The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Charles Matton’s Boites *

* (restored)

 

‘J’aime chez Charles Matton cette familiarité obsessionnelle qu’il entretient avec les objets, le sentiment de leur évidence, qui est plus qu’un sentiment esthétique, et qui tient de l’exorcisme et de la magie. Faire surgir l’objet, voilà qui est plus important que de le faire signifier.’ — Jean Baudrillard

‘In his influential study of the poetic implications of our interactions with buildings and spaces, The Poetics of Space (1958), the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observed that it is “reasonable to say we ‘read a house’ or ‘read a room’, since both rooms and houses are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy.” Bachelard’s interest is in the powerful correspondence between the spaces we live in and our psyches, the ability of rooms and buildings not only to reflect our personalities and imaginations, but to affect them, and the ability of spaces to harbour our most intimate and deeply personal memories: “Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.”

‘Bachelard’s observations are useful when understanding the work of the French artist, Charles Matton, (1931 - 2008). Matton made work in many media. A talented draughtsman, he was an illustrator for Esquire and designed sets for films. Throughout his career, he worked in photography, painting, sculpture and film, but it is the remarkable series of boites that he created from 1985 until his death, for which he will be remembered. The boites are small enclosures measuring approximately two cubic feet in which he built miniature replicas of real spaces, ranging from exacting models of the studios of artists such as Courbet, Vermeer and Francis Bacon to intimate bedrooms and bathrooms and the vast book-lined spaces of the New York Club’s Library. Presenting 40 of a total 72 boxes that Matton made during his lifetime, the exhibition provides a comprehensive introduction to the work of a little-known, but strikingly original artist.

‘One of the most immediately impressive aspects of Matton’s miniature boxes is their magical or bewitching quality, inviting the viewer into their spaces with a virtuoso technical skill. Through the subtle and precise use of mirrors and lighting effects, Matton is able to create the illusion and the suggestion of spaces much larger or smaller than his two cubic feet enclosures. Inside the box Boulevard Saint Germain (1991), there’s an exacting miniature replica of a Parisian interior, the corner of a room opening onto two half open doors, behind which sit two other rooms and further doors. As you peer into the space, the room creates the illusion of opening outwards in multiple directions into further doors and further rooms. It has a magical, uncanny quality that makes you wipe your eyes in disbelief. You know there’s only this small enclosure, but you lift your head to check anyway, enchanted and bewitched by the realistic but otherworldly quality of what you’re seeing.

Corridor Library (2000) creates the illusion of an infinitely long corridor lined with books, their tiny spines fastidiously stacked, conveying a sense of great expansion and scope that transcends the work’s miniature scale. In other works, such as Mirrored Cupboard III (1999), Matton makes use of painted glass to give the appearance of a mirrored cupboard door reflecting objects within the room of the box, but which does not reflect anything outside of the box, helping to maintain the illusion of the box’s self-enclosed space. Curator, Joe La Placa, acknowledges Matton’s technical achievements, but believes that his work is distinguished by its content rather than the meticulousness of its form: “With Matton, many people pay attention to the technical aspects of his work, which are extraordinary. But there are many other artists who work in miniature, and it’s what he depicts that is important: moments in time, moods, qualities of light at particular times of day, a certain kind of metaphysical feeling that the boxes exude; that is what makes his work so captivating.”

‘Many of his boxes have an extremely personal, emotional and intimate quality. Debussy’s Poisson D’Or (2004) depicts a room with faded wallpaper and a slightly worn oriental carpet. In the centre of the room is a grand piano. Using a video projection, the piano stool is inhabited by a young man playing Debussy. The young man is in fact Matton’s son, shimmering and not quite there in the projection, haunting and beautiful. This box has the atmosphere of a particularly vivid memory; a particularly resonant dream. Matton’s box suggests, as Bachelard also argues, that it is our spatial awareness that most vividly suggests memories.

‘Even the boxes without figures seem haunted by intimacy and particular emotional timbres. Matton created a long series of hotel corridors and lobbies. Hotel du Lac (1994) shows a hotel lobby with faded but lavish curtains and a large bookcase. In the middle of the box there’s an open door, through which, with the use of mirrors, Matton creates the effect of a never-ending corridor. The work has a personal basis in Matton’s biography in the sense that Matton grew up in hotels because his father worked as a hotel manager. This was an uncertain time, the occupation, and the family’s hotel was occupied by soldiers during the Second World War. The doorway to infinity, then, suggests an invitation to escape to the world outside the confines of the space. Hotel du Lac has an enchanting, wondrous quality, while also suggesting extreme loneliness and the sensation of being trapped.

