The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Fire *

* (restored)

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I mean, why are these girls naked? why is the boat on fire and what the hell is going on here?

 

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In Martin Honert’s polyester-and-resin sculpture Feuer (1992), the artist was inspired by a dictionary illustration that, as a child, became the very definition of fire in his mind. Honert then translated this symbol into plaster, with a later work evolving into a three-dimensional floor sculpture of painted and illuminated resin.

 

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I hope you die in a fire! Hope you’ll be stabbed in the heart, hope you’ll get shot and expire! Hope you’ll be taken apart! Hope this is what you desire! I hope you die in a fire!

 

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Around the Fire
by Ted Berrigan

What I’m trying to say is that if an experience is
proposed to me—I don’t have any particular interest
in it—Any more than anything else. I’m interested in
anything. Like I could walk out the door right now and go some
where else. I don’t have any center in that sense. If you’ll look
in my palm you’ll see that my heart and my head line are
the same and if you’ll look in your palm you’ll see that it’s
different. My heart and my head feel exactly the same. Me,
I like to lay around of a Sunday and drink beer. I don’t feel
a necessity for being a mature person in this world. I mean
all the grown-ups in the world, they’re just playing house, all
poets know that. How does your head feel? How I feel is
what I think. I look at you today, & I expect you to look
the same tomorrow. If you’re having a nervous breakdown, I’m
not going to be looking at you like you’re going to die, because
I don’t think you are. If you’re a woman you put yourself
somewhere near the beginning and then there’s this other place
you put yourself in terms of everybody. “The great cosmetic strange-
ness of the normal deep person.” Okay. Those were those people—and
I kept telling myself, I have to be here, because I don’t have
a country. How tight is the string? And what is on this particular
segment of it? And the photographer, being black, and the writer,
me, being white, fell out at this point. And he didn’t want to
look at it—I mean it’s nothing, just some drunk Indians riding
Jersey milk cows—but I wanted to see it, I mean it was right
in front of my eyes and I wanted therefore to look at it.
And death is not any great thing, it’s there or it’s not. I mean
God is the progenitor of religious impetuousity in the human beast.
And Davy Crockett is right on that—I mean he’s gonna shoot a bear,
but he’s not gonna shoot a train, because the train is gonna run
right over him. You can’t shoot the train. And I always thought
there was another way to do that. And it is necessary to do that
and we bear witness that it is necessary to do it. The only distinction
between men and women is five million shits.

 

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In 1971 a search for gas went wrong when a whole drilling rig fell into an underground cavern. Natural gas started coming up from the hole. It was set alight so it wouldn’t kill everything around. For 35 years now the flames keep burning. At night the burning gas makes the crater seen from miles away. The crater is located in Turkmenistan in the heart of the Karakum desert. The crater is called Darvaza or The Burning Gates.

 

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Playlist




 

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Designed by a team of Hungarian engineers originally as a means of mass decontamination for Cold War-era tanks in the event of a CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) attack, this fire-fighting chimera has found a niche in the modern world. The Big Wind is one part T-34 tank and two parts MiG 21 jet engine. Specifically its a T-34 tank chassis with a pair of Mig 21 jet engines mounted to its roof. Windy needs three crewmen: a driver inside the tank to steer and stop it; a controller in a rear cabin at the back of the platform to run the jet engines and the water jets; and a fire chief who walks about 15 feet away, issuing orders to the two other crew members through a remote-control unit. When the water is turned on, the six nozzles above the MiG engines unleashing an immense blast of water that mingles with the jet exhaust and becomes a ferocious spray of steam. The water is moving at a maximum rate of 220 gallons of water a second, or twice what an average U.S. household uses in 24 hours. (If you hooked up this machine’s water pump to a typical suburban swimming pool, it would suck it dry in about 50 seconds.)

 

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The world’s most weird fashion show where all of the models walked on the ramp with the fire flames burning on their body.

 

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A museum in Italy is burning artworks from around the world to protest harsh austerity cuts by the Italian government. Antonio Manfredi, director of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, kicked off the protest this week by setting fire to a painting by French artist Severine Bourguignon. Manfredi says the museum will burn three artworks each week as part of its “Art War” campaign. “I have 1,000 artworks from artists around the world, and they’re already facing destruction due to the indifference of the government,” he told CNN. “We want the government to pay attention to the country’s cultural institutions.”

