‘Woody Vasulka (born Bohuslav Vašulka, 1937, Brno, Czechoslovakia) studied metallurgy and mechanics at the School of Industrial Engineering in Brno (1952-1956) and in 1960 he settled in Prague to study television and film production at the Academy of Performing Arts, also writing poetry and producing short films.

‘Steina (born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadóttir, 1940, Reykjavík, Iceland) studied languages, and violin and music theory at the conservatory in Prague.

‘They met in the early 1960s, married in 1964, and 1965 emigrated to New York where Steina worked as a freelance musician, and Woody edited industrial films at Harvey Lloyd Productions. In 1966, at the request of architects Woods and Ramirez, Woody collaborated on developing films designed for a multi-screen environment to be shown in the American Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. Contact with the cinema enabled Woody to experiment with electronic sound and the stroboscopic projection of moving images. Using a 16 mm Pathe camera, he captured images at 360º, projecting them onto different screens to create three-dimensional sound and light environments. He first came into contact with the electronic video work through the exhibition TV as a Creative Medium, which took place in New York in 1969. The same year he started to experiment with electronic media and produce a pioneering body of tapes, investigating the narrative, syntactical and metaphorical potential of electronic imaging. Using a sound synthesiser and video recorder, Steina began to work on the project Violin Power (1970-1978).

‘Encouraged by Eric Siegel, who collaborated on their first works, Woody and Steina formed a research group which culminated in the establishment of The Kitchen (Live Audience Test Laboratory) in New York in 1971. The Electronic Kitchen was a laboratory where artists could experiment with the technology of the moment and present their projects in public. By the end of the 1970s, The Kitchen had become an important reference point, though more for the promotion of video art than for technological experimentation.

‘Woody’s numeral experiments began with his construction of the Digital Image Articulator, resulting in his 1973 and 1974 works created using sound and video synthesisers: Vocabulary, The Matter, C-Trend and Explanation. In 1975, he published “Didactic Video: Organizational Models of the Electronic Image”, in collaboration with Scott Nygren in issue 3 of the magazine Afterimage, whilst in 1978 “Syntax of Binary Images” came out in issue 6 of the same publication.

‘In 1974 they moved to Buffalo, New York with its Experimental TV Studio. With the idea of dissociating the camera from the human point of view and treating it as an autonomous imaging instrument, Steina began to work on a series of installations and videos entitled Machine Vision. In 1976 she received a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim which enabled her to complete her the research.

‘In 1976, Woody received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce the series Recoded Images as part of the Video IX project, presented at the Museum of Modern Art of New York.

‘In 1980 they moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico and continued their work in video, media performance, and video installation. Steina used the Digital Image Articulator to record the images for her videos, exploring real landscapes: Selected Treecuts (1980), Search of the Castle (1981), Summer Salt (1982). In 1982, she was given grant by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation to produce her latest version of Earthworks, entitled The West. Steina then worked with the singer and composer Joan La Barbara on the project Event in the Elsewhere, based on experimentation with voice and image.

‘Woody built different machines from waste material with the aim of creating an articulated control system for recording sound and image. His work Artifacts goes back to this period. He then began practical and theoretical research into what he called “The Epistemic Space”. In this research, which spanned several years, he examined forms of interactivity between participant and machine through the voice, language and music. He used multi-channel projection systems, his work becoming ever more three-dimensional. Also, his literary and poetic interests led him to produce a series of single-channel videos (The Commission, 1983, and Art of Memory, 1987) which are considered his most emblematic works.

‘In 1989, Steina made The Elevator Girls, collaborating with the American Film Institute to produce The Other Asia. In 1990, she completed the installation Ptolemy. In the interactive performance Violin Power, Steina went back to early projects, using the a five-stringed Zeta Midi violin and manipulating her videodisks according to the sound of the musical instrument.

‘Woody’s development of an expressive image-language began as a rigorous deconstruction of the materiality of the electronic signal, and has evolved to the application of imaging codes and digital manipulation to narrative strategies and a series of interactive installations in the 1990s, such as Theater of Hybrid Automata (1990) and The Brotherhood: A Series of Six Interactive Constructions (1990-1996).

‘In 2014, the Vasulka Chamber, a center of electronic and digital art in Iceland, was established at the National Gallery of Iceland. The Vasulka Chamber is a collaboration with Steina and Woody Vasulka, and includes a part of the Vasulkas’ archive. Later in 2015 the Vasulka Kitchen, a center for new media art in in Brno, Woody’s hometown was founded, dedicated to preserving the legacy of the artist, who passed in December 2019.’ — monoskop

 

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Still

 

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Further

VASULKA.ORG
Fonds Steina et Woody Vasulka
Steina and Woody Vasulka – Monoskop
Steina and Woody Vasulka – Electronic Arts Intermix
Woody Vasulka, Who Inspired Generations of Video Artists, Is Dead at 82
WOODY VASULKA (1937–2019)
Steina and Woody Vasulka: In Dialogue with the Machine
STEINA AND WOODY VASULKA: IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SIGNAL
Book: ‘Steina and Woody Vasulka: Machine Media’
Dr. Woody Vasulka
Book: ‘Buffalo Heads Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990’
Experiments in Signal Processing — (Super)STATION
Skyping with Video Pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka
A Visit With First Couple of Video Art : Steina and Woody Vasulka Have Diverse Takes on Power

 

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Extras

Artisode 5.4 Steina & Woody Vasulka

The Vasulka Effect | Trailer

Binary Lives *Steina and Woody Vasulka – Peter Kirby / 1996

Paul Sharits / Entretien avec Steina et Woody Vasulka

 

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Interview

 

Chris Meigh-Andrews: Woody, you have said that “video negates film”- what did you mean by that?”

Woody Vasulka: The idea that you can take a picture and put it through a wire and send it to another place- you can broadcast from one place to another- this idea of an ultimate transcendence- magic- a signal that is organised to contain an image. This was no great decision, it was clear to me that there was a utopian notion to this, it was a radical system and so there was no question of deciding that this was it. Also I was not very successful in making films- I had nothing to say with film. This new medium was open and available and just let you work without a subject.

C.M-A: So taking up video freed you from the ‘subject’.

W.V: Exactly. I didn’t have to follow what was the strength of the movie- that intimate voyeur narrative system that was very successful. I like movies of that period, as you know, but I also knew well the avant-garde, the left Avant-Garde, and as I grew up in a socialist system that was something the regime couldn’t forbid. So we were fed very much by these products of the avant garde. Later, when I came here and saw what the Americans called avant-garde, I was very sceptical about it because we had this in Europe and that was the true avant-garde. But then I gained a great respect for the American avant-garde because they did it from the belly of the beast-

Steina Vasulka: Because in America it wasn’t a priori art. In Europe it was “Art”. It isn’t any more, but in especially in Czechoslovakia, it was art.

W.V: Maybe it wasn’t, but you could deny that it wasn’t art.

