________________

 

‘Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ debut, Sleepovers, in its display of rural, small town folks, is a quietly radical book of short stories giving voice to people often overlooked in literature. Being from a small town in western Pennsylvania that’s been ravaged by drug addiction and unemployment, I can’t explain how good it feels and how rare it is to find good work about those kinds of places that displays life honestly. It is such a rare treat to read good literature that is taken seriously about these kinds of places and folks, often, I believe, because those who craft it have no idea what they are talking about. It either quickly veers into parody or is overly dramatic.

‘In Sleepovers, the individual stories in this collection sing out wildly and beautifully on their own, but also, importantly, deftly cohere. Rooted in a sense of place and voice that feels natural and not labored. It is an exciting and refreshing book and marks Phillips a unique voice in a sea of contemporary posture-core writers. She cares not for the trappings of the surreal or postmodern—there are no tricks here, no clever in-jokes, characters do not stare out their Brooklyn apartment windows in medicated detachment, there’s no ironic stabs at our modern condition (thank God thank God). Phillips writes from a place of radical honesty, of true human compassion. She is writing to share and invite people in, to create a space to engage with the reader.

‘In Sleepovers, Phillips writes about her rural hometown of Woodland, North Carolina. With an almost hypnotic perfection, she crafts her character’s voices and often, like the best fiction, the text feels as if it is vibrating off the page, is being read too you, like some kind of secret transmission. Her attention to detail regarding voice in the predominantly first-person collection is uncanny, and like the best magicians, she keeps the hard work hidden, makes it look easy.’ — Nicholas Rys

 

ASHLEIGH BRYANT PHILLIPS SITE
G H O S T G R I T Z
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips Leavens Rural Poverty with Tender Mercies in “Sleepovers”
ASHLEIGH BRYANT PHILLIPS INTERVIEWED
Buy ‘Sleepovers’

 

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips Sleepovers
Hub City Writers Project

‘Hailed by Lauren Groff as “fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be,” and written with “incantatory crispness,” Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips’ characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they’ve ever known. Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. “The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ imagination is profoundly original and private,” writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers marks the debut of a fearless new voice in fiction.’ — Hub City Writers Project

Excerpt

from The Truth About Miss Katie

Miss Katie made me want to be a teacher. She taught me so much. And I wanted to tell her goodbye. I wanted to tell her how nice I think she is and thank her for all she’s done and ask her if she thinks we’ll ever see each other again.

I wanted to give her a gift. I wanted to paint her a painting. A thing called a still life, of opening spring flowers, but she never even got around to staying around here long enough for me to see any spring flowers open. And I didn’t want to ask Grandma for a canvas. Grandma wouldn’t even let me explain what a canvas was. She said, “None of that mess.”

So I stole some paper from school and did a self-portrait at night in my room in the dark. I had to try it over and over again for a while like that until it came out good. Because I couldn’t really see what all I was doing, but I got the hang of it after a while. And that’s what I wanted to give her, the self-portrait I did, because it had gummy worms on it, floating around my head.

Miss Katie asked me what was my favorite restaurant and I said that even though I love McDonald’s, and McDonald’s has toys ’cause my cousin Terri works there and she brings them to us from her work, I have never been to the Golden Corral. I’ve seen the commercials and I don’t even know where it is around here but the TV says that the Golden Corral is all you can eat—it’s buffet. Kayla says she’s been there and that buffet means the food never goes out. You can eat until you’re so full you’re about to pop. Kayla says if I ever go, to try the BBQ pizza. She says you wouldn’t think it, cause it sounds gross, but she says it’s so so good.

Miss Katie said she’d never gone to the Golden Corral, but she said that she’d take me someday. I told her I heard we can put candy on our ice cream there. “I’m sure,” she said. She said she’d put gummy worms on her ice cream. And I just wanted to know if she could tell me when I went out to the bleachers to find her and give her my self-portrait when we were going to go to the Golden Corral.

But when I got out there, I saw her on the phone and I didn’t want to interrupt. I listened behind the gym, heard her talking some real bad stuff. She was saying, “This place is a shit hole.” And, “I’m just so alone here.” And she told her friend that we’d made her a 7Up cake. Miss Katie was kinda laughing then. She said she spit the cake out in the bathroom. She said 7Up cake was some country shit.

I can’t believe she said that. I mean she told us that she loved the 7Up cake. And it really is so good. We never get it except only on special occasions when Sammy’s mama makes it. We all love it so much when she makes it. It’s my favorite cake.

Miss Katie said the swimming pool here doesn’t even have a diving board. I’d never thought about that before, but she said it so mean. And she said she was scared of getting robbed. She was shaking her head and getting frustrated. “Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “Helping. Yes. They needed me.” Yeah she did show us things, but I never knew that we needed any help.

Miss Katie started crying on the phone and I remembered my sister. She’d be crawling into the fridge at night when she was hungry, when she won’t supposed to be looking for something to eat. It hurt my feelings to hear Miss Katie talk like that. And I want to tell her that I don’t ever want her to come back here again because I hate her.

Extras

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips reads “Shania”

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips in conversation with Mary Miller

 

 

_______________

 

‘Many of my books are “novels” but they are hardly written with a narrative arch in mind. I write on a very much more micro-level: I have a sensation or sentence in mind and then I try to exhaust everything using that kernel (and with everything I primarily mean myself, but also our entire culture, it’s a futile idea no doubt).

