Category: Uncategorized (Page 874 of 1103)

 

‘Andy Milligan was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on February 12, 1929. He was a self-taught film maker, playwright, script writer and costume designer. He grew up mostly in Minnesota, but he and his family moved around the country a lot. His father, Andrew Milligan Sr. (1895-1985) was a captain in the U.S. Army who served in the military for over 50 years (retiring in the mid 1960s holding the rank of colonel). His mother, Marie Gladys Hull (1903-1953), was an overweight, neurotic-bipolar alcoholic who physically and verbally abused her husband and children. She served as the basis for scores of her son’s characters when he began making films. Milligan had an older half-brother named Harley Hull and a younger sister named Louise Milligan Howe. After finishing grade school, Milligan joined the U.S. Navy where he served four years. After his honorable discharge, he settled in New York City in 1951 where he dabbled in acting on stage and opened a dress shop.

‘During the 1950s Milligan became involved in the nascent off-off-Broadway theater movement where he mounted productions of plays by Lord Dunsany and Jean Genet at the Caffe Cino, a small Greenwich Village coffeehouse that served as a hothouse for rising theater talent like Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen and John Guare. Milligan also became involved with directing low-key theater productions at Cafe La Ma Ma Experimental Theater Club. During this period he operated and designed for a clothing boutique named Ad Lib and used his crude dressmaking skills to costume many theatrical productions.

‘In the early 1960s Milligan turned to film making. He met some of the actors for his early films at Caffe Cino. His first released film was a 30-minute black-and-white 16 mm short drama entitled Vapors (1965). Set in the notorious gay bathhouse St. Mark’s Baths, it was written by Hope Stansbury, the raven-haired beauty who would star in a few of his later films. The film, set on one Friday evening in the St. Mark’s Baths, portrays an emotionally awkward and unconsummated meeting between two strangers. Milligan was later employed by producers of exploitation films, particularly William Mishkin, to direct softcore sexploitation and horror features, many featuring actors known from the off-off Broadway theater community.

‘Milligan then hooked up with famed sexploitation producer William Mishkin and made 11 features, all shot with a single hand-held 16mm Auricon camera on short ends (snippets of film left over from other productions). Some of those include Depraved! (1967), Seeds (1968) (“Sown in Incest! Harvested in Hate!”) and Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973). Many of these early works play like bizarre morality tales where sleazy characters get violently paid back for their excesses.

‘In 1966, Milligan set up shop in a Victorian mansion located on northern Staten Island, within walking distance of the ferry and his own house. The house soon became “Hollywood central,” where he filmed most of his movies on budgets ranging from $5,000 to $20,000. Milligan was a one-man army–he wrote, directed, built sets and sewed costumes for his splatter epics like The Ghastly Ones (1968). His usual “stock company” (Stansbury, Neil Flanagan, Hal Borske) was often supplemented by Staten Island locals who were dragged into performing.

‘Milligan even married one of his actresses, Candy Hammond, who starred in a number of his films, most notably as Pussy Johnson in Gutter Trash (1969). No one took the wedding seriously, because Milligan was unabashedly homosexual and an avowed misogynist. The service took place at the Staten Island house, which was still decorated for the movie shoot Seeds. That night, Milligan cruised gay bars to celebrate.

‘In 1968, Milligan began to make horror movies featuring gore effects with The Ghastly Ones (1968), a 19th century period piece and his first color film which was produced by JER and titled by Sam Sherman. In 1969, he made his next horror movie, Torture Dungeon (1970), a medieval period piece after which he moved to London, England to make movies there after having made a deal with producer Leslie Elliot. After directing Nightbirds (1970) in London, his partnership with Elliot collapsed as he was working on The Body Beneath (1970). Milligan then teamed up again with William Mishkin again where Mishkin produced and Milligan directed three more period piece British horror films which were Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970), The Man with Two Heads (1972), and The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972) (all shot in 1969) before Milligan’s return to Staten Island in 1970.

‘On his return to New York, Milligan wrote and directed another medieval period piece titled Guru, the Mad Monk (1970), which was shot for the first time with a 35mm Arriflex camera and filmed entirely inside a Chelsea, Manhattan church. This movie was released on a double feature with The Body Beneath. Through the next years, Mishkin released Milligan’s British-made pictures, some with additional scenes shot in New York. The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! was one of Mishkin’s films in which he had Milligan insert new killer rat scenes shot in New York, mostly at his new Staten Island house on Corson Street where Milligan lived during that time and filmed another horror period piece there in 1973 which was titled Blood (1973).

‘After directing the 1972 sexploitation drama Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973), Milligan’s output was restricted mostly to gory horror movies as he moved to the southern tip of Staten Island in the Tottenville neighborhood where he lived in and owned and operated a dilapidated hotel located at the end of Main Street right next to the southern end of Staten Island Railway.

‘In October 1977, Milligan moved into 335 West 39th Street in Manhattan (a four-story building purchased for $50,000 by Milligan and stockholders), where he founded and ran the Troupe Theater, a seedy but fun off-off Broadway venue above which he lived in a third-floor loft until he left New York City for good in March 1985. He moved to Los Angeles, California, where he shot three more contemporary horror movies between 1987 and 1988 as well as operated another theater company, called the Troupe West, which ran until 1990.

‘Andy Milligan was heavily into S&M and had very few serious relationships (all with men). The few friends he did have were just as emotionally troubled and dangerously disturbed as he was. A Vietnam veteran and ex-convict named Dennis Malvasi, who once drifted into and worked at Andy’s Troupe Theater in the late 1970s and early 1980s, later made news headlines in March 2001 when he and his wife were arrested for aiding the flight of fugitive James Kopp, the suspected murderer of a New York abortion doctor. One boyfriend, “human toothpick” B. Wayne Keeton (so-named for his gaunt physical build), was a good natured Louisiana hustler who appeared in a small role in Monstrosity (1987), one of Milligan’s last films. Keeton’s death from AIDS in June 1989 hit Milligan hard, and he soon began having his own health problems. He learned shortly afterwards that he, too, had contracted AIDS, apparently from Keeton. With no insurance, little money, and the era of exploitation films over, Andy Milligan went into a reclusive decline until his death on June 3, 1991 at age 62.’ — Dennis Dermody

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Andy Milligan @ IMDb
Robert Patrick’s Andy Milligan page
A CELEBRATION OF HATE: THE HORROR FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN
Cinefear: Andy Milligan
Book: ‘The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan’
Nicolas Winding Refn: My obsession with Andy Milligan’s cult horror movies
Garagehouse Pictures Releases a Double Dose of Andy Milligan
Exploitation Films and Success: The Half-Told Melodramas of Andy Milligan
A GORY TALE OF TERROR!
Andy Milligan: Avant-Garde Filmmaker?
Andy Milligan @ MUBI
Book: ‘Gutter Auteur: The Films of Andy Milligan’
Theatre of Pain: Andy Milligan’s Bloodthirsty Butchers
Andy Milligan is ruining me: A trash film fan finally meets his match
Sex-Gore Netherworld: Nightbirds & The Body Beneath Disinterred

 

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Extras

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies: Andy Milligan: Artist, Auteur or Asshole?

Andy Milligan Exploitation Gallery with music by Hal Borske

 

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Interview with Andy Milligan biographer Jimmy McDonough
from Plan 9 Crunch

 

1) How much of an influence did Cafe Cino have on the evolution of grindhouse (42nd St.) cinema and eventually on mainstream cinema?

McDonough: I’m not sure it had any influence on 42nd Street. It had a great deal of influence on Andy, though. Freedom. It gave him the license to create. And to make flesh certain fantasies lurking in his mind. Very powerful, that. If I had a time machine that is one place I’d go back to…the Cino, to watch one of Milligan’s productions. Better yet, watching Andy watching of his productions. See those beady little eyes dancing as he utters a low, evil chuckle, all while watching a couple of actors beat up on one another. I think the Cino days held great promise for Andy. He had a big framed picture of Joe Cino, an unusually sentimental thing for Milligan. I still have it.”

