In the beginning of October 2016 Infinity Land Press launched ‘Alien Existence’, a disquieting selection of original artworks and all-new text by Philip Best. Amplifying the dark themes of recent Consumer Electronics albums such as Estuary English and Dollhouse Songs, ‘Alien Existence’ charts the shattered psychic landscape of the early 21st century in all its eerieness, wonder and confusion. ‘Alien Existence’ is sure to both disturb and enchant.

The book includes 40 pages of Best’s creative writings, over 200 colour reproductions and an extensive interview with the artist conducted by Martin Bladh.

As a musician Philip Best now records as Consumer Electronics and has previously been a member of Whitehouse, Ramleh and Skullflower. “Alien Existence” is his second book. The first , “American Campgrounds”, now commands high prices on the collectors market and interest will no doubt be equally strong for this handsome new volume.

260 pages, 280x210mm, hardbound

http://infinitylandpress.com/2999170-alien-existence-by-philip-best

 

 

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EXTRACTS
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BULL MARKET

staff sex films measure the speed / of pre-adolescent orgasm
graffiti as sexual data / take a look at this dying
commercialising appetites / gender identity disorder
rough and tumble / realms of natAure
women once boys / slaves to the token economy
repetition reinforcement / static information
obliterating interiority / time-travel machines
cages built of convention and consumerism
magpie cobbling of memorabilia / cartridges of blurry polaroids
ambient rock and spin / hostile fantasies of higher authority
accelerant tiny stars / on her tiny necrotic hands
child of the double door / somehow special somehow exempt
date-coded footage / kidneys barely functional
alien penetrations / uterine sarcoma
alien existence / filth paradise
servants of the gut and the groin
sette full fowle in synne / intimacy and shame
question the wounds / drilled back sex toys
shape of experience / syntax of events / inherited reflex
gears slipping / discharge of mares in heat / nausea and weight loss
rob the body / skirt-chasing wet cement
warmth fading / competitive suffering / greater london weapons systems
battered blue / inhuman openings / are women animals?
retching worlds entire loosening exercises in begging and the sexless
piecemeal voids crying

 

 

GOD’S NAME EVERYWHERE

We must accept the eventuality of bringing the USA to its knees; accept the closing off of critical sections of the city with barbed wire, armored pig carriers crisscrossing the streets, soldiers everywhere, tommy guns pointed at stomach level, smoke curling black against the daylight sky, the smell of cordite, house-to-house searches, doors being kicked in, the commonness of death.
George L. Jackson Blood In My Eye. Random House, 1972.

Jeannie tells me she used to be real pretty. She says she was popular in school, glee club, honor roll. She says she grew up somewhere across America but now sheís here. Jeannie says, “Guess I’m nothin’ new, huh?”
Scot Sothern Street Walkers. Powerhouse, 2015.

You see, with a logical mind like yours, or other people who try to think this out, or look for a rule that’s being followed, or for a certain way that they think, or had thought out and would do things — there was no such thing. There was no set rule. Just killing, that’s all.
“Joan B.” quoted in Lawrence L. Langer Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. Yale University Press, 1991.

the babies will win against their killers

Telegram sent by Wilhelm Reich, 1 April 1954, collected in Mary Boyd Higgins (Ed.) Whereís The Truth?
Wilhelm Reich Letters and Journals 1948-1957. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2012.

 

 

THE PUSH

woe to the bloody city full of lies and robbery
today i hear the beat of death in all things
i hear it in the streets and in the parks
you will all die
you will all die
you will all die
from mayfair and westminster
to camberwell and peckham rye
riverwheel aflame london capsized
and at night father when i pray
you are not there
you are not there
you are not there
all hail to the creatures and the sluts and the poor
in guarded isles of midday devils all prancing to war
money may fall
and towers may fall
and bodies will fall
but theyíll still want it all and theyíll still take it all
politicians profiteers all poison the well
ride their rough horses headlong pell mell
over layer upon layer of metropolitan sick

it’s a trick
it’s a trick
it’s a trick

so, woe to the bloody city
that covets fresh fields and flesh within the cauldron
this time is evil
woe to the bloody stage
and final blank page of the failed state
that hoards its wealth and arms itself
against the stranded and lost
at whatever the cost
whatever the cost
whatever the cost

o gods, break their teeth
o gods
break their teeth
i mean it’s the attitude that counts
as well as everything else it takes
you with me?
i mean we should never compromise
we wonít get anywhere in life
accepting second best
you get it yet?
if you don’t taste it
if you don’t feel it, baby
we haven’t come a very long way
have we?

so what exactly is it?
this grand unified theory
of female pain and wet cement
could it be the face that would sell condoms in a cunt?
or better yet
i had a lover once
some men came by
shot up the house she lived in
tore up the place
broke every fucking window
burned her out
she couldnít tell me why
i hate men and their violence
their weak murderous minds

 

 

TWENTY MINUTE TEST

1) Undeveloped rolls of film.
2) Two last shots.
3) Leg fracture.
4) More film, recovered then processed.
5) Betamax.
6) FC = Fuck.
7) Some in colour, good quality.
8) Punishment beating.
9) Deep black bruising.
10) Witness stated “His body was normal”.
11) Expressed preference that girl should be “flat”.
12) Wanted to see her stumble and fall.
13) “Bring her down”
14) Failed to pay attention and the lights touched her naked body.
15) Found burns exciting.
16) Had Houston amputation film (HWA).
17) Traced trauma to childhood accident.
18) Tension barely perceptible.

 

 

MIRROR WORLD

Julie was curling a young girl’s hair when I came in. She was styling it to be just like her own: wavy all round the sides and flat at the crown. But the girl’s hair was shorter and brown in colour; Julie’s was pure blonde.
They were grouped around the mirror. Julie smiled over. He was a mechanic, but he’d always wanted to try his hand at writing. He was telling me this, and fixing coffee, as the girls continued to do their thing at the mirror.
There were pictures of dolphins and killer whales on the walls.

I tried to show her exactly how the body had looked from what I could remember of the photograph [KP27, the “scene-establishing shot”], almost a year after I had seen it. Putting my palms on the ground, I lowered myself down on my left side and curled myself round into a sort of foetal position, knees bent and legs drawn up.

VOICE-OVER: I’d been having a recurring nightmare. I’m three years old dancing on my mother’s grand piano. I’m wearing her gold spiked heels. The grownups are clapping, stomping in rhythm. My ankles twist in the big shoes. I want to stop dancing but they cheer even louder.
IMAGE: PRESCHOOLER IN UNDERSHIRT AND UNDERPANTS, DANCING FOR THE CAMERA
VOICE-OVER: I don’t know what they want from me.

