* (Halloween countdown post #3; restored)
In 1897, the French playwright Oscar Metenier, bought a theater at the end of the impasse Chaptal, a cul-de-sac in Paris’ Pigalle district, in which to produce his controversial naturalist plays. The smallest theater in Paris, it was also the most atypical. Two large angels hung above the orchestra and the theater’s neogothic wood paneling; and the boxes, with their iron railings, looked like confessionals (the building had, in fact, once been a chapel). Metenier was himself a frequent target of censorship for having the audacity to depict a milieu which had never before appeared on stage — that of vagrants, street kids, prostitutes, criminals, and “apaches,” as street loafers and con artists were called at the time — and moreover for allowing those characters to express themselves in their own language. One of the Grand-Guignol’s first plays, Metenier’s Mademoiselle Fifi, which was temporarily shut down by police censors, presented the first prostitute on stage; his subsequent play, Lui!, united a whore and a criminal in the enclosed space of a hotel room.
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‘Gianni Proia’s ‘shock-umentary’ ECCO contains this short scene, which the filmmaker claims is of the final performance at the Grand Guignol Theatre. Whether this is true or not is unclear, as much of the other ‘reality’ footage in the film appears to be either staged or grossly misrepresented. The footage does show actors from the Grand Guignol performing a scene for the cameras as well as some brief interior shots of the theatre itself.’
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Metenier was succeeded as director in 1898 by Max Maurey, who, from 1898 to 1914, turned the Theatre du Grand-Guignol into a house of horror. He measured the success of a play by the number of people who fainted during its performance, and, to attract publicity, hired a house doctor to treat the more fainthearted spectators. It was also Maurey who discovered the novelist and playwright Andre de Lorde–“the Prince of Terror.” Under the influence of de Lorde (who collaborated on several plays with his therapist, the experimental psychologist Alfred Binet), insanity became the Grand-Guignolesque theme par excellence. At a time when insanity was just beginning to be scientifically studied, the Grand-Guignol repertoire explored countless manias and ‘special tastes’: L’Homme de la Nuit (The Man of the Night) presented a necrophiliac. L’Horrible Passion (The Horrible Passion) depicted a young nanny who strangled the children in her care. (Like Metenier, de Lorde was often a target of censorship, particularly in England where two of his plays were canceled by the Lord Chamberlain’s censors.
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This is an excellent site about Le Grand Guignol that unfortunately presents itself in French language only. However, there are videos showing historically accurate recreations of two Grand Guignol plays, Le Baiser Dans La Nuit and Le Faiseur De Monstres, which you can find by entering the site then clicking on the link titled Pieces.
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Fear of ‘the other’ appeared at the Grand-Guignol in countless variations: fear of the proletariat, fear of the unknown, fear of the foreign, fear of contagion (for all the blood spilled, sperm ejaculated, and sweat dripped there, the Grand-Guignol had to feel some degree of nostalgia for cleanliness). The heroes of Gardiens de phare (Lighthouse Keepers) and Le Beau Regiment (The Handsome Regiment) had rabies. Leprosy decimated the passengers of Le Navire aveugle (The Blind Ship), and the servants in L’Auberge rouge (The Red Inn) fell prey to a mysterious malady. In several plays, among them La Fosse aux filles (The Girls’ Den), a brothel visitor was exposed to syphilis. But what carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness, loss of control, panic: themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify. When the Grand-Guignol’s playwrights expressed an interest in the guillotine, what fascinated them most were the last convulsions played out on the decapitated face. What if the head continued to think without the body? The passage from one state to another was the crux of the genre.
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The Tragedies’ Theatre is small American theater company that stages the original Grand Guignol plays in English with period costumes, makeup, and props. There’s more than a bit of irksome American style staginess and corniness about their versions, but the qualities of the original plays can be discerned. Here’s their version of the play Chop Chop.