‘And yes, there are a lot of “images” in my books, though often they are involved in a kind of near-montage-like series that do not on the whole come together (like the synthesis of Eisensteinian montage) but tends to keep moving until I and the poem are exhausted and we stop. Images do tend to be considered kitsch in American experimental poetics, a poetics that tends to be skeptical of the kind of absorptive, spectacular quality of images. But I’m very much interested in the spectacular and absorptive, in affect and poetic effects, in the visceral and fantastic.

‘I’m not all that interested in “innovative” poetry. To me it usually denotes a kind of high culture, high taste label. And also a sense of linear futurity that I think is not only boring but oppressive. I’m far more interested in the degraded and anachronistic, the trashy and the melancholic. Even “the poetic.”

‘But it’s true that my poems are very “aggressive” or violent, Joyelle wrote an article on the “ambient violence” in my work a while back. That seems true. In my mind art is very violent, but that’s not separate from the narrative. It’s in the very conflict within the artwork. I’m always at odds with myself, with my books.’ — Johannes Göransson

 

Glamor & Beauty
Johannes Göransson @ Twitter
Foreign Objects in Your Mouth: Johannes Göransson Interviewed by Katrine Øgaard Jensen
Transgressive Circulation: A Conversation with Johannes Göransson
Buy ‘Poetry Against All’

 

Johannes Göransson Poetry Against All
Tarpaulin Sky

‘This slim journal contains multitudes. It’s a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it’s an urgent manifesto. “Poetry is obscene,” Göransson writes. “But there are those who want to maintain the illusion that it is good for us.” This necessary book strips away the various illusions that have obscured poetry’s truest values. Göransson concludes: “This is written without hope.” But paradoxically, Poetry Against All offers just that. (Jeff Jackson) Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson’s Poetry Against All — for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers — concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one’s children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself. (Ken Chen)’

Excerpt

Foreigners make the best detectives, but they also make the best killers. They have no souls, portrayed as flat. This allows them to move in the volatility of atmosphere. This is also why the foreigner is kitsch. I take a selfie. Insects and electricity.

 

There is no cure for looking at images. At least that’s what they would have us believe. The degenerate porn addicts keep looking at pictures of naked bodies. An underworld of bodies and flowers: The poet must be a pornographer. No the poet must make pornography against porn.

 

In Distant Star by Roberto Bolano: The climax is when all the fascists go into the photography show and come out puking. But we don’t see the photographs. We just see the effect, the vomiting. The exhibit is like a black hole in the middle of the book: it both explains everything that happens and refused to actually show anything. Of course the photographer is a poet. The character is a poet-as-pornographer. But Bolano’s book – with its black room at the center of the book, a center that cannot be seen but whose effects is vomiting – is a work of parapornography: the pornography vomits itself.

 

The word “tusenskönor”: The correct translation is “daisies.” Daisies. Ann Jäderlund would never write a poem with “daisies” in it. Her poems are teeming with thousandbeauties.

 

The words ”baroque” and ”ruins,” which play such a central role to Friedlander’s notion of Nazi kitsch, are replayed in all the discussions in the US right now about ”ruin porn.” Ravishing pictures of luxurious ruins: Is it the fact that the ruins are mostly formerly wealthy buildings that makes the ruin porn luxurious, or is it the ruination process, the debasing process that is the ultimate luxury?

 

These ruin-porn buildings always strike me as toxic spaces. The toxicity of art.

 

With a stunning frequency, ruin porn is condemned in xenophobic terms. The photographers are accused of being foreigners, or worse, foreign tourists. I’m reading a discussion right now, where one accused photographer points out that he’s actually from Detroit. A critic immediately replies: “No, if you were really from Detroit you wouldn’t aestheticize our economic collapse.”

 

Not only is it only foreigners who make ”porn,” making porn seems to make you into a foreigner.

 

That time D. [an “experimental writer” from Bay Area] attacked me for turning her book into pornography by reading it retinally and failing to see it as a very ethical ”critique” of pornography.

 

Later she forbade me from writing about her writing because I come from ”some place different.” I’m not from the Bay Area. I’m from some place else. A foreigner, I made pornography out of even her moral critique. I ruined her sense of agency. I made kitsch out of her experimental art. As Haryette Mullen might have put it, I was an “unimagined reader.” I perverted her book. She had throw me out of her Republic (because I was not a member already). She wanted to denaturalize me.

 

Like when S. [critic and professor] said I was “tossing bombs” into US poetry. Being sensationalistic. Being a flat foreigner. Being violence.

 

Tarkovsky’s Stalker must be one of the origins of ”ruin porn.” The images are so beautiful – so ”ravishing” – they verge on kitsch. The snow falling indoors, the reliquary of discarded objects under water. The imagery is so gorgeous, iconophilic. I just want to look and look.

 

You can’t long for a place that still exists. The worst is to be in the place and yet to long for it. This paradox transforms me into a ghost. No, I was already a ghost. Since I was 13 years old I’ve been a ghost. And America has tried to exorcise me. But not as hard as I’ve tried. I’m trying right now. It’s finally working.

 

How strange it is to be home. Seeing this place where I grew up is oddly similar to the sensation of going to Korea. The feeling of returning home and the feeling of being some place utterly foreign, belonging and strangeness: How can these feelings be so similar? Something between joy and melancholia. A head-on crash with fantasies.

 

I want to take away all my ties to this place.

 

Went into town with Thomas and walked around. Had an ice cream and sat on the benches on Stortorget. Nothing has changed. It was sunny in that dusty way that smells of lilacs. To write The Sugar Book I have to become a tourist in my own home. I have to fake my own death. Disappear in order to live here again.