They wait their turn,
huddled shyly together on benches.
When the individual is called, his or her outer
garments are removed so that every bone,
every muscle, is exposed to the penetrating
gaze of the specialists.

I am so fucking up to my neck in debt & so badly need to do well. This is not a bad thing to do with JJ & I’m really happy for him. JJ gets everyone falling over themselves – I get fake numbers & stood up.
Johnny’s so well into it – making heaps of friends & as usual no matter where I am – I feel alone.
It’s not San Francisco, it’s me.
I can’t explain this feeling to anyone, this feeling of COMPLETE DETEST for myself
& this feeling of being so average. I’ve tried so badly to understand why & to make mother & JJ understand – but they think Iím being so silly – but I really feel like this so much.
It’s a feeling of being so invisible, being no-one, feeling like Iím never a part of something & never quite fitting in.
I know Johnny has been all over the place since leaving, but he never has that feeling of no self worth. The most beautiful people become spellbound. He always feels he deserves the best & BECOMING MORE RADIANT and confident all the time.
I really am not joking & this sounds stupid but I am so exhausted with feeling this shit & feeling so lonely despite being with JJ every day & feeling so low & so up to my eyeballs with debt – I sometimes really can’t be bothered to wait & find out what happens.
I just want to disappear.
I feel like I’m reeling & I don’t know what to do.
I feel so outside.
I’ve nothing anywhere.

 

 

BALLROOM BLITZ

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS Live at Tilburg 013, Saturday 15 Sept 2012

Set list: (You All Forget) Rudolf Hess. Gemini. Anne Frank v. Franz Kafka. Come Clean. Everyone Everywhere Fuck. Mothers Morals. Estuary English. Grendel Drone.

Band members: Philip Best, Sarah Froelich.
Set length: 60 mins.

CODY Review: Those for whom Mogwai is just “noise for girls” will find that there is plenty to do in Stage01, which tonight forms the backdrop for a trio of power electronics and harsh noise acts. Thus there is the duo Consumer Electronics, according proven shock-and-awe-prescription public body comes: exhibitionism, Rudolf Hess, screeching noise capes, Anne Frank, masturbation, Britney Spears, disheveled wanker paste booklet which work. Mr. Consumer Electronics is a fat Rob Halford in the uniform of a darts player and the dell-like lady to his right a few times does not keep her smile while turning knobs, so really shocking just can not be. Except for those few stray Yann Tiersen fans who accidentally ended up in the back of the hall, and after half a minute back out paddling, scarred for life.

PB Journal 14/09/12 [hotel, 2am]: I hate playing fucking festivals, co-opted by cunts, corporate logos all over the full colour 128 page fucking brochure. Bands are horrible. Only decent people are those hardy folk who have travelled and PAID for tickets. Nice guys/girls and thoroughly down to earth. A serious fucking minority. Rest of the cunts are either liggers or shit promoters promoting shit fucking labels of seriously shit fucking ‘music’, mostly American, polluting the fucking dressing rooms and all effort spent trying to score drugs rather than ‘promote’ the bands they ostensibly ‘represent’. Generally these vermin are both older and stupider than anyone else present. And the organisation of these fuckfests is particularly reprehensible. Thus, if you want to get a vegan brunch at 14.30hrs it will be served at site location 68, but if you need technical assistance on stage at 21.00 hours beacuse the amps are fucked you might as well forget it because the technical staff whose number is worthy of a D.W. Griffith epic have all fucked off to smoke ‘draw’, quaff the artists beer or update their fucking tumblr. You know one cunt actually said ‘peace’ to me. Non-ironically. Despite all this, the show itself was great, due, in part, to employing sound engineer worthy of the name. SF, as usual, was immense, and ploughing huge furrows of drone sound & intense stage charisma. Earlier in day had been strolling though town when random stranger called out “Hey Sarah!”. I’d better get used to this. Light guy had usual instruction of “imagine you’re auditioning for Van Halen”. And, again as usual, fucked off after 10 minutes. Still, volume throughout venue was truly unpleasant yet astonishingly clear. Needless to say, hated all support acts (War, Lust For Youth etc., though Ice Age intrigued me). My main problem is the 80s fixation of these young fucking cunts, thus you get familiar tropes of Robert Smith-style vox (tick), banks of horrid synths (check), wanky drum machines (ubiquitous), ‘new romantic’ strides (present and correct), added to floppy quiffs, ‘dancing’ and all-round OMD worship. Ugh.

 

 

PHILIP BEST INTERVIEWED BY MARTIN BLADH (extracts)

 

Photo by: Karolina Urbaniak

Let’s talk about your defunct blog from which the majority of the text material in this book is taken from. You did put a lot of energy into it. Tell me about your ambitions when you started it and why you chose to take it down?

The blog you refer to, “The Child Botanical”, served a number of purposes and was probably the only creative endeavour I’ve ever been involved with (save a few experimental live performances) in which the final outcome was far from certain, in which an almost complete surrender of control was required. Generally when I work I have a very definite idea of where I’m going, of exactly what I want to achieve. I actually think this is a prerequisite of making effective art. The ‘Child Botanical’ blog was a different, quite intimidating, but ultimately liberating way of working. It was a proving ground for fresh ideas, for the new connections I was teasing out through my reading, image-making and day-to-day life. The blog was somewhere I could post snippets of works-in-progress, juxtapose seemingly unrelated words and images, snatches of lyrics, extracts from reading and viewing, my personal responses to unfolding news stories and audience reactions to increasingly inflammatory Consumer Electronics performances. I’ll address those performances later but, again unusually for me, it wasn’t really a conversation I was looking for. I deliberately disabled comments on the blog so I had no idea how or even if this material was being received. I was just throwing this stuff out there, like shit against the wall in a dirty protest.