‘In contrast, many of the boxes exude a playful spirit, suggesting a network of childhood associations such as dolls’ houses, model-making and the surreal, “nonsense” literature of authors such as Lewis Carroll. As La Placa explains: “Matton was a very, very playful character, and that spirit of child’s play is part of the spine of his work.” In order to emphasise this quality, and encourage visitors to enter into this spirit, the exhibition is being held in a specially constructed labyrinth near King’s Cross. The labyrinth will consist of a room within a room. On the outside, the boxes will be displayed alongside preparatory material in a ring around a central room. The central room will contain a large two-way mirror very like the ones used in Matton’s boxes to create the illusion of deep, never-ending space. The experience of walking into the room within a room, then, will approximate the experience of entering into one of Matton’s boxes. As La Placa explains: “Looking through this mirror will hopefully give you the same effect as looking into the boxes, only on a life-scale.” This effect of being inside one of Matton’s boxes is heightened because the inner room will also display a larger-than-life-size sculpture entitled La Grande Lulu (2000), a playful bronze with round cartoonish lines of a woman running, while a miniature version will also be displayed in one of the boxes.

‘Many of the works have a dramatic quality, as if they are dioramas or stages on which something is about to play out. In some cases, the drama is well known, but the setting perhaps less so. In Paul Bowles’s Bedroom Tangiers (1998), the particular quality of the light and furniture of the room offers a kind of relic of the dramatic, bohemian life lived within its walls. In other cases, such as Untidy Woman’s Bedroom (1991) and Collector’s Bedroom (2002), the occupiers of the rooms are more anonymous, and part of the enjoyment of these works is in supposing the drama of the rooms’ absent characters.

Homage to Edward Hopper (2002) portrays a dusty room in an apartment block draped in evening sunlight streaming through half open windows, which borrows and recaptures the sense of empty tension and anticipation that so inhabits Hopper’s paintings. There are cracks and fading marks in the wallpaper. The floorboards are exposed. There is a pile of newspapers in the middle of the floor. It’s a near-empty room, but it’s filled with an atmosphere of foreboding, the viewer can’t fail to be captivated with a sense of drama about to unfold. Propped up against the wall is a canvas painting of the same room; a Hopper painting, just finished, or in progress. Through his masterful manipulation of light and space, Matton almost enables the viewer to feel what compelled Hopper to paint the scene, what atmosphere he felt there that he conveyed in his painting. Hopper is only one of many artists to whom Matton paid homage in his boites. They provide a fascinating document of his influences and concerns. In his miniature versions of the studios of artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and Vermeer, one can see his recurring interest in scale and in the relation of interior and domestic spaces to the interior spaces of psychology.

‘The preparatory materials that will be shown alongside Matton’s boites consist of drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures and are remarkable artworks in their own right. They occupy a curious relation to Matton’s miniature boxes because the boxes themselves were originally created as preparatory material for large scale realist paintings. He would create meticulous miniature models of rooms and spaces, which he would then photograph, blow up to a large scale and convert into a realist painting on a canvas. At some point while engaged in this process, Matton decided to reverse the order and make the boites the finished artwork, for which he made drawings and photographs as research material. This reversibility of process means that the artworks have a complicated relationship to the idea of a finished piece and to the idea of concrete reality in general. The photographs, drawings, sculptures, models and boxes are intertwined in a complex relational web, in the tangle of which reality dissolves or disappears.

‘One of the richest and most interesting aspects of Matton’s work is how in-tune it is with much 20th century French philosophy and cultural theory. His circle of friends included Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, both of whom championed his work. Baudrillard’s writings on Simulacra seem particularly relevant. Baudrillard thought that our contemporary experience is so dominated by images, simulations, replicas and references that we have lost our ability to experience what the images are meant to depict: reality. While Matton’s work makes a concerted effort to approximate reality as closely as possible in the boxes, by the act of doing so they also articulate a drama of the hyper-real, where the distinction between reality and replica blurs. For example, Matton’s meticulous recreation of a particular moment in time in the Nice bedroom of Nobel Prize winning author J.M.G Le Clezio (1999) is more real to the viewer than the actual room, which might never again experience quite the same effect of light shining through half-closed jalousie blinds which is captured in Matton’s box. Once we have seen Matton’s box, that virtually becomes the reality of the space depicted and we lose touch with a sense of what the real space might have been.

