The blog of author Dennis Cooper

Macaulay Culkin Day

 

‘Macaulay Culkin has opened the doors of his trippy New York apartment-turned-art studio. The 32-year-old former child star, who looks considerably healthier than he did this time last year, is posed inside his $2 million SoHo pad. But while most would do a little tidying up before letting cameras into their home, Mr Culkin seemed happy with the litter-strewn look, leaving cigarette piles.. alcohol bottles and half-emptied cans of Red Bull kicking around. e also decided to wear a bizarre outfit for the occasion topping off his ‘artist at work’ guise with a shoulder-length peroxide blonde wig and Jackie O sunglasses.

‘Mr Culkin explained that he snapped up the roomy 5,100-square-foot condo, described as a ‘playground workspace’, because it reminded him of the 1988 film Big. “After seeing Big, I wanted a loft space with an elevator that opened directly into my apartment, just like Tom Hanks did,” he said. A Nineties theme runs throughout the place with Nickelodeon game-show decor and a wacky Nintendo-themed room. Mr Culkin – who is worth a reported $15 million – isn’t the only one to live at the flat and it is also home to his friends Adam Green and Toby Goodshank. Mr Green and Mr Goodshank are both former members of the indie rock band Moldy Peaches. The trio got together last February to form the art collective Three Men and a Baby (3MB).

‘Mr Culkin explained at the time: “We cleared out everything, laid down plastic and went a little nuts at the art supply store.” Their debut show titled Leisure Inferno included brightly colored paintings punctuated with Nineties cultural references. The cast of Seinfeld standing nude on the Wheel of Fortune; Korn’s lead singer, Jonathan Davis, playing to a surreal crowd that includes E.T. and Wally from the Where’s Waldo series; and Kurt Cobain rendered as a character from the 1995 film Hackers.

‘Describing 3MB’s inspiration Mr Culkin said: “We took a lot of things from our own youths, from 5 to 25 years old. It’s almost self-referential in that we’re referencing ourselves when we’re referencing Hackers. It’s essentially a box within a box.” While their home-turned-studio is stuffed with bright decorations and pots of paint, the place feels conspicuously devoid of actual art. But apparently that’s because most of the group’s shared creations are currently on display at Le Poisson Rouge, a bar and gallery space in Greenwich Village.

‘Mr Culkin’s last acting job was on the TV series Kings back in 2009 and his last film was the dark comedy Sex and Breakfast back in 2007. At the height of his fame the Home Alone star was regarded as the most successful child actor since Shirley Temple and once quipped: “I’d made enough money by the time I was 12 to never have to work again.” Last February it was speculated that Mr Culkin had developed a drug habit when he stepped out sipping Red Bull looking emaciated.

‘The National Enquirer reported that he was “close to death,” because of an addiction to prescription medication and heroin – claims his publicist told MailOnline were “fictitious” and “categorically without merit.” Now that Mr Green and Mr Goodshank have left New York on music tours, Mr Culkin is now working on his next book, a collection of non-fiction stories about his friends which will be a follow-up to his 2006 novel Junior. “I’ve been about 80 percent done with the first draft for far too long. But now I’m going to make sure it takes up some of my energy,” he said.’ — collaged

 

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Stills






























































 

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Further

Macaulay Culkin @ IMDb
Fuck Yeah, Macaulay Culkin
Macaulay Culkin Fansite
‘A Gallery Of Macaulay Culkin’s Art’
‘Troubled child star Macaulay Culkin’s solitary lunch for one at Taco Bell’
‘Step Into Macaulay Culkin’s Terrifyingly ’90s Hipster Apartment’
‘Macaulay Culkin: Little Boy Lost’
‘Don’t Macaulay Culkin Your Parents’
Macaulay Culkin: ‘I’m Michael Jackson’s Doo Doo Head’
Macaulay Culkin’s iPod presents A Saved by the Bell Valentine’s Dance
Photos from Macaulay Culkin’s iPod: Christmas Beach Edition
Macaulay Culkin Soundboard
Video: ‘E TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY Macaulay Culkin’
Buy Macaulay Culkin’s ‘Junior’

 

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Exploitations


Macaulay Culkin Addicted To Heroin


Macaulay Culkin Dead or Alive?


Macaulay Culkin Near Death Worries Now Coming From His Parents

 

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Junior

 

THE INTRODUCTION.

NowHere Near Nowhere.

I want to make one thing clear before we begin: I am not a writer. I couldn’t possibly be a writer. I have written and rewritten the words “Introduction” or “The Introduction” so many times in the past couple of years that I’m convinced I was not born to do this. Writing could not be my calling after the mess I’ve made of all this. This has taken way too long. The whole process of writing this book was so agonizing and ate away at so much of my time that there’s no way I can’t finish now. But at this rate I never will. It took me ten minutes to write this very sentence. I’m no writer. This is not my calling.