 

I have to make this book into a riddle.

 

I have to throw away the key.

 

In Paul Celan’s “Paris Memories,” the tourists can’t breathe until they die.

 

The Sacrifice, is a vacation movie, a tourist film. It could be read autobiographically. Tarkovsky is on vacation in Bergman’s Sweden, when the Soviet Union returns with nuclear attack – return of the repressed – to tear apart the fabric of his new life. Tarkovsky had of course abandoned his family in the Soviet Union in order to dedicate himself to his melancholic madness, his art. But Sweden is contaminated by his Russian nostalgia. It’s like his nostalgia brings about the end of the world.

 

The apartment I rent in Malmö has a beautiful terrace but it smells like sperm.

Extras

Johannes Goransson Reading, April 11, 2018

Paul Cunningham’s book trailer for The Sugar Book

 

 

______________

 

‘Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator – a scarcely fictional version of herself – is of the performance artist Pippa Bacca who, in 2008, set out on a symbolic journey from Milan to Jerusalem clad in a white wedding dress, hitchhiking her way through cities and countryside. Bacca was never to reach her destination. The narrator’s research of this woman’s failed journey runs alongside and increasingly intertwines with her own story, that of her tortured relationship with her mother, never recovered from a cold husband’s abandonment. Natasha Lehrer’s translation skilfully captures the fiendishly digressive style of Léger, whose sentences in their lyricism and volume often seek to dispense with the inhibitive punctuation of full-stops.

‘Readers of the previous two novels by Léger – Exposition and Suite for Barbara Loden – in what is now considered a trilogy completed by The White Dress, will be familiar with her introspective style. This trio of texts in which plot takes a back seat does to a certain extent revisit the same themes. However, The White Dress shows Léger doing something new. Her melodious intertwining of another’s story with her own recalls her other works, but this is an altogether darker, altogether more unashamedly melancholic exploration of narrative. Where Exposition constantly teeters on the verge between biography and autobiography, the narrator of The White Dress is no longer so tentative. For Léger’s message seems to be that to immerse oneself in other people’s stories, whether out of pity or simple escapism, is only to find a projection of one’s own life. Everything, for this author, is inherently autobiographical.

‘To reach such a conclusion might lead one naturally to consider that life is endlessly repetitive. If the other is a projection of the self; if, as the narrator writes when describing a range of acts by different performance artists, ‘it seems to me that it was me doing it’, then the implication is that all our thoughts, our actions, are only ever repetitions of others’ thoughts, actions. The White Dress shows us, however, that this is no bad thing. Léger brings out the fascination of memory, of identity, of melancholy, and shows that if life is endlessly repetitive then it is by nature endlessly literary. After all, as her narrator writes toward the end of the novel, ‘we are made of paper’.’ — Charlie Fox

 

La Semaine de Nathalie Léger
A Woman Telling Her Own Story Through the Story of Another Woman
The Slow Bloom of ‘Suite for Barbara Loden’
Out of photographs into words
Buy ‘The White Dress’

 

Nathalie Léger The White Dress
Dorothy, a publishing project

‘The White Dress is the third in Nathalie Léger’s award-winning triptych of books about women who “through their oeuvre, transform their lives into a mystery” (ELLE). In Exposition, Léger wrote about the Countess of Castiglione, the most photographed woman of the nineteenth century; in Suite for Barbara Loden she took up the actress and filmmaker Barbara Loden; here, Léger grapples with the tragic 2008 death of Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered while hiking from Italy to the Middle East in a wedding dress to promote world peace. A harrowing meditation on the risks women encounter, in life and in art, The White Dress also brings to a haunting conclusion Léger’s personal interrogation—sustained across all three books—of her relationship with her mother and the desire for justice in our lives.’ — Dorothy

Excerpt

The dress would need to be washed occasionally. A few weeks before her departure, Pippa Bacca organized a bonfire in the garden of her studio on Via Filippo Argelati, in Milan. She sent out invitations by email: ‘If you would like to contribute to the bride’s journey, come and burn something for me.’ On a cold, wet afternoon, on Sunday 17 February 2008, she lit a huge fire in the little garden at the back of the building, and everyone, I find it quite chilling, came with an object to burn – a letter, some old papers, spices, an issue of Vanity Fair, a second-hand copy of the I Ching, greetings cards wishing her safe travels – to throw on the fire. The ashes would be used to make soap for washing the dress. The wood residues had to be salvaged, mixed with rainwater and left to infuse for a week, the mixture then filtered through a piece of fine cloth to obtain the ash extract that would then be poured into a small container. Apparently it works very well. Dazzling white restored by ashes. Why not. The dress, the white, the foot-washing, the ash, accessories, images, arguments, everything had to be terribly significant. For the dress, Pippa worked with a designer to whom she explained at length what she wanted. The fabric petals that formed the skirt represented all the countries to be crossed, like the blank pages of the notebook on which Pippa was planning to write an account of her journey. The cape was for her to wear in countries where women are required to cover their hair, and to dry feet after they were washed. Her departure was fixed for 8 March 2008. Friends and family came to Casa dei Morigi for a big party and the first foot-washing. In among all the commotion and jubilation, a melancholy accordion provided the soundtrack for the improbable ceremony of a bride setting out beneath an overcast sky on a journey to save the world.