Some, but not all, of the text in “Alien Existence” originated from that blog, but I have quite painstakingly edited and retooled the material to create what I hope is a more coherent whole. You’re quite correct, I put a lot of energy into maintaining the original blog, working virtually daily on it and putting everything I was reading and viewing through the prism of it. After three or four years I was exhausted, and had also started to perform again as Consumer Electronics with fellow musicians Sarah Froelich and Russell Haswell. The first album we recorded together as a trio, “Estuary English” (2014), very much had its genesis in the pages of the blog – but as I honed the lyrical content of that album and readied it for release I needed the record to stand alone, as a finely crafted summation of where we had arrived at. That’s the main reason I took the blog down. This book, too, is me trying to get a grip on all the stuff I was trying to make sense of in the postings on “Child Botanical”. But hopefully with the benefit of reflection and greater understanding of what I was dealing with or trying, however clumsily, to get my head around. Now when I work, I just keep everything to myself, in notebooks and scrapbooks, safe from public viewing! The “News from Warring Tribes” section, for example, is an extract from a much larger prose text I’ve been working on for the last year or so. No idea if I’ll ever use it beyond the extract printed here, but I like the simplicity (and challenge) of just working with language and nothing else. No images, no sounds, no studio engineers, no small fortunes spent on professional (but totally invaluable) record mastering. When I was much younger, in my teens and obviously way before we had blogs or anything like the range of digital forums we have today, I had the idea of producing a weekly magazine which solely detailed what I was getting up to and my reaction to everything that stumbled across my path. For various reasons, most notably finances and a somewhat chaotic private life, it just didn’t work out but as I’m getting older I’m returning to the idea of publishing just one book a year. Focussing my energies on a single project, and if no-one pays attention, that’s really not a problem at all.

How much time do you spend going through source material for your collages and scrapbooks? How important is juxtaposition and choice of colour? Do you have a specific audience in mind? Is response and communication of importance to you?

As I think you can imagine it takes a fair amount of time to harvest the images for my collages and scrapbooks. Obviously I have a certain type of image I am looking for, and within that group I have a quite specific idea of what I ultimately want. As with a lot of things, it’s very much a matter of cutting away what is unneeded, of knowing exactly what you don’t want, to arrive at precisely what you do. Every small detail is vital so colour is obviously of strong importance. I haven’t trained as an artist so I have a fairly untutored eye and technique. That doesn’t matter. It’s all about juxtapositions and connections, either the ones that are readily apparent when you construct the collage, or the ones that emerge at a slower pace, as the material gathers and develops. I guess my fascination with scrapbooks as objects has its genesis (like many things) in my childhood wanderings in the streets of Plymouth. In the old Barbican area of the city there was a huge and baffling colour mural of numerous historical figures (some recognisable but many completely obscure) painted along the entire side of a building and beside it a dusty old shopfront window display stacked with oversized antiquarian folio volumes with patently false and incredible titles. I was mesmerised by these fake volumes, bound in old vellum and with wildly crazed titles inked painstakingly in hand on the ancient spines. I would return again and again to see fresh books added to the pile and to gaze in wonderment at the anatomical engravings that were occasionally on display. As I stood there nose virtually pressed against the dirty, darkened glass I saw people come and go, long-haired shuffling figures and beautiful, almost Pre-Raphaelite women. Trust me, not a common sight on the streets of Plymouth in the 1970s. Years later I discovered that this intriguing building was the working studio of the remarkable artist Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002), in fact I even ended up sourcing rare occult materials for his renowned collection of sorcery and witchcraft. It was during this time that Lenkiewicz sadly passed, and in due course his executors found a fully-preserved tramp that the artist had embalmed and placed behind the bookcase.

The question of audience reaction is a crucial one and my attitude towards how the work is received has varied over the years. When I first started making music in the early 1980s there virtually was no audience to speak of, so they were not really considered as a significant part of the equation. And if they were it was generally with a view of total contempt. It was a different time. I think that to make the music we were making, and then to take it out and play it with utter seriousness in standard rock clubs and established punk venues as opposed to welcoming avant-garde spaces (if, indeed, they even existed) you had to be pretty single-minded about what you were doing. Audiences and fellow musicians might have been young, but booking agents, venue owners and most crucially sound engineers tended to be older people with a very set idea of what was and what was most definitely not ‘music’. It might have been the 1980s but in many clubs and bars it was like punk never happened. One of the reasons Whitehouse, for example, had such a simple, but brutally effective, set-up was so that sound guys (and it always was ‘guys’) in venues could grasp it easily, once they’d recovered from the heresy of you not having a drummer. Another reason was so you could leave the venue as quickly as possible with all your gear in one bag – sometimes running directly from the stage and straight back on to the street. Did that a number of times! I guess that we were arrogant assholes in a way, but of necessity I would suggest, because I doubt we could have done it at all without that obnoxious cockiness and unshakeable self-confidence. Over time and as audiences grew you’d begin to receive feedback on how the records and concerts were being received. And that developed into an increasingly valuable part of the process, but let’s be brutally clear here – making music or creating art is not a fucking popularity contest. I enjoy all reactions to my music and work and have never particularly minded whether the feedback received is positive or negative. The Whitehouse album “Cruise” (2001) for example was absolutely detested by a reactionary old guard of fans who thought it too ‘digital’, or too ‘arty’, or not ‘extreme’ enough. That fucking word again. It was music to our ears to hear the complaints of these disappointed punters. As a performer you need to move on and not listen to the more conservative elements of your audience. Enough people in your existing audience will get it and you’ll probably attract new people to what you are doing as well. And, if not, well, at least you’ve stayed true to what you wanted to do and avoided becoming a fucking human jukebox where they put the money in and you pump out the song they want to hear. So negative reactions don’t bother me. The only exception to this I can recall was the (to my mind) sexist and misogynistic comments that were made when my wife Sarah joined Consumer Electronics. I couldn’t believe it! I hated those comments and was glad those idiots had shown their true colours and no longer liked us. It felt like a job well done. But having said all that, sometimes, as I mentioned above regarding my blog, it’s good to just put stuff out there and not elicit any reaction. Just do it for yourself.

There is a text passage called ‘Coitus And Collecting’, which seem to be quite revealing. It is of course a simplification, but I know that some people believe that this is what it all comes down to, a compulsive attempt to collect and pinpoint an obsession, sex by proxy etc. There is some truth there right?

