___________________ ‘Natalie Duckett wants to enhance your sleep with her Woodpecker Alarm Clock that makes the drumming sound of a woodpecker twice a day. The entire clock is made of natural materials, with the majority of the alarm clock being a piece of wood. The sound of the woodpecker drumming can be changed by what surface the clock is put up against or on top of. The evening alarm is automatically set to go off for when the sleeper should be in bed in order to get 8 hours of sleep.’
__________________ ‘The Wind Chime Alarm Clock features 12-hour and 24-hour clock modes, date display, a stopwatch function, and two different alarm modes. You can wake up to the sound of electronic beeping or to the gentle sounds of wind chimes. We choose the latter. You can also set the wind chimes to chime continuously, although this will drain the batteries fairly quickly.’
_________________ ‘Initially set to the same time, these identical battery-powered clocks will eventually fall out of sync, or may stop entirely. Conceived shortly after artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s partner was diagnosed with AIDS, “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1991 uses everyday objects to track and measure the inevitable flow of time. When one of the clocks stops or breaks, they can both be reset, thereby resuming perfect synchrony.’
_________________ ‘Tunafish alarm clock has no fishy smell.’
________________ ‘Switch up your alarm’s annoying buzz with the Singing Kero Clock. This cute green alarm clock wakes you up with one of two alternating songs, sung by a frog duet. What’s more, these amphibian fellows aren’t just funny crooners either, they dance as well!’
__________________ ‘This clock will wake you up with a sound that can’t be ignored. The people who sleep heavily, this gong-beater swings his hammer to strike the gong and sound the alarm.This novelty digital alarm clock has a useful snooze function, back light and easy-to-read display and is perfect for anyone who needs a bit of morning clarity! The man swings and hits the gong 3 times to produce loud gong sounds… no one will sleep under this situation until he/she dismiss the close button.’
___________________ Devon Dikeou Tricia Nixon: Summer of 1973, 2017: ‘Ongoing antique marble fireplace and mirror, working heating element and air conditioner, clock radio circa 1973 with looped radio broadcasts from the summer of 1973 variable dimensions.’
___________________ ‘Dominic Wilcox has created a series of miniature time-based sculptures using a collection of vintage mechanical watches and customised model figures. By attaching tiny figures and hand made models onto the second and minute hands of each watch, Wilcox has made unique, animated scenes from everyday observations and imagined situations.’
___________________ ‘Watch time come alive on the ever changing face of the ferrofluid clock. Controlled by an intelligent internal system that is accessible via a web browser, it allows you to customize the clock to display time, text, and even shapes.’
___________________ Aiko Miyanaga waiting for awakening -clock-, 2011
___________________ Atelier Van Lieshout Pipe-bomb Clock Lamp, 2019: ‘The Pipe-bomb Clock Lamp is a steel, working clockwork attached to a pipe-bomb on a slender steel pole. The improvised explosive device to which this measure of time is attached suggests that time is running out, but at least we can keep count whilst it does.’
____________________ ‘My launch 360’s disc drive broke and M$ wants 200 to fix it so I said screw that and decided to make it into something useful: Achievement Unlocked Alarm Clock.
Edit: Yes I am aware that it uses an unreasonable amount of energy. I usually leave the TV off and usually just have it on while I sleep for just the alarm feature I do not use it as my primary clock
Edit 2: Really I understand the power concerns STOP FILLING MY EMAIL WITH COMPLAINTS. I MADE THE TV SCREEN BLACK ON PURPOSE BECAUSE IT TAKES LESS POWER ON A CRT TO DISPLAY BLACK.’
___________________ ‘Control your urges with this iconic Chococlock. Every hour chococlock will deliver a a chocolate treat to the tune You have 30 seconds to grab it before the clock snatches it back!’
___________________ ‘When the alarm sounds, the propeller shoots up into the air, flying around your room. To turn the alarm off you need to get up, catch or retrieve the propeller and place it back into the base station. The propeller flies to random heights.’
__________________ ‘Stuart Ringholt’s Nuclear Clock (2019) tells time a billion years in the future, when the Earth’s rotation has slowed to such a degree that each day takes 34 hours to pass.’
__________________ ‘There’s something about scent that’s more efficient at waking someone up than anything else. Smell a nice hot cup of coffee or the ocean breeze and your body and your mind both wake up at the same time! The Sensorwake employs light, sound, and aroma to wake you in under 2 minutes. Simply slide the cartridge in and set your alarm timer and the Sensorwake gently blinks a light while playing soothing music along with filling the room with the smell of an espresso coffee that immediately get you out of bed.’
_______________ ‘This is a photo I took of the clock I built. I used a cigar box for a case, mounted the board on top, and printed some stock clock faces for the meters (I’m dying to redesign those to match the lovely Romeo Y Julieta typography when I get some time).’
_______________ ‘Clock Ticking 10 hours, Ticking clock sound effect for 10 hours. Clock Sound. Feel free to use it for your projects.’
_______________ Nam June Paik French Clock TV, 1989
_______________ ‘The Danger Bomb Alarm Clock wakes you every morning with an explosion sound, and to disable the bomb, you have to follow the code (which resets every morning) to unhook the correct wire.’
________________ ‘Clockman is the alarm clock that will definitely get you out of bed. He wakes you up with an assortment of remarks (all in Japanese) designed to get you up and about. And he comes in four colors, each one with distinct personality traits matching a blood type (a common belief in Japan). Yellow Clockman (blood type O) cuts straight to the chase and speaks rough. Pink Clockman (A) will put up with most things and is the politest of the bunch. Blue Clockman (B) is a bit of a buffoon. And green Clockman (AB) lives in his own reality! Choose your new bedside companion.’
_________________ ‘This is the “God Bless My Family” clock. It features two little kids praying. Their prayers can be heard at bedtime or as an alarm in the morning to start your day. Or, it seems, whenever the clock randomly decides to start talking in the middle of the night, which has been my own disturbing experience with it. The highlight of the clock is the boy’s prayer. His take on the word “evil” in the phrase “but deliver us from evil” sounds like it’s out of a horror movie. (I won’t even get into the fact that he says “and BLEED us not into temptation” instead of “lead us.”)’
________________ ‘Simply set the Alarm Clock Rug to the time you need to get up, and it will make sure you are out of bed and ready to go right on time. In order to turn off the alarm, this rug requires you to place both feet firmly on its surface for at least 3 seconds. If you want some peace and quiet, you will have to get out of bed and start your day!’