Look at Europe from above as if it were an immense maquette. See the landscapes, forests, valleys, waterways, the lines of the highways, urban agglomerations, roundabouts and junctions, industrial zones right by huge cemeteries. Study it, follow the roads, examine the housing estates, squares, alleyways, parking lots. Lean in, observe the brightly lit interiors, the tiny apartments, minuscule kitchens, bedrooms, tables, chairs, beds and lights. Look at the bodies in miniature, simultaneously busy, lying down, eating, pacing up and down in all these tiny spaces, sitting, despondent or animated, engrossed or desperate, telling, or trying to tell, what’s happened, whatever it is that’s happened, we see people talking to each other, holding out a hand or turning away, dancing in the stippled glow of fairy lights, greeting each other, embracing, now they’re fleeing, scattering, some rush forward, they fall and don’t get up again, we see them fighting, the huge crowds look so tiny at this scale, throngs of people, convoys, people running, suddenly holes, here, there, a gaping crater made by a shell in the middle of the city, bloodied bodies, we see dogs, trains, dead bodies piling up next to fire hydrants, libraries in flames, columns of humans tramping through the dark, through the cold, we see them fleeing, suffering, dying, we see people being hunted down, executed, we see them, we see the glistening outline of corpses already putrefying in the summer sun, we see the earth dug up, makeshift graves, broken stones, we see the erasure of traces, the archaeology of concealment, close to roundabouts, or right between two highways, not even at a discreet distance.

She wanted to travel through countries that had recently experienced war. I don’t know if she saw the signs of massacres, facades of buildings riddled with bullet holes, neighbourhoods still devastated, houses still in ruins. Did she see the Potocari cemetery, the 8,372 names and the steles commemorating all those killed in Srebrenica during a single week in the summer of 1995, did she see the memorial to the Bosnian genocide at Višegrad, the stele where the word ‘genocide’ engraved on the stone had been chiselled away by one group of people then added back with marker pen by another? Asking the question, I am only trying to understand what she wanted to do: did she really think that a dress with a train could erase the horror? But why would I want to even appear to reproach her? Is it because I would have extricated from the infernal fabric one or two or ten atrocities, an entire book of inhuman suffering inflicted by humans, that I would have got closer to the truth of these massacres, would have had more legitimacy when it came to denouncing them, been more effective when it came to atoning for them?

Extras

Nathalie Léger La robe blanche

RENCONTRE AVEC NATHALIE LÉGER

 

 

________________

 

‘Loudermilk centers on two friends conning their way through the 2003–2004 academic year at “the Seminars,” a prestigious Midwestern MFA program very transparently modelled on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Ives is an alumna). The charismatic Troy Loudermilk attends classes and is the one officially matriculated, while his extraordinarily shy sidekick Harry Rego ghostwrites the poems. As Loudermilk/Harry’s work arouses the admiration—and suspicion—of those around them, the teenaged daughter of two poetry faculty vies for Loudermilk’s affection, and a fiction student removed from the rest of the action struggles to write. Though Ives’s portrait of the Seminars/Workshop is more farcical than flattering, readers expecting yet another referendum on the MFA will be pleasantly surprised to discover a much stranger and more ambitious book. In Loudermilk, Ives has taken a subject notoriously difficult to make interesting—the difficulty of writing itself—and narrativized it into an elaborate plot peopled by avatars of the types Sontag enumerated decades ago.

‘Sontag says a good writer must be a fool and an obsessive, that the critic and the stylist are bonuses (so, inessential). But Ives—not just for her own erudition and syntactical artistry, remarkable as they are—counters that it is the critic and the stylist who are indispensable, for they are the ones who interface thought with language. Obsessions can be substituted, replaced, and tend to descend on us whether our nature is obsessive or not. Likewise, a fool’s confidence can be adopted when necessary; it’s no coincidence “bravado” so often collocates with “false” (or that Loudermilk is the only one of these characters without any apparent artistic promise of his own). Taste and intelligence can be faked, too, of course, but a good writer nevertheless must develop them sometime. Perhaps it is, after all, through the faking that the making happens.’ — Jameson Fitzpatrick

 

Lucy Ives Site
‘The Sexual Risk Avoidance Regime’, by Lucy Ives
I Am Loudermilk: The Millions Interviews Lucy Ives
Scamming the Scene: Lucy Ives and the Fiction of the Cultural Industry
Buy ‘Loudermilk’

 

Lucy Ives Loudermilk, Or, the Real Poet; Or, the Origin of the World
Soft Skull

‘It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry.

‘Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life.

‘Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.’ — Soft Skull

Excerpt

This isn’t anyone’s autobiography. What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.

These are the two terse sentences Clare Elwil has been writing for the past ten weeks. Her notebook jitters on the tray table. Even a single additional three-word phrase would be an improvement. For ten minus three is seven, which is equivalent to three plus four, and three times four equals twelve, which, one plus two equals three, again. Ten divided by three is a little more than three. Ten times three is thirty, and three plus zero is three. The plane, meanwhile, is one. It’s grievously small. Clare is on the plane. It was impossible to fly direct and that of course indicates something about where she is going. It was a good day this morning, light and bright; yet, occasionally, as the plane darts and veers on its descent down the unpleasant roads of the midwestern sky, she fears loss of consciousness. For a few months now her distress has attached itself to back-ground noise; it is no longer “in” her. It arrives. “On catlike feet.” This is someone’s poem, no doubt? A book on the piano in that apartment. Her mother’s apartment, Clare corrects herself. She is headed to the Seminars.