‘When Alice hit the ground from what seemed like an endless tumble down the rabbit hole, she was first contracted like a telescope, shrinking so that she thinks she might disappear altogether. Shortly afterwards she’s stretched again (like a Giacometti sculpture) so that she thinks she’ll never see her toes. It’s as if her size is refocusing to deal with the strange and uncanny qualities of her surroundings. Enclosures enacts a similar readjustment of focus on the part of the viewer, as if by refocusing our attention on the miniature we’re able to stretch it liberatingly outwards again. At the core of Matton’s work are questions of scale, and part of the triumph of his art is its ability to open up spaces much larger than the everyday spaces we inhabit, in spite of and in fact because of the miniature platform on which he worked.’ — Colin Herd

 

 

____
Further

Charles Matton Website
‘Charles Matton – Selected Works’
Le Cercle des Amis de Charles Matton
‘Charles Matton: Enclosures’
‘Architect of Illusions: Charles Matton’
‘Charles Matton sort de ses boîtes’
Book: Paul Virilio ‘Charles Matton: Enclosures’
‘Magic and Miniatures’
‘A BRIGITTE BARDOT portrait by Charles Matton’
‘Les Boîtes de Charles Matton’
‘Charles Matton’s exhibition, best ever seen’

 

___
Film

Spermula (1976)
‘This is the weird, wonderful and highly stylistic film directed and produced by Charles Matton. It is an incredible piece of film fantasy. It is simply outstanding. I am not one to give pompous reviews on any film I happen to see but this film is a major exception. It includes the beauty of 70’s supermodel Dayle Haddon,who has modeled for Yves Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld, Max Factor, Estee Lauder, L’Oreal Paris and now a human rights activist and ambassador for womens rights. Back to the film. It is explicit. Many of the scenes feature open sex and unrestrained debauchery. Many film buffs have simply thrown ‘Art House Porn’ at this film, yet I think it is a little bit more deserving than that. A wacky and interesting plot of extra terrestrial angels on a mission to better humanity with their unique philosophy. Looking at this films history it seems it was quite controversial, for those in the know anyhow. Underground art scenes etc have had their stake on it and many versions and cut and paste originals have been lost. What I believe is remaining are two versions.

‘An English version that apparently has been dubbed completely out of context and respect for the plot of the original french version though it too has it’s share of meddling, reports are that it was edited and cut beyond belief as there were even more explicit displays, more than you see here so one can only imagine. Rumours are that Eva Ionesco (appears right in the beginning, sitting on the satin chaise and also skipping in silhouette) and her mother were involved in the film which I don’t doubt since if you are familiar with the mother’s (Irina Ionesco) exceptional work in photography and styling, known for her dark, poignant, erotic, unsettling yet beautiful imagery you will no doubt see also in this film which swings from the period Baroque/Rococo to 1930’s ART DECO. The styling(Alberte Barsacq) is absolutely elegant, a word I use sparingly. The soundtrack is stunning, beautifully elegant piano arrangements, Cabaret tunes, some Disco is thrown in and 1930s jazz bands. What sets this film so apart from most films of this underground variety is that the film in general is highly stylised, stylised to the point that I think to myself ‘Only in the 70s’, only in the 70s when permissiveness was much greater, Disco was everywhere and interior design and Fashion were at its peak that such a film could be made and incorporate some of those abstract themes and in general plain weirdness together to create something so exceptional.’ — GABRIEL ANTINOUS

 

___
Boxes

‘At first he didn’t make them to show them, but to use as a tool to produce photographs. His first exhibition contained the paintings, photographs of the interiors and finally the boxes. It was to make the public believe that the photograph was an honest representation of the space. It was to create this illusion.’ — Sylvie Matton

 

 


The New York Loft, 26th Street (1986)


Boulevard Saint Germain (3 doors) (1991)


Boulevard St Germain


Sigmund Freud’s Study (Night) (2002)


A Romantic Collector’s Bedroom (2002)


Francis Bacon’s Studio (1987)


Chambre de William Burroughs, Tangier (2004)


Le loft au grand escalier (1989)


Library (Homage to Proust)


Bathroom II (1987)


Petit matin au Café de Flore


The Secret Garden of Marianne and Pierre Naho (1933)


The Green Living Room With Two Armchairs (1987)


Paramount Theater Aucland (1989)

 

