Set in landscapes as diverse as ancient Babylon, India, and the seamy underbelly of San Francisco, these daring and innovative tales are laced with Vollman’s fertile imagination. The Rainbow Stories ushers us into a world that bears an awful yet hypnotic resemblance to that of our deepest nightmares, confirming Vollman’s reputation as a dark visionary of contemporary fiction.’ — Penguin Books

 

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Excerpt

Saint Catherine of Siena

They say she was broken on spiked wheels, and then, since she remained miraculously alive, they decapitated her with an axe. When I see her in the paintings, studying at her Book of Devotions with such sweet concentration, it is hard for me to understand why anybody would have wanted to interrupt her. Of course I cannot ask her; nor can I ask her persecutors, since they died in the desert long ago and thorns have grown up on their graves. Therefore I have chosen to record the tale of Catherine O’Day, who is also a martyr; and if I fail to achieve my purpose may God have mercy upon my soul.

 

Saint Catherine of San Diego

Catherine had violet hair. The sun wanted to tell Catherine something golden, but since she had such violet hair she could not hear any other color even in the might of summer when dark green tree-shadows cooled the emerald grass, and other women wore white summer dresses because they knew the meaning of summer which even the dogs knew in their tongue-lolling ambles and waggy-tailed sprints which made music with the clinking of their identification tags like ice in cocktail glasses, and everyone else under the sun was caught in summer immensities which made their morning shadows strong and faithful as the shadows ran at their heels and swerved through enormous angles unimpeded by houses or walls or the scorching gleam of silver mica stars in the sidewalks, because summertime is above all immunity from pain. Summer was in the Berkeley T-shirts with clouds and colored music-notes on them, and it was in the tanned milky-smooth faces of the lovers skipping down the sidewalk hand in hand, and summer could be perceived (in its deficient mode of Being)2 in the prances of the gawky freckled girls who wore shorts and had big round glasses that made them resemble summer owls trying to be happy and forgetting the cruel needs of moonlit nights when they had to swoop down onto desperate mice and bear them high and devour them in their horrible beaks while watching them with their big expressionless eyes, which were painted on their feather-masked faces out of the same evil trickery that makes cosmic rays shoot across the sun’s face like the bars of a visor so that summer is dimmed and confused by entities which want to keep the sun’s true nature hidden—except to the Elect, which included Catherine, and that was why the sun was trying to reach out to her, but Catherine would have none of it because she was not a summer person. Summer people did not know that pretty soon they would turn their backs on everything that they now thought was so important. It was not that they were hypocritical; it was simply that someday summer would be over. Meanwhile the new Berkeley students streamed across the concrete, offering each other string cheese, turning their class schedules round and round in their hands, saying “Okay okay okay,” and the freshman boys told the freshman girls how primordially they needed them at their parties, and the freshmen girls said they would see what they could do, and Asian girls sat cliquishly on the steps, tapping the toes of their silver shoes, and Catherine in San Diego lay on the bed reading Heidegger as she had been doing for almost seven years.

 

Her Earthly Unearthliness

Much of her life, Catherine had been reading, sometimes taking her book to visit me in Heaven where it is cold and foggy and she must lie on the couch wrapped in a thick Canadian-Indian sweater and a reindeer skin. Sometimes she rested her temple against two fingers and stared straight ahead at her book or manuscript with the same strenuous fixation of gaze as a competition shooter; in truth her thought traveled like bullets along the violet beams of her gaze, exploding every concept she met into a plasma of minute distinctions, and her silky hair seemed to be three different colors of violet. The strands of Catherine’s violet hair lived together in beautiful braids or beautiful tangles, as Catherine dictated, and they visited each other when the wind blew; and although her lips were pinkly lovely, like the customary pink-streaked rose-petals to which so many other describers of lips have rightly resorted, her hair was even holier than her lips, being violet, since violet light will cause potassium metal to fling its electrons out in worshipful offerings, which no amount of red light can ever do. (Violet has the highest frequency in the visible spectrum.) Catherine’s hair was a violet meadow that laughed at the rigid violet bars of mercury’s and cadmium’s emission spectra; in this violet place Catherine’s spirit waved like a searing wind which made hearts ache. Her hair was almost translucent in the sunlight. It was persistent and inescapable.

