(Remember Harry Nilsson)
(Who is Harry Nilsson and Why is Everybody Talking About Him)
(Skidoo) Watch on youtube
(Marianne Faithful “Don’t Forget Me”)
*
p.s. Hey. Today your guest-host Mr. Ehrenstein takes it very easy on you guys with this minimalist paean to the great Harry Nilsson. Please share your Nilsson-related thoughts with the man in charge. Thanks! And thank you for the sweet breather, David. ** David, Hi. I didn’t like it at all. I’m not that kind of fella. I know Franko B. I met him once, and he gave me a drawing of a horse. Sounds like he liked you better. Oh, you had me all curious about Duffries Farmer, but okay. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ouch! Curious about your neck. I wonder why it in particular is so resistant to the vax? Or is your neck always kind of sensitive? I haven’t read the Nilsen bio, but I saw a documentary on him that makes a lot of use of him reading from it aloud as the documentary’s voiceover. Have you seen that? It’s called ‘Memories of a Murderer: The Nilsen Tapes’. Ah, you chose the Lynch head. Nice. Elijah Wood’s head? Goodness gracious! There was a time back in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ days when I could have made a pretty penny auctioning it on eBay, but I’ll figure out something to do with it. If nothing else it will make a nice prop in Zac’s and my haunted house movie, although Zac and I are against cameo appearances, so we’ll have to put some prosthetics on it or something. We did that in ‘Permanent Green Light’ because at one point Leon’s Friend is carrying a severed head/mask around, and it was very visibly a Rob Zombie mask, and we had to fuck it up to disguise that. Love finding an old cassette player in the trash and noticing that the cassette inside has the words ‘For God’s sake, don’t listen to this tape whatever you do!’ scrawled on it and pressing Play, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you again ‘in person’ for the Nilsson fest! ** cal, Agreed, coolness! ** Misanthrope, If you mean real decapitation videos, no, I do not want to watch them, but thank you the horrible suggestion. I’m sure you’ve tried waking David up by telling him how boring he is. What has happened with that project where the guy in …Germany (?) was going to illustrate your novel? ** T, ‘Fresh neck’, wow, nice. Those Japanese, man, they’ve got to going on linguistically. Ultraman seems to have saved yesterday’s post with the same seeming ease that he saves the world. What a guy. Why does the UK think yesterday is the most depressing day of the year? Interesting. I wonder if France has a most depressing day designation? I’ll ask my French friends. You played guitar! You play guitar? What did you play? Either song title or genre identification would be sufficient. How great would life be if one had an effects pedal for one’s thoughts. Can you imagine? Thank you, obviously. I hope your day includes an A&R guy from Universal Music knocking own your door and saying, ‘I happened to be walking by your building the other day when you were cranking it on your guitar, and here’s a multi-year, multi-million dollar recording contract for you to sign. Oh, and I spoke with Jimi Hendrix in a seance this morning, and he sends his respects.’ xo. ** _Black_Acrylic, You’re right, and I’ve never read that book, and now I’m going to. Henry Moore! When I was young he was such a big name and deal, and now I almost never hear anyone talk about him. It’s strange, the whims of time. Well, the only show on CNN International that I make a point to watch is ‘Reliable Sources’ about how the media covers news, and I was watching it, and then I just left the TV on, and the next show was a sports show and they not only announced Leeds’ victory they even showed some game footage, so how about that, eh? ** Bill, Mm, good question. I think it was just art, but it certainly would be an excellent cookies receptacle. I think you’re right about that ‘Prometheus’ thing, and I’m guessing it was probably in the form of a gif. Safe bet. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. I too was surprised yet not to find more than one Mishima head artwork in my search. Well, plot is a pretty powerful device. I just like it better when it’s not given paramount importance, I guess. ‘The Ring Cycle’ was pretty great to see in the flesh, and very, very, very long. I like Sirk. He’s awfully good at what he does. Weird that I haven’t done a Sirk Day here, or maybe I did? I’ll find out. That Sontag quote is fascinating and very thought-producing, and it does sound both like a stretch and strangely plausible at the same time. Huh. Good, let’s use today as a place to pan for gold, and we can pool our respective booty and save the world or something. Ready, set, … go! ** Right. Please dwell in David’s choice Nilsson samples, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
*
Thanks David Ehrenstein cool vids… hope you had a good new-year pal…
Cheers Dennis… I was friends with Franko in the 90s for several years… I first heard of him in 1994… this woman Suzie Krueger was in the place I worked and told me he had a picture of me on his wall from a porn mag… she said I has a nice dick… it wasn’t until years later 1998 that we became friends for a couple of years… funny in 2002 I was working in a theatre… and Robert Englund came in who played Freddy in ‘a nightmare on Elm Street’…. I think Suzie may have taken his name she had a reputation and all… I liked her…. I had that film when I was a boy I stole it from the place I did a paper round.. so reimagining Freddy coming into the theatre and telling me the same all those years later might have been fun…. or maybe whilst I was delivering newspapers…. ha!! “……My friendz gotta picture of you on his wall! Wanna come see?”