S.V: It wasn’t all art, but we thought of it that way. It was in the academy- the same academy as music and painting.

W.V: Also in that milieu of Prague this elitist art was so much the only art.

S.V; That was why the American avant-garde was so much more interesting, because it lived in this hostile environment where the movie wasn’t considered art to begin with.

W.V: But they had an ethical explanation for it. P. Adams Sitney, for example.

C.M-A: I have the impression that the so-called ‘structural’ film-makers didn’t like Sitney’s formulation. Hollis Frampton for example felt very constrained by it.

S.V: Yes, but they were also flattered.

W.V: He never understood them I think, that was the problem. But nobody could understand Frampton, he was too complicated. But Jonas Mekas did most of the footwork. He was the man that gave this movement total legitimacy by a simple ethical statement such as “this film is beautiful, just because it wasn’t made in Hollywood”. So he transcended the aesthetics through ethics. This gave a complete self assurance to a whole generation, because they made their films as individuals outside of the industry- in fact, in protest to the industry. They had the same strength, in fact a greater strength- a moral right, than the film industry. This was a very much cultivated opinion which I was very interested in, because coming from the other side, where film was the government- even if there were radical movements in film. At that time, even if there was any significant film made, it had the same ideology- forget the medium, forget the scratches, and simply deliver the ideology- fulfil the narrative system or whatever. Hollywood had the same interest.

S.V: That’s why when we conceived of video as being the signal- the energy and time and all of that, we though we were right there, smack in the middle of it. These were the radical times in experimental film and there were all these people starting up in video. We were all discovering this together. We erroneously thought that everybody conceived of video this way; this ‘time/energy construction’. Now I realise we were very much alone. We were never lonely because we thought we were in the middle of it, but we were. We never had any followers who practised this time-energy organisation.

W.V: The schism- the problem was between what Paik was doing, and what this new generation of Americans was doing. Paik- and Vostell in particular, were never comfortable with this internal organisation of the image. Paik successfully used magnets to distort the existing artefact, this was his strongest period. He took external forces such as magnetism and produced images, but they were very traditional in the sense of their residual context.

The whole American movement was trying to figure out what makes the picture. How is it scanned? How do you encode this image on this new canvas which is constructed in time and drawing on lines, and soon after, in the same decade- the 70’s, how to define the digital in which the horizontal and vertical territory of the screen is then divided into binary numbers- the coincidence of time produces an image. This was the most radical thought which is never mentioned. Paik never entered this; the peak of his of effort was colourising, keying and mixing with his synthesiser, and altering the magnetic state of the cathode ray tube. But we were interested in this new icon- the signal which was initially analogue and later digital- the organising principle of the image.

C.M-A: But this had nothing to do with ‘television’. Paik was coming in from a reaction to television as an object. Drawing on ideas of Cage’s about the piano as a cultural object. All of Paik’s images seem to be in reaction to broadcast television- even the things he processed. Your work on the other hand seems to have nothing to do with television at all- or does it?

W.V: Its like this. Paik’s pictorial world was the world of known symbols-not primary symbols- but secondary. For example, he would always take famous people if he could- the more famous, the more desirable. He was the shadow of everybody: McLuhun or Cage, or Nixon. You actually could see the effort of taking the established codes, putting them on television, destroying or altering them by the prescription of, lets say, Fluxus. So there was this anti-bourgeois effort. But Vostel was much more explicit about it. Vostell’s use of the object of television was much clearer-putting television sets and turkeys in the same pan. It was interesting and I really liked his work because he was demeaning.

Paik was caught in the middle of this transition because as he says openly: as music became electronic, and then ‘art’ and eventually ‘high art’- in the same way television- the electronic image, will eventually become material for high art. This was his struggle- to achieve high art at any price. This meant that he would violate any of the rules- the rejection of the popular, of the bourgeois, of the successful . But I think he had no strategy for this. As a man coming from the Orient, success is a condition for the definition of your significance. He fought it at times, but eventually settled to this notion that if he was not famous, or at least a famous Korean or Asian, then he had failed. So he carried this huge baggage of playing this specific role- and he became the first internationalist.

There is a nice essay on the subject- that in half a year he made six international projects- satellites, etc. But since defining himself in this way he left our interests which was to seek common images or common codes- we were trying to build another set of codes, which is in a way in the tradition of the European avant-garde. You have to invent everything, There’s no way you can incorporate, or appropriate cultural symbols. Then of course Worhol broke it completely because he’s the guy that just put it right there completely- he said: “this is it, this is what is allowed”.

C.M-A; Warhol was very influential on the ‘structural’ film-makers too, in the sense that he was the one who broke with the earlier important American avant-garde tradition- abstract expressionism, and especially Brakhage’s romantic ‘personal’ mythopoeic films. Worhol’s approach of switching on the camera and leaving it running- the ‘stare’ of the camera becoming a significant thing. I’m wondering whether all of that fed into your work, because there’s another perhaps more important strand which is the sound. What’s interesting about all of your early work is that the sound signal and the picture signal are compatible, and most importantly interrelated. There’s a whole musical language which is the other possible way of making abstract art which has nothing to do with any kind of narrative- there’s no narrative expectation, even though there’s a time-base. I would have thought this was an important strand feeding into the work you were doing.

S.V: Very much. It was the signal, and the signal was unified. The audio could be video and the video could be audio. The signal could be somewhere ‘outside’ and then interpreted as an audio stream or a video stream. It was very consuming for us, and we have stuck to it.

I remember that Jonas Mekas didn’t like video very much, and he said “why don’t those video makers just make silent video? We all started with silent films.” This was the biggest misunderstanding of the medium I’ve ever seen. Video always came with an audio track, and you had to explicitly ignore it not to have it. It seems that even in this respect there was no one else who did that.

W.V: Our first synthetic visual tool was the audio synthesiser- the “Putney” (EMS) How do you interact with the television screen? Its a ‘time construct’. Normally it constructs a frame- the illusion or representation of a frame, and its normally organised so precisely that you are not supposed to see that its actually organised line by line using some kind of oscillators inside and if you turn the television on when there is no broadcast signal, there are free-running oscillators- two horizontal and vertical oscillators. As soon as there is a broadcast signal it locks onto it, it becomes a slave to a master which is the broadcast signal. The signal itself governs. So we would put into the input a sound oscillator- or oscillators, and we saw for the first time that we could get an image from a source other than the camera. So our discussion was about departing from the camera, which television insisted upon having, and still does. The second principle was to get the tools to organise time and energy in order to produce a visual or other artefact. So we started with interference patterns. Interfering with that time structure, anytime you interfered with that it would organise itself and that was our entrance into the synthetic world from the audio tools. Since then we understood the affinity between the sound and image. Also we inherited an important thing from the sound instrument which was the architecture of the sound synthesiser. The signal itself is only one component, which is the timbre, or pitch. Also there is an overlaid structure called the voltage control principle in which at times you could exchange the voltage that you could control to became the source of the image, and then the material itself became the control. So you could work with this architecture and eventually present some form of a development or sort of a control which could be almost like a composition. We understood that this was too primitive to claim that, but there are some people that spent years composing. But when we look at each other soberly we recognise that it was a struggle of immense problematic dimensions. But these bright Americans like Steve Beck and Eric Siegal really fought, piece by piece, inch by inch, point by point to define that event in that particular part of the screen.