2) Why didn’t Andy Milligan, in your opinion, make it out of the grindhouses as a director, given that he had more critical success at Cafe Cino and as an off-Broadway theater director?

McDonough: “He was self-destructive. Milligan refused to tailor his act for anybody. He was incapable of it. And Andy could be an angry, angry guy. It scared people. Producer William Mishkin was the only one who could deal with Andy for more than a picture or two, and even that relationship was fraught with tension. Mishkin gave him the opportunity to make movies, but it was never financially rewarding enough to lead anywhere. The limitations were always the same–and primarily it was, “make it for nothing.” Bill was a very cautious individual who wanted to see a return for every dollar spent. Andy was caught in a trick bag, stuck on the Mishkin plantation. All he could do was grind out one cheapo film after another. Eventually he burned out and grew very bitter about it all.”

3) There seems to be mixed accounts as to whether or not Milligan actually made some of his films in England. One individual told us that he did not make any of his films there. Can you somehow confirm if Milligan did/did not make any of his films in England? What evidence or information do you have to suggest that Milligan did indeed film in England?

McDonough: Didn’t make any films in England?!? You can’t be serious. What poppycock. Is this the same “individual” who goes around claiming Andy wasn’t homosexual? Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Body Beneath, Nightbirds, The Man with Two Heads, The Rats Are Coming… were all shot in England (parts of Rats were shot on Staten Island). The English estate where Milligan shot Body Beneath and Rats–do you think that’s a set? Done with CGI? All the overseas actors–Berwick Kaler, Julie Shaw, Annabella Wood, Dennis DeMarne, so many others–did Andy fly them all to Staten Island? He didn’t have enough in the budget to buy the crew coffee! You read the book, right? Reliable witnesses like John Borske and John Miranda are quoted about working with Andy overseas. Andy HIMSELF talks about living and working in England. He made films for an English producer, Leslie Elliot, also quoted in the book. Are they liars? Did I make it all up? What would be the point of such a conspiracy, anyway?”

4) What are your thoughts as to whether or not Milligan will ever achieve the cult status of someone like Ed Wood? Could Milligan ever achieve the same status as Wood, and could you envision Hollywood ever making a big budget film of his life, like Tim Burton did of Ed Wood? If Milligan will never achieve the status of Ed Wood, why is this?

McDonough: There was a certain innocence about Ed Wood (however angora-swathed) Milligan never had. Andy comes from a grimier, more recent time. He kind of picks up where Wood left off. Every week I get more and more mail about Andy. So something is happening, however tiny. Much to my amusement, there has been talk of a film of The Ghastly One, but I don’t see how that particular environment could ever be replicated. Maybe in England. Don’t tell anybody!”

5). In your own view, what is it specifically that makes Milligan films so sought after by cult film fans? What is his appeal to you as a writer?

McDonough: You know how there are these utterly obscure 45s that record fanatics savor? Some nobody–let’s call him Herman–cuts a few great records at midnight in the back of a radio station and only 500 copies slip out to the world. Herman doesn’t make a dime, works his entire life as a high school custodian, then dies of cirrosis of the liver at his Mom’s house. Twenty years later he has a fan club in Sweden and the French are writing books about him. Suddenly Herman’s got a cult! It may only be twenty-six people, but they’re willing to die for the guy. Why? Who knows. Something in what Herman did struck a chord within these few. And if one person catches the virus, it’s a given somebody else will get it, too. That’s one of the few things that makes life bearable: sharing a movie or a book or a song with another person. Suddenly you’re not alone. Everything’s so homogenized these days, it’s like it all comes out of the same fast-food vat. Movies are so slick, TV is all the same reality show, the radio’s filled with songs that have been AutoTuned free of emotion. There’s no use crying about it, that’s just the way things work. The Model T turns into the PT Cruiser. You can’t escape it. Andy is a refreshing antidote to all that. His is a timeless world, a dirty aquarium swimming with threadbare thespians in outlandish costumery, all of them ranting and raving the Milligan world view. Within seconds you know where you are, and it isn’t pretty. There’s something so original, so crackpot about the vision. For better and for worse, there’s nothing remotely like it. Andy’s movies are looking better and better as the years go by. I think I was too hard on his films in the book. That’s the only thing I regret about The Ghastly One. What appeals to me most of all is that Milligan did it against all odds. People laughed at him, told him he was no good. He kept right on going. Make no mistake, Andy was an artist. You may think his art is something that should be scraped off the bottom of your shoe, but he was a true artist until the bitter end. One of the many reasons I admired him.”

6) Milligan is noted for his “swirl technique” in early films, as well as long shots and facial closeups. Is this all due to the limitations and weight advantages, of an Auricon, or did he have his own style techniques that he deliberately used?

McDonough: “I think it was a combination plate. Andy couldn’t be bothered by technical things, even the simplest adjustments that would’ve made his films a thousand times more bearable. The guy had no patience. Try to show him a different way of doing anything and he went berserk. Yes, he was affected by the limitations of his equipment, but primarily he was driven by emotions that way were beyond his control. Andy was a walking, talking ‘swirl camera.’ So that seeped out of his fingers and through the 16mm Auricon. His 35mm pictures are more earthbound. You couldn’t ‘swirl’ that tank.”

7) I was watching Tom Vazzo on a GURU DVD extra talking about working with Milligan’s later films. He has little nice to say about Milligan’s film-making. You were there for a couple of films. I’d like you to relate some positives of Milligan’s skills that showed up even in a film such as Monstrosity?

McDonough: “You can’t judge Andy by Hollywood (or even ‘Independent Filmmaker’) standards. He existed in a creepy little snowglobe all his own. Milligan made pictures for no money. NO MONEY. Anybody who’s worked in the film business knows how hard it is to make a movie, particularly if you’re a one man band like Milligan. There was something heroic in the way he did it. And he swept you up in the enthusiasm. It was the best fun ever. I wish you could’ve been there. I worked on big budget Hollywood pictures and it was a total bore. With Andy it was always total lunacy. Whenever I get together with Charlie Beesley, my primary cohort from those days, we end up doing impressions of Andy–or his much-beloved ‘script girl’ Frank Echols, who was always rolling his eyes at whatever atrocious faux pas Milligan had just committed. Honestly, I think of those times and I laugh out loud. Some of the happiest days of my life, working for Andy.

8) In The Ghastly One, you describe Milligan as an ill-tempered misanthrope capable of tantrums and vilifications, yet your affection for the man comes through in a genuine manner. Explain this paradox. How could someone who pushed so many people away from him be so well liked by you and others?

McDonough: Explain? I don’t think I can. My job as biographer is to evoke, not explain. Cantankerous, complex characters deserve friends, too. I’ve spent my life around them, and apparently I am one. Andy could be screaming about shooting drag queens one minute and then turn around and do something so kind and gentle you’d do a double-take. Not many people saw this side of him, but it was there. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of Andy. I still wear the cowboy boots he gave me. I still have the cowboy shirts he made for me. And they still reek of his scent, which, I must tell you, is quite unforgettable. Eau d’ Milligan!”

9) Why were Milligan and other grindhouse filmmakers so easily manipulated and exploited by people such as the Mishkins, etc. Did they have any legal recourses they could have used?

