‘When I walked down the stairs to the Segal Centre’s CinemaSpace in Montreal on May 18, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. That night, rough sexual images shocked and sometimes angered me; they stabbed at my biases and rigidity. But I’m sure I’m not alone: that’s just how it feels the first time you watch the work of American animator and filmmaker Lewis Klahr.
‘”People tell me when they watch my films, they experience long after-effects,” said Klahr, who has been using collage techniques to create experimental, sometimes disturbing films since the late 1970s. In an event titled “Lewis Klahr: Hieroglyphs of Lost Time,” the Segal Centre screened Engram Sepals, a series of seven short films depicting a decades-long downward journey of sex, drugs and alcohol. It pulls viewers into an eighty-one-minute orgy of substance abuse, confusion and sexual experimentation, and exposes American vices and anxieties. Shooting on 16mm film, Klahr used images cut from from magazines, comic books and ’70s porn rags, as well as old Super 8 footage, to create distinctly adult animations.
‘Klahr, who was in attendance at the event, explained that the short stories he told in his films were really about discovery. He carefully sourced and selected each image he used in his collages and, he said, everything has a meaning; just as the real world has structure, so do the worlds he created. He emphasized that music and images need to reinforce each other for a film to work. “I wanted the emotions like in a Dionne Warwick song, combined with experimental movies,” Klahr said.
‘The epic voyage of Engram Sepals began with the 1994 short Altair, a shifting collage of images from 1940s issues of Cosmopolitan. Behind the romantic images of well-manicured women, there was an underlying sense of doom. Klahr used blue-tinted backdrops and repeated images of cigarette cases, martini olives, cards and beds to evoke the feeling of addiction.
‘Altair—which is now included in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection—was the tamest of the seven movies. The following film, Engram Sepals was even more sinister: Jimmy Olsen, the freckly young photojournalist from the Superman comics, was shown lying dead on the ground. Then, in Pony Glass, Klahr manipulated Olsen’s clean-cut persona by placing cut-outs of him in scenes of same-sex affairs, interspersing these with images of looming clocks and mid-century offices. Klahr, speaking after the show, admitted that experimental filmmakers often use repetition to encourage viewers’ personal interpretations of images, and the looping music and recurring images in Pony Glass underlined Jimmy’s identity crisis and sexual self-discovery.
‘As I was watching the series, my own brain started playing tricks on me, too. During Govinda, Klahr’s 1999 take on a coming-of-age story, I inwardly named a woman in the film “Sarah.” Listening to the Indian-influenced accompanying song and watching Sarah’s loss of innocence, I felt as if the vocalist was singing, “Run, Sarah, run.” As I watched her naively walk into a forest, like Eve taking a bite into the apple, I wanted to stop her. When her journey into the forest led her to drugs and group sex, I felt truly outraged. I did not like the chaos of the scenes. I wanted to put the world back in order. Who knew collage could be so emotional?
‘At the beginning of the second half, Klahr warned the spectators at the Segal Centre that the following material was not for everyone. And it’s not. Viewers would go on to witness orgies, cut-outs of drugged-out porn stars having rough sex and, with the final piece, A Failed Cardigan Maneuver, I experienced a longing to return to the relative innocence at the beginning of the film. “I needed the courage and self-permission to go where those images could take me,” Klahr said. A rake poked at the characters’ anuses and scratched the surfaces of their skin; a needle was inserted into a penis; I couldn’t help but cringe. “Even though you’re not involved, they [images] still hurt,” Klahr said. “You’re feeling those things.”
‘For days after seeing Engram Sepals, I had an urge to analyze every cut-out and make sense of my experiences. I wanted Klahr to explain his imagery so I could file it, label it, make sense of it. But Klahr’s films stubbornly refuse to be classified.’ — Renee Giblin
___
Stills
_____
Further
Lewis Klahr @ IMDb
Lewis Klahr @ LUX
Review: Sixty Six
Lewis Klahr @ Anthony Reynolds Gallery
Collage. A Conversation with Lewis Klahr
An Evening with Lewis Klahr
Flotsam and Jetsam: The Spray of History
Lewis Klahr @ Experimental Cinema
THIS LONG CENTURY
Circumstantial Pleasures
Complicating a Simpler Time: Lewis Klahr’s Collage Films
Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Six is a masterful journey through inner space and the American past
Observations on film art : Lewis Klahr X 3, X 4 – David Bordwell
Lewis Klahr’s trinket dreamscape
GOING KLAHR
_____
Extras
Studio Visit with Filmmaker Lewis Klahr
Johann Carlo, Willem Dafoe, and Kate Valk in Lewis Klahr’s “The Diptherians Episode Two”
Battle Hymn for Insurgent Arts—David Rosenboom and Lewis Klahr
_____
Interview
Toni D’Angela: I’d like to talk a little bit about the practice of collage. How did you “meet” the collage? How have you experienced this artistic practice? How and when did you start?
Lewis Klahr: It was very much in the air in NYC in the late 1970’s after i graduated from college. Found Footage filmmaking was emerging as a dominant genre in experimental film circles. I saw several Wooster Group theatrical productions which had a very strong effect on me. Collage was attractive because it allowed me to explore the past in terms of personal memory and history.
TD: Did the collages of Picasso and Braque (around 1912) and the “montage” of the Berlin Dadaists (around 1916), have an influence on your personality as artist?
LK: Not much. Cubism didn’t make much sense to my eye. The Surrealists, Schwitters and Max Ernst did. But in terms of 2-d work Schwitters and Rauschenberg offered the most initial interest and inspiration. I saw Rauschenberg’s silk screen paintings before I knew I wanted to be a visual artist when I was in high school and was struck by their texture, superimposition and the way they used newspaper imagery that I recognized from my childhood.
