Category: Uncategorized (Page 73 of 1086)

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Ginger Snaps (2000)
‘When Ginger Snaps, the cult horror-comedy directed by John Fawcett and written by Karen Walton, was released in 2000, it was an outlier among outliers. In a genre oozing with regressive and often outright sexist portrayals of women, Ginger Snaps was a monstrously funny film about two teenage girls whiling away the beige of suburban Bailey Downs. Ginger and Brigitte did this in their own special way: through elaborate tableaux of suicide and death, photographed and presented as a slideshow for a school assignment. These tableaux form the opening title sequence to Ginger Snaps, introducing the world to the Fitzgerald sisters through a masterpiece of title design. These staged scenes are the girls’ ode to and rejection of suburbia, the sequence becoming a mini-text within the film that lays bare their whirling inner lives; their feelings of connection, nihilism, creativity, curiosity, and disillusionment are all there, laid out neatly among the peroxide and lace. The attention to detail in the grisly gestalts is astounding, with references to everything from children’s fairy tales (The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland) and classic literature (Paradise Lost) to obscure dead Russians (Pavel T. Shvetsov) and contemporary cinema (Se7en, Heathers). The music, composed by Mike Shields, features violin and cello and smatterings of giggles, deftly wielding a melancholy that manages to avoid dipping into cornball.’ — Art of the Title

 

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The Dunwich Horror (1970)
‘The Dunwich Horror is a tale of birth and death and terrible creatures. Based on the short story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft, the minimalist graphic title sequence was designed by artist and graphic designer Sandy Dvore. Dvore cut his teeth working with legendary B-movie producer and director Roger Corman, who first courted him after seeing Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) and Dvore’s titles work therein. Skidoo was a light and saucy affair: comedic bickering, singing, boats, sunshine. The Dunwich Horror, on the other hand, takes its cues from the graphic minimalism of the 1960s, Lovecraft, and the terror of the unknowable. His first excursion into graphic animation, the titles to The Dunwich Horror cleverly blend themes from the film through scale and image morphing, each silhouetted form growing and shifting into another. The title sequence acts as prologue and as summary, explaining the cold open of a woman in labour and foreshadowing events to come. The style is reminiscent of leading graphic title designers of the 1960s like Saul and Elaine Bass and Maurice Binder, with hints of Matisse and his Blue Nudes cut-outs.’ — Art of the Title

 

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Trick ‘r Treat (2007)

 

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Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
‘This 1948 horror comedy film is the first of several in which Abbott and Costello, American comedy darlings of the ’40s and early ’50s, meet various characters from the Universal Pictures stable of monsters. This film was originally meant to be titled The Brain of Frankenstein and features no less than three “titans of terror”: Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, and of course, Frankenstein’s monster. Though he was not officially credited, the playfully spooky opening title sequence was designed by Walter Lantz, co-creator of Woody Woodpecker. In 2001, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (the film’s poster title) was inducted into the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress, who deemed it “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It’s considered the last of the American golden age monster films.’ — Art of the Title

 

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This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967)

 

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30 Days of Night (2015)
‘The audience is confronted with a sequence of highly disquieting images that cross-dissolve or fade to black. Details of torn and tainted photographs, northern lights, shadows, a bloody tooth embedded in a thick layer of ice and references to the Alaskan wintercape. Brian Reitzell’s haunting score greatly enhances the discomforting atmosphere. “In production, I built miniature film sets, like details of the houses out of driftwood, soiled carpet, burned wallpaper, anything I could find in skips or on the streets of Soho in London. We asked for photos of cast and family and Sony supplied some, but we sourced most of the pictures or shot our own to look like the town inhabitants. I then filmed plates of these elements along with organic materials to create the vignettes. The time-lapse ice was real but I found treacle to be quite good blood, along with washing powder mixed with course sea salt for snow. Our meeting room was a mess.”’ — MOMOCO

 

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Jigoku (1960)

 

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Videodrome (1983)
‘Videodrome happens to feature one of the most thoroughly effective opening sequences of David Cronenberg’s long career, an opener that would foreshadow the Canadian filmmaker’s frequent and authoritative use of title design to set the stage in subsequent works. Arriving with a hiss, bent and distorted, Videodrome’s bright orange title card coalesces in a storm of static, giving way to a TV station ident: “CIVIC-TV (Channel 83, Cable 12) … THE ONE YOU TAKE TO BED WITH YOU.” The cheerful message is accompanied by the image of a lonely man lying in bed with his television, a teddy bear tucked beneath his hairy arm. These opening moments will tell viewers most of what they need to know about Max Renn (James Woods), the film’s main character — a pioneering television impresario and purveyor of schlock and shock. Renn’s faithful executive assistant Bridey James (without whom it is evident he is completely hopeless) then appears on screen to deliver his docket for Wednesday the 23rd. Month and year unknown. Composer Howard Shore’s dark, electronic score gives Videodrome a foreboding edge right from the get-go, playing over the normally grandiose Universal fanfare. Though overriding the studio bumper is a fairly common practice today, it was an unusual way to kick off a film in the early 1980s. Composed for an orchestra, Shore recorded both a classical arrangement of the soundtrack and a completely digital version programmed into a Synclavier II synthesizer — mixing between the two throughout the film. The latter gradually becomes the more dominant sound as Renn descends further and further into signal-induced madness.’ — The Art of the Title

 

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The Haunted Palace (1963)

 

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Friday the 13th: Part 3 (1982)
‘After the intro sequence where were shown that Jason is still alive, the film goes into this incredibley cheesy but wholly fitting 3D title sequence complete with equally absurd and oddly out of place title music that sounds like something from the late 70’s. You gotta see (and hear) it to believe it.’ — Robot Geek

 

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Jason X (2001)

 

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The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
‘From the very beginning of visualizing the title sequence for The Island of Dr. Moreau, Kyle Cooper knew that the theme of biological mutation would be paramount. Through a series of explorations with storyboard artist Wayne Coe, Cooper honed his sequence from an initial direction of eyes splitting and multiplying as if going through cell mitosis to the final direction, which begins by pulling the viewer through a series of animal irises. In this way, Cooper intimates the film’s plot inter-species biological tinkering gone awry. The resulting sequence is aggressively paced to a driving hip-hop beat, a hallucinatory combination of medical and cellular imagery from a number of stock sources that could possibly pose serious problems to epileptics in the audience. “I usually do things with scissors and scan them in,” says Cooper, who admits to a preference for hands-on, low-tech approaches to projects. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, Cooper uncharacteristically turned to Illustrator for help to pull out the edge points of the credit typefaces to render them figuratively red in tooth and claw. The credits appear at first normal, but then the serifs spike out dangerously and begin to mutate and splinter as if they, too, were going through an out-of-control metamorphosis.’ — Art of the Title

 

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The Omen (1976)

 

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The Fly (1986)

 

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Nosferatu (1979)
‘The titles are written in a fairly bold font, with the key part of each letter being thick, and the other parts of the letter being much thinner. It is fairly uniform and formal, each letter being evenly spread apart. The most important titles such as names have capitalised first letters, and the less important titles such as linking words being written in entirely lower case. It’s noteworthy that the title of the film is capitalised in its entirety to give it additional significance. The white colour, font style and sans font all connote the Gothic atmosphere that the film strives for. In terms of positioning, the text is located in the centre of the screen and is vertically spaced apart enough that the images behind the text is still visible. The visuals primarily serve as background detail during the title sequence, and they are animated with a simple fade in and out.’ — Group 3

 