 

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Veteran stunt man Tom Steele replaced James Arness in the fire scene. Steele wore an asbestos suit with a special fiberglass helmet with an oxygen supply underneath. He used a 100% oxygen supply
which was highly combustible. It was pure luck he didn’t burn his lungs whilst breathing in the mixture.

 

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I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.

The poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

The wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches.

The houses, too, so very thick thereabouts, and full of matter for burning, as pitch and tarr, in Thames-street; and warehouses of oyle, and wines, and brandy, and other things.

So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops. This is very true; so as houses were burned by these drops and flakes of fire, three or four, nay, five or six houses, one from another.

We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins. — Samuel Pepys

 

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This demonic little girl who set fire to a kid’s house.

 

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Fire Therapy involves setting yourself on fire. The therapy involves placing a “fire rope” made from some 20 different Chinese herbs on the patient’s body. After covering the rope with a plastic wrap, two wet towels are placed on top. Then, alcohol is poured on top of the towels and an attendant sets the whole thing on fire.

 

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When the Bombardier beetle feels threatened, its ass releases a chemical compound which is very close to being fire in liquid form. The beetle doesn’t just excrete it, but actually mixes up the chemicals in its inner chambers then shoots the deadly chemicals as a high-speed boiling spray at the remarkable rate of 368 and 735 pulses per second. They can aim the spray precisely and with great force.

 

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I can only imagine the amount of stress Tarkovski was under when this astounding sequence shot was filmed. His other great “burning down it all” scene (at the end of “Offret”/Sacrifice) lead him to madness, because of a little out-of-time movement of a character. He had to beg for cash to re-film it again, and died from lung cancer the next year.

 

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Boy band Westlife burn themselves in effigy for their final performance on June 22 in Dublin.

 

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Weird Paul Petroskey has been writing and recording music since 1984, and has written or co-written over 700 songs and appeared on over 50 released albums. Petroskey formed his label Rocks & Rolling Records in 1987, through which he released his first album In Case of Fire Throw This In on cassette tape. In 1990 Petroskey began performing with drummer Manny Theiner and in 1991, signed with New York record label Homestead Records. Through Homestead Records the two released the album Lo Fidelity, Hi Anxiety, but was not picked up for a second album.

 

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Trilogy

 

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This Fire
by Alice Notley

No one loves you more … more … more …    
There were sincere lies everywhere placed directly before
the next step. Does everyone pretend, part of alive
I am proposing words — All structures have crumbled
in earliest death. I’m crossing the yellow sands
It’s so hard to know without relating it, to you
shaping a heart, take hold of me and someone says
I don’t get it! You don’t have to have love,
or you do, which? I don’t think you do; before
the explosion? I was here without it and have been in
many places loveless. I don’t want you
to know what I’m really thinking or do I, before
creation when there might be no “I knew”
Everything one’s ever said not quite true. He or she be-
trays you; why you want to hurt me … bad
Want to, or just do? Treason was provoked
everywhere even here, by knowing one was one and
I was alone, a pale hue. The sky of death
is milky green today, like a poison pool near a
desert mine. Picked prickly pear fruit and I
tasted it, then we drove on, maybe to Yarnell.
These outposts where I grew up; I didn’t do that
I have no … identity, and the love is an object
to kick as you walk on the blazing bare ground, where …    
sentimental, when what I love, I … don’t have that one
word. This fire all there is … to find … I find it
You have to find it. It isn’t love, it’s what?

 

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He cheated. She’s angry. But this is one of the most extreme pay-backs we’ve ever seen. The wounded partner filmed herself dousing her sleeping boyfriend’s private parts in liquid before setting them alight. He wakes up to the horrifying realisation his testicles are on fire. The woman is heard saying: ‘Yeah that’s right…You cheat on me with my f******* co-worker, you didn’t think I wasn’t going to f******* find out? You stupid a** n***** – get the f*** out. You and that b**** can go to hell.’