S.V: It was the cameraless image. They were interested in a principle that could no be obtained from the camera obscura. (Richard) Monkhouse did the same. And then what did they do, they introduced the camera! If not as feedback, then images of the face, or something. Woody was also obsessed. I was never that obsessed though I was also interested in this cameraless way of constructing images from energy.

W.V: We all eventually used the face as a reference. I also used a hand as a reference. You cannot really make abstract video. This was never really an interest of any of our generation- not a single member. There were some people that tried to do a genre of abstract sound and music, but it had no genre definition generically, it was arbitrary and had no analytic quality whatsoever, and it disappeared anyway, as we said about Larry Cuba, it became a one-man computer-generated film. But he was actually analytic- I would put him into this idea of trying to represent a genre.

Most of the problem was not really to mix the images, but to deconstruct them, and we went through a long charade of building these machines that would deconstruct the images- meaning they would show the elements- including the codes, because that was the mystery. What you compose with it was usually the banality. If you look at the work of the last thirty years in video its a pathetic movement. It tries to present a synthetic or synergistic possibility, but only as an environment it succeeded, but not as a genre. All my narrative work- I had to do it, but I call them total failures because they are supposed to speak about something else, but they always address this interest in the audience to see a dramatic form, the proscenium, the dramatic form . So that’s where it became very problematic because we did not want to make abstract images, we wanted to make concrete images, but how do you build generic images that belong to themselves only? That is the dilemma. We tried to do it through tools- the ‘dialoguing with tools’ – which was sort of true- simply trying to find the least or the most generic images to describe the medium itself, including the behaviour. Later the computer made clear that there was no new language- just some additions to it such as the power of transformation, or endless variations which we already had in video. Film was a very difficult medium to do endless variations, it had limited variations.

C.M-A: This ‘dialoguing with machines’ that you have engaged with, and also Steina’s Machine Vision, are they both the same thing?

W.V: The dialoguing lead towards the Machine Vision, because I constructed the first one, but I never had a use for it.

S.V: Yeah, you walked away from it. See that’s the thing. Woody could work technically. He could take motorcycles apart or sewing machines, and then put them back together.

W.V: Aeroplanes actually. During the war I was living across from an airfield.

S.V: It was so natural to him. I have never done that. Woody would construct something and then say..”Oh well”, and I would say “No! This is good.” I would come in and want to use it. That’s actually how a lot of things were with us. I would also construct something; get something going and then I would walk away and Woody would see that there was a whole piece in there. That was kind of our collaboration.

C.M-A: Thats the other strand that we haven’t yet touched on. This collaborative interaction between the two of you which is quite unique as well. Not only were you involved with thinking about the video medium from the inside, making tools which were specifically intended to uncover or deconstruct video, but there was the interaction between two people who had come from very different but compatible backgrounds and specialisms.

W.V: We’ve always been united by an interest in the signal. That was something that we could never think outside of any machine or an installation. We’ve really struggled together, and we still do. She does something and there’s a signal involved, and that unites us, looking or appreciating. But I was never interested in the object- I was interested in the screen only until about ten years ago. In Steina’s case she was always interested in the instrument ,probably because of the violin, and she adopted these instruments as instruments of play. But I always denied that because instruments came too easy to me. I knew that life had to much more miserable. So I thought to try to find the secrets of the metaphysical content of the time-energy and the code. This were the highest calls. But I couldn’t do these machines. You will see on these tapes, I’ve even built them and eventually I have given up. But it is something that comes so naturally that I denied it. I would never discuss anything about a machine with anybody. It is something forbidden in me because I know if I follow that I would probably discover the atom bomb.

S.V: But Woody was good, because my idea was that he could build them for me- he could make it. But he would say: “Do it yourself woman!” Collaboration or not, I had to drill the holes , and they were always wrong and always kind of off-centre.

There’s another thing about all this machine stuff. First of all, we have always wanted to be inspired by the machines, we always wanted to have an equal partnership where the machines will suggest to us what we do; or the machine shows us. You put a camera on a machine and you see what it does. It’s not imposing your ‘superior’ view on the camera. Especially for me it led to this whole thinking about what is the hegemony of the human eye, and why are we showing everything from this point of view , and who is the cameraman to tell the rest of the world what they can see, wasn’t it just out of the view of the camera that all of the action was? All the things that I had never thought about before because I was a musician. This whole idea of the tools as hardware, and then the tools as the signal and signal processing was very important, and there was the dialogue in between. In the middle of this we come into the computers. We came into them very early; we bought our first computer in 1976.

W.V: Yes, we built this first complicated machine in the 70’s.

S.V: That was the thing. We first bought it because we could never control anything, if you tried next day to repeat what you had done the day before it was impossible, so we thought we would get a computer. In that sense the computer was completely boring because it did exactly what you wanted.

W.V: Fortunately again our systems were always open systems, they were not really ‘black box’. So we could actually take a whole ‘bus’ such as an addressing bus and take it away from the pins and put it elsewhere. So you could start really screwing around with the machine. We could even do some feedback, because we had a machine that was ‘real time’ at not too many points in the image but when the top was shown, the bottom was being prepared in the buffer, we could achieve a feedback and we plugged it all back and we could see how the machine resonated inside. All the bits we could hear, you could wander around and pin yourself into various portions of the machine. So if we had built a black box we would never have known what was inside. So we had our strategies and we understood what we wanted to explore. Some of the things came totally by surprise, some we could predict. So we made it as an adventure.

C.M-A: Where does the notion of ‘art’ come into this. There seems to be an assumption that it was art, where does that come from-does it come from the culture?

W.V: Yes, it is a societal overlay. It is not you who decides where it belongs, because in fact, this has always been problematic. The whole area in fact. When you look at Malcom (Le Grice); I read what he said. He only knows about Nam June Paik. He always puts him as the reference. He forgets about the huge society of Americans smoking pot, thinking daily about how to make these images. How to communicate without wires and be totally utopian in political and other senses. And then Malcom tells us that in fact Europeans were much more systematic, and he gives me these three names I have never heard. And so I am very entertained. I can use it to start a little discussion in my own mind and see if there is any need to write about it. This idea of defining this as an art form came from the sixties in which ‘experimental art’ as a funding code was coined. It also appeared via England as well. (“Cybernetic Serendipity”) Also in the mid-west in the small universities. Video was at first closed-circuit remember. Each university got a camera and maybe a recorder.

(Tape ran out  here…)

 

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Works

1969–71

Participation, 60 min.

Participation

Adagio, 10 min.
Calligrams, 12 min.

Calligrams

Decays #1 & #2, 7 min.