Oh yes, I’d agree with you there, undoubtedly. You’re getting these guys now who are getting busted with hundreds of thousands of images on their hard drives. More images than you could possibly even look at. But that’s not really the point, is it? Collectors can be quite astonishing. In the real world (as it were) I’ve had occasion to work on and off with high-end antiquarian books and other collectibles and ephemera. You meet some quite extraordinary people, like Lenkiewicz for example. I’ve kind of worked my work up in that trade. One of my earliest calls was to a terraced house in a quite poor neighbourhood in Bristol. There was an obese man squashed into an armchair and his fingernails were completely uncut and curling over, his big paws brown from nicotine staining. His wife was a small bird of a thing, white-haired and neatly dressed. She immediately told me she was making her husband sell his collection because if he didn’t she would leave him after forty years of marriage. The “collection” was piled around the house. Literally each room upstairs and downstairs was piled high with porn magazines, complete collections in running order and the guy had a handwritten guide he’d assembled with remarks on each of the models (“Raven”, “Jacquie” etc.) and their characteristics. He thought I might find it useful when I came to sell the collection. Trouble is the magazines weren’t really old or ‘specialist’ enough to have much of a resale value (they’d probably be worth a small fortune today), just mountains of recent porn. I ended up selling them on privately to an academic at a local boys school and he then sold them on to a contact in the Israeli army. The modern day soldier requires a certain amount of adult stimulation I was told – and the army was happy to provide for its men. Other material I’ve handled or even turned down has given me quite an eyeopening perspective on the ingenuities and depravities of the human imagination. And, of course, collectors, enthusiasts and amateur photographers can be total pigs. Anton Pachinger, the great Austrian collector of antiquities, who also amassed an astonishing collection of erotica, is mentioned in the ‘Coitus and Collecting’ section; he’s notorious for robbing a grave so he could saw a silver chastity belt from a corpse. Just barged the gravediggers out of the way and got down in the dirt such was his fervour. View all collectors with deep suspicion!

Why did he have to make the tape? Why did everything have to be recorded, detail after detail, condemning them both to this living death? He was like a clerk, filing away his sordid little catalogue of murder mementoes. All that talk of liberation and immortality and all the time he was just a bloody stamp collector.

Jean Rafferty Myra, Beyond Saddleworth. Wild Wolf Publishing, 2012.

Let’s talk more about your lyrics (some of which are printed in this book). To my taste you’re probably the best wordsmith within the (excuse the term) “extreme” electronic music scene today. How do the words come to you, some concepts and motives seem to carry a deep personal meaning? There’s of course a big difference between the teenage anger of “Tit Pulp” (Right To Kill, 1983) compared to the lyrics from “Dollhouse Songs”. How do you feel that your writing has developed over the years, and are you trying to express yourself differently?

Not so a great difference as you might imagine. One prominent feature of my lyrics is that they tend to have many autobiographical elements within them, my numerous faults, fuck-ups and countless wretched times I’ve let myself or others down. Allied to this is my perhaps inexcusable inability to leave other people in my life out of my songs. So, “Tit Pulp” for example”, although on first look a prime example of the 1982 power electronics ‘aesthetic’ (for want of a better term), is actually a record of the miserable few months I spent living in London with a person who is actually named in the lyrics of that song (William wisely removed her name from the accompanying lyric sheet). Now I would never of course write a song quite like that these days – but even so, people like “bright-eyed Anne” in “Ruthless Babysitting” is a real person (or, more exactly, a conflation of this person with Anne Frank scribbling in her Amsterdam diary) and I could give numerous other examples from Whitehouse or CE lyrics based on real people, real conversations, real incidents. A surprising number of lines. Of course, the songs are not pure autobiography, but these elements are incorporated into other observations, narratives, investigations, self-reproaches. I am also a tireless proponent of Intertextuality. The final section of the song “The Push” (from “Dollhouse Songs”), for example, is based on events related to me by a lover interlaced with lines from Samuel R. Delaney’s novel “Dhalgren” (1975). The original conversation with my lover had astonished me at the time and stayed with me for over a decade, I’d written numerous songs in the meantime and hadn’t felt the need (or couldn’t find the way) to address what she had related to me but suddenly there it was, needing to be said. Ripeness is all.

For me, the literary underpinning from Delaney adds extra resonance to her words and empowers the song tremendously. As a small aside I can also be at times a useless judge of my own music. I’d shelved the song from the album until Russ and Sarah insisted it be included and for many people it proved to be a highlight of the record.

We achieved absolutely everything we wanted on Estuary English – in simple terms a state of the nation jeremiad crossbred with an honest catalogue of my own numerous personal failings.

Philip Best interviewed. Quietus, 12 January 2015.

 

 

 

BUY NOW

http://infinitylandpress.com/2999170-alien-existence-by-philip-best

 

Infinity Land Press provides exclusive, clandestine publications which are inoculated against the circulatory system of the established book market.

Founded in 2013 by Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak, Infinity Land is a realm deeply steeped in pathological obsessions, extreme desires, and private aesthetic visions. Having disappeared over the horizon from the nurseries stocked with frivolous babblings of apologetic pleasures, Infinity Land is foundationally a geography configured by the compulsive, annihilating search for impossible beauty. In the words of Yukio Mishima, “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”

http://infinitylandpress.com

 

