The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Hoaxes *

* (restored)

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In the 1970s and early ’80s, the East German Olympic program employed the electronic composer Martin Zeichnete to create workout soundtracks for the GDR’s teams — shimmering, motorik pulse-music that, in combination with a top-secret doping program, would aid the athletes in their goal to become the ultimate Menschen-Maschinen. Now, Edinburgh’s Unknown Capability Recordings has collected some of Zeichnete’s work as Kosmischer Läufer: Cosmic Music of the East German Olympic Program 1972-83. In an interview published in Slow Travel Berlin, Zeichnete discusses how he was influenced by West German artists like Kraftwerk, Cluster, and Neu!; he discovered the music — banned in the GDR — by listening to Düsseldorf radio broadcasts he managed to pick up in his native Dresden. As an amateur runner, he had the idea that hypnotic, repetitive music might help athletes focus. When, in 1972, the German-Brazilian inventor Andreas Pavel introduced the Stereobelt, a predecessor of the Walkman, Zeichnete knew how to make his dream a reality. Strangely, a Google search for “Martin Zeichnete” only turns up links related to the compilation; a Google search for German-language documents returns no results at all. (Indeed, “Zeichnete” — which is also the third-person preterite of “to draw” — doesn’t appear to be a common German surname, although “Drew” does happen to be the name of one of the label’s founders.) The interview published in Slow Travel Berlin turns out to have been published on Scribd.com by Unknown Capability Recordings, the label responsible for the anthology, back in February. Neither interview includes photographs of Zeichnete, and he doesn’t appear in a series of promotional videos for the release. And the more you listen to the music, the more it begins to sound both too pristine, given the tapes’ alleged age, and too stylistically perfect in its aping of Neu! and Kraftwerk.

 

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Very strange and bizarre footage which purports to show a weird stick-insect type creature, crawling down some buildings in Russia.

 

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A girl who was reported to have died after being hit in the head with a shovel is still alive – despite a hoax death article being posted on the internet. Last week, a video of a girl getting hit in the head with a metal shovel generated a whopping 500,000 views in the first two days of being uploaded online. Rumours circulated on the internet soon after that the teenage girl suffered serious head injuries and dropped dead while she was watching the movie Mean Girls at home. The clip shows two girls called Miranda and Emily fist fighting over Emily’s boyfriend, who threatens her rival with an air soft gun which shoots plastic BBs. Instead, when Miranda charges at her, Emily picks up a metal spade and throws it at her with full force. It hits Miranda in the back of the head, who then falls on the kerb, cracking the side of her skull on the road which leaves her unable to hear out of her right ear.

 

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Wrestling is fake

 

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Cast your mind back to 2003 and you’ll remember two Russian pop stars who dressed in school uniforms, sung about being lesbians and snogged on stage a lot. Yes, we are talking about t.A.T.u. and their Number 1 single “All The Things She Said”. Speaking on Russian TV, one half of the duo, Yulia Volkova, said that she would not accept her son as gay, because men are made to have sex with women and make babies and anyone who doesn’t is wrong. “Yes, I would condemn him” she said, “because I believe that a real man must be a real man. God created man for procreation, it is the nature. The man for me is the support, the strength of… I won’t accept a gay son.” But before you get on your high horse and say that fake lesbian Yulia doesn’t like gay people, she also says being homosexual is still “a little better than” killing people. “I just want my son to be a real man, not a fag,” she said. “I believe that being gay is all still better than murderers, thieves or drug addicts. If you choose out of all this, being gay a little better than the rest.”

 

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Hotelicopter

 

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In 2009, a strange Facebook account appeared out of nowhere and friended people en-masse. The name on the account was Junko Junsui, and she had a message for anyone willing to listen. Thus began a strange mystery that would continue for years to come, as countless people across the internet became enamored of Junsui, her story, and the shadowy organizations she claimed were hiding in plain sight. Some people actually accepted the seemingly random request, and, upon investigating further, found that Junko was not just a friendly Russian beauty, as her profile initially made it seem. Rather, she appeared to be a part of a weird alternate reality game involving a terrorist group called ‘The Junsui,’ Russia, and private military companies—all of which were warring with one another across the internet. Many found untangling Junko Junsui’s web to be a thrill, which makes sense: the confusing premise seemed as if it was lifted straight out of a Metal Gear Solid plot. Shadowy organizations, corrupt governments, overzealous groups defined by genetic modification, a huge conspiracy: Junko Junsui delivered on all fronts. But more than that, people found the entire thing disturbing, too. One of the most notable early clues in the ARG led players to discover video clips of a woman trapped inside of a room. If there was a “puppet master” behind it all, that person seemed particularly antagonistic toward people who participated. Junko Junsui is said to have became irate in her Facebook posts whenever people posted her communications on forums, sometimes allegedly outing anonymous participants who believed they were just playing a game. In the end, there was no grand conspiracy. There were no terrorist groups, and no shadowy government organizations. There was only a slick game that got out of hand, and players that desperately wanted to believe in something.