McDonough: “I think a loaded gun would’ve worked much better. Those days were like the wild west. A handful of people held the power on 42nd Street. They controlled what played there. You wanted to play your pitiful little picture there, fine, but bend over first. A handful of distributors were savvy enough to swim in this shark tank and William Mishkin was one of them. He was the filter between Andy and the powers that be. Once Milligan lost Mishkin, it was really over for him. No way was he going to deal with somebody like Bingo Brandt and emerge without his feathers. I have a lot of respect for William Mishkin. Did he treat Andy as good as he could’ve? Probably not. But they made a lot of pictures together. And those lurid campaigns we all love came from Bill’s feverish mind, nowhere else. In terms of exploitations campaigns the guy was a genius. I love the posters and pressbooks for Milligan’s pictures as much as the movies themselves.”

10) Do you think any “lost” Milligan films, such as The Naked Witch and “The Degenerates,” might have prints that are still lurking out there somewhere?

McDonough: “You never know. I think I might’ve just located a 16mm reel that I believe is from “Depraved.”

Last question: If you have any box office information on Milligan’s films, we’d love to share that info on the blog. Also, any chance of a release of Nightbirds some day? (It took us a long time to find Torture Dungeon, Blood and Legacy of Horror, and I’m not sure the last two were worth it!

McDonough: “(I’m) happy that my collection of Milligan films now resides with the noted Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and he plans on releasing them on DVD. Mr. Refn is just the man for the job. He loves all things Milligan and I know he’ll do a great job with it all. A huge relief, that.” Editor’s Note: “Nightbirds” was released in 2012 by BFI DVD’s Flip Side label with “The Body Beneath” and extras.

 

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16 of Andy Milligan’s 29 films

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Vapors (1965)
‘1965: Mr. Jaffee is a curious but closeted married man, who decides to take a walk on the wild side one night over to the local bath house located in Times Square, New York. When he is a approached by Thomas, a swinging regular who takes an interest in Mr. Jaffe as the new face “on the scene”, a deep and philosophical discussion about marriage, homosexuality and other social taboos begins to unexpectedly unfold. The two become emotionally intimate in a very short time, with no sexual contact of any sort, while everyone around them are screwing like rabbits.’ — letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Compass Rose (1967)
‘Compass Rose doesn’t get the best rep among Milligan fans and for good reason. Andy even hated the film himself. Joe Bush’s script is too pretentious, painfully annoying characters and way too many in-jokes. But despite the film’s downfalls and horrific sound, it does offer a glimpse into Milligan’s lost sexploitation films. The standard storyline elements and b&w photography of such titles as Filthy Five and Gutter Trash are all here. Not to mention drugs, suicide, a whirligig orgy and a moralistic storyline that all leads up to wonderfully Milligan ending complete with S&M. So for those who want something close to Naked Witch or Depraved (besides the two existing ones), Compass Rose will fuel your hunger for things long lost.’ — Alex

the entire film

 

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The Ghastly Ones (1968)
‘Opening with a completely unrelated massacre of a couple by wide-eyed Milligan cohort Hal Borske and his trusty meat cleaver (complete with eye gouging, amputation, and inept gore galore), THE GHASTLY ONES starts off with a bang before settling into a family reunion from hell set to a snail’s pace. Three sisters from different walks of life reunite when their father passes away and are told by the family lawyer (a completely unrecognizable Neil Flanagan, GURU THE MAD MONK himself) that they will only inherit any money from their father’s will if they spend an entire weekend in “sexual bliss” at the family mansion. Welcoming the trio are British maid Martha, lady of the house Hattie (the incomparable Maggie Rogers), and resident idiot Colin (Borske, now with fake teeth poking out of his mouth). But also hiding in the basement is a hooded killer who methodically kills off the sisters and their husbands with pitchforks, butcher knives, and the requisite meat cleaver.If you’ve never seen an Andy Milligan film, this would be a good place to start. It’s filled with all the typical Milligan ingredients: bitchy relatives, stereotypical heterosexual romances, shaky hand-held 16mm camerawork, muffled soundtrack punctuated by needle-drop library music cues, able actors trying their best with terrible dialogue, with dripping blood, ugly sex and nudity, and garish set design, all rolled into a feature-length monstrosity.’ — Casey Scott

Trailer

 

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Seeds of Sin (1968)
‘In SEEDS, a family reunion over Christmas reignites long simmering tensions and rekindles dangerous sexual affairs. But, as buried secrets are revealed, a mysterious killer begins murdering the perverse family members one by one in increasingly sadistic ways…’ — Vinegar Syndrome

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Torture Dungeon (1970)
‘I’m a bit mystified by exploitation auteur Andy Milligan’s Torture Dungeon. It’s got all the trademarks of Milligan’s work, including bizarre, wobbly camerawork, home-made period costumes, a micro-budget, some blood and some nudity. But if shoehorning a film into a genre is a required thing, what genre is this odd, nasty little work? With a title like Torture Dungeon, I can only imagine it was distributed to the drive-ins and grindhouses – or wherever it played – as a gore-filled horror film akin to a Herschell Gordon Lewis epic like Blood Feast. Yet, there isn’t all that much gore in this dungeon, what we have on our hands resembles more a violent historical play done in the inimitable Milligan style. For sheer uniqueness, the works of Andy Milligan are worth a view and Torture Dungeon is no exception. It’s almost the Milligan take on Macbeth, and we certainly experience a poisoned view of the world through the director’s eyes. The acting is over the top for some characters, particularly Gerald Jacuzzo as the seizure-riddled, hedonistically evil Norman. Richard Mason as Ivan the hunchback is grating and manic with his constant jumping around and giggling, we can only assume he’s acting as directed. The rest of the cast are more-or-less serious, and do their best. Milligan’s costumes are actually quite impressive to this untrained eye, and they make up for the lack of sets on display. I can’t even remember a scene with any sets in it!’ — Boris Lugosi

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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The Body Beneath (1970)
‘Hammer Films never hired John Waters to make a vampire soap opera for $10 starring bowling alley clerks instead of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. But if they had, it would be known as THE BODY BENEATH. Reverend Ford is a Catholic priest who is also a vampire. With the help of his hunchback assistant and a gang of green-faced lady vamps, Ford seeks to extend his lineage by any means possible. This includes sticking sewing needles in people’s eyes. Filmed “in the graveyards of England” by legendary queer filmmaker Andy Milligan, THE BODY BENEATH is dreamy, nihilistic horror that exists in a space-time continuum known only to itself.’ — Joseph A. Ziemba

Trailer

 

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Guru the Mad Monk (1970)
‘With a reported cost of $11,000, it was one of Milligan’s better-funded productions (don’t laugh!), and it was his first to be shot on 35mm film with theoretically professional-grade audio. However, Guru the Mad Monk is also the movie that Milligan himself identified as the worst he ever made. Let me reiterate, to make sure the full magnitude of that statement sinks in: Guru is the Andy Milligan movie that Andy Milligan thought was awful!’ — Scott Ashlin

Trailer

the entire film

 

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Nightbirds (1970)
‘As with Vapors, it’s essentially another two-hander. Unlike that tender debut, the central relationship is straight… and twisted. Worldly, manipulative Dee (Julie Shaw) picks up homeless, virginal Dink (Berwick Kaler) while the latter is vomiting on the pavement. She moves him into her barely furnished Commercial Street flat, where a creepy landlord implies the method of paying rent. Milligan’s trusty Auricon pulls tight focus on the nascent couple as their initial attempts to play house curdle into a tragically imbalanced power dynamic. Dee’s layers of mendacity are steadily peeled back, the taut narrative assuming an inexorable downward spiral for Dink (cue one of the director’s signature ‘swirl camera’ climaxes). Candid for the time, though decidedly unerotic, Nightbirds’ wicked woman/hapless man paradigm is indelible childhood residue: Milligan simply despised his volatile, abusive mother. Hence the unabashed misogyny which consumes much of his output like a red-raw wound. For her part, Shaw inhabits the icy toxic blonde with real verve, though she understandably baulked at a scene of animal cruelty alluded to by the working title Pigeons (needless to say, Milligan executed this nasty business himself). Surprisingly, the actress appeared in little else of note.’ — Manish Agarwal