Why is it so difficult now? This used to be a comforting thing. Writing this book was fun. It made me feel better. I’m not comfortable right now. I’ve never felt comfortable explaining the way that I am. This (the newest in a long line of introductions) is already a failure and I’ve barely begun. Here I am, only on the second paragraph, and I already feel like I’m blowing it.

It’s just that in the past year I have gotten way too many people involved in this project — agents, publishers and so forth that I feel I’ve been disappointing with my lack of results. I’m just ready to let this go. I’m just ready to give up and say this is it and nothing more. You can have it because I have nothing left.

Not in any kind of painful way, but it’s hard for me to talk about this project. It’s just that I don’t know what it is anymore. I could just be imagining this, but people see this book in different ways. I could show this book to ten different people and have them form very different opinions of what it is and what it means to them. Sometimes I feel like I have a dozen different people inside of me. I’ve always been that way and I’ve always written stuff down. But this is different, this is the introduction of my book. I can’t just wing it.

My real problem is that after a while I decided to save this introduction for last. I figured that one of the reasons this intro was so hard to write was because I needed the book and all its parts to be in place before trying to sum it all up. And to be quite honest with you, most of the material in this book is foreign to me now.

If I wanted to be all David Copperfield about it, I could say I began this project more than two decades ago on a hot summer day in a New York City hospital, but the truth is I only became of aware of it actually becoming a book in early January of 2001. It is now crawling to the end of 2005 with the completion of this endeavor nowhere in sight. So much of it was written so long ago that I may have lost sight of what it meant, not only to the reader, but to me as well. Perhaps that is why I have found it so difficult to introduce this part of myself to the rest of the world, because I don’t know what it means to me anymore.

So much has changed since I first sat down and began to write this book. I’ve changed. I got arrested recently and to be quite honest with you it wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be. I got a new dog and I named her Audrey. I found a girl (a real girl) that I’m in love with, and if you can believe it, she loves me back.

I’m looking at her right now, in fact. She bought me a new computer and on the desktop there’s this picture of her on the beach. She and I and a bunch of our friends went to Hawaii recently. I had never been there before and I enjoyed myself very much. We had a house right on the beach. A couple of days into it, while sitting in the shade nursing my new sunburn, she decided to try surfing for the first time. And needless to say it was quite a funny sight. If you’ve never seen someone take their first surfing lesson before, then drop this book and everything else you’re doing immediately and arrange it. It’s well worth it. On one of her many tumbles into the ocean a friend of ours must have snapped a picture of her. Her butt is on the board as she’s washing ashore and she has this smile on her face. It looks like you’ve just surprised a five-year-old with a truck full of candy. I’m talking ear to ear. Every time I turn on my computer and I see this picture it makes me happy. I know how lucky I am to have someone that makes me feel that way, believe me. I’m lucky to have her.

My point is I didn’t have her or that picture when I started making this book. (I may have had other pictures, but that’s a different book altogether.) I didn’t have a lot of things I do today. I was just some twenty-year-old punk kid who thought he could just whip out some book when I started writing this. Now I’m a twenty-four-year-old accused felon with a dog that shits all over my house and a girlfriend that can’t surf. I can’t account for that person or what he wrote four years ago. I can’t remember his intentions.

So I’ve decided (just now in fact) that I’m going to disassociate myself from this book completely. I think it’s the right thing to do. Too many of the people around me are scared of it, and rightfully so. I’ve put my words in a position to be easily misinterpreted and used against me. So from now on this is not my book. Understood?

Maybe some visual aids will help us both. This is me. And this is my book. Get it?

Me.

My book. v There, I think that helped us both better understand that this is my book and not me. This isn’t even a proper representation of the way I feel at this very moment. This is just a collection of words put together in a way of my choosing to tell some kind of story. So from now on nothing you read (including this introduction) is my fault, it’s the book’s fault.

See how I got myself off the hook? A real writer wouldn’t have done that. I am not a writer. I am a fraud, and you can quote me on that. I can read the headlines now. “Young man uses connections to get book published.” The reviews nearly write themselves. In fact, I wouldn’t be very surprised if these last couple of sentences are the most quoted of any other. I’m a sham, a fraud, and a failure all at the same time. And this introduction proves it.

One of the things I hate most about this book is that it is all about me. Much like anyone with too much time on his or her hands, I feel as though I am the most important person on earth and everything I do is relevant. I say the most charming and inspired things when no one is around. I think I might have something to say and that everyone in the entire world wants to know about it. Almost everything people do is artistic. That doesn’t make it art. I may be being too hard on myself but that is the reality of my world and I’m letting you know how aware of it I really am. I’m not trying to pass this book off as something it is not. This is just a bunch of stuff I put together and someone said

“Hey, you should write a book,” so I did. It might not be your cup of tea. You might only get a couple pages into it and throw it in the trash. You might not even give yourself a chance to read this very sentence. But who knows, you could be one of the people out there who might actually like it. You may be able to say all the things about it I can’t say for myself. But then again, I’m not a writer.