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Troll 2 (1990)
‘The opening credits of Troll and Troll 2 are almost exactly the same, a Goth aesthetic appearing with a brooding score and a large spooky dark house serving as a sinister backdrop… Both movies have formidable looking manors yet only Troll 2 uses their location throughout. The original manor is hidden by the apartment house that it would become, and ultimately attempt to change back into. And the T2 title sequence cuts literally to the chase, showing a horde of goblins running wild. One main difference in the credits are, of course, the names: the original has real actors the likes of Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hack, Sonny Bono, and others mentioned further in, while the super low-budget sequel is full of no-names, including a real life dentist; all were completely unknown and never heard of again until the documentary brought their unprofessional brilliance to light.’ — Skull Island Surfer

 

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Final Destination (2000)

 

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Final Destination 2 (2003)

 

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Final Destination 3 (2006)
‘Once again, a group of young people narrowly escape death, this time at a carnival. Picture Mill filmed the fortune teller, and created the virtual “Game of Death” to help set up concepts that would be seen later in the feature.’ — Picture Mill

 

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Final Destination 4 (2009)
‘The client’s brief was to create a sequence for the fanboys that used the equity that existed in the deaths of the first three movies within the franchise. For legal reasons we were not allowed to show any of the actors in the previous films, so we almost couldn’t use any of the actual footage from those films. The problem was therefore how to show those very specific deaths without any of the footage. The truth is, even if we were able to use that footage, none of it was shot 3D. The X-ray idea took care of that problem, and conceptually it seemed authentic to the spirit of these movies, to show deaths in new and innovative ways. We then intercut the X-rays with footage from the previous films that did not show any actors, and with footage we shot of our own actors, in exactly the same death scenes. Finally, the whole sequence has a stereoscopic dirt pass, with specks both in and outside of the screen. It also has a grain pass that sits slightly inside of the screen to avoid engaging the screen plane in any way, and so creating a real window to a stereoscopic world.’ — Jarik van Sluijs, Art director

 

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Final Destination 5 (2011)
‘The opening sequence was done by Kyle Cooper who is an amazing title sequence creator and in fact was responsible for the original titles for the movie Se7en. I told Kyle up front, ‘Look, nobody’s done a really good 3D title sequence. I want you to do what you did for the titles in Se7en for that genre, to do the equivalent of in 3D for a 3D movie’…At the same time Brian Tyler did an amazing main score with that complimented the images and those two things I think told the audience right away, ‘strap your seatbelts in, this is gonna be a fun ride.’ — Daniel Rutledge

 

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Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975)
‘The shadow-stabbing murder next to the family Christmas tree will do nicely! Dario Argento does Not like to keep the audience waiting for its first scare.’ — aesthetic of the image

 

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Cabin in the Woods (2011)

 

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Spider Baby (1964)
‘The cackle of Lon Chaney Jr. shatters the silence, and so begins Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told. Cute cartoon caricatures begin to pop up, smiling ear-to-ear like they were made for a bubblegum wrapper. Chaney sings about cannibal spiders, ghouls and skeletons, the song lilting up and down like a bumpy forest road. Illustrations of hearses, spiders, and creepy kids start to pull this parade into Addams Family territory, but even the Addams’ classic jingle doesn’t include the line, “This cannibal orgy is strange to behold in the maddest story ever told!” Cannibal Orgy happened to be the film’s original title, because director Jack Hill thought that sounded funny. In stark contrast to these cartoon cavalcades, a man is stabbed in the eyes in the very first scene, two kitchen knives plunged into his skull by a little girl. Designed by EIP (who still remain a mystery, and director Jack Hill cannot recall), the opening sequence to Spider Baby treats the approaching acts of dismemberment and perversion with all the gravity of a Hanna Barbera cartoon. To dissuade anyone from getting the wrong idea about the scruples of anyone involved with the film, Spider Baby establishes that this is all one nutty punchline, serenaded by a song composed by Ronald Stein (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Haunted Palace), which mentions werewolves and mummies as if the ditty was at one point meant for the animated Mad Monster Party. “We just went into a recording studio and [Chaney] knocked it out,” said Hill. “He had a great time doing it.”’ — Art of the Title

 

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The Haunting (1963)

 

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The Grudge (2004)

 

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Blacula (1972)
‘The opening title sequence to William Crain’s Blacula, designed by Sandy Dvore, is the story of a predator, fluttering alone in a strange and stark world. Amid the rough grain of paper and close-up ink textures, a black bat stalks a round red dot through a maze of white veins. The dot transforms into the crimson figure of a woman and in one small scene after the next, the bat hunts and feeds, taking where it can. This animated sequence appears seven minutes into the film, immediately following a stiff opening prologue, and injects the film with style and levity. Its spirited animation and funkadelic groove aids the film in shifting gears, transitioning from past to present-day Transylvania. The minimalist approach and colour palette harkens back to the graphic execution of Dvore’s previous title design effort for The Dunwich Horror. The genres of horror and Blaxploitation experienced a great crossover in the early- to mid-1970s, resulting in a number of Blaxploitation horror films, but the first and most often remembered is still Blacula. It was so successful that the studio, American International Pictures, produced a sequel immediately. Scream Blacula Scream, released only 10 months later in 1973, also bore a title sequence designed by Sandy Dvore.’ — Art of the Title

 

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Candyman (1992)

 

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CHROMESKULL: Laid to Rest (2011)

 

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Psycho (1960)

 

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Zombieland (2009)
‘The rules and title sequence evolved separately, but in the end came to a more understated simple approach. The goal was to integrate the type into the film and propel the narrative without becoming heavy-handed. The film is essentially a comedy, and we felt that punctuating the humor with a simple typographic approach was the way to go. As the concept for the title sequence evolved, the marriage between type and image became more apparent. Certain shots that at first felt perfect in an initial edit found a new place as the type began to take shape. The interactive animation of the type first started with the rules and eventually made their way into the main title sequence. We wanted to seamlessly integrate the type into the scene, making the type become another character. We were inspired by the tension between beauty and horror that the slow motion footage created. The goal for the type was to respond to that horrific grace, to react to the movement. First our lead designer, James Wang, set the type; this was then handed off to our 3D team who would model and texture the type. After the modeling and texturing was in good shape it would be handed off to an animator to apply the motion. During this time a lighting artist would be applying looks, eventually the animation would be approved and the lighting would be further polished until finalized. This particular job was accomplished using the requisite Adobe suite of tools and Maya. Our pipeline was essential in accomplishing this job, a labor of love that creates an ease of use for the creative team while being simple enough for production to effectively do their job.’ — Ben Conrad, Creative Director

 

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Night of the Living Dead (1968)

 

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The Ward (2010)
‘In clever shadow play, the title type is the very thing you pass in the darkness that makes your blood run cold. With shifting shards and a spine-tingling soprano, the opening titles to John Carpenter’s The Ward create a graceful unease. Fractal lobotomies and fractured woodcut prints fly, the images depicting men and women wracked to the tools of torture. We are shown the early days of mental health practices in which similar and yet more evil devices were used to “cure.” The designers, Gareth Smith and Jenny Lee, known for their work on Up in the Air and Juno, exacerbate the already robust sense of dread that exists regarding the sensed helplessness. The system is broken. The shards cut deep.’ — Art of the Title

 

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Re-Animator (1985)

 

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Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

 

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Halloween (1978)
‘John Carpenter’s menacing theme for Halloween sends some into a panic and some smiling. Composed and performed by the man himself, Carpenter’s influences were Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone, with whom Carpenter worked on The Thing. The opening sequence shares some similarities with a film that Carpenter adores, Roy Ward Baker’s Quatermass and the Pit. The sequence plays like a blackhearted processional we’d like to writhe away from but the pull of this simpleton’s grin has us ensnared. A flicker to contemplate and a well-timed fade to black leave only Carpenter’s credit and his music. And our eyes, open with fear.’ — Art of the Title

 