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p.s. Hey. This lucky blog gets its second opportunity in a week to help usher an amazing book into the world. This time the tome is by the great Philip Best, co-mastermind of two of the most seminal and innovative noise-shaping music units of our recent lifetimes aka Whitehouse and Consumer Electronics. As you’ll see in the post, his talents obviously exist heavily outside of music creation as well, and the fine Infinity Land Press, whom you guys around here might know as the publisher of my scrapbook ‘Gone’, Michael Salerno’s ‘Childhood’, and other excellent books, has brought some of Best’s visual and textual work out for public scrutiny. I just got my copy of ‘Alien Existence’ in the mail yesterday, and it’s gorgeous. Enjoy the post/ introduction, consider a purchase, and thank you. And really big thanks to Mr. Best and to Martin and Karolina at Infinity Land. ** Armando, Hi. No, I’m not in ‘I Apologize’. Maybe you’re thinking of Ishmael Houston-Jones’ and my piece ‘Them’. I was in that. Mm, I think I sent my first letter to Bresson even before I saw ‘Le Diable Problement’. The first Bresson I saw, and the one that changed my life, etc. was ‘Lancelot du Lac’. His widow is alive. She edited the new book of Bresson interviews that was just published. I don’t watch Bresson’s films often because the experience is too intense and emotional for me. The ‘Jerk’ performances in Paris will be two in French, two in English. I have no idea if I’ll be here then yet. Dude, if an agent is saying he or she will definitely accept it in late 2017, that’s an offer to take very seriously. This shit takes a lot of time. Without patience, you’ll never succeed at it. Unfortunately, that’s the way it is. Anyway, I wouldn’t burn that bridge unless you already have. Try other places and use that offer as a fall back. I’m not that into painting, to be honest with you. It’s not very often that I respond to paintings. I’m drawn more to sculpture, installation, video, etc. I can’t even think of favorite painters. Strange. ** Joakim, Hey! Well, gee, that sounds incredibly intriguing and exciting that ‘The Sluts’ influenced or positively interfered with what you’re making. Thanks, gee. Right now is crazed with writing projects and the film, but I would love to contribute if I can, and something with Zac would be great. Let me talk to him and see what he thinks. Those are very cool tattoos. That’s coming from me who is not an inherent huge fan of tattoos. Nice. And good placement. Happy birthday a day late to Asger! <3, me. ** New Juche, Hi! Oh, it’s amazing, man. You’ve felt uncertain about it? That’s interesting. That can be a really good sign as long as you have a deep underlying faith in something beneath the uncertainty, and publishing it is probably due to that faith. No, it’s really beautiful! Be very proud. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ‘Hair’, wow. I saw ‘Hair’ when I was a young teen at the Aquarius Theater across from the Palladium. That might have been before your time in LA. I practically had to blackmail my mom to take me because of that outrageous, at the time, moment when the cast stood naked onstage for about 30 seconds in very low light. ** Sypha, Ha ha. I told Kristen that everybody was going to think the darkest art in that show was my pick when, in fact, she chose most of the wild stuff. Coincidentally, there’s ‘Alien Existence’ right up there. So you beat the blog by 24 hours. I’ve only started looking at my copy, but it seems great, yeah. Ah, the tidal wave of initial no’s when submitting a mss. Urgh. Ride it out, man. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! Yeah, see, I totally, totally get your thinking about tattoos, and that makes absolute sense to me. I guess I feel like I’m into tattoos when one really thinks about what a tattoo does and means and how it effects people. I really get and respect that. Yes, if you do think of Hungarian writers you can recommend, I’m extremely interested. My day ended up being less active than I’d thought. Plans got delayed for practical reasons. I just worked and did some emailing and blah blah. Paris is having this weird, extreme air pollution problem right now. And it was weird to be outside and see the smog/haze over everything. Yikes. The art shows that I was going to see and will see probably on Saturday are this one and this one. And probably some others too. I’m looking at that apartment where I had that wrong address mix up tomorrow. Fingers crossed. Did Thursday treat you really well? How so? ** Steevee, Hi. Yes, Zac was very happy with your thoughts. Thank you again. That is tough: 2 to 3 weeks in advance. At the same time, it doesn’t seem strange and difficult for studios to do critic screenings quite early on. What a weird and self-defeating strategy on their part. Have you read Lim’s book on David Lynch? I haven’t but I’m meaning to. ** Morgan M Page, Hi! Thank you on behalf of Kristen and myself. Yes, the ice record is pretty good. I put it at the top for a reason. There are actually two other dissolving ice record works I came across while looking around. That one had the best video, which is basically why it got chosen, ha ha. Oh, wow, yes, I know Cassils’ work a bit, albeit mostly via the internet, and I’ve liked what I’ve seen very much, but I hadn’t seen that ‘Tiresias’ piece. I would’ve put it in the show if I’d found it. Thank you for hooking me up. I’ll see the next potential apartment tomorrow morning. Ugh, it’s stressful, but I’m just hoping to find a place and get it over with asap. Yes, ‘Jerk’ was revived from a long dormant period specifically because of that gig in Montreal. I hope you get to see it. I think it’s definitely one of Gisele’s my best works, and the performer Jonathan Capedevielle is really brilliant in it. Have an awesome day! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Me too, about Eggleston’s Xmas pix. They were among Kristen’s finds. ** Misanthrope, Thanks, G. Glad you had fun. Well, as you can imagine, I haven’t eaten at a McDonald’s in … God, decades? Not much there for me. I think the only thing of theirs I’ve ever eaten was a scalding hot, terrible apple pie-like thing. I would say that supporting Trump does not fall into the category of mundane, no. Aw, a bunny in your yard, aw. There probably isn’t a rabbit in ‘God Jr.’. It’s just the only work of mine where I could imagine it was possible. Poor, poor LPS. He’s got it bad. God, in a week that strapping young fella should be on fire again, no? I’m sure. Let me know what you think of ‘Manchester by the Sea’. I’m curious about it. ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Thank you very much for your thanks, man! No, you’re awesome. How’s your Xmas looking? ** Okay. You know what to do around here today, so go do it. Please? Thank you. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Faced by hospitalizations, therapies and rehabilitations, the characters in Flamingos are in a permanent state of psychological mutation. In exchange for melancholy reminiscences about their mundane existence, false messiah Simon holds out a promise of release from the drudgeries and depressions of Middle America.

‘Grant Maierhofer’s polyphonic voice formally recalls such Modernist masterpieces as Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Nonetheless, this book is wholly his own, a brilliant, idiosyncratic exploration of the fragmented twenty-first-century mind.’ — ITNA Press

 

 

‘This work will be a nightmare. You are no detective.” This is a noir without the proper detective to piece back together the crime and its narrative. This is self-surveillance under the influence of drugs, art, poetry. Without the narrative cure, the novel becomes sick: “Here the plague again. I’d read once of a fictive plague and a city essentially turned to chaotic police state rot… One thinks as well of the art created then and its constant incestuous vein.” The narrative can turn into a police state of rot or incest. Maierhofer has put his mind to exploring the pustules of this plague “pumped through imagined tubes into the skulls of various Americans and Elsewhereicans.’ — Johannes Goransson, author of Haute Surveillance and Dear Ra

‘Part Beckett, part Unabomber manifesto, part Laurie Weeks, Grant Maierhofer’s Flamingos is singularly alive and wild. Despite its explicit, fascinating cast of characters and influences, the book’s voice is energetically original and strange. Each wrought sentence makes manifest a rapacious linguistic and cultural appetite, along with a world-transforming alchemy.’ — Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Argonauts

‘Permutating along a fine line between culture and trash, theoretical reality and actual reality, Gucci and Mayhem, Maierhofer’s Flamingos invents a way of thinking about our world and what’s left in it that feels at once schizophrenic and clear as lube, as much like a map or index as a New Novel in an era where there can almost no longer be a novel at all, but information. Here’s some information you’ll want to bang to the front of the plague-strung queue while you still have eyes.’ — Blake Butler, author of 300,000,000

‘Elliptical, surgical, Flamingos is also grim, smart, funny and syntactically menacing, a kind of fictional oral history of what one character calls ‘an American Darkness.’ Grant Maierhofer plays for serious stakes.’ — Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

‘A luminous whirlwind of language, emotion and wit, Flamingos cuts through the lethargy and indifference of our lives and our lit with style and rage. This writing is a blast!’ — Jeffrey DeShell, author of In Heaven Everything is Fine and Arthouse

 

Buy ‘Flamingos’ @ Small Press Distribution
Buy ‘Flamingos’ @ amazon
Grant Maierhofer @ ITNA Press
ITNA Press @ Facebook
‘Flamingos’ @ goodreads

objets d’piss
Grant Maierhofer @ Twitter
Grant Maierhofer @ Instagram

 

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Meet Grant Maierhofer

 

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Related imagery

 

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Related videos

Rudimentary Peni – “Death Church” (full 1983 album)

John Lennon- Mother (8X Slower Primal Scream)

Kathy Acker Docu by Alan Benson New York 1984

 

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Excerpt (Opening)

 

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Patient – a neurotic, poring over lived experience and print

Flamingo – a daughter, sunlit, driven by manias

Edmund – a viewer, a depressive, concerned with sight

G.G. – a criminal, involved with strains of black metal, survivalist

Attila – a driver, lover of his auntie, thinker

Simon – a healer, a messiah, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., Ph.D.