 

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This photo, taken by Jim Templeton, shows his daughter sitting in a marsh in the north of the UK. However, what makes this photo interesting is the fact that Templeton claims there was no one standing behind his daughter when he took the picture. It is clear to see that in the photo, which Kodak have examined and confirmed has not been tampered with, there is a figure which seems to resemble a ‘spaceman’ in full astronaut clothing. This has lead to many ‘believers’ claiming that Solway Firth, the location the picture was taken, could be an area of ”space-time displacement” that allows ‘non-Earthlings’ to be seen and captured on film. The most likely explanation is that photographer’s wife is stood in the background, with her back towards the camera and her blue dress appearing white due to overexposure.

 

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In 1770, an astonishing robot was unveiled that possessed the artificial intelligence needed to defeat any human players in a game of chess. Nicknamed “The Turk,” this animatronic chess champion was created by Wolfgang von Kempelen, and it toured Europe and America until it was destroyed in a fire in 1854. That’s when it was revealed it wasn’t a robot at all, but an elaborate hoax, with a human chess master hiding inside The Turk all along.

 

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Irena Kolokov was caught off guard when she turned up to meet her boyfriend, Alexey Bykov, 30, but found what appeared to be a horrific car accident when she arrived. “We’d arranged to meet at a certain place, but when I arrived there were mangled cars everywhere, ambulances, smoke, and carnage,” Kolokov told Orange News. “When I saw Alexey covered in blood lying in the road, a paramedic told me he was dead, and I just broke down in tears.” His face covered in fake blood and his head wrapped in gauze, Bykov staggered up to his love, who was so distraught that when her boyfriend approached her she shoved him off while crying uncontrollably. “I wanted her to realize how empty her life would be without me and how life would have no meaning without me. I think it worked,” he said.

 

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This is a Moon Melon, scientifically known as asidus. This fruit grows in some parts of Japan and it’s know for its weird blue color. What you probably don’t know about this fruit is that it can switch flavors after you eat it. Everything sour will taste sweet, and everything salty will taste bitter, and it gives water a strong orange-like taste. This fruit is very expensive. It costs about 16000 JPY (which is about 200 dollars).

 

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Naked Came the Stranger is a 1969 novel written as a literary hoax poking fun at contemporary American culture. Though credited to “Penelope Ashe”, it was in fact written by a group of twenty-four journalists led by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady. McGrady’s intention was to write a deliberately terrible book with a lot of sex, to illustrate the point that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. The group wrote the book as a deliberately inconsistent and mediocre hodge-podge, with each chapter written by a different author. The book was submitted for publication under the pseudonym “Penelope Ashe” (portrayed by McGrady’s sister-in-law for photographs and meetings with publishers). The publisher, Lyle Stuart, was an independent publisher then known for controversial books, many with sexual content. According to Stuart, he appropriated the cover photo (a kneeling nude woman with very long hair down he
r back, photographed from behind) from a Hungarian nudist magazine. By the end of the year, the book had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List. As of May 2012, the book’s publisher reported the book had sold 400,000 copies.

 

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A 1931 photo in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung showing the US Navy airship “Los Angeles,” blown by a gust of wind, lifting a ship into the air.

 

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Erik Nordenankar’s self-portrait – which straddles the entire globe – was allegedly created by tracing the route taken by the specially-primed case on its 55-day journey around the world. The artist claimed he gave the case to DHL, the package delivery firm, with exact co-ordinates detailing the stages of its tour. When the package was returned to Stockholm he claimed he downloaded the GPS’s route memory to produce the enormous drawing above. It is composed of a single 110,00km-long line that passes through six continents and 62 countries. But after bloggers pointed out holes in Nordenankar’s claim, DHL confirmed to the Telegraph that the artwork was an “entirely fictional project”.