Decays, 1970

00:00 This tape begins with static.
00:27 Title screen. The video quality is quite poor.
00:33 An image of a man’s face is manipulated through video image processing with music.
07:25 A different, more abstract image appears and is processed with music.
11:47 Tape ends.

Don Cherry, 12 min. (in collaboration with Elaine Milosh)

Don Cherry

Evolution, 16 min
Interface, 3:30 min.

Interface

Jackie Curtis’ First Television Special, 45 min.
Sexmachine, 6 min.

Sexmachine

Sketches, 27 min.

Sketches

Tissues, 6min.

Tissues

1970-78

Violin Power, 10:04 min.

Violin Power

‘In 1991, after having experimentally interfaced my acoustic violin with a variable speed video cassette player, I bought a MIDI violin and a Pioneer Disk Player. Interfacing these instruments with a computer gave me an instant access to any frame of video on the disk as well as access to fast/slow and forward/backward movements. The initial software was written by Russ Gritzo and further developed and improved by Bill Heckel. Violin Power is a ongoing continuous project with an ever increasing ‘repertoire.’ So far I have made five videodisks and I change the program for every performance.’ –– Steina Vasulka

Black Sunrise, 21 min.
Contrapoint, 3 min.
Discs, 6 min.

Discs

Elements, 9 min.
Keysnow, 12 min.
Shapes, 13 min.
Swan Lake, 7 min.

Swan Lake

1972

Distant Activities, 6 min.

Distant Activities

Soundprints, endless loops
Spaces 1, 15 min.
Spaces 2, 15 min.

Spaces 2

1973

Golden Voyage, 28 min.

Golden Voyage

Home, 16 min.

Home

Vocabulary, 5 min.

Vocabulary

1974

Strange Music for Nam June Paik, 37:27 min

Strange Music for Nam June Paik

‘A performance of Nam June Paik’s film and music, selected by musicians and composers who knew him well.’

1-2-3-4, 8 min.
Heraldic View, 5 min.

Heraldic View

Light Revisited, 3:49 min.

Light Revisited/excerpt

‘The work is a single channel video projection and audio installation with screens and mirror.’

Noisefields, 13 min.

Noisefields

‘Noisefields is comparable to Orbital Obsessions because here as well the Video Sequencer is used to switch between two video sources to create similar flickering effects. However, differently from the interplay of self-reflexive visual input that in Orbital Obsessions arises from recording the scene of the location, Noisefields reveals the source of every electronic input. The imagery presented refers to its detecting of electronic signals and does not carry any other information, except that the Colorizer is used for variation. The circular form introduces a simple division into an inner and an outer field of interrelated pulsation, so that on the whole, the “content” of this work is an audiovisual modulation of “video noise.”‘ — Yvonne Spielmann

Solo For 3, 5 min.

Solo for 3

Soundgated Images, 10 min.
Soundsize, 5 min.
Telc, 5 min.

Telc

1979

Six Programs for Television: Matrix, Vocabulary, Transformations, Object, Steina, Digital Images, 174 min., total (29 min. each)

Transformations

‘After we got the computer, the concerns became totally different. Before we could even perfect the control of analog tools, we plunged into digital ones where, in fact, everything is a product of control. It is in ‘interactive real time’ that I feel video becomes a category apart from the others (film on one side and computer graphics on the other).’ — Steina Vasulka

In Search of the Castle, 12 min.

In Search of the Castle

Progeny, 19 min. (In collaboration with Bradford Smith)

1983

The West

Watch an excerpt here

1984

Pariah

Pariah

1989

In The Land of The Elevator Girls

In The Land of The Elevator Girls

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Ian, Hi, Ian. My up is up enough. Excellent news about finishing your story draft, man! Enjoy everything possible. ** Bzzt, Hi, Q. I’m very happy to hear that you’re feeling better. I like Houellebecq okay. He’s a good writer. I’m not huge on him. But it’s hard over here because he such a self-promoting media hound and is always doing everything provocative he can to be in the French press/TV. France literature is a vast sea of so many great things. Hard to know where to even start, suggestion-wise. Really depends on what kind of lit you want to read. I’m heavily inclined towards the experimental side. Balzac is an interesting choice. Sure, why not? He’s a biggie. Yeah, really good to try to ward off grudges. They tend to be largely self-destructive and barely effective re: their targets. I’m a big ‘confusion is the truth’ and nothing is as it seems because everyone is unsolvable, etc. guy. Not that it always works, mind you. Apparently the Derek ban was an algorithm thing, and Amazon has restored it to their products. So you’ll probably get it. I hope your week is just one upbeat thing after another. ** David Ehrenstein, Morning. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien. It went really well. Tons of traffic, even so far. Lookin’ good. Enjoy all the great things you hear. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. I kind of remember you recounting some your mom’s wacky sayings and doings. I like the cut of her jib, or whatever that old saying is. Hoping that ENT says, ‘Sure, come on over, weirdo!’ The streets here are jammed with shoppers too, but on foot (and bike). And are likely to be more packed still today because the govt. just announced that our COVID rates are going up again and that our reopening is about to be either be stopped or reversed, urgh. ** Milk, Hi, Milk. Ha ha, I get that. How are you? ** Nick Toti, Yes, the film we hope/plan to shoot in SoCal is the one about the family turning their house into a home haunt. Absolutely bring that tradition to your new coordinates! Spread that great shit. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Ben. Yes, whatever it takes to get your fired up and typing (or using a pen?) again. ** Maryse, Hi, Maryse! Yes, I saw you have a blurb on Damian’s book, and that was cool and unexpected. If you remember to alert me about that Zoom thing, I’ll make sure the link gets headliner status here on ye olde. See you in the other place! ** Bill, Ah, so cool of you to get ‘Fucked Up’ on goodreads. As I told Misa, it looks like we’re about to re-tighten here, fuck, because the Covid cases are going back up again. So I need to get the Buche ASAP. Good luck with your equivalent. ** James, Hi, James. You share a home with Damien, don’t you? Or I mean your books live under the same imprint’s roof. Being busy is something of a godsend at the moment, you bet. I’ve been good. Bunch of interesting project stuff is welling up. Paris is giving itself its beautiful Xmas light-based makeover as usual, yes. It never looks better. I’ll find your email. Take care sir. xo, me. ** Brian O’Connell, Hi, Brian. Glad you were/are excited by Damien’s book. ‘Academic’ is a good word for what I find uninteresting about his films, yeah. ‘Velvet Goldmine’ is more loosey-goosey and fun loving while still smart. There are films of Von Trier (especially ‘Dancer in the Dark’, ‘Dogville’, ‘Manderlay’, … ) that literally made me want to rip the movie screen down or do an Elvis Presley on the monitor. I haven’t seen the last few. Intense dislike is just too guaranteed for me. Oh, man, I’m so sorry to hear that about your granddad. I sure hope they’ve stanched the bleeding and that he can get back to life ASAP. Really stressful. Worst year ever, 2020, goes without saying. Did Tuesday present you with a marked, general improvement? ** Okay. Today the blog concentrates on the works of the great video art pioneers Steina and Woody Vasulka who were also fundamental to the establishment of NYC’s seminal art/performance venue The Kitchen. Know their work at all? Now you can. See you tomorrow.