TD: The collage is also came into the American painting, the late Modernism. One of the first exhibitions of abstract expresionism was called “Exhibition of Collage”, but even before 1942, and before the works of Robert Rauschenberg during the ’50, it was Joseph Cornell the artist who had introduced the collage in the visual arts and into the american experimental film. What do you think was his most original contribution? And how Cornell has inspired you? If he did…
LK: I didn’t know Cornell’s work until 1980 and the extensive MOMA retrospective that I was fortunate enough to be in NY to see. I went 5 times as it was a huge turning point for me. From my encounter with his work, I was convinced that collage was the mode I most wanted to work in. Cornell was especially helpful to me in two regards: emotion and revery. His work granted me permission to create emotion-centric films. It also gave me a powerful first hand experience of a kind of ‘eternal time’ that could be glimpsed while in the revery of viewing art work. While I had had this latter experience of altered time throughout my life, viewing movies and listening to music, seeing Cornell’s work was the moment I consciously defined this experiences importance to me as a film artist and its depiction as a goal of what I aspired to create.
TD: What about the collage of other masters of the experimental film as Harry Smith, Robert Breer (even though both are not totally identifiable with the practice of collage) and Larry Jordan?
LK: I admire and was inspired by the work of all 3. Larry Jordan’s Our Lady of the Sphere was the film I saw that alerted me to what could be done with cutouts. The way he, Harry Smith and Ernst had made use of Victorian cutouts made me feel that I could do something similar with more recent outmoded mass imagery from my own childhood.
TD: Apart from these references probably well known, what can you tell me of the (other) sources that have inspired you?
LK: Influence is a funny thing. It is very broad – it includes the obvious: Jacobs, Warhol, Anger, Conner but in some ways I was effected more by certain movements or moments then filmmakers. For instance Psychodrama figures large with its exploration of the mythic, symbolic, pyschological self and depiction of the subjective hooked to narrative. Or the eclectic and diverse approach to filmmaking at the Collective for Living Cinema in the late 1970’s.
Often overlooked because I shared more of an outlook and sensibility than a direct obvious relationship with their work (they weren’t making cutout films though many were grappling with appropriation) are my extremely formidable and exciting fimmaking peers: Peggy Ahwesh, Mark Lapore, Phil Solomon, Ericka Beckman, Julie Murray, Nina Foneroff, Scott Stark, Esther Shatavsky, Craig Baldwin, and of course, my wife Janie Geiser (as both a filmmaker and theater artist).
And then there’s the poet and scholar Walter Lew who I’ve been in aesthetic dialogue with since my early 20’s. Or the scholar Tom Gunning who has certainly had as much influence on me as any fimmaker.
And finally there’s the history of narrative filmmaking and in particular classic Hollywood. I still spend more time looking and thinking about the latter than any other kind of filmmaking. Some key directors for me – Jean Epstein, Jacques Tourneur, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Pierre Melville, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Nick Ray, Wim Wenders. But then there’s individual films, too numerous to mention, like Sylvia by Gordon Douglas or Hercules in the Haunted World by Mario Bava or Welles’ Mr. Arkadin. These three probably tell you more about my aesthetic choices and interests then anything else on the above list in the way they marry the high and the low, the hidden and the blunt, poverty and the sublime.
TD: What do you think of found footage? Today is a practice very developed and almost predominant in a certain kind of cinema, and in filmmakers that are different among them, we could quote Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, William E. Jones, actually yourself, for your usage of it in Her Fragant Emulsion.
LK: I had began making films in 1977 and Her Fragrant Emulsion is from 1986-87. It is my first film to receive a good deal of critical attention however.
Found Footage was a genre I paid attention to – it was so dominant for such a long time that it was impossible not too. But it is a genre that peaked in the 1990’s and I don’t go out of my way to look at much now. And in the past Bruce Conner, Morgan Fisher, Godard… The collage, of course, is different from found footage, but they are practices that have something in common, they have been associated and related.
I understand found footage filmmaking to be a vital branch of collage. Anytime one uses appropriated imagery one starts to enter the collage realm.
In my maturation as a film artist, found footage filmmaking was a stage of development– a half way point between shooting live action films in the world and working with cutouts which has been my primary form of address. In my case, I needed to move onto working with cutouts to get the control I desired over appropriated sounds and images.
TD: Can you describe your relationship (feeling, critical thought…) with the images, the signs, the archives of the past?
LK: That’s a huge topic that my films address better than I can in words. But for me the most uncanny experience I’ve ever had is the difference between the past and the present. It’s a mystery I can’t resolve for myself – how things are present and new and then age and disappear. It’s the shape of life lived.
TD: It can be said that the melancholic tone of your works is not just simple nostalgia, but a way to challenge the “identity” of the present, to make it larger, a way to open the present to the past, a way to broaden the horizons at least?
LK: Thanks, that’s beautifully articulated and I aspire for my work to have that effect. My subject is concerned with, to quote Tom Gunning, “lived time” more than a desire to merely time travel backwards. Though i find nothing wrong with that very human impulse and would like to add that I find simple nostalgia to be infinitely more complicated than most people give it credit for being. I’m continually surprised by how threatening and frightening simple nostalgia seems to be for so many people. To me, making art about the past always reflects many things about the present tense it is being authored in. It can’t help but do that. I like to describe my work as describing the pastness of the present.
Melancholy is important to me in several other ways – first of all despite the sadness, regret and/or longing it contains, it also contains a great deal of ecstasy. Melancholy also affords me a way in to the timelessness of revery which is important to my work process and the impact of my finished films.
TD: In Lethe and False Aging there is a sort of invitation to practice a certain oblivion to rediscover the tradition too, to see it with different eyes and discover something new. So maybe everything was already invented, like it says, (I think of modernism and the avant-garde cinema too), but it’s still possible re-invent it… Even through the process of hybridization of genres and materials… The past, tradition, tradition of modernism too, the myths of American society, as are the clouds of Trilogy of Nimbus: they are full of materials, images, archives, signs, but you know how to get out something new from them, not only to quote them…
LK: Thanks, that’s high praise. I’m glad my work speaks to you so eloquently. I understand some of what you’re describing as a crucial element of our time, that mass media and now electronic culture, has certainly made media absorption a significant part of daily, urban life throughout my lifetime. I have a necessity to grapple with what I’ve absorbed as do many others. My ability to project my thoughts and experiences into my source materials via the moving image is crucial to creating what you’re experiencing as a viewer of my work.
When I was 15 I read Black Elk Speaks which was an oral biography of a mystic Sioux Medicine Man who was Chief Crazy Horse’s cousin. He was at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and toured with Buffalo Bill to Europe among other highlights.
