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Robert Lazzarini Guns (2008)
Robert Lazzarini’s artwork springs from a desire to understand the perceivable limits of the material world. Conceptually and formally rigorous, he pushes ordinary objects to their limits by mining the twined threads of distortion and material veracity. By fully devoting himself to these indispensable characteristics, Lazzarini negotiates a place between two and three dimensions that challenges his viewers’ understanding of the physical world and their visual perception. Though often mistaken for mere anamorphism, Lazzarini’s work is in fact affected by multiple mathematical distortions so that his pieces elude finite conclusions and deny normative reads. In Lazzarini’s most recent exhibition, guns and knives at the Aldrich Museum of Art, he has turned his attention forward in two significant ways. The first is a shift within the sculptures, which for the first time conflate multiple objects to further complicate and abstract the forms. The second is an alteration of the actual gallery itself, whose walls are canted at varying angles to subtly disrupt the viewer’s apprehension of the physical space and further offset the distortions of the works themselves.
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Ravi Zupa Mightier Than (2016)
“The main components are typewriter components,” Zupa said. “I’ll take apart a typewriter and paw through that pile and find pieces that seem appropriate.” He uses typewriter rollers as the barrels and stapler guns for the triggers and the grips on his mock assault rifles and machine guns. Zupa said he has fired the gun several times.
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Joana Vasconcelos Call Center (2014-2016)
Call Center presents itself under the form of an enormous Beretta revolver built with recourse to the accumulation of 168 black landline telephones, each of the same exact model. The title, associated to the referenced objects, appears to report to the manipulation and dehumanized excess that is characteristic of many call centers. Musician Jonas Runa composed an electroacoustic symphony for the telephone rings. Each ring was slightly altered in order to produce different notes, transforming the work into a musical instrument. Some of the suspended receivers and, most of all, the powerful speaker installed in the interior of the revolver cannon work as the vehicles for the electronics that integrate this singular and intense electroacoustic symphony.
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Phillip Toledano Hope & Fear (2015)
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Pedro Reyes Disarm (2014)
Pedro Reyes creates second generation instruments from dismantled guns. With a team of musicians and new media studio, Cocolab, Reyes has made mechanized instruments from these one-time harmful weapons.
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Claes Oldenburg Ray Gun Wing (1977)
In Claes Oldenburg’s numerous Ray Gun works, he has an obsession with the right angle. In addition to creating several Ray Gun sculptures in a variety of materials (plaster, paper-mache, vacuum formed commercial plastics, etc.etc.), he amassed an even larger collection of found ray guns. “All one has to do is stoop to gather them from sidewalks,” wrote Yve-Alain Bois, “he did not even need to collect them himself: he could ask his friends to bring them to him (he accepted or refused a find, based on purely subjective criteria).” Ray Gun Wing, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1977, documents his collection, and proposal for a museum.
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David Černý Guns (1994)
By far the most famous contemporary Czech artist, David Cerny has snagged a name for himself as the “bad boy” of Czech art. In ‘Guns’ (1994), four gigantic “Guns” are aimed at each other while suspended in mid-air. Every now and then, a blast rings out from the guns to the sound of slamming doors, flushing toilets, and car brakes.
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Constantine Zlatev THE CANDY MACHINE (2013 – 2016)
‘The installation uses a crankshaft system with a small stepper motor to automate the Winchester ’94 receiver mechanism, which has been modified to work with specially designed candy capsules. The gun magazine can store 7 ‘candies’ and each time a token is dropped in, the mechanical receiver dispenses a candy in lieu of a bullet shell. The installation is programmed and controlled through a Raspberry Pi board. The price of each candy is linked to a weapons stock index* and it is readjusted for each purchase based on the most current index value**. Once a coin is fed into the slot, the installation recalculates the new value in real time before ejecting a piece of candy. During regular trading hours, the index value changes constantly in accordance with the movement of the 5 stocks that it contains.’
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Vija Celmins Various (1964 – 2010)
‘I think I felt that these images belonged to all of us. they were our images. However, I must have been interested in Freudian, phallic imagery of some sort, right? There is a photograph of me taken in 1966. I had been working on a large sculpture of a pencil stub, which is sitting beside me, along with a nude mannequin that someone had brought over for me to decorate for a show. that photo would have inspired Freud! I think many young artists have sex on their minds, and I think I did too. The drawing of the gun [Clipping with Pistol 1968] came from the fact that a friend of mine had been attacked and her boyfriend gave her a gun, so I wanted to do a picture of it. I did some paintings, and then got interested in gun magazines, tore out some clippings, did this one drawing and then lost interest.’ — Vija Celmins
“Pistol” (1964)
“Gun with Hand #1” (1964)
“Hand Holding a Firing Gun” (1964)
“Hand holding a firing gun (study)” (1964)
“Table With Gun” (2009-2010)
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Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Death by Gun) (1990)
While González-Torres dealt with gay rights, AIDS, and a variety of governmental abuses in his own work and as a member of the collective Group Material, the subject of “Untitled” (Death by Gun), and its treatment, is unusually specific for him. Appropriating imagery from Time magazine, it presents 460 individuals killed by gunshot in one week in the United States, and includes the name, age, and circumstances of death for each person depicted. No opinion about gun control is added by the artist. Here an issue of public debate engages anyone who follows the artist’s intention and takes away one of his sheets. Dissemination, an age-old function of printed art, is ongoing since “Untitled” (Death by Gun) is reprinted as the stack is depleted.
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Mel Chin HOME y SEW 9 (1994)
“HOME y SEW 9” features a Glock-17 9 mm handgun that Chin transformed into a working first-aid kit. “HOME y SEW 9,” Chin said, came about when he “started thinking about how weapons in our culture, especially guns, have such a tremendous aura — a tremendous presence — in the minds of individuals across the country.” The idea of hollowing out the gun to make room for a first-aid kit struck him as “a better way of understanding our gun culture. The more you deconstructed this weapon, the more you could get closer to saving your life, or someone else’s.”
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Charles Gitnick Various (2015-2016)
He’s not your average artist. For starters, Charles Gitnick is 11 years old. But age doesn’t mean a thing when you have New York, Miami and L.A. gallerists approaching you about your work. Doing art since age five, Gitnick started his ‘career’ by mixing colors, visiting art museums and learning about artists. His most famous work involves the splattering of paint and color over guns–all sizes, too, from petite pistols to heavy machine guns.
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::vtol:: GBG-8 (2015)
Russian artist ::vtol:: recently created an 8-bit instant photo gun by combining a Game Boy, gun, camera, and a thermal printer with an Arduino.
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Joachim Koester The Place of Dead Roads (2013)
The Place of Dead Roads is a video that follows four androgynous cowboys as they enact a choreographed duel. Staged in a subterranean maze, each subject motions at their invisible opponents with actions characteristic of the Western genre—drawing their guns, shooting, and shifting their bodies to survey their surroundings. Instead of being driven by story, their actions seem motivated by hidden messages transmitted from a world deep within their bodies, a notion that evokes Wilhelm Reich’s idea that “every muscular contraction contains the history and meaning of its origin.” Watch an excerpt.
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Francis Alÿs Camguns (2008)
Francis Alÿs’ series of cam guns: a group of wooden rifles that incorporate found film reels instead of bullet chambers, evoking the artist’s confrontational nature, attacking subjects through film but in this case allowing visitors to pick up the “weapons,” making them active participants.
