‘The American Underground Film Archive is a project by Michigan based art company American Underground, to preserve the best of independent and underground cinema, and save the things no one else would give a second thought, putting them all up here where they should be seen. No money is made off of these, it is just out of pure love for cinema.’

 

__
Further

American Underground Film Archive
Shozin Fukui
Sarah Jacobson
Richard Kern
Michael P. DiPaolo
Jon Reiss
Nick Zedd
Tracey Moffatt
Tessa Hughes-Freeland
John Lurie
COUM Transmissions
Amos Poe
Ralph Thanhauser
Win Chamberlain
Sally Pugh
Andy Warhol
Rudy Burckhardt

 

___
Stills

 

_______
Ephemera

 

___________
No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground (1979)
by J. Hoberman

 

Drifting across the Bowery, fallout from the 1977 punk “explosion” continues to spawn art-world mutations. For the first time in the decade since the structuralists zoomed in on the stuff and ontology of film, a radically divergent group sensibility has blossomed on New York’s independent film scene. Closely linked to local art-punk, no-wave bands, these filmmaker’s parallel the music’s energy, iconography, and aggressive anyone-can-do-it aesthetic, while using the performers themselves as a kind of ready-made pool of dramatic talent.

The existence of a punk bohemia, the cross-fertilization of avant-garde rock and post-conceptual art (heralded by last May’s no-wave concerts at Artists Space), and the proliferation of sync-sound super-8 cameras have stimulated a number of young artists and musicians over the last year to produce a new wave of content-rich, performance-oriented narrative films. These are hardly seamless fictions; some are willfully, at times brilIiantly, primitive. Many of the filmmakers were initially attracted to super-8 talkies as a documentary tool, and even the most extravagant of their fictions are grounded in a gritty, on-the-street verite.

Rejecting the increasingly academic formalism that has characterized the 1970s film avant-garde, as well as the gallery-art of video, the super-8 new wave represents a partial return to the rawer values of underground of the 1960s (Jack Smith, Ron Rice, the Kuchar brothers, early Warhol). Like its precursor, the new underground’s technically pragmatic films enact libidinal fantasies, parody mass cultural forms, glorify a marginal lifestyle, and exhibit varying degrees of social content. Their populist rhetoric has a ’60s ring as well: “I want to make films that people will see and that won’t get stuck in some independent film art house,” says one. “I’m thinking of drive-ins, rock clubs, prison, and television.”

Beth B and Scott B, a look-alike pair of art school drop-outs in their mid-twenties, have been the most effective of super-8 filmmakers in getting their work around. Their “B-movies,” Black Box and GMan, turn up everywhere from P.S. 1 to Hurrah. Currently, the Bs are screening episodes from their serial-in-progress, The Offenders, at Max’s Kansas City. They call the fllm “a savage satire on society’s distortions,” and its cliff-hanger format suits their sensibility perfectly: It’s as though the film’s sinister conspiracies, femme gangs, and punk bank-robbers were just a part of the daily round of life in Lower Manhattan.

Other super-8 films have been surfacing intermittently over the last few months on the Millennium-Collective-Kitchen circuit, but the New Cinema on St. Mark’s Place has been the punk-film bailiwick. Calling itself the city’s first video-cinema, the New Cinema transfers super-8 to videotape and projects it upon a four-by-five Advent screen. The theatre’s premieres have ranged from the neo-neorealism of Charlie Ahearn’s The Deadly Art of Survival (a shoestring Enter the Dragon shot in and around the Smith housing-projects) to the guerrilliere newsreel of Vivienne Dick’s Beauty Becomes the Beast (Teenage Jesus’s Lydia Lunch as a ‘five-year-old child); from the sci-fi povera of John Lurie’s Men in Orbit (slum living-room as space-capsule) to the Quaalude surrealism of Michael McClard’s Motive (a punk psychokiller rigs the Museum of Modern Art’s men’s room to electrocute random users).

The 50-seat storefront opened in January with cofounder Eric Mitchell’s mock-Warhol, terrorist parody Kidnapped, and has been plastering its schedule across downtown walls ever since. Mitchell, 26, rivals the Bs as a pragmatic self-promoter. The Soho News tagged his theatre’s blend of super-8 and video “a kicky scam to get [foundation] money,” but Mitchell is an affable hustler. I ran into him several days after the New Cinema’s advertised “Symposium on the ‘New Narrative,’ ” and when I asked how this unlikely but impressive-sounding event had gone, he burst out laughing.

“I just saw a really funny film, The Connection,” Mitchell tells me. A connoisseur of dated bohemias, he has a small shrine to Edie Sedgwick taped up in his one-chair Lower East Side apartment, and blandly describes Kidnapped—shot last spring, shortly after Warhol’s 1965 Vinyl played the Collective—as “a 1960s underground movie happening today.”

Indeed, its 15 unedited super-8 rolls are a poverty-row rehash of the Factory’s assembly-Iine method. A few jittery extroverts, stimulated by drugs, Mitchell’s on-screen direction, and the no-wave music blaring from a plastic phonograph on the floor, jostle each other and the ever-panning camera within the cramped, harshly lit confines of the filmmaker’s living room. When not trading insults, the cast vaguely pretends to have abducted a wealthy industrialist (Mudd Club owner Steve Maas) and are half-heartedly beginning to torture him as the camera runs out of film.