 

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Michael Jackson is alive


Memorial Strangeness


Michael Jackson This is it backwards


Michael Jackson is alive proof not fake not scary


Michael Jackson Death Hoax – LaToya’s best slip ups


MICHAEL JACKSON IS ALIVE, I SAW HIM IN PARIS !

 

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In June of 1972, a woman appeared in Cedar Sinai hospital in nothing but a white, blood-covered gown. Now this, in itself, should not be too surprising as people often have accidents nearby and come to the nearest hospital for medical attention, but there were two things that caused people who saw her to vomit and flee in terror.The first being that she wasn’t exactly human. she resembled something close to a mannequin, but had the dexterity and fluidity of a normal human being. Her face, was as flawless as a mannequins, devoid of eyebrows and smeared in make-up. From the moment she stepped through the entrance to when she was taken to a hospital room and cleaned up before being prepped for sedation, she was completely calm, expressionless and motionless. The doctors thought it best to restrain her until the authorities could arrive and she did not protest. They were unable to get any kind of response from her and most staff members felt too uncomfortable to look directly at her for more than a few seconds. But the second the staff tried to sedate her, she fought back with extreme force. Two members of staff had to hold her down as her body rose up on the bed with that same, blank expression. She eventually fought herself free, causing serious injuries to the staff members, then walked out of the hospital. There was never a sighting of her again.

 

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A living Wooly Mammoth shot by a German camera man in 1943 while being transported to Siberia.

 

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It seems almost incredible that Ursula Bogner’s musical talents should have remained undiscovered until now. Yet in view of her biography, this might have been just as inevitable. It was on a flight to Vilnius that I met Sebastian Bogner, Ursula’s son, who told me he was on a business trip for a pharmaceutical company. The usual small talk soon led to the topic of his mother Ursula, who also ‘liked to play around with synthesizers’, albeit purely on an amateur level and in a dedicated music room fitted especially for this purpose in the parental home. In the late 1960s, Ursula Bogner started to record her own music on reel-to-reel tapes. With some of these titles, we only found individual tracks of pieces recorded on a four-track-recorder – in these cases, I had to recombine the separate tracks to recreate the original piece. Unfortunately, I could not involve Ursula Bogner in the mixing process as she passed away in 1994. Invoking the original’s authenticity might seem insensitive, yet there was no other way to release them in their entirety. Ultimately, only three of the tracks featured on this CD/LP are such ‘reworkings’. All other titles were taken straight from the original reels. Covering a fairly short period of her creative career, they also convey a peculiar coherence in both form and content. A coherence that reflects her accessible, rhythmic and sometimes even ‘poppy’ side. Naturally, my own preference played a part in the selection process. All my personal favourites made it on the CD/LP, and whenever I listen to this collection, I invariably succumb to the titles’ light-hearted nonchalance. This might leave many hours of undiscovered gems, but a further compilation is already in the works.

 

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Miscellaneous

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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Donald Charles Alfred Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from The Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide.

 

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We found out recently, through conducting customer surveys, that the crust is overwhelmingly the most popular part of the pizza experience, and also that the majority of Domino’s devotees crave extra crust once they’ve finished their meal. These findings, along with our love of surprising people and pushing boundaries, led us to the Edibox. With every future Domino’s delivery, you’ll see the Edibox upgrade option: double the dough to enjoy alongside double the glorious garlic and herb dip. And the best bit? You won’t have to fight to fit that square box into a round bin – this is a waste-free dining experience.

 

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When three young men in Georgia claimed to have run over an alien in 1953, they caused a media frenzy. The 2ft hairless, creature with eerie, dark eyes was quickly confiscated and taken to Emory University to be examined. Experts revealed it was in fact a Capuchin monkey that had been made to look alien by having its tail cut off and fur its removed with depilatory cream. It was then the boys confessed that they’d come up with the idea over a card game. One of them bet his friends $10 he could get himself in the local paper within a week. He bought the poor monkey at a petshop, gave it a lethal dose of chloroform before removing its hair and tail.

 

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Nat Tate was an imaginary person, invented by writer William Boyd and created as “an abstract expressionist who destroyed ‘99%’ of his work and leapt to his death from the Staten Island ferry. His body was never found.” Boyd published a book about Nat Tate as a real biography. Gore Vidal, John Richardson (Picasso’s biographer), and David Bowie were all participants in the hoax. “Nat Tate” is a combination of the names of two London art galleries, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. Boyd and his conspirators set about convincing the New York glitterati (social elites) that the reputation of this influential abstract expressionist needed to be re-evaluated. Bowie held a launch party on April Fool’s Day eve, 1998, and read extracts from the book, while Richardson talked about Tate’s friendships with both Picasso and Braque.