________________ ‘This nifty alarm clock is designed so users can wake up to the smell of bacon, and then actually eat it too. Simply put, load the gadget up with a few strips of frozen bacon the night before, set the timer for 15-minutes before you’re ready to chow down, and you’re ready to go.’
________________ ‘Ruth Ewan’s “We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be” (2011) is a decimal clock that displays decimal time dividing the day into ten periods rather than twenty-four. Midnight becomes ten o’clock, midday becomes five o’clock, each new hour contains one hundred minutes and each new minute contains one hundred seconds.’
________________ ‘This pillow has the ability to display the clock on a soft display made on fabric under the pillow surface. It can function as an alarm and also detects snoring.’
________________ ‘Sonic Bomb Alarm Clock is designed specifically for those who need extra help waking up in the morning. It’s called the Sonic Bomb, and it’s tricked out with a flashing LCD light display, customizable alarm tones, and a vibrating component that quite literally shakes you awake.’
________________ ‘This brand Projector Clock will give your living room or bedroom a unique flair. The clock will project onto the wall with high definition from 1 to 7m. Full display of hours, minutes, and seconds is very vivid.’
_________________ ‘In between a meditation device and a clock, Eyelash Clock offers a new experience in the perception of time. It ignores the stressful codes we are used to when facing the passing of time. Numbers, clock hands and ticking sounds disappear, allowing us to contemplate time instead of enduring it. At first sight, Eyelash Clock appears like an indefinite and static object. But if you take a closer look, you can perceive a slight movement. By focusing a little more, you realize that fibers straighten up by slowly moving away one from the other.’
_________________ ‘JoJo Bizarre Adventure Art Decor Home Wall Clock Black Original Gift Unique Design’
_________________ ‘The option to delay your alarm is a thing of the past in a new alarm clock, which promises to wake you up ‘unless you’re dead.’ The clock, dubbed the ‘Timely Wake-up Device’ sits under your mattress, and repeatedly inflates and deflates. By doing this, the clock bends your spine into an awkward position, preventing you from sneaking in a few extra minutes of shut-eye. And as if this spine-bending wasn’t enough, the system also includes a speaker, which blasts loud noises into your ears.’
_________________ ‘John Muir, Sierra Club founder and Yosemite savior, was a fantastically creative maker too! One of his inventions was an alarm clock that knocks the leg out from under the bed.’
_________________ John Menick Giving Time, 2000: ‘To create the work Giving Time, New York-based artist and writer John Menick had a technician alter the works of a watch so that it would take exactly 28 hours to make a full rotation, even though the watch’s face is unchanged. The work was inspired partly by the artist’s research into the history of standardized time. The concept being tested was that the recipient would live by the time dictated by the watch. For example, showing up at work when the watch said it was nine a.m. Even though they might be somewhat conscious of the fact that the watch was off. The wearer would gradually go out of phase with everyone else. And just as gradually return.’
_________________ Tehching Hsieh One Year Performance (Time Clock Piece), 1980–1981: ‘For one year, from 11 April 1980 through 11 April 1981, Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour. Each time he punched the clock, he took a single picture of himself, which together yield a 6-minute movie. He shaved his head before the piece, so his growing hair reflects the passage of time.’
_________________ ‘Banpresto’s new GONG! alarm clocks look like those bells that they have by the side of the fighting ring. The difference here is that these ones are designed to wake you up. When it’s time to get up, a referee’s voice starts to count down from 10. If you don’t get out of bed within the 10 count the “round” is over, and the bell rings. An internal vibration sensor detects if you’ve actually gotten out of bed of if you’re still lying there like a lump.’
_________________ ‘With the Real Time grandfather clocks by artist Marten Baas, a man is filmed while he draws the hands of a clock from the inside of the interface. This film is integrated in the housing of a traditional floor clock. The man seems to stand in the clock as he keeps on drawing the current time.’
___________________ ‘STORY is a new magnetized piece from Flyte. The company’s latest design is an improvement to the wall clock, a work that uses powerful magnetism to move a hovering metal ball around STORY’s edge.’
__________________ Joseph Kosuth Existential Time #20, 2020
_________________ ‘Though it might appear at first to be a normal street clock withe the same nineteenth-century design typically found in Manhattan, this work subverts traditional notions of time. The numbers on Alicja Kwade’s clock in Against the Run are rotated about 90 degrees clockwise. And the hands rotate backward. Meanwhile, the second hand appears to stand still, pointing vertically at all times.’
_________________ ‘The single worst clock I have ever seen. I actually said aloud “Whyyyy”‘
_________________ ‘The Screaming Meanie alarm clock advertises itself as the loudest alarm clock you can possibly find. Making sounds at 120 dB, it’s as loud as a jet plane taking off!’