 

The Boundaries of the Catherine-Horizon

It is known that holiness is localized. Thus, a weaker ectoplasmic field is reported to exist on automated ranches, whose green alfalfa-beds are enlightened only by the random rainbow dews of sprinklers, than in desert ghost towns where tall thin phantoms hoot in chimneys like apes of justice, laboriously attempting to imitate their mentors and masters, the summer owls of whom I have already spoken, and although they scarcely possess the resonance of flesh, which would be of value to them in achieving their dark-livered endeavors (actually they do not have livers either), their reedy efforts are indulgently applauded by the owls in feathery wing-beats; thus encouraged, fat ghosts now roll tumbleweeds back and forth on Main Street with translucent smiles of vacuous delight; if the owls are amused then they will clap their claws together in mid-air with the savage elegance of clashing antlers, in the process, perhaps, letting slip some squeaking dying rodent-ball whose bloody dews the ghosts can inhale, but since this happens no more than every hundred years, if at all, it is fortunate for these freeze-dried souls that they have no tibial collateral ligaments to shrink or spasm, and can therefore flex their shimmering knees all night in the pursuit of their summer sport, vainly hoping to incite the owls’ beaked praise. The truth is that they cannot propel a real thing a single inch, nor could ten thousand ghosts united (be happy that you are not yet a ghost!); it is only wind that blows the tumbleweeds about, whistling through their weed-bones while the stagnant ghosts swirl in the night-dust behind, indefatigably pretending to push them, not only to propitiate the owls, but also to keep from considering themselves even more superannuated than they already do when, knowing the outcome and hence snarling in such despair that they expose their clacking teeth, which resemble those icicle-like fangs of the deep sea-fishes, these revenants lay their heads upon each other’s breasts and listen for a heartbeat, as is customary at the termination of a deathbed scene; if even one soul were to have within his chest the pulpy mechanism which emits those dull and bloody thuds, they would be soothed, just as a puppy taken from his mother will stop whimpering when a loudly ticking clock is placed against his belly; but of course the ghosts hear nothing and furiously rake each other’s non-existent chests with their non-existent fingernails, and then, afraid of the owls, return with increased anxiety to their delusional project of the tumbleweeds; meanwhile, more mathematically-minded sprites play “Musical Chairs” between the tombstones, trying once and for all to solve the problem which eluded Leibniz: how do you put ten bodies in nine graves while adhering to that monodist doctrine of one body, one grave?—for they want privacy when they rest their cool cheeks against the cool cheek of the earth; and meanwhile young ghosts creak doors beautifully, ingeniously, as they are expected to do. Thus every spirit does its part—But turn your back and walk over the dunes for two dozen steps, and the night is depopulated.

So the holy presence of Catherine could be felt only from Tijuana, half an hour south of her, to Mount Shasta, 13 hours north of her. This point having been clarified like ectoplasmic butter, we will now enter the Catherine-horizon and begin the story.

 

A State of Grace

I am the Holy Ghost. As I descended from Heaven, I presently reached that violet-black sea of storm-tossed mortality, and at the bottom of the ocean was a little blue bubble, and I shrank my form into a discrete particularity in order to make myself available to the people there on a one-to-one basis, believing as I did in the religion of good manners, the trajectories of which are usually as carelessly plotted as those of champagne corks. As I continued to fall, the ontic world loomed bigger and bigger. It sparkled with cities and airplanes and fireflies. Presently it took up my entire field of view, and continued to enlarge, the horizon becoming less and less curved until at last it was the standard Being-horizon in its average every-nightness that we experience in our freeway relatedness, speeding southward toward Catherine in San Diego (or rather, to be more concrete, Solana Beach); and the smoggy moon got bigger and bigger every hour until it was like a beautiful yellow ball of super-processed glow-in-the-dark cheese. The air pollution smelled like coconut macaroons. The following morning, continuing south through Los Angeles, Long Beach, Seal Beach, Leisure World and other points upon this continuum, I found that the smell was like smoke, rusty metal, asphalt, and rotten eggs, in that order. This part of southern California was defined by its four-lane gas stations, its speeding blondes, and above all by its grey-white sky through which the desert mountains were hardly visible. Once I completed my journey through those low sea-passes, Catherine was attained.