 

In Damien Ark’s debut novel, Fucked Up, seventeen-year-old Elliott attempts to survive the trauma of being the sole survivor of a serial killer while his abusive mother reinforces his inevitable cycle of self-destruction. Diagnosed with Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Elliott numbs himself with endless sex and drugs, blindly falls into the hands of rapists and murderers, but continues to search for some sense of hope in his life. Set in a postmodern dystopia on the verge of the apocalypse, Fucked Up is an eclectic take on transgressive literature that finds surreal romanticism under the grit of one of the most confrontational narratives ever written.

“Fucked Up gnaws on its angst with Ark’s prose like a precision hydraulic grinder spewing an eminently harsh noise opera of apocalyptic paranoias worming through the barebacked orifice of an urban sex-revenge epic that is gloriously captivating as it is inflamed and gaping.” —Elytron Frass

“savagery boils underneath the household. there are shotguns loaded w/ flechettes pointed at you inside of every wall from every angle. snakes with tanto blades & drenched in sweet cologne are hunting you. you & everyone around you is armed to the teeth. escape is unnecessary. we’re all demons here. liveleak gore videos are going into syndication. the whore sells sex soaked in dirt & public executions on the same ticket. a boy fucks his terror down as car bombs cook pedestrians. the trains will keep running off sheer ocean cliffs. with dense lethality damien ark is going to decapitate your moral comforts.” —MIKA (tokyo_vamp)

“Echoing the apocalyptic poetics of Stephen Tunney’s Flan, the kaleidoscopically perverse interior landscape of Alfred Chester’s Exquisite Corpse, and the emotional complexity of Dennis Cooper’s My Loose Thread, Damien Ark’s astounding debut creates a trauma-scape so massive it transcends the merely personal and embraces the familial, communal, animal, and environmental violence all around us. Relentless in its brutality and boundless in its compassion, endlessly explicit, sickeningly funny, deeply spiritual, and formally maximalist in every sense, this book will try to kill you and then terrorize you back to life with a sublime alchemy that turns filth, rage, humiliation, and despair into something so pristinely, purely human you must read it to believe it because this book invented it. Fucked Up is an era-defining work which stakes its soul on the most perverse notion possible: that hope might flourish in spite of all.” —Maryse Meijer

The book of the summer is now the novel of the year. Enter 2020, combustible and fraught, the mass lapsarian hangover, the Eschaton underway, the fires and floods, the privation, the mass casualties, the lifting of the veil on so-called public institutions, safety nets, governing norms and corporate bureaucracy as a cover for sex criminals, sociopathic predators and insidious drivers of perverse incentives, the drug-depredated populace. Fucked Up is a relentless onslaught of brutality to stagger the fainthearted, an incomparable monolith, a testament to what is printable, a spectacular orgy of the gruesome and profane, of violence and depravity raw, uncut and unadulterated, eerily prophetic, bearing an uncanny resemblance to modern times. This is a tender porn novel for the disaffected, a revelation that insists on your undivided attention, replete with endearing misfits and wanton disreputables. A radio dispatch from the basement of devastation and despair, spiritually righteous. Flickers of beauty and hope haunt each page, as our narrator reckons with their raw deal inheritance and the gift of life, friends and lovers, states of ecstasy and withdrawal, uncommon beauty in the scourged humanity of its world’s denizens. While Ark doesn’t exactly world-build, the atmosphere created here envelops and lingers in the sensorium. Once inside, a reader feels transfixed and their outlook execrated, awakened to the appalling nature of the status quo unmasked and hypocrisies laid bare, an emporium of horrors unimaginable here confronted, unflinching, with a tonal sleight of hand that straddles the comical, the absurd and the darkly distraught and dejected, the frank portrayal of destructive malevolence which through this book will leave indelible psychic marks. Like all redemptive art, Fucked Up ultimately comes to terms with its own hideousness via a tightrope gallows humor and unabashed zeal for the puncta of bliss the written word renders breathlessly. Peduncular, in bloom, unmistakably profound and uncompromising, Damien Ark boldly lays claim to the mantle of transgression as their birthright. It’s their lane now, and may you be emboldened by their audacity and permanently unlearn conformity. Get your angelic kicks before the coming storm, the spoils you reap will blind a god, somewhere between a prayer and a primal scream. Above all, Fucked Up is an antediluvian clarion call, a furious indictment, a work moral and political. – Manuel Marrero

 

INTERVIEW (Excerpt) –

MM) The book is extremely lurid and violent, and relentless at that. Paraphilic sex, child murder and abuse, sexual violence, urban blight, hard drugs, suicide, self-harm, abject poverty and despair, opiatic anhedonia, and lives painfully lived abound in sordid detail. Trauma haunts the narrative as if the characters are marked, forsaken, doomed on arrival. What made this such a preoccupation for you? Do you have a fondness for “ugly art?” Pessimistic art? Antagonistic art?

DA) Trauma is the primary focus of the novel. It’s the core of where it started and it’s in my blood. I remember being a kid and reading books about survivors of rape and sex trafficking, and they had the most bullshit Disney endings, while I was in group therapy for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, thinking to myself, there’s no hope for any of us, so where’s our story? I went to a sobriety school and barely anyone came out of that place clean. My entire life has been spent around people that have been abused or have abused others.

It only makes sense that with an upbringing like mine, growing up surrounded by drugs and alcohol and having to talk with others for hours every week about my experience of being sexually abused, that I’d write this. Think of the sickest person in your head – I’ve met them. I know them. I can vividly feel them when I close my eyes.

Shock value was never my intention or of any interest to me while writing this book. If anything, that’s the last thing I want people to see, even though that’s probably an impossible task. FU is the ugly truth of what many people that experience trauma and mental illness go through when they aren’t given help and fall through all the cracks in this garbage society.

Ugly, pessimistic, and antagonistic art attracts me more than other forms of art, but I’m also pretty fond of lush romantic poetry.

MM) There’s some naturalistic, eschatological themes and imagery throughout, with the monsoon rain, floods and serpent fauna recurring as more than mere symbolic motifs, but features of the omnipresent, entropic milieux. Did you have climate change and the end of the world in mind? It’s a timely subject matter. Tell me about the pythons.

DA) If you’re in my age range (younger millennials and “zoomers”), then you’ve most likely grown up with the knowledge of climate change, the apocalyptic aspect of it, and how our world leaders care more about their profit than the greater good of humanity. It’s my personal belief that we’re at the point of no return. I don’t think it’s even possible to survive in a world where we’re attempting to find balance beyond what’s inevitable. Assuming you can live with the turmoil flow is inconceivable to me.