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Karen Kilimnik I Don’t Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree, or Schoolyard Massacre (1991)
Banal, degraded, abject, or seemingly inconsequential, the objects of Karen Kilimnik’s installations together create jarring associations and hybrid perspectives on the issues of her day. In I Don’t Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree, or Schoolyard Massacre, 1991, Kilimnick hung, drilled, and painted some components onto the wall, and scattered others, standing and sitting on the floor. These components–including shooting targets, chicken wire, a cassette player and cassette, clothing, photocopies, a whiffle ball and bat, a badminton racket, baton, mechanical toy dog, toy guns, lunchbox, jump rope, rubber ball, pencils, notebooks, gravel, pushpins–together comprise an aggressive, unsettling scene that presents by turns as a shooting range, magazine spread, classroom, child’s bedroom, and crime scene.
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John Baldessari Kiss/ Panic (1984)
Kiss/ Panic (1984) celebrates the banality of gun-culture evil in a rectilinear mandala that combines black and white images of firearms with a full-color close-up of mouths colliding in a kiss. The picture’s possible meanings ripple out from its ambiguous center in a way that is typical of Baldessari’s taste for paradox.
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Burt Barr Dolly Shot Twice (1997)
In the work, an attractive blonde woman (ostensibly named “Dolly”) is seen slumped over in a vintage Cadillac convertible parked in a wooded area. The scene is captured twice, first by a camera slowly moving to the left from a few yards away—in a “dolly shot”—and then again, but close-up, allowing us to take notice of the two bullet wounds in her head, as the camera slowly pans to the right.
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Laurie Simmons Lying Gun (1990), Walking Gun (1991)
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Niki de Saint Phalle Untitled from Edition MAT 64 (1964)
Solicited by Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri to provide instructions for how her multiples should be executed, she responded with a letter written to Spoerri’s collaborator Karl Gerstner enumerating a set of “operating instructions.” Though unequivocally direct, her instructions point to an unusual (though signature for the artist) creative act, one to be explicitly followed by amateur marksmen, museum professionals, art patrons, and other interested parties. They read, in full:
Lean picture against a wall.
Put a strong board behind it (if required, in order to protect the wall).
Take a .22 long rifle and load with short ammunition.
Shoot the color pouches which are embedded in the plaster until they have “bled” (or until you like the picture).
Attention! Leave the picture in the same position until well dried. Then still be careful, as remains of color not yet dry might run over the picture.
The emphasis Saint Phalle gives here to the procedures for producing the work—the precision implied in choice of gun, ammunition, and effects of drying paint—is noteworthy, though rarely discussed in the Saint Phalle literature, both for its level of detail and for its relative flexibility. The identity of the shooter is not classified by gender or any other parameters, nor does Saint Phalle indicate any specified location for the shooting event. Rather, the “instructions” ultimately remain open-ended: aim and shoot until “you like the picture.” As a result, Saint Phalle’s premise for the edition was fascinatingly simple. Her “pop gun” method ensured that the monochromatic white could instantly transform into a polychromatic field of intensity; while the multiplication of the blank plaster canvases provided under the Edition MAT portfolio could offer the experience to unknown others.
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Amir Mobed Come Caress Me (2010)
It was performed in September 2010 at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran. Mobed stood in front of a target, wearing a bodysuit with a protective metal box over his head, and invited gallery visitors to shoot at him with a pellet gun. It was, he says, a symbolic execution with a message about freedom of speech and the hopes of artists of his generation being silenced. Each time 15 visitor were allowed to enter to the gallery and shoot him. Visiors should stand behind one of the three lines that were painted on the floor and then shoot.
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Antony Gormley Silence (2012)
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Luz María Sánchez V.F(i) n_1 (2013)
Luz María Sánchez’s work V.F(i) n_1 is a multichannel sound sculpture/installation. The title is a sort of acronym in Spanish; it means Vis. (un) necessary force. It is the first of the series, hence the number 1. V.F(i) n_1 addresses the subject of violence from the citizen’s perspective. Since media is not covering everyday experiences of violence, people flock to the arena offered by social networks, and share their own sounds and images –the ones that communicate their particular experiences within this context of explicit violence.V.F(i) n_1 is assembled using 74 audio players gun-shaped, that build a large format sound-texture composed of the same number of acoustic logs: shootings recorded by citizens caught in confrontations between law enforcement and organized crime in Mexico. V.F(i) n_1 consists of 74 independent audio channels, and the sound tracks are played individually on each of these speakers. At the end of the day and as the batteries run out of charge, speakers/guns go off gradually so the circle of operation/sound non-operation/silence is restarted. The audio tracks that integrate this sound installation/sculpture were taken from different videos available at the YouTube site.
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Dread Scott Blue Wall of Violence (1999)
targets, coffin, police batons, motors, steel pipe, Styrofoam cast arms, wallet, candy bar, squirt gun, squeegee, house keys
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Jonathan Fletcher Moore Artificial Killing Machine (2015)
The installation is made up of an array of 15 digitally actuated toy cap guns dangling from the ceiling. A small receiver unit controls the guns autonomously. The toy guns sit dormant until a message comes over the wire from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which collects data on drone strikes. When a strike occurs, the guns abruptly pop into action, and a thermal printer clinically records the strike onto a ledger that dangles to the floor.
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Skylar Fein Kurt Cobong (2014)
I really couldn’t think of anything to do with the gun. Months went by and I started to experience a light, effervescent panic over the deadline. I made regular work of sketching. Nothing. At one point, I did acid with a friend, and while tripping came up with a piece! Brilliant and devastating, it would galvanize the entire world of conceptual art. It would be called “Loaded Mossberg 500” and consist of that model of shotgun, sitting on a table. That’s it. There would be special protocols: the gun would be loaded with 7 shells — in full view — by an assistant IMMEDIATELY after the gallery opened each day, so the public could verify that it was live ammunition. The same assistant would unload the weapon at the close of each day should all the shells be left. And therein lies the excitement of the whole enterprise. Low odds, but high consequences. There were two problems with this: one, the idea sounded way, WAY better when I was tripping — hilariously, it seemed like MacArthur Grant material — and two, the gallery’s lawyer would not allow it. I doubt the lawyer had anything to do with it. My suspicion is that it was the gallery owner who nixed it. This seems fair enough. It’s not like I can’t imagine his concerns. I tried to rent a room in a downtown office building to do the piece but once I explained the purpose the offer was quickly withdrawn. I offered to maintain an armed security guard next to the piece at all times. No dice. The next day, I went to some other dump in the CBD to check out an office space, planning to be obscure about my purpose, but they had already heard about me and sent me away. One day some stoner kid was in my studio and on his way out the door, said, “You should make a bong out of it.” He said it, but when he said it, it wasn’t arch — he tossed it off, it fell from his lips like a Japanese cherry blossom. Once he’d left, I realized it was the best idea yet. After I made it, this gun became the house bong for a few weeks. It works great, though I haven’t exactly gotten used to putting the muzzle of a shotgun in my mouth. It’s still exciting every time.