____
Extras


Charles Matton, visiblement – Documentaire portrait


Art. Interview pinceau : Charles Matton


Exposition de Charles Matton

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. To say I agree would be gilding the lily. Everyone, David Ehrenstein would like to link y’all up to ‘a Derek Jarman music video for the Pet Shop Boys. “Spring” (Rupert Audley) who can be seen fucking the Caravaggio painting in “The Last of England” is on view very briefly in this video in black leather with white hair. Rupert’s family is part of the British aristocracy. He’s a gay punk.’ Here ’tis. ** Chaim Hender, Hi. The new film that Zac and I writing is about a haunted house attraction and we’ve been thinking and talking about the very issue you brought up! What were the odds? IRCAM is basically this working institute, lab, studio, etc. that has the highest, newest sound tech available. They work/collaborate with everyone from experimental musicians/artists to giant movie makers. And I think one can apply to work at the institute with their stuff. Gisele and I have collaborated with them on, I think, four of our theater works, and the opera will be the fifth. They’re very cool and love a challenge. As Steve said, if I’ve ever met Thomas Pynchon, I didn’t know it. I don’t think I have. ** Steve Erickson, Ah, good old divisive Haneke. I haven’t seen ‘Happy End’ yet. Zac and Gisele really liked it and thought it was one of his better films. So there you go. I heard a little of the Emo Kid record. It’s quite curious. I’m not sure what else to think about it yet. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I’ve never seen even a single second of ‘Game of Thrones’, but that restaurant looks like wacky fun. ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, gosh, I’m very sorry if I haven’t thanked you for your Xmas cards. I’ve really liked and displayed them. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to explain my rudeness other than because of my terrible emailing habits. Anyway, I totally understand if you want to stop sending a card to me. ** Ketsan, I liked your Thanksgiving piece. It’s very sharp and swoopy and has all sorts of exciting linguistic and other thrills. Thank you, kudos. I’d say the 10th arr is def the best for Paris eating at this point in time. I hardly ever eat out, I don’t know why. I like food pretty well. I like watching people eat. Zac hates watching people eat. There are two things he won’t allow in our films: people eating and people whispering. I’m good. Man, I hope that Bronchitis is crawling out of your pores or butt or wherever it goes to die. ** Okay. It was quiet here yesterday. Today’s post restoration is due to a request off-blog by someone who is writing some big thing about Charles Matton’s work and said that reposting my thing would be a big help to him. But I think it’s probably well worth seeing, or re-seeing as the case may be, apart from that, so … See you tomorrow.

18 Comments

  1. David Ehrenstein

    Charles Matton would appear to be the French analogue to Joseph Cornell — aside from “Spermula” (and thanks for the links)
    “Happy End” is pretty good, but not up to “Cache” IMO. Still it offers us the sight of Jean-Louis Trintignant trying to kill himself over and over with a calm deliberation that’s delightfully weird. (As y’all know I consider him the greatest actor in the history of the cinema. He wanted to retire after his daughter’s murder, but Haneke asked him to do “Amour” which was hailed far and wide. Consequently he couldn’t turn down “Happy End”)

  2. David Ehrenstein

    Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” is a disgrace. Like the “Twilight” movies its designed for Fag-Hags longing to own a gay man they can call their own. Daniel Day-Lewis began his career as an actor of supreme liveliness ( “My Beautiful Laundrette”) He’s ending it as a neurasthenic stick-figure.

  3. Steve Erickson

    Wow, I had exactly the opposite reactions to HAPPY END and PHANTOM THREAD. The former is going on my list of the year’s worst films, the latter on the runners-up to my top 10 list.

    Speaking of top 10 lists, here’s the (admittedly incomplete -it would be great if the Village Voice preserved all Pazz’n’Jop ballots on their website the way they used to) file of my 1997-2015 music lists: https://steeveecom.wordpress.com/1997-2015-music-top-10-lists/

  4. Dóra Grőber

    Hi!

    Excuse my sudden absence yesterday. I was just about to leave from work when a policeman came in the gallery and simply told us that the street is locked down because the Chinese prime minister visits our country right now and he was about to make an appearance nearby (we’re almost next to the parliament). “Security reasons”, he said. So I was stuck in the gallery for like another hour and by the time I got home I was thoroughly exhausted and angry. I’m the last person to go into politics but this country is a joke, really.