Climate change isn’t the primary focus of the novel, but it’s there in the atmosphere and the background for the entirety of it, sometimes sneaking in with a stronger presence here and there. There’s also this apocalyptic scenario involving an asteroid heading toward Earth that plays throughout the novel. However, nobody pays much attention to it, as it’s more written in symbolic terms than literal.

As a pluviophile, I knew I wanted to explore the nature of constant rain in a novel. At times, it’s cleansing and harmonic; other times, it’s destructive and claustrophobic. I’d like all of my novels to have a weather theme concerning climate change. It’s hard for me to believe you can write anything modern anymore without including the backdrop of our rapidly changing planet.

The pythons are one of many symbols in the novel, just like the Loretto staircase, ghosts, tropical plants, etc. Most of these ideas come from obsessions and dreams of my own. If you look up dream interpretations of various symbols, it adds other layers of meaning to those things. When I started to understand what those things meant in my own dreams, I figured that I could intertwine them into my novel as well. However, people can interpret these things however they want, and I find that more interesting than my own cheat codes to the novel.

MM) I believe and you believe this book is a marker of queer literature. A testament to how the queer experience can be depicted, with no easy categories, buried under an onslaught of bleak brutality. What kind of voice for the marginalized do you see yourself as? How do you feel about the state of risky literature with respect to the climate, and what does it mean for the market you’re trying to target? What’s your message for others like you?

DA) Well, I wrote it for myself, as a gay male who doesn’t feel that he fits in anywhere, especially with mental illness issues. Most queer literature, even when it’s focused on serious subjects, feels too safe. It feels like it’s made to be marketable. A fucking fantasy. You can’t go too deep into reality. People might disagree with me, but I think it’s the LGBT+ community that has made some of these barriers for people like me to get their voice out. You’re more likely to experience all of these horrible things like homelessness, abuse, survival sex, etc because you’re LGBT+, but we need to be a safe space that only writes about those things in specific ways that are as non-triggering, ultra-inclusive, and safe as possible for all audiences to read. Yeah, fuck that bullshit. The market I’m personally targeting is probably small, but it’s mainly for outcasts, especially young people that currently feel like they have no voice. I hope it inspires other people to take risks and be true to themselves. I’m sure anyone that’s curious about the experiences and heavy themes will take an interest too because we’re all attracted to the morbid, whether we realize it or not. Some people get a thrill out of being shocked and put into hidden worlds they’re unfamiliar with. Of course, people also love reading transgressive fiction because it’s typically outsider and innovative, so I hope FU fits into and also breaks that bubble of expectations.

Read the full interview here – https://expatpress.com/interview-with-damien-ark/

 

RANDOM INSPIRATION AND HINTS –

The ‘miraculous staircase’ in the Loretto Chapel. I had a friend that had a painted of it and he claimed that it was haunted. We used to go ghost hunting together. Something about the paintings story captivated me. Ghosts and the supernatural are also a recurring theme in the novel.

 

One of the characters, Gavin, owns two green tree pythons. I’ve always found these creatures fascinatingly beautiful. I think they work well as a representation of him and his brother, among other things.

 

Rain is a primary theme and tool that I used when writing the novel. It has ambience to it and destructive qualities. I imagined a story where it’s constantly storming, sometimes in torrential and apocalyptic manners. Climate change is a backdrop that mirrors the instability of the character’s lives and is also a reality that we face in modern days. Rarely, if ever, do I see climate change play a role in stories.

 

I’ve always been fascinated with this serial killer, especially the way that he was killed. He was whipped, stabbed, and then hung from a crane, for the crimes of raping and murdering children. There’s something very cathartic about that story. In the images, he doesn’t seem to have any emotions either, as if the pain means nothing to him. I related this experience the people that abused me and the experiences of people I know that have been abused. It often feels like even when there’s ‘justice’, they’ve already won or gotten what they wanted. The serial killer that Elliott survived is based off this person. Even though he’s dead the entire novel, he remains a primary antagonist by living in Elliott’s head. In my opinion, this mirrors the experience of what PTSD is like, or at least in my case.

 

Southpacific’s self-titled album and Airiel’s Winks & Kisses compilation were the most played pieces of music that I listened to while writing the novel.

 

Gavin (character mentioned earlier) is also a noise musician. I imagine that the music that he creates kind of sounds like this – harsh noise with lush ambient synths.

 

 

AN EXCERPT –

—— My aimless mind wanders from the voices and then back to the video on my laptop. Faggots slamming meth in a parking garage and trading their infected loads. Even worse, they’re proud of their disease. That’s what gets me off. The video pauses, won’t finish loading, so I close out of it and switch to another tab. More updates on a mass shooting. First female teenager that has committed a mass shooting and took out half of her school, over three hundred other kids. How many children ended up having their heads blown to pieces in it? How many bodies exploded in desolate hallways? When the bullet impacts the flesh it causes limbs to rip apart. How long did she plan for this? You can find the footage online. Found it. I know that God is here with me and I know that God is watching. The video comes to a cold stop and I stare at the arrow that urges me to replay it. How could someone do something like that? Pulled the fucking trigger on that ten-year-old girl. Didn’t even think about it as she squeezed it. All because she was bullied. Will the little girl have a little pink casket that her mutilated body is shoved into and what will she look like a month after her death? I want to see the chest explosion and the maggots in her flesh. But most of all, I want to see this girl that killed all of these children die, too. I want to see her hanging from a crane. See her impaled through her pussy and out through her mouth on a spike. See her face when the judge tells her that she’s getting the death sentence. That’s the face I want to print off and cum to and rip apart. Pink caskets and wasted tissues filled with cum.
—— Now I understand what everyone sees in you. The words that those sick pedophiles said to me as they touched me scatters storm clouds inside of my head. How could Bijeh resist? God fucking damn, you were one sexy little kid. The shyer and more innocent they are meaning the better the victim, the louder they’ll scream, the tighter their ass will be. Such a hot fucking face. Too bad your schizo meds gave you that disgusting belly. Otherwise… Sexy little kid. Sexy. Little. Kid.
—— Is it okay if I spend a few more years holding myself and crying under a bed as I mourn the childhood that I was never able to have? Can I? Don’t hurt me. Don’t. Hurt me. Why does my throat tense up every time that I try to scream? Why do I always gush into a frenzy of laughter after I finish sobbing for hours? This isn’t funny. Is it? Ha. HA HA! HA HA HA HA! Can we start over, mother? Can I be a child again? What would we do? Oh, I know! Let’s play Yahtzee. Pajama party! A tea for you and a tea for me. What else could the two of us do? Smooth jazz records with the kitchen windows open? A bubble bath and weekend cartoons? Dress up barbies? Pineapple yogurt and coloring books? Stupid faggot piece of shit. I love you too! Off to school. See you! Don’t you ever come back.