So here it comes, the book. You can say anything you want about it now. It’s not mine anymore.

the end . . .

 

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20 of Macaulay Culkin’s appearances

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John Hughes Uncle Buck (1989)
‘In this cheerful, lightweight comedy, excruciatingly clumsy, disorganized, and messy Uncle Buck Russell (John Candy) becomes the screens most unlikely babysitter since Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty. While their parents are away, eight-year old Miles (Macaulay Culkin), six-year old Maizy (Gaby Hoffman) and their teen-aged sister, Tia (Jean Kelly) are left in the care of Buck. Surprisingly, the very inept Uncle Buck entertains the younger children who come to love him and earns the respect of Tia when he rescues her from her worthless boyfriend. However, in doing so, Buck nearly loses his long-time girlfriend Chanice (Amy Madigan). John Candy is delightful in the leading role giving a touching and notable comic performance.’ — Allrovi


Excerpt

 

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John Hughes Home Alone (1990)
Home Alone was set—and mostly shot—in the greater Chicago area. Other shots, such as those of Paris, are either stock footage or film trickery. The Paris-Orly Airport scenes were filmed in one part of O’Hare International Airport. The scene where Kevin wades through a flooded basement when trying to outsmart the burglars was shot in the swimming pool of New Trier High School. A mock-up of the McDonnell Douglas DC10 business class was also put together in the school, on the basketball courts. Some scenes were shot in a three-story single-family house located at 671 Lincoln Avenue in the village of Winnetka. The kitchen in the film was shot in the house, along with the main staircase, basement and most of the first floor landing. The house’s dining room, and all the downstairs rooms (excluding the kitchen) were built on a sound stage. The house was built in 1921 and features five bedrooms, a fully converted attic, a detached double garage and a greenhouse. “Kevin’s tree house” in the backyard was built specifically for the film and demolished after principal photography ended.’ — collaged


The original trailer


The screams

 

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Howard Zieff My Girl (1991)
‘To cut to the inevitable: Yes, Macaulay Culkin, the towheaded young megastar of Home Alone, kicks the bucket in My Girl — and no, the big event won’t be nearly as devastating to little ones (at least not to those over the age of 8) as, say, Bambi’s mother getting gunned down by hunters. This will come as a relief to many parents, but it’s also a testament to the emotional level at which My Girloperates. The movie unfolds in TV Land, that clean, well-lighted place where life comes in episodes and there isn’t a tragedy that can’t be resolved in 17 minutes. If only the movie didn’t pile on conflicts like a Freudian layer cake. By the time Culkin’s character dies, it happens so casually that it’s almost as if he’d moved away.’ — Entertainment Weekly


Excerpt

 

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John Landis Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991)
‘Michael and I had an understanding about my father. He knew what that was all about. He’d lived it. It’s not like I can just bump into people on the street and say, Oh! You too! It doesn’t happen that often. Michael’s still a kid. I’m still a kid. We’re both going to be about 8 years old forever in some place because we never had a chance to be 8 when we actually were. That’s kind of the beautiful and the cursed part of our lives.’ — Macaulay Culkin

 

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Joseph Ruben The Good Son (1993)
‘Who in the world would want to see this movie? Watching The Good Son, I asked myself that question, hoping that perhaps the next scene would contain the answer, although it never did. The movie is a creepy, unpleasant experience, made all the worse because it stars children too young to understand the horrible things we see them doing. Macaulay Culkin’s character is a very evil little boy; the movie could have been called Henry, Portrait of a Future Serial Killer. But what rings false is that the Culkin character isn’t really a little boy at all. His speech is much too sophisticated and ironic for that, and so is his reasoning and his cleverness. The character would be more frightening, perhaps, if he did seem young and naive. This way, he seems more like a distasteful device by the filmmakers, who apparently think there is a market for glib one-liners by child sadists.’ — Roger Ebert


Trailer


The Making of The Good Son

 

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Howard Deutch Getting Even with Dad (1994)
‘In Getting Even With Dad, a straight-arrow 11-year-old (Macaulay Culkin) whose mother has died gets dropped off in San Francisco with his father, an ex-con (Ted Danson) who has ignored him. The boy tries to foil his dad’s final heist and fix him up with a female police investigator. Anyone who was hoping that by now Macaulay Culkin would have outgrown the Home Alone character can forget it. He may be 13, but he’s still cute. He still outsmarts every bad guy, parent and cop he runs into. And the kids still think it’s pretty funny. Macaulay Culkin’s character was supposed to have a short haircut in this movie, but Culkin, who had let his hair grow at the time, liked his looks and did not want to cut it. His father, Kit Culkin, demanded on behalf of his son that he be allowed to keep his hair the way it was, pointing out that his character was more a rough around the edges, working class boy and not a clean-cut, prep school one. He got to keep his long hair.’ — LA Times