Black Elk describes in great detail his various visions. Many center around horses as these were essential animals in the Sioux lifestyle. In my urban and suburban world, horses and Buffalo didn’t figure. In my world, horses had been replaced by cars as a mode of travel. But I could recognize a correlation between Black Elk’s ability to name different horses and my ability to name types of cars or pop songs on the radio.
So for me naturally, as I convey the mythic understanding of the world I inhabit, the latter figured prominently.
The Nimbus Trilogy, that you site above, works to illuminate change through repetition. Just like the so called structural filmmakers who preceded me (Frampton, Snow, Landow, Gottheim) I am posing perceptual riddles for my viewers by presenting a complete 8 minute film (Nimbus Smile) which is then followed by a film (Nimbus Seeds) of the same duration with the same image sequence but an entirely different soundtrack. In the third and concluding film (Cumulonimbus) the sound track from the second film repeats while the image sequence completely changes. These recombinations evoke different stories and meanings in each of the films.
TD: Can I say that your animation/collage is a way to challenge the idea of private property, ownership, Identity (present like identity and identity like present), a way to continue to keep open the “conversation”, a sort of endless entertainment, as Blanchot said, or dissémination (Derrida)?
LK: Yes appropriation is both a way to question ownership and issues of copyright as well as artistic authorship. As a collage artist I am both collaborating with my source materials by both changing them and leaving them intact. For me the necessity to work with what I have absorbed outweighs my interest in respecting the capitalist boundaries established by copyright law which are mostly concerned with profit and a price structure that I don’t have the financial resources to participate in. To me there is the obligation of the mass source materials in question and their responsibility after ingestion by the culture which is something copyright law doesn’t respect, takes for granted and/or overlooks. Collage and appropriation is part of the culture’s digestion process. I am of the firm belief that such cultural digestion is necessary for the culture to stay psychically healthy.
Similarly with artistic authorship – as a viewer and a maker, it is less important for me who invents or originates something then which artists bring it to life.
TD: Do you see something new and interesting in the current landscape of experimental film, moving images, etc., related to your work (animation/collage)?
LK: I am more interested in what I find interesting and stimulating then what is new. But there are many younger artists whose work excites me and I’m in dialogue with. To name a few: Jodie Mack, Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, Fern Silva, Stephanie Barber, Karen Yasinsky, Inger Lise Hansen, Blake Williams, Mary Helena Clark, Laida Lertxundi and Michael Robinson.
TD: When you started to work it was with “film”, now, for several years, you are working in video. What’s the difference and how it has changed your work? You know, many people are talking of death of film or cinema…
LK: Cinema to me is not the material of film itself but all the different aesthetic ways and approaches filmmakers have of creating moving image pieces.
So for me it has not been a very large adjustment. I did wait to make the switch until I saw that digital video’s resolution was equivalent to 16mm but now in the last few years it is more equivalent to 35mm.
Digital Video is different in very positive ways for me – my work is now capable of being shown to much larger audiences via streaming and in theatrical spaces with my intentions still visible and clear. Often when I worked in Super 8 and 16mm my finished films were somewhat dark and didn’t project that successfully even in a small space. For instance the first time I was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1991 the super 8 films I was screening had to be screened with my projector in the room to convey their color successfully. The room was very small, but it was still too long a throw for a super 8 projector for the intensity of the color I had photographed to be visible if the projector had been placed in the booth.
Digital video enhances texture which is also very good for my work. It is very clean and detailed and while this might be a bit of a limit for live action shooting, since I’m shooting my analog source materials, they tend to provide a kind of dirt and grit that has some of the feel of analog and the film stocks of 16mm.
Shooting, editing and printing Digital Video is less expensive then shooting super 8 even was. This has made me very very prolific which has greatly re-invogorated my aesthetic. Making a feature length work is no longer a major financial investment.
Where Digital Video is precarious, a huge step backwards and ongoing challenge, is in archiving finished work and working to keep it current with all the tech upgrades which come at an unbelievable rate of speed- 3 years is a lifetime. In contrast traditional film has remained virtually the same technically for the past hundred or more years. Film Stock if properly stored can last for many decades, hard drives unfortunately can not.
TD: About death… Watching April Snow, I thought of a mixture of Dali (watches) and Ruscha (cars), it’s also a voyage into a great american myth: the car, from fordism and its ideology to On The Road, a symbol for the consumer society but also for dreams: dreams of family to get economical safety, dreams for young people to escape and live an experience… The drive experience was important for artists too: Tony Smith, Ed Ruscha… Today the road seems to be replaced by the eletronic-virtual road, can I ask you what do you think of that?
LK: Above I talked about cars and their mythic importance to the world I live in and Black Elk the Sioux Medicine Man. I’m glad that April Snow was able to send you off into such an extensive associational revery about all those larger connections, however, I undertook it with a more specific mythology of aging in mind – that place in young adult hood where one can feel forced to choose between the love of ones youth and more grown up responsibilities. It’s a kind of moment that many experience as a death in life. I was thinking of my dear late friend, the great filmmaker Mark Lapore, who was very interested in this kind of moment where things are in transition.
TD: Last question: how do you do your films? I mean, I am asking you as if I was a naif. If someone did not know anything of collage and animation, how would you explain your work to them?
LK: My films are very simple to create technically. I work with a digital still camera set up on a tripod and compose my cutouts on a little table beneath the lens or on the floor of my garage studio (there’s the car again! Or in this case, the repurposing of a space designed for one. In Los Angeles garages are very important spaces for much creative activity that doesn’t involve cars). The cutouts are illuminated by mostly a single light source – a 250 watt, 3200 Kelvin balanced bulb.
Before I worked in digital, I had the same shooting set up with a 16mm Bolex or a super 8 camera. In my present digital set up, the imagery I photograph frame by frame, feeds into my computer where a wonderful animation program called Dragon organizes the individual frames into shots. All of this activity is stored on a hard drive. I edit on the computer, and am still using Final Cut Pro 7, although that will have to change next time I upgrade my computer.