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Halloween II (1981)
‘The opening title sequence is similar to the opening of Halloween. There is a pumpkin of the left hand side of the screen and credits on the right. As the credits go by the camera zooms in on the pumpkin. the difference this time around is that as the camera zooms in the pumpkin slowly opens up to reveal a skull inside of it. By this sequence the audience is told that the movie is going to be related to Halloween in some way, by the pumpkin. And that the movie is going to deal with death, by the skull inside. What makes it effective is that it starts out like the original does, making people think it is going to be just like the original but it grabs their attention by having something happen, opening up the pumpkin to reveal a skull. This tells them to not expect this to be a copy of the original, that there will be some surprises in store for them.’ — halloween2horror

 

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Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
‘I mean, up to this point in my career, I had specialized in creating animation that looked like it was computer generated. What I actually used were animation cameras, lithographic negatives, colored gels, etc to create the effect of computer animation. However, for this project, I did it for real — I made the decision to actually use a computer to generate the animation. So I purchased my first graphics machine, a Z-2D system made by Cromemco, and entered the world of digital animation. The Halloween III animation was fairly simple. I enlarged the logo that production used for their TV spots and had it printed out on a grid. That made it simple to manually generate X and Y data for the logo. The program that animated the reveal of the scan lines was written in Fortran. I could control the speed of the lines as they animated onto the screen, and did several detail animations of different parts of the logo, as well as the entire pumpkin. The animation was basic enough that we could shoot it off the display monitor in real time. My friend and later business partner Greg McMurry helped us sync up the monitor to the film camera. One interesting aspect of shooting the graphic was that Tommy wanted some occasional static and video breakup to it. This posed a problem, since the monitor we were using was being fed directly from the computer, and it produced a consistent, stable image no matter what we tried. What we ended up doing was piping the video through the wireless link of a Steadicam monitor system. We added video glitches by messing with the antenna system on the unit!’ — John Walsh, Designer

 

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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
‘Halloween 4‘s opening moments more than effectively convey the vibe of a small town Halloween and the feel of those glorious autumn months, as leaves blow past the screen and various different decorations and harvest-related items are seen, laden with the movie’s title and credits. In only a minute’s time, without a single word being spoken, it’s clear that we’re once again back in Haddonfield, and the intended atmosphere is very much felt – just as it is throughout the movie. The simple score of doom suddenly begins sounding a whole lot more familiar as the action begins, signaling the long-awaited return of Michael Myers.’ — Halloween Love

 

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Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
‘There are a great many moments that don’t make sense in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, but the first instance of confusion comes directly after the “Moustapha Akkad Presents” title card flashes across the screen. It’s here that the film’s title is revealed, but according to the opening of the movie, its title is simply Halloween 5. There isn’t a “Revenge” or a “Michael Myers” in sight. I always found this odd.’ — Consequence of Sound

 

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Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
‘The beginning of this movie features a good two minutes or so of opening credits with orange text against a black backdrop with the classic Carpenter score playing in the background. There was no ingenuity, there was nothing to it. Basic as anything can get. Even Halloween 5 had a pretty cool opening title sequence. I asked myself, how lazy can some people be?’ — ohmb.net

 

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The Conjuring (2013)
‘Welcome to Parapsychology 101, ladies and gentlemen. Employing overhead projectors and viewfoil, Becker Design takes audiences through an unsettlingly academic post-mortem of Director James Wan’s The Conjuring. Smiling family portraits, faded newspaper clippings, and photo negatives are clinically presented by an unseen lecturer. As shadowy fingers move transparencies in and out of frame, layering on the creep factor with each new sheet of acetate, subtle, sometimes troubling changes can be observed. For many, the decidedly analog presentation of The Conjuring’s main-on-end title sequence will evoke memories of darkened classrooms and dull lectures. Joseph Bishara’s disquieting score, however, will drum up a baser instinct — the musical equivalent to the hair on the back of your neck standing up. This blending of the ordinary and terrible, the mundane and the malevolent, serves as a fitting endnote to one of the most infamous paranormal investigations in recent memory.’ — Art of the Title

 

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Insidious (2006)
‘In the beginning of the title sequence for Insidious the camera tracks down on a lamp, we then see the camera tilt and the text tilt the opposite way. This makes the setting seem “off” and makes the viewer uneasy about what we see. The camera tracks down and moves along a boy’s bedroom. The high angle in the shot along with how the camera moves(slowly) make it seem like someone is watching the oy and we are looking from that perspective. The camera continues to track along down a hallway where we see a woman in the dark holding a candle. We don’t see who this is at first and the camera moves in slowly, all in one shot, to create tension. This tells us that it is a thriller or a horror movie. The next thing we see is the title pop up and flicker in the darkness. The typeface used looks evil because it looks like it has forked tips like a snake’s tongue or the devil’s tongue/horns. The text is also red like blood and sharp and pointed like blades. After the title, the rest of the sequence is shots of parts of the house, the shots are often from a really low or high angle or from behind a corner to nake it seem like someone is sneaking around the house. The shots are very dark toward the edges in a vignette style, this is used to make the shots seem claustraphobic and to also obscure the viewers vision to create tension, the viewer doesn’t know what is going on around them. The soundtrack in this sequence is eerie and sounds like a slow screeching. When the title for the film comes up the screeching gets more intense and then dies down and gets slower again for the rest of the sequence. The soundtrack fits well because it creates tension, it builds up and crescendos at the title to shock the viewer.’ — Charlie Mead’s Media Blog

 

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Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

 

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Midnight Movie (2008)

 

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Alien (1979)
‘We float over a planet as white forms appear, dismembered. They work their way from the outside in, everything pointing to the centre. That is where they come from — the middle of you. As the pieces come together, forming a word denoting, in the most basic of terms, The Other, we are enveloped in a steady and dark tension. This was Richard and Robert Greenberg’s second major film project as a company, R/Greenberg Associates. The first, the teaser and opening title sequence to 1978’s Superman, gave them a start, but their second, Alien, established them as a creative voice. In this opening sequence, a disjointed version of Helvetica Black is used to instill a sense of foreboding, the letters broken into pieces, the space between them unsettling. This usage of type, in which letters are simultaneously message and medium, a lens through which ideas are both displayed and distorted, as structure and as obstruction, is a motif to which Title Designer Richard Greenberg would return again and again.’ — Art of the Title

 

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The Wicker Man (1973)

 

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The Taint (2010)

 

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Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
‘The opening title sequence is undeniably haunting and evocative. It begins with a few sharp keys on the piano and then fades into Krzystof Komeda’s chilling main theme, with Mia Farrow providing the vocals. Mia begins to sing the la-la-la’s, and the viewer is instantly unnerved. While the theme plays, the camera pans over an establishing shot of New York’s Upper West Side. We follow this shot as it transitions from hard, brown New York buildings to soft, bushy greenery in Central Park, then slowly to a closer composition of one peculiar building that is slowly revealed to be the Dakota/Bramford. Throughout the sequence, the superimposed credits are a bright, pink, and swirly cursive with all the flourish and girlishness of the young Rosemary. You somehow, oddly, get the impression that this is her handwriting. This credit sequence establishes not only the role of the building itself in the narrative, but also a central theme of Rosemary’s Baby: the juxtaposition and eventual marriage of the masculine and feminine. The aesthetic of the score and credits offer typical representations of the feminine, flouncy and blushing, while the buildings are sturdy, ruddy representations of the masculine. These two are amalgamated in the ornate yet rigid Dakota/Bramford. Like Rosemary, a stylish gal-about-town carrying the child of Satan in her womb, the building comprises both hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine attributes. Finally, if you freeze frame around the 1:40 mark, the elaborate “Written for the Screen and Directed by Roman Polanski” credit briefly rests atop the Dakota/Bramford building, appearing like a shiny bow wrapped around the building.’ — Examined Media

 