Haydn – a son, former love interest of Flamingo, caregiver

Eileen – a niece, preoccupied with bloodline, marked with loss

Olivier – a witness, Simon’s cohort, misfit youth

 

As you walk out of the valium of death
a sad feeling limps around your brain
funny farmers sowing seeds of discontent
pumping nerve gas around unfeeling veins

“Happy Farm” – Rudimentary Peni

A story? No. No stories, never again.

In Heaven Everything is Fine – Jeffrey DeShell

 

1.

A cackling life inside, a smear of bellylaughs spat back at tellings of doctors, explorers, manipulators. There He dictates with some solution. Spread through cities and guts and the entrails of homelives or families, the presence and he says what’s done. Slid easily back into the comfort of loss—step one, repetition, regurgitation of psychobabble—we did His will to varying degrees of efficacy; he had his say and we were merely subjects. Out out their eyes would look and sweep. Waves of grass and promise lumbered up against the buildings as streams of hope, possibility, taunt. His voice mad of distraction and mother’s milk. His arms earthplates of welcome into what could be. Simon, not a man, not a man. Simon, our teething on his light and what would come. Simon, a future, a renewal. Burnt again and born again our bodies clayshells dripped of ideology to embrace the Father, embrace Simon. A plague of cure-alls, panaceas, SSRIs, MAO inhibitors, breathing exercises, consultants, meetings, rooms, plastic furniture, sweatdrops left from anxious bodies too medicated in various heats never converging. Simon, his own renewal never. Simon, constant drilling awareness of all minutiae and no substance building every hoveled life in cities. He heads south to find a grave in Florida; more followers to meet the beck and call. He topples amid manifesto language and yearns to beat back against the pulse of protest in his times. Simon, ever the miserable failure. Simon our Christ, our Cunt Fear our Cock Fear our Man Fear our Woman Fear our Plague Fear our Head Fear our Love Fear our Death Fear. Simon he lives and dies for his own sins, not ours. Simon’s a polyglot mumble found in waves, in graves, in gutless darknesses beneath wherevers. Simon would wander etching missing notes to sidewalk wondering why they’d dropped in for thinking ever. Simon assembled the passage, the mode. Simon put together the festering, saw what might be done. Ordered and disordered whole gasping last breaths of fathers lost in death while the thumbs twiddled at the wheel of his auto outside belighted storefronts. Scrapped together and wrapped up to be found by some moralist of Hawthorne’s gape and reach. There is no puzzle etched in chalk—it is his missive. It is fetish. It is leatherine. He’s hobbled obsessed with evering death. His mother a jovial plot of mothers, a husking, a collective. His father whatever protest against the aforesaid, and mayhaps a bit of mistaking, mistaking. Simon doesn’t plan our lives, just mumbles at the bodies while they pass.

 

Patient
You have begun to sift through notes to find something revealed. The incessant in this place, the schizophrene. You’ve attempted to grind meaning out of the gaggle; their therapies your only connective point. You have not heard voices so much as intuited nauseas. You’ve fed yourself on bad coffee spreads in hospital and within homes of loved ones kind enough to take you after hands began to slip. The world would not be righted. His take on things suddenly gained perspective, now a straitjacketed old man occasionally seen mumbling on newsfeeds about some great redemption. You began a search backward into heads, perhaps avoiding your own. With each change you only hoped to black your walls.

 

Flamingo
Call me Flamingo; whatever it was is fading. I sat atop where I happened to live just being. Outside my work inside my car I’d slug at sugary black liquids that energize. I programmed, encrypted. Where I existed was within a city no longer operating as a city, rather a pustule. His alterations to the landscape, the mentalities. I call it pustule and had no friends there. I walked like Travis in Paris, Texas in the clothing come across mostly in stores secondhand. No safety zone. There will be no safety zone. I had no commitments, had broken no marital code, to my thinking. Thirty-four years and my ex-husband and I got divorced when I turned thirty-one and told a falsehood regarding a pregnancy. He wouldn’t shut his mouth about wanting to put children inside my medicated guts. He was an oafish man with long ambitions and consistently short haircuts who I met and engaged with physically, the result of a website that allowed couples to couple and put their parts to use.

 

Patient
Having no more patience for the journal, the diary, the anything approximating a brief lament quasi-essay interrogation of what you’ve read, watched, listened to, you enact this. An assemblage. Your research. The work. You do not care. It will exist time to time and will account for what has existed between times and times. It will not delve in any capacity. Let them face it: it is fairly dead; there is only now a pissy teenaged scrawl. Embittered voices asking after daddy.

 

Flamingo
I didn’t ever love him but he collected bad films and we watched them and ate pizzas and there was something loving to it, I daresay. My teeth are goners like the betrothed as a result of meds and energetics. I feel such an urge to tell. We’d sworn in various ways not to unveil the various things he’d put inside our skulls. I watched footage of his ECT and guess I pitied the man. Perhaps before this I was converted. His reach was that entire. Picture the doctor describing the procedure as Simon’s pinned to leather chair bound in cuffs of same just moments before his mouth is stuffed of rubber and his body seems to shake itself loose. Undefined gluey rivulets came forth and doctor returned to speak softly about its result, its promise, what might come to be expected. He’d acquired it on receiving permission to research this and more and used its grant money to record himself starved beneath his home in lurid shades.

 

Edmund
I cannot profess to have known the man, or wake up and proceed as his follower. I do not do the “how I came to be this way” as is their wont, the ilk’s wont, so here I piddle. The storied. Newsprint. I’ve burnt his telling to my brow and thus am culpable, required to speak whereof I do not know. Archivists have asked after the recordings. I’d pirated them occasionally for late viewings and meditation. I’ve kept them boxed with annotation; some home recordings from his trials.