Excerpt

 

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Donald Petrie Richie Rich (1994)
Richie Rich was Macaulay Culkin’s final film as a child actor. The movie received negative reviews from critics and maintains a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 20 reviews. However, Roger Ebert gave the film 3 out of 4 stars saying he was surprised how much he enjoyed it and though it wasn’t the greatest movie, he liked that it had style and didn’t go for cheap payoffs. Richie Rich earned a Razzie Award nomination for Macaulay Culkin as Worst Actor for his performance in the movie (also for Getting Even with Dad and The Pagemaster) but lost the award to Kevin Costner for Wyatt Earp. The film also fell short of recouping its budget at the box office, with a $38 million gross in North America in a $40 million budget. It was however a home video success, with $125 million in VHS rentals.’ — Wiki


Trailer


Richie Rich in 5 Seconds (Extended)

 

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Harmony Korine Sonic Youth’s Sunday (1998)
‘”Sunday” was the loudest, most conventional rock track on Sonic Youth’s 1998 effort A Thousand Leaves, but it was the second version of the tune to be released. The first landed on the soundtrack of Richard Linklater’s 1996 film subUrbia, which itself was an adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s play. It starred Giovanni Ribisi, Parker Posey and Nick Zahn, but by the time 1998 rolled around, it was director Harmony Korine and Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin who were repping doomed hipsters. It still skews strange, ten years later, watching Culkin and Thurston Moore bang their heads in slow-motion. Especially since there is nothing slow about the track: It rocks holy hell. It’s an odd juxtaposition, but Harmony Korine is all about that.’ — Wired


The Making of Harmony Korine’s ‘Sunday’

 

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Randy Barbato Party Monster (2003)
‘It’s weird when people say [about Party Monster], “Oh you did this to get away from the work you did before.” Well, that implies I’m trying to break out of some kind of box that I’ve been put into. The reason I took so much time off is I felt the industry defined me, and I wanted to define myself. So I had to take back my own life, and I had to go away for eight years. I was losing touch with my family and I hadn’t done a full year of schoolwork in my entire life, so I had to take control of myself again. Before, I was doing things that I didn’t really want to, and I lost the joy, because it became like a machine. I was being forced to do something I didn’t want to do. But when I look back on it, I did truly enjoy doing it. It was just a matter of finding the joy again, and I think I have.’ — Macaulay Culkin


Trailer


Excerpt

 

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Brian Dannelly Saved! (2004)
‘I think that at the heart of this movie is a really good Christian message. It’s a really faith-based movie with a good Christian message, a good message over all. The basis of any religion, let alone anything Christ-related, is be a good person, be good to the people around you and accept them for who they are. And that’s it, whether you’re a Buddhist or anything like that, that’s the message. I think that’s the underlying message of this movie, which is be good, accept people for their faiths or what they believe in or don’t believe in, and you can make a family whatever you want to make it as long as you accept people for what they are, no matter what their faith is. I think overall it’s a good Christian message. I hope Christians get it, I hope they really dig it.’ — Macaulay Culkin


Trailer

 

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Macauley Culkin reads from his novel Junior at B&N; (2006)
‘Novels written by celebrities tend to be grating, solipsistic affairs. Given a choice between Ethan Hawke’s literary fiction and the veiled memoirs of glittering train wrecks like Nicole Richie, most sane people would choose television. When I heard that Culkin was now a novelist, I rolled my eyes along with everyone else, a reaction I had to suppress repeating when he prefaced our chat by announcing, “The funny thing is, I’m not really a big reader, not a big fan of books in the first place.” But Junior turns out to be oddly, unwittingly . . . compelling. A postmodern mishmash filled with drawings, epistolary fragments, personal manifestos, and public diatribes, the book is best appreciated as a piece of conceptual art rather than a legitimate novel. Tear out the pages, staple them to a wall, and you’d have a deconstructionist installation, an accidental dissertation on the crippling self-consciousness brought on by early fame. Child Actor: Fall and Rise.’ — New York Magazine


Excerpt

 

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Miles Brandman Sex and Breakfast (2007)
Sex and Breakfast tries to say something meaningful and profound about sex and relationships, but the script is so poorly conceived and constructed that any message it may have had is muddled up beyond recognition. If you’re looking for an enlightenment, you’re likely to end up either confused or angry; if you’re looking just for entertainment, look somewhere else. The movie tries so hard to be important that it never even tries to entertain, and it ends up being neither. As a result it may be one of the dullest and most forgettable movies you’ll see, despite its shock value (which is much less shocking than it tries to be), the admittedly intriguing subject matter, and the competent editing and cinematography. The sad truth is that the only real draw it has is a group sex scene featuring the kid from Home Alone.’ — IMDb


Excerpt

 