Kidnapped’s follow-up, the more conventionally entertaining Red Italy, is an effective burlesque of the sort of early ’60s import Pauline Kael called “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties.” Although Mitchell swears that his next film—a homage to Scorpio Rising, with an all-French cast—won’t star anyone from the music scene (“which is going to shreds anyway”), what’s immediately striking about the super-8 new wave is its symbiotic relationship to certain no-wave bands. Jennifer Miro (the Nuns), Arto Lindsay (DNA), Gordon Stevenson and Lydia Lunch (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) are all film performers. James Chance’s Contortions—famous for his attack-the-audience punch-outs—form a subunit all their own. Saxophonist Chance and guitarist Pat Place have appeared in a number of movies, as has the group’s ex-organist, Adele Bertei, and present manner Anya Phillips. (The flow works two ways: Gordon Stevenson is about to release a film, filmmaker Vivienne Dick plays organ for Beirut Slump, and the Bs are set to tour Europe this summer with Teenage Jesus. Performance-artist James Nares, another former Contortion, is the auteur of the scene’s Grand Hotel—Rome ’78, a 90-minute costume drama that looks like a toga party in Little Lulu’s clubhouse and features at least half of the above-mentioned personalities.

Although 40 minutes too long, the film does have its moments. With one tooth blacked out, spindly David McDermott III plays the meglomaniacal Caesar as a sniveling, screaming six-year-old, tirelessly ranting “I am God!” on the steps of Grant’s Tomb. Meanwhile, Mitchell—scratching his armor and mumbling “pretty weird,” as though Stanley Kowalski had stumbled onto the set of Quo Vadis?—chain-smokes through a tepid love scene with the coyly simpering Lydia Lunch. A black slip hiked over her thighs and a spiky mop of hair cascading onto her face, she rises from her mattress-on-the-floor divan only once in the film, to chase McDermott around the camera with a whip.

(cont.)

 

_____
Selection

Shozin Fukui Rubber’s Lover (1996)
‘A secret Corporation has been running tests on human subjects to determine the effects of sound and ether using what they call DDD (Digital Direct Drive). The problem is, the subjects tend to blow up if subjected to too much of it. Upon learning that there experiments are about to be shut down, researchers Motomiya and Hitotsubashi go off the deep-end by kidnapping the corporation secretary, and increasing there experimentation in hopes of proving there work. With there first subject unsuccessful due to blowing the test subjects brains out, they continue by enlisting another to delve even further. The intent is to increase psychic ability in humans. But how and why they came to the methods they are investigating is beyond me. I think a film like this is not intended to really stay on coherent course rather than to shock the viewers with stark violence, overacting and nightmarish segues. And let me re-iterate overacting is a big part of this!!

‘In keeping with the visual needs for this film, the director Shozin Fukui chose to intermix a variety of industrial imagery to help sell the look and feel. Often Fukui uses close ups of machinery, gears, wiring, and electronic parts to further drive home the industrial environment they are in. On the most part, this film is pretty incomprehensible. The human experiments are outfitted in strange rubber bondage suits and then injected with ether to get them on an accelerated addiction. This combined with the audio overloads is supposed to awaken psychic abilities, though these abilities also come with a price of madness and fatalities. The whole idea is pretty ludicrous and a stretch on scientific reasoning. I never did get the whole ether thing. If there’s some credibility to the idea of it …I’m really not sure. But I guess it doesn’t matter. The result is total on screen chaos.’ — HHN

 

Sarah Jacobson I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993)
‘I Was a Teenage Serial Killer might very well be the only movie that feels fully, authentically submerged in riot grrrl aesthetics & ideology. Its black & white chocolate syrup gore and its cut & paste block text collages directly echo the visual patina of the Xeroxed zines that sparked the movement and gave it a name. Its misandrist serial killer premise that lashes back at the misogyny of its own punk community plays like a faithful adaptation of the Bikini Kill track “White Boy.” It even has bonafide riot grrrl cred on its soundtrack, which includes contributions from the seminal band Heavens to Betsy (which featured Corin Tucker, later of Sleater-Kinney). It’s not a perfect film, but it is a perfect time capsule of the exact frustrations & aesthetics that fueled the feminist punk movements of its era.’ — Swamp Flix

 

Richard Kern Catholic (1991)
‘Catholic is a b/w Super-8 short written, produced and directed by Richard Kern. A Catholic student has a crisis of faith.’

 

Michael P. DiPaolo Requiem for a Whore (1989)
‘The last day in the life of a NYC streetwalker. Well my “day job” at that time was videotaping confessions for the Brooklyn DA’s Office, where I also did some surveillance stuff and I thought I could get a more “real” unguarded view that way. In addition, I was planning on going down to the West 20s/30s to video the prostitutes, and I knew that there would be no way in hell to do that without hiding the camera. Finally, I wanted to get some background footage for a shot-on-video feature I would later complete in 1989– Requiem for a Whore.

‘I would put the camera–a Panasonic VHS camcorder with a wide-angle lens–inside a black gym bag that had a hole cut out on one end. Then I placed black gauze/screening over the hole. I would start recording about a 100 feet before turning onto the block I was going to shoot, then just kept walking and pointing the camera in the direction of anything interesting. But I made it a point of trying NOT to look where I had the camera pointed and I always kept walking. By doing it this way, I never knew what I had until I got home and was able to screen it.’ — Vanishing New York

 

Jon Reiss A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief (1988)
‘A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief is a fractured narrative featuring large anthropomorphic robots living in their own fictional world devoid of humankind, the machines act out scenarios of perpetual torment, exasperated consumption and tragic recognition. The film is a fast paced glimpse into the disturbing nightmare of machine psychology.

‘During the 1980’s I worked closely with Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) directing four documentaries of their live performances in addition to A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief. This film was an outgrowth of that relationship. The founder of SRL, Mark Pauline, and I wanted to create a fiction film using the machines to go beyond the restraints of documentation and the traditional utilization of non-human characters in narrative cinema.