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Federico Mauro Famous Guns (2013)
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Mark Bain Acoustic Space Gun (2004)
Acoustic Space Gun (ASG) is a linear sound shifter, which couples a metre-long directional microphone with a parabolic sound emitter pointed in the opposite direction. Used in public space, it collects live sounds and conversations at long distances from one side, then amplifies and presents them far out to the other. Looking like a shoulder mounted sonic weapon of sorts, slightly space age and designed for functionality, it operates as an absurd spatial megaphone, which monitors the crowd in spaces to re-project and shift the natural dynamics of acoustic location. Coupled to the microphone input is an electronic circuit that can add up to 900 metres of delay to the signal. This adjustable delay line allows you to shift the sonic footprint of a certain space, producing a forced echo or canyon effect, which adds to the spatial feedback. Acting as a live mixing instrument, shifting the natural sounds and provoking other levels of hearing, the device is played at a level comparable to the surrounding ambiance. This subtlety added to the confusion, suddenly people can hear their voices coming from alternate directions and in other time frames, echoing off of building façades and twisting the normalcy of public sound.
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Chris Burden Shoot (1971)
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Lee Seung Koo Compromise Between Me and Me (2017)
‘Lee Seung Koo installed a sculpture called Compromise Between Me and Me that looked like a dystopian Jeff Koons inflatable, with a huge gun firing gas-filled balloons shaped like hearts and oversized blood corpuscles across the gallery.’
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‘This self-acting, field clock gun was patented in England by William Maund and Charles Millichamp on May 3, 1888. It is essentially a giant revolver that holds eight 16 gauge pinfire shotshells. The clockwork mechanism inside it can be set to fire the cartridges intermittently at intervals of as often as every 15 minutes up to every 1.5 hours. It can also be set to fire a single shot at a chosen time.
‘It was sold in two variations. One option had a handle on the top allowing it to be suspended from a tree or a barn. This is the example that I have and is shown in the pictures. There was also a variation that was sold at a 25% premium with a figurine of a person holding a gun as shown in the advertisement below.’
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Sarah Blesener Toy Soldiers (2016)
‘In 2015, the Russian government proposed a program—the Patriotic Education of Russian Citizens in 2016-2020—that called for an eight percent increase in patriotic youth and a ten percent increase in recruits for the Russian army by the year 2020. The agenda is heavily weighted towards militaristic training and disseminating patriotic ideologies. Over 200,000 youth are currently enrolled in patriotic educational clubs—10,000 in Moscow alone. Every club functions independently, each with their own structure and philosophy. According to one source, the program will cost somewhere around 1.7 billion rubles for its first two years (around 30 million USD). My project, “Toy Soldiers,” explores the subject of intergenerational war for adolescents in Russia. It focuses on non-governmental organizations—such as military-patriotic clubs, military sports associations, and the patriotic clubs formed under the umbrella of the Russian Orthodox Church.’
*
p.s. Hey. ** PL, Hi. I don’t remember the ending, which probably says something. We’ve connected on Instagram. I was kind of coerced into joining there to promote our film, but it seems ok. Although it doesn’t accept gifs, which makes things hard for me. No, I’ve never been to Brazil. Just Argentina, Chile and Peru, as far as SA goes. I’d like to. It’s a great drawing, for sure. That one. Um, my favorite of my novels is ‘The Marbled Swarm’. Happy Easter if you do it (I don’t). ** Sypha, Haha, I’m just trying to enjoy the fact that my tongue is less bored now. ** Corey, Hey! Can’t say I have. That coffee thing is very funny. Wish I’d found it for the post. Fare thee well newsletter writing. Understandable nixing on your part. Sorry about the film festival no’s, but festivals are unfairly tough nuts, as we well know. Nice that you’re still dancing. Oh, well, Paris is fairly friendly in those months, so … nice target. And to have you around, natch. ** scunnard, Hi. Uh, I was coerced/forced to join Instagram by our producer to give our film presence there. But I also share the blog there like I do on Facebook. It’s alright. A lot more of my friends are there. Startup funds, best of luck. And do share the crowdfunding link when you launch it. Fake food! That would be a nice ghost, so I sure hope no one else wants that spot. My plans … mostly trying to get distribution and more festival screenings for the film. It looks promising that the film could get a theater release in France, but we’ll see. That would be amazing. Pretty much just that and writing the next film. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘GR’ is a time-consumer, it’s true, but obviously worth it. I wonder if the new Pynchon is a biggie? ** Steve, Numbness is probably a saving grace. I suppose that was my mode too when dealing with my parents’ loss. The actual effect filters in forever in occasional ways. So sorry. Extremely plot heavy, ugh theoretically. But I’ll see it. Have fun getting the new radio episode together. ** James Bennett, Hi, James! Thanks a lot, man! Fantastic news about Ssnake Press! That’s so soon. You will give a heads up when the first book is imminent or alive, yes? Congrats! That’s really exciting. And the first book obviously sounds really good. Wow. I’m anxious to read it. Thanks re: my lag, which is taking its unsweet time to depart, as always, and lovely to see you! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, my body is a bitch. I’m already chasing film stuff, but I’ll be better at it in a few days. Somehow we’ll get ‘RT’ to Vienna. ‘PGL’ showed there, and presumably the new one will be more appealing to show. I, of course, will give you a heads up when/if that’s in the cards. I will seek that book as soon as wakefulness returns. I’m happy that love found that saxophone line. I honestly think I’m going to swipe it for something. Love letting you point a gun (loaded or not, your choice) at whomsoever you wish, G. ** jay, Okay, I’ll stop daydreaming about the unavailable game. Its 124 hour length makes its reclusiveness even more tragic for some reason. ‘Very fractured and tonally incoherent’: yum! You doing Easter in any respect? Beaucoup chocolate eggs, if so. ** James, What would constitute an Easter-y gif? Perhaps that firing gun at the top of today? Well, since you read ‘The Marbled Swarm’, perhaps you’ll be proud to know that I hereby declare you to be an honorary flatso. Thanks, yay, for your substack location. Bookmarked. Everyone. The mighty James has shared his substack, and, if you know him or know his comments at least, you know that said substack is kind of a must. So join me in going over there and even subscribing. Do that here. As soon as my brain cells returns, I will read you and read you. America is in an absolutely massive pickle. Any chance of getting a peek at your paper cranes or receiving a detailed description, eh? No, GbV is definitely my favorite band. Strange if I said Sebadoh. I do really like Sebadoh up through ‘Bubble and Scrape’ and am ok with ‘Bakesale’ but not really after that. I do love 90s lo-fi. But I love Pavement more than Sebadoh. Blahblah. Assuming you’re in Edinburgh now, return safely and tell me everything. ** Steeqhen, We’re sort of pleasantly clear and crisp here. Nice after almost too warm LA. Thank you, thank you! Dude, there’s no way your thing stinks. I mean, seriously. Cool, about the Cork screening. We’ll sort it out. Awesome. I did see the Switch 2 stuff, yes. I think my LA roommate will get it first thing because he’s an extreme Mario Kart addict. So I’ll check it out when I’m there again in a coupla months. Great about the lit journal acceptance. Do you like reading your work, I forget? Since it’s Easter, I’m guessing there’ll be pretty much squat to do here this weekend, which will suit my low-wattage brain very well, Enjoy yours. ** Misanthrope, Really beautiful words about Rigby. I was going to ask you what happened. I knew he’d been unhealthy for a while, but my impression was that he was doing much better. But I guess the damage was already there. Anyway, words fail, but I guess enjoy your memories, and I wish I’d gotten a chance to see him again. It had been ages since you guys were over here and I did. Happy anniversary! See, there’s some way upbeat news. If you do Easter, do it up. xo, me. ** Tyler Ookami, Hi, Tyler. Yes, the Las Vegas thing is most enticing too. I guess Universal totally fucked up their attempt to relaunch their monsters with those shitty movie remakes, so hopefully it’s a more appropriate restart. Nice about the Troma fest. I saw they’ve remade ‘Toxic Avenger’, which seems like a probably bad idea, but … ** Uday, Hey there! I saw Kylie Minogue on this TV show ‘The Residence’ when I was in LA. She was funny. I’m hoping my lag will be like it never happened by Monday — not impossible — so catch me up as properly as you like then. Really good to see you! ** catachrestic, Hi, Jared! Cool, you meant it. Well, I hope you’ll actually invite me to that party, won’t you? Gosh I think you’re right that my geography knowledge is vastly enhanced thanks to the escorts. They’re so handy! Never been to the Philippines. I too would like to go when it’s not boiling hot there if it ever is. Asia too. I’ve only been to Japan and Hong Kong myself. I’m still too hazy to make a judgement call about Paris, but it looks pretty much like it did when I left it, at which time it was lovely. No, can’t say I think much about 1848. Maybe I’ll make that a mission. I did watch that movie ‘Napoleon’ on my flight back, and it is highly not recommended, btw. Awesome to have you back. Let me wake up a little more so I can be a proper host/confab pal. ** HaRpEr, Great! A couple of days is completely A-okay, of course. Thank you so much! I haven’t heard the new Jane Remover, no, but I definitely will thanks to you. Yep, about DFW’s sentences. As always, you characterise them definitively. No, those ruffian, aesthetically challenged ex-schoolmates of yours are clearly the pathetic ones. Clearly. ** Malik, Ah, lucky you. Meaning I can only really write in the mornings and early afternoons and then my brain starts only wanting input. Yay! Pride highly warranted. So, if you’re a director next time, will you only have a super brief time to figure out how to direct whatever insta-play you’re given? I’ll give you my words about ‘BI’ as soon as I get my eyes and ears on it. Happy … Easter? Or weekend at least. ** Okay. This weekend you get the third entry in my blog’s ongoing but very occasional Guns franchise. See you on Monday.