—— Final cigarette. I light it when I hear the front door open, which tells me that Dylan’s home. The buzz brings me back to reality and out of my role-playing fantasies of re-creating my childhood. It’s strange how quickly I can transform from being that unscathed boy and into this primal animal.
—— My feet kick at the seashells on the bed as I reach towards the dresser to grab a bottle of lubricant and the same dirty towel that we’ve used countless times before. I situate myself comfortably in bed and suck hard on my cigarette before he opens the door. Eyes locked on each-other. Attempting to match each other’s dance in order to see who’s the first to give in. Dylan drops his EMT jacket, leans his back against the wall, crosses his arms, and simply waits. “How do you want it,” he asks. “All of the way? No holding back?”
—— “No holding back,” I regurgitate. But I want even more than that. I want to be able to wake up in pain over it. Whatever it takes to make me feel human again.
—— After I ash my cigarette I step out of bed and move towards him. My eyes glance towards his jeans. His hands are tucked into his pockets as he tries to refrain from squeezing at his obvious erection. The back of his shirt is soaked with sweat from having exhausted his body all day. I try to squeeze the liquid out of it as I press the left side of my face against his chest. A part of me is crying. The other part wants to be torn apart limb by limb. When our lips meet, I nibble on the tip of his tongue to signal to him that it’s okay to bite me. It’s just one of our many codes that we’ve constructed over the past few weeks.
—— “You showered,” he notes in-between placing hickies all over my shoulders and neck. “I’m going to eat you all up tonight. So. Are you wearing it? The jockstrap? Let me feel it.”
I push him against the wall with all of my strength and embrace his skin, pulling at the hairs at his armpits, pinching his nipples with my fingernails, my tongue delving as far as it can penetrate inside of his mouth. It’s a fight I don’t want to win. As soon as he has the button and fly of my pants undone, he trips me to the floor and swiftly pins my wrists down. Our gaze connects again. He twists and squeezes just like I like it.
—— Before he goes to tear off my shirt, I stop him, “You’re wearing too much shit. At least take off your shoes. And look at all of the fucking mud you tracked into your brother’s room.”
—— “Shut it.” He teases me before he does the unexpected. Tosses his shoes at the door, stuffs both of his dirty white socks into my mouth, rips my shirt in half and uses it to bind my hands behind my back. “Don’t fucking move or I’ll fucking slam into you raw.” Squeezes my cheeks, which are gnawing on the warm and rugged cotton. Tosses my pants over an amplifier and wastes no time to pull his cock out, spitting on it and beating off madly.
—— We move to the bed. I’m on my back, dissociating and blindly following his straining orders. He pulls the socks from out of my mouth and fucks it, which does what it knows best to do all so naturally as if it were made only for that sole purpose. My body flushes up like a moon drifting into the sun. It’s all happening too fast for me to process anything other than the chaotic cables in my brain splitting and jolting bolts of electricity through every corrupted cell inside of me. I exist so that he can sway my hair away from my eyes and rub his pre-cum across my busted lips. I exist so that I can feel his calloused hands forming a garroting mechanism around my neck. This fucking need and craving to suffer and be punished. Others pray for world peace or total extinction. This is the sole blessing that God grants me.
—— Resolve. His hands loosen their grip as he goes to jerk off and gush streams of cum over my face. I lick up whatever I can before he scrapes it from my cheeks and forehead to taste it for himself. Then I’m flipped around and loosened up while my sweat dampens into the sheets. I don’t even get the chance to pull on my dick and fuck with it nor would he let me in the first place. Instead, my erection remains stiff and agitated in the jock while my balls tense up painfully. What I’d do to either have my testicles ripped off right now or to see myself cum. Discipline.
—— My ass squeezes around his prick as he pumps into me. Grunting and flesh slapping. My hands restrained and pulling for release for the sole purpose of pretending that I’m being raped. He pulls on the jockstrap and pounds my pudgy white ass until he can see the tears streaming down my face and into the pillowcase. “Don’t fucking stop,” I cry. He tells me to shut the fuck up. Slaps my ass, slowly pulls himself out and rams it back in. Holds himself up by his toes and fingertips and uses all of his weight to hatefuck me. This would be better if I had another cock to choke on to keep my retarded mouth shut. I can imagine it. Snot drooling down to my upper lip, ears ringing with tinnitus, stomach squirming, and my cock so ready to cum but unable to.
—— “Now sit on it,” he says. Which I didn’t expect, but he’s still hard and the bullet head is purple and throbbing. “Don’t fucking touch yourself. Don’t touch your fucking cock.” He unties my wrists and I see it. The slit seems enraged. But I can tell that he doesn’t enjoy breaking me. After this is over, he’s going to hate himself for it, which will lead from one thing to another, also known as the endless cycle of shame and self-hatred that burns like a virus until suicide or murder becomes the last option.
—— At one point in my life I could never understand why people hated having the lights on during sex, but now I get it, because I can see my sloppy fat flesh bubble jiggling as I ride him. For what it’s worth, he’s just as ugly. The only difference is that his sin comes from the inside. I see it when he shuts his eyes and pierces the front of his bottom lip with his canine teeth. He wants me to be something different, that dead boy perhaps, and he wants it so fucking badly that he’s bleeding for it. As for me, all I want is to become nothing more than this pulse of pleasure where nothing else – no pain or glancing at scars on the wrists or dead best friends or traumatic flashbacks – ceases to exist.
—— Never seen someone so into the act as he is right now. This must be what it’s like to truly connect with somebody you love. Pretty, isn’t it? He sets fire to the end of a blunt and puffs on it, one hand on my side and the other delicately running up my chest. I close my eyes and I’m not ugly anymore. Lean forward and plant a kiss, trade mouthfuls of smoke, and feel him tremor his next load into me.
—— Once it’s over, everything unfolds ever so slowly again. The voices and gnawing sounds from outside. Is it the weather or is it someone preying on me? Talking to myself under my breath while he paces and changes. I let him feel like shit for however long he needs to. I let him lay down behind me on the bed and I listen to him strum chords for an hour until he’s found a somewhat-decent tone to spread out into a two-and-a-half-minute piece of music. My sense of reality muddies into a monochrome world. So what do you see? Three worlds. First world? Past, the car on fire. Second world? Dylan’s simple expression as he searches for the right way to end the song. And the final world? Snow. A world so frigid cold that it feels as if my throat is being cut apart. So you know how it ends.
—— I drown the voices with alcohol and drink myself silly to put me to sleep, but it doesn’t really matter because the nightmares find their way back and antagonize me. I’m trashed and drifting, being swallowed within an ugliness as vile as the basement. The smothering haze begins to form a dream world around me in which I find myself running through the streets as someone chases after me. He has a kitchen knife with my name edged into it. His face is distorted and mutilated just like I’ll be when he catches up to me. Parts of the dream happen too fast for me to process, but the ending is always as clear as light beaming through sheets of ice. We’re in some warehouse and he’s approaching me. Dylan and Gavin are there, both dead, their heads torn off, intestines pulled out, and now it’s my turn to die. The fear paralyzes me. It feels so fucking real when he plunges the knife into me. The pain is still there even as I wake up to examine my stomach and chest. Instead of coming across a gruesome wound I notice three distinct scratch marks on my right side. Mocking of the trinity, as Connor used to say. It seems that I end up as a dead body in almost every dream that I have.
—— “Hey.” This remains to be the sole word that Gavin says when I wake up with a fever and sticky sweat seething from out of my skin. He’s on his side and glaring at me with exhausted bags under his eyes. The voices turn my attention away from him and to them; it seems like they’re coming from out of the air vent. Faggot pig. Can you oink like one better than you can suck cock? That’s all you are. All you’ll ever be. I look down at my hands, but I don’t understand why I have them and if they’re really my hands. Is this really my body? The sharp pain from the nightmare is there. But what if this world is fabricated and the layers of sleep that I continuously die in are what’s real? Hands. Hands. Not my hands.
—— “What do you mean?” he asks, stopping himself midway from taking my arm. “Of course they’re your hands. You want a cigarette? Maybe some breakfast?”
—— “You promised me sex. You thought I’d forget. Well, now I want it.” I’m not sure where those words came from or if it’s even me that said it. How often do I say what I’m thinking out loud without realizing it?
—— “Constantly,” he answers. I stare at his hands as he handles a flashlight. Hands. “You… Don’t worry about it. I couldn’t sleep with you fidgeting like that. It makes me feel like shit because I don’t know what to do. Do I wake you and pull you out of it only to have you scream and attack me or do I let you suffer through it just to see it affect you for the rest of the day?”
—— “But the sex…” Again, not me speaking. Is that even my fucking voice? Fucking pigs voice.
—— “Not yet. After breakfast, maybe. Just try to relax and smoke and think about nothing.”
—— My mind races like a dozen bricks tossed into a washing machine. He leaves to make breakfast and I pace around the mess of guitar strings, half-broken ambient cassettes, dusty imported records and contact mics. Eventually, I put on a pair of briefs and sway myself back and forth on the edge of the bed. I focus on the sound of soft rain that reminds me of Islamic prayers and wind-chimes that allow my mother’s whispering voice to calm me down. I’m gonna take good care of you. Nobody’s ever gonna hurt my baby boy. I love you, I love you, I love you, my sweet Elliott. She sings to me. Yes, I’m fine. Everything’s gonna be fine and she’s gonna take good care of me, someday.