‘For the original shooting we were able to get access to an enormous warehouse in San Francisco which enabled us to create the incredibly large sets (15 feet high – 30-60 feet wide) in order to have enough space to film the machines, some standing 10 feet tall.’ — Jon Reiss

 

Nick Zedd Police State (1987)
‘Zedd is minding his business, when he is stopped by a cop who accuses him of being a junkie. After a short argument he is beaten and dragged to the police station. At the station he is interrogated by a detective (Rockets Redglare) and the police chief. After being beaten and tortured several more times, Nick Zedd’s character mutilates himself with some hedge cutters.

‘Even with the extremely amateur filmmaking involved, Nick Zedd’s Police State manages to be one of the strongest and most provocative “fuck cops” movie out there.

‘The intense anger fumes as Zedd creates a brutal, shocking, and briefly hilarious short that proves to be unforgettable in every way. No amount of boom mic slipping into frame will undo the power this film has.’ — Scar

 

Tracey Moffatt Nice Coloured Girls (1987)
‘Nice Coloured Girls was written and directed by Tracey Moffatt, an Australian Aboriginal artist working in film, photography and video. It is an unusual film in that it is quite different to the documentaries and realist dramas of contemporary Aboriginal filmmakers and to ethnographic documentaries of the past. Moffatt has set out to counter dominant representations, to challenge the notion of what constitutes an Aboriginal film and to explore how representations throughout history have constructed her identity and that of her race. In doing this, she draws attention to the means by which history itself is constructed and also, how film constructs meaning. Unlike the bulk of films about Aboriginal people which are set in the outback and portray Aboriginals in a community environment, the setting for Nice Coloured Girls is primarily the urban landscape and shows the central characters, three Australian Aboriginal women, in their element.

‘The style chosen by Moffatt is anti-realist in Nice Coloured Girls (and her later film Night Cries A Rural Tragedy). The visual language of the film is strongly figurative; symbolic devices are used to economically evoke times and places (such as climbing of the rope ladder and the arms pulling at the bag of money) and she subverts dominant cinematic conventions (such as with the use of fluid temporal and spatial zones). The effect of this approach is to provoke the audience into awareness of the actual existence of filmmaking and narrative codes and thus induce an active, analytic, critical approach from the audience.

‘Nice Coloured Girls is a ground-breaking film stylistically and thematically. The audience is left to question history, in particular the reliability of primary sources. The absence of the Aboriginal point of view in Australia’s ‘history’ becomes glaringly obvious as we are left to question the nature of traditional representations of Aborigines. As Australians, Aboriginal people have been marginalized and stereotyped but Moffatt who is a young, contemporary Aboriginal Australian offers an Aboriginal perspective through her work and questions dominant representations which have excluded Aborigines (or offered unrealistic images of them).’ — Senses of Cinema

 

Richard Kern You Killed Me First (1985)
‘You Killed me First, one of Richard Kern’s longer films starring David Wojnarowicz and Lung Leg, could be read as a clear teenage allegory of the Cinema of Transgression itself. A girl (Lung leg) bristles at the religious directives of her parents, asserting her right to personhood outside demure hairstyles and turkey dinners, constructing voodoo dolls and entertaining other manners of dark drawing in her dank emo-den. When confronted with the humanity and hypocrisy of her tormentors, the young antihero vanquishes their belief systems (and bodies) asserting, “You killed me first!”’ — Daily Serving

 

Tessa Hughes-Freeland Baby Doll (1982)
‘Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s “Baby Doll” is a tiny slice of cinéma vérité from 1982 about the girls working the now defunct Baby Doll Lounge on Church and White St. in downtown Manhattan. It captures a moment before NYC got sanitized.

‘In live-action films, as well as collaged films from found footage, Hughes-Freeland taps into the sophisticated emotional filters we erect to deal with uncomfortable feelings. Images crash into one another in disorienting ways. Drawing upon the mind-altering potential of spontaneous transformation and the power of myth, her films are essentially “psychedelic”—conjuring ineffable experiences beyond the commonplace.

‘“My films are ritualistic and atavistic—inspired by dreams, visions, and imagination. Sometimes the nucleus of an idea for a film starts with an object. The original idea for Hireath came from the top of the Christmas cake, which my mother made every year,” the artist says.’ — Howl!

 

John Lurie Men in Orbit (1979)
‘Like certain Warhol movies of the mid-60s and Mitchell’s 1978 Warhol homage Kidnapped, Men in Orbit is based on a single idea or situation. Two costumed astronauts (Mitchell and Lurie) are strapped into their seats in a space capsule that appears to be a classic Lower East tub-in-kit apartment and blast off into space, guided by the voice of their unseen Mission Control (Michael McClard). The movement of the capsule and subsequent absence of gravity is signified by occasional camera tilts. The only other special effect is a video monitor which at one point shows the men their wives back on earth (one them is the fellow Super 8 filmmaker and future screenwriter Becky Johnston).

‘Men in Orbit is in no way a parody. The movie not so much a satire on science fiction as a science fiction experiment — how will these actors perform under these specific conditions? The soundtrack is noisy with largely unintelligible dialogue but nothing much actually happens. (If anything, the movie, in production at roughly the same time as Ridley Scott’s Alien, conveys the banality of space travel, made during a period when NASA was part of daily consciousness: Skylab was falling, the space shuttle was about to begin regular flights.)