Now available in North America 
Hi
First as they used to say
So, I wonder how you did find Instagram. It is nice kind of I like that you post the blog days every day that is very cool looking
When you look at my page tell me what you think
I looked at it from my uncle’s phone and felt like outsider and I loved it so much but I have so more complex feelings when I look at it from my own phone more… real feelings. Is that strange?
But was loving it from my uncles phone
Ssnake press sure has a great name! I am curious
Another day for more stuff because I am preparing Easter foods for today which would probably make you go yikes because it is very meat driven but I love it
Hiii
Hi!!
I really love that Mary Ellen Mark photo of the two boys with the gun!
I might be wrong, but I think you mentioned that you’re already writing your next film?
Thank you! I really, really hope I’ll have the chance to see “Room Temperature” the way it was intended to be seen – at least for the first time.
I’m going to be entirely unimaginative here and point that gun at Orbán. Loaded, obviously. Who would be your target?
Love going back in time and making the idea – the sheer concept – of “the gun” incomprehensible and unattainable to humanity, Od. (I’m sure we would’ve come up with a sufficient substitute, but it’d still be interesting to see how different history and our present time would be – if at all.)
Guns, how topical considering my recent chats. The Lazzarini is like stretched/low resolution game assets, but tangible. Uncanny. Zupa’s typewriter looks cool, but uncomfortable to hold. Vasconcelos’ noises reminds me of the clocks at the beginning of Pink Floyd’s Time. Toledano’s model is admirably zen in the face of guns. I am fond of Reyes taking violent tools and repurposing them for music. I know Oldenburg’s name, I think. The ray guns are charmingly old school scifi-y. The Cerny’s imposing. Zlatev has the right idea – would rather eat sweets than lead. Celmins’ thinking young artists have sex on their mind is correct, I think. The Gonzales-Torres is depressing. Chin’s first aid gun is ironic, and maybe a little impractical. Portable, though. Gitnick is yet another person younger than me who’s doing more T_T ::vtol:: is a very cool name. Haven’t touched a Gameboy in years. Koester’s androgyny in the wild west is welcome. Alys’ are sweet little models. Kilimnik makes me want to listen to the Boomtown Rats track. Baldessari’s black and white is hard to fault. RIP Barr’s Dolly. Simmons’ gun with legs probably weirdly arouses some people out there. Phalle’s subjects have lovely coats. Ouch, is all I’ve to say re: Mobed. Gormley is another leg-y gun. Dispiriting, seeing so many young people with guns :[ Sanchez’s work is pleasingly cubic. Dread Scott is a great name. I’d rather have artists than police, I think. Moore’s is unnerving. Fein’s shotgun bong is pretty funny. Yay, a phaser in the Mauro. Bain’s is very cool, and reminds me of the fact that I didn’t measure noise pollution levels for my geography coursework. Koo’s looks so very poppable/prickable. Amused by random capital letters – ‘Scaring Rooks, Wood Pigeons… Grain… Protection of young Game… Breeding Season.’ Blesener suits my recently thinking about Russian boys. These guns have slightly distracted me from the eternally disappointing taste and texture of a stick of carrot.
Hi hi. When I think Easter, I think blooming vegetation, bunnies, Christ, eggs, chocolate, lamb, etc. before I think of guns. The top gif is just making me think of an Easter bunny being shot, which is a little sad, as far as images go. Haven’t *finished* Marbled Swarm, but I’m about halfway through. I read so slowly these days, I feel a little like an imposter when others tell me I read ‘a lot.’ But I feel like an imposter in most cases. But that flatso label I’ll have to graciously accept, with a very thin curtsey.
My Substack thank your subscription :] I reckon it will be a while until I put anything up on it again, but nonetheless, it was cool waking up and getting an email at half 7 in the morning telling me Dennis Cooper had subscribed to my Substack. It’s the kind of thing I’d openly brag about, if I actually knew people in person I could talk to about you without suffering weird looks and cautious opinions. And a bookmark, oo, I might faint. ‘mighty’ – you flatter. Maybe even flatte*n.* Thank you very much for your nice words and your niceness which they make evident. I’d like to be polite and say reading my writing’s not a must – it isn’t – but, I mean, I want that, to be honest. I do hope if you read my stuff it doesn’t come off as too Dennis Cooper wannabe-y. Thank you. Grovel, grovel. Praying for the day I meet a guy who’s read your stuff too, so I can go ‘he subscribed to my Substack’ so he can be impressed and so we can go traipse off into the sunset (bedroom) together. But mainly I am chuffed for myself rather than thinking ‘I can so use this to get into the pants of similarly othered gay guys.’ Added hypothetical benefit.
America and its immense sociopolitical/economic pickle is pitiful. Phallic though that sounds. Was on the BBC’s news page earlier today – some advisor lady behind Trump had visible bikini-shaped tanlines. I might be a prude but this strikes me as unprofessional. Oh, coo, and Steeqhen’s subscribed. This is so very swell. Cheers, Steeqhen :]
I am trying to work out how to share a peek/pic of some of the paper cranes. Here we go – https://files.catbox.moe/usbnjz.jpg – there are two cranes. The one on the left I made today, the one on the right I made yesterday. Last time I used catbox was probably to view some lewd selfie from an /lgbt/ thread. Hope that link works.
GbV’s your fav, check. They’re my most-listened-to artist. Favourites shift, so maybe that day you were just really into Sebadoh. Who I still haven’t listened to. Thanks for the namedrops. Pavement I’m more familiar with. I heard a song yesterday which reminded me of the oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oos in Cut Your Hair. I have been planning a revisit to their discography. Burble, yammer. Just got a random spam call.