Slumbering beside her is a very pink man in his late fifties. His oblivion gives Clare ample opportunity, if not permission, to study the boyish short-sleeve button-down shirt he must wear in acquiescence to some regional career norm. Gray hairs curl on his speckled arms. His face has collapsed under weight of dream. He sighs. He is a machine for living, simple in conception and construction. In the right breast pocket of his button-down his boarding pass is displayed, as if to signal a belief that it might be reasonable and acceptable, a sensible business practice, that he be asked to leave the plane midflight should he be unable to produce the document at a moment’s notice. Associated with him is a salty scent, a faint musk; essentially inoffensive.

Clare’s body, specifically her head, rebels. Dread is taking on several recognizable shapes—like continents of the northern hemisphere of the planet Earth or, perhaps, she manages to think, these are sheep. Sheep! They lumber toward her, throbbing electrically. Or hogs. Are there three? It is possible there are three of them. Maybe four: a fourth hides behind the body of one of his fellows, seems briefly to merge stickily with the others—viscous and amorphous—before coming unabsorbed once more. “Pigs,” Clare mutters, as the angle of descent is rendered more pronounced by the professional whose gestures control this can.

Clare is a year late. She should have been making this bizarrely perilous short flight, like being thrown across the state of Illinois, at the end of the summer of 2002, when she was still a great writer. Admittedly, she had been a very young great writer, but all magnificently accomplished persons have had to be something before the period of universally acknowledged dominance—and Clare was evidently, tellingly being what she was then, which was very, very promising. It is in description now that Clare has a tendency to become most mired. No, now it is in description that Clare has a tendency to become the most mired. The tendency? Is that the word? Mired?The? She slides back and forth, on wheels, mobile yet unable to pass over the hump that stands between her and poised, proper articulation. What was it she was? Who was there? The very sentence is unnatural. The sentence is very unnatural. Who? Had anyone in fact said or believed this of her? The sense that this had happened somewhere, the naming of her, the praise of her, the walking to the home of the doughty publisher, the short man, his cobbled streets. She was to receive the award before a polished black piano. His piano, not her mother’s. To someone, oh someone, then one Clare Elwil, these events had occurred. “You have a name for a book cover,” an anemic woman in a pair of avant-garde earrings, nests of silver thread, had whispered. Clare was a stylist, a judicious narrator. She sold her story to the room. She was someone, the worthies said, who should be driving the bus, and there were daffodils jangling everywhere in Cambridge.

Here, the plane touches earth. Clare gags. A black star blooms, and she maintains herself in a kind of (obviously wishful) corporeal stillness, by force of will. The pink man stirs.

The plane bounces. There comes a smattering of applause.

Clare Elwil is in the middle of nowhere, where she will remain for the next two years, and what no one knows but they will soon discover is that she can no longer write.