 

PREORDER/BUY HERE –

https://expatpress.com/product/fucked-up-damien-ark/

 

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Today the blog gets to do one of its favorite things and turn itself into a red carpet in abeyance of the world premiere of an exciting new book, in this case the first novel by the daring and maximally gifted young writer (and longtime DC’s d.l.) Damien Ark. Please check out all the related hints and excerpts and exclusive goodies and then usher yourself into the book itself. Thank you for choosing this place as fire entrance, Damien! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Very French, no? Oh, thank you a lot for those Sonbert links. I managed to put together a future Sonbert Day this weekend which would not have been possible without that gift from you. And I happened to find your ‘Casanova’ appreciation yesterday on my own, and it’s excellent. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has written an appreciation of Fellini’s odd and underrated film ‘Casanova’ that I highly recommend. Here. ** Sypha, Hi, James. It’s funny: the Cyclopes one seems to have been the most popular around here and yet I wasn’t even seriously considering it. But now I am. Hm. ** Misanthrope, I too love or would at least eat all of them except the Fauchon caviar-filled Buche whose mere existence makes me kind of nauseous. Dizzying is great term for Derek’s novel, yes. That oughta be a blurb. I’m glad your mom thinks I’m swell. I like that word swell. I like what it seems to describe. And good to know your mom might have a heady perv side. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. The love for the cyclops one really surprises me. I almost didn’t put it in the post. I need to re-find my sense of humor as an eater. Yes, all my pals in LA too were rushing around yesterday buying and eating things up. Good luck. Here’s hoping your lockdown is as quick and relatively painless as ours was. ** Derek McCormack, Ah, ha! Suave pick, sir. And I could just take a quick five minute trot from my front door to the Ritz’s and get that little bitch. Hm. ** h (now j), Hi, pal. Good choices. They’re both on my short list. ** _Black_Acrylic, What am I not seeing in the Cyclopes one. I think I’ve lost my mind. I’m going to go do what I always do with the top tier (in my mind) Buches and go look at them in the flesh before deciding. A lot of the best looking Buches photograph very well, but look a little starved in the real. ** Golnoosh, Hi, G. Thanks for your votes! As I keep saying, the Cyclopes Buche’s charms totally escaped me until its local popularity woke me up. I think, at this moment, my top pick and most likely purchase is the La Gazette faux-pottery one you like as well. There’s something so wrong and right about it. But we’ll see. I think that one is going to sell out fast, so I need to decide pronto. ** Steve Erickson, Hm, I don’t know about the YouTube thing. You would think. Well, basically the Bushes tend to be roughly birthday cake size or slightly smaller. The people who disliked ‘Mank’ are being much more convincing than the ones who loved it. I’ve never heard of ‘How to with John Wilson’. I’ll check my listings. Sounds most curious. I’ve never heard of ‘Nathan for You’ either. I literally almost never watch TV. ** Brian O’Connell, Happy Monday, Brian. I too think the Xmas Buche is an art form. High five. And the French do too. Or some of the French. Seeing friends at the current time is akin to being given a rent free apartment in the middle of Disneyland (if you’re me). Nice weekend, iow. ‘Superstar’ is great. It and ‘Velvet Goldmine’ are my favorite Haynes films. I’m not a huge fan. I find his films too stiff and over-thought out in most cases. I like it best when he relaxes and plays around as in the case of the two films I mentioned and ‘I’m Not There’. I greatly dislike every Lars von Trier film starting with ‘Dancer in the Dark’. I think all of his films from then on are an odious combination of arrogant, stupid, and blatantly manipulative to one degree or another, but I’m okay with some of the earlier ones, ‘BtW’ included. Hey, man, I hope your Monday does you proud. ** Armando, Hi, A. I’ve been pretty good, I guess, and you? Happy so many of the Buche’s spoke to your taste buds and, well, your taste in general. Today? The Pinault Foundation, which is this new, big soon-to-open art museum in Paris, wants Zac and me and our friend writer/curator Sabrina to maybe to do a lecture/presentation about haunted house attractions at the museum, and the meeting to discuss that is tomorrow, so today will be taken up by us three figuring out what we want to propose. And your Monday? ** Damien Ark, Hey, D! Happy novel’s DC-related birth day so to speak! Well, if the hate mail is coming even pre-publication, and if it’s based around generalising bullshit like homophobia and antisemitism, it’s not in any way, shape or form about you or your book. It’s just outbursts by ugly, indiscriminating people. So try to be rubber to their glue. Otherwise, publishing intense fiction can get intense reactions, and you should prepare yourself for that and accept that ‘you started it’ as they say. Spoken by someone who has had their share. Try to enjoy your book’s big day around here. ** Right. Your day is squared away and already explained up top. See you tomorrow.