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The Thing (1982)
‘When I did the effect for the title I used… a fish tank that was about four feet wide by two feet high. I put smoke in the fish tank and on the back of the tank I put the title that was drawn on an animation cel and behind that I had a piece of plastic garbage bag which I stretched over a frame and behind that I had a light pointing through the letters. When I photographed it, I put a flame from a match to the plastic. The plastic would open up and let the light through the letters. That is how the letters look like they form and burn on with the [light] rays. It was a simple process but we went through a lot of takes; one take only formed the letters “N.G.”’ — Peter Kuran, Designer

 

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Dead Silence (2007)

 

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The Blob (1958)

 

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Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)
‘Ah, rubber-faced Ernest P. Worrell. With your denim vest and baseball cap, you regaled a generation of children and their parents from the late ’80s and well into the ’90s. The fourth film to star Jim Varney’s Ernest character, Ernest Scared Stupid (also known as “Ernest Saves Halloween”) sees our hapless hero battle an army of monstrous trolls in order to save a small town on Halloween. Scared Stupid’s opening sequence perfectly zeroes in on that intersection of base physicality and esoteric film knowledge. Varney’s facial contortions are intercut with a slew of clips from vintage horror and science fiction films and shots featuring the limbs of various creatures (likely designed by the Chiodo Brothers), creating a montage that was modern in its use of typography and live-action while harking back to its campy influences. The clips include such classics as Nosferatu (1922), White Zombie (1932), Phantom from Space (1953), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), The Screaming Skull (1958), Missile to the Moon (1958), The Hideous Sun Demon (1959), The Giant Gila Monster (1959), The Killer Shrews (1959), Battle Beyond the Sun, and the Roger Corman-directed black comedy The Little Shop of Horrors (1960).’ — Art of the Title

 

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Dracula (1931)

 

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Le Frisson des Vampires (1971)

 

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Signs (2002)
‘A sibilant breath is slowly drawn across catgut: in and out, up and down the strings of a violin. Matching the sighing notes of the unseen fiddler, a light diffuses out of the shadows before dissolving again — a malfunctioning flashlight in a darkened farmer’s field? Whistled by winds and bleated by horns, a frantic three-note motif replaces the calm respiration. Something is out there in the blackness. Bold words are glimpsed fleetingly in the flickering light, like names shouted into the empty night. Employing only text, light, and shadow — along with James Newton Howard’s alarming and Hermannesque main theme — the title sequence for M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs relentlessly increases the tension before anything remotely suspenseful has even happened. Though it finishes on a name now synonymous with cinematic twists, Picture Mill’s main titles have a gleefully old fashioned tone that lays the groundwork for Shyamalan’s surprisingly twist-free scary movie opus.’ — Art of the Title

 

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The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

 

 

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p.s. Hey. A couple of people told me that they’ve been having trouble commenting here in the last few days. Nothing seems to be amiss on this end, so hopefully it was just some glitch, but if people keep having problems, let me know and I’ll investigate further. Sorry. ** jay, ‘Tis. All right, I’ll see if I can take a little tour of Sims 4 and get the lay of its land. I’m good with vegan material shaped like old fashion meat products. I ate veggie dogs just last night. What I don’t like is that new type that appeared in the last few years where they give the ‘meat’ fake blood and a meaty smell. Those make me nauseous. But I go back and forth between vegetarian and vegan, so that might make a difference? Get yourself a Consumptive Poet TikTok channel, and maybe it will. Later gator. ** kier, Yes, apparently. Mine is better but, boy, it’s really taking its sweet time becoming my good old ear that I never even have to think about. Mine doesn’t hurt, it’s just clogged and the clog kind of, I don’t know, tickles or something. Is the application for anything potentially exciting? How is your work going? What’s going on? Zac’s bike should be approaching Paris right about now, but it’s supposed to start pouring rain in about an hour, poor him. But I should be able to blow him your kiss from a foot away pretty soon. Tons of love from me! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Moving that book up the stack is not a bad idea. Let me know if that trauma book is worth pursuing. Sometimes I like to chew on toothpicks, so hopefully love can work his magic with bits of wood too. Surely. Love replacing the act of birth with really cool opening credits, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s a beaut. Yay! Double yay! About your story. I’ve never heard that phrase ‘broken the duck’. That is an odd one. Maybe you could write a story about a guy breaking a duck. ** Diesel Clementine, Hello, Diesel’s husband. It’s a fine thing to get to meet you and replace Diesel’s hintings with flesh and blood. Or with type at least. I’m so sorry about your gran. It sounds like her life was a rich, strange one, which I guess would be all of ours lives’ goal. Mine was a taxidermist and painter who believed I had been a bear in one of my past lives and called me Denny Bear. Thank you so kindly for the kind words. I wil try to keep eeking out appealing words. Take care. Hope to see you again sometime. xD. ** HaRpEr in Blogland, Hi. Nice name, actually. Yeah, some people seem to be having problems commenting, but I can’t figure out why. Wow, you found a video of ‘A Couple…’ I wonder why I couldn’t find that. Thank you, I haven’t seen it in ages, and I suspect the low quality was there from the outset. Great luck with the ideas coming up phase. I’m bouncy if you need something to bounce ideas off of. True, true, about ‘Autoportait’, and, as usual, beautifully put. His last novel ‘Suicide’ is great too, although much heavier. (He killed himself immediately upon finishing it.) ** nat, Hey, nat. Wow, weird and interesting, that it was your first book. Quite a decent start. Obviously, I hope you like the Kristof. Fairly quiet here too. All hail the uneventful, I guess. ** Okay. Maybe it was my fucked up ear, but I thought today’s post was a good and interesting idea for a post apparently. And I still kind of think so, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. Anyway, please give it a shot. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

‘It is inevitable that we spend the majority of our time thinking about ourselves, but what kinds of thoughts do we think? Our tendency, I would argue, is for the repetitive and the haphazard; we reflect on those aspects of ourselves that come to mind most commonly—the foods we like to eat, what we think of the daily commute, how we would prefer to make love—and we reflect on those things that occasion forces us to—the trials and strong experiences that we cannot help but break apart within the crucible of our minds. This way of considering self is not limited to our real lives. In the realm of the imagination, that of great works of literature, the protagonists’ thoughts tend to stick to a few worn paths, leaving entire modes of experience that are never described. We know what Leopold Bloom thinks when on the toilet, but what of those many parts of life that he never visits in his one Dublin day? Of those things, which make up the great majority of Bloom’s life, Ulysses is silent.

‘Autoportrait by Edouard Levé is notable for attempting to say all the things about a person that are not usually said. The book is simply a series of declarative sentences that lasts for 117 pages. The sentences are all ostensibly about Levé himself; they lack any discernable order and they are contained within one book-length paragraph. They seem to include every genre of thing that could be said about a person, ranging from the factual (“I have never filed a complaint with the police.”) to the oddly pointless (“I do not foresee making love with an animal.”) to the philosophical (“I wonder whether the landscape is shaped by the road, or the road by the landscape.”) to the bizarre (“On the Internet I become telepathic.”) to the psychoanalytic (“Whether it’s because I was tired of looking at them, or for lack of space, I felt a great relief when I burned my paintings.”) to the comic and confessional: “On the street I checked my watch while I was holding a can of Coke in my left hand, I poured part of it down my pants, by chance nobody saw, I have told no one.” Throughout, Levé touches on more topics than we are conditioned to expect from a single book: childhood, politics, sex, art, death, depression, fears, hopes, reading, walking, nature, sartorial preferences, Spanish cafes, scruples about talking too much, rubber boots, the effect of a cane on one’s appearance, and the fear that one’s vocabulary is shrinking are just a small number of the topics included. In fact, the book’s exceptionally mercurial demeanor means that with nearly every sentence Autoportrait shifts to a new facet of life.