Trailer

 

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The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972)
‘The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! is nowhere near as good as its title, and it’s nowhere near as sleazy, gory or filthy as some of Milligan’s other movies. I saw it on TV as a kid and was shocked to discover on a recent rewatch* that not much had been edited out of the movie. I had always assumed the film had been cut to ribbons for broadcast, but the reality is that not much happens in the movie – except for some really repulsive true-life mutilation of a mouse. Most of Milligan’s films were shot in Staten Island (at his own home), but Rats is one of a handful that was shot in England. I’m not sure how you would tell the difference; there are almost no exterior shots, and most of those are in a generic backyard (there is one amazing street scene where we see cars reflected in windows of shops – this is a movie set in the late 1800s).’ — collaged

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Man with Two Heads (1972)
‘The performances in The Man with Two Heads is actually perfectly serviceable. No-one fluffs their lines and Denis DeMarne, trusted with both Jekyll and, naturally, Blood, is perfectly serviceable in the role. His later regular appearances on British television programmes posits him exactly where he is – an actor at the beginning of his career dealing with material politely deemed “thin”. The film is hampered by Milligan’s regular flaws: a murderous overuse of stock music drowning out the actors’ dialogue; poor sound editing and recording, meaning everything seems to have a slight echo.’ — HORRORPEDIA

the entire film

 

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Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973)
‘Andy Milligan’s bumpy partnership with famed NYC sleaze peddler William Mishkin, Fleshpot on 42nd Street is considered by many (relatively speaking) to be one of the director’s best films and a surprising change of pace from his preceding programmers like Bloodthirsty Butchers and Torture Dungeon (both of which get a shout out here). More of a throwback to Milligan’s startling early short film Vapors, it’s a grungy and surprisingly affecting look at Times Square just as the last wisps of the Love Generation had faded away. Sporting a cast comprised of East Coast adult film up and comers and members of Milligan’s own stock company, it’s been a bit of a mystery title for years with prints of varying lengths floating around and the advertising of two different versions indicating that it was originally shot in a hardcore variant. As it turns out, that latter assumption was more or less correct, though this is about as far from a porno chic title as you can get.’ — Mondo Digital

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Blood! (1974)
‘In this transmission Milligan just barely establishes a monster-movie frame before getting down to what he’s really interested in: barriers of politeness breaking down between people as conversation devolves to name-calling, bile-spewing, and pure, unfiltered hate. This is guaranteed to be the only sequel to The Wolf Man in which Lawrence Talbot Jr. nearly throttles his banker to death for making bad investments with his deceased father’s money. To be fair, Larry may have been on edge after the lengthy and detailed amount of time he spent signing a lease with a nosy realtor earlier in the week (they say it’s a renter’s economy). Or perhaps he was taking out the stress of being married to Dracula’s daughter, or some residual humiliation at his lack of desire for her the night before in bed? In Milligan’s world being a monster isn’t tragic. It’s depressing and a constant source of malaise.’ — laird

the entire film

 

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Legacy of Horror (1978)
‘Released the same year as Halloween, Milligan’s descent into exhaustion — artistically and personally — begins with Legacy Of Horror. Merely an unmemorable remake of The Ghastly Ones, Legacy is best left misunderstood. Three couples, placed somewhere between 1900 and 1960, mumble and eat plants. The expected token retard-handyman is thrown over a bridge. At 37 minutes, the characters convene for a reading of the ol’ “sexual harmony” will, but there’s no sex. At 60 minutes, a black-clad killer dishes out split second maimings, but there’s no bloodshed. As a result, there’s no hope. The least spiteful film in Milligan’s resume, Legacy Of Horror leaves no mark, save for a few spots of well-placed humor (check out Mr. Ito!). Intentioned weirdness seems suspicious. There’s an obvious hope that the film’s irrational moments will gel together naturally. They don’t.’ — Bleeding Skull

the entire film

 

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Carnage (1984)
‘Carnage is not a film that everyone needs to see. It’s padded with establishing shots of Milligan’s Staten Island home and conversations between inconsequential people. There are long sequences of Carol sitting in a chair and drinking wine. There’s a housewarming party with a very long toast. The camera is stuck on a tripod and left for dead. But I can’t dismiss the film. The lack of vitality may be a problem, but Milligan’s cynicism is always present. And always hilarious. If Carnage was cut down to 60 minutes, like Milligan’s earlier Blood, I’d be beside myself with joy. As is, this film is for a very select group of people. People who can appreciate a cheap-ass horror film with dialogue penned by a nihilist who would rather be punching a relative than making a movie.’ — Bleeding Skull

Trailer

the entire film

 

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The Weirdo (1989)
‘Twenty five years in the biz and Milligan still didn’t understand eyelines. Absolute legend. The part where the weirdo cuts off both of the bully’s hands with a switchblade and then is having a tender moment with his girlfriend while agonized wailing is barely audible in the mix is honestly one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen in a movie.’ — Gregory Joseph

Excerpt

 

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Surgikill (1989)
‘Andy Milligan’s last gasp before he bought the farm was this criminally unamusing slasher-genre lampoon which finds a hospital violently beset by an unidentified serial killer. The eccentric but loyal staff does everything possible to keep the situation under wraps while a bumbling police investigation is underway. This painfully unfunny dark-humor pasquinade won’t likely appease the small-but-avid coterie of Andy Milligan enthusiasts. In most cases, Milligan’s monogram directorial flourishes evince a bizarre, dissentient singularity…an unpremeditated aspect with considerable appeal to a niche viewership. Critically speaking, these films are indisputably wretched. To a discriminate audience, however, they transcend critical assay by virtue of their waywardly off-center peculiarities. SURGIKILL is lacking in this distinction, however, as failed attempts at comedy rarely outshine their deficiencies with abstract or specious incidental charm. This film is an improficient blaze of inanity which is entirely non-evident of professionalism in any facet of its lazy fructification. Quite simply put, SURGIKILL is possibly the worst comedy I have ever seen. An unfortunate final coda to a career as diacritic and fascinating as it was inglorious.’ — EyeAskance

Excerpts

 

 

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p.s. Hey. In addition to Blu-ray and DVD, PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT is also now VOD on Amazon Prime and Vimeo in North America. Appropriate links to your right. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. Surely, the DVDs can go to Australia. I think you just need a player that accepts the NA format. Cool about your friend in Glasgow digging the film. Yes, I’ve read ‘The Suiciders’. It’s excellent. I’m pretty good at keeping up with Travis’s work. If your brain makes you barrel into the new one while polishing off the extant one, so be it, obviously. That’s certainly happened to me too. Great news! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Of course. Suicide remain a touchstone cultural music unit all these years later. I’ve paid zero attention to the MET Gala, but I definitely take your word for it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks again for the emailing and help with the post construction. Wow, that’s an impressive turn out, and a nice, tidy overview there. Everyone, You can watch the entirety of last weekend’s giant Scottish Independence march in Glasgow in 39 seconds. How is that possible? Find out. ** Steve Erickson, Hm. Well, that does make me a little more interested to see it. Okay, should I get the chance, I will. Interesting. ** Misanthrope, Jeez, when you describe LPS’s weird behaviour, it almost feels like there’s a method to his madness, but I’m beginning to think not and that he thinks his bizarrely great luck so far is destiny or something. I’m painfully reminded of a young friend of mine from years ago, Ziggy, who inspired the character ‘Ziggy’ in ‘Try’. He fucked up in school and with a lot of things, and he barely got away with it for a long time because he was charming, smart, and, in his case, very good looking, but his luck totally ran out when he reached adulthood. Now he’s a crazy homeless guy living on the streets of Portland. Not to say I think that’s LPS’s fate, but maybe it’s a cautionary tale. ** Armando, Hi. Glad you liked him/it. No, I would say Blanchot’s my writer dude if I had too choose one. ‘Warp and Woof’ is fantastic and genius, of course! Glasgow was good. Screening was great, and I was happy to have a couple of days to get to know the city. Yes, sorry to be slow, email-wise. Things are crazily busy right now with the film release and other stuff, more over-busy than even usual, so I’m way behind. I will get to your email ASAP. Nobody can write like Derek McCormack. He is a singular genius guy. No, ‘LDP’ wasn’t the big influence on ‘PGL’ that a few people seem to think, I guess because of the common ‘suicide’ thematic, but our thing is very different. We honestly weren’t thinking of any other directors or films when we wrote and made ours. We wanted to do something that was completely ours. Influences are influences, and people/critics always want to start by trying to identify ‘influences’ when they see something new, but I don’t think starting with seeming influences is a good way to enter our film. So you enter the big C tomorrow? Enjoy the living heck out of your trip, pal. ** Okay. Do you know the films of the oddball film director Andy Milligan? If not, you can begin to by attending today’s post. See you tomorrow.