The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – Final Kiss
The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – Laboratory of Hallucinations
The Tragedies’ Theatre du Grand Guignol – CADAVRES EXQUIS
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Under the direction of Camille Choisy, who directed the theater from 1914 to 1930, staging overtook text. Once he even bought a fully equipped operating room as a pretext for a new play. In 1917, he hired the actress Paula Maxa, who soon became known as “the Sarah Bernhardt of the impasse Chaptal.” During her career at the Grand-Guignol, Maxa, “the most assassinated woman in the world,” was subjected to a range of tortures unique in theatrical history: she was shot with a rifle and with a revolver, scalped, strangled, disemboweled, raped, guillotined, hanged, quartered, burned, cut apart with surgical tools and lancets, cut into eighty-three pieces by an invisible Spanish dagger, stung by a scorpion, poisoned with arsenic, devoured by a puma, strangled by a pearl necklace, and whipped; she was also put to sleep by a bouquet of roses, kissed by a leper, and subjected to a very unusual metamorphosis, which was described by one theater critic: “Two hundred nights in a row, she simply decomposed on stage in front of an audience which wouldn’t have exchanged its seats for all the gold in the Americas. The operation lasted a good two minutes during which the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”
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‘At one performance, six people passed out when an actress, whose eyeball was just gouged out, re-entered the stage, revealing a gooey, blood-encrusted hole in her skull. Backstage, the actors themselves calculated their success according to the evening’s faintings. During one play that ended with a realistic blood transfusion, a record was set: fifteen playgoers had lost consciousness. Between sketches, the cobble-stoned alley outside the theatre was frequented by hyperventilating couples and vomiting individuals.’ — Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: theatre of fear and terror.
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If the Grand-Guignol was a popular theater in both meanings of the word — it was frequented by neighborhood locals as well as the higher-brow audience of the Comedie Francaise — it was not a public affair. Going to the Grand-Guignol was less a social act than a private one and certain audience members preferred not to be seen. Some witnesses reported that the iron-grilled boxes in the back of the theater encouraged a certain ‘extremism.’ The cleaning staff would often find the seats stained. With the arrival of Jack Jouvin, who directed the theater from 1930 to 1937, the repertoire shifted from gore to psychological drama. Wanting to have complete control over the theater, Jouvin ousted Maxa, who, in his opinion, was stealing the spotlight. Jouvin’s lack of talent and his personal ambition triggered the eventual downfall of the Grand-Guignol. Birth, evolution, death: the genre sowed the seed of its own decline when it began to parody itself. The abundance of terrifying elements in the later plays became so overwhelming that they were no longer believable.
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Further resources: Grand Guignol Online — Le Grand Guignol at Dark Echo — Phantasmic Attractions — The Grotesque in Theater — Le Grand Guignol at Thrill Peddlars — Librairie Grand Guignol (in French) — Fall and Rise: The Grand Guignol
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By the Second World War, the theater was beginning to vacillate, carried away by its own excess. The war dealt it its final death blow. Reality overtook fiction, and attendance at post-war performances dwindled. In the spring of 1958, Anais Nin commented on its decline in her diary: “I surrendered myself to the Grand-Guignol, to its venerable filth which used to cause such shivers of horror, which used to petrify us with terror. All our nightmares of sadism and perversion were played out on that stage. . . . The theater was empty.” In an interview conducted immediately after the Grand-Guignol closed in 1962, Charles Nonon, its last director, explained: “We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things — and worse — are possible.”
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p.s. RIP Ken Jacobs ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, it went really well in Baltimore. Same thing here: Xmas in early October?! Love peering at you blearily through dense jetlag, G. ** jay, Hey, jay!! Always happy to surprise and even startle. Congrats on divising an un-‘bad’ feast. I guess it’s digested into ever fainter memory by now. Thanks, yeah, good trip but very burnt until I get some decent sleep, but good burnt. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Hope you got home as safely as I did. The ‘Hellraisers’ are a matter of ever diminishing returns unless maybe you smoke a lot of weed. The MIX rejection was a surprise, but we seem to have gotten something else and better for NYC now, we’ll see. ** Misanthrope, Dude, good to see you and Alex and Little Show even briefly. I hope it was worth the drive. ** Jack Skelley, Hm, okay, I’ll give Ty Segal some quality time then. Hazy salute. ** julian, Hi, j. Personally I think ‘Books of Bloods’ are far, far and away his best fiction. I’m not even sure you need to go further. Long ago I asked John Ashbery to sign a book, and he crossed out his printed name, and I thought that was cool in a personalizing way or something, and I just started doing it. Baltimore went well, and I liked the city quite a bit. It looks really good and it feels a good kind of comfortable. Best to you. ** Dev, Happy October to you! Sure, yes, please about the guest-post, but you really don’t need to pitch it unless you want to. If there’s any kind of post you want to make, I’m automatically interested. Thanks a bunch. Baltimore was very cool. ** Carsten, Hi. Baltimore went very well. I’m still in a jetlag cloud, but I’ll check my email for the author’s hopeful response once I’m awoken. Congrats on the poem pub. I’ll be there as soon as I’m worthy of it. Everyone, Carsten’s poem “Hunter’s Curse & Cure” just came out on the Dewdrop here. ** Måns BT, Hey, Måns! I’ve never played ‘Disco Elysium’, no, and maybe I do remember you recc’ing it. It might have been in my long no-gaming phase. Anyway, I’ll seek it. Thanks, pal. I know I keep saying this, but Stockholm film folks are top of my agenda, and now I won’t be traveling for a while, so I predict I will write to them on my hands and knees any second. Watch. xo, me ** Steeqhen, Hey. I can only recommend ‘Books of Blood’, but I’m not a horror-fantasy book reader, so, while the others weren’t for me, I don’t know. Shoot high as a writer, always, but stay logical about how hierarchies work. ** Mark Stephens, It’s weird and sad that we’re not doing an LA Halloween, and weird and not sad that we’re doing a Xmas-adjacent LA, but hey! Love, me. ** ellie, Yes, of course! ** Stil, The flight I had on Icelandic Airlines had a new level of bad entertainment choices, and you wouldn’t believe what I made my eyes absorb. Great about the film openness situation. Have you started on it? ** Pete, Hi, Pete. It’s so nice to meet you, and thank you so much for the great words about my work. What do you do or make and want to make and etc.? I’d be interested to know. Warmest greetings from over here. ** Nicholas., Hi, man. Uh, we’re deep into fall here, as far as I can tell. (I just got back to Paris, and I’m barely awake). Museums, sure, I mean depending on the aim, but, generally, sure. Tired: me too, like, so tired. ** Uday, Me neither until I made the post. And I haven’t watched it. A Mirbeau book, okay, that’s appealing in theory, but I’ll skip it anyway, thank you. ** PL, I had a good time, but I’m so jetlagged I can’t tell if I’m better yet, haha. ** _Black_Acrylic, Haha, I think I remember ‘Nightbreed’ being sufficiently fun, but don’t hold me to it. ** James Champagne, Hi, James. I’ve read almost nothing of his post-heyday, the ‘Weaveworld’ era, etc. He was really fun to interview, very cool guy. ** Uday, I hang my head in shame. I don’t even remember what that film is, but I am barely brain-functioning this morning if that isn’t obvious. Well, you got a good story. ** Laurenz, Hi, Laurenz. Thank you for coming in. Oh, sorry, I’ll go find your email. I can be really bad at email and miss things constantly. I’m very jet lagged this morning, so I won’t subject your email to my brain today, but I’ll find it and get it ready for my mental return. ** Jack, Hi, Jack. Well, I think we’ve just set up a NYC screening for ‘RT’, and I can’t be specific yet other than to say it’ll happen in December. Thanks for asking. ** darbz 🐻, I’m so happy my blog hit the bullseye with your love. I met Clive Barker in the early 00’s and interviewed him. He was very cool. I put the Instagram stories up, but rarely, and usually they’re shared like that one, I didn’t know there was music on that. How strange. Trip was good. Uh, I ate vegan Mexican food and an omelet and macaroni and cheese that made my stomach upset. How do the locks look? Any news from the Halloween job? And thank you for the playlist! I have to wake up more, but I’ll be all over it. xoxo. ** Steve, Hi. Barker’s a gentleman, even though I don’t think he wants to be. No, unfortunately John Waters was away on tour, so I didn’t get to see him. It went very well. Everyone, New episode of Steve’s mighty music podcast is up and ‘this is the most packed one yet, with 33 songs (10 of them being hip-hop). I also played DL Jeff Jackson’s band Julian Calendar’s cover of Green Day’s “longview”’. Here. ** Midnight Matt, Hi! It was really nice getting to meet you and talk to you a bit. Thank you for shlepping all those books to the theater. I really regret that we had to split before the Stevie, Eileen, Derek shebang. Glad and not surprised it was stellar. Good to see you! ** Billfold Cunninghamster, I haven’t seen it, but I so hear you. ** HaRpEr//, Baltimore went great, but I am very zonked out with jet lag so far. Alas. Just in the last several days, Geese seem to have gone totally viral. They’re everywhere. They’re like the thinking person’s Turnstile or something. If you read him, seriously, read ‘Books of Blood’. I wouldn’t start anywhere else. ** nat, I honestly will be a lot better in conversation after I get some actual sleep. ‘Hellraiser’ is fun and cool enough to try to induce amnesia about the Pinhead/hip stuff and buckle down with it, I think. ** Allright. Apologies for all my haziness up above. Halloween continues with a restored look at Grand Guignol. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Big D! It was. We all thoroughly enjoyed RT. It’s your best film yet and I don’t say that flippantly.