‘To structure a book without structure is, of course, to invite accusations of bad faith. But the totality of Levé’s oeuvre convinces that his use of chaos is not out of laziness or obstinacy but is rather an expression of some deeper logic. Levé was both a writer and a photographer, and all of his written and photographic books are made in the way that Autoportrait is made: without form, in rigorous adherence to conceits that Levé attempts to exhaust. Thus his previously translated work, Suicide, a book about a man’s suicide, is written in what he calls a “stochastic” order, “like picking marbles out of a bag.” Narrated by a friend of the suicide, the book seems to simply exhaust all that the narrator knows of his deceased chum. Autoportrait similarly exhausts all that Levé can say about himself, or, at least, all that he can say for the purposes of this self-portrait.

‘As with Suicide, the prose in Autoportrait is so clean and generally immaculate that when Levé does misplace a word, it jars. (As Jan Steyn did with Suicide, here translator Loren Stein has done Levé a true service; one wonders which homophone for Steyn/Stein will bring Levé’s third book into English.) The book gives the pleasure of aphorism, not so much for the content (though often that is the case as well) as for the rigid way the sentences snap together, leaving behind a sensation of inevitability. Stein is to be given great credit for economical phrasings that are pulled satisfyingly taut by the weight of their last word. Levé’s musings have an odd power to inspire self-examination; sentences like “I remember what people tell me better than what I said” are powerful invitations to consider one’s own practices. Throughout, the book conveys a pleasing air of levity and whimsicality, perhaps simply for the forthrightness of the prose, no matter whether it discusses trivial traits or life-and-death questions.

‘As good as the sentences are individually, how do they fit together? Pointillism is a word frequently associated with Levé’s prose (a characterization encouraged by the two covers of his English-language translations, both taken from Levé’s illustrations of himself). It’s not a bad word to use with his work. Each sentence feels like its own little dab of semantics, independent of the surrounding sentences though also related in some murky way that should be grasped if we could get far enough away from the text. This sense solid overall construction is abetted by the titles of Levé’s four prose works, which are each single, solid words that imply some object of study that they amount to: “self-portrait,” “suicide,” “works,” and “newspaper.” At very rare times the text even seems to indicate something about itself: “I am making an effort to specialize in me,” Levé tells us out of nowhere on page 81. At other times the text agglutinates quite magnificently, as in this stretch:

‘I will never know how many books I have read. Raymond Roussel, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Antonio Tabucchi, André Breton, Oliver Cadiot, Jorge Luis Borges, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Ghérasim Luca, Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Joe Brainard, Roberto Juarroz, Guy Debord, Fernando Pessoa, Jack Kerouac, La Rouchefoucauld, Baltasar Gracian, Roland Barthes, Walt Whitman, Nathalie Quintane, the Bible, and Bret Easton Ellis all matter to me. I have read less of the Bible than of Marcel Proust. I prefer Nathalie Quintane to Baltasar. Guy Debord matters more to me than Roland Barthes. Roberto Juarroz makes me laugh more than Andy Warhol. Jack Keuroac makes me want to live more than Charles Baudelaire. La Rochefoucauld depresses me less than Bret Easton Ellis. Olivier Cadiot cheers me up more than André Breton. Joe Brainard is less affirmative than Walt Whitman. Raymond Roussel surprises me more than Baltasar Gracian, but Baltasar Gracian makes me more intelligent. Gertrude Stein writes texts more nonsensical than those of Jorge Luis Borges. I read Bret Easton Ellis more easily on the train than Raymond Roussel. I know Jacques Roubaud less well than Georges Perec. Ghérasim Luca is the most full of despair. I don’t see the connection between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Antonio Tabucchi. When I make lists of names, I dread the ones I forget.

‘I like how these sentences glow with the heat of thought, as though Levé wrote them all down in a fit. They stand out as a little tangle of thought, a sudden desire to pin down something that remains at arm’s length. Although this list tells us surprisingly little that we can grab on to as fact, what it most connotes is a sensation that Levé has both barely begun to exhaust a subject and said all that he wants to say about it. It is a sensation felt throughout Autoportrait. Levé’s portrait ultimately points us not to him as a person so much as the limits of what a portrait can express, and why we have generally chosen paint ourselves into certain cherished forms.

‘By breaking out of these forms and remaining silent on his choice to do so, Levé forces us to take on the role of ethnologist. This is where Autoportrait most strongly resembles graphic art. All points of entry to the text are equally valid; the text feels that it is happening all at the same time, instead of passing through time as the book is read from front to back. It doesn’t recruit a reader’s intellect in the sense of most challenging literature—which requires readers to fill out subtleties of plot, social interaction, and occasionally grammar—it asks the reader to say what is beneath the slick surface of each sentence.

‘Such a form will likely make many readers uncomfortable, as it entirely ignores those requirements asked of long works of prose. Its apparent simplicity also invites the accusation that anyone could make a similar book. To these remarks I have only one good response: the book proved far more engrossing than most books I have read this year, and it has given rise to far more thought and discussion. As a writer and an artist Levé constantly upended expectations with the simplest of gestures, as he has done here. Autoportrait is another small gem from a writer of great talent and originality.’ — Scott Esposito, The Millions

 

____
Further

Edouard Leve @ Dalkey Archive Press
Edouard Leve @ Editions POL
‘Happiness, Sadness, Death’
‘How Works Works’
Edouard Leve @ goodreads
‘533 Ideas: The conceptual, playful, maddening books of Édouard Levé’
‘On reading Edouard Levé’s Suicide’
‘Reconstitutions D’un Journal: Sur Edouard Leve’
‘The Death of Sophistication: A Review of Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait’
’25 Points: Autoportrait’
‘Suicide’ reviewed @ Bookworm
‘The Intentional Fallacy and Edouard Leve’s Suicide’
‘I can’t help wondering how Édouard Levé spent his last days.’
Buy ‘Autoportrait’

 

____
Extras

Edouard Levé reads from “Oeuvres”

Hervé Loevenbruck at EDOUARD LEVE exhibit

Edouard Levé au MAC

PERFORMANCE ” OEUVRES ” D’APRES EDOUARD LEVE

 

______
Photography

‘Before Suicide, Levé was better known as a conceptual photographer than a writer. His photographs were often composed scenes that were not as transparent as their titles would suggest, as in his collection Pornography in which models, fully clothed, contort into sexual positions, or his collection Rugby, a series of photographs of men in business attire playing the titular sport. In both, the photos represent an action but are not the real thing. As Jan Steyn points out in the Afterward to Suicide: “We cannot see such images and naively believe in the objective realism to which photography all too easily lays claim: we no longer take such photos to show the truth.”’ — Jason DeYoung

 

_____
Interview with Jan Steyn
translator of Levé’s Suicide

 

Scott Esposito: Could you give us some sense of Edouard Levé the writer and artist? Obviously the fact of him committing suicide 10 days after handing in this manuscript makes a great lede, but it shouldn’t overshadow his photographic/literary endeavors. As I understand them, there’s a remarkable unity there, and they’re all very interesting.

Jan Steyn: I was one of the few readers of Suicide who didn’t know about the author’s own decision to end his life before reading the book. Suicide is quite shocking even without this back story, not least because it is written in the second person, addressed to “you,” the friend who committed suicide.

Levé left us a small, distinguished, body of work: Oeuvres (2002), Journal (2004), Autoportrait (2005), Suicide (2008), and his photographs. I think you are right to point to the “unity” of these works. Levé did not start off as a writer and photographer. He attended a prestigious business school and then tried his hand at painting first. But I think all his subsequent work shares an aesthetic with, and are (sometimes quite explicitly) announced by, Oeuvres. That book consists of a numbered list of 533 projects, some of which Levé went on to undertake. It is as if he sat down and decided, “This is the kind of work I want to do,” and then made a meta-work out of this list and, in a recursive gesture, added the meta-work to the list.