 

‘If formal experimentation in art were a crime, Claude Simon would certainly have been charged, convicted and sentenced. He is usually associated with a group of French novelists writing in the decades after the Second World War known as the nouveaux romanciers. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, and especially Margurite Duras are more familiar names to readers in English, even though Simon was the only one of this loose fellowship to garner a Nobel. There are more differences than similarities among them, but they shared the common cause of attempting to transcend the received nineteenth century parameters of fiction, such as the centrality of plot, setting, character, and motivation. As with Boulez’s music, their books can seem difficult to the uninitiated. At its best, their writing can be starkly, startlingly beautiful, if, unavoidably, cerebral.

‘Claude Simon’s gorgeous final novel, The Trolley (2001), published when he was eighty eight, is all of these, and something more —it is haunting. To open this book is to find time splintering. On one page we read the impressions, or memories of impressions, of a young boy growing up in a coastal town in France, just after the First World War. On the next, an old man, presumably the same boy now in a stare-down with the end of his life, gives a somber, almost hallucinatory account of time spent in a modern hospital. A beginning and an ending, between which yawns an immense lacuna —the life lived. The novel is slim, where we feel it should, by rights, be long.

‘To speak of its form: The Trolley belongs to a sub-species of novel which doesn’t seem to be a novel at all. Memoir, meditation, travelogue, history, essay — these can seem more apt designations. It is in good company. W. G. Sebald, for example, in The Rings of Saturn, his grand investigation of entropy and loss, casts a wide net, gathering into his narrative hull the writings of the 17th century doctor Thomas Browne, the silk worms of the Chinese imperial court, and the personal lives of historical figures such as Roger Casement and Charles Algernon Swindburne. The narrator seems to be the author himself, and what he shares of himself has the ring of of autobiography. The photographs, grainy, melancholy, distributed throughout the pages contribute to the impression of a documentary, rather than fictive reality. But this itself is it’s fiction. J. M. Coetzee’s Summer Time is written as a biography of a writer named John Coetzee, whose salient distinction from the author himself is that he is deceased. Among the strangest and most brilliant recent examples of this kind of un-novel is Australian novelist Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch, in which a subtle and poignant portrait of the artist emerges from a close examination of the unwritten lives of characters from his life in reading, and even from his own books.

‘In The Trolley, objects, scenes, episodes, and characters are observed, often at dauntingly close range, but are never manipulated through a plot. Which is not to say there is no story, but it is a story the reader constructs. For example, we are shown a garden with an iris border. It is an old, established garden with full-grown trees. It belongs to the narrator’s aunt and uncle on his father’s side, the family to whom he and his mother came after his father was, we infer, killed in the War. We are shown his mother lying on a chaise longue in this garden. She is sick. Later, we are shown the same garden, the same chaise longue, minus his mother. No plot here, but, most assuredly, a story. Contrary to Simon’s reputation as a “difficult” writer, the writing here is not difficult. True, one has need of a healthy attention span to track with his immense, drifting sentences, but the language with which he fills these sentences attains a luminous, sometimes distressing, clarity.

‘Death is a constant in this book, the rats and kittens being a stand-in for death on a larger scale, rarely seen but always in the offing. His father’s death precedes the narrative, and, though barely mentioned, is generative of all that follows. There are the physically and psychically decimated survivors of the War who, besides aimlessly pedaling go-carts around a stone monument at the town center, intensify the loss of those, perhaps luckier, who, like Simon’s father, didn’t survive. His mother’s death, alluded to rather than recounted, changes everything again.

‘But it is his proximity to his own death that provides the most salient structural element in the novel. The perpetual incursion of one time frame into another is a characteristic feature in all of Simon’s writing. In this case, his hospitalization late in life continually interrupts the narrative of his childhood. These incursions make up for what drama is lost by his eschewal of the more traditional buildup of tension through plot. For example, a memory from his boyhood, in which he is running to catch the trolley after school, follows on the heals of an episode in the modern emergency room to which he has been transported by ambulance, “a sort of coffin”; so when we see him breathlessly watching the missed trolley disappear around a corner, we already know that, in something like seven decades, there will be one very important ride he will not miss, and both scenes acquire a luminosity they would not otherwise achieve, and the metaphor of the trolley, carrying its passengers across the length of its finite line, comes into its own without ever a moment of underlining. The weight of this slim book owes, not to novelistic expansiveness, but to this kind of juxtaposition.’ — The Stockholm Shelf

 

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Further

Association des Lecteurs de Claude Simon
Claude Simon, The Art of Fiction No. 128
POLAR Claude Simon
Philippe Sollers ‘Claude Simon, l’évadé’
‘Obituary: Claude Simon’
‘Claude Simon: Adventures in Words’
‘Reading Between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts’
Book: ‘Claude Simon: Writing the Visible’
‘Claude Simon, George Orwell and Catalonia’
Textes de Claude Simon parus en revues entre 1955 et 1985
Claude Simon @ goodreads
‘Le nouveau roman est mort: vive Claude Simon!’
‘Hypertextualisation de Claude Simon: tentative de restitution d’une oeuvre’
‘Calude Simon et Marcel Proust’
Buy ‘The Trolley’ @ The New Press

 

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Extras

Claude Simon wins the Nobel Prize

Claude Simon commente son travail de photographe

Claude SIMON par Jérome Lindon

Claude Simon aborde description et langage

 

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Manuscripts

 

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

ANTHONY CHEAL PUGH: Claude Simon, a remark you made during our conversations in Dublin a year or so ago particularly interested me. You said that you did not consider that French writers were very strong in the field of the novel, but that they excelled, on the other hand, at autobiography. You spoke not only of Proust, whose A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs you were rereading at the time, but of Rousseau and Chateaubriand. Could I begin by asking you to comment upon this observation, from a reader’s point of view?