‘Mitchell and Lurie smoke innumerable cigarettes and devour what looks like a McDonald’s happy meal. Mitchell in particular is giggling throughout. These men may truly be in orbit but their often hysterical laughter suggests that the movie’s real drama may be pharmaceutical, played out in their own inner space.’ — Orphan Film Symposium

 

Coum Transmissions After Cease to Exist (1977)
‘Characteristic naïve shock tactics and juvenile fun in this charming, fascinating document of prime-era Throbbing Gristle/COUM Transmissions, where Chris Carter’s nether regions are on proud display and receives the final cut while Soo Catwoman is tied to a bed. TG never really mastered the ambient genre but here the hissy, lo-fi soundtrack fits the murky visuals like a pair of German leather gloves with homicidal intent.’ — Falkus Twigbottom

 

Amos Poe Unmade Beds (1976)
‘This is the story of Rico, a man who lives in New York in 1976 but who lives his own life in Paris during the time of the ‘New Wave’. He is a photographer who thinks he’s a gangster, a loner, and an outsider. He uses his camera like a gun, loading it with bullets of film. He’s constantly on the look for a reality to fulfill his fantasy, and as long as he has that energy, he lives. Of course, he’s also a romantic, and this is his downfall, because he believes all photographers to be liars. When Rico falls in love, the delicate balance of the world he has made for himself is disrupted. With Duncan Hannah, Eric Mitchell, Debbie Harry, Kitty Sondern, Patti Astor.’ — Clint Weiler

 

Ralph Thanhauser Godard in America (1970)
‘During April 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, a comrade from the Dziga-Vertov Group, toured major American universities screening See You at Mao in order to raise money to finish a film on the Palestinian Al Fatah movement (a project that was never completed). This penetrating document of that tour reveals the enormous appeal of these French filmmakers to a new generation of politically engaged young Americans.’ — Harvard Film Archive

 

Win Chamberlain Brand X (1970)
‘The film follows the on-and off-air shenanigans of Wally Right, the manic head of a television station. It takes on President Nixon, the Vietnam War, sex, drugs, technology and advertising, alternating between vignettes riffing on TV programming — an exercise show, a soap opera, a financial report — and Dadaist commercials like one for “Food,” in which the film’s cinematographer, John Harnish, is seen sitting with a naked blond woman at a table covered with fruit. “Eat more, think less,” he quips to the camera. Abbie Hoffman plays a corrupt cop who bathes in a tub full of money; Taylor Mead portrays an indignant American president holding a news conference; and Ultra Violet gives an off-key performance on “The Tomorrow Show.”’ — SS.com

 

Sally Pugh Huey! (1968)
‘Documentary film produced by American Documentary Films and the Black Panther Party from 1968, honoring Huey P. Newton’s struggle for African American civil rights, advocating for his release from jail and addressing issues of racism in American society. Features scenes from the funeral of Bobby Hutton and the Huey P. Newton Birthday Rally in the Oakland Auditorium on February 17th 1968, with speeches by: Bobby Seale (who explains the Black Panther Party’s 10 Point Program in detail); Ron Dellums; James Foreman; Charles R. Garry; Eldridge Cleaver; Bob Avakian; H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. Also includes views of police officers showing the weapons and armor they carry in patrol cars and of African Americans discussing racism in American society. This film was scripted and directed by Sally Pugh.’ — letterboxd

 

Andy Warhol Couch (1964)
‘Couch is a silent black and white film from July 1964 ranging from 40 to 54 minutes. The cast of the film reads like a who’s who of the New York underground. Stars include Billy Linich (Billy Name), Taylor Mead, Baby Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Ivy Nicholson and Ondine. By all accounts, Couch is one of Warhol’s most directly pornographic, yet it is also repetitious and boring. Warhol utilized a stationary camera to film various individuals on a couch in some form of intimacy, be it kissing, hugging, oral sex, or intense conversation. The real star of the movie is the couch. Billy Name, the man responsible for the silver interior of the Factory, found the red couch on 47th Street. Throughout the mid-1960’s, the couch popped up in photographs and films, like Blowjob, becoming a symbol of the Factory years. The theft of the couch in 1968 marked the symbolic end of the Factory Era, as the shooting of Warhol by Valerie Solanas did in actuality.’ — Reality Studio

 