Yeah, Little Show was in a mood, hahaha, and I had to get him out of there. Plus, you had a lot of fans who wanted to meet you, and I wasn’t about to get in the way of that for them.
NYC in December? Okay. 99% sure I’ll be there. Kayla wants to come along too, along with her boyfriend. Great excuse for us to get up there, though we’ve been planning to anyway. This time, though, it won’t be briefly. I want to say hey but not just in passing.
It’ll be a fun time.
Oh, and yes, great to see you and the full house for the film. You and Zac deserve it.
Hi!!
Welcome back – and with another Halloween post! Definitely my kind of theater.
It’s so good to hear “Room Temperature” is successful wherever it goes! What’s the next step – the German festival at the end of October?
Love curing your jet lag immediately – as he always wants to do, Od.
I remember in 90s UK the House of Horrors here was 25 Cromwell Street where Fred and Rose West committed their many atrocities. Every morning we would turn up at the newsagents as we waited for our school bus and see the latest headlines detailing the police findings. Gordon Burn – Happy Like Murderers would be the essential document of those crimes. Worth pointing out that Fred and Rose never had the glamour of certain other British serial killers.
RIP Ken Jacobs. Another giant left us.
Glad to hear that both trip & screening went well. I hope you beat that nasty jet lag quickly.
No sweat re. your BlazeVox author friend’s response. I know you’re beat & this is far from urgent.
Thanks for giving my poem the public shout-out. The Dewdrop was kind enough to link to my blog, which has seen an uptick in traffic since the publication. The next poem comes out on Cathexis Northwest Press November 1st, so things are rocking, though no takers for the chapbook yet.
Saw “One Battle After Another” yesterday & while I enjoyed it, have to say I found it quite overrated. Kept waiting to be wowed, but remained merely entertained. That’s the problem with critics going batshit overboard with their praises. The performances are great (some of Leo’s best work I think, he’s terrific when funny), but overall I’d say it’s just more artful than average, that’s it. The timeliness of the subject matter is probably what grabbed so many people, but I for one found the film not very incisive about the political material it uses as plot fodder. Brief political aside: saddest of all—to me—is that the right-wing maniacs depicted in it are hardly fictional & yet the leftie revolutionaries are. The film makes one yearn for a vital resistance in the real world.
Hey Dennis,
Never heard of the Grand Guignol, but I feel like I’ve been missing it my whole life!! Totally up my alley, a shame I won’t ever get to truly experience it. I’ll keep it in mind though to see a recreation somewhere if one ever appears near me (wherever I am in the world, as this would be way too obscene for Ireland!)
I find that I tend not to be much of a horror reader myself, though I’ve dabbled in a few of the King novels and enjoyed what I’ve read; I find that horror stories tends to scare me more than anything else, mostly because my imagination is so strong. My main form of horror literature is actually youtube videos reading out 4chan posts or reddit tales, or the SCP stuff (which has basically replaced the entire genre of creepypastas, my go-to in the early 2010s). I’ll give Books of Blood a go soon, to fit the season.
The pitch wasn’t accepted which is a shame, though I think I may just write about it anyway because i’m just so into cults at the moment. I originally wanted to get into cults and the relationship with music (in creating music, inspiring music, and the overlaps of cult leaders and popstars), though that would have focused a lot on the 80s and 90s of the Branch Davidians and The Family International, and a bit with Heaven’s Gate and Lil Uzi Vert. I’m trying to write a little every day, and focusing less on making sure it’s presentable and instead just a hobby that may be put out, as my brain has been conditioned from the past year of essays, exams, dissertation and magazine running to write things quick and make them work, instead of just having fun or letting myself enjoy it.