CLAUDE SIMON: Andre Gide says somewhere in his Journal that France is most definitely not the home of the novel. And in fact, if one compares the works of nineteenth-century French novelists and their inferior contemporary imitators (Mauriac, Sartre, Camus, etc.) with for example those of Dostoevsky, whose characters, as in life, are eminently ambiguous and contradictory, incarnating at once good and evil, torturers and victims at one and the same time, then the French “realist” novel, deriving from the fable, the comedy of manners, or the philosophical tale with its didactic intentions, appears desperately flat, putting on stage univocal social or psychological types, bordering on caricature. It was Strindberg who noted in his preface to Miss Julie, not without irony, that Harpagon is avaricious and nothing else, whereas he could at the same time be a great financier as well as a miser, a perfect father, an excellent public official. . . . Personally, this kind of novel has always produced in me a boredom only attenuated by the descriptive passages (and this is something I experience more and more). For example, it was only because during the Occupation I bought the complete works of Balzac second-hand from a bouquiniste (books were hard to find then through lack of paper) that I read my way through La Comedie humaine, and what is more, despite several attempts, I have never been able to get to the end of a novel like L’Education sentimentale. In works of a biographical kind, a character reveals himself, deliberately or otherwise, in all his rich complexity, with all his contradictions, and without any manner of teaching standing out at all from his adventures. Anais Nin said somewhere that the everyday world seemed to her so devoid of interest that she preferred to take refuge in “the imaginary” and “the marvelous.” No doubt she never took the trouble to look at the incredible marvels all around us, a simple leaf, a bird, an insect. She really should have meditated upon Picasso’s remark: “Kings do not have their most beautiful children with princesses, but with shepherdesses,” for if ever you apply yourself, as Proust did, to examining attentively the life of anyone in your entourage, it’s not long before you notice that it presents a thousand times more complexity, richness, and fascinating subtleties than the fictive and summary lives and the spectacles staged in so-called “imaginative” novels.

Thus, Rousseau, who never stops moralizing, and acts with great meanness, if not with great brutality, devotes himself lovingly, for example, to the problem of the education of children, even writes a complete work on the subject, and abandons his own, without a second thought, to the state orphanage. Chateaubriand, although he is a sincere Royalist (he will prove his fidelity to the royal cause right into exile) and a sincere liberal as well, gambles away, as quickly as he can, the sum of money his family had collected, with great difficulty, in order to allow him to join the emigre army, and what is more “mislays” the wallet containing the little money he had remaining in the carriage bringing him back home, none of which prevented him from nevertheless going off to fight for his king and getting severely wounded. . . . In the same way, L.S.M., who risks his life for the Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, finds it quite normal that his wife be given a negro as a present; a fervent Jacobin, he contrives to get an ardent Royalist out of prison and marries her—and what author of fictions would ever have unleashed his imagination to the extent of inventing the episode of the heart cut out of the General’s corpse!!!

Finally, and as a corollary to this, container and contained being, in art, one and the same thing, the form of these works (let’s say, for simplicity’s sake: their style) is always admirable. It is not a matter of chance that Chateaubriand and Proust are the writers of the most sumptuous prose in French literature.

ACP: What is it that one is looking for when readin
g a text calling itself an “autobiography?”—an imaginary identification with an author (or with someone else, quite simply)?—or does the special pleasure of the reader not come from the loss of a stable identity, to the extent that autobiographical writing seems to lead to a dissociation of the writer’s “self” and to the production of “doubles”?

CS: Certainly not, as far as I am concerned, an “identification” with an author, but other than the pleasure of the text itself, a pleasure whose nature you have just defined quite well.

ACP: Is not the reader of an autobiographical text in search of echoes from the past, echoes of experiences he might himself have lived, perhaps at an unconscious level?

CS: Perhaps.

ACP: You said in a recent interview that all your novels since The Grass were “practically autobiographical“, while stressing that you did not tell all about yourself, and that it was always necessary to choose between the multiple possibilities that memory offers. You have often said, besides, that this raw material was necessarily transformed by the work of writing, by the act of putting it all into words. If, therefore, your novels are “practically autobiographical,” we have to understand at the same time that they in no way constitute acts of self-revelation, and that your aim is not to “confess yourself” to your readers, nor to explain yourself, let alone give your opinion on this or that subject. There is nevertheless in your novels a strong element of plot, even what appears sometimes to be an element of parody of the detective story, and this has repercussions upon what the reader guesses to be the underlying auto biographical story. To the extent that a text which is “practically auto biographical” inevitably encourages a kind of latent voyeurism in the reader, the part of the plot that remains concealed (what you do not say) causes a “blockage” in his reading, and he finds himself (I certainly find myself) in the same situation as the narrators and characters (Georges in The Flanders Road, the student in The Palace, or the narrator in Histoire) wanting to know “how it was, exactly.” This is of course just a schematic account of how readers come up against gaps in the autobiographical text and find “knots of meaning” that resist interpretation, but such a situation does seem to be typical of some of your more celebrated novels. Does what I have described correspond to any deliberately demonstrative strategy, or is it a question of a phenomenon that occurs during the writing process, something uncontrollable? Does each descent into the past—your past—lead to locked doors? Is not the fictional enigma (the detective story element) a kind of allegory of the impossibility (at the psychological, epistemological, and teleological levels) of the impossibility of the autobiographical project?

CS: I really cannot see what elements of a “parody of the detective story could be found in my novels. Are you not somewhat bemused by Robbe-Grillet’s theories and novels?

ACP: Quite possibly, but it has been shown that the detective story follows the pattern of the Oedipus story, and it has been claimed, even (by Barthes, for example), that all narratives correspond to a similar archetypal structure, and autobiographical narrative, it seems to me, can hardly be an exception here.

CS: It is certainly clear that in all narrative there is a “quest” of some kind: it is what the word “istoria” means in Greek—a “quest,” or “inquiry. ”

ACP: Actually, when I spoke of elements of “parody of the detective story,” I was thinking of the plots of, for example, The Wind, The Palace, Histoire, and in particular the story of the execution of the General’s brother in The Georgics—novels where a narrator tries to piece together a story out of things that happened to someone else, or to himself at another period in his life. In each case a “double” emerges—something that corresponds to the situation in the detective story, where the detective and the criminal could be said to represent, symbolically, aspects of a split “self.”

CS: That does apply to some extent to the situation in Histoire, but to tell you the truth, when I was writing the novel the “I” and the ’ “He” became so mixed up that the “inquiry” reached a point beyond which it could not progress.

ACP: The kind of questions I have been asking should not really be put to an author, as I well realize; readers must decide for themselves how they react to the “autobiographical” element.

CS: Yes, that is the reader’s decision.

ACP: William Burroughs, writing about Kerouac, went as far as to say, “Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only real thing about a writer is what he has written, and not his so-called life“. What do you think of this observation?

CS: I leave to scientists and philosophers the task of defining “reality.” They appear to have some difficulty doing it. To come back to the written (or painted) work, it seems to me to be a reality in itself, and to that extent, to be a part of reality as such.

ACP: May I ask you, in conclusion, what you think of the following remark by Blanchot: “The writer never reads his work. It is, for him, unreadable, a secret before which he cannot dwell1”?

CS: It is a perfect image of the position of the writer in relation to his work. The expression “before” appears particularly pertinent. He finds himself indeed always “behind” (I have myself compared the work of the writer to that of an artisan embossing copper or bronze, beating it out from behind, condemned to never being able to contemplate the result from the other side).

 

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Book

Claude Simon The Trolley
The New Press

‘Claude Simon, an author and a cultural icon in France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and old age. His madeleine is the trolley of the book’s title, the transport that took him to and from school every morning of his childhood. Passing back and forth between vine-covered hills, the trolley punctuates the trivial or cruel events of many lives, while action unfolds at the shore, in the gradually modernizing town, on a tennis court, and in a country villa. Elsewhere, life in all its fragility persists in the pavilions and labyrinthine corridors of a hospital, where our narrator now travels on a wheeled hospital bed, set to begin a new voyage into old age. When coincidences unite the two trajectories, the story becomes a fugue of memory that has delighted critics and made the book an immediate bestseller in France.’ — The New Press

 

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Excerpt

Chapter One

The needle pointing to an arc of embossed bronze gradations on the dial responded to a lever the motorman tapped with his open palm in order to start moving or gain speed, returning it to its initial position and thus cutting the current when approaching a stop, then rapidly and strenuously turning a cast-iron wheel to his right (a smaller version of the kind which used to work well-pumps in old-time kitchens) in order to activate the screeching brakes. The handle of the lever which the motorman pushed as he stood in front of the oval column on which this rudimentary instrument-pane l was set retained only a faint brown trace of its original varnish, the unprotected wood beneath now grayish and probably grimy.