*
p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. Well, that was something. Me too re: Soft Cell/Almond. I always thought it would be very interesting to meet him and have a conversation. Cheers back, and here’s to your week. ** Dominik, Hi!!! My pleasure, as always. I’m almost well, mostly just a lingering stuffed up nose and slightly cloudy chest. I kind of figured that Saturday’s love was unnecessary, but you can never be too safe or something. Ha ha, I bet there’s one guy out there whose fetish is guys who look like thumbs, and I’m going to find him. Love proposing marriage to the loneliest person in the world with no prenuptial agreement, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, of course, for your insights and experiences re: Mr. Jarman. Quite a treasure trove. I interviewed him for, I think, the LA Weekly at the Chateau Marmont when ‘Edward II’ was released. Very lovely guy, yeah. ** _Black_Acrylic, Your parents are a tough crowd. Fireworks still? Well, I suppose they must be dead ducks by now. Excellent! About the feedback. Are there specific rules as to what constitutes ‘micro’? Length restrictions, etc.? ** Brendan, I hope your opening was a blast. Well, can such things ever be such a thing? Surely, in your case. Fun? I Zoomed with Jack on Saturday morning your time, and he was geared up for the festivities. Enjoy the afterburn, maestro. ** David Fishkind, Hi, David. Very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for your generous thoughts and sharing about reading the Cycle. Yes, I credit large amount of psychedelics with, well, a huge amount of whatever caused me to be whoever I am. Or the good parts, at least. What you say about anger makes enormous sense, of course. I’m strangely a person who rarely gets angry, even imaginatively. Whatever I’m full of is something else, or else I mischaracterise it to myself for some reason. I’ve never been afraid that I will lose my sense of the line between the real and the imagined or that my writing will lose that line either. Not sure why though. It’s greatly meaningful to me that you have a strong relationship to my writing. There’s no greater gift for doing all of this. I don’t think I ever wrote about Nick Drake until ‘I Wished’. There was a very long time when I couldn’t listen to or even think about Nick Drake because the association with George. Thank you for the link to your work! I’m grateful. I will go read your writing once I’m finished with this p.s. thing. Oh, I see there are a few of your writings there. Great. Thank you very much again, and, of course, please be there if/when ever the connection would be useful for you. Take care. ** scarf, Hi. It kind of was, right? What happened? ** politekid, Hi, Oscar! Oh, really, about the Schwab reference? I couldn’t figure that one out. How very boring. Ah, yes, the days when one could imagine some teen out there writing the ‘Citizen Kane’ of viruses. I know they probably still are, but it used to be possible to imagine the impetus as not being freighted with politics at all. Book proposals are so vexing. I vowed to never do one again, which cuts me out of no doubt interesting possibilities. And the one time I made one, it did sell the book it proposed, although the book was so not what I had proposed that it got cancelled. Anyway, granted that I know nothing, but I still strongly suspect your proposal is hitting the necessary marks with much more flair than you can probably detect at the moment. That’s encouragement, even if it doesn’t sound like that. That quote you quoted is really, really fucking good, it’s so true, you’re right. Oh, yeah, ‘Ghostwatch’, I need to watch that. I made a note at the time and then lost it. Internet archive, gotcha. Okay, I’m there, maybe even today. Thank you, pal. I’m good. My sickness or whatever is gradually fading out. I lost my wallet/card, but a new one is supposed to arrive this morning, although I don’t trust FedEx one little bit. The virtual haunt thing went really well. We were happy. We’re going to look into doing it in London. Now-wise, just waiting for hopefully good fundraising news any day from the producer of Zac’s and my new film. And this and that. Enjoying the winter’s gentle growth spurt. What’s your week like? ** Bill, Thank you, sir. How was the gig? Were you satisfied all in all? Good reception? Bon Monday. ** wolf, Wolf, rawr! I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. All kinds of wondering about how you are and what’s the what with you. Someone else did a small Jarman Day at some point, so the place has not been entirely bereft before this past weekend, it turns out. Like I told Mr. E, and probably have told you, I interviewed him once, and he was just as you say in person and even to me, a grunt who was asking him yet more questions. Paris is good. Getting wonderfully chilly. Xmas lights just starting to go up. Oh, no, about your mum unloading the Paris flat! Yes, yes, come visit post-haste! I should be around. Zac and I will need to go to LA to work on our film before too long, but I think we’ll likely be here for at least most of December. Come! That will be so great! Big, … no, wait, gigantic love to you!!!!! ** Misanthrope, Yeah, it’s weird how things can just slip by one. Yay, about Cornstalkers! Envy city. Nice! I watched the first, oh, 15 minutes of ‘CMBYN’ before shutting it off in horror, but Elio doesn’t ring a bell. Oops, about the big CO scare. You can’t be too careful, etc.? That sucks about your weekend’s consequent decimation however. But I’m glad that little Elio is A-okay. My weekend wasn’t bad either. Hugs. ** Right. I decided to show you a bunch of clocks. See you tomorrow.
‘By the time of his death from AIDS related complications in February 1994, Derek Jarman had amassed a reputation as one of Britain’s most controversial filmmakers. Indeed, only Michael Powell, Ken Russell and Jarman’s more direct contemporary, Peter Greenaway, demonstrate a similar proclivity towards taboo-breaking, provocation and sheer bad taste. However, Jarman also belongs alongside these names as one of the truly distinctive, original and even idiosyncratic talents in British film. His debut, Sebastiane (1976), was shot in Latin, he was nominated for the 1986 Turner Prize “in recognition of the outstanding visual qualities of his films”, yet his final film, Blue (1993), contained no images at all.
‘Critically problematic to a fault, to many he remains a marginal figure whose highly personal body of work is too experimental to be considered mainstream; yet his work is also ironically viewed as being too artistically conservative and conventional to be wholly accepted by the avant-garde. To his admirers, however, Jarman was at the centre of what Peter Wollen called “the Last New Wave”, Britain’s belated answer to the great Modernist movements in post-war Continental art cinema. For others still, Jarman has a significance that goes beyond his contributions to his own national cinema. One of the fathers of international “New Queer Cinema”, Jarman’s sexuality had always been a significant part of his work, but after his diagnosis as HIV it became its “principal, determining factor”.
‘Jarman saw himself as a queer artist following in the footsteps of Jean Cocteau and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and like his forebears, was an inveterate polymath – a notable painter, set-designer, writer, gardener and political activist – who nevertheless remains best remembered for his films. Jarman was, however, a Renaissance man in more than one sense. Indeed, five of his eleven feature films centre around the “interface between the Renaissance and the present”, an historical space that Jarman made his own, and which is essential to one’s understanding of his work. It is in his fascinating, often original and at times controversial engagement with the past – the art, literature and cultural heritage of Britain and Europe – that Jarman proved himself to be the true successor to Pasolini. Indeed, Jarman felt a kinship with the Italian director not only as a fellow queer filmmaker, but also as another critically problematic director who had gained an unshakable, though partly undeserved, reputation for controversy, despite being largely drawn to “traditional” material. Indeed, as Jarman himself noted of his own work, “Shakespeare, the Sonnets, Caravaggio, [Benjamin] Britten’s [War] Requiem, what more traditional subject matter could a film-maker take on? And yet I’m still seen by some as a menace.”