 

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I always have a certain sim couple I play with (My simself and my boyfriend’s simself) and I sent them to university once. I put them in a dorm (I don’t remember which one, sorry.) and picked a room and everything. Everything went well until every other roommate just started to cook their own food. One of the females ended up setting the stove on fire. So everyone panicked because there was a giant fire. Boyfriend-sim called the firefighters twice. 2 firefighters arrived but they didn’t do much. Boyfriend-sim tried to help putting the fire out but then this happened.

I know he’s hot but his butt shouldn’t catch on fire. Luckily, he didn’t die. He ended up signed and I teleported him to their room and tried to keep him there. It took me a few tries though. He already had about 3 near-death experiences that day. I teleported my sim to their room, too. I couldn’t lock the doors during a fire so I just kept canceling their “Fire!!!” actions. After a little while I just kept getting messages that the firefighters couldn’t reach the fire. I thought it was weird. The fire stopped after a while but it had taken someone. Everyone in the dorm got the moodlet of witnessing death.

My sims were okay, but everyone else in the dorm was just crying all day and screaming about the person that died. They didn’t go to their classes, they didn’t eat, they didn’t sleep, etc. So they ended up falling asleep in their own puddles of pee while smelling like hobo and it disgusted my sims because they were just lying in around in the hallway. My sim used the cry on shoulder and cheer up interaction a lot, and the moodlet just disappeared for them after 2/3 sim days. But the roommates just kept crying and I don’t know why. Anyone else had this experience with a dorm in University life?

 

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Fakes

 

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Maniac Cop 2 contains the best man on fire scene in the history of cinema. Director Bill Lustig cut the picture in only three months utilizing a team of editors, just so he could have a print ready for the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. That’s right — Lustig wanted Maniac Cop 2 to premiere alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Sadly, the film wasn’t accepted into the prestigious fest. Maniac Cop 2 doesn’t give a shit with whom the audience emotionally identifies. Yet this complete disregard for life is also what makes the movie sadistically special.

 

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I remember the first time I saw Isabelle Hayeur’s Fire with Fire video installation. A four storey building seemingly ablaze, with projected flames filling the windows of the top three floors, best viewed from the derelict end of Vancouver’s East Hastings Street. At five p.m. each day, as dusk settled over a city overrun with Olympic boosterism, Hayeur’s work was switched on; staff waited 30 seconds between igniting the second floor projector, the third, and the fourth, to heighten the sense of inexorable consumption. In a few minutes, the fire builds to a mute roar, filling 20-foot expanses of glass (backed by opaque paper for the projection to play on). The effect from street level was thrilling and, each evening, homeless folk paused alongside international media and wayward tourists to collectively indulge in Hayeur’s mediated schadenfreude.

 

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I’ve devoted myself to the enterprise of destroying my memory . . . I set fire to it, and with its debris I charcoal-scrawl the paper. And each day, if I succeed in seizing some glint, if I manage, as the old Irish hermit says, to lead the darkness to the light, my basic purpose will be to entangle it with the banality of these lines, wobbly, black, relatively crooked upon the paper, in the yellow oval slicing the table, and where soon, once daylight filters in, and I lay down my pen, it will vanish. — Jacques Roubaud

 

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p.s. Hey. Starting tomorrow, the p.s. will be on vacation for about a week as things gear up here in NYC and cut into the time I would normally have to interact with you guys. The p.s. and I will be back on Saturday, the 22nd. In the meantime, you’ll get more restored posts and your monthly escorts batch. Please feel free to hang out, comment to me or to each other and/or about the day’s post, and I will catch with every last comment that you leave here on the 22nd. ** H, Hi. I’m staying way over east on Avenue D where it’s not crowded but, yes, with each block traversed in an eastward direction, it fills. No, I don’t think there’s any Halloween-like thing happening in NYC at the moment, as far as I can tell. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Greetings from a very strange place to your strange place. I’m glad the DCA guy got back to you, but, jeez, so much bureaucracy for something so simple and only beneficial to them. Best of luck, buddy. ** Misanthrope, I guess for the same reason that stores don’t leave their Xmas displays up all year? AKA you got me. Okey dokey, on the 25th or 26th. I’ll be there. And get in touch before then, obviously, so we can arrange to hang. Yep, Ishmael still does his part at the beginning. It’s literally the same piece just with mostly new dancers and older versions of the rest of us. ** Steve Erickson, I’m not sure, what documentary do you mean? I’ve seen a fair number of docs on the haunted house attraction industry, so I’m not sure. ** David Ehrenstein, Nice add sir. ** K___-on, Oh, please. They’re virtually nothing alike. You just haven’t met the right walkable  haunted house yet. Thanks. NYC has been relatively bosom-buddy-like so far, but the trip remains young. ** Right. There’s an earlier thematic post thing up there restored for your possible delectation. Blog will see you tomorrow and every day except Sunday as per usual through the 21st. And I’ll see you again the day after that. Have a splendid week!