To ride in the motorman’s cab (which in any case you had to step through in order to enter the tram proper) instead of taking a seat on the benches inside constituted something of a privilege not only to my child’s mind but also, quite plainly, to those of the two or three passengers who, similarly scorning the benches, would stand as a rule in the cab, probably not imbued like me with the importance of their position but simply because smoking was permitted here, judging by the apparently taciturn motorman who may have been “officially” silent as enjoined. by a sort of Franco-English placard: “Defense de Parler au Wattman,” which somehow reduced him to an inferior caste, condemned to mute solitude, at the same time that it suffused him with a nimbus of power like those tragedy kings or potentates it was forbidden by a severe (and sometimes mortal) protocol to address directly, a status (or position—or function) the motorman assumed with. utmost gravity, eyes always fixed on the oncoming rails, as if absorbed by the weight of his responsibility, waiting at each stop for the liberating clang of the ticket-taker’s bell to re-ignite, with his nickel-plated lighter, the cigarette butt stuck to his lower lip for the entire route (which. from beach to town required, including stops, about three-quarters of an hour), a stubby grayish tube of saliva-steeped paper which had turned transparent around the brown tobacco it contained and was nearly split by the rough stems (known as “logs”) which were too thick or unevenly rolled.

I seemed to see it, to be there among the two or three privileged characters permitted to stand in the cramped. six-foot-square cab provided they neither addressed nor distracted the silent motorman in a gray flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, threadbare trousers, and rope-soled espadrilles not exactly down at the heels but so frayed they seemed bearded, standing with feet wide apart and the impassive face and extinguished cigarette of a quasi-mythic being whose gestures—at least to my child’s eyes—seemed to have something ritualistic and sacred about them as he tapped the speed-lever with his open palm, leaned over to yank the brake-wheel, or stamped his right foot on the warning-whistle button as the car took a blind curve, sounding it almost continuously when, once past the tollhouse, the tram entered the town proper, first descending the long slope to the public gardens, skirting the wall around them, turning left at the monument to the war dead and, following the Boulevard du Président Wilson, gradually slowed along the Allée des Marronniers, coming to a stop at the end of the line almost in the center of town, opposite the movie-house with its glass marquee and enticing posters which in garish colors offered prospective customers the enormous faces of women with disheveled hair, heads flung back and mouths open wide in a scream of terror or the invitation to a kiss.

Some fifteen kilometers separated the beach from town: a rolling landscape with vine-covered slopes, the route dotted (on the right side as you came up from the beach) with opulent estates, their houses dating from the last century, two or three kilometers apart and somewhat concealed by trees, offering an inventory of what the vanity of recently acquired or consolidated fortunes could inspire in their owners, as well as in the architects who complied with (or even anticipated) their wishes to build at a period when the ambitions of a wealthy provincial class of limited cultural resources (occasionally inspired by the medieval or orientalist décors of operas seen in Paris during a honeymoon, for example) proposed a range of architectural features (towers crowned with delicate terra-cotta balustrades or else squat, flat-topped, and vaguely Saracen), of questionable taste but generally agreeable, not too embarrassingly ostentatious (except for one, the most recent), with old-fashioned names (like their Louis-Philippe or Napoléon III furniture) and a certain naive freshness (like “Miraflores” or, more simply, “The Aloes”).

In either direction (from town to shore or the reverse) two trolleys leaving once an hour at the same time passed each other halfway along the route, not far in fact from that property the name of which (“Joué”) matched an absurd crenellated façade (like those cardboard toys, those forts or castles given to children as Christmas presents), and vague misgivings still clung to the origins and date of the builder’s fortune, the present inhabitants (descendants of the romantic parvenu or perhaps recent purchasers) treated by the little society of the other “estates” not with any sort of ostracism but quite simply ignored, which somehow afforded them a certain prestige consisting of a combination of scorn and suspicion, the latter encouraged by the fact that from a certain angle, before the trolley took the incline leading to the “garage” (the name given to the double set of tracks which, halfway up the line, permitted the two cars to pass each other), it was evident that the ridiculous medieval façade was attached to nothing but an unfinished, not even roughcast wall behind which could be momentarily glimpsed a huge windowless structure (really a sort of shed), so that the tile roof had to slope down to accommodate what passed for medieval loopholes in the crenellated architecture.

At this hour of the morning, the two or three schoolboys allowed to stand in the narrow and prestigious cab were trying to avoid notice by standing close together in order to make room for those other habitués, apparently office workers or laborers in threadbare clothes just like the motorman’s and who preferred to ride standing in the cab, exchanging an occasional remark in this congested place where they were permitted to smoke or rather to suck on the cigarette butts rolled in that same grayish paper made transparent by saliva: a taciturn group to which, years later, I would recall belonging with that same sense of absurd privilege (though realizing I was being shown no more than tolerance), a sort of elite in the stifling stench of the shed vestibule which the guards locked up at night and in which every afternoon there would be five or six shadowy figures in clothes just as threadbare and dirty as the motorman’s (with this difference, that they (the clothes) had once been uniforms and that, in the stench of the field latrines which were also set up in that airless vestibule where their presence was tolerated, their elitism consisted solely in the possession by cunning, theft or some clandestine trafficking, of the sole mercantile value acknowledged in such a place, i.e. (as was indicated by similar hand-rolled cigarette butts, lumpy, spit-drenched and smoked down to the very end), of tobacco). And in the same way, having reached the end of the line, the motorman, head tilted to avoid the flame of the lighter so close to his lips, drew one last puff on that cigarette butt reduced to less than a centimeter of black-rimmed paper which glowed for a second before being delicately grasped between two fingers, plucked from his lower lip to which it had stuck, and finally thrown away, after which, holding in one hand the lever-handle raised off its axis, he stepped down from the car and, accompanied by the ticket-taker, headed for the little cement pavilion evidently built on the model of the comfort stations (a function it would in part subserve) and which doubtless included a narrow desk covered with log books to be signed and a cash box for the ticket-taker, both men covering the several yards like a sort of twin figure, with this difference that if the ticket-taker seemed to be wearing the same shapeless gray outfit he was nonetheless distinguished from the motorman by a sort of military cap, and his shapeless jacket was creased by the shoulder strap of his coin purse as well as by the strap of his oblong ticket tray held in the crook of his left elbow and on which were stacked in two parallel rows the many-colored stubs of the (one-way / round-trip) tickets corresponding to each of the stops along the route in a range of pastel colors (pink, tan, mauve, yellow, orange, indigo, azure) which, contrasting with the taciturn and expressionless faces of the two men and their threadbare garments, seemed like a bright display of flowers, their price-stamped petals sanguine and primaveral in every season.