 

However

Half an hour south of Catherine, in Tijuana, Beelzebub (whom we will see again) was buying a stiletto.—“How much?” he said.—“Twelve dollars.” said the man gently.—“How about ten?” said Beelzebub.—The man spread his hands sadly. “Okay,” he said. “I wrap it up for you.”

 

My Materialization

“I actually have this peculiar feeling that something in the air is trying to talk to me,” Catherine said.

“I’ve never been afraid of spirits, but I know that potentially you can be,” said her sister Stephanie. “For American Indians, fear’s a big thing. But one finds that the spirits are usually very strong and guiding.”

“Well, let me see,” Catherine said, hiding her mouth behind her hair.

“What comes to mind is that I’m very skittish about spirits. Extremely.”

“In the Ghost Dance religion it’s almost universal that people resist,” explained Stephanie. “They don’t want to go in to where the spirit takes them. It’s often the Elders that convince them to open themselves. The skepticism and resistance are really a part of the process.”

Catherine didn’t say anything.

“When you close your eyes, what does it look like?” asked Stephanie.

“I immediately got an image,” Catherine retorted, “but I don’t know if it’s a good one. It could be improved. Well, for some reason I just see a face—well, let me try to get a second one and then I’ll describe them both.”—She was still for a time.—“Well, okay,” she said finally. “I have two images now, and they’re very different. The first one . . . I was hesitant because I had a feeling that it’s from some memory of some painting that I’ve seen, so it’s a little suspect . . . I just see a face, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this face somewhere. It’s yellowish. No, the hair is yellowish. Pale yellow. Long face, long hair, sort of high cheekbones with . . .” She paused to think again. “Large features. Let’s see. I wouldn’t say . . . Sort of sad and somber. Okay, that was the first image. But again, I think that came from a painting I saw once.—The second one was very different, and . . . young, handsome, smiling.” She laughed a little embarrassedly. “Sort of sensual, and colorfully dressed, very colorfully dressed.—But it’s difficult to concentrate.”

“Do you think they’re two approximations of the same thing?” said Stephanie interestedly.

“Of the same thing?” said Catherine. “I think one’s the true one, and one’s the false one. I think the true one is the second one.”

“Just because it came later, or because it’s happier?” Stephanie said.

“Because it’s happier.”

“My first image of myself,” I announced, “was this sort of green clammy thing, a bunch of vapors with these two black eye-holes full of greyish fog. I’m the Holy Ghost, you see. I’m kind of a sad thing, but I’m not an evil thing.”

“Mmm hmm,” said Catherine cautiously. She had already begun to withdraw from the conversation. There were days when she was very very tense.

“How about you, Stephanie?” I said. “How do you see me?”

“Well, you know,” she said, “from the first time I became aware of you, I always got a visual image, and it was the same one. It’s grey smoke, in a sort of thick column that ripples the way water ripples if you toss a pebble in a lake. So you’re this sort of ripply column of grey vapor that I can’t quite see through. In my peripheral vision I can see what’s behind you, but if I look at any one spot I just see opaque smoke. But it’s funny; sometimes your image fades out, and there’s just this black shreddy raggedy tophat and a black cane appears below and beside it, and it doesn’t occur to me why that happens.”

“Do you want to talk to me, or are you afraid of me?” I said.

“As I said, I’ve never been afraid of spirits,” said Stephanie. “I personally have never experienced that. You spirits have always been a lot more powerful than I am, but you’re stronger and guiding, and it’s always very light and uplifting.”

“How about you, Cathy?”