Extras

Lucy Ives at Flying Object

LUCY IVES

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. So, tomorrow there’s this Zoom event where the legendary editor/ agent/ cultural force Ira Silverberg will be talking with Diarmuid Hester and me about WRONG. It has been given the title ‘Dennis Cooper Must Die’, and it starts at 3 pm East Coast/USA time, which means 8 pm UK time and 9 pm here in Paris, etc.). It should be cool, and you can sign up to be there here. ** G, Hi! Yeah, it’s a relief. The blog having survived. I … don’t think the blog will get taken down at this point. It is a bit confusing. The people who repaired the blog are the ones who were offended and complained about certain content (the escort/slave posts, basically), but it remains unclear as to whether that means I must remove that content or not. We’ll see. ILP has talked about reprinting ‘GONE’ again, but I’m not sure when or if that’ll happen. They have a lot of new forthcoming books on their agenda. Yes, I read your new poems on SELFFUCK yesterday, and they’re awesome. Let me share. G, also known as the wonderful writer and podcaster Golnoosh Nour, has three new poems just published on the great SELFFUCK site that I highly recommend to you. Here. Thank you about ‘Closer’, and the character map, wow! I’m sure you know I do all kinds of complicated graphs about my novels when I’m preparing to write them. Very cool! Bonnest of bon days to you! ** Armando, Hey there. Blog is back, yes, and that’s a relief, yes indeed. I’m good. I have a very painful broken toe, but I’m going to the doctor tomorrow. Paris is handling the pandemic pretty well. We’re still relatively free, and most everything is open and functioning, although the COVID cases are rising dramatically right now, so we’ll see if that lasts. So sorry to hear it’s still intense there. We’ve been pretty lucky in Europe. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was sixteen, and I go vegan fairly often. I’ve been vegan (albeit with a few dairy slips in restaurants) for about a year now. Favorite Tom Waits album? Mm … I guess ‘Bone Machine’. I don’t listen him all that much. Yes, I have a fondness for Black Metal. Darkthrone … hm. I like the early stuff best, so maybe ‘Under a Funeral Moon’. ‘Plaguewielder’ is pretty great too. Your Waits and Darkthrone faves? ‘Climax’: I thought it was Gaspar regrouping after the complete disaster that was ‘Love’ and doing what he already knew how to do rather than pushing himself further forward, so I was somewhat let down by that, but I did enjoy it quite a lot. And you? Good to talk with you too. I’m going to Paris’s Halloween haunted house attraction at Le Manoir de Paris tonight, so I’m very psyched about that, and having a Syrian dinner beforehand, and otherwise probably working on stuff. You? ** Misanthrope, Her films are all over the place, so it’s easy to not know if she’s steering things. Find out how Japan is doing. I wonder if I picked up a guitar whether I could re-find my abilities thereby. I’ve barely touched a guitar since I was 19. It’s the escorts/slaves who are the predictable problem, partly because the WP people are not remotely artist types, and convincing them those posts are not intended to pimp actual escorts to the blog’s viewers is being quite difficult. Oh, boy, re: David. He’s a very lucky dude, but luck is not eternal, so I hope he gets some objectivity on his own accord before it’s too late. Man oh man. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. An indie musical about a gay mailman sounds like it has possibilities. I don’t know that Michael Chabon story. Well, I hope it’s something Gus actually really cares about and is actually into because it’s been ages since he’s made a film that wasn’t just okay at best, in my opinion. ** Dominik, Hi there, pal! Glad the post was in your realm. I think the blog will be okay. It is tricky, but I think it’s going to be fine. I may need to dump or make the escort/slave posts differently. We’ll see. No, Zac and I ended up spending the day going to art galleries, but I’ll see the new Noe in the next few days. ‘Skype-beer’, nice. Not as nice as ‘Beer-beer’, but … Ha ha. Rimbaud being fisted by Baudelaire love, Dennis. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I think it’ll be fine. The blog, I think. Not for sure, but it’s looking a little brighter at this very moment. If your parents don’t get punk, watching ‘Decline’ with them should be quite amusing. It is ultra-punk. Still no new restrictions on us in Paris, but they could be imposed any day now. ** politekid, Hey, Oscar!!! That’s cool about the bookstore stint. Not so much about the power mess obviously. What’s the puppetry and object theatre book? I don’t imagine I can get BFIPlayer over here, but I’ll check. That’s a very sweet line up right there. Ozu dive: big up on that! Like I said up above, I think the blog situation will be okay. I’m very nerve racked about blog problems after the google thing, so I’m very wary and get easily worried, but I think the blog is safe. It’s just about whether I need to delete some offending posts or not. It’s been quiet here. Just working on some writing, looking at art, going to a haunted house attraction tonight (!!!!), and … not too much. What about you, man? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Well, it’s the WP repair crew that has the issues, not anyone out there reading, as far as I can tell. I didn’t see the Noe yet, but the new one (which I will see shortly) is ‘Lux Aeterna’. It’s the one that premiered at Cannes, and I think it’s still 60 minutes long as far as I can tell. Word is that it’s kind of a mess, but I’m always interested to see what Gaspar makes, and Paul Hameline, who was in ‘Like Cattle Towards Glow’, is in it, and I’m curious to see his performance. Ever more interesting about the Leary doc. We had three mice in our apartment this summer, but we started cleaning better and using a metal trash bin, and they seem to have lost interest in or apartment now. Good luck with yours. ** Right. Here are, as advertised, four books I just read and loved and recommend. Check ’em out, won’t you? See you tomorrow.

 

‘Punk has been tamed, punk has been neutered, punk has been domesticated. The album The Stooges is fifty years old this August, and the music of omnidirectional bile and antiauthoritarianism that it anticipated has been museumified, the subject of a Met Gala and a Museum of Sex show—this despite Johnny Rotten’s staunchly anti-erotic definition of love as “two minutes and fifty seconds of squelching noises.” Punk has been turned into something that it never was, as has so much “problematic” art, in this case retrospectively cast as protest music with clearly articulated social justice–oriented aims that if stated wouldn’t ruffle the feathers of a contemporary middle-class liberal. This required a process of selective amnesia: we can remember Joe Strummer yawping about Sandinistas or whatever, but not Rotten growling seemingly anti-abortion sentiments in “Bodies” or Siouxsie Sioux performing in a swastika armband.

‘All of this only underlines the importance of Penelope Spheeris’s achievement in her punk films, for they offer a from-the-pit perspective on what American punk and hardcore was—not what many of its contemporary interpreters might have liked it to be—an idiom cleanly classifiable neither as progressive nor as reactionary, a nailbomb chucked in the direction of popular entertainment, a subculture whose identifiers projected a clear “KEEP OUT” stance to the wary. This body of punk films may be said to include Spheeris’s fiction feature debut, Suburbia (1983), and Dudes (1987), and the Decline of Western Civilization trilogy of documentaries, released in 1981, 1988, and 1998. Part I and Part III are addressed to two generations of Los Angeleno punkers, while Part II, subtitled The Metal Years, focuses on the Los Angeles hair metal scene as centered around Sunset Strip clubs like Gazzari’s, Rainbow Bar & Grill, and the Cathouse club. It’s a bit of an outlier, but the film finds enough affinities between this world and that of punk to merit inclusion.

‘It was the first Decline that tagged Spheeris as the foremost interpreter of the punk phenomenon. The film was shot between fall 1979 and spring 1980 using equipment checked out from the music videography company she ran, Rock ‘n Reel, a world away from the yacht rock outfits and bloated FM rock acts that she made a living shooting. A lightning-in-a-bottle document, The Decline of Western Civilization catches a pivot point in the southern California punk scene, as the center of gravity is moving away from the older, artier, more queer-oriented crowd in Hollywood, represented by the likes of the Alice Bag Band and X, and moving toward the dowdier precincts of the unfashionable South Bay and Orange County, where bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were playing in a headlong, raw-power style that would eventually be distinguished—if never particularly well-defined—as “hardcore.” Brendan Mullen, founder of Hollywood punk club the Masque, identifies the key element in this new music as breakneck velocity, playing at “upwards of 250, 300 beats per minute.” Recording a moment in punk history, Decline also helped to make it. On the other side of the country, punkers in major cities saw Spheeris’s movie and started to imitate the roving, herky-jerky dance seen in the SoCal pits, dubbed the Huntington Beach (colloquially shortened to “H.B.”) Strut. And if hardcore might’ve eventually made inroads in Boston, New York, and Washington D.C., Spheeris’s movie certainly did its part in expediting matters.