That Allée des Marronniers which the trolley followed, gradually slowing down at the end of its route, parallel to the Boulevard du President Wilson just past the monument to the dead erected at the entrance to the municipal gardens, seemed to constitute, in the late afternoons (as if there were a link between them and the monumental monument), the rendezvous of half a dozen of those little go-carts consisting of a black-painted wicker seat between two wheels behind a third smaller wheel attached to a steering-shaft by a bicycle-chain running up to the double-crank also serving as handlebars and operated by the hands of those men (or rather, apparently, of exact copies of the same man—for they all looked just alike: the same bony, raptorial countenance, the same black moustache waxed to a point (or comically frizzled with a hot curling-iron), the same hand-rolled cigarette butt, the same tiny fan of faded ribbons in the jacket buttonhole, the same shiny black oildoth, creased and worn in patches, spreading from the seat down to the narrow running-board on which no foot ever rested) whom Maman called with what seemed a sort of wicked delight by a compound name (stump-men) which had a sort of sinister resonance (like thousand-legger or praying-mantis) and which on her lips and in her tone of voice had something at once offensive, macabre, and despairing about it, as if she were reproaching them not only for the exhibition of their infirmity, but for merely existing, for having emerged, virtually sliced in two but alive, from that conflict which had torn from her the only man she had ever loved, as if that cruel label of hers somehow implied a charge of cowardice along with envy, jealousy, and pity—she who had now renounced that crepe veil behind which, not without a certain ostentation, she had hidden her face long past the decent limits of mourning, but persisted in wearing only dark colors and who perhaps (just as her membership in a certain charitable society obliged her twice a week to teach the catechism to a handful of unruly children in a side-chapel of the cathedral) visited the hospital or the hospice or the asylum (there must have been a site, a shared locus from which, in the late afternoons, they headed toward that Allée des Marronniers impassive and terrifying with their waxed moustaches, their hawklike noses, their rickety vehicles and their tormented bodies, constituting a permanent chastisement, a permanent recrimination with regard to the living …) where these wretched creature were quartered, in order to bring them candy or even perhaps (though she hated this vice, but doubtless in memory of that smoking-service brought back from the Orient by the man for whom she still wore mourning and which figured in cloisonné (tray, tobacco jar and ashtrays) a flock, of pink-breasted turquoise birds flying through reeds over huge water-lilies) … perhaps, then, some of that inferior tobacco stocked in country stores, cubical packets wrapped in flimsy gray paper sealed by the white ribbon of the State Excise, and to which she never failed to attach one of those notebooks of little sheets of cigarette paper whose trademarks (“Riz-la-Croix” or “JOB”) might have seemed so many incitations to submit to their martyrdom had not the cross stamped on sky-blue paper simply referred to a manufacturer’s name and the acronym JOB printed in gold letters on a white background been derived, as was common knowledge, from the lozenge-shaped enlargement of the founder of the firm’s initials (one Joseph Bardou) and, like the cross, had no application to the sufferings of the biblical figure.

Furthermore, her own face (which when she was still a young woman had begun to grow puffy during the four years of an interminable engagement when she had obstinately opposed her mother in order to insist upon marriage with a penniless man, a match which the old lady considered if not degrading at the very least disastrous socially as well as financially, and which, later on, disappointment or rather despair, the accumulation of tears, seemed to have distended even more, filling it like a sponge) … her own face, then, since the disease which was to carry him off had attacked her, proceeded, as though by a sort of mimetism (or macabre coquetry) at first simply to waste away, then to grow cadaverous and gradually to mummify, irresistibly suggesting by the end, in an ashen, feminized, and pitiless form, the faces of those men physically amputated of half of themselves and, as if she was blaming them for some indecent exhibitionism or even, who knows? despite their cruel mutilation (one of them had only one arm as well) for still being alive—or rather for having survived, for having emerged from that war which had torn half of herself from her as well, so that this horrifying label of stump-men which turned them into somehow mythical creatures (half-human, half-arboreal) and which she never failed to repeat on each occasion with a certain insistence and even satisfaction (“the stump-men’s allée,” “that time of the afternoon when the stump-men get together,” etc.), seemed like an unappeasable protest, as if she had perceived their existence (or their perseverance in remaining alive) as an affront to her grief, a ceaselessly renewed sneer of fate, and …

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Fascinating stuff about Markopoulos, thank you! Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has added to his legendary FaBlog with a new ditty called ‘The Second Amendment Solution To “I Don Know”’. Check it out. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Oh, cool. Yes, I just bought what I think is that book you mentioned when I was in Glasgow. You have the Blakeston Little Caesar book! You must be one of a handful. Cool, thank you. ** Bill, Hi. Experimental artist babes, you can’t beat ’em. I hope your weekend was pleasantly work filled and entertaining. Did you see anything of note? Mine was work-y (TV script, gif novel) and stress-y (pre-PGL release nerves). ** Kyler, Thank you, Kyler! I’m so happy you went to see PGL again, and your great words are super heartening. Well, it’s always quality not quantity. That’s the golden rule, I think. I’m glad to hear that the reading was great at being what it was, and do give an alert, yes, when we can do the looky-loo thing via youtube. ** liquoredgoat, Hi, man. It was fun, thanks. Super congrats about the MFA degree! You gonna celebrate or something? And I’m excited to read your poem! Everyone, liquoredgoat is, in real life, the wonderful poet Douglas Payne, and he has a new poem up at the literary site decomP. Please join me in feasting your eyes, etc. on it. Right here. ** h, Hi, h. Yes, I thought of you making the Markopoulos post as I know you’re a fellow big admirer. I’ve never had the privilege of seeing his films projected, just on-line and streaming. Lucky you. I have a book of his criticisms that I just bought the other day, and I’m obviously looking forward to reading it. I’ve only read a couple of scattered pieces of his here and there, but I was blown away by them. Yes, I saw the email/poetry book! Thank you so, so much! The Glasgow screening was great. It went really well. Zac and I were very happy. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Sucks that Zac and I missed that march in Glasgow by a hair. That would have been fascinating. Shit. Well, I’ll look for video. Yes, yes, I’m enthusiastically awaiting the opportunity to host a ‘welcome’ post for The Call. Can’t wait! Everyone, The great _Black_Acrylic aka Ben Robinson has launched a fascinating new zine, The Call, which will be the subject of a post here very soon. In the meantime, here’s its new website. ** Misanthrope, Hey, G. I want to see the new ‘Avengers’, mainly because I saw the first two and actually enjoyed them in the way they seem to meant to be enjoyed. But I’ll probably wait for my first in-flight chance. That’s how I saw the first two, and why break the spell? Wow, Joe Mills liked PGL? That’s nice to hear and quite an accomplishment. Very cool. It does sound like lawyer might be a good gig for LPS. Hard to imagine him attending the near-decade of university that would take. He’s a lucky, lucky little dude. So far. Well, that’s tentatively great! ** Nik, Hey, Nik! Good to see you, man! Agree about the early Anger films really holding up. I saw a bunch of his more recent films last year, and unfortunately they were pretty awful. But hey. Well, your intended novella sounds very fascinating. Wow, yeah, my eyes are already itchy. Fantastic! And, yes, very looking forward to seeing you here. And, yeah, if something’s happening work-wise then, I’ll give you the word. I’ll email you Blake’s email address in a few minutes. Don’t hesitate to write and ask him, and tell him I gave you his contact and urged you to approach him. Great idea, obviously. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Excellent on the start if your monologue. I like what you’re proposing, for sure, and I quite like that title: ‘Seasick’. Exciting! ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Happy to have made the introduction. Very nice quote on the Robbe-Grillet. Thanks for it, and for the link. I’ll get myself over there. And for the link to The Tenemos Facebook page. I joined. And I see they propped the Markopoulos post. Nice of them. On the Eurovision post — which I’m excited you’re still into doing — well, basically what people do, and what is best for me, is to write/graph out how you want the post to be with text, etc., and then indicate where you want the photos and videos to go. For videos, a link to their location is good. Then I’ll imbed them. For images, best to send them as email attachments, and I can insert them in the spots where you want them to go if you indicate the names/places in the mock-up post. Deadline: the earlier the better but I can put the post together fairly quickly. Does that make sense? I can explain more and better if you want. It’s nice to be home. The film release is pretty stressful and busy-making, but that’s natural. Excellent news about the registrar’s recognition! Full speed ahead indeed and always whenever possible! ** Right. The great Nouveau Roman author and Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon’s final novel ‘The Trolley’ rarely gets discussed, and that was my impetus to put a spotlight on it. Give it some time. Thanks! See you tomorrow.