‘This tension between radicalism and tradition stems from Jarman’s upbringing, a period Jarman stresses is “crucial to understanding the nature of his films”. Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman was born on the 31st of January 1942 in Northwood, Middlesex, where his father, Lance Jarman, an RAF bomber pilot, was stationed. His mother, Elizabeth, was a warm, supportive and artistic woman with whom Jarman certainly identified more strongly than his father, who, by Jarman’s own admission, created his “aversion to all authority”. However, their relationship nevertheless remained complex and Jarman’s attempts to reconcile himself to his father and gain his approval carried over into his work, a fact emphasised by the eroticism, as well as horror, associated with men in uniform in so many of Jarman’s films. However, Lance Jarman also certainly instilled in his son the belief in tradition that would be as much a part of Jarman’s art and personality as his proclivity towards provocation, and Jarman understood that “without men like my father the war would never have been won”.Furthermore, Jarman’s father was an enthusiastic amateur filmmaker, whose colour home movie footage of young Derek, his sister and his mother plays such a crucial part in The Last of England (1987). Indeed, by 1987, when the film was being made, Jarman, who was righteously angered by the homophobia and authoritarianism of eight years of the Thatcher government, and who had recently learned of his own HIV positive status, began to empathise with his father, who “stared at disbelief at the society he had helped to save”.
‘A gifted painter, Jarman was accepted to the Slade School of Art in 1960. However, his father was skeptical about this path and agreed to support his son at the Slade only if he first earned a “proper” qualification. Respecting his father’s wish, Jarman went up to King’s College, London, to read English, History and History of Art. This eclectic course of study facilitated Jarman’s development as a serious artist and gave him “a range of cultural and historical reference which is apparent in all his films”. Indeed, it was during this first degree that Jarman would develop his love and understanding of Renaissance history, art and literature. Studious and seemingly chaste, Jarman was still uncomfortable with his sexuality and began to “read between the lines of history” searching for forebears to validate his existence. He did however, find “some heavyweight soulmates”, not least Caravaggio, Shakespeare and Marlowe.
‘Upon graduation from King’s in 1963, Jarman took up his place at the Slade. Arriving at a time of great liberation, it was here that he truly came to terms with his sexuality and allowed it to inform his art. In addition to studying painting and theatre design, Jarman also enrolled on a course taught by Thorald Dickinson which enabled him to see the work of great European filmmakers including Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini and Pasolini, amongst many others, as well as screenings of American avant-garde films by the likes of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Cinematically speaking, Jarman’s own work falls between these two categories, producing examples of European-style art cinema, such as Caravaggio (1986), and more radical, avant-garde work such as Blue, as well as films such as The Garden (1990), which combine elements of both in “an eclectic, hybrid manner”.’ — Brian Hoyle
Throbbing Gristle – Psychic Rally in Heaven (1980 – 1981)
Wang Chung – Dance Hall Days (1983)
Psychic TV – Catalan (1984)
Bryan Ferry – Windswept (1985)
The Smiths – The Queen Is Dead (1986)
Pet Shop Boys – It’s A Sin (1987)
The Mighty Lemon Drops – Out Of Hand (1987)
Suede – The Next Life (1993)
Coil – Egyptian Basses (1993)
_____ Interview by Akiko Hada & Rieko Fujii
WORD ASSOCIATIONS
Chaos: Chaos… (laughs)… most of my friends.
Energy: I am certainly lacking it (laughs) .
Death: I think about it every day, particularly at the moment. That what happens… well, it doen’t really associate with anything in particular. Certainly my friends’ death. I think about it an awful lot, I mean, we are living at the end of the world.
[The telephone rings. It’s Jordan. She’ll ring back in three quarters of an hour.]
Flower: Camellias… They’ve got bright green leaves, and they are red and pink and sometimes white. They come out at the wrong time of the year, almost in winter, and they look as if they should be tropical. They are a most tropical looking flower you get around here. When you see them in the spring here… such a surprise, they don’t look as if they should be here. They’re wonderful.
Kinship/Family: Oh, definitely my mum, and my grandmother. I don’t really like families, I find them rather terrifying. So, fear. Yes… (laughs).
Fog: There isn’t any left in England. We don’t have fogs like we used to have. We used to have wonderful fogs in London. I mean, people die in them, they are so strong (laughs.) Probably you can see them in a room, you can look across the room and actually see the fog in the room. When they stopped burning coal, fogs really stopped as well. Los Angeles… it’s another thing which reminds me of.
Volcano: Kenneth Anger. He put volcanoes all over his new film. They are wonderful, they are all over the film.
PASSION, FILM, PAINTING
What is your passion in life?
Oh, I don’t know. I think it alters. When I was a kid, I was passionate about flowers, butterflies – I used to collect butterflies – and paintings. And when I grew up a bit, I became passionate about music at that period, and theatre. And then I changed again. I’m not so passionate any longer, I am too old for passion (laughs). The Romans used to think passion as a madness. I’m not passionate any longer, am I, James?
[His friend and producer James Mackay is sitting on his bed, reading a magazine.]
James: Films?
Film… Am I passionate about films? When I see the old movies I made 10 years ago, it’s fascinating to see my friends 10 years before. I think the older the film is, the more fascinating it gets. The first photographs are really fascinating, and the first films are really wonderful to watch. I think a film gets more and more extraordinary when it gets older, and having been doing it for 10 years, some of the things I have done are old and have that feeling, for me anyway.
Do you like 30’s Expressionist films?
Yes, very much so. [Dr. Caligari?] Yes. Also, some Japanese films of that time as well. Mizoguchi’s wonderful films… I love his films, those are my favourite films.
I feel your films are not a kind of a media for giving some concrete message through them, but more for creating an interesting imagery. Do you agree with that?
Very much so, because I was a painter, I came to film from being a painter. I’ve never worked in the film industry as such, I’ve never worked in television. What I am looking at is always important in my films. I have also worked as a designer, of course, I worked for Ken Russell as a designer, so that influenced me as well. I suspect my weakest spot is having to write my own script as well. But they [the films] are all visual, that’s what interests me.
What is the reason why you work on both feature films and experimental films?
It is really one grown out of the other. I started as a painter, as I said, and I rented a super 8 camera from my friend, and I went and took a lot of super 8 films. As the time I was still designing for Ken Russell, and still painting, and slowly films took over. And I’ve never stopped making my own super 8 movies, but after doing that for 5 years, it is also exciting to make a feature film. And a situation occurred where it was possible to make Sebastiane in 1975. We made it with very little money, a friend of mine got a loan against his house, and we went away and made that film. In fact, all my roots are painting and home movie making, the underground area of film making, on the whole, rather than the commercial cinema.
What is the difference, in terms of your ambition, between feature films like Sebastiane and Jubilee, and those experimental films such as In the Shadow of the Sun?