 

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Ashley Casey Martin reportedly posted photos of herself with what appeared to be injuries — or at least what she thought appeared to be injuries. What she posted with the photos led to her post going viral. In fact, the use of makeup (in particular, black eyeliner and shadow) appears to be more than a little obvious. In fact, it looks similar to the eye makeup used by at least one member of the band The Misfits. Are they her inspiration for this harebrained hoax?

 

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This incredible video of an eagle swooping down and snatching a toddler with its talons from a Montreal park has been watched more than 1.2 million times. Social media verification experts at Storyful point to evidence of fakery, including Twitter user @thornae’s animated GIF showing inconsistencies with the eagle’s shadow. New Statesman writer Alex Hern also points out that “there is the slightly odd motion of the child after the eagle lets go of it. Not only does it carry on going up — which would just be momentum — but its ascent actually speeds up a bit before falling.”

 

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While cleaning up after the 1959 Tulare County Art League exhibit in Visalia, California, a group of janitors and maintenance men remarked to each that they could make “modern art” that was just as good. So the next year, they set out to prove it. They took a piece of scrap metal from which holes had been cut for door latches, and they painted it black. One of the group remarked that the metal vaguely resembled the shape and size of a cat. So they titled the piece “Peterfid Tomcat” — deliberately misspelling the word “petrified.” And as a finishing touch, they put a $350 price tag on their creation. Then they snuck their piece into the display area of the exhibit. Its presence raised no eyebrows. In fact, it was promptly awarded a ribbon for merit.

 

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This photo shows the Cooper family sitting around a table, just days after they had moved into their new family house in Texas. What the family was unaware of is that when the photograph was developed, the image of what appears to be a falling body emerged in the left hand side of the room. Although the photo has been cropped, hence the family not appearing in the centre of the image, it was examined by experts, and deemed to be genuine. But as film was so expensive in the 1950s, it was common for people to re-use film. This meant that two separate images could be developed on top of one another.

 

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A video apparently showing an cocky Italian teenager lying under a speeding train has tuned out to be a fake. The 26-second YouTube clip shows the prankster seemingly lying down on tracks in Perugia, Italy, before goading an oncoming locomotive as it races towards him. Seconds later he lies flat on the track as the train appears to whizz over him at high speed.

 

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In September, 1726 Mary Toft began to give birth to rabbits. The local surgeon, John Howard, responded to her family’s summons and hurried to Mary’s house where, to his amazement, he helped her deliver nine of the animals. They were all born dead, and they were actually rabbit parts rather than whole rabbits. Nevertheless, this didn’t lessen the amazing fact that she was giving birth to them. Then, when a famous London physician, Sir Richard Manningham, threatened that he might have to surgically examine Mary’s uterus in the name of science, she wisely decided to confess. She explained that she had simply inserted the dead rabbits inside her womb when no one was looking, motivated by a desire for fame and the hope of receiving a pension from the King.

 

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Since his suicide in 1991, the literary reputation of Jerzy Kosinski has continued to sink. At one time he was one of the most promising writers on the American scene, pounding out three hits in a row-the cult classic The Painted Bird, Steps (winner of the 1969 National Book Award), and Being There (filmed in 1980 with Peter Sellers in the starring role). With their grisly violence and a sexuality bordering upon the sadomasochistic, the books raised Kosinski into the ranks of America’s celebrity class. He appeared repeatedly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, played the role of Lenin’s stooge Grigory Zinoviev in Warren Beatty’s film Reds, posed for the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and presented the Oscar for screenwriting in the spring of 1982, watched by 600 million people. Even as his star was ascending, however, Kosinski was all but finished as a writer. His last six books became progressively more trivial, self-absorbed, and unreadable; and there drew closer the day of his exposure as a literary fraud. In June 1982, the Village Voice revealed that Kosinski (for whom English was a second language) had made extensive use of translators and collaborators to write all his books, and then had concealed the fact. George Reavey, a poet who was embittered by his own lack of literary success, complained to anyone who would listen that he wrote The Painted Bird. But Reavey was only one of several who could have made the same complaint, and not only about The Painted Bird. Being There so closely resembled a prewar Polish bestseller called The Career of Nikodem Dyzma as to deserve the charge of plagiarism. Kosinski never fully recovered from the Voice’s expose. The remainder of his life, as he himself said, was spent running from it.