‘Spheeris was in her midthirties at the time of the shoot, a decade or more older than most punkers at the time. If her age might’ve marked her an outsider in the milieu she was capturing, she was in other respects its ideal chronicler. Freak shows were in her blood, coming as she did from midway folk. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1945, her father, Andrew, was a former Olympic wrestler from Greece who created his own traveling carnival, Magic Empire Shows, and performed in it as a strongman. Penelope—the first of four children to Andrew and his wife, Juanita (nicknamed “Gypsy,” and picked up by Andrew at a stop in Kansas)—traveled with Magic Empire Shows until, in 1951, at a stop in Troy, Alabama, her father was killed while defending a black troupe member from harassment. Spheeris’s mother thereafter took her children to California with their first in a series of nine stepfathers, shuttling the family between trailer parks in gritty, working-class Los Angeles neighborhoods like Long Beach, Chula Vista, National City, Midway City, and Venice Beach, where she tended bar at a dive called the Circle.

‘Through Spheeris’s peripatetic youth, rock and roll was the one constant, her shelter. She was a regular at venues like the El Monte Legion Stadium, the Rendezvous Ballroom on Balboa Island, and the Cinnamon Cinder in Studio City, a devotee to surf rock acts like the legendary Dick Dale and the Deltones. After putting herself through film school at UCLA waitressing at Denny’s and the International House of Pancakes, she started making the scene at LA’s punk clubs—the Masque, Club 88, Blackies, Cathay de Grande—and saw something that was worth setting down in celluloid.

‘Young enough to feel the goaded animal anger of this anguished music in her gut, old enough to bring some perspective to bear on the men and women making it, Spheeris caught something essential about the scene, specifically the degree to which it revolved around music by and for damaged individuals, people practically radiating with their hurt, for whom this music was nothing less than a lifeline. Her childhood marred by violence and instability, lived in part in the highly unorthodox familial environment of the circus, Spheeris understood something about her subjects, and was able to put them at ease in a way that many filmmakers might not.

‘Now treasured as a time capsule, Decline was on its initial release more of a succès d’estime, and it succeeded in catching the attention of producer Roger Corman. As the newly inaugurated expert in the mores and folkways of hardcore punk, Spheeris was given her first fiction feature by Corman, a punksploitation picture to be titled Suburbia. The film’s opening, one of the most bracing and brutal in ’80s American cinema, depicts a toddler being mauled to death by a stray dog. Undeniably something to get an audience standing at attention—the movie inspired the Pet Shop Boys song of the same title, and the lyric “Let’s take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight”—it also effectively introduces the underlying themes of the film: child neglect, child endangerment, the hostility of the suburban environment.’ — The Criterion Collection

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Penelope Spheeris Site
Penelope Spheeris @ IMDb
Penelope Spheeris: ‘I sold out and took the money’
Penelope Spheeris on leaving Hollywood behind: “They can blow me”
PENELOPE SPHEERIS: FILMING ROCK & ROLL
Penelope Spheeris @ Facebook
Penelope Spheerie @ letterboxd
The Truth About Punk According to Penelope Spheeris
On steamrolling bold visions into existence and healing along the way
Penelope Spheeris looks back on her cult punk docs the police tried to ban
Visual History with Penelope Spheeris
On The Corner of Lookout and Wonderland: A Profile of Penelope Spheeris in Present Day Los Angeles
‘I’ll die a punk’
Penelope Spheeris: Selling Her Soul For Cinema
PENELOPE SPHEERIS IS THE BLACK SHEEP OF HOLLYWOOD
Penelope Spheeris on Wayne’s World, Dating Extras, and Why She Didn’t Do the Sequel
PENELOPE SPHEERIS TALKS ABOUT THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Sleaze on the Sunset Strip: How Penelope Spheeris captured the hair metal scene at the brink of implosion
Talking to Penelope Spheeris about time
Interview: Penelope Spheeris
The Family Values of Penelope Spheeris and Anna Fox
Underground with Punk Icon Penelope Spheeris
Penelope Spheeris on Documenting the Misunderstood
Penelope Spheeris Revisits Her Decline of Western Civilization Trilogy
For Penelope Spheeris, Fame Came at a Price
“It’s All About Shocking People”
Penelope Spheeris: Things are better for women … kinda

 

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Extras

Penelope Spheeris on “The Decline of Western Civilization”

Megadeth – In My Darkest Hour

Night Ranger – I Did It For Love

Megadeth – Wake Up Dead

Penelope Spheeris at length

 

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Interview

 

The A.V. Club: You’ve been a filmmaker forever, but you’ve said in interviews that you didn’t grow up obsessed with cinema.

Penelope Spheeris: I wasn’t obsessed with it. I would go to movies because it would be our escape. We lived in trailer parks, and I would save money by collecting up Coke bottles so we would be able to go. It would cost, like, a dollar to get into the Saturday matinees. I’d go to a double feature and you got free stuff in the middle, you know, news reports and The Little Rascals and shit.

AVC: Then you ended up making a Little Rascals movie.

PS: That’s why I did it, because I really knew a lot about The Little Rascals from going to the matinees.