11 Comments

  1. James Nulick

    Dennis,

    The Pointer Sisters / Bruce Springsteen song ‘Fire’ is playing in my head right now.

    I’m a bit of a firebug myself. When I was 8 years old I set my father’s garage/ shed on fire. It was this huge wood building in the back 40 of his salvage/ wrecking yard, where he stored radiators, catalytic converters, etc. It was about 20×20, I’d say. I was playing with a small yellow and blue can of Ronson lighter fluid, flicking matches at the liquid I had sprayed along the perimeter. Well summers in Phoenix are hotter than a two-peckered Billy goat…before I knew it, the entire garage was engulfed in flames… I was horrified! I really got an ass-beating that day!

    You’d think I’d learn, but I didn’t. A few years later, when I was 16 and a sophomore in high school, my “friend” Delbert Patton dared me to light a trash can on fire near the door INSIDE our 6th hour Consumer Math class, the logic being if there was a tiny fire, we’d get out of class for the day. Bad move. The balled up papers in the metal can caught, girls started screaming, we were all marched outside. Who ended up ratting me out? Why yes, Delbert Patton! I was suspended for 3 months. When I came back the following semester, my Con Math teacher, Mrs. Gilsdorf, who was a cool, older lady, nicknamed me ‘Firebug Jimmy.’ The name more or less stuck until I finished high school…

    What do they say about boys who like playing with fire? I forget but I think it’s either sexual or they’re maladjusted or something, and yet I turned out just fine! ?

    Have fun with Them, Dennis! I’m sure it will go swimmingly! See you in a week!

    Love,
    James

  2. James Nulick

    Dennis,

    The Pointer Sisters / Bruce Springsteen song ‘Fire’ is playing in my head right now.

    I’m a bit of a firebug myself. When I was 8 years old I set my father’s garage/ shed on fire. It was this huge wood building in the back 40 of his salvage/ wrecking yard, where he stored radiators, catalytic converters, etc. It was about 20×20, I’d say. I was playing with a small yellow and blue can of Ronson lighter fluid, flicking matches at the liquid I had sprayed along the perimeter. Well summers in Phoenix are hotter than a two-peckered Billy goat…before I knew it, the entire garage was engulfed in flames… I was horrified! I really got an ass-beating that day!

    You’d think I’d learn, but I didn’t. A few years later, when I was 16 and a sophomore in high school, my “friend” Delbert Patton dared me to light a trash can on fire near the door INSIDE our 6th hour Consumer Math class, the logic being if there was a tiny fire, we’d get out of class for the day. Bad move. The balled up papers in the metal can caught, girls started screaming, we were all marched outside. Who ended up ratting me out? Why yes, Delbert Patton! I was suspended for 3 months. When I came back the following semester, my Con Math teacher, Mrs. Gilsdorf, who was a cool, older lady, nicknamed me ‘Firebug Jimmy.’ The name more or less stuck until I finished high school…

    What do they say about boys who like playing with fire? I forget but I think it’s either sexual or they’re maladjusted or something, and yet I turned out just fine! ?

    Have fun with Them, Dennis! I’m sure it will go swimmingly! See you in a week!

    Love,
    James Dennis,

    The Pointer Sisters / Bruce Springsteen song ‘Fire’ is playing in my head right now.