None of his books, not even Suicide, delivers a straight-up narrative with a beginning, middle and end. They are frequently compared to pointillist paintings, but perhaps it would be more useful to compare them to his own photographic series: a sequence of similar but discrete elements that add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Autoportrait consists of a long list of facts about the author recounted in no apparent order; the narrator of Suicide remembers his friend ‘at random’; the works in Oeuvres could be described in any sequence; the stories in Journal are only arranged by which section of the newspaper they would appear in. Each fact, memory, work or newspaper article is self-contained, but each also helps build a picture of the author, the dead friend, the artist or the newspaper (and hence the current state of the world).

SE: How did you discover Suicide?

JS: I first read Suicide in 2009. I had just finished my translation of Alix’s Journal and was casting about for my next project. The good folks at Dalkey suggested I take a look at some of the French books they were considering. Suicide was one of these. I read it in one sitting. I immediately knew this book merited translation and wanted to be the one to do it.

SE: Levé himself describes the structure of Suicide in the pages of the book; in your translation, he says that it is composed of “stochastic details, like picking marbles out of a bag.” While I see a lot of truth to that statement, I thought it was somewhat belied by the suicide itself, which has an uncanny power to impose a narrative on a life, and which I thought was imposing a kind of order on the book. Your thoughts?

JS: I would sooner say the suicide imposes a meaning than a narrative on life. Far from imposing an order on the book, it is the element that allows the book to be episodic while still having an undeniable coherence.

The narrator uses the marble metaphor to describe the way that he remembers his dead friend: not in a coherent narrative with a beginning, middle and end, but in fragments that come to him in no discernible order. This metaphor could certainly be extended to the composition of the book, Suicide, but only if we also extend what it would mean to “remember” someone. For much of what is recounted in Suicide, the narrator isn’t himself present as a witness and is inventing as much as he is remembering. Perhaps memory always entails an element of invention, but at times he recounts in detail entire episodes that he could only have had the scantest evidence for.

That said, there are two things about the ordering of Suicide that are obviously not “stochastic.” It begins with the scene of the suicide itself, and it ends with a poem, not by the narrator, but by the dead friend. Only after introducing the suicide itself can the narrator flit between the years before and the years after his friend’s death knowing that each episode is tied to this first one. And only at the very end, outside the stream of the narrator’s memory and invention, do we get the (in my opinion rather anticlimactic) poem that gives us the voice of the friend.

SE: I’ve read Levé described as a follower of Oulipo, and certainly the influence comes out in Suicide. Do you know what (if any) was his relationship to the group?

JS: I am regrettably ignorant of Levé’s biography outside of what is publicly available. The Oulipoian influence on him is clear from the work itself though. He starts of Autoportrait with a reference to Perec, who of course also wrote a novel in the second person. Each of Levé’s works, both literary and photographic, exercises the formal limitations Oulipo is known for. But I’m afraid I don’t know if he attended meetings or had friends in the Oulipo.

SE: Can you tell us anything about Levé’s death? I’ve read that he had contemplated suicide for at least a year before writing Suicide, and that he had even constructed a mock-up of himself being hanged (his eventual mode of suicide) in order to photograph it. [Note: in addition to being an author, Levé was an equally successful and innovative photographer.]

JS: I’ve read the same things you have, and I don’t know any more. In a way, I’m not sure that I want to know more either. I completely understand why the reception of the book has been determined by the author’s suicide, which does cast quite a different light on it. But my fear is that it distracts from the book. I agonized over whether I should even mention Levé’s suicide in my foreword. Eventually I decided to mention it, but to go with an afterword: a gesture that was completely wasted since the blurb on the back (not by me) asserts that the book must be read as a kind of suicide note.

SE: I’d like to get a sense of the translation challenges involved in this book. This will be hard to describe to someone who hasn’t read the book, but the feeling of precision to Levé’s language is intense–I’ve read that he was a perfectionist, but that doesn’t begin to describe the sheer sense of precision that comes across in your translation. As I read, I felt that this sensation reaches a high point in the poetry at the end of the book, where the lines can be as short as 3 or 4 words yet communicate much subtlety and meaning through their arrangement and word choice.What was your experience translating it?

JS: You are right that Levé’s language is usually clinically precise. But there are exceptions, passages that have a slightly out-of-control romantic feel. I am thinking of the passage where the narrator recalls “you” riding on horseback through a thunderstorm. My guiding principle throughout was to avoid the temptation to “improve” Levé’s prose or to try to make it more consistent. A translator is not an editor.

The poem was especially tricky, partly because, as the old saw goes, poetry is that which is untranslatable, but also because of the form of this particular poem. In my translation, nearly every line ends with the word “me,” which is not the case in the French. What I hoped to retain was the incantatory rhythm of repe
tition and near-repetition. That and the precision of meaning.

SE: One final question: Obviously the facts surrounding this book are going to color the way people look at it, but as I read it for myself I was struck by how easy it was to let go of all that. It didn’t feel like a suicide note, or an expression of depression, or anything like that so much as an enigma. I would say that it wasn’t a book about suicide so much as an art object with suicide as its theme. What is your impression of what this book is “about,” or, rather, what kind of a reading of this book would you give?

JS: I like the idea that Suicide is an “enigma,” and I certainly prefer that to anything as reductive as the idea that Suicide is a straightforward suicide note. And, like you, I prefer thinking of it as a work, to thinking of it as an explanation. It is a question, not an answer.

Yet Levé’s work, especially Autoportrait, actively thematizes the relation between the artwork and the life (and death) of the author. So it is not surprising that people look to the details of Levé’s life, and death, for an explanation. This need to find an explanation is not something external to the work but rather produced by the work itself. I think of it more as a case of art spilling out into life than of life contaminating the purity of the artwork. In as far as Suicide is a good enigma, it should leave its readers puzzled, the way the wife, mother, father and friends of the ‘you’ character are left puzzled.

If Suicide is an enigma, it is not because it is in any way murky or obscure in its treatment of its topic. Quite the contrary. It gets its force as an enigma from the clarity of its prose and its unblinking narrator.

But you are asking me to interpret the book, or to give you a reading, which I suppose I could do, but not as a translator. My role as translator is the opposite one. I do not pair down or exclude possible meanings. I try to keep all the possible “solutions,” even those which would ultimately prove false solutions, alive within the English text. I am the guardian of the enigma. The sphinx, not the hero.

 

__
Book

Edouard Levé Autoportrait
Dalkey Archive Press

‘In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond “sincerity,” Leve works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Leve’s prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine–until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author’s dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction… made entirely of facts.’ — DAP

____
Excerpt
from The Paris Review

When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal. When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks. I archive. I joke about death. I do not love myself. I do not hate myself. My rap sheet is clean. To take pictures at random goes against my nature, but since I like doing things that go against my nature, I have had to make up alibis to take pictures at random, for example, to spend three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country: Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Jericho, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Syracuse, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta, Bagdad.