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Orange (UK) Phone Operator Ad (2007)
‘Cinema advertisement for the UK phone operator Orange and the Orange Film Board featuring ‘the men from Orange’ meeting former child star Macaulay Culkin on the set of a serious prison movie. The two men convince Macaulay that his serious prison drama needs an input of some ‘Home Alone’ style slapstick. “You’ve been doing this whole ‘loner’ thing forever. What age are you now…15?”‘ — collaged

 

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Adam Green The Wrong Ferrari (2011)
The Wrong Ferarri is a feature-film written and directed by Adam Green. Conceived on Green’s European music tour in the summer of 2010, the film was shot entirely on an iPhone camera, with Green writing the script for the actors on index cards. Scenes were shot in France, Prague, Venice, The Jersey Shore and New York City. Green has stated that The Wrong Ferarri was inspired by Woody Allen’s Bananas, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s UHF, Robert Downey, Sr.’s Putney Swope and the television show Seinfeld. The film contains strong profanity, sexual themes, and several scenes of nudity and is unrated by the MPAA.’ — collaged


the entirety

 

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Macaulay Culkin’s iPod (2012)
‘Last year, Macauley Culkin quietly started a new job as a New York DJ at Le Poisson Rouge, a club managed by Tabisel, also a former child actor. Each of Culkin’s parties come with its own theme, usually tangentially related to adolescence. He had a prom where he crowned his own king and queen. After the paparazzi snapped a shot of him in February, looking scraggly and gaunt on a New York street, he hosted a canned- food drive to mock the tabloids that wondered whether he had been starving himself. Tonight’s dinosaur birthday party is like a piece of performance art: a former child actor’s reinterpretation of childhood. Its actual meaning is harder to understand.’ — Daily Beast

 

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3MB Collective Discusses Their Gallery (2012)
‘Macaulay Culkin’s not dying — he’s just embraced the path of a starving artist. Apparently, Culkin has teamed up with buddies Toby Goodshank and Adam Green to form 3MB Collective, an art group whose debut show, “Leisure Inferno,” is opening at The Gallery at Le Poisson Rouge (where Culkin currently hosts weekly dance parties) on September 13th. In this in-studio video, a mostly barefoot Culkin shows off the group’s ”hell-raiser disco luau” art, including a naked painting of the cast of Seinfeld on Wheel of Fortune and an homage to Kurt Cobain as a hacker of the “deep web,” and talks about the joys of collaborative art.’ — Flavorwire

 

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Adam Green Adam Green’s Aladdin (2016)
‘“I’ve been trying to really take a step back from the traditional rock musician thing,” said Adam Green. The musician’s tour this fall, one of dozens since making a name for himself in the New York indie scene in the 90’s, is definitely untraditional: Each concert starts with a screening of his film Adam Green’s Aladdin, after which Green will take to his set-designed stage in the bell-bottomed costume from the film, bringing the soundtrack alive. In short, it’s a real-life execution of a movie-turned-art-show-turned-album, which Green refers to as “a community project, because everyone did things for free.” The idea — a film starring himself and a genie lamp that doubles as a 3D printer in one of his favorite childhood stories — started at a dinner with Natasha Lyonne in New York, and was further improved during a downtown shopping trip where he bought a lamp with Alia Shawkat. Over the next few years, he wrote the screenplay on planes and in hotel rooms while on tour, eventually turning to Kickstarter for funds and friends for his cast. In Green’s case, those friends happened to be Lyonne, Shawkat, and Macaulay Culkin.’ — clgd


the entirety

 

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Macauley Culkin, Adam Green, Thomas Bayne, Toby Goodshank Father John Misty: Total Entertainment Forever (2017)
‘There is a lot going on in Father John Misty’s new “Total Entertainment Forever” video. George Washington eats some Viagra and throws on a VR headset in an effort to “hack the Constitution.” Then, inside the virtual world, he witnesses a 1990s fever dream—Kurt Cobain (played by none other than Macaulay Culkin) is arrested by McDonald’s-themed fascists and flagellated. Then, at the orders of their hook-handed leader (Josh Tillman, naturally), Culkin/Cobain is crucified. All the sets and props are made of papier-mâché, there’s an incomprehensible appearance from “Garfield” character Jon Arbuckle (also crucified), and it ends with a little girl visiting Washington’s charred body.’ — Pitchfork


the entirety

 

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Mike Warzin Google Assistant: Home Alone Again (2018)
‘Once again, twenty-eight long years after the exciting Christmas adventure in Home Alone (1990), the Wet Bandits’ grown-up nemesis, Kevin McCallister, finds out that he has the house to himself. However, this time, he is not entirely home alone, as Google’s versatile AI-powered, intelligent personal assistant is on his side. Now, Kevin can easily organise his shopping list; turn down the temperature; create complex personalised routines, and above all, fend off the ambitious burglars. Will you, too, make Google do it?’ — Nick Riganas


the entirety

 