Rudy Burckhardt Mounting Tension (1950)
‘The story was made up more or less as we went along; Larry as the madly energetic, oversexed artist and Jane, a combination of palmreader and psychoanalyst, trying to straighten him out but turning into another girlfriend and model. John Ashbery is a straight boy interested in baseball but ends up an abstract painter. With a scene in the Museum of Modern Art.’ — R.B.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! That book’s fun if you’re in the mood for a trippy goofball novel. Oh, wow, I see. About leaking SCAB’s treasures rather than using the avalanche method. That’s exciting! Well, I’m chomping for the first shard. Cool. No, France, at least, doesn’t do miniature golf. I love France, but …no miniature golf, no Halloween?! So I miss miniature golf, I guess. In LA, where I come from, it’s an easy fix. I think my love was terrifying, yeah, although I think the bee meant well and is very lonely. Ha ha. Your love is pretty terrifying too, or at least to me who was hospitalised for severe sunburn once when I went to the beach on LSD once and zonked out under the summer sun for hours. Love inhaling helium and shattering every window for 100 kilometres in every direction when he says, ‘I love you’, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, if only that MacGuane directed film was actually good. Stellar cast, though, you’re right. I own that Judy Garland album. ** Misanthrope, It is funny. It’s a funny, fun, cool novel. It’s true: worst conclusions. Is that they want? The first five pages? That’s tough. Although it’s true that I, at least, pretty much decide whether to read novel or not based on … well, the first few paragraphs even. So, you changed the phrase so the agents will know that they … do (don’t?) … have sex? Oh, right, this is your kind of ‘Call Me By Your Name’ novel, right? I overthink everything. There are worse ways to work. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. ’92 …’ is good, yeah, but, yeah, I think ‘…Bushwacked…’ is the one. I know, shame about the ’92 …’ film. And there’s really no excuse. You’re listening GbV, you wise, wise fellow! Uh, wow, I kind of feel like making a best of GbV’s recent stuff post would be so self-indulgent of me, being such a diehard, but, on the other hand, boy, does that sound like a great idea! Let me see what I can do. Okay, you need to define what you mean by ‘second phase’. There are four GbV phases. Technically, the second phase starts with ‘Mag Earwhig’ and goes through ‘Half Smiles of the Decomposed’. Then phase three is the reunion period. And phase four is the current line-up period. (Actually, to be a diehard, there are subphases as well, like the Doug Gillard era, the Todd Tobias era, etc., but I’ll spare you.) Which phase do you mean? I’d be more than happy to, of course. I’m good. The novella, now titled ‘The Has-Been’, is on hold for the moment because it’s Zac’s turn to have a whack at it, and he’s away and chilling and not into working at the moment, so it’s waiting for his return to duty in order to progress. An excerpt from its current state will be in the upcoming Infinity Land Press anthology. You good? ** Steve Erickson, Everyone, Another musical concoction from Mr. Erickson … ‘I wrote another song today, the gqom-inspired “Fragrance”. I tried building something out of layers of percussion with no melody (although it includes synthesizer chords.).’ My appointment for my first vax shot (Pfizer) is on Monday, the 3rd. I don’t dislike Verhoeven. I think his things can be fun. I just think the claims of his hardcore fans that his films are genius meta-textual masterworks is insane, that’s all. Cannes looks good. I’m personally hottest for the new Wes Anderson. And the Carax, of course. ** Jack Skelley, Jack-of-most-trades! Can not wait to see what you do with that challenging subject matter. See you tonight! ** Bill, Hi, Bill. My first shot’ll happen on the 3rd. Second shot on June 12th. Gilbert Peyre, yes! I wonder what he’s up to. That Judith Schaecter painting is very nice. I’ve never seen it nor heard of her before. Huh. Any productivity pop up and surprise you this weekend? ** Right. This weekend I’m raiding the vault of the American Underground Film Archive in order to give you guys the chance to have proper underground film marathon in your very own homes. Or the chance to watch one or two underground films. Or the occasion to ignore the whole thing too, I guess. *sad face* In any case, see you on Monday.

 

‘Thomas McGuane has steadily produced novels, stories and screenplays, and essays on sports and pastimes like fishing and horseback riding. He has been quietly influential and subtly subversive. Coursing through his work is a current of strident silliness—funny names, wacky characters, outsize occurrences—that flows from Mark Twain, picks up Ring Lardner and others early in the twentieth century, and adds Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, post–World War II.

‘In spite of this, McGuane is hard to place. The humor is evident from the start, but there is something stylishly askew. The early novels The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), while full of oddballs in slapstick situations, also feature formalities of diction and syntactical quirks (“Stanton beckoned”; “Little comfort derived from the slumberous heat of the day”) that seem plucked from the Victorians. The Sporting Club’s protagonist even puts himself to sleep reading Thackeray. Complex intellectual formulations pop up, the following (from Ninety-two) occasioned by its narrator’s imagining his “aging lame” father in a whorehouse—horrible thought perhaps, though the narrator wonders if quiescence would be even worse: “A silent man wastes his own swerve of molecules; just as a bee ‘doing its number on the flower’ is as gone to history as if it never was. The thing and its expression are to be found shaking hands at precisely that point where Neverneverland and Illyria collide with the Book of Revelation under that downpour of grackle droppings that is the present at any given time.” One imagines young readers at that time (1973) pausing here to light up, musing, “Like, wow, man.” Early McGuane is full of such moments.

‘Still, McGuane’s work dodges the then-discernible categories. He was not part of the Barth/ Barthelme/ Hawkes wing of mytho-historical realism, though he seems to have been a fan, or at least a reader. Critic Dexter Westrum reports that a friend remembered young McGuane paying a quarter for a “first-edition hardcover of The End of the Road, John Barth’s scarcest title.” And while Richard Brautigan (along with Carlos Castaneda and Baba Ram Dass) gets a mention in McGuane’s 1992 novel Nothing but Blue Skies, McGuane is never fixedly part of the hippie-lit set. Pynchon’s 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49, does seem to have some bearing on the case. Pynchon, like McGuane, goes readily to comic extremes, and indulges in similarly trippy intellectualizing. Pynchon’s college pal Richard Fariña, whose campus romp Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me was published soon after Crying and sported a Pynchon blurb, might have come to McGuane’s attention. But Fariña, like Pynchon a student of Nabokov’s at Cornell, comes off as Joyce-struck. Classicisms and interior monologue often get in the way of his tenderly slapsticky, innocently iconoclastic prose. Early McGuane is winnowed clean of modernism’s more oppressive effects. …

‘McGuane is one of the rare contemporary American writers whose characters always do things. They run businesses, put up fences, farm, ranch, guide, fish. They are not people on vacations or grants, they are not professors, critics, writers, or artists—or, when they are, they are artists becoming cattle ranchers, as in Keep the Change (1989). In this way issues of class and money arise naturally, between bosses and workers, and the sense of automatic and persistent injustice is apparent and recurrent. The disadvantaged are abundantly aware of this, even when they themselves are acting badly. There’s a crushing moment at the end of the story “A Skirmish” (To Skin a Cat, 1986) when the dirt-poor father of troubled boys who have been tormenting the story’s narrator nevertheless takes his boys’ side, figuring that in the long run his boys “will go where they’re kicked” while the well-off narrator “will always have something [he] can do.” The hint that the safety net money affords tilts the playing field irreversibly in favor of the upper class gives McGuane’s comedy political heft. As McGuane put it to The Paris Review, “I suppose I am a bit left of Left. America is a dildo that has turned berserkly on its owner.”’ — Mark Kamine, The Believer