I would rather be bored alone than with someone else. I roam empty places and eat in deserted restaurants. I do not say “A is better than B” but “I prefer A to B.” I never stop comparing. When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you’re still traveling, but not really. I sing badly, so I don’t sing. I had an idea for a Dream Museum. I do not believe the wisdom of the sages will be lost. I once tried to make a book-museum of vernacular writing, it reproduced handwritten messages from unknown people, classed by type: flyers about lost animals, justifications left on windshields for parking cops to avoid paying the meter, desperate pleas for witnesses, announcements of a change in management, office messages, home messages, messages to oneself. I cannot sleep beside someone who moves around, snores, breathes heavily, or steals the covers. I can sleep with my arms around someone who doesn’t move. I have attempted suicide once, I’ve been tempted four times to attempt it. The distant sound of a lawn mower in summer brings back happy childhood memories. I am bad at throwing. I have read less of the Bible than of Marcel Proust. Roberto Juarroz makes me laugh more than Andy Warhol. Jack Kerouac makes me want to live more than Charles Baudelaire. La Rochefoucauld depresses me less than Bret Easton Ellis. Joe Brainard is less affirmative than Walt Whitman. I know Jacques Roubaud less well than Georges Perec. Gherasim Luca is the most full of despair. I don’t see the connection between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Antonio Tabucchi. When I make lists of names, I dread the ones I forget. From certain angles, tanned and wearing a black shirt, I can find myself handsome. I find myself ugly more often than handsome. I like my voice after a night out or when I have a cold. I am unacquainted with hunger. I was never in the army. I have never pulled a knife on anyone. I have never used a machine gun. I have fired a revolver. I have fired a rifle. I have shot an arrow. I have netted butterflies. I have observed rabbits. I have eaten pheasants. I recognize the scent of a tiger. I have touched the dry head of a tortoise and an elephant’s hard skin. I have caught sight of a herd of wild boar in a forest in Normandy. I ride. I do not explain. I do not excuse. I do not classify. I go fast. I am drawn to the brevity of English, shorter than French. I do not name the people I talk about to someone who doesn’t know them, I use, despite the trouble of it, abstract descriptions like “that friend whose parachute got tangled up with another parachute the time he jumped.” I prefer going to bed to getting up, but I prefer living to dying. I look more closely at old photographs than contemporary ones, they are smaller, and their details are more precise. I have noticed that, on the keypads of Parisian front doors, the 1 wears out the fastest. I’m not ashamed of my family, but I do not invite them to my openings. I have often been in love. I love myself less than I have been loved. I am surprised when someone loves me. I do not consider myself handsome just because a woman thinks so. My intelligence is uneven. My amorous states resemble one another, and those of other people, more than my works resemble one another, or those of other people. I have never shared a bank account. A friend once remarked that I seem glad when guests show up at my house but also when they leave. I do not know how to interrupt an interlocutor who bores me. I have good digestion. I love summer rain. I have trouble understanding why people give stupid presents. Presents make me feel awkward, whether I am the giver or the receiver, unless they are the right ones, which is rare. Although I am self-employed, I observe the weekend. I have never kissed a lover in front of my parents. I do not have a weekend place because I do not like to open and then shut a whole lot of shutters over the course of two days. I have not hugged a male friend tight. I have not seen the dead body of a friend. I have seen the dead bodies of my grandmother and my uncle. I have not kissed a boy. I used to have sex with women my own age, but as I got older they got younger. I do not buy used shoes. I have made love on the roof of the thirtieth floor of a building in Hong Kong. I have made love in the daytime in a public garden in Hong Kong. I have made love in the toilet of the Paris–Lyon TGV. I have made love in front of some friends at the end of a very drunken dinner. I have made love in a staircase on the avenue Georges-Mandel. I have made love to a girl at a party at six in the morning, five minutes after asking, without any preamble, if she wanted to. I have made love standing up, sitting down, lying down, on my knees, stretched out on one side or the other. I have made love to one person at a time, to two, to three, to more. I have smoked hashish and opium, I have done poppers, I have snorted cocaine. I find fresh air more intoxicating than drugs. I smoked my first joint at age fourteen in Segovia, a friend and I had bought some “chocolate” from a guard in the military police, I couldn’t stop laughing and I ate the leaves of an olive tree. I smoked several joints in the bosom of my grammar school, the Collège Stanislas, at the age of fifteen. The girl whom I loved the most left me. At ten I cut my finger in a flour mill. At six I broke my nose getting hit by a car. At fifteen I skinned my hip and -elbow falling off a moped, I had decided to defy the street, riding with no hands, looking backward. I broke my thumb skiing, after flying ten meters and landing on my head, I got up and saw, as in a cartoon, circles of birthday candles turning in the air and then I fainted. I have not made love to the wife of a friend. I do not love the sound of a family on the train. I am uneasy in rooms with small windows. Sometimes I realize that what I’m in the middle of saying is boring, so I just stop talking. Art that unfolds over time gives me less pleasure than art that stops it. Even if it is an odd sort of present, I thank my father and mother for having given me life.

I believe the people who make the world are the ones who do not believe in reality, for example, for centuries, the Christians. There are times in my life when I overuse the phrase “it all sounds pretty complicated.” I wonder how the obese make love. Not wanting to change things does not mean I am conservative, I like for things to change, just not having to do it. I connect easily with women, it takes longer with men. My best male friends have something feminine about them. I ride a motorcycle but I don’t have the “biker spirit.” I am an egoist despite myself, I cannot even conceive of being altruistic. Until the age of twelve I thought I was gifted with the power to shape the future, but this power was a crushing burden, it manifested itself in the form of threats, I had to take just so many steps before I got to the end of the sidewalk or else my parents would die in a car accident, I had to close the door thinking of some favorable outcome, for example passing a test, or else I’d fail, I had to turn off the light not thinking about my mother getting raped, or that would happen, one day I couldn’t stand having to close the door a hundred times before I could think of something good, or to spend fifteen minutes turning off the light the right way, I decided enough was enough, the world could fall apart, I didn’t want to spend my life saving other people, that night I went to bed sure the next day would bring the apocalypse, nothing happened, I was relieved but a little bit disappointed to discover I had no power.