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Seth Green Changeland (2019)
‘It’s a polished, pleasant film whose locations all look duly spectacular — if you hadn’t dreamt of a Thai getaway before, you certainly will after watching. The eye candy, amiable cast and other attractions are all enjoyable enough that you can forgive how perilously slight the material here is. Green’s writing has previously been primarily confined (as has frequent collaborator Meyer’s) to the surreal ADD animation sketch-comedy series “Robot Chicken.” While “Changeland” merits credit for breaking out of that antic comfort zone, it really doesn’t try very hard to provide even the mild narrative substance needed to ballast a lightweight entertainment like this.’ — Variety


Trailer

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** G, Hi, G! I always have a pack of chewing gum in my pocket. Being a smoker, it helps me get through unusually long movies and performances and stuff without being overly distracted by cravings. At the moment, I tend to chew Freedent White, but I’m not in love with it at all. ** David Ehrenstein, I was obsessed with that song when I was a little kid. Also ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’. I’m sure that must mean something. ** David S. Estornell, You too. Dress heavy, it’s cold outside. ** _Black_Acrylic, Nice description. And true when I think about it. My all-time favourite gum was this one with ‘sour orange’ flavoring. but it only tasted like god for about a minute tops before the flavor was nowhere to be found, and then I could have been chewing any old thing. ** Misanthrope, Dumbassery can be attractive. And I don’t mean that in a sexual innuendo way. A lot of people don’t like my work. That’s neither news nor bothersome to me. I ‘saw’ you at the marathon thing. I had it streaming in the background for most of the day. With a few exceptions, it seemed like a bunch of poet friends reading for each other and patting each other on the back. I thought I seemed like kind of a sore thumb. But I’m used to that, ha ha. ** Kyler, Hi, Kyler! Thanks for saying that, man. Happy increasingly less new New Year. Yeah, sleep in. What I’m typing is absolutely not with losing a dream for. Good to see you, buddy! ** Dominik, Hey, hey, Dominick! Me too. I think the director was never able to raise the funding for the film. I think he was trying to raise a million dollars or something difficult like that. He made a short film version first that got shown and seen a bit called ‘Weak Species’. Here’s the trailer. I don’t know that Poppy book, huh. Good? I guess Poppy has totally quit writing now, from what I hear. My year started usually, I guess. Doing the usual. Whatever that is. Have a sweet weekend. That’s some scary love, and I like scary love. Love that’s an exact replica of this Cramps song/video just because I just watched/listen to it five minutes ago and because it’s so great, no? ** h (now j), Hey! Chew that gum. That’s what I’d do. Thank you about the reading. xo. ** Steve Erickson, France was quiet as a mouse at the strike of New Years except for some gigantic illegal rave down south that was all over the news and may have partly lead to our curfew being switched in certain regions from 8 pm to 6 pm as of today, although not in Paris thank god. Hope your computer hangs on by more than a thread all weekend. Yes, the same gum-related rumors flew about when I was a kid. I’m sure there must be a small bunch of people right now who think chewing gum contains a microchip that controls the chewers’ minds and was placed there by Bill Gates. I’m not sure how the NYE marathon thing went. I’m not sure how one would know. I guess via traffic level? That I don’t know. ** Sypha, Hi. Sure, I’m happy to have that post. You can tell Justin or whoever to send me the post makings when he or they want, and I’ll happily host it at whatever time is convenient for them. Sounds fun. HNY to you! ** Bill, Like I said to Steve, it’s hard to know that marathon reading went. A few people in the related chat said nice things. I don’t think it’s being archived, but I’m not entirely sure. That stout sounds nauseating, man, ha ha. You still okay? Have a fine weekend full of, gee, the moon and the stars? ** Right. Macauley Culkin has had such a curious career trajectory. To the degree that I thought a post charting the whole strange thing might provide an interesting experience. And that’s what I made and what you currently have staring you in the face. See you on Monday.

18 Comments

  1. Golnoosh

    Hi Dennis, your reading last night was otherworldly. In fact, the most powerful reading I’ve ever seen. (And I have been to many readings and I have seen some good ones, although I’m quite picky as you can imagine). Your reading made me more obsessed with ‘I Wished’. I am sad I have to wait like nine months to read the whole book. But it wasn’t just about the words. There was something about the way you read it. The way you just gave it all, and how vulnerable but courageous it seemed to do so. It left me feel breathless and tearful. The only other performance that I saw that came close to this was in 2016, a few weeks after I’d lost my mum; there was an event for the book Mad Like Artaud, and as part of it there was this performance artist who crawled on the floor the whole time, naked, and tortured himself – for instance, by banging himself against the radiator… I wasn’t sure what was happening but I found myself in tears. Your reading had the same effect on me last night. Again, I am not sure why, and if I’m honest this uncertainty has made it a bit of a challenge to finish my essay on your work; I find it difficult to intellectualise and justify something that I have an instinctive connection/ reaction to. I hope you’re well xoxo

    ps Home Alone boy is cool; although I find it a bit weird that he’s in his 40s now…