 

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Are certain of the fake actors of the Sandy Hook hoax directly connected to the Rockefeller cabal? They are, regardless, all fakes and hucksters, that is those who claim that the event was real and testify to the same. There are no exceptions. All the people involved at the most crucial levels in Sandy Hook are actors playing a pre-determined role.

 

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This photo seems to depict a man in what would be described as modern-day hipster clothing – in 1940s Canada. Sceptics were quick to attack the image, claiming it must be photoshopped, however, after much research it was confirmed that copies of the same picture are kept at the Bralorne Pioneer Museum in British Columbia, Canada. So is this guy a time-traveler or just a very modern looking 1940s man? Well its hard to tell. His clothes, sunglasses and modern looking camera could all have technically been made in 1940, however, historians have said it would have been extremely unusual to see a man walking around looking like this at the time. Kodak have confirmed that small cameras, like the one our ‘hipster’ appears to be holding were available in 1940, however were rare due to their high cost.

 

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Benjamin Vanderford is a 22 year old banker who in his spare time enjoys video art, as well as music; Ben is also known as The Great White Hype on the label Record Label Records. He is an experimental freestyle rap artist, who records all his rapping in one take Last August, Vanderford was seen being decapitated on a tape which was quickly picked up by an Islamic website and then disseminated around the net and western media. The fact that the entire event was staged by a group of San Francisco friends was only made apparent when Reuters showed up at Ben’s apartment complex. For his side, Ben faulted the mass media for publicizing the stunt without first verifying that the video was genuine.

 

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UFOs

 

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John Ernst Worrell Keely was a US inventor from Philadelphia who claimed to have discovered a new motive power which was originally described as “vaporic” or “etheric” force, and later as an unnamed force based on “vibratory sympathy”, by which he produced “interatomic ether” from water and air. Despite numerous requests from the stockholders of the Keely Motor Company, which had been established to produce a practicable motor based on his work, he consistently refused to reveal to them the principles on which his motor operated, and also repeatedly refused demands to produce a marketable product by claiming that he needed to perform more experiments.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. If you’re reading this from London (or nearby), PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT will be showing there on Friday September 14th, 7:30 pm at Cabinet Gallery, 132 Tyers St, Lambeth, SE11 5HS. A Q&A with Zac and me will precede the screening. Should you be there or there-ish and available, it would be great if you can come. Thanks! ** Sypha, Do you think you’ll ever un-abort the Warhol novel? I don’t think I could handle a Cher album. I’m mainly interested to find out if she covers any deep, more ‘obscure’ tracks or if she just does all the overly familiar hits. Great about the ‘Harlem Smoke’ post whenever you think it’s time. The term ‘glacial pace’ is synonymous with ‘thriller’ for me, so you’ve got me pre-hooked. ** Misanthrope, Oh, sure. Cancer is the catch-all physical problem solver. Scariest shit. I’m still betting on a mesh-related thing, not that I’m a betting man. All the luck in the world, G. You probably eat milk chocolate when you eat the stuff. I’m all and only about the dark stuff where sweetness is just an ephemeral silver lining. Mmmmm, four layer wedding cake, yum. Errrr, the day of sugar poisoning misery afterwards, ugh. And yet … NYC, London, book ’em! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yeah, we wanted to choose films that are hard to see over there. ‘Un Lac’ is my favorite Grandrieux too. And its lack of sexual violence makes it a closer fit with ‘PGL’. As I think I’ve said, ‘Grandrieux’s films are barely released even here. Granted, they’re tough things, but I think he must have a fetish for his films being rarities or something. The Cinematheque is doing a big Grandrieux retrospective this fall, which is very exciting. Our first choices for the two ‘carte blanche’ films were Bresson’s ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ and Benning’s ’11 x 14′. The Bresson was, unsurprisingly, impossible to get, which is a shame because it’s so extremely hard to see in the US. ’11 x 14′ got nixed because FSoLC showed it a couple of years ago. Thank you a lot again for doing that piece on our film and the screening. It’s greatly appreciated. ABBA only did one US tour to promote ‘The Album’ in ’77, and I saw them on that tour in LA. It was a weird thing, a matinee performance in Anaheim where most the audience was parents and children. It was totally incredible though. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D. Thank you, it was a real pleasure to put together, obviously. ** Jamie, Hey! I’m always very, very happy to have any good news on the blog accessing front. Cool. Yeah, Clementi made a large handful of films, extremely experimental. I love them. By your description of that talk, my guess is  it was Brigid ‘Polk’ Berlin? My weekend was all right, Work and planning and blah blah. I didn’t get to the fun fair only because I’m hoping to go with a pal later today. Great that the dance was so exciting. I just peeked into the video, and it does look really ace. It was by Stasis? Is that choreographer’s name? I couldn’t quite tell from the video credits. I’ll see if Gisele knows that work. Thanks for sharing that tangential taste, man. Well, I hope the overindulged one has recovered his or her senses to the fullest, i.e. that the WS happens tonight. And, if so, how did your thang go down? No sweat and totally understandable about London. It’s not exactly next door. A way will be found for you to see the film sometime for sure. Monday on my end: Find an open Tabac since I’m almost out of cigarettes, which could involve scouring Paris since most Tabacs and other stores are closed for the holidays as they are every year around now. Work on the film synopsis. Figure out some technical stuff about the London PGL screening. Funfair. Not sure what else. It’s supposed to rain all day. And you? May your Monday turn every motor vehicle in your extended vicinity into unicorns. Open Tabac love, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, I remember really liking ‘Superstar’ when I read it decades ago. I don’t know that Simon Bill book at all. It sounds really fun. I’ll search. I don’t know his art either, and that ‘Duck Rabbit’ is really nice. Another search. Thank you beefing up my day, man. Have a great one. ** Bill, Hi, B. She’s almost always pretty hilarious even when the films are just surrounding mush. Yeah, I read the Pitchfork interview. He’s super cool. I predict a very interesting future with his stuff. Canned sounds, pop conventions, vocals … holy shit, I’m so the edge of my seat about that sketch, Bill. Kind of excitement central. A DW seance is worth a shot. Man, he would have such a lot to say about du jour. ** Okay. I decided to restore this old hoax-fixated post for some reason, and that’s that. See you tomorrow.