I went to an exhibition of Franko’s this time in London… with my pal Tony… franko wasn’t there…. it was of collages on doors etc…. I spotted a porn picture of me… a stephoscope was strategically nailed just above… the ‘drum’ bit was dangling infront of my head/face… so I tucked it in the back of the picture… unsure if he spotted that….
he once got me to piss in a bottle for him at his studio… not sure what became of that…
X
Merci Beaucoup, Dennis! As y’all will doutless notice this salute to the great Harry Nilsson frequentlycrosses paths with the great Van Dyke Pakrs — with whom Bill and I are in intermittent contact here in L.A.
For behid-the-scenes infor on “Skidoo” (le pleus maudits des “filmsmaudit”0 be sure to get yourself a copy of Bill Teed’smemoir “Early Plastic” (its on Amazon) Bill was crashing in John Phillip Law’s basement up on Miller Driver during production and has some lively stories.
Hi!!
My neck and shoulders are always pretty tense. I guess I carry around most of my general anxiety there, and the vax somehow tenses my muscles even further. Or that’s how it feels. But I think it’s getting better now.
I haven’t seen the Nilsen documentary! But now I will. Thank you for the tip! I only saw the mini series that came out a couple of years ago, starring David Tennant, and I think it was pretty good too.
Haha, I’m sorry my love picked such a tough severed head to make good use of. He put some effort into finding a relatively unlikeable one, I have to admit. But maybe it’ll be a worthy partner to your now-unrecognizable Rob Zombie mask!
I would’ve been very disappointed with love if he hadn’t pressed Play. I hope he’s still alive. And… not completely out of his mind either, after what he heard. Thank you! Love looking for a artist guy to draw him to the point he cant be no more, Od. (Yeah, I needed to go back for this to the latest escort post. It was too good to just leave there.)
@ David, thank you for this fun size selection! Always nice to see Marianne here, I’m a definite fan.
MARIANNE IS A GODDESS!!!!
Hey Dennis! This is probably betraying my age here, but I had never heard of Harry Nilsson before today! I really like the places he pushes his voice in ‘Remember’… I’ll have to check out the films in the next few days. Thank you to the esteemed Mr Ehrenstein for making this a notable day in mine and HN’s twin histories. I looked into that ‘most depressing day’ thing and it seems to have originated in some marketing guy trying to come up with a ‘Blue’ January equivalent to Black Friday etc, failing but the concept still sticking. Continuing the music theme, I *kind of* play guitar! I did a fair bit in my teens and then stopped completely for a few years up until now because I was moving so much and it was too much hassle to cart it around. I’ve taken it back from my parents house because after focusing pretty solely on laptop music in the interim I’ve got interested in doing song-style stuff again and I get fed up of staring at my laptop all day long. Yesterday I was mainly just banging out harmony ideas and warbling along, but the one song I played was ‘Powderfinger’ by Neil Young, who I don’t really know anything about apart from my dad being a big fan of his, but it has the rare honour of being the first song I ever ever learnt, and having just retuned all the strings atypically, I re-employed it to see if I could relocate the basic chords or not. Re the effects pedal for your thoughts thing, I’m really really into this. Maybe if it was on your thoughts full-time it’d make you kinda seasick, but with writing and all different ways you could conceive of the ‘signal’ of a text, and modulate the lexis, semantics, phonology or whatever the same way a guitar pedal would. I’m trying to program my own digital versions of guitar effects on mu laptop to save money and I keep thinking how if I was able to hook it up to like a natural language processor and try to simulate the processes you’d get some crazy effects. That said, I’m currently an immense way off from that in programming ability, but like even trying to work out how a textual signal could be split and looped and multiplied etc is keeping my brain occupied for the meantime. But anyway, thanks for your day wish!!!!! That is some hell of a lofty wish, so I’m not sure my Wednesday quite ascended to that height, but hey it was pretty decent all the same. I started teaching a Japanese class at my school to the kids there which is pretty fun. I’m trying to apply for French nationality right now so I was also down the town hall to hand in my dossier, and even though I was braced for the full horrors of French bureaucracy cos my “claim” or whatever is pretty tenuous, it was actually painless and things look pretty promising. What went down with you in Paris? Wishing you a Wednesday that adds a mystery red button to every pair of your shoes that just reads ‘TAP DANCE: ON-OFF’, xT
Sirk Day would be a great idea.
The second film I downloaded from worldscinema.org was Radu Jude’s short PLASTIC SEMIOTIC, in which he arranged dolls and other toys to act out increasingly more explicit and darker scenarios. There’s something a bit adolescent about it – wow, children’s toys can be used to stage scenes of sex and violence! – but I have to like a film that shows Pinnochio eating the ass of a male soldier.
Following the Dennis Nilsen mini-series, the BBC have just aired FOUR LIVES, about the murders of gay men by Stephen Port and the police’s misbehavior and homophobia in the case. I’ve been waiting for it to turn up in the usual places.
I’d LOVE a Sirk Day !