  2. David S. Estornell

    Oh gosh! I really would like to fuck mister Culkin, he lives in Vincennes, 12ème arrondissement de Paris. I would like to kiss him, he is beautiful. Have a nice day beloved Dennis. It’s cold out there. Bisous 😘

  3. David Ehrenstein

    Outside of being Michael Jackson “Roadkill” MacCauleyCulkin is a perfect example of the way the “Entertainment” bohemoth chew and and spits outc child stars. Darryl Hickamn — so memorable in “Leve Her To Heaven, “Meet Me in St. Lous” and “Keeper of the Flame” has been most eloquent on this point, speaking of the way he rose to a certain level — but no further — kept him sane and aive (He’s still with us BTW) MaCauley Culkin is thoroughly washed-up as an actor — his one megahit “Home Alon” leading nowhere but Michael Jackson’ bed. His more talented brother Kieran (beyond superb in “Igby Goes Down” and “Margaret”) may have a chnce at a real career. Dean Stockwell, who is also still with us , had a great career as both a child star and an adult actor. When asked what he’ddo if his children wanted to go into show business, he said he’d build them a theater for the backyard.

    Haley Joel Osent is another example of a brilliant child star who like MacCauley never made it to adult roles. He is however still alive. The same can’t be said of of such great child stars who ended up as drug ODs like Scotty Beckett and Bobby Driscoll.

    It’s a sad business boys and girls

  4. Misanthrope

    Dennis, Ha! Well, dumbassery works for David, so I think you’re right, hahaha. And of course not in a sexual innuendo way.

    Yay! You saw me on there. I did leave a comment there, too. I’m sure you saw that.

    Well, I can tell you this about your reading: while everyone else was reading, the comments were popping in left and right. When you read (except for one comment right at the beginning): silence. Says something, I think.

    The bit you read was brutal but tender. I told some friends, “He’s never written about this before in this way. It left me speechless.” And at the end of one line, I caught a little of your dark humor that no one ever seems to catch in your stuff. But yeah, it was powerful, hence the silence.

    So if you were a sore thumb, it was a welcome one that shook things up a bit.

    I watched the whole hour you were in. Kinda got what you were talking about there too. There was one I really didn’t like at all. The one fellow read from his car, which I found really interesting, with the people walking by in the background. At one point, I was like, “What if somebody carjacks this man in the middle of it?”

    Who was the “Allen Ginsberg” person who kept putting up quotes? I guess they were quotes from Ginsberg’s work? I don’t know. It was fucking annoying, though.

    I’m sending a link to it to Rigby, Joe, and Mieze. I think it’ll be archived? They want to see it.

    Talked to Rigby last night. Put him on speakerphone for a bit so he could scandalize my family. It was a pretty good time.

  5. Jeremy McFarland

    Hi, Dennis! Happy New Year!

    I had a huge crush on Macaulay after seeing Party Monster in high school. I recently got all of my old books from my mom’s house and found my copy of Junior. I haven’t reread it, but when I did read it I was really pleased with. The whole notion of it as not-an-autobiography autobiography was really cool to me at the time.

    Have you ever had the chance to meet him? I started reading Smothered In Hugs and was surprised by how many now massively famous young celebs you’ve interviewed.

    Anyway, hope you and your loved ones are well!

  6. Dominik

    Hi!!

    Thank you for another great post! I’m pretty fascinated with Macaulay Culkin. I find his career trajectory curious too, and he’s obviously pretty close to being a boymuse, at least on a certain level. His book introduction is surprisingly neurotic and self-conscious. At least it was surprising to me. It really does make me think of these almost unedited “a famous person wrote this” kind of books (usually called “honest” instead of unedited) but I still feel a slight urge to pick it up, haha.

    Wow, I’ve never heard of “Weak Species.” I need to investigate right now. Thank you! Did you feel like it had an understanding of or connection to your writing?

    “The Devil You Know” is a short story collection, and it’s somewhere between Poppy’s two periods (the horror/damaged boy period and the later New Orleans chefs period). I liked it, some stories more than others. He has a Patreon (patreon.com/docbrite), and it says he’s working on a book entitled “Water If God Wills It: Religion and Spirituality in the Work of Stephen King” now.

    I have to agree, this Cramps song/video is great. Love looking for love in public toilets, D.

  7. Chris Goode

    Hey D, what up dawg. Just dropt in to wish you a phantasmagorical hoot of a year-to-come, and here you are putting up the Macaulay Culkin decorations like you knew I was coming.

    I feel like from the moment he did the Sunday video (& The Bad Son book that HK made around the same time) it was sort of impossible for Mac ever to do anything in future that would be not-interesting. Like everything would always be fraught and confusing and overdetermined, even whatever boring chat show or dumb goof-blob with Adam Green, because of the long indelible radiance of that moment. I was thinking the other day, when Michael Alig died, that I need to watch ‘Party Monster’ again. But ‘need’ is probably doing some heavy work in that sentence.