13 Comments

  1. Steve Erickson

    Elisabeth Vincentelli’s 33 1/3 book on ABBA touches on the paradox that back in the 1970s, they were considered incredibly square and their audience for a concert would probably include children, but they also appealed to gay men and other outsiders. ABBA: THE MOVIE is really bizarre. I kept thinking that the journalist who is so desperate to interview the band is not going to get any interesting issues from them.

    I don’t know how much I should talk about this in public, but I’m trying to give up tranquilizers. I thought it was going great till last Thursday when I cut down my dosage by .5 mg – at this point, I’m taking half the amount I was taking 5 months ago – and was hit by sleep problems that have left me tired and spacey during the day. I E-mailed my doctor half an hour ago to ask if this is a temporary problem that will go away in a few more days or if I really need them to have a decent night’s sleep. I’m pretty sure benzos have done permanent and serious damage to my memory over the years I’ve been taking them.

    It’s now raining in New York this morning, and at 10 AM it looks as dark as early evening.

  2. Sypha

    That mannequin lady at the hospital hoax was pretty creepy, like something from the pages of Ligotti.

    I think the Cher ABBA album is mostly just the hits tbh… at least that’s the impression I got when I skimmed the track listing a few days ago.

    I think almost every artist has a Moby Dick/white whale project they spend a great deal of their life pursuing but never finish… maybe mine is the Warhol one. I doubt it’s ever coming back though: a few years back I even destroyed all my notes for it. A lot of things I was planning on using for it eventually appeared elsewhere, in other projects, anyway. And, truth be told, the subject matter doesn’t quite obsess me now as it did ten years ago (though Warhol is still my favorite artist).

    I’m halfway through the HS proofs (read 100 pages yesterday). Yesterday I got past the two densest/most difficult chapters. Namely, chapter 5, a 49 page behemoth in which the main character goes on a long walk around Providence, being interviewed at various Lovecraft-related sites, which reads almost more like a tour guide at some points, or a history lesson for both Providence antiquarian architecture and Lovecraft’s relationship with the city… I find it mostly fascinating but I worry the typical reader might find it dreadfully slow-going (hell, some parts of it bored even me, but I left those parts in out of perversity). And chapter 9, a 46 page monster where the main character and his romantic interest walk around the entire RISD Art Museum, after which they go to a coffee house and have a long and pretentious debate about atheism, pessimism, Gnosticism, and so on (while Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” plays in the background). A real page-turner, ha ha. From here on in most of the chapters are a more reasonable length, though.