In other news, life has been tough but mostly because of how terrible everything seems to be in the world, and how it doesn’t look like it’ll ever get better or easier for a while. In my head I’m wishing for things to be easy like they once were, but I know that most of that is really me wishing to be young and innocent, and not an adult trying to start living. And really things were never simple or ‘good’, that the past century of western life is more just a moment in time and not the way life has always been or should be. I forget that Spain was in a fascist dictatorship until 1975, or even how Ireland is not even truly 100 years old, in the way of being a distinctly independent country. Or how Germany was once two separate countries or most of Eastern Europe was one large country…
Things are always changing and things get bad and people go on. And I can’t just sit in my room, frozen in place over the weight of it all.
I hope your jet lag vanishes quickly!
I’m happy that one of my cousins is coming to New York in the middle of this month. We’ll be meeting for Mexican food. I haven’t seen her in person since I was a teenager and I’ve never met her husband, so I’m really looking forward to catching up.
I heard a very unusual album yesterday, Romeo Poirier’s OFF THE RECORD. It’s composed from samples of recording studio chatter and noise, originally never intended for public consumption. I don’t know how much it’ll hold up on repeated listens, but it’s a must for my next “Radio Not Radio” show.
I saw Luca Guadagnino’s AFTER THE HUNT yesterday, which proved to be one of the year’s worst films – just a horrible script and bad decisions all around, though Julia Robert’s performance is very good. Since Amazon produced it, it feels like Bezos’ reactionary psyop against feminism and “wokeness,” at the risk of turning into a conspiracy theorist. I’m catching the new Kelly Reichardt film tonight.
Glad to hear the screening in Baltimore went well! I have an exam in a couple days so I’ll get back to you about the guest post after that’s over. Thanks so much!
There’s a fun Grand Guignol-themed album by the French avant garde metal band Pensées Nocturnes called Grand Guignol Orchestra. Didn’t know there was an American theatre company reviving their plays! Pretty cool.
Hey Dennis.
Sorry to hear that you won’t be able to have Halloween in LA 🙁 Promoting your movie sounds quite gruelling, so I hope you feel better after all that jet lag and whatnot. I once pitched the idea of doing a grand guignol play at my high school, but that got shut down. A shame, since every production always looked like a ton of fun.
The Nobel Prize is gonna be announced tomorrow, and my mum was asking about it. I said I didn’t really care, but I would be very happy if Krasznahorkai or Pynchon wins. I remember Garielle Lutz was once in the running, and it would please me immensely if she won. But otherwise I think I’ll be nonplussed. I’ve been enjoying the new Pynchon for what that’s worth. Is “Bleeding Edge” worth checking out? It seems like Pynchon is having another big moment with the new film and everything, so I’ve just been immersing myself again. But I’m always reading a ton of books at the same time, so…
Whatever. Anyway, I hope to see you in Ghent! I would love to see the film. In the meantime, my life has been a mess of fuck ups, but has also been weirdly kind in letting me write. I got in contact with an old friend after two years and found out that not only had she been sex trafficked, but that she had also had a stroke. So I’ve been doing my best to help out, but life is always kinda hard. I dunno…
Lots of hugs to you and Zac
Hey! I’ll have to do some research on the Grand Guignol. Ive been so close to finishing my book these last months and the last part of the book is very difficult to write/ and decode (despite the fact that im the one who’s writing it) it becomes this transformative experience which in ways breaks all the boundaries and traits of the main character set up in the first part of the book. I suppose some form of “cognitive dissonance” for the character, which does eventually break him in the end of the book. OR rather he’s submitting to the infection that plagues his adolescent years in hopes it will debride his corrupted body. Sometimes I worry I have no idea what im writing about when the chapter says something that seemingly conflicts the point of his character philosophy….but I think that the point. I never know what im doing sometimes, and I think I resemble the character in many ways so if I confuse people who read it..oh well. Im rambling well anyways this specific part his boyfriends a aspiring undiscovered artist who serendipitously meets this nymphomaniac artist/son of a wealthy art collector and together they plan to destruct the body of our main character through “performance” and dissected photography of his body, one of the pieces they perform in Germany, before a paying crowd of artistic degenerates is a piece called “Tiger” where James desires to recreate the painful wounds of the dog attack that the book starts out with in the introduction. Basically the artist/his partner drugs him to the point he cant feel pain(which he already has a high tolerance to pain) they give him coagulants and start “dissecting him” in a way that resembles the pain inflicted by a dog.