________________
13 of Lewis Klahr’s 38 films
_____________
Station Drama (1990)
‘STATION DRAMA is a silent, black-and-white Super-8 film from RIGHT HAND SHADE, the fourth and final section of my twelve film series TALES OF THE FORGOTTEN FUTURE. This section explores via collage cutouts, thematics related to the genres of the bio-pic, home movies and the actuality film. It stars dancer/choreographer Paula Clements Sager as a fictional early 20th century aviatrix that was inspired by “West with the Night,” the autobiography of real life early aviation hero Beryl Markham. Combining cutouts with live action superimpositions of old media (a metal record, a radio dial and a nickelodeon), the story follows the fabled life of my fictional aviatrix from childhood to circus and WWI fame that brings on a personal crisis. This film is one of my personal favorites of all my work but also, is unfortunately, one of the least known and seen.’ — Lewis Klahr
the entire film
_______________
The Pharaoh’s Belt (1993)
‘In its use of popular imagery and its creation of a ironic modern fairy tale, THE PHARAOH’S BELT explores these issues in a manner without parallel in an avant-garde mode of filmmaking, better known for its disavowal of the commercial than its radical engineerings.’ — National Society of Film Critics
__________
Altair (1995)
‘ALTAIR offers a cutout animation version of color noir. The images were culled from six late ’40s issues of Cosmopolitan magazine and set to an almost four-minute section of Stravinsky’s “Firebird” (looped twice) to create a sinister, perfumed world. As in my 1988 visit to this genre, In the Month of Crickets, the narrative is highly smudged leaving legible only the larger signposts of the female protagonist’s story. The viewer is encouraged to speculate on the nature and details of the woman’s battle with large, malevolent societal forces and her descent into an alcoholic swoon. However I feel it is important to add that what interested me in making this film was very little of what is described above but instead a fascination with the color blue and some intangible association it has for me with the late 1940s.’ — LK
_________
Lulu (1996)
‘Initially commissioned to accompany a Danish production of Alban Berg’s LULU, Lewis Klahr’s cut-out animation refigures the opera’s themes in a torrent of images. With an ever-inventive approach to color and symbol, Klahr distills the title character’s moral predicament, along with a great many of German Expressionism’s characteristic motifs, in the span of a pop song.’ — Fandor
____________
Pony Glass (1997)
‘Superman sidekick Jimmy Olsen is overrun with sexual delirium in this improbably expressive cut-out animation. Lewis Klahr mines the latent anxiety of his midcentury materials to entrancing effect, steering the hieroglyphs of comic books and advertising towards a roaring melodrama in three acts. Nostalgia has rarely seemed less innocent.’ — Fandor
______________
Elsa Kirk (1999)
‘In the mid-1990s I unearthed photographic contact sheets of different women in a thrift store in the East Village. Only one was named and dated: “Elsa Kirk, Feb 22 ‘63.” But all looked like they were from the same photographer and time period. There were twelve images per sheet of these models/actresses and I found myself intriqued by the strong sense of fiction and document in these photos. ELSA KIRK and CATHERINE STREET are two of the films I created from these contact sheets. At first, I was unable to translate these images into collage animation. So I reversed my usual process and began making Xerox enlargements of the sheets which became backgrounds for a series of flat collages. Gradually, these became storyboards for the films and led to the hieroglyphic montage style of the completed trilogy, an approach that I had intuited when first attracted to the potential of cutouts two decades before but had never been able to capture on film.’ — Lewis Klahr
_____________
False Aging (2008)
‘Klahr injects False Aging with such a restless, melancholy oddness (ice cubes memorably circling around a telephone) that by the time his film concludes with Warhol’s last doubts and ponderings (as sung by John Cale), we’re sure there’s something very special going on.’ — IFFR
_______________
The Pettifogger (2011)
‘A year in the life of an American gambler and con man circa 1963. A diaristic, first person montage full of glimpses, glances, decaying ephemera and elliptical narrative. An abstract crime film and, like many other crime films involving larceny, a sensorial exploration of the virulence of unfettered capitalism. An impressionistic collage film, culled from a wide variety of image and sound sources that fully exploits the hieroglyphic essence of cutouts to ponder what appropriation and stealing have in common.’ — Fandor
message from Director of The Pettifogger Lewis Klahr
______________
The Moon Has Its Reasons (2012)
‘The Moon Has Its Reasons is an elliptical melodrama about romance, open to viewer interpretation.’ — Tribeca Film Festival
the entire film
_______________
Sixty Six (2015)
‘Messages and portents bubble up throughout Lewis Klahr’s 90-minute, 12-episode feature Sixty Six, which poetically fuses images and ephemera of the Sixties with Greek mythology. It begins with the brief film “Mercury,” in which light-box-illuminated double-sided pages from Flash comics evoke the fleet-footed messenger god. A pulp serial that shimmers with potent emotions and fragmented memories, Sixty Six is made up of digital films Klahr began working on in 2002 and fittingly opens with an epigraph from Paul Eluard and André Breton: “Let the dreams you have forgotten equal the value of what you do not know.”’ — Film Comment
Excerpt
the entire film
______________
Black River Falls (2017)
‘Music by Dick Connette from his album, Too Sad for the Public Vol. 1: Oysters Ice Cream Lemonade. Suzzy Roche sings the vocal. Dick’s lyrics were inspired by the reknowned photography book, Wisconsin Death Trip.’ — letterboxd
the entire film
_____________
Circumstantial Pleasures (2020)
‘Created episodically 2013–2019 and released as a completed compendium 2020, the six-part Circumstantial Pleasures, received exactly one public screening on its release—at Brooklyn’s Light Industry on February 29 of that year—before COVID-19 relegated the work to the peculiar fog of pandemic-era online exhibition spaces. During a subsequent online run in plague time virtual venues, the work was recognized as uncannily prescient in its seeming anticipation of pandemic era anxieties. Indeed, the film, with its global scope; ruminations on illness, isolation and thwarted travel; and considerations with supply chains and the flows of goods and capital—not to mention the anomalous inclusion figures from contemporary politics and entertainment—Circumstantial Pleasures is an aggressively visceral work, manifesting a dark and unsettlingly expansive rumination on the exhausting and beguilingly narcotic toxicities of late-stage global capitalism. And nearly five years later, the mysterious masterwork in fact feels painfully nostalgic and uncannily resonant on the eve of a new, darker, political era.’ — The Lab