    I’m a bit of a firebug myself. When I was 8 years old I set my father’s garage/ shed on fire. It was this huge wood building in the back 40 of his salvage/ wrecking yard, where he stored radiators, catalytic converters, etc. It was about 20×20, I’d say. I was playing with a small yellow and blue can of Ronson lighter fluid, flicking matches at the liquid I had sprayed along the perimeter. Well summers in Phoenix are hotter than a two-peckered Billy goat…before I knew it, the entire garage was engulfed in flames… I was horrified! I really got an ass-beating that day!

    You’d think I’d learn, but I didn’t. A few years later, when I was 16 and a sophomore in high school, my “friend” Delbert Patton dared me to light a trash can on fire near the door INSIDE our 6th hour Consumer Math class, the logic being if there was a tiny fire, we’d get out of class for the day. Bad move. The balled up papers in the metal can caught, girls started screaming, we were all marched outside. Who ended up ratting me out? Why yes, Delbert Patton! I was suspended for 3 months. When I came back the following semester, my Con Math teacher, Mrs. Gilsdorf, who was a cool, older lady, nicknamed me ‘Firebug Jimmy.’ The name more or less stuck until I finished high school…

    What do they say about boys who like playing with fire? I forget but I think it’s either sexual or they’re maladjusted or something, and yet I turned out just fine! ?

    Have fun with Them, Dennis! I’m sure it will go swimmingly! See you in a week!

    Love,
    James

    • liquoredgoat

      James! Haven’t crossed your path on the blog in awhile! Are you yet at work on a follow up to Valencia??

  3. James Nulick

    Dennis, arrrrgggggghhhhh!!! My comment keeps disappearing!

  4. KeEtOn

    I remember a movie from the 80s Exterminator. I think it was a guy gets revenge by killing criminals with a flame-thrower movie. Always thought a flame-thrower would be fun. Fire is very magical to me. Haha what is with all the boys setting their junk and butts on fire? A walkthrough takes all the fun out of it. I dont know Ive only been to one at Virginia Beach a million years ago. Nice quiet day on the Gulf of Mexico here, listening to Phil and the Illegals and trying to pick a fight with myself. New York City gives me the willies, I have a bunch of old-time NYer friends and young ones too and their humaness t-totally slaps my titties with a goofy humaness. Weird Pollard dream last night. Dream of him frequently it seems. There was a sense of stay strong, something about my eye, and a birthday cake. I don’t know. Heres to NY receiving Them.

  5. David Ehrenstein

    Jimi Hendrix

  6. Misanthrope

    Dennis, Good luck on getting everything together for THEM. Awesome. And…will do, sir. I’m excited, the kids are excited.

    Yes, if you see this, tell Ishmael how much I loved his dancing last time. I actually told him myself. I remember the emotions I felt vividly to this day. Dude is something else.

  7. Bill Hsu

    Hey Dennis, we enjoyed Crowd last night. The slow movements were mesmerizing, and the interactions and clusters of activity drew my attention in different directions all through. I’m curious, did you write backstories for the characters?

    Hope New York is going great. I’m only in Berlin for a few more days, sigh.

    Bill

  8. liquoredgoat

    Hooray for this post coming back! One of my favorites from the old blog. That photo at the top has haunted me for years. Hope you’re well, Dennis.

    I sometimes think my mind is turning to jelly. I have to make a corrective Dennis. That prose you put in the post on my book that I said I didn’t recognize was indeed mine, but it had been so long I forgot I had written it and that I posted it it my short lived lit mag experiment. I really do love that story, and was flummoxed when journals wouldn’t take a story about a hunter feeding a female Alaskan politician a dead wolf. Too contentious and over the top? A bit? 😉

    Loved The Marbled Swarm, Dennis. That must feel like a lifetime ago to you though, maybe, writing that book? Especially since you’ve diverged so much from traditional texts these past years. Sounds like a boring interview question.
    I just know that poems I wrote even two years ago feel like artifacts almost, even if I revise or touch them up.

  9. liquoredgoat

    Also, I know there were plans to open some of sort of Blade Runner-style bazaar in NYC. I don’t know if that has happened yet or if it will, but I certainly remember reading about it. I love that kind of shit.

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