In a sandwich, I don’t see what I am eating, I imagine it. Even very tired, I can watch TV for several hours. As a child I dreamed of being not a fireman, but a veterinarian, the idea was not my own, I was imitating my cousin. I played house with a cousin, but there were variants, it could be doctor (formal inspection of genitals), or thug and bourgeoise (mini–rape scene), when we played thug and bourgeoise my cousin would walk past the swing set where I’d be sitting, outside our family’s house, I would call out to her in a menacing tone of voice, she wouldn’t answer but would act afraid, she would start to run away, I would catch her and drag her into the little pool house, I would bolt the door, I’d pull the curtains, she would try vaguely to get away, I would undress her and similute the sexual act while she cried out in either horror or pleasure, I could never tell which it was supposed to be, I forget how it used to end. I would be very moved if a friend told me he loved me, even if he told me more out of love than friendship. I find certain ethnicities more beautiful than others. When I ask for directions, I am afraid I won’t be able to remember what people tell me. I am always shocked when people give me directions and they actually get me where I’m going: words become road. I like slow motion because it brings cinema close to photography. I get along well with old people. A woman’s breasts may hold my attention to the point that I can’t hear what she’s saying. I enjoy the simple decor of Protestant temples. I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments. I do not tell stories from things I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, I describe impressions, I make judgments. The modern man I sing. In one of my recurring nightmares, gravity is so heavy that the chubby pseudo-humans who wander the empty surface of the earth move in slow motion through an endless moonlit night. I have utterly lost touch with friends who were dear to me, without knowing why, I believe they don’t know why themselves. I learned to draw by copying pornographic photographs. I have a foggy sense of history, and of stories in general, chronology bores me. I do not suffer from the absence of those I love. I prefer desire to pleasure. My death will change nothing. I would like to write in a language not my own. I penetrate a woman faster than I pull out. If I kiss for a long time, it hurts the muscle under my tongue. I am afraid of ending up a bum. I am afraid of having my computer and negatives stolen. I cannot tell what, in me, is innate. I do not have a head for business. I have stepped on a rake and had the handle hit me in the face. I have gone to four psychiatrists, one psychologist, one psychotherapist, and five psychoanalysts. I look for the simple things I no longer see. I do not go to confession. Legs slightly open excite me more than legs wide open. I have trouble forbidding. I am not mature. When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss. I can see how drops of water could be torture. A burn on my tongue has a taste. My memories, good or bad, are sad the way dead things are sad. A friend can let me down but not an enemy. I ask the price before I buy. I go nowhere with my eyes closed. When I was a child I had bad taste in music. Playing sports bores me after an hour. Laughing unarouses me. Often, I wish it were tomorrow. My memory is structured like a disco ball. I wonder if there are still parents around to threaten their children with a whipping. The voice, the lyrics, and the face of Daniel Darc made French rock listenable to me. The best conversations I ever had date from adolescence, with a friend at whose place we drank cocktails that we made by mixing up his mother’s liquor at random, we would talk until sunrise in the salon of that big house where Mallarmé had once been a guest, in the course of those nights, I delivered speeches on love, politics, God, and death of which I retain not one word, even though I came up with some of them doubled over in laughter, years later, this friend told his wife that he had left something in the house just as they were leaving to play tennis, he went down to the basement and put a bullet in his head with the gun he had left there beforehand. I have memories of comets with powdery tails. I read the dictionary. I went into a glass labyrinth called the Palace of Mirrors. I wonder where the dreams go that I don’t remember. I do not know what to do with my hands when they have nothing to do. Even though it’s not for me, I turn around when someone whistles in the street. Dangerous animals do not scare me. I have seen lightning. I wish they had sleds for grown-ups. I have read more volumes one than volumes two. The date on my birth certificate is wrong. I am not sure I have any influence. I talk to my things when they’re sad. I do not know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against the alarm clock. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. I’ve never played Sims, I think only because it just never ended up in front of me. See, but you’re making me want to again. Is it still extant, or I guess I mean is it still alive and concurrent or is it now a retro pleasure? You have a good boyfriend. I mean based on the breakfast making choice on his part. But surely for many reasons. Ah, for the days when consumptive poets seemed to be a dime a dozen. What was for ‘breakfast’? ** kier, Kier, buddy boy! Hey! So very awesome to get to lay eyes on your typing! I’m okay. I will of course seek out the bloody nosed beetle because, no, it’s news to me. That’s weird: I’ve had an ear infection for pretty much the same amount of time, and it’s so fucking annoying. What are you doing for yours? At first I just waited for my body to fix it on its own, and then it didn’t and didn’t, and I just other day finally started putting antibiotic drops in the ear, and it’s vaguely helping and hopefully fixing the motherfucker, albeit at a lax pace. No, we haven’t made our Scandinavia trip yet. We’ve been stuck here trying to solve huge problems around our new film. Well, I have. Zac is actually riding a bicycle from the western coast of France to Paris as we type. There’s no way we’d go up there without letting you know. And, ooh, that Fujiko sculpture … we’ll aim for that time period. We’ve just been trying to get our film finished and to get around vast producer-caused bullshit. I think we’ve close. The Olympics were fun. I live near where four of the stadiums were, and my neighborhood was jam packed with people, which I actually enjoyed. Zac’s fine, he’s good, and guaranteed that he would send his love to you if he wasn’t incommunicado on a bicycle at the moment. So hopefully we’ll see you before too, too long. In the meantime an avalanche of hugs and kisses to you from moi! ** Cletus, Oh, good, Berrigan’s amazing. Shit, that real life double whammy is stressful to even try to imagine. But I’m glad you’re being pragmatic about it. I’ve read some Frank Stanford, but not in a long time. Cool, I’ll revisit. What’s the creative project, if you don’t mind saying? Gosh, I haven’t written a poem in such a long time. I don’t seem to find myself going into poetry writing at all, I don’t know why. It feels like a really tall mountain or something. I should. Maybe, maybe. Thanks! I’m glad your upside seems to be outweighing your temporarily hassling downside. ** _Black_Acrylic, They still haven’t rebuilt from the fire? Wow, but good that they still plan to, I guess. X-Ray, nice, the project of our old d.l. pal Chris Dankland. Your written words are highly awaited. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, I can’t say that when I’m bored and want to have fun that lighting myself on fire ever strikes me as the solution. Looks to be pretty hetero inclination. I am 100% on board with your love’s task of yesterday. 100,000%. Haha: if love figures that out and tells you, spread the word. Love pissing in the mouths of every slave who wants their mouths pissed in, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Casey Donovan. There’s some new young twink porn star who calls himself Casey Donovan, I assume as some kind of homage, but he doesn’t look anything like his namesake, and I’m confused. ** Charalampos, Earthquake? LA had an earthquake or a dozen in a row recently. Paris doesn’t get them. So far. I have not seen ‘Our Lady of the Assassins’, but I will look into it based on your glowing report. Ted Berrigan is always pretty great, yes. A must read type of poet. I’m hoping that when Zac returns from his bicycle trip tomorrow he will have read the script and will be prepared to give me feedback. Hi back from me while singing ‘Stand By Your Man’. ** Måns BT, Greetings galore, Måns. In English, I guess we have, let’s see, Hello, hi, hiya, hey, yo, ho, howdy, … gosh, lots. My knees are starting to hurt just a little bit, but I’m still on them. I guess I missed Saltkråkan. Huh, how could I have missed it? I feel like we explored everywhere. My favorite thing was that one little play they put on where Pippi floats around on a little lake in a boat with a bunch of other characters singing pirate songs and ‘fighting’ and maybe the boat sinks or something? My impression, at least in the US, is that Astrid Lindgren is only known for Pippi Longstocking. I’m not sure about in France. The French are probably way into her. I guess make sure you friends know that ‘Dielmann’ has been voted the greatest film of all time by the critics so it’s the critical consensus’s fault not yours if they’re bored or something. What did you guys think? xo, me. ** Lucas, Bellmer is kind of Gisele’s God, no surprise. She’s also really into Morton Bartlett. Do you know his stuff? No, I watched the Ceremony on TV. Turns out that normal non-paying people weren’t allowed to get near the thing. It was kind of weird and elegant, the ceremony. I was okay with it. Not yet: re: the link. Today. I do like Pharmakon, yes. She was supposed to perform at this event some years ago in NYC at the New Museum where artists did performances inspired by my gif novels, but she got sick. She’s good friends with Puce Mary. You mean you making heavy noise music? That sure sounds interesting to me. ** James Bennett, Hi, James. Oh, cool, a general thing, that’s obviously ideal. Do you have specific projects you want to do thanks to its good graces? The Westlife self-immolation was one of the oddest things ever. I wish Oasis was smart enough to do that. ‘Jealousy’s’ A-okay as an entree, yes. Tot siens, me. ** Harper, Hi. Ah, a specific project that asks for bulk, gotcha. Obviously, I encourage the YouTube project. I’ll subscribe. I’m not a nostalgic person whatsoever, but I do miss the wild and wooly YouTube days. Anyway, yeah, exciting idea! Thumbs way, way up and all of that. I do know ‘The Nude Restaurant’, yes, and I’m already daydreaming. There’s also this pretty obscure Michel Auder video of a similar sort called ‘A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking’ starring Gary Indiana, Taylor Mead, Cookie Mueller, Jackie Curtis and others. Almost impossible to see nowadays though. ** Oscar 🌀, Neither rain nor clouds nor sleet nor snow could squash my smoke signals. As it should be. I’ve been warned about that giant inflatable polar bear costumed guy, and I’ve been going out in disguise, but maybe I’ll leave the fake moustache and wig behind and face the music. You on the other hand should be careful when going out because I have it on high authority that Banksy’s in Glasgow at the moment with his trusty paint brush in tow and that he wants to say hi to you in the only way he knows how. Apart from dying in agony, I need the producer to fork over the money he’s been promising for 16 months, and I’m going to have to consult my voodoo doll manual to figure how to do that magic trick. And I’ll try to get him to wash your dishes while he’s dying in agony. I have read ‘Querelle of Brest’. It is, of course, very good. Not my favorite Genet, but very good, and I encourage you to crack its cover turn its pages attentively. ** Right. Today I have restored another spotlight that happens to be aimed at another of my favorite novels. Very highly recommended. See you tomorrow.