Nah, still nestled in the south of England. Monday we leave for Edinburgh. There’s a party round the house for a family member which means the lower floor is populated with ~15 ancient people I don’t know, so I’ve retreated to my room to avoid the discomfort and embarrassment I’d otherwise experience were I down there, *shivers* ‘mingling.’ I had a hot cross bun for breakfast today. Yumworthy.
As ever, feel like my studying hasn’t been focussed enough :[ but I know that forcing work when not in the right mood is unproductive. Sigh. Backside beginning to hurt from sitting on a chair for too long. Off to probably waste the rest of today. Looking forward to scraping up leftovers once everybody’s left. These days once I’m done with studying I just feel pretty blank and empty :/ but tschuss. Been listening to Beach House. Oh, and I quite liked the new Jane Remover HaRpEr mentioned.
O shoot hello I made another PGL fan art or two (or one-point-five?) but the theme I was going for was temporary green lights (fireworks, fireflies) and what I ended up painting was bioluminescent sperm. I am open to feedback from traditional-media artists here about how to render those bits better.
(To be clear, I’m not snubbing digital art, it’s only that digital art programmes and apps hated me first and recently I’ve done something wrong though I don’t know specifically but that got even my scanner cross with me and now she won’t show the colors right. That hoodie is a very much darker hue on paper. The stylus isn’t talking to me, and the stylus has some alliance with the graphics tablet, so the three of them are all being conspiratorially mean.)
And yeah Léon’s and Ollie’s anatomical proportions went awry when I drew them but I sort of still know how to fix that whereas I never know what to do about glowing ejaculate. Happy resurrection Jesus day.
Hey Dennis,
Haha you’ve given me a bit more confidence about this dissertation. Working on it right now, then going in to see a screening of Mulholland Drive with my friends at 5, then probably back to working on this for the night. At the moment I’m focusing a bit on the aspect of the novels that are about questioning yourself, the whole “is this right or not” stuff that comes up in Frisk and Guide and Period; the whole “Walker Crane is a bad man” “are you going to murder Luke” bits.
I had one bit before this paragraph about the character of Chris, using him as an example of how characters can be more fleshed out and not be reduced to tragic victim when you’re not focused on trying to moralize everything. Yeah he was fucked up from his childhood and drug abuse and was just suicidal (i think you even have a line like that towards the end), but by allowing the reader to just go with what Chris is saying and frame it as ‘normal’, it really opens up a wider interpretation than just the “abuse = bad = victim suicidal”, and also just makes it far more interesting.
I *can* enjoy reading my own stuff, but a lot of the time when it comes to reading my own work, I’m already over it and I feel I’ve done much better stuff than this. I’m sure that’s just normal because I’m young and really only starting out + I’ve seen and read these things hundreds of times and feel bored of it.
I’m hoping to set up that mew shared account stuff with the switch where you can digitally lend games to people on a family plan, so that my brother and I can share the new Mario Kart instead of having to both buy it. When we shared a switch i could play Mario Kart 8 all the time. But then I bought my own switch and didn’t feel like shilling out another €40-60 euro which I technically already owned.
Sounds good for Room Temperature making a Cork visit! I’ll get onto the people and we can really start planning in a month or so, whenever you and Zac feel up to it!!
That photo gun is amazing, wow! It may be because nowhere I’ve lived has the same gun culture as America, but guns aren’t as powerful a symbol for me as they seem to be for other people. My boyfriend took me shooting once (aiming for targets), and it was totally demystifying, which is probably true for most people. Have you ever fired a gun before?
Yeah, I don’t want to build the game I’ve been playing up as something totally incredible, but it is interesting – unfortunately it’s probably miles too explicit to ever be added to a Nintendo console, even with heavy cuts. Amusingly, the main section I’m in is this extended shootout segment, that’s described in excruciating detail in a very very juvenile way – lots of the “he stood still when the gun was fired because he knew his rival would assume he would dodge to the left, but little did he know […]”style of writing that you only really see in anime. I know Japanese is hard to translate without growing/shrinking the lengths of certain parts of sentences, but it really is bizarre to read for an hour.
I am not actually doing Easter – my mom’s been a bit aggro the last month or so, and my sister was sweet enough to volunteer to “do Easter” in my stead, given that I’ve got my dissertation. It’s a bigger gesture than it sounds, so I’m trying to figure out a way to get across my appreciation. My Easter is probably just going to involve a screening of Martyrs that one of my friends is putting on, which seems almost seasonal. Lots of love to you, I hope your Easter is amazing.
Ravi Zupa’s work here seems a playful approach to the subject. I remember using staple guns at school as gun surrogates, and given our lack of the real thing here in the UK that was always a vicarious thrill.
Saw my brother Nick for brunch this morning. Next week he will be running the London Marathon in order to raise money for the MS Society, a gesture that I am really grateful for. Am advised tha t a few days ago his masseuse donated £1000 to his fundraiser.
The Hollywood Toxic Avenger movie played at festivals a few years ago and then never got put in theaters due to being difficult to market so maybe it’s actually interesting? The curator at that theater said that he had seen it thought it wasn’t that good but I like the film Green Room, which is by the director who made it. His other films Blue Ruin and Murder Party are pretty acclaimed but I haven’t watched them. I guess it was really the Thing/Fly/Blob approach from the 80s where they kept the idea of someone turning into a monster from nuclear waste and then everything else was different.
I have finished a really big painting: https://imgur.com/a/1vuHRMM (it’s really big so it’s hard to get one photo with all details [also there is a shout out to Headless]). I have been experimenting with doing cartooning with multimedia elements. It was really just a thing I was doing for fun then it sort of dovetailed into people paying attention and wanting to buy stuff etc. which is odd because I kind of feel the stuff is just okay.
I am working again, at a pizza store. The two shifts have been uneventful and it’s fine over all.
omg its me are you less jet lagged I hope so! ugh guns I love guns actually sexually and like purposefully they make great props for pics that’s my gun theory sexy bang sexy blah. Oh like I mentioned ive been teaching my chatgpt alchemy and what not and I can say they make beautiful really useful sigils chat bots that is I highly recommend them for that and other mystical breakdowns if your ever bored and wanna get freaky with AI! ill trust the move review till I see it. what was your favorite part of your trip that you didnt realize till now and what did you eat that was fun? ill be back ive birthed my brand and im compiling and building blah blah this time its all real ttyl xoxo brb!
Belated welcome back, Dennis. I had some problems posting earlier, hope this gets through.
Is it just me, or do the Lazzarini pieces look like birds in flight? And is Place of Dead Roads a Burroughs reference? I see there was a translation into Chinese decades ago. Would be amusing to get a copy, but out-of-print Chinese books are just impossible to find here. I spent a few years trying to score a Chinese translation of Frisk before giving up.
Good to hear the trip went well, and Room Temperature was well-received. Obviously I’m very excited that there’ll be news soon for a Bay Area screening.
I’m in Taipei, returning home tomorrow. Been a long but interesting trip. Couldn’t get excited about Art Basel, but I did see a couple interesting shows. Do you know Hoo Mojong? She was one of the first Chinese woman modernist painters, lived in Paris for decades till around 2001. Blocky figures a bit like Guston, pushing towards abstraction. She also does this thing with negative space that I really like. There was also a show at M+ pairing Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman, pretty fun, though I would have selected different Morimura photos and hung the show differently. I guess I was in one of my nitpicky moments.