 

____
Media

McGuane, Richard Brautigan, a.o. in ‘Tarpon’

Tom McGuane with Richard Powers: the Long and Short of It | 3-6-2018

Excerpt: ‘Missouri Breaks’ (1976), based on TM’s novel

Warren Zevon sings ‘The Overdraft’, co-written with Thomas McGuane

 

_____
Further

Thomas McGuane Official Website
‘He’s Left No Stone Unturned’
Video: Sam Lipsyte on Thomas McGuane
‘Thomas McGuane: The lay of the land’
TM interviewed @ Identity Theory
TM’s story ‘Cowboy’ @ The New Yorker
TM’s story ‘The Casserole’ @ The New Yorker
‘Captain Berserko Writes a Better Ending’
‘Thomas McGuane: FR&R;’S Angler of the Year 2010’
‘La leçon de vie de Thomas McGuane’
TM’s ‘Remembering John Updike’
Video: ‘Thomas McGuane in “Trout Grass”’
Buy ‘The Bushwhacked Piano’ @ Amazon

 

_______
Interview
from The Paris Review

 

All five of your books seem to have distinctive stylistic features. Could you talk about the specific evolutions your prose has undergone?

THOMAS McGUANE: I started my career distinctly and single-mindedly with the idea that I wanted to be a comic novelist. I had studied comic literature from Lazarillo de Tormes to the present. The twentieth-century history of comic writing had prepared me to write in the arch, fascist style that I used in The Sporting Club. Then the picaresque approach was something I tried to express in The Bushwhacked Piano, although I’ve now come to feel that the picaresque form is no longer that appropriate for writing; writers are looking for structures other than that episodic, not particularly accumulative form—at least I am. Ninety-Two in the Shade was the first of the books in which I felt I brought my personal sense of epochal crisis to my interest in literature. It’s there that you find this crackpot cross between traditional male literature and The Sid Caesar Show and the preoccupation with process and mechanics and “doingness” that has been a part of American literature from the beginning—it’s part of Moby Dick. The best version of it, for my money, is Life on the Mississippi, which is probably the book I most wish I’d written in American literature. When I got to Ninety-Two I was tired of being amusing; I like my first two books a lot, but I tried to put something like a personal philosophy in Ninety-Two in the Shade. That book also marked the downward progress of my instincts as a comic novelist. Starting with Ninety-Two I felt that to go on writing with as much flash as I had tried to do previously was to betray some of the serious things I had been trying to say. That conflict became one that I tried to work out in different ways subsequently. The most drastic attempt was in Panama, which I wrote in the first person in this sort of blazing confessional style. In terms of feeling my shoulder to the wheel and my mouth to the reader’s ear, I have never been so satisfied as I was when I was writing that book. I didn’t feel that schizophrenia that most writers have when they’re at work. That schizophrenia was in the book instead of between me and the book.

The father-son relationship is constantly a major issue in your fiction. Is some of the tension of these fictional relationships autobiographically based?

TM: This is plainly so. If you’d been around me while I was growing up you’d have clearly seen that my relationship with my father was going to be a major issue in my life. My father was a kid who grew up rather poor (his father had worked for the railroad) and who had a gift for English; he wound up being a scholar-athlete who went to Harvard, where he learned some of the skills that would enable him to go on and become a prosperous businessman, but where he also learned to hate wealth. My father hated people with money and yet he became one of those people. And he was not only an alcoholic but a workaholic, a man who never missed a day of work in his life. He was a passionate man who wanted a close relationship with his family, but he was a child of the Depression and was severely scarred by that, to the point where he really drove himself and didn’t have much time for us. So while he prepared us to believe that parents and children were very important, he just never delivered. And we were all shattered by that: my sister died of a drug overdose in her middle twenties; my brother has been a custodial case since he was thirty; as soon as my mother was given the full reins of her own life, after my dad died, she drank herself to death in thirty-six months. I’m really the only one still walking around, and I came pretty close to being not still walking around. It all goes back to that situation where people are very traditional in their attitudes about the family, a family that was very close (we had this wonderful warm place in Massachusetts where my grandfather umpired baseball games and played checkers at the fire station), but then they move off to the bloody Midwest where they all go crazy. I’ve tried to work some of this out in my writing, and my younger sister tried to work it out in mental institutions. She was the smartest one of us all, an absolute beauty. She died in her twenties.

Nicholas Payne in The Bushwhacked Piano says, “I’ve made silliness a way of life.” Was “pranksterism” part of your own life as a kid?

TM: Yes, it was, but there’s more to it than that. We have chances for turning the kaleidoscope in a very arbitrary way. I wanted to be a military pilot at one time and came that close to joining the Naval Air Corps until I got into Yale, which I didn’t expect to happen. One of the practical things they teach combat fliers is that you can only reason through so much, and therefore in a combat situation if at a certain point you feel you can’t reason through a situation, then the thing you must do is anything, so long as you do something. Even in the Navy, with its expensive equipment and its highly predicated forms of action, you are told to just splash something off and do it! Doing something arbitrary or unexpected is probably the only way you’re going to survive in a combat situation. Game theoreticians have made this an important factor. The first strike is really very close to pranksterism. Pranks, the inexplicability of comedy, and lateral moves at the line of scrimmage can sometimes be the only way you can move forward. In silliness and pranks, there is something very great. It’s in that scene I created in Panama—the decision to jump off the diving board not knowing if there’s water in the pool. Sometimes that’s not a dopey thing to do but a very smart thing. It’s the first strike.