Trailer
Excerpt
____________
Five Days Till Tomorrow (2022)
‘Begun in 2015 and completed in 2022, Five Days Till Tomorrow evokes a timeless oneiric twilight, depicting a menagerie of fantasy comic book characters as they sleep, loll, and patiently inhabit a landscape of 1970s futuristic architecture waiting for the extended night—described in the title—to come to its end.’ — Letterboxd
Stream the film on Amazon Prime
*
p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi, jay. Happy to reflect that period’s detritus for you. Fanfiction is def. more fascinating to think about 90% of the time. Most of it is just evidence of the ‘crime’. Wow, a game inspired by ‘Marienbad’. Talk about a must. Robbe-Grillet just wrote ‘Marienbad’, Resnais directed it. R-G did a direct a number of films, and they’re all pretty interesting. Anyway, that game … I’ll target it once the film stuff is over. Nah, the back thing is an ongoing thing, nothing can prevent it. It only flares up maybe once a year or twice. I’m used to it. It’s just part of being me or whatever. I just keep my fingers crossed about its timing because I’m way hampered, mobility-wise, for a week or a couple when it happens. Thanks about the teaser. Headlong into your improving week then. Off you go. ** Misanthrope, That’s just nuts, man. Prayers that some judge blocks the enforcement of whatever they’re doing to you guys. Nice to have a nice little David anecdote. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks! I’m going to let the boys’ verbiage rest in peace, and, besides, I think love has milked them for what they’re worth, so, hm … If you can’t give me feelings with old fashioned meanings, Then just stay in love with yourself, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ was my only phase of being into the franchise, not that I’m pushing you in its direction. ** James, Kitty Glitter strangely has a way with words. Pretty rare amongst the fanfiction set, I must say. Thanks re: the trailer. Very fresh is what we’re going for. We’re not into the t-shirt era by any means over here. Still wearing a scarf, but wrapped more loosely. Yes, about the poetic. Honestly, I think ‘Room Temperature’ is probably a poem more than anything else, for instance. I wonder if ‘twink’ came from Twinkies or twinkle or, I guess, elsewhere. They’re both worthy as progenitors. I longingly await a day when I don’t talk about American politics, but I think that day is a long way off. I’m going to be working every day until I go to LA. It’s my fate, but I like working, and I don’t like relaxing. Cool, Nomeansno were lovely. Strange adjective for them, but yeah. On the character names, it depends. In ‘Try’, Ziggy is based on a friend of mine whose name was Ziggy. Calhoun is a slightly disguised version of the name of the guy it was based on. The others names in there I just picked because they had the right syllable count and vowel sounds. Until tomorrow then. ** Nicholas., Happy the teaser successfully teased since that was the hope. The blurb (logline) was our doing, yes. It’s a very hard film to describe in a couple of sentences, so we said as little possible basically. The ‘cult writer’ thing … It’s just kind of strange to end up with that moniker. It’s better than gay writer or transgressive writer and the other tags I got along the way. I just don’t like that it locates my work over to the side, like ‘it has its fans, but we don’t need to take it seriously’. It’s a bit like putting my work in a jail cell or something. I don’t know. Nothing I can do about it. I love cauliflower and pizza, so that sounds way yum. I never eat dessert, I don’t think. But I think a few weeks ago I ate at a falafel place and then bought/ate a macha eclair (@ l’Eclair de Genie) afterwards, so I guess that? What sweet thing did you last follow up your meal with? ** Steeqhen, Hi. You’ll find a way to power up, no doubt. I guess I should watch ‘Anora’. I don’t know what ‘ Peep Show’, but I hope it lives up to its title’s implication. ** Steve, Oh, yeah, ‘Flow’ was nice. I suppose you’re right about the goodness of ‘Anora’s’ win. I haven’t seen it, so I had no thoughts. As I’ve said, I have a fondness and big respect for big failed ambition, and Hunt-Hendrix’s high goals charm me. Plus, yeah, good music. I met and had a really interesting conversation with them when they played in Paris before they transitioned, and I found them very impressive. ** P, Hi, P. Oh, you know Mike. Well, of course you do. I’ve never met Chandler. My friend/roommate in LA helped shoot some of their videos. That’s so cool about the SFMOMA show and you being represented. Wow, I wish I could see that. Maybe it’ll travel to LA or even here. That’s exciting. I’m sure, as nice as it is, it’ll just be a drop in your bucket or whatever they say. I just worked our film all weekend, and that will continue this week. We’re in a big crunch to finish it and get the promo stuff together now, so that’s kind of my whole life du jour. You have Roxy Music tattooed on your stomach, wow, that’s very cool. The ‘Country Life’ cover is way, way up there in the album cover canon, for sure. Favorite RM songs, wow, that’s hard, Hm, off the top of my head and memory, ‘A Really Good Time’, ‘Mother of Pearl’, ‘Editions of You’, ‘Ladytron’, … I could go on. Shirt size? Uh, Large, I guess. I’m tall-ish, 6’1″. I did get stuck in a loop of listening to ‘Here Come the Rome Plows’ by Drive Like Jehu for a couple of days, now that you mention it. Have a great Tuesday. What happened? ** HaRpEr, Hi. Randy Stair, gotcha. The first half or two-thirds of ‘A Voice Through a Cloud’ is dreamy great. If he’d been able to finish it in the shape he was in at the beginning, it would have been one of the all-time great novels, I think. I have no thoughts or feelings of note about the ‘Stars’, ‘Trek’ or ‘Wars’. Once every few years I get bored enough to look at the reviews of my books on goodreads, and the bad ones are wild. There was an ‘I Wished’ review that I thought was particularly memorable. Let’s see … ‘Over the years I’ve come across a few articles and YouTube videos mentioning what a genius underground or outsider or avant garde writer Cooper was. All the articles and videos made a big fuss of him being a homosexual. That always set off a literary alarm that warned ‘the guy is not a writer, he’s a homosexual who types.’ I finally decided to read one of his books. This one. “I Wished.” Yup. He’s a homosexual who types.’ Ouch. Thanks a lot about the teaser! ** Justin D, Thanks, Justin. I can’t wait for you to have a way to see it. I think the vast majority of fan-fiction is unreadable. It’s like *looks at watch* have your orgasm already, for Christ’s sake. But Kitty Glitter had an odd way with words. Rare. ** Uday, Hey. Like in our previous two films, we only use music that the characters in the films hear. In ‘RT’ there’s just the sound/music of the haunted house made by Puce Mary and one song that one of the characters sings, and that’s it. It’s pretty quiet, yes. Try to enjoy your empty abode. Dance around naked or something. I read quite a lot of philosophy at one point, not so much recently, although I did get into a jag of reading a lot of Deleuze a few years ago because I hadn’t read him all that much before, and I was pretty amazed by him. What about you? I just read some books that I’m putting in a post in a couple of days, but I won’t be reading much of anything in March. The first two weeks I’ll be too busy with the film, and then I go to LA for the premiere, and I’ll be overly busy with film stuff there too. Alas. ** Okay. Today the blog presents another experimental filmmaker whose work most of you are likely not to know, Lewis Klahr, who works primarily with collage and animation, and who is very worth your time, I think, if you can spare him some. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Good morning, blog. Haven’t been to a cinema in sooo long. Olives I do not like. They’re so yucky to me. A Failed Cardigan Manoeuvre is such a great title. I have a couple cardigans. I might have 3, by some point. I’ve come round to them. I still believe in the supremacy of jumpers, though. Unclassifiable things tend to beat out the easily boxable-in things. I *love* the use of comic cut-outs. They’re nice to look at. These are enjoyably uncanny to watch. They remind me of early horror games on the web, with the way of moving. Collages are something I could try more of. In theory they’re not super ‘difficult’ but one can do so much with them. Especially digitally, but I’d prefer working with physical material. Disavowal of the commercial is understandably popular in this kind of art. The Altair still feels like bowling/arcade floor, to me. Big fan of how Pony Glass engineers sex. That some of it is between men is a bonus. Can only imagine how long makin these would take. Nice one, blog. Klahr’s new to me, and cool to me, too. :0
Morning Dennis! I deliberated for several seconds if I should have gone with a full stop or exclamation mark. I’m feeling sunny. Glitter’s fanfiction is great stuff. I’ve read and written fanfiction in my time, and derived some enjoyment from both things. But I’m not as into it as a lot of people on some of the corners of the internet I dip in and out of. I’m impressed by 1) the crazy hunger with which so many read fanfiction, and 2) just how much people do with their fanfiction. Like, people will take media and stretch it out in their own way so much one wonders why they didn’t just write original fiction instead. But for the most part the fanfiction I’ve read and written was the ‘let’s make two guys fuck’ type. Kind of an exercise in mimicry, I’ve felt. Though I’ve managed to wiggle in some fun with narrative voice and self-aware writing. The communities that sprout up surrounding fanfiction interest me. A large chunk of them seem *heavily* adolescent. A lot of it’s crap, some of it’s good, but in general I’m charmed by it. I don’t get how some people read and write these suuuuuper long fanfics. They’re their own interesting thing.
If fresh is what you and Zac are going for, you’ve got it with that teaser trailer, and presumably the rest of the film, too. I’ve no idea how one gets a film to feel fresh. But you’ve done it, which is swell to experience. A bit Edward Hopper-y, in feel.
I’m in a T-shirt at the moment, but in a jumper too. It’s annoying because I’m super cold in the mornings so wrap up but then my walk ad/ex college warms me up, uncomfortably, and then I have to carry my coat and pack my jumpers in my backpack. First-world problems. Lovely as my scarf is it’s starting to be unnecessary, thanks to the weather.
Anytime I’ve had a discussion with another about what makes a poem a poem, we just end up going in circles. Classifying literature just will never 100% ‘work,’ it seems. I bet there’s a poem somewhere out there which feels like a film.
Research time. Mildly amused that Troye Sivan is Wikipedia’s posterboy for twinks. Disputed etymological origins, of course. Dated back to the 60s, to the 50s’ ‘twinkle,’ to an older British gay slang term ‘twank’ meaning a gay prostitute on the receiving end of things. Twinkies are cited as an inspiration, too. Small and full of cream, fnar. I think Twinkies have a longer shelf life, though. Some have made it an acronym – ‘Teenaged (as you pointed out in that other comment), White, and Into no Kink.’ So there’s some word stuff.
I think all my teachers have, by this point, understandably, brought the current state of U.S. politics into class, which makes sense, because it’s relevant. I’ve been told that teachers are meant to keep their political views out of their class, but I think everybody, students and staff alike, are in agreement that U.S. politics is *quite* the clusterfuck, shitstorm, etc. at the moment.
Oo, going to LA. Will be a change from Paris. Oh, how’s the Visa stuff going? Or gone. I’m viewed by my family as a workaholic, and I’ve been told I have trouble relaxing. Sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not. I’m with you on liking working, though. It can be unenjoyable but at least I feel like what I’m doing matters. Routine and structure, woohoo, that’s me.
My mother and brother are unsurprisingly not the biggest fans of nomeansno. Horses for courses.
Ziggy’s a remarkable name. I had Bowie in mind, since that’s the only kind of Ziggy I knew. To be chums with someone who might feature in/inspire a character in your work(s) must be fun. And/or interesting. I like the kind of, gap, or lack thereof, between real life people and fiction involving/inspired by them, and the use of names in making/closing that gap. I’ve always tried to avoid naming characters in my writing, and especially using names of people I know. Jack was a go-to default and then I ended up falling for a Jack and that was personally significant/distressing and now I avoid the name like the plague. Which says something about me and writing, maybe. The names work just fine in Try. I never feel like the names I pick work, though. Hm. But see you tomorrow. Man, tea is great.
Dennis, Well, unfortunately, I think this mandate is a result of the unions losing the lawsuits they filed regarding all this. I’ll have to look into it more, but I know the union where I work (and am not a part of) sued. It’s probably why we didn’t go back right away and had about a month extra. We’ll see what happens going forward.
Thing, too, is that we might end up having our contract canceled someday. Who knows? I could see Elon and his team looking at our whole division and going, “Eh, AI can do that.”