That was a very private film in a way, because I was working with friends, it was just made for my friends. We never expected that film to go further than my studio, maybe shown to friends or Co-op [London Film-Makers’ Co-op] or something like that. All those films in those days were really made in our own cinema, a group of people who were living in studios, we all lived in a close proximities to each other, so we were making a sort of bigger home movies. That’s what those films are, and I actually rather like them. They are very private films compared to the feature films.
What kind of paintings did you used to do?
[Pointing to a painting on the wall] That’s the last one I did, those little ones there with a star in it, there in a black picture. It’s a sort of landscape, but it is difficult to ascertain that, it’s a sort of apocalypse picture, rather like John Martin’s, a 19th century painter. I started painting landscape, and these became very abstract. In fact, for a long time I was doing rather big abstract pictures, sort of influenced by American painting, then I stopped, but I still work on these.
Do you still paint then?
I do a little bit, every now and again. They start off like that there, and I do a bit each day, but they are like drawings rather than paintings, they are very simple. I don’t do any big pictures, I don’t have any room. I need to work in this room, it’s not just big enough for paintings. it’s only 15 square feet at most [he must have meant 15 x 15 feet], I think. So I have to move my desk to paint, that’s why they are so small.
Talking of painting, when and how did you get interested in Caravaggio?
It was suggested by a man who commissioned this film, called Jackson. It wasn’t an idea that I had myself. He came up to me at a gallery opening about four years ago, before I did The Tempest, and asked me whether I was interested in writing a script, and he sat me down to write a script for three months. I’ve left it for a while as I worked on The Tempest, and then re-written it again in the last month or two. We’ve set up an office and I hope we’ll start filming at the end of this summer. But like all these things, you just never know. Because of the situation here in London, to actually get organised… [is] very hard.
OTHER DIRECTORS’ FILMS
I heard you had trouble with David Bowie [in regards to the Neutron project.]
No trouble with David Bowie whatsoever. David Bowie was going to do it, but in the end we couldn’t get the money together fast enough, so he had to find something else, which was Elephant Man. Then he started Elephant Man and he was working really hard, he was so exhausted by it, so he said to me, “I don’t think I can do it next January”. That’s when we could probably have done it. In the mean time, I was having problems, which I think he sensed, with the company that commissioned it, they were having problems, so we decided to call it off. But I’m certain that I will work with David Bowie one day. I think he wants to work with me, and I certainly want to work with him, just this time it was not quite right.
What do you think of his films?
I quite liked The Man Who Fell to the Earth, I thought he was quite good in that. I liked that film. I didn’t see the other one [Just a Gigolo], I heard the other one was terrible. Everyone said it was terrible, so I decided I didn’t want to see it. I never go to see films because of the actor, and I only go and see one if people said it was a good film. Everyone said this one was terrible, and I believed them this time. Sometimes I don’t believe them, but I believed them about this film.
Any recent films you’ve seen and liked?
I saw Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I thought that was wonderful, a lovely film. It looks so wonderful at the beginning, all that landscape. I went to the Berlin Film Festival, but I didn’t see many films I really liked. Most of them that I like are things like super 8 films from New York, Caroline Key and people like that, Scott B and Bess B, more or less underground – I don’t know if that’s still the right word for it. Honestly, I preferred that sort of cinema while I was in Berlin, though I went to see one or two commercial films.
I can tell you films I hated, that’s very easy. I hated Elephant Man, I thought it was absolutely awful, unbearable. I can give you the reasons which are specific. I think it was [?? – illegible] the way the English life was set up; it was very conventional, made like a television documentary; had a certain style of acting that I didn’t like. I thought the only nice thing about it was the photography, which was beautiful, wonderful, but everything else was absolutely haywire.
I hated Long Good Friday, it was so boring I nearly went to sleep in it. In fact, there is a whole area of English cinema which are so terrible. Alan Parker is another one. Fame and that dreadful film called Midnight Express, which is so nasty because that man had his head beaten up, and all the audience were cheering for it. That is the English yawn cinema. I call that a “yawn between two long adverts”.
But there are English directors who are interesting. People like Chris Petit who made Radio On, Ron Peck who made Nighthawks, and there are others as well. There are underground film makers, there is a young super 8 film maker called John Maybury who has made a film recently, which is absolutely wonderful, and he’s going to show it at the ICA this summer.
Have you seen any of Julien Temple’s films?
Great Rock & Roll Swindle? I liked that, I thought it was fun, light-hearted and funny, like the English Carry On films of the 1950’s.
Yes, I think Julien likes those films.
Absolutely, so do I. Julien Temple is another one who could probably produce very interesting films. Jim Sharman, though he’s Australian, I don’t know. We will see. I don’t like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but there is a new one so we’ll see what it’s like.
Did you like the Rocky Horror stage show?
I didn’t like the film at all, the stage version is much more interesting. Somehow the film did not work in England, no one liked it in England, it only lasted for a week. It’s only been successful in America.
What kind of reactions do your films get abroad?
I don’t know. In Germany very favourably, they get very good reactions in Germany. Different films differently. For example, Sebastiane did very well in Italy. None of them did particularly well in America. It’s very difficult to break into the American market, although none of them yet has done disasterously. Considering the budgets, which are all very small, all of the films made profits, which is excellent. I don’t know about Japan, I don’t know if any of them even got there. I don’t think so. The Tempest did very well in Australia, and now Jubilee is also released in Australia. I think Jubilee was before its time, because now it seems people are interested in that film again, it seems to be coming back. I don’t know, every country is different. I think the films are most consistently liked in Germany, of all the coutries.
Are you usually aware of what other directors are doing?
I don’t know a huge amount about films, I know a lot about paintings. I am brought up as a painter, I have never consistently studied film, I have never been to film school or anything. I think one is aware of other film makers, one is in contact with a lot of people who see films. I do see films, there are hundreds of things one misses. But, for example, going to the Berlin Film Festival for ten days, you see 2 films a day or 3 a day, so you do see a lot of films in places like that, very often the sort of films that I really liked, particularly ones from abroad. I am not very keen on English film-makers. But you can understand it: if one is working in a particular country, one would have to be very critical about the sort of films that are being made around them. I like the German cinema very much. I like Werner Herzog’s films, not all of them but I like The Heart of Glass very much. I like Japanese films. Like most people, I seem to like films that come from abroad.