 

Attila
Say for instance one weekend I visited my auntie where she lived and we’d come together? I’m not sure of preferred terminology in matters but I know where I stand. You live outside moralizing as such and a body like Simon comes easy. I’ve picked up a bit here and there; the rest I give to him and auntie. I haven’t seen much but you see enough sleeping amid thirty or more heaped metallic crates hauling whatever needed wherever. Simon came to me those nights. He’d driven to set funding aside; saw his route as shamanic. I’d followed briefly. Was then the learning took. Read a bit, not much. Lots on plague, sure. I guess I never shook the notion that the world had just, or was soon to just, lost most of its presence, say?

 

Patient
When you became roughly twenty-four and one-half years old you became a follower of Star Trek. It was late, and the fondness grew from a likeness you saw between its creator and images of L. Ron Hubbard—you needed religion. Hubbard’s voice seemed to flood the sixties for you, this syrupy drawl, moneyed, tyrannical. Perhaps a surrogate father, though you’re hesitant to welcome it. Grown men sitting before microphones arguing over the state of things; the mind, humanity, children. It might be here your vulnerability began.

 

Simon
And I taught them. And did not. To resist their obsessive teeth. To grind their desires to a bulb, then watch it burn. And there is no hemlock, no way out; I, therefore, walk aside with the mud and silt, and you become my enemies. I do not know how to speak it, to think, “I, Simon, become difference, or God.” I have nothing to say. You and I cannot judge you and I. Now the time comes, I think, to make something known. I began to witness all, and remained with them delivering the judgment of a man; I retched, became as lofty as your walls. My followers more my fathers and mothers than I their leader. It becomes the other hand, you, not to the soul, there is no wrong against you, and yet a rope grows around my throat. I did not learn anything. I’ve never found a bad fellow in the house of the mad. Everyone in me, their language, and the desire of circumstances aside, the asylum is not where I shall lay. It would not be an apt turn, sad, and you took hold of me not as a good man, but death itself. The doctors you have to say? The medicine speaks in dull, dumb, blind tones and incoherent even. If you become deaf, mute, blind, what you do echoes. Ridiculous, I’ll show you. It’s what I showed each of them. But it is good that all is well. Nothing to do with the question, your questions, it makes no difference, as all are one. It is perfect. There is God. He is seated within your walls to right and left of me. It is your God, a parent. And that is God. But let me speak: the power of the Father, there is no other, bleeds much more than you think. You imagine things, fabricate diseases. A man thinks, then set aside by the dose, or the sessions; if they do not do it again, you sell that sense of newsprint, public opinion, video, as you have hung up to spite me. I did not what you now do. You do not have to kill out of my mind because it is rotting; you all in front of all to string me up. And the beginning of all my children they are your own, they hear and turn back the face of the doctors. I do not care. And I never hesitated, only showed them how to do something good for the good of the all, what you think is evil. Your mothers in the newspapers to write things that you will not tell me, you forget me in the asylum. To eat the flesh and to desire, to the teeth, a being better than your own. Tell you the same way, you send out to find my head. Your own wickedness loud enough. What are you and your descendants. Each of you the picture of right and good against my hands.

 

Attila
“Attila! Attila!” a sort of gull’s crack from youth chimes me back. I know my mother well in memory. Sat high above the earth in my employ, there is coherence; an aftermath, a settling. A wind might push through and scrape against the metals, or heat stopped for coffee against the chest and cheek. Go on runs see other sides to people, ugly, feral families driving from vacation to its opposite. Go on runs and neglect myself for weeks or so. Simon capitalized on as much. Easy to see the emptying spirit I guess. Easy to spot a man nearing on some life-death dilemma. We spoke of what we’d seen. He told me of various tortures, new ways out he’d carved. I listened and slurped at cans our feet both wrapped in wool and up against his dash as night proceeded. He’d experienced shock, insulin therapy. He’d met brilliant physicians, philosophers. He’d seen a youth bury his hands in a jar of water designated for Jaques Lacan. He spoke well of matters so I felt sharp, less dumb. He prompted my speech. I’d once met a boy on the street in New York and talked over the state of things while he broke from loading something into a gallery. I’d once emptied myself on the longest stretch of desert I’ve seen without car or human presence in sight. My family became immaterial beyond the cat on lap or memories of fattened weekends on auntie’s couch and I’m quite at peace in an American darkness. Today sat in bath with filth and limbs stretched out and intermittent dose of scalding water on ankles. Home for several days, maybe the boredom would swell, thick and pungent. I’d visit auntie’s and come away round and shining. I drive a small pile of plastic guts while off the road. My father might be sickened at my indolence.

 