  3. alex rose

    oh dennis, i remember some of these, my dreams destroyed, hurray !

    it would be great if you could share my work with others sept/oct, sorry for not replying to your words, work has been busy and the ny gallery boys are within the deepest coma known to me

    but now i’ve 3 days off work so i’m trying to fiddle up some new work and behold and lo the neighbours have got a the builders in, it sounds like an einsturzende soundcheck at 7am, oh dennis they’re so loud with their hammering ( each other ? ) and all of them so plain looking ,i tried a few catcalls, all to no avail..

    ian bunnyman, yip, i read an interview with him last week and he seems the worse for ware, he’s threatening to redo vocals over some of the classics. cough there’s a newish album in the year, woe be tide

    dennis, i checked the weather in paris, mmh, id burn an irish church for paris to rain

    love to you and well done to you and zac on all the PGL glitter

    alex,x

  4. Jamie

    Hola Dennis,
    I bloody love hoaxes, or I find them and what goes on behind them quite fascinating, so this post was another beauty for me, ta. I love that pic of those happy janitors with their cat sculpture! I vaguely recall there being a a guest post on here once about Ghostwatch (?), the disastrous UK fake doc, which is maybe my all time fake hoax, mostly cos I watched it unfold live. I’ve always fancied writing a fake quiz show.
    How was your day? Did you get your smokes? I’ve had a mildly frustrating day, trying to write another short play for a competition for kid’s plays. I had a seemingly good idea then realised, after doing a fair bit of work on it, that it was a fairly irresponsible scene that seemed to advocate the theft of confectionery. I’ve no problem putting that across, tbh, but it definitely wont win this type of thing. So, I’ve been trying to come up with something else and I got nothing. Ach.
    WG will be taking place in the next hour or so and the next one after that will be taking place in Paris! Exciting.
    Stasis is the name of the dance group. Their website is here –
    http://stasiscompany.com/
    I really like the photo of one of them eating noodles at the bottom of the page.
    I hope everything’s going good with you and the film synopsis is working out.
    Tuesday plans for you? I’m going to come up with an idea for, and write, a 20 minute play for children. We’ll see.
    May Tuesday soothe you like drowsy cough elixir on a blistered throat.
    Galvanised love,
    Jamie

  5. Mike W

    This post is most entertaining. Check out classical pianist Joyce Hatto for another good fraud. She released 100 albums under her name, none of which she played.

  6. Dominik

    Hi!!

    Well, it looks like France’s serene weather did float here for one whole day, haha! We had an almost normal day on Saturday – and by Sunday we were back with the extreme heat. Wow. I hope it’s still lovely over there!
    I really hope your producer won’t be a pain in the ass. Just this once. Seriously.
    Did you manage to write the synopsis?
    Ah, it sounds so, so exciting! Your huge collection of polaroids! I did indeed start taking pictures myself! I went to this weird gothic event with Anita on Saturday and we saw some interesting and inspiring faces. The funny part is that we ended up taking a single picture of me instead of them, we just used the atmosphere there, but I like how it turned out and I have the feeling that this is the picture that was “meant to be born” that evening. I also met a dear friend of mine after work today and we took some more pictures at this run-down pub/cinema. Just like you said, I love how the price of the film makes me really put myself into every single photo I take/model for. It makes me want to actually put the effort into bettering my technique to be able to meet my inner vision as precisely as I can for the first try.
    Thank you for sending me the Mapplethorpe picture you owned. I really like it too – I’m sorry you had to let it go at some point. I’m still in the process of digging myself deeper and deeper into his work but I’ll send you my favorite piece when I find it.
    Second oldest teenager, then? Haha!

    Between the goth event and a free-style Sunday, I tried to write whatever’s in me… out of me. I didn’t quite manage, I feel like I couldn’t catch it but it still gave me some small amount of satisfaction. When you posted Saturday’s Viva post (which fits so perfectly into my whole inspired mood right now that I almost wept when I saw it!), I was watching ‘Paris, Texas’ so that was weird. Suddenly seeing it being mentioned in your post too.
    And how was your weekend, Dennis? I hope you also had an inspired and great time!! I’m excited to hear about every single thing you deem worthy of sharing!

    P.S.: huge congratulations on the London screening!!!

  7. _Black_Acrylic

    Whatever abhorrent views Ms Volkova may have had re her son’s private life, I still say t.A.T.u. made some great pop music and that’s really what counts.

    Today I’d been hoping to get the writing started but find that it’s difficult to come back to after such a long break. Researching zines looking for submissions has drawn a blank, maybe because it’s summer? Dunno but I should just get the words down, it’s a confidence thing for sure.