Anyways that long sentence to say there may be inspiration to take from “the most assassinated woman in the world” and the line ” the young woman transformed little by little into an abominable corpse.”
Oh guess what I did get a call back from the halloween store and tomorrow ill be doing an interview yay! Tomorrow there is also this zine club at this cafe and some people I mildly know will be there and I think I want to go after the interview but just imagining all the stress and overstimulation of planning two different “outings” is making me very anxious…but I think I might go as there is nothing the body cant do if it wants it and ill just pretend its a double score or something so I dont give myself a panic attack thinking about transportation and mental; fatigue.
Did you get to listen to that playlist? Its fine if not. My locks look epic.
https://i.etsystatic.com/14247125/r/il/d70938/6249721979/il_fullxfull.6249721979_pahq.jpg
they look like this .
Have a good day!
not A dog. THE dog.
also on the topic of Clive Barker, alot of his early theater work does have a lot of that mutilated body art to it which I’d go more into detail about if I hadn’t already ran so verbose already
Hey Dennis, any way I could send you a PDF galley of my novel: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1648211496?&tag=skyhorsepub-20. Hope you hoppin around ready for the horrors
Hey, Dennis!
It was great meeting you at New/Next! Images from Room Temperature are still living in my mind, and helping pull me through this week before I get swamped by a reading tomorrow and a music fest on the weekend.
Funny to see this post about Grand Guignol, knowing that someone at the Q&A mentioned it. I was always aware of its existence, but never dove deep enough to see what it was all about. Safe to say I’m hooked. There used to be a community theater in Baltimore called Yellow Sign just across the street from the Charles that specialized in GG-style pieces, and now I’m starting to mourn it.
Hope your trip back was safe, and your jetlag cloud dissipates soon!
Glad everything went well in Baltimore, Dennis! The Grand Guignol was a complete revelation to me, and it was such a pleasure to read about it before work this morning. Sad, but sobering, to read about how they fell off post-war because they couldn’t be more horrifying than reality.
I’m curious, have you had a chance to see One Battle After Another? I……didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t respond to it the way everyone else is seeming to. Would be curious to hear your thoughts when you have a chance.
I was in Minneapolis last weekend to see my friend Riki perform; she has a couple of albums out that are great 80’s throwback synthpop if you’re into that. She was opening for a Chicago post-punk band called French Police who were quite good. I also had a chance to see an LA band called Patriarchy on Saturday; they have an excellent new album called Manual For Dying that puts me in mind of your work (most of their music does).
Best!
Grand Guignol, cool. I love this sort of thing. I still randomly think and daydream about the post you did about Cabaret de L’Enfer quite a lot for some reason.
Yesterday I posted a couple of times by accident because my phone which I normally comment from broke and until it arrives (tomorrow hopefully), I’m commenting from my laptop which doesn’t show when I comment or let me use the name I normally use. It’s been very refreshing to go without a phone. It froze and refused to co-operate right after I was coincidentally thinking about how doomscrolling is rotting my brain, so I think it might have been some sort of divine message.
Yeah, Geese are everywhere. Same with Frost Children, they’re viral. I may seem to be some idiot jumping the gun but I do think that Cameron Winter is the best lyricist I’ve heard in a while, and such a charismatic presence. So I hope Geese get everything they want in the long run. When I heard his solo album for the first time I didn’t know how the whole world wasn’t listening to it. I think there are some people who have a very intriguing kind of charisma that manages to have a peculiarly broad appeal, seemingly against the odds, and what makes their work challenging or interesting may in a rare case be so compelling that it cuts through.
Aw damn, sorry about not being in LA for Halloween, but halloween is in the heart of course. If it makes you feel any better I’m probably going to have the worst halloween in years.
Dennis!! Powerhouse of a post today. Such a big fan of Grand Guignol that it even allowed me to enjoy Baby Jane. Urgh. I know. And of course Guignol, the puppet, returns in my mind to you and the irreplaceable Giselle Vienne. Weird, weird feeling today. Some sort of premonition of my descent into junkiehood, a habit I have not yet started, nor have any plans to start. I do not believe in either the predictive or prescriptive power of premonitions, so at least that’s a relief. In my vision I go through life backwards and have everything that’s happened to me happen again but on dope. Odd.