    Well, in the parallel planet where an Abba is a standard international unit for the happiness of a Happy New year, I wish you an infinitely cube-of-Abba new year, D, and I send love from London, where we are all dying, but it hasn’t made anything about us seem less pretentious, so far as I can tell.

    Illegal hugs, Ch.xx

  8. h (now j)

    Dennis!! How was your weekend? Very interesting post on Macaulay Culkin! Honestly it’s a bit difficult to mediate on his strange career trajectory right now but his change is indeed puzzling.

    I’ve mailed something to your place (via a store in Paris) for your upcoming birthday so I’m hoping you will get it soon & enjoy. Please let me know when the mail arrives. I didn’t want to say anything to surprise you (if possible at all) but this circumstance makes me worry about the safety. Please quarantine the package for a few days before you open it.

    A few days ago I realize I have a presentation (brief one, though) at a seriously polite conference on this coming Thursday, I feel I will be a bit stressed next week but more soon! (The post I promised will be with you sometime before mid-January… apologies for the delay; I’d forgotten about a few previously scheduled tasks this winter and the covid surge seems to slow down everything. But truly excited to send you that one! )

  9. cal

    gonna have to listen to The Pizza Underground to day now, thanks Dennis lol. How have you been my friend?

  10. Sypha

    Dennis, thanks, I let them know. Well, it turns out they’ll be collecting all the information and then sending it to me so I’ll stitch it together and send it to you when it’s done.

  11. _Black_Acrylic

    I always reckoned Macaulay Culkin to be one of the good guys, and this post only confirms that to be the case. I thought Party Monster: The Shockumentary was pretty wonderful so am curious to give the MC-starring film a try.

  12. wolf

    Cooppitty Coop!!
    Happy new year dude! Whatever that means! Hope 2021 is less shit than 2020! On the one hand, that’s a low bar to clear. On the other hand, “things can always get worse”. Have you taken some fun resolutions? Mines are: (1) bake more cakes, (2) stay more on top of new cool music coming out and (3) try and support theaters if/when they re-open. How was your new year? Nothing very exciting here of course. Although we did get a new projector so that’s nice, esp. for older 3/4 ratio stuff that projects REAL BIG. Do you know the BFI iPlayer? They’ve got a lot of free stuff , mostly older historical films. I can definitely recommend watching some vintage Meliès blown up massive on your living-room wall! I’m not sure you can access it from France though, now I think about it… maybe with a VPN? Well, anyway. It’s a great archive for cinema-lovers.
    I’m back “at work” tomorrow. Wish me luck – if I don’t shove some cacti in my face from sheer boredom after 2 hours it’ll be a goddamn miracle.
    Hugs with papier-maché special effects!

  13. Steve Erickson

    New conspiracy theory: Gates and Soros invented vaping, promoting it among teenagers so the kids can inhale their microchips, which are stamped with an infinitesimal “666” logo! (I just pulled that out of my ass, but if I made a meme to that effect and posted it on Reddit, Facebook or Twitter, I’m sure the QAnon crowd would take it seriously.)

    I wonder exactly what happened between Culkin and MJ, but he seems to have survived the period of “near death from heroin addiction” rumors and be in a better place now.

  14. Bill

    Can’t say I’m a Culkin fan, though I did enjoy Party Monster. I’m slightly tempted to see that last Seth Green movie, though the reviews are quite mixed.

    A curfew starting at 6pm is so… un-French. But.

    Saw Parting Glances again with a friend last night. Fine way to spend a Saturday evening, I must say.

    Bill

  15. Thomas Moronic

    Happy new year Dennis! I love this day. MC totally fascinates me. Such a well curated study of his oddness and the oddness around him. I’m glad that he seems to have a decent grasp of everything.

    The blog has been so good recently. Spent Xmas and new year sat on my own writing and reading and the blog has had a really stellar few weeks (I mean when doesn’t it? But there’s been so much stuff to keep my brain busy!). Loved seeing the Jonathan Brandis photo story poem again! Sorry for being quiet.

    Love
    Thomas xoxo

  16. Kyler

    Loved the comments that Galnoosh and Misa made about your reading. Yes, it was quite stirring. You came on at the end of the hour, and didn’t know how much longer I could stay there, so glad you came on at the end.

    I was very good about not waking to read your comment and will try to do the same on Monday! I just tell myself, relax Kyler, you can read it leisurely after breakfast. We’ll see if that works again. I’ve got this new mattress and it keeps me sleeping late. And dreaming Jungian dreams! So symbolic!

  17. Bill

    I enjoyed this recent dance performance (available free through 1/6), by Margaret Jenkins, with Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert:
    https://youtu.be/wcDDDSx4cp8

    There’s a lot of nice layering of live dance and video. DL Mark Palmer was one of the video artists; not sure if he’s mentioned that here.

    Bill

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