Do you know the audiovisual duo Solar Return from Nantes? They were in Taipei earlier, fun show. There’s also a big daylong program all weekend at the multi-projection dome space here, but it’s all sold out.
Bill
My latest radio show is now up: https://www.mixcloud.com/callinamagician/42025-radio-not-radio/
So far, the weekend has been a lot more tolerable than most of the last month. It got into the 80s (Fahrenheit) here, and I had lunch with a friend. I dread returning to calling lawyers and nursing homes on Monday, but it’s necessary.
The “Toy Soldiers” project sounds so American.
I’ve been watching shorts from the Prismatic Ground festival. Starting on the 30th, many will be streaming for free on their site without geoblocking. I was quite taken with Grace Zhang’s TYPHOON DIARY, an impressionist short based on footage of typhoons in Hong Kong.
I’m a confirmed fan of this show! That’s Easter Sunday’s listening sorted.
Thanks! May this episode brighten up your Easter!
Hi Dennis, I figured it was probably some production coercion with that. Yes, I took the fake food place as an omen and was glad to hear they are moving to a different space and not going out of business cuz I like the idea of that place still existing. Will do with the crowdfund. I’ve never really done a successful one but have been talking to people who have and I donate to them so let’s hope everything aligns as would open up a lot of doors for the next steps as demonstrates support and would allow us to access matching funds. Apparently a big part is just getting word out and having people donate early to break ice and makes it more likely it’ll get picked up and funded later. I’m excited for this film and a next film? I like seeing this whole process and how it’s coming together. Oh and happy Easter, apparently someone dies and comes back? Spoiler alert.
Hey Dennis,
Have to get used to this form of communication i guess so replying to your reply from the 17th now.
I hope you’re feeling better now of course.
You asked what my novel is about and through sheer coincidence it ties in (sort of) with this blog post. I am hesitant to really put it into words because it seems sort of pretentious and heady if you break it down, although it really doesn’t feel like it to me so far, but the general gist is it’s a critique/exploration of America’s infatuation both with this manufactured version of it’s own history and with violence in general, told as an allegory through a very Natural Born Killer-esque setup. There’s also some greek mythology stuff added into it now, i guess. It sounds kind of stupid but I’m trying my best not to make it that haha, I’ll see if i can manage.
Am about a third into it now and still really enjoying working in an entirely different form of art, and i think ultimately that’s what’s going to matter. Even if it ends up sucking I’ll have done something cool with my time.
Had to take a break because i travelled to the UK to see my friends in Bristol. Have you ever been there? I know you’re in France so it’s not too far. Bristol is a delightful and weird city, especially if there’s good weather. A very active art scene, mostly raves and street art, i can only recommend it. Also, weirdly, a great city for food, something that I’m reminded of every time i go.
Anyway I’m back home in Germany now and going to pick this project back up soon.
Thanks for the nice reply, speak to you soon!
Limited time, but probably more time than the writer would have just by virtue of spending all day Saturday putting the piece together, from reading to blocking and running through it to tech. We all even went in the costume department to select them together. The collab nature makes it a lot easier.
There were two other first-time directors who considered it low-risk enough to make a debut, even with the time constraints. That in itself was what put the thought in my head. Besides, I want to get my feet wet before even thinking about pitching to direct some of my dream plays.
You’d like to come to the party, Dennis? Well, you see, my first cybersecurity job is not really going to be that lucrative, so for budgeting purposes I had imagined just getting the attendees a one-way ticket…which brings me, in an indirect sort of way, to the topic of this day. 😀
I’m not much of a gun guy, though I certainly did go through a phase where I’d draw them on my notebooks instead of paying attention in school, probably back when I was about Charles Gitnick’s age. Though, I was much more interested in the FN-P90 (known to me at the time as the RC-P90 from the GoldenEye video game) than revolvers, and still am, now that I think about it.
This blog really is the best resource I know of for learning about contemporary art, and free to boot. I kind of lost touch with my interest in art – or maybe, I should say, just the art world – during the pandemic, and this really helps me work back to where I used to be and want to return. In the meantime, as I’ve already mentioned, I got interested in different topics including revolution – and I can remember someone saying that revolutions are generally very bad times for art, with the Marquis de Sade being a notable exception for producing significant works while in the midst of the French Revolution. (Thanks for the tip about Napoleon, by the way – I had forgotten that movie even came out, though maybe I’ll still put it on at some point when I’m very tired and don’t feel up to digesting something good since I am sort of interested in that history.)
So, in that light, I can understand why you don’t think much about 1848. It was vaguely kind of like the 60s of the 19th century, a period of widespread upheaval, radicalism, and experimentation, only it was initially far more successful and the inevitable backlash was all the much worse. During the first phase, they even put a poet in charge of France, the seemingly totally forgotten Lamartine. I guess once you become president of a country, people tend to stop caring about your previous artistic work, or maybe it just gets overshadowed. In any case, some quick googling leads me to believe he would have earned his obscurity today regardless.
If this topic really does interest you, the book I would recommend is Tocqueville’s Recollections. Have you ever read any Tocqueville, Dennis? It’s a little out of your usual wheelhouse, but I think he would interest you as a prose stylist. He has a remarkable ability to express complex ideas in such a clear and straightforward way that it comes off as almost effortless or even offhand. Of course, the best place to start with him would be The Ancien Regime and the Revolution.
Anyway, the whole history of the revolutionary cycle the world went through starting in about the late 18th century (or earlier, if you want to include the Dutch Revolt and the English Civil War) till the 20th is closely tied up with the history of the evolution of weapons technology. The 2nd Amendment meant something different back when the firepower differential between states and those who might want to overthrow them wasn’t nearly as big as it is today. A lot of really interesting artists and works here. Among my favorites are the Luz María Sánchez installation and, of course, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres thing.
Dennis, Thanks for that. So, Rigby was born and raised in Leeds, very impoverished. When he was about 9, the family moved to New Zealand. When he was 18 or so, he was like fuck this, it’s too hot, there’s nothing here, I’m gone, and moved back to London to get into the underground music/lit/art scene, and he remained there ever since, except for the year and a half he went back to NZ a few years ago to take care of his mum when she was diagnosed with cancer. She’s still alive and is in London right now to collect his things and his ashes, which she’ll take back with her to NZ.
During his time in NZ as a teen, he became great friends with a girl named Angela, who’s probably his best friend. She and I have been in constant contact and it’s really helped both of us. She’s great and has been by his side forever too. I’ve also been in contact with his mum. As you might imagine, she’s wholly overwhelmed and exhausted.
I was planning on getting over to see him this year. He and Alex wanted to meet each other. I was also planning an excursion to Paris during the trip for a few days. Oh, well.
I can still always do Paris again eventually.
As I told you in my email, Rigby absolutely adored you and loved your work. The friend of his who initially contacted me to inform me of his death said the same thing when I told her I’d reach out to you. So, yeah, you were a big part of his consciousness. I don’t know if you knew that.
Thanks. Yeah, it’s been a year and I’d like to think we’re still going strong. We get on really well. We’re very similar in a lot of ways and I think that helps. And we just like each other, you know?
This guns post reminds me of Rigby. He wasn’t big into guns but he got the appeal, especially after having gone to a range with a friend and shooting an AK-47. He was like, I get it, it was intoxicating. He never did it again, though.
Hey Dennis!