    On the homepage of the gallery there’re two pictures which basically show the entirety of it: https://citygraph.net/pages/contact-us
    It’s pretty small but full of art. The stairs lead to the owner’s tiny workshop. It always makes me think how “compact” the whole thing is and how nice it must be to own a place like this: where one can produce and sell their own creations.
    Hildur Guðnadóttir – her name sounds so familiar for some reason (I have no idea how to pronounce it, though). It’s amazing that you get to work with her!
    How was your visit to IRCAM yesterday?

    I had yet another work-y day today. Definitely better than yesterday…!
    How was the day on your end? What happened?

  5. Sypha

    Some of these pieces of art are certainly very distinctive…

    Dennis, okay, thanks for clearing that up, your answer is pretty much expected. I guess I just wanted it confirmed, because, as you know, silence can be an ambiguous thing! But I’d be happy to send you a card again. Is your address still the same this year as it was last year?

  6. Dom Lyne

    Hey Dennis,

    I love the boxes; they are amazing. I can’t find the words to describe the thoughts/feelings that things like this inspire without using aggrandising words like “I makes you feel like God looking in on his creations.” In a way it is like this, but more innocent, it’s the feeling I had when I was a kid and would look into the house of my little ‘Sylvanian Families’ figurines, and I would feel this little bit of power and control, that what would happen next would be of my design. Looking at the boxes Charles Matton produced, you’re presented with scene, the last breath of a story unknown to you before you looked at it, but for which you now have total control over.

    There’s something about miniaturised scenes, especially when they are based on real-world places. To me they feel more innocent; the darkened corridors/hallways and dishevelled bedrooms all create images and stories in your head, but for me I can’t picture their stories as being overtly tragic: no boxer-briefed man sat slumped against the bed with a needle in his arm, or some thief about to be discovered hiding around the corner. To see these scenes, my mind changes the scenery to an image of their real-world counterpart. Again, for me I think this comes back down to what I was saying about that feeling of control; there are things in our lives that we can’t control, but with these miniature scenes we can control everything. We can create that world where people don’t die tragically, where even the darkest places can feel safe.

    Today’s post has really inspired me, and actually made me question how and why I felt what I did when seeing Matton’s boxes. That’s the second time today that your blog has done this, although the last post brought up some fond memories from the past. I don’t know if you saw it, I was a bit late in leaving my comment, but I left a message for you (it ended up being quite long). It was about my memory of the Jekyll and Hyde Club in New York, as well as a little catch up on what’s been going on for me and my extended absence from commenting.

    Hope everything is well. Love and hugs as ever,

    Dom

    • Armando

      @Dom Lyne

      Hey,

      Fuck, I know most likely you won’t get to read this, but, wow, so great to “see” you here, man. Fucking *LOVE* your work! Thank you so much and congratulations for it!

      All the best!,

      Armando.

      • Dom Lyne

        Hey Armando,

        I just saw your comment, thanks for that. I woke up feeling a bit off today, and what you wrote has cheered me up massively.

        Take care,

        Dom

  7. Amphibiouspeter

    Hey DC,

    Thanks for the book recommendation. I saw Forced Entertainment’s adaptation of the Notebook a few years ago. It was pretty disappointing which is a shame from a seminal company like that. But I’m excited to read it! Seem to remember something about someone fucking a dog?

    Thanks for today’s post. I thought the most amazing thing about Matton’s model boxes was the light – pretty special. I went to an exhibition on Dioramas a couple of weeks ago and it was really good. It displayed a load of old dioramas from museums and gave context about how it’s now a redundant form (funny, like a museum exhibit on old museum exhibits) and then they had how various artists had responded to the form. One artist had a live fish in a tank, surrounded by ‘fake’ dirt in a bigger tank. Hard to describe but it felt like contemporary art at its best and most concise.

    Thanks for the tip on the publisher, I took a little look yesterday – but fell asleep before leaving a comment on here. Haunted house themed restaurants are pretty weird right? What’s weirder is that you can basically think any random thing up and with a bit of time on the Internet realise there’s a whole bunch of them out there.