Patient
In your schooling you’d learned well to subvert commonly-understood histories in favor of something postcolonial that accounted for the cruelties of mostly White Men since the Dawn, and it was in this way you’d entered the narrative of Gene Roddenberry, terrified and useless as a newborn. Not dissimilar, you met Simon through the texts consulted and eventual correspondence where he’d become a number. He now submits experimental essays to the PEN Prison Writing program. Young girls wrote him letters and he’d respond with sheets of toilet paper scribbled through with stories about the end of Nature, the end of God, a new beginning for the human race, a revelation, a plague, anything to set their teeth on edge. He’d become imprisoned and institutionalized after any number of things. You’d watched with some disdain his testimony as it seemed to lose coherence, heft. He’d sent a list of possible wives at one point wanting you to see. You assembled what you could in going forward, occasionally pulled back to the work that seemed to embrace simply surrounding yourself with souls.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Today the blog has the honor, privilege and fun to help usher in (out?) the new novel by the extraordinary writer and long time local of this place Grant Maierhofer. I’m most of the way through reading ‘Flamingos’, and I can tell you it’s a very fantastic novel, so do explore the samples and info about it today and consider picking up your own copy if everything adds up. Thanks a lot! And thank you, Grant, for letting the blog do its small part. ** Gregoryedwin, Hi, Gregory! I’m so pleased you’re taken with his work. Like I said, I’m brand new to it myself. I hope all is as great as humanly or even inhumanly possible with you, man. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. My impression is that his work is essentially unknown outside of France. Oh, ha ha, thank you for campaigning for LCTG. That’s so awesome of you. I would love to have been a been a fly on those walls just to see the other critics’ befuddled faces. I have no interest in seeing ‘Moonlight’ based on what I hear and know. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Yes like I said, his work was unknown to me too until I read paeans to him occasioned by his very recent death. Very special work. I hope that his work’s visibility is increased by the tragically belated kudos at the very least. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi, Dóra! I’ll tell you the buche winner(s) for sure. Traditionally, I usually photo document the chosen buche’s unboxing and destruction by mouth, and I’ll try to do that this year too. ‘Never “motionless”‘: a perfect way to put it. Okay, the tattoo festival sounds quite fun enough, if not what you’d imagined. You’re going to buy a machine? Do they look cool? I’m imagining so. I guess I’m imagining they look sort of like a Goth dentist’s drill. Which is probably too … romantic?  My yesterday was kind of hectic. First, right after I launched the blog, I managed to accidentally hit my head on something and rip a hole in my left ear, which took about an hour to stop bleeding, and my ear still looks a little scary, and then I had to rush to meet the real estate agent at the apartment I was to check out. I waited, but he never showed up. It turns out he gave me the wrong address, but then he  was very pissy about it and tried to blame me for the mistake, so I’m not sure if I’m going to reschedule that visit or not. Then I met with Gisele to talk about this new dance piece I’m working on with her. That was good, and I have a bunch of work to do on that today. Then I met up with Zac, who’s not completely better but was feeling okay enough to meet and look at some art. That was great, of course, and we did some planning for all the stuff we need to start doing right now to get ready for our upcoming film shoot. We went to the Centre Pompidou mainly to see the Cy Twombly retrospective. It confirmed my pre-existing opinion that his paintings are self-coddling, privileged, excessively tasteful, overly precious stuff whose reverential treatment by the whitest, most effete contingent of the art world is boring. But still, it was worth doing. Then Zac and I walked around, talked, and that was great, and then I came home, by which point it was near bedtime. So, not an uninteresting day, all in all. How was Tuesday for you?  **  New Juche, Hi, Joe. Yesterday was crazy, so I finally was able to get ahold of your new book this morning, and I’m excited to open it.  On ‘Death of Louis XIV’, well, it was more thoughtful and aesthetically  rigorious/curious than I had imagined it would be.  The tone is odd and  interestingly maintained. Like that. I was given the wrong address, so I didn’t see the apartment. Maybe I’ll see it this week, we’ll see.  There are some experimental filmmakers working with Super8, yes. It can be hard to see their work because many of them think their work is too compromised when uploaded onto Vimeo, etc. And because, generally, the work being done in that format is highly experimental/personal, and the venues for that work are few and far between. **  Ferdinand, Hi. Cool, good move to upload your photos. I look forward to seeing. ‘Lolita’ in Dutch is a very funny idea. Well, based on having been able to speak Dutch at least rudimentarily back in the 80s.  Thanks, man, about the blog, and have an excellent week yourself.  **  TomK, Hi, Tom. Yeah, the wood block one is a sleeper hit.  **  Steevee, Hi. Oh, gosh, of course I hope you do like LCTG. And your vote, if so, would be very kind. Yes, it had no theater distribution at all, anywhere, due to its producer’s nefarious business practices. I tried a little more Heron Oblivion, and it’s growing on me. The Fairport Convention meets Iommi comparison is very cool. I like that.  I do know of Lionel Soukaz. I think I’ve only seen a few of his short films, which intrigued and impressed me. Interesting: I’ve been thinking of doing a post about his work here, and you mentioning him seems like the checkered flag to do that, so I will. Well, it’s true that it’s not easy at all for me to find people my age or even fairly close to my age who maintain an interest in new, more experimental music. Or film or literature, frankly. I’ve never understood why that interest declines with aging, but yeah. Mm, well, aren’t the films that you seek out as a critic shaped to a considerable degree by your understanding of what kind of films your experience tells you editors will be willing to have covered? Which means it’s through no fault of your own. If you were wtriting about film for, say, The Wire, it would be a different story, but then you would also basically be writing for free, which is not fair for you.  **  Joakim, Hey!  Yeah, that two-plus month Google war was so stressful. It was surprising and heartening to find out how much worldwide support the blog has. That was amazing, And I won, shockingly. But at the time, it was scary and horrible, for sure. Great that you might come to Paris! I’d love to meet Asger. As you might know, Michael and Bene are in Italy waiting for the birth of their child, which should happen any day. I think they’re back here in early January. I should be mostly here. Zac and I are getting ready to shoot our new film at the end of March, but I think, other than some day trips to Bas Normandie where we’ll be shooting most of it, I should be here. If you do make plans to come, just let me know in advance, and we can make sure that M, B, and I are here. Cheap-ish hotel? I can check and ask around, and I will. Wow, only just briefly clicking over to look at your recent work, it looks incredible!  I didn’t know that you’re making three-dimensional works. I’ve been out of it, obviously.  Wow, the work looks absolutely fantastic. I’m going to spend some real time over there when I finish the p.s. Congratulations, pal. I would love to talk with you about it. Another reason I hope you’ll come on down here.  Great! Love, me.  **  Jamie, Hi Gem-y. (as in ‘a precious or semi-precious stone, especially when cut and polished or engraved’).  Newcastle. All I know about that place is the most ultra-clicked thing, i.e. that coals are bound for it for some reason.  My Monday was busy, had its ups and downs. See my description to Dora. I read a couple of Bartlett’s books back when we were press-mates. Let me think. Oh, ‘Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall’ and ‘Mr. Clive and Mr. Page’. I remember that were quie good but not quite my thing. I think his main thing is plays, no? Or was?  Excellent Tuesday to you, and I hope everything continues to go really well there where coals are bound. Tell me please.  **  Misanthrope, Well, he went on to made experimental documentaries. It happens, man.  Comet Ping Pong … oh, is that the pizza place where Clinton runs her child sex ring?   ** Kyler, The article was exellent, my friend. Kudos, and I learned stuff too. You sound really good. Excellent!  **  Armando, Hi, man. I thought your words about Haynes were a bit harsh, yes. Apples and oranges and all of that. Well, based on what you wrote about Jos Charles’s book, I think I can safely, ha ha, say that you and I live in very different worlds and heads. I eat at least one Xmas buche per year. Well, not all of  it ‘cos I share it/them with pals. I don’t think those slave sites necessarily even existed back when I was writing ‘The Sluts’. ‘The Sluts’ was derived from the form and goings-on of a now-defunct website where clients reviewed escorts.  I have no idea how many of the slave profiles are sincere, legit, etc. I think most them are people fantasizing aloud, but I don’t know. Ha, if you went to see ‘I Apologize’ in February I guess I would think that you must be very wealthy to spend that much money to do something so peripheral. Later, gator.  **  Okay. Return to welcoming Grant’s novel into existence, please. See you tomorrow.