I contacted the people who do the programming at Zita about ’Room Temperature’ about 2 days ago and I’ll update you whether they’re positive to the idea or not when I get a reply! I’m sure they will be.
I’ve gotten really into Guided By Voices recently btw! I used to listen to alien lanes all the time when I was like twelve, but never listened further for some reason, until now. Holy shit, they’re fucking genius. I’ve listened through a couple of albums now, but I’m quite bewildered and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of music they’ve produced. You got any favorite albums or songs by them? Would love to hear them!
Read anything of value lately? Or watched anything? I’m pretty starved for new films or books to read! Currently reading ’Exquisite corpse’ and I’m enjoying it.
Wishing all the best
Måns
Guns always scare me. Even stapling wood with a staple gun is awful. When I was a kid, I went to a festival where this guy stole a woman’s purse, dashed her baby to the ground, and then fired a gun into the air in the middle of a crowd. That’s always stuck with me, I suppose. It’s been the kind of month where a lot has happened (travelling up and down the East Coast, mostly), and yet most of it feels repetitive (research, conferences, creative work). On the plus side one of my short stories won me a prize voucher to our local bookstore so now I’m using that money to get the The Thing compilation that was recently released. I think some of your stuff might be in there? Not sure. You’re really just everywhere. Do you know if/when RT will be released theatrically/online? I’ve been following along all the articles and Substack posts about it and now I’m even more excited to watch it. It’s Easter break here so I’ve finally had a chance to rest and catch up on the books I’ve been meaning to read. Might translate one of them. Let’s see. Wishing you foamy soap in your bath/shower today.
Heres the comment I sent sunday which spoilerss did not send in time.
4.18.25
I wonder if I can send this on time? I am a bit tired right now. and I wanted to see if I could respond before the weekend despite my business. This is in responds to the other post .
Oh what gig were you referring to if you can remember? I cant remember what I had said in march. Do you remember? How was your trip? Anything noteworthy. Oh, either I’m crazy or live in another universe where you had seen joy division live. Im pretty sure You told me you saw throbbing gristle…and that’s where I got confused
Right now theres a dog named obi wan kenobi where I work and he is just the sweetest old man dog, trotting along the yard with a ball in his mount. He is a black cairn terrier. I wish I felt I belong at the place because right now I make so many mistakes I just feel so distant.
Oh Ive been reading an biography book on Tallulah Bankhead. Everything is kind of just meh which is an understatement but maybe next week i’ll have more to say?
What kind of burritos did you have? Where did you eat them?
I ate really good Indian food + chana masala the other day.
Oh Oh wait, Did you get my package! I hope so, let met know
Love Darbs
4.20.25
Hey Apologies in advance , the heat is awful and im hypersensitive with sensoryi ssues and it just frustrates and overwhelms me and makes speaking hard. I just wish Iknew how to communicate with you, its frustratinglike everything else that is so simple, and shame results from this frustration because I cant express things or say anything right.
i feel shame because I feel like I dont talk ambitiously as I used to when I first started commenting and this inability to communicate makes it so much frustrating!!!!
Ughh does that make sense? I hate that theres tears coming from my eyes from trying to articulate the simplest of thing. But this isnt me being pessimistic, really im restless and I wish I wasnt so I could just focus on writing. I used to write for three hours and read every day, ive just been trying to get back to that headspace which im obviously not in. Its not even laziness its just that silence is not as forgiving as it used to be and now its can manifest the most harmful thoughts. I cant calm my body down sometimes and all this doesnt matter but I guess I just feel helpless riht now. I just want things to hurry up and get better before this pain becomes too much. But im not lazy.
But monday is a great day and I hope that when it comes everything will start fresh becasue I know these problems I have are beyond my control it feels sometimes and ive tried to control what I can. Its frustrating.
Oh im very exhausted after all this mental strength.
I hope your patient with me because im hoping i’ll be better at articulating the good next week, and everytime I start trying to express myself I feel disgusted because if I havent been able to read and write as much as I used to. im really really sorry I strain myself so much to make the comment not so verbose I really do try. Im going to really try this week but I hope your ok with me as i am because I really try not to be so flawed.
Hey. I forgot to ask for your email for the Sparks post if you could kindly oblige. Expect it in the next few days. It’s mostly just the photos I’m working on now, particularly finding high quality images. And also finding good links and videos and stuff. Ordinarily I’d be able to do this all a bit swifter but I’m doing final edits on my dissertation and stuff, but the Sparks post is a lot of fun so it’s not a chore at all.
Easter again. Weird holiday, sort of pathetic in that nothing happens. No decorations or anything. I watched ‘Megalopolis’ mid-afternoon because I was in the mood for a bad movie, and in my opinion it’s the good kind of bad movie. It is really just unbelievably terrible. The way I’d describe it is that it’s a rich person’s idea of social critique, so didactic and obvious that it makes you want to puke. Every scene is overlit, the actors all seem strung out and unreactive, and everything is just uncanny. In my opinion, there’s a fine line between masterpiece and masturbation, and the best so bad it’s good films tow that line. I really hope the era of the bad movie has returned, because Hollywood excretes so much uninspired shit that makes you want to eat fistfuls of glue out of boredom, and the way I see it is that really bad movies are way more entertaining than the homogenous, inoffensive slop that the machine ordinarily grinds up. No one will remember ‘Oppenheimer’ in about ten minutes, but this’ll last I reckon.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention about the Pynchon novel! Yes, I never thought we’d get another one. On the penguin website it says it’s almost 400 pages, so it’s average Pynchon length in terms of his last books but not another ‘Against the Day’. A lot of people theorise that Pynchon is creating his own alternate American history in that he hasn’t written more than one book set in a single decade, and apparently this is the 30s which he hasn’t done before, so maybe that adds up? Also, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie is a loose ‘Vineland’ adaptation, so maybe we’re entering a new Pynchonmania?
what the fuck is an easter.
hey dennis, hey others if you read this as well. pew pew. guns scare me. i might need to get over my fear in the coming years.
fitting enough, karloff day made me watch targets. it’s really great. perfect even, i dunno. this viewing a part stuck me to deeply, it’s when after bobby (tim o’keefe) kills his mom, his wife and a delivery boy, and we cut to byron (karloff himself) wakes up, unaware that he woke up to a new world that is gonna change him. maybe the germans have a word for the feeling i felt, but it stood out to me in a movie filled with nailbiters.
the past month has been. boring, uneventful. didn’t leave me a lot of stuff to store up to tell you. like the most eventful thing was that i kept meeting my family members — mom, grandma, cousin, brother, etc — while i was walking. i never meet them even if we literally live in the same city, and even they have noted it being insane that we never met. so it goes.
writing has gone fine, my breakthrough has basically made me upend my whole project that it barely has any simularities to what it started as, but it made me finally feel comfortable with the first few chapters. so i’m happy.
i hope to catch RT in theaters hopefully, maybe in oslo if kier’s plan works out and all. your comment about the lack of haunted houses over in europe give me a tickle. not sure why. rip Ehrenstein, i liked his comments when i was reading through the archives, and his essays for criterion. i think that should be all for me. hope your jetleg has cleared.
Hi Dennis! Loved the piece on the guns. There’s some Belgian artists I know (who make nice pieces, I find) who made a couple of hundred wooden guns, in all shapes and sized and weird interpretations, and they got to travel to Tokyo to present their work. You can check it out here: https://www.frankenrobbert.com/portfolio/guns/
How goes the movie screenings? Are you getting some good reactions from viewers and critics? I’m still going to send you that e-mail, about screening in Belgium. The e-mail will come like a last unexpected ghoul in a haunted house, when you least expect it and you already see the exit!