Are there any contemporary American writers you especially admire or feel affinities with?

TM: Nobody very surprising, I suspect: I like Barry Hannah, Raymond Carver, Harry Crews, Don Carpenter, Don DeLillo, Jim Harrison, Joan Didion. DeLillo has categorized a certain kind of fiction in a way that seems absolutely definitive: “around-the-house-and-in-the-yard fiction.” There are a lot of good writers who belong to that group—a lot of recent women writers are in that school, for example, and many of them are tremendously good. At the same time, writers with broad streaks of fancifulness or writers who have trained themselves on Joyce or Gogol, as I did, may feel a little reproached when we compare ourselves to these writers who write about the bitter, grim, domestic aspects of living. You feel, gee, I’m pretty frivolous compared to these serious people. Sometimes this can be a misleading reproach because you may decide that you need to change your subject matter if you’re going to be a serious writer.

 

____
Book

Thomas McGuane The Bushwhacked Piano
Random House

‘As a citizen, Nicholas Payne is not in the least solid. As a boyfriend, he is nothing short of disastrous, and his latest flame, the patrician Ann Fitzgerald, has done a wise thing by dropping him. But Ann isn’t counting on Nicholas’s wild persistence, or on the slapstick lyricism of Thomas McGuane, who in The Bushwhacked Piano sends his hero from Michigan to Montana on a demented mission of courtship whose highlights include a ride on a homicidal bronco and apprenticeship to the inventor of the world’s first highrise for bats. The result is a tour de force of American Dubious.’ — Random House

‘The work of a writer of the first magnitude. His sheer writing skill is nothing short of amazing. The preternatural force, grace, and self-control of his prose recall Faulkner…. McGuane is a virtuoso.’ — Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review

‘McGuane shares with Celine a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare.’ — The New Yorker

Select sentences and passages

Years ago, a child in a tree with a small caliber rifle bushwhacked a piano through the open summer window of a neighbor’s living room. The child’s name was Nicholas Payne.
Dragged from the tree by the piano’s owner, his rifle smashed up on a rock and flung, he was held by the neck in the living room and obliged to view the piano point blank, to dig into its interior and see the cut strings, the splintered holes that let slender shafts of light ignite small circles of dark inside the piano.
“You have spoiled my piano.”

*

The red Texaco star was not so high against the sky as the Crazy Mountains behind it. What you wanted to be high behind the red Texaco star, thought its owner, was not the Crazy Mountains, or any others, but buildings full of people who owned automobiles that needed fuel and service. Day after day, the small traffic heading for White Sulphur Springs passed the place, already gassed up for the journey. He got only stragglers; and day after day, the same Cokes, Nehis, Hires, Fanta Oranges, Nesbitts and Dr. Peppers stood in the same uninterrupted order in the plastic window of the dispenser. Unless he bought one. Then something else stared out at him, the same; like the candy wrappers in the display case with the sunbleached wrappers; or the missing tools on the peg-board in the garage whose silhouettes described their absence.
That is why when Payne coming at the crack of dawn, rolling a herd of flat tires, pur- suing the stragglers all over the highway, seemed unusual enough that the station owner helplessly moved a few imperceptible steps toward him in greeting, “Nice day.”

*

Later, some entirely theoretical argument with the bartender ensued during which the bartender thrust his face over the bar at Payne to inquire how anybody was going to wage trench warfare on the moon when every time you took a step you jumped forty feet in the air.

*

The man finished and charged Payne three dollars. Payne told him he thought he’d been protecting a dollar and a half’s worth of biness. “Rate went up,” said the man, “with complications of a legal nature.”

*

And California at first sight was the sorry, beautiful Golden West silliness and uproar of simplistic yellow hills with metal wind pumps, impossible highways to the brim of the earth, coastal cities, forests and pretty girls with their tails to the wind. A movie theatre in Sacramento played ‘Mondo Freudo’. In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, “My horse is soiled!” While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

*

We each of us know instinctively that hemorrhoids were unknown before our century. It is the pressure of the times symbolically expressed. Their removal is mere cosmetic surgery.

*

His coordination departed and he made unnecessary noise with his feet. He still bravely managed to get to the edge of the bed and look down at the muzzle of the shotgun bobbing under Missus Fitzgerald’s nose. He had occasion to recall the myriad exquisite ways she had found to make him uncomfortable.

*

You’re going to get a crack at cooling your heels in our admirable county jail,” she said, moving toward him. “Do you know that?”
“I just want my walking papers.”
“No. You’re going to jail you shabby, shabby boy.”

*

When sophisticated or wealthy women get angry, they attempt to make their faces look like skulls. Missus Fitzgerald did this and looked awfully like a jack-o-lantern. She was that fat.

*

She had built, with her share [of Mr. Fitzgerald’s G.M. earnings], a wig bank on Woodward Avenue for the storage of hairpieces in up-to-date, sanitary conditions…. Fitzgerald had visited his wife’s operation, walking through the ultraviolet vaults filled from floor to ceil- ing with disinfected hairpieces. It was not the Mountain West in there. Stunted workmen in pale green uniforms wheeled stainless wagons of billowing human hair down sloping corridors. Prototypes of wig style rested on undetailed plastic heads.