You met David, so you know he can be a fun and funny guy when he’s not on dope. He’s actually quite bright. But then the drugs come calling.
Hi!!
I just went through the P.S. and read that Goodreads review you shared with HaRpEr. Jesus Christ…
I’m a little embarrassed to say that I’m completely unfamiliar with Suzi Quatro’s music. I like this song – or rather, her voice. Don’t mind us we’re just spilling our guts, If this is love I don’t wanna be loved, You pollute the room with a filthy tongue, Watch me choke it down so I can throw it up, Od.
Hey Dennis,
Wow, another artist I need to put on the backburner until I’m finished this semester!! I love collage, and Klahr’s work is gorgeous. I love the way it seems to distort and pervert reality, but also make you accept that that is just the reality the art lives in…
Got myself up and back to college, sat in the library studying for my exam tomorrow. Can’t remember if I mentioned the awards for my magazine but that’s pretty exciting; I’m mentioning it because we just got the copies of our newest issue + the UCC society awards night is tonight so perhaps we might win another award for best society publication.
Peep Show was created by the same guy who made succession, but it’s a British show about two 30 something losers who live in a flat and are perpetually stuck living a shit life of their own creation. The name comes from how the camera becomes the eyes of the characters in scenes, going inside their thoughts and making you incredibly uncomfortable having to watch ‘yourself’ being abhorrent and humiliating. The show itself feels half like a parody of real life with characters called Big Suze, Super Hans, Dobby, etc, but also so uncomfortably real and drab that its depressing nature is hilarious. It’s where Olivia Coleman got her start.
Here’s another dream of mine from today:
It took place in a circular shopping center/mall/whatever you wanna call it, which became a bit of a metroidvania-esque quest of collecting items, opening rooms, doing quests and battles, and returning to the mall to open a new ‘room’. One of the rooms was actually just a grave for Grimes in the middle of the shopping centre, which was probably more inspired by Grimes from the Simpsons who died at the end from electrocution, but the spirit of the singer came out of the ledger, and I had to battle some Resident Evil freakish creature… I think my dream is telling me that I’m in the process of the ‘quest’ (i.e. the quest to get my degree), and that I really just want to play a video game…
Lewis Klahr is a new name to me and as ever, I’m very glad to make his acquaintance. Seeing these comic characters act out a range of xxx fantasies makes for an outlandish experience. Pony Glass I particularly enjoyed.
Right now my sweet treat has been an entire box of milkduds after dinner well ill pop the box open before dinner have 3 then come back for the rest. Its so simple chocolate and caramel but the ratio is actually perfect cause the caramel is soooo good and there really isnt that much chocolate im actually dying for a British batch cause European chocolate is amazing and i think a box of high quality milk duds is hilarious. Love your desserts especially the matcha one matcha makes anything healthier and the perfect energy boost so they don’t count as desserts just smart snacks. And yes totally teased and thank you for the logline background i really love it! Do you think your movies also could fit into your written world like are they books you write in motion or do you go in like this is gonna be cinematic so its a different story all together? Like i said that logline is sooooo like if it was book id have to buy the copy cause if someone told you that was their story you’d for certain ask for more details it really draws you in haunted house labor of love im totally on board! And yes i see how its a jail they’re saying everything you do is so extreme or crazy when it’s actually just you shinning your light for the world and creating things people actually need and relate too and evolve off of(mef for sure thanks for frisk especially) like whats so culty about this it’s quite rude hell when my friends read some or one of your books after i gushed about them they would come back like oh hes crazy that was so intense as if nothing of note happened on the pages but brutality even I find it rude but that’s cause i care. If someone reads my book and takes something bad from it its not my fault cause it was made with love and to be a record of it people will do what they want but we don’t deserve titles based on that especially wrong ones! Hum ill be back that really riled me up lol! Possibly duplicate idc i was on a roll writing this!
Someone mentioned Whitechapel in the comments a few days ago. I really enjoy their new album HYMNS IN DISSONANCE. I don’t even know what their politics are (it’s a concept album about an evil cult), but this is a furious cry of rage with monstrous riffs, whose aggression hits the spot right now.
If there are a lot of one-star reviews for a book on Goodreads, it either means that the book is formally challenging or a lot of people found it offensive. (Or both – those are usually the best!) Gretchen Felker-Martin’s horror novels got brigaded by TERFs who obviously didn’t read them.
“A homosexual who types” is a nice turn of phrase – if only it were meant as praise!
I’m starting to feel somewhat better and finding it easier to get out. I’ll be seeing a press screening of MISERICORDIA tonight. Bruce LaBruce’s TEOREMA-gone-porn THE VISITOR opens in New York Friday.
I had a disturbing conversation with my dad yesterday. He was very spicy and couldn’t hear half of what I was saying. My mother told him to drive them to their tax accountant, but he couldn’t remember how to get there. My parents have a meeting with their lawyer tomorrow morning, and I’m very worried they’ll blow it off, since it’s so hard to reach them on the phone.
Hiii Dennis ,
so excited for your movie . Big projects like that are so intimidating to me. Movies especially. It really seems like magic. I hope the final stretch is not too stressful .
I woke up still drunk from being up till 5 last night and with a sore stomach . I had gotten off work, walked around for a bit and then came home, my roommate had some of our friends over . I don’t know why this happens but it often does when we are all hanging out drinking , and I hope you will get a kick out of this –> we start punching each other in the stomach as hard as we can . Theres no winners or tier list or whatever , each person gets a few licks and I guess tries to act tough. I’m not the weakest or the strongest , so I get to act tough for a little bit. I am usually never a sad drunk and hate talking about my feelings but eventually all of my friends had left but one and I guess I was crying talking about how my mom sucks . Embarrassing…. Anyways I woke up and got up right away ( usually I lay in bed for an hour ,,, bad habit) because we ran out of toilet paper last night, and I had to walk a few blocks to the coffee shop to do my business. Sat there and read for a bit now I’m back home showered and about to get dressed and go to the city, writing this was a higher priority than putting clothes on haha. One of my friends birthday’s is today and another one is tomorrow so they have planned out this two day schedule of skating and hanging and drinking . We are supposed to have all met at the skatepark in soma an hour ago but they are running late too so I don’t feel that bad about taking my time to get there. I have to dip off and go to work but then am going to meet back up with them . It should be fun. I have a silly idea for a story, still have a lot to think about but I think I may be onto something… I have never written a story. Do you know why some books have blank pages at the end? I guess I could google it but I wanted to know what you think haha.