  8. Misanthrope

    Dennis, Yes, the big scary C! I don’t know, it’s probably in the backs of all people’s minds once they hit a certain age anyway. I’m with you on the mesh thing; that’s my theory too. We’ll see. Luckily, Nurse Ratched didn’t draw my blood this time. Last time, the woman went into some weird part of my arm and had to move it all around. Stung like fuck and left me with a bruise for 2 and a half weeks. This time, it was a piece of cake, as usual. Just a pinprick that I didn’t feel at all.

    I guess the results will be back in a couple weeks.

    London is totally booked, and the train to and from NYC is booked. Now for the hotel in NYC. Good times to ensue.

    I’m supposed to take the kids to London next year. Hell, I’m thinking about just doing Paris instead. Or maybe both. We’ll see.

    Oh, I like milk and dark chocolate. Finding some good dark chocolate is the key. I do prefer the milk version, though, especially if it’s really smooth and light. I still remember the chocolates in Paris when my niece and I were there. She still talks about them too. Ace stuff, my man.

    We feasted on that birthday cake all weekend. Six of us ate off that fucker for 3 days. It was an 8-inch three-layer cake. Really good shit.

    I remember some of these hoaxes when they happened. Man, I loved Tatu or whatever they were called at the time. And then the weird anti-gay comments ruined it all. Ugh.

    The UFO ones are intriguing. I told you about the fighter jets chasing the blue object over my house one night. I believe I even linked to an article in the Washington Post at the time. My mom ran outside and saw them, as the rest of us somehow slept through it. We’re about 15 miles from Joint Base Andrews. Sent those F-16s up and the fuckers couldn’t keep up with it. The next day, they admitted they’d sent up planes but found/saw nothing. They even lied about that: they sent up four planes and not the two they admitted to.

    It was probably a training exercise of some kind. But my mom said it was freaky as shit.

    As you know, we’re not conspiracy theorists, but that was some off the hook shit.

  9. Steve Erickson

    I’ve discovered the amazing genre of “priest reaction” videos on YouTube. Ever wondered what the clergy would make of Ariana Grande’s “God Is A Woman” music videos, various hip-hop songs about controversial subjects, the trailer for Star Wars: THE LAST JEDI or a comedy prank video where someone dresses up as a priest to buy condoms (in Spanish)? If I can ever read the comments on your blog dependably again (I can’t read a thing today), this would make a great Day!

  10. Bill

    Geez, Junko Junsui isn’t that different from what’s been going on, eh?

    I appreciate the anticipation, Dennis. But I can’t promise anything until I figure out the vocals. I’m trying not to take the easy way out, at least for now.

    Been listening to the new Henry Threadgill, Dirt… and more Dirt. I don’t think he’s made an uninteresting record in years.

    Bill

  11. David Ehrenstein

    You Forgot Laur Albert!

    Alex Rodgers has lost all his propaganda platforms because of his “Sandy Hook Hoax” The families (one of whoma has had to move 7 times) are suing him for his last dime. .

  12. Shane Christmass

    One other interesting thing about the Solway Girth Spaceman is that Henderson then stated that he was visited by the Men In Black:

    “Templeton said that after the photograph was published he was visited by two men who said they were from the government who refused to show their identification and that “They said they worked for the government and that they were only identified by number.”[6] After taking the men to the site where the photos were taken, Templeton said that when he explained he had not seen the figure at the time, the men became angry and drove away, leaving him to walk home.[1] In September 1964, Templeton dismissed the two men as frauds, saying: “It all looks like a leg pull to me. I’m sure the men were not security agents.””

    I have a two hour commute to work everyday which is great for writing but also sometimes podcasts. I listened to a terribly voiced but fascinating podcast on this spaceman recently.

    Here’s an equally pulpy article on Solway and the MIB.

    http://spacemancentral.com/solway-firth-spaceman-resources/the-men-in-black-visit-jim-templeton/

  13. JM

    grandrieux is good but once u see two u’ve seen it all. one is not enough. this is not the hoax post i was expectingg from the hoax title and in that way the hoax is the post istelf yum yum. a bit sick a bit headachey a bit sad. he accepted the name safe word. we’re pretty in tune nice. the new gaspar noe looks good. saw ceylans wild pear tree which is like a dennis cooper book gone wrong.

    ascetic art is my vibes at the mo & im reading joseph mcelroy;s actress in the hosue which is a strange and rippling text

    hope the health tendrils extend into and thru

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