AVC: Do you remember the first thing you ever shot?

PS: When I was at school at UCLA, they loaned [us] cameras and I was going home one day and I saw a bunch of crows flying in a field. I used some negative film, and I printed it as a negative so it was a black sky with white birds in it. That was my first piece of film I ever shot. And I’m like, “Man, this is cool!” Filmmaking is about trying to master or change reality, and have your own interpretation of it. It’s kind of an ego trip in a way!

But yeah, I fell in love at that moment, and again when I did my film at UCLA called Hats Off To Hollywood. I put some music to a shot of Hollywood Boulevard in, like, 1968 or something, and man, when you put music and movies together—it was like the sky opened up and God said, “You’re meant to do this.” So I did it.

AVC: Combining music and film is your thing, but a lot of the stuff that you do is also about outcasts, people who live on the margins. What is it about those kind of characters that interests you?

PS: I think the fact that I was born on a carnival [had a lot to do with it]. When we traveled around, the people that would join us as we moved from town to town would be people that didn’t really have any reason to stay where they were. The carnival was a collection of outcasts, so I feel very comfortable around them.

AVC: You’ve filmed in the pit at punk shows, you’ve done TV movies about alien abductions, you’ve shot in a women’s prison. Has there ever been a day on set where you were just like, “What the fuck am I doing here?”

PS: That would be working with the Weinsteins. I have done a lot of different kinds of genres and a lot of different types of subject matter, but I did those because I just took whatever job I could get. Because as a woman in the film business, you really don’t get to pick and choose.

But working with the Weinsteins was probably the moment where I said to myself, “How the fuck did I get here? What am I doing?” I did a movie called Senseless with David Spade and Marlon Wayans with the Weinsteins producing back in 1998. I was just finishing this movie and I said, “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to work in this movie business anymore.” And as a matter of fact, that was that.

AVC: Do you feel like you forgot why you were in the business, or that it had changed into something that you didn’t recognize anymore?

PS: It changed into something that I didn’t want to be a part of. I really didn’t want to be a part of mainstream Hollywood anymore. It was too—it’s ugly. You have no friends in Hollywood. Hollywood is a lonely, lonely desert, especially as a woman.

AVC: Something that I’ve heard a lot of female directors say is that there’s no mercy. If you make a movie and it’s not a hit, that’s it.

PS: There’s no forgiveness. Oliver Stone could go wreck a car and get arrested for being on drugs and then do Alexander. But we can’t do that. Women can’t make mistakes. I’m not driving home tonight because I had a couple beers, you know? [Laughs.]

But yeah, you can’t screw up when you’re a woman. One little mistake, and you’re done. Like Senseless, they kept rewriting it and rewriting it. And I’m like, “Dude, you guys, this is not working. Don’t keep rewriting it. Let me just do the movie I signed up to do.” But they kept rewriting it, and it’s in my contract that I got to do what they say, you know? And at one point, I said to Bob Weinstein, “I don’t think this works,” and he goes, “This is my fucking money and I’m going to spend it any fucking way I want to.” And how are you going to argue with that?

So I had to do the movie, and it didn’t do very well. And as a woman, when you do a movie that doesn’t do well, then you’re done. You’re in director jail.

AVC: For forever.

PS: Forever. It’s not like they go, “Okay, Penelope, you’re out of jail now. Let’s make a movie.” At this point, I don’t want to make a movie. They can’t even fucking beg me to make a movie. I got to make a lot of money in the days when you could make a lot of money as a director, and I invested it right. I don’t need that anymore. It’s not like I’m bitter. I just feel like I went through too much pain. I really did enjoy my life, being in the movie business.

AVC: That’s something that’s incomprehensible to a lot of powerful men in Hollywood, that you would not care about them.

PS: [Laughs.] Really?

AVC: I think they think that the world revolves around them and that’s why they can do whatever they want.

PS: That’s their problem, because I don’t care. I don’t care. I really don’t. I feel like there’s more important things in life than going through these dealings where you’ve got these people that are deceitful and liars who don’t stand up for their words, you know? And I went through a lot of that.

I don’t mean to be griping. Let me tell you, I did better than most people did. I got paid during the time where they were paying directors millions of dollars for doing movies. I think that’s why the Weinsteins tortured me so much, because they paid me 2.75 million or some shit like that for doing Senseless. It’s like, “Okay, we gave you all this money so we’re going to torture you this much.” It’s not worth it.

AVC: So you just thought to yourself, “This isn’t that important to me”?

PS: I got to a point where I said, “It’s not that important to me.” It took a little while, because that was me. I identified with the movie business. “I am a filmmaker. That’s what I do.”

Right now, I don’t identify with that anymore. [Sin and I] just spent two years building a house together, and we have six houses, and we’ve got a lot of tenants and a lot of rent, and I don’t need the movie business, you know? So if they don’t hire me because I’m a woman—because I’m an older woman—if they don’t hire me, I don’t give a shit. I don’t know who fired who, but as far as I’m concerned, I fired them.

AVC: That’s kind of badass. “Fine, well, fuck you too, then.”

PS: I don’t need them. I really don’t. Especially now, what am I going to do? Work for a year on a movie and make $50,000? They can blow me! That’s a quote. You can print that.

AVC: How does it feel to go to something like this event and see something that you did back in the early ’80s and be celebrated as a filmmaker?

PS: It does feel good, especially because when I did it back then, nobody cared.

AVC: You were saying the LAPD tried to shut down the premiere of The Decline Of Western