I tell you the one film that I was disappointed by, though – Kurosawa’s last film, Kagemusha. Everyone thought it was absolutely wonderful, but I thought it was terrible. I found it unbelievably boring. It had none of the finess of real Japanese cinema, it seemed to be terribly infected by the sort of Western music that I always loved, but I just found it warring. I suppose Japan is like that, Western music is played everywhere. But I found it odd because the film was set back in the past. If it was a film about modern Japan, it wouldn’t matter. But it did seem to me that it was muddled, for me it was.
What was that wonderful film, I always forget. There is a wonderful film about a boy who has been painted with in a temple, a singer who is painted with signs and the demon tears his ears off, and he goes off to the graveyard and there is a princess…. That film [Kwaidan] is absolutely wonderful.
PRODUCTION
What degree of power do you have in the production of the films?
What sort of power? Control of the subject, or…
Do you have an absolute power?
Of course not. The whole thing about film making is so enormous that I don’t know how you interpret power, it’s a very broad question. I think I’ve always [used] my own material, or adapted Shakespeare, for a start. I have always made the decision what I was going to make. I haven’t made anything that I didn’t personally want to make. I don’t know if that’s power or not.
When it comes to actually making a film, they are made on a fairly communal basis, everyone suggests ideas and things, and I don’t work in a way a normal commercial film director does, because we don’t have the resources. When you’re making a film with very little money, you don’t have that sort of power. When you’ve got millions of dollars, then you can say “paint that house red!”, “I want that river to go blue!” and so on. Working with small budgets, you have to improvise all the time.
Do you get much influence from people you work with?
Yes I do. I work with people I know, people I have known for a long time. They are people I know quite well outside of the film, and whom I listen to normally, so one is listened to when one is making a film.
Obviously, if we are going to get the film together, the last decision is going to be mine, but you can see, it’s sort of reciprocal. I’ve been working with highly intelligent and articulate actors, for instance in The Tempest, Heathcote Williams who knows much more about Shakespeare than I do. So if Heathcote says in the morning, “I think this line should be put it back again” or “we should cut it out”, I will listen. That’s how we work. I don’t work in the dictatorial manner, I don’t think. But I have a very firm idea what I want to do before I go filming, and this is a question of setting up. You see, if you get all the right people in the beginning, you never have to ask anyone to do anything they don’t want to do, because you have worked out what people would want to do in any case. That’s where the art is, finding the right people before you start, and when you start, everyone does just whatever they want do do more or less. That’s how it’s worked.
What relationships do you have with your actors?
They are all different, obviously. Some are friends and some are friends’ friends. There are very few people who don’t come out of my circle of friends. Nearly every one of them knows someone else on the film, or someone on one of the other films. Although they are not all great friends of mine, maybe, and I don’t see them often, they are all people whom I’m likely to bump into in the course of ordinary life. I probably see Jordan once every month, or somewhere or other I go and say hello to her. I’ve kept in contact with most of them, not all of them. Just like life, some of them go away completely. But they are all people whom I know or they know friends of mine.
SPIRITUALITY, RELIGION, ETC.
Have you had any spiritual experience?
It’s very difficult to know about it, isn’t it? Have I seen ghosts and have I seen angels? I don’t think I have.
Any memories of funny, strange or shocking experience?
I have hundreds of funny, strange or shocking experiences. I have hundreds of them, I don’t know where to begin. Talking about religious experiences, I have got a very strange experience which, I don’t know if it will mean very much to you because obviously you come from a very different culture, but ancient Greece is the root of Western culture, and in Delphi, which is sacred to Apollo, where the sacred well was that used to speak prophecies, and it still exists. I was hitch-hiking through Greece when I was much younger, I was hitch-hiking down to Delphi to see the famous bronze of Charioteer. It was a group of three of us, and we got in very late at night. The lorry which took us stopped before we got to the village, and we had to walk to it at night. There was this waterfall, and it was very hot, obviously in the middle of summer in Greece, and we decided to sleep out by this waterfall. And when we woke up very early int he morning, because the sun came up at four thirty in the morning, we found a sort of ravine where water came out of a cave, and there was a big stone and we cooked our breakfast on this stone and washed all our clothes in it. Then a little later, at about six o’clock, several people arrived, looked at us very strangely and disappeared, and about twenty minutes later, about 100 policemen in 4 police vans arrived. I’ve never seen so many policemen in so few vans, just hundreds of them everywhere, arrived and arrested us. It turned out that we had washed our clothes in the sacred well of Apollo, the well that gave you prophecies, and we cooked our breakfast on the altar. We didn’t know that we’d done it, it was completely innocent, but obviously, it was one of the most awful things you could possibly do. Afterwards I thought it was rather wonderful, it was almost a religious experience. There you are. It is the answer to both of your questions – it was religious experience and a funny story . And we never saw a thing in Delphi, we were thrown out of the town, they wouldn’t let us back in. They took us out and said, go away.
What does religion mean to you?
I have no organised religion whatsoever. I was bought up in the Church of England, and there was nothing I could learn from the Church. I have a totally secular view of life. I mean, in a way, I believe in this fatalism but it is nothing to do with organised religion. If I got my hands on England, I’d make them all read “Tempest” instead of the Bible. I think they would learn more.
Are you interested in the religions of the East?
I have been, but not deeply. There was a huge fashion in England about 10 or 15 years ago. As a young student I almost reacted against that, because I was slightly younger, you can imagine the situation. I am much more interested in the Art of the East. One of the great influences of my life was a man who had deeply known about the Japanese art, who’d been to Japan. He had always told me the stories of things that happened to him in Japan, and he had a Japanese tea bowl. I’ve still got one of his Japanese tea bowls, up there. It’s a rather nice one, I love it. It’s not a very old one, apparently it’s 19th century, but it’s beautiful, isn’t it? I think it is. Perhaps it’s very ordinary to you. I think it’s wonderful. It is used, I’m afraid it’s used for very English tea instead.