*

“I wonder if you would say ‘oh’ if you were a part-time secretary at the bank if Wy- andotte who had dropped December’s salary on a teased blonde beehive which you had stored all through the summer and broken out for the Fireman’s Ball in November only to find that the expensive article contained a real thriving colony of roaches and weevils; so you spray it with DDT or 2, 4-D or Black Flag or Roach-No-Mo and all the bugs, all the roaches, all the weevils run out and that wig bursts in to flames by spontaneous combustion and the house which you and your hubby—because that’s what they call their husbands, these people: hubbies—burns down around the wig and your nest egg goes up with the mortgage and it’s the end. I wonder then, if you were her and had owned this wig which you had stored privately, I wonder if you would have wondered about a refrigerated fire- proofed wig bank after all? Or not.”
A little voice: “I would have put my wig in the wig bank.”

*

The shadows lay this way and that, the way a tide will carry on a particularly shaped bottom, bulging and deepening and only holding fish in specific places. Or the way six grandmothers will fall when simultaneously struck by lightning.

*

When man tries to devise things for the defeat or alteration of the natural world, usually those things turn out looking like a penis. But the phony phallus here is loaded with renegade sperms in the form of native Florida bats that by nature will not obey the will of man. They cannot be made to devour mosquitos upon man’s orders, just as artificial insemination is often a bust, and cloning is risky business. In addition, under the auspices of Florida, such antics are doomed, ludicrous, and sometimes fatal; so the mosquitos remain to pester, infect, and kill.

*

The bulk of the rest of his time would be used in aimless and pointless research in the natural world, from biology to lunar meditation; all on the principle, the absolute principle, that ripeness was all.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Technically, they’re not dictionary definition automatons, but yeah, gotcha. Mm, I feel like there was a guest-curated Satie post ages ago, but I’m not sure. If so, I’ll try to resurrect it. If not, I’ll put it amongst my to-dos. Yesterday was John Waters’s birthday! Talk about a high holy day, gay and not! ** Misanthrope, I’m beginning to wonder what doesn’t scare you, ha ha. I remember the F chord being a contortionist nightmare. One phrase alteration in your novel will change everything? That’s pretty amazing. Huh. I don’t understand agents. Never have, never will. Oh, man, warm hugs about your friend’s death. So, so sorry. Death should be illegal. ** Bill, Ah, automatons are amidst your zeitgeist, awesome, and, well, yes, that makes sense. Unproductively busy would describe my week thus far too. Shame we can’t kvetch together over a burrito. Go into the light. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ah, so you’re re: ‘WoO’ like I am re: ‘QaF’. Hooray for outsiders? Wait, there’s new SCAB coming out on Monday?! Is that what you meant? Whoa, if so. Huh, I think the magic jumping beans I had were plastic too now that you mention it. Or … I can’t remember. Do you know what Spanish Fly is? When I was a kid, that’s what other kids called something that was supposed to be a primitive form of Viagra mixed with a date rape drug. I think it was a myth, but the kids I knew were always saying to one another, I’m gonna slip that girl (or boy) a Spanish fly and … I guess do whatever kids thought hot nonconsensual sex consisted of. I’m glad I guessed right about your ground floor. I miss miniature golf, even if it’s almost always more fun in theory than practice. Ha ha: your love. Love like a talking bee with a huge IQ, G. ** Jack Skelley, Car jack! I like when my blog becomes characteristically itself. I’m doing my ‘The Holy Mountain’ imbibe tonight. Well, I’m certainly ultra-curious to hear your wordage about ‘I Love Dick’. Please prepare a soliloquy for Saturday? Glad you’re on board with ‘Mars Attacks!’ Lukas Haas’s speech near the end is one of my favorite things in the world. You have the proofs aka the proof! Imagine my slobber. You wrote the Uber Granny story? No! That’s vast! Next? Uh, a story about ‘I Love Dick’? Too traumatic? ** Steve Erickson, The left and right need to eat a slice of hot boysenberry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. Tulpas are already itching to be tired. ** Billy, Unambitious teachers and dowling rods are a terrible combination. Exactly, disaster movies are like Buster Keaton on excessively bloated budgets and with non-human Keaton-esque protagonists when they’re lucky. Sounds like heaven. I’ve never been a fan of London, I don’t know why. I mean I like being there okay and dig what it affords, but I find it very alienating, and I hate the tube especially after living with Paris’s sublime-ish metro. But I’m just weird. No, I’ve never been committed to a nuthouse. It’s almost shocking how kind of sane I am. I generally prefer theorist’s fiction to their theory when I have a choice. I like seeing a theorist’s ideas imaginatively laid out. Blanchot is great in general. His novel ‘Death Sentence’ is my all-time favorite novel. So I guess maybe try that? I don’t know John Horne Burns. I must find out about him, obviously. I’ll hunt for his output. Hm, I suppose you’re right about automatons being sort of cavemen gifs. That would explain a few things. I mean a few things that are uninteresting if you’re not me. ** Brian, Hi, Brian! Sometimes all you need is a good shiver, right? I think shivering (not from being cold) is very underrated. Empirical improvement is some sort of satisfaction, albeit vastly undercut by emotional dumpsterdom. Sorry, man. You will manage. Ive gotten to know you well enough to know you’ll more than manage in fact. That warms my heart about your brother. Artists rule. Or can. One hopes. Um, subsequent days have proven less refreshing, but they’ve passed without untoward incident. Do you have relaxing or even mouthwatering weekend plans, I hope? Happy Friday to you too, my friend. ** Okay. I think some of you or even most of you, I don’t know, know that I have a fondness for psychedelia-influenced novels of the late 60s and early 70s, and the book under my spotlight today is a good example. See you tomorrow.