    Sweeeeeet – take it easy 🙂

  8. Steve Erickson

    Your Odd Future fandom largely seemed to end after Tyler’s first album, but I’ve really gotten into Syd’s FIN lately, to the point where I think it’s one of the year’s best albums. She sings sweetly over hard hip-hop beats, with slowed-down male voices often sampled into the mix and touches of weird electronics. Her love songs are very explicitly about women. Columbia did a terrible job of promoting this – it was digital-only for months and then they released it on LP a few months later. I had the CD on order at Rough Trade for three months and eventually released it would never come out on that format. They put out an EP containing 3 new songs last September with even less promotion. Misa brought up the issue of whether homophobia is holding her back, but I think the issue is that Sony has dozens of artists and she is not a priority. She really needs a new label that will actually treat her as a big fish in a small pond, like Warp is currently doing with Kelela (who is far more influenced by IDM but is doing a version of “alt-R&B” that’s spiritually kin to Syd’s music.) If SZA and Solange can become stars, I don’t see why Syd can’t.

  9. Steve Erickson

    The full Sundance lineup was just announced, and unless I overlooked it, your film didn’t make the cut. (I am sorry if mentioning this comes off as rubbing it in.) Your next big chance is Berlin, right? I assume you submitted for Rotterdam as well.

  10. Jeff J

    Hey Dennis – I enjoyed being introduced to Charles Matton’s boxes. Interesting work. At first scroll, I thought that film was a mistake, but then I looked closer and saw it was his work as well.

    Do you happen to recall any interesting novels that integrate diary entries in the text — but that aren’t composed entirely of diary entries? Researching something and looking for examples, thinking they’d be plentiful but somehow coming up blank.

    Excited about the opera project surfacing. Anything else you can share about it at this point?

  11. Armando

    Hey, man,

    How are you?

    I would like to ask you something very, very seriously. Could I adapt ‘Oliver Twink’ into a screenplay? Would you let me? How would all the loyalties stuff work and all that?

    Take care,

    Good day; good luck,

    A.

  12. Misanthrope

    Dennis, Those haunted house restaurants yesterday were cool. And I’m liking some of Matton’s stuff here today.

    Yeah, insurance is nice to have just in case, you know? At least for anything catastrophic. I’ve got a loose tooth now -a bicuspid or pre-molar- that I’m gonna have to take care of soon. I think I had a cavity there and just never bothered with it. Now it’s pretty loose and hurts from time to time and I chew on the other side of my mouth. Without the insurance, it’d probably cost a lot more than it will without. (Though I wonder if I couldn’t pull it myself…I mean, there’s YouTube tutorials, I’m sure…)

    The cost of insurance is outrageous, though. As a friend of mine from Scotland said, “You Americans are being conned!”

    What do you do about doctors and health care stuff while you’re in France? Can’t you pay a small fee out of pocket or something?

    You know, I never liked the tiny screens of the DS and PSP and the Gameboy and all those. I like my big TV screen. But yeah, the games are fun, beating up bad guys and hunting for shit. Not really hard, but it can be time intensive as you build up abilities and open powers and stuff.

    LPS’s intake hearing is in the morning. I took the day off for it. Ugh. I’m sure it’ll go all right, but I still thank you for the support.

  13. Misanthrope

    Oh, and Dennis, one more thing: A question for you. When you think of your print novels, what do you think when you think of God Jr?

    I was thinking on it the other day and just became curious as to how you regard it yourself.

  14. Steve Erickson

    Imagine if the McKarey haunted house – which is now offering an 8-24-hour “survival experience” – opened a restaurant!

  15. Chaim Hender

    This was fun. I love miniatures and look forward to watching “Spermula” over the weekend.

    After years of staying up very late for no good reason I’ve discovered I’m a morning person. My most productive time seems to be 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM. Not sure how much of this is body clock and how much is that it gets dark here early despite the latitude (eastern edge of time zone, we’re somehow only 1 hour ahead of Paris…) and this is the only quiet time in my dorm living situation. Does anyone care to share habit modification stories?

    I’m becoming interested in the absurdity of music writing. I agree with whoever it was who said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” but I see that as a challenge and selling point rather than a reason not to do it. I have a love/hate relationship to music critics (from your neighborhood alt weekly to Pitchfork) taking any band (from high school kids of modest talents to global stars) as a pretext for flights of Ruskin-like fancy that seem to have little to do with the music. What was it like working in that world?

  16. Bill

    Great to see this restoration! It’s one of my favorite days. I’ve been a big fan since seeing a Matton show in Paris years ago.

    This article has a photo of the Sacher-Masoch room, which is quite different from a lot of the boîtes.

    I’m almost done with the San Francisco art/post/punk gig. Dennis, are you still using something like the blogspot template? I remember that’s what I used to give you; hope it’s still easy to work with.

    Will almost definitely see Radian playing here Sunday. Might go to Pere Ubu later; not sure yet.

    Bill

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