_____________ 19 of Derek Jarman’s 24 films
______________ A Journey to Avebury (1971) ‘A Journey to Avebury is a short experimental Super 8 film made by Jarman in 1971, in a period when he was just beginning to transition to film as his preferred medium. It charts a walking journey he made through the Wiltshire landscape to the Neolithic stones at Avebury.’— Tibor Nagy
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_______________ Garden of Luxor (1972) ‘A silent avant-garde experience created by Derek Jarman, filled with superimposed images forming a whole picture. His palette consists mostly of reddish random images of Egypt and the pyramids; a strange garden destroyed from time to time by a man with a whip; a young peaceful man relaxing on the floor; other smoking and eating insects. This is Jarman’s view of the Garden of Luxor and its mysteries.’— IMDb
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________________ Stolen Apples for Karen Blixen (1973) ‘Begins with a portrait of Karen Blixen taken from a photograph which is then superimposed with images of Gerald Incandela in a cloak collecting apples dropped from a tree and holding them up in tribute to her.’— MUBI
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_______________ Art of Mirrors (1973) ‘The Art of Mirrors is an abstract film made in 1973 by director, Derek Jarman. The film, shot in super 8 features figures moving in the foreground and background of an empty space holding mirrors which occasionally flash in the lens of the camera. The images portrayed in the film are reminiscent of Jarman’s Abstract Landscape paintings of the same period. In his diary Jarman wrote of this film, ‘this is only something that could only be done on a Super 8 camera, with it’s built in meters and effects.’ The film’s title was reworked in the script for ‘Dr Dee The Art Of Mirrors and The Summoning Of Angels’ in 1975.’— Letterboxd
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_______________ Sebastiane (1976) ‘Derek Jarman’s 1976 film Sebastiane is a loose retelling of the story of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. The martyr’s tale is recontextualised from its Christian origins into an unapologetic representation of queer male desire and a commentary on the nature of reception. Jarman is certainly playing ‘fast and loose with history’ here but to dismiss the film because of this is to entirely miss the point. He is not disregarding history with this film in order to create a purely fictional story of queerness with a historical veneer superficially painted over it. He in fact shows a great interest in the historical process, interrogating how history is used and constructed by the present. In this film we see a pure expression of queer individuals striving to find a place for themselves within the past, negotiating the lines between heritage, history, and reception. This results in a highly unique work to which we should direct greater attention.’ — Alex Grindley
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____________ Jubilee (1977) ‘When Queen Elizabeth I asks her court alchemist to show her England in the future, she’s transported 400 years to a post-apocalyptic wasteland of roving girl gangs, an all-powerful media mogul, fascistic police, scattered filth, and twisted sex. With Jubilee, legendary British filmmaker Derek Jarman channeled political dissent and artistic daring into a revolutionary blend of history and fantasy, musical and cinematic experimentation, satire and anger, fashion and philosophy. With its uninhibited punk petulance and sloganeering, Jubilee brings together many cultural and musical icons of the time, including Jordan, Toyah Willcox, Little Nell, Wayne County, Adam Ant, and Brian Eno (with his first original film score), to create a genuinely unique, unforgettable vision. Ahead of its time and often frighteningly accurate in its predictions, it is a fascinating historical document and a gorgeous work of film art.’— The Criterion Collection
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_______________ The Tempest (1979) ‘Shot on 16mm on a characteristically tiny budget, Derek Jarman’s third feature was just as playfully wayward as Sebastiane (co-d. Paul Humfress, 1976) and Jubilee (1978), with which it has rather more in common than any conventional adaptation of a Shakespeare play. There is copious nudity (mostly male, but also the distressingly unforgettable sight of Caliban’s mother Sycorax breastfeeding her son), unconventional casting (Toyah Willcox’s Miranda hardly suggests innocent purity) and setting (a crumbling mansion as opposed to an island), and an approach to the text that clearly regards it as a springboard rather than a sacrament.
‘Yet the result is one of the most imaginative of all Shakespeare films, and comes far closer to capturing the play’s sense of magic than the lacklustre BBC Television Shakespeare production that was broadcast only a few months after its release. It was a long-term labour of love for Jarman – he’d been obsessed with the play since his schooldays, and had made a serious attempt at getting the film produced in 1974, when his lack of experience counted against him.’— Michael Brooke
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_________________ In the Shadow of the Sun (1981) ‘Derek Jarman’s In the Shadow of the Sun is part home movie, part fever dream; a fantasy and a reverie and a technicolour nightmare, made more surreal, menacing, and beautiful with an electronic soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle.’— forestpunk
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_______________ Imagining October (1984) ‘Produced for the 1984 London Film Festival, Derek Jarman’s Imagining October is a dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War.’— MUBI
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______________ The Angelic Conversation (1985) ‘”My most austere work, but also the closest to my heart.” So Derek Jarman described THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION, his lyrical celebration of gay love set within the context of a series of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ethereal Super-8 images slowed to a magical, meditative pace follow the love affair between two men, as Dame Judi Dench provides a soothing presence with her narration of fourteen sonnets. The disruption of the narrative with images of barren and threatening landscapes echoes perfectly the exaltation and torment explored in the works. Polished off with dreamlike music by Coil, Jarman’s most cherished film is an intoxicating portrait of love.’–Zeitgeist Films
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______________ Caravaggio (1986) ‘Derek Jarman struggled for seven years to bring his portrait of the great Renaissance painter Michelangelo Caravaggio to the screen, producing a critically acclaimed masterwork and powerful meditation on sexuality, criminality and art. Told in flashback as the artist (Nigel Terry – Troy) lies dying in poverty, the film brilliantly recreates the look and colour of Caravaggio’s original paintings while exploring the homoerotic subtext of his work. Speculating on the artist’s relationship with his model Ranuccio (Sean Bean – Lord of the Rings), the film explores a vicious love triangle also involving the model’s wife, played brilliantly by Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Michael Clayton) Jarman’s muse and collaborator throughout several films, this was Swinton’s first feature role. With luscious production design it was the first major film production for award-winning costume designer Sandy Powell (The Aviator, Shakespeare in Love) the dazzling Caravaggio is arguably the most accessible of Jarman’s films.’— Umbrella
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Derek Jarman about Caravaggio
_______________ Pirate Tape (1987) ‘For fans of the film Decoder, here is a shared cinematic universe of Derek Jarman’s 1983 Super-8mm collaborative short, Pirate Tape. Re-coded at the corrected speed, it stars William S. Burroughs & FM Einheit with sound by Psychic TV, who at that time featured: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Peter Christopherson (Sleazy of COIL), Geoffrey Nigel Laurence Rushton (Jhonn Balance of COIL), Alex Fergusson (of Alternative TV), John Gosling (of Zos Kia), and Paula P-Orridge.’— Romain Frequency
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_________________ The Last of England (1987) ‘The Last of England is not a conventional film by any means, but it does feature many of Jarman’s typical hues. From his earliest film experiments, the director had been using Super 8 to realign visual perception, going so far as to shoot at literally a handful of frames per second only. He had already began to push the medium in longer works, such as In The Shadow of The Sun (1984), and the previous year’s The Angelic Conversation (1987), but this is the first instance of the feature-length film being fully realised in this beautifully grainy medium (before being transferred to video, aptly creating further degradation).