I don’t think the moma show will be doing any traveling, at least I hope not . The skateboard hanging in the museum was the one that had been hanging in my room haha I’m sick of my wall being blank where it used to be.
Love love love a really good time , favorite line ” all your troubles come from yourself, nobody hurts you, they don’t care” wow have had to humble myself a lot of times with that one . I haven’t ever heard that song before. I think todays song for me is the breaking hands by the gun club. Anyways rambling over , hope the weather is nice , thanks for listening , asking , telling, makes me smile!
( do you like playing pool?)
( I don’t know why Im asking )
Peep Show is an absolute favorite of mine. It’s an English comedy show about these two nerdy roommates and their constant failures to live up to social expectations. I am American but I watch mostly comedy series from England in terms of TV, really. I think I relate to how they depict geeky, unmasculine characters with poor social skills, like they’re less likely to depict that type of character as pitiful and endearing and that makes me relate to them more, I guess.
Liturgy are fantastic. I think people have the wrong impressions of Hendrix. I don’t think she’s trolling or try to pull a con, I think she’s very serious about the ideas. But I also think a lot of the project is meant to be fun or have an awareness and humor to it. I like Violet Cold a lot, they are sort of the new punching bag for a black metal adjacent band that is very queer, positive, leftist, uplifting, etc. I like the album Noir Kid a lot. It’s sort of related to the whole hyperpop wave but not quite of it. The ones after I don’t like as much.
Do you find bad reviews funny? Or do they get you down? Or they’re just usually worth ignoring?
Hey. ‘A homosexual who types’. Ugh. But funny. Whoever wrote that thinks they have the grandeur of Truman Capote proclaiming that Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ is ‘typing, not writing’. So many goodreads reviewers are quick to label things pretentious, but the irony of course is that their reviews are always haughty and full of navel gazing. I think ‘Closer’ got a lot of new goodreads reviews since it was re-printed in the UK, and I guess the cover led them to think it was a different kind of book. Anyway, reading that kind of thing is probably not a good idea unless you find the experience motivating in some way. The people who really care about your stuff hold the books so close to their heart that to speak on them feels sacreligious, just like how you talked about feeling about watching Bresson for the first time the other day. I’ve felt that about a few things, and to even try to talk to someone about it feels a betrayal of whatever is in your imagination.
I got a bootleg copy of ‘Eden Eden Eden’ in the mail today. A bootleg copy of a book is a strange idea, but I suppose it speaks to the legend around the novel. It’s huge, spread over a mere 60 something pages, although it doesn’t even have page numbers. A tiny font as well, I guess I’ll have to squint. No idea why they decided on formatting it this way. Anyway, I really wanted a physical copy, and spending anywhere from £100 for an old genuine copy wasn’t a viable option. I love physical things, and I just can’t get excited about non-tangible pixels on a screen. It’s nice to have a book as an object, which feels like a small shrine to the thing the text conjures.
I’m drowning in creative projects at the moment, pleasantly though, if it is possible to drown pleasantly. So many college assignments, but these are the last assignments I’ll ever have I suppose. I’m pretty excited about this long poem / cycle of poems I’m working on. We have to write something about the marketplace near to our campus, which at first sounded like the most boring thing ever, but I’ve found a way to centre it around my interests. It might be one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written. I’ve created a method which I don’t even know how to explain, but at least I understand it in my head. One part is almost done, and is a pastiche of ‘Pinocchio’, who eventually wants to go back to being a tree again rather than a real boy after the things he’s been subjected to. I’ve been turning to Jacques Brel and Kurt Weill (particularly ‘The Threepenny Opera’) for inspiration. The last poem involves a chanteuse singing a parody of ‘Mack the Knife’ re-written to be about Punch and Judy before stopping after being harassed by a lecherous old man and going on a rant. Anyway, I may be revealing too much, it’s just that I’m really excited because I’m in the stage where everything seems to be coming together.
Yeah, I agree, fanfiction is definitely a weird subculture. I know a lot of modern (heavy air quotes here) “transgressive lit” is kind of in those spaces, which always tickles me a little. The idea of this generation’s Bataille writing about “Interview with a Vampire”, rather than anything more personal or unique is a strange mix of depressing and amusing – but I suppose the short-hand of pre-established narrative for a set of characters/archetypes/investments probably lets you get into meatier parts of writing earlier, so I’m sure it’s got positives too.
Yeah, I know what you mean about being disabled by pain. I’m sort of the same, but given that I live with lots of different people, I sort of have to cushion their comfort as well as my own. Like, when I’m in pain, my boyfriend fusses over me because he doesn’t want to just watch or leave the room, but he does it so intensely that I kind of have to organise his emotions/behaviour more than my own. The guy I’m hoping to live with next year is awesome though, he’s perfectly happy to just sit and talk casually, even if I’m accidentally making it clear how much physical discomfort I’m in, which I really respect/appreciate.
Anyway, my week’s somehow getting even better, I just got some results back from a uni module I was a little anxious about, and I somehow got basically the top marks? Go figure, I guess! Lots of luck with the film, and love from here. P.S., james, my profile photo is from a French anti-AIDS campaign by the organisation “AIDES”, they had a strange series of photoshoots of people having sex with venomous animals a few years ago.
Hey. I could take your advice and dance around naked, but then again I could do that with my roommate in the room. He wouldn’t mind if I really wanted to, I don’t think. Mostly I’m using his absence as an excuse to pile excess books up on his desk. I’ve entered another fervent phase of reading and it’s wonderful. Excited to see your book recommendations, especially as I go into break next week. I do end up reading quite a lot more philosophy than I’d ever publicly admit to (except here, where sincerity is my norm). I do enjoy Deleuze, but outside of a certain decentralisation of the whole faculty I don’t think I’ve properly absorbed him yet. Love that you’re busy with the film, especially in (seemingly) a better way than before. Love overusing parentheses.