“Am I afraid of you? Well, let me see. What comes to mind is no, I’m not afraid. However, I know I’m still a bit skittish. But if you want to stay over for a few days and it’s all right with Stephanie, I would certainly love to have you.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Say what you want about Hard Rock Cafe, but they have great nachos. Funnily, Dangling Carrot’s Grisly Garden is actually the SoCal haunt that excites me the most. But since that’s your fave, I would also be very happy with Twisted Dreams because it was my very favorite amongst the 20-something home haunts I hit up last year. Thank you, love. Enjoy the time with your family, or I hope you did, I guess, by the time you see this. Love putting a push button on my bookshelves that make them grow new shelves, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Dusty Springfield plus haunted … what is there not to worship there. Thank you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Fairbrook Manor, hold on, oh yes, good choice. Oh, awesome, how was the class? That’s great, great news! ** Misanthrope, Thank you. Again. Well, I guess what I was saying is that realising TC is one of the unimaginative, shallow, dunderheaded people who think dating a Jenner is cool is some kind of final straw. That there are millions of said people only makes it worse. To me. Wow, your friend’s daughter won! And $1000 bucks, not bad. Sorry about your swamp. Or sorry that the swamp is composed of your job and not of fake alligators and fog machines. ** 🤺Darbi, Hi. I do understand the responsibility that comes with employing the word love. Oh, my god, Scully is completely incredible! He is so fucking cool. He looks amazing. You’re a total master of that medium, my friend. I predict that stop action will go so immensely viral if you make it. Thank you! I will, I will, re: the book if I can score it. No, I don’t mind the chain thing at all, of course. Nice about the gauges. So, they’re in and doing their stretchy thing? You don’t have security to taze anyone who would dare mangle one of your precious animatronics? What a selfish fucker. The link worked. I’m not on instagram but it let me look at them without hazing over the page and ordering me to depart. Thanks again, pal. ** Steve Erickson, Thanks for the Tribeca answer. It was suggested to us that we should submit our film there because we were told it’s an adventurous festival, and the deadline is next week, and we’re trying to decide whether to submit there or not. I’ll do some further investigation first. Matt Gaetz going viral is definitely not helping my state of mind either, if that helps. What you describe about the Costa does sound like the installation except the women were just gazing into the lens, not singing. Cool, I’ll try to find that Nick Pinkerton book, thank you. Yes, as I think you may already know, our film was funded almost entirely via the art world. ** Corey Heiferman, Good question. Wow, that video. I sure wish the Boy Scouts had been like that when I was in them That was a borderline Kennth Anger film right there. Thanks. Mm, in my experiences with home haunts it seems to be great family togetherness creator. And a way for parents to let their wild teens blow off their steam in house. I wouldn’t be surprised of a lot of the home haunt families make them specifically for that reason. Oh, that’s good to hear about Tribeca. Like I told Steve, we’re debating whether to submit our film there. Your I-80 trek sounds fun, but it’s good you survived. Nice plate of feet there. No doubt made of meat, but, hm, tofu would work. So now I’m semi-hungry. ** T, Hi! Well, let’s see, here’s my somewhat educated guess. Home haunts started in the US in, I think, the 1920s when parents wanted to find a way to keep their apparently overly rambunctious kids off the streets on Halloween. And since LA is basically a giant suburb and therefore contains endless houses even in the city center, home haunts were more doable there. And time passed, and it grew exponentially there more than elsewhere for said reason. Plus, Hollywood is there, and quite a few of the houses are put on by people who work in the film industry and who therefore have prop making skills and access to quality props and decor and stuff. So there are some possible reasons why SoCal is Halloween Mecca. You’re here! And unemployed, con … grats? Well, then, let’s hang and/or coffee or something. This weekend? I think I’m fairly film-unimpaired this weekend? It’s looking like I won’t get to LA for Halloween, which is seriously breaking my heart and mind. There’s just too much film work to do and a very early November deadline. Tragic. ** 2Moody, Yes, exactly. I made home haunts in the basement of my family home almost every Halloween starting at a very young age, so yeah. I am seriously not an enjoyer of camping. Hm, there used to be Haunted Hoochie videos out there. I’ll see if I can find any. I can’t say that I understand people’s fear of and/or within haunted houses at all. They’re such artificial concoctions, and, barring the odd ‘extreme’ haunt, they won’t even touch you, so … But I am not normal, just like you. No one over here is getting that booster shot. Maybe we’re being a little too c’est la vie. Oh, no, you watched ‘Teenage Werewolf’?! Crazy. Now I should. I was going o say I did a DeCoteau post, but you beat me to it. Tomorrow I’m restoring an old post about the granddaddy of awful/fun horror movies Mr. Hershell Gordon Lewis if you want to get really down and dirty but silly. ** Right. I decided to spotlight my favorite William Vollman book, and so I have. See you tomorrow.