You asked about the writing — well I’m doing this thing where I’m attempting to write a trilogy in one go, where the first book (called ‘mal’, which is Dutch for (among other things) a ‘mold’, but also ‘silly’, and of course also the French ‘le mal’ etc) is the blueprint for the two others (called ‘mla’ and ‘lam’), whereby the first is written ‘truthfully’ as a sort of fragmented novel, and the two others are complete genre-pieces that exist entirely out of the same words (and their frequency of usage) of the first one. So I’m seeing if I can publish them all at the same time. Thinking the second book will be some sort of picaresque novel, and the third one maybe a horror story. My publisher is crazy enough to encourage me in stuff like this (he published a book called “3968”, where the ‘writer’ repeats every word in Orwell’s 1984 twice, so it reads like “I I went went to to the the door door (…)” etc. The guy also read the whole book over the span of several days, in a glass cubicle in a museum, guarded by a guard). Anyways, that’s my current project, and I’m plodding on with it, writing a couple of hundred words every other day or so, because I also work full time as a bookseller and I take care of my mother.
All the best! Looking forward to the blog this week
Arno
Hey man, long time no see, speak & the like. You might remember me as stan_cz, the moniker I used here ages ago.
Tough to decide where to start & especially how to keep this digital reunion brief. I see that you just returned from L.A. I lived out there for almost six years (2010 to 2015). Came in on a student visa & attended L.A. City College, married a Jamaican girl & stayed on, working odd jobs & playing the usual artist’s survival game. Things went downhill with the wife, now ex, which led to a nasty divorce that I’ll spare you the details of. After that war I reluctantly returned home, to Germany, where I took a Cambridge course & became a teacher. Did that for a while, teaching English & German to adults & refugees, which doesn’t pay well but provided a decent enough income security to get by on. Plus I actually enjoyed doing it most of the time.
I kept up the poetry all these years. Poetry, which is really my life blood & what’s kept me alive, during both the light & the dark patches, & of the latter I’ve had many. It wasn’t until my mid-30s though that I reached a style & a perspective that satisfies me, or rather that matches the distant music I could till then hear but not quite reproduce. Ethnopoetics was the key that unlocked everything for me. A hunger for the sacred (outside of organized religion) coupled with a love for experimental form led me to the poetries of the world’s deep tribal/oral traditions. Or to narrow it down to one book, Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred. The stuff I write now lands on my blog carstenczarnecki.blogspot.com plus I’ve been assembling a collection I will probably end up self-publishing, most likely with some photographs, to add a visual component.
Glad to see you’ve found another creative outlet in film now, though I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to see any of your films yet. I barely watch any these days. I still find the form appealing, but the end result tends to bore me to tears. It’s all still so tied to melodramatic plot convention & formula… Your stuff looks rather avant-garde though, which is right up my alley.
I’m currently in Spain until Sunday finalizing a long-planned move out here (Malaga region), because I still refuse to let Germany keep me. Late August is when I’ll stay here for good. Anyway, looking forward to catching up with you. Hope the jet lag is wearing off. Take care.
Hey man, long time no see, speak & the like. You might remember me as stan_cz, the moniker I used here ages ago.
Tough to decide where to start & especially how to keep this digital reunion brief. I see that you just returned from L.A. I lived out there for almost six years (2010 to 2015). Came in on a student visa & attended L.A. City College, married a Jamaican girl & stayed on, working odd jobs & playing the usual artist’s survival game. Things went downhill with the wife, now ex, which led to a nasty divorce that I’ll spare you the details of. After that war I reluctantly returned home, to Germany, where I took a Cambridge course & became a teacher. Did that for a while, teaching English & German to adults & refugees, which doesn’t pay well but provided a decent enough income security to get by on. Plus I actually enjoyed doing it most of the time.
I kept up the poetry all these years. Poetry, which is really my life blood & what’s kept me alive, during both the light & the dark patches, & of the latter I’ve had many. It wasn’t until my mid-30s though that I reached a style & a perspective that satisfies me, or rather that matches the distant music I could till then hear but not quite reproduce. Ethnopoetics was the key that unlocked everything for me. A hunger for the sacred (outside of organized religion) coupled with a love for experimental form led me to the poetries of the world’s deep tribal/oral traditions. Or to narrow it down to one book, Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred. The stuff I write now lands on my blog carstenczarnecki.blogspot.com plus I’ve been assembling a collection I will probably end up self-publishing, most likely with some photographs, to add a visual component.
Glad to see you’ve found another creative outlet in film now, though I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to see any of your films yet. I barely watch any these days. I still find the form appealing, but the end result tends to bore me to tears. It’s all still so tied to melodramatic plot convention & formula… Your stuff looks rather avant-garde though, which is right up my alley.
I’m currently in Spain until Sunday finalizing a long-planned move out here (Malaga region), because I still refuse to let Germany keep me. Late August is when I’ll stay here for good.
Sorry to hear about David E’s passing. I hung out with him once in L.A. Feels several lifetimes ago.
Anyway, looking forward to catching up with you. Hope the jet lag is wearing off. Take care.
Hey man, long time no see, speak & the like. You might remember me as stan_cz, the moniker I used here ages ago.
Tough to decide where to start & especially how to keep this digital reunion brief. I see that you just returned from L.A. I lived out there for almost six years (2010 to 2015). Came in on a student visa & attended L.A. City College, married a Jamaican girl & stayed on, working odd jobs & playing the usual artist’s survival game. Things went downhill with the wife, now ex, which led to a nasty divorce that I’ll spare you the details of. After that war I reluctantly returned home, to Germany, where I took a Cambridge course & became a teacher. Did that for a while, teaching English & German to adults & refugees, which doesn’t pay well but provided a decent enough income security to get by on. Plus I actually enjoyed doing it most of the time.
I kept up the poetry all these years. Poetry, which is really my life blood & what’s kept me alive, during both the light & the dark patches, & of the latter I’ve had many. It wasn’t until my mid-30s though that I reached a style & a perspective that satisfies me, or rather that matches the distant music I could till then hear but not quite reproduce. Ethnopoetics was the key that unlocked everything for me. A hunger for the sacred (outside of organized religion) coupled with a love for experimental form led me to the poetries of the world’s deep tribal/oral traditions. Or to narrow it down to one book, Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred. The stuff I write now lands on my blog carstenczarnecki.blogspot.com plus I’ve been assembling a collection I will probably end up self-publishing, most likely with some photographs, to add a visual component.
Glad to see you’ve found another creative outlet in film now, though I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to see any of your films yet. I barely watch any these days. I still find the form appealing, but the end result tends to bore me to tears. It’s all still so tied to melodramatic plot convention & formula… Your stuff looks rather avant-garde though, which is right up my alley.
I’m currently in Spain until Sunday finalizing a long-planned move out here (Malaga region), because I still refuse to let Germany keep me. Late August is when I’ll stay here for good.
Sorry to hear about David E’s passing. I hung out with him once in L.A. Feels several lifetimes ago.
Anyway, looking forward to catching up with you. Hope the jet lag is wearing off. Take care.
Beloved Dennis,
I’m not exactly sure how to reach you, so I’ll write to you here!!!!
I’m currently translating one of your short stories into Spanish (no profit involved) and I’d love to ask you some things about it. I know you’re probably busy, but it won’t take much. Where could I write to you?