‘Within its disintegrating frames, Jarman unleashes his anger at the state of Thatcherite Britain; a violent, grey place verging on the totalitarian and the decrepit. The film takes its name from Ford Maddox Brown’s painting of 1855, and shares its themes of escape and the changing of place, but in the most poetic and impressionistic of senses. Whereas the characters of Brown’s painting are saying goodbye to the white cliffs of Dover, Jarman is saying goodbye in an emotional way; he’s stuck in the place physically but is witnessing a higher establishment dismantle the world around him. If Jarman were to recreate Brown’s painting, the cliffs would be crumbling.’— Adam Scovell
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_______________ War Requiem (1989) ‘Derek Jarman creates a visual evocation of Benjamin Britten’s choral masterpiece, The War Requiem, which blends the Latin Mass of the Dead with the poignant poetry of Wilfred Owen. Dramatised scenes featuring spellbinding performances from an extraordinary cast are interwoven with cinematic, poetic images and harrowing archive footage, which all serve to recreate the horrors of 20th century wars – the loss of innocence, the unbearable suffering, the nightmares, the tragic waste of life. Critically acclaimed on its release, Derek Jarman’s War Requiem is perhaps the visionary director’s greatest film. As a testament to the futility of war it is a unique, poignant and haunting experience.’— Hibrow
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_______________ The Garden (1990) ‘In his film The Garden (1990) Derek explored what it meant to be gay in the 20th century, against the political backdrop of Section 28 and the HIV crisis. Filmed on location in Dungeness against the backdrop of Prospect Cottage and the nuclear power station. Filmed on Super 8, laid down on to tape and then 35mm film. Shifting from the personal to the political these excerpts from the film show Jarman working in his garden.’— Garden Museum
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______________ Edward II (1991) ‘One of final masterpieces from director Derek Jarman, the iconic New Queer Cinema classic Edward II offers a radical, postmodern take on Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan tragedy. Newly crowned, the youthful King Edward II (Steven Waddington) sets the stage for palace revolt when he takes the ambitious Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan) as his lover. Neglecting both his wife, Isabella (Tilda Swinton), and his royal responsibilities, Edward heaps titles and honors on Gaveston, while indulging in a life of ease and pleasure. Distraught with jealousy, Isabella conspires with her husband’s powerful enemies to depose the king and have her vengeance.’ — Film Movement
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_______________ Wittgenstein (1993) ‘A bold, offbeat biography of the great Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, personalised in Derek Jarman’s unique style to address the politics and sexuality of the troubled intellectual.’— MUBI
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_________ Blue (1993) ‘Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman’s experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.’— Noah
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_________ Glitterbug (1994) ‘An hour-long companion piece to Blue, Glitterbug is a collage of Derek Jarman’s Super 8 videos, assembled posthumously by his close friends as a tribute to the late artist.’— MUBI
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p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. Early 90s: lo-fi indie rock, rave culture, writing my novel ‘Try’, queer punk, … It was nice, better than nice even, but I never long for the past. Nostalgia doesn’t agree with me for some reason. I’m a forward momentum kind of guy. What awards show? I like awards shows, I don’t know why. Award shows and disaster movies, big guilty pleasures. I keep feeling better, thank you. Still pretty imperfect internally, but righter every day. Have a weekend full of joy and all of that good stuff. ** Misanthrope, How was Cornstalkers? Tell me, tell me! Bon weekend away from the work load, buddy. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Glad you dug it, of course. Skelley to the rescue. Yes, I have a sniffle and still a bit of internal clog/haze, but I’m living like I don’t. If I was in university I would maybe write my dissertation about depressing Russian twink porn of the early 00’s. It was so unique. I’d love to locate and interview the people who made it and find out whether it was intentionally depressing and disturbing or if they didn’t realise it was or just didn’t care if the models seemed so desperate and miserable. But alas. Love rewiring everyone’s brain until they have zero interest in what Kanye West does or thinks or feels, G. ** Your Nightmare, Mine or everybody’s? ** Cunt Fucker, Oh, no, you played the ‘you’ll never equal Bresson’ card! ** FuckYou., Okay, now you’re just boring. ** Jack Skelley, Hi, Jack! Thank you ever so much, sir and pal. Brendan’s opening is tonight! Or today! As is our book club. What a day! Everyone, If you’re in the LA environs, amazing artist and blog d.l. Brendan Lott has a show of his photographs opening today with a catalogue that includes an essay by yesterday’s guest host with the most Jack Skelley. Go if you can! Here’s the scoop, courtesy of Jack: ‘Artist Brendan Lott’s new show at Walter Maciel Gallery here in L.A. opens Sat. Nov.6. Here’s the gallery website. Brendan published a gorgeous book to accompany his stunner photos and kindly asked me to write an essay. Brendan’s book is here. See you a little later! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, Guy Fawkes, right. So the fireworks tradition is people imagining they’re him and that the air is the House of Lords? Is that the idea? ** David Ehrenstein, I’m so very sorry for your loss, David. A close friend of mine died unexpectedly recently, and I know how very hard that feels. Hugs. ** alex beaumais, Hi, alex! Welcome! I’m very happy to have facilitated Mr. Skelley’s getting you in the door. I never watch TV, it’s weird. Thanks for wanting to watch PGL, and I hope you like it. How are you generally or specifically? What’s going on? Have a terrific weekend. ** politekid, Hey, O. Yeah, I don’t know what was up with the trolls. It’s weird to get attacked out of the blue with no known impetus, although I guess the post somehow triggered it? I don’t know. Thanks for having my back, my friend. How are you? What’s your latest? ** Steve Erickson, Gisele leant me a little money, so I’ll be good, I think. Thank you. Curious about that new track, obviously. Yeah, that was confusing: the Schwab thing. Makes you wonder. Have a fine weekend, sir. ** Okay. It was odd to realise that I’d never made a Derek Jarman post before, but, as soon as I realised that, I made one, and now everything is hunky dory. Enjoy yourselves with it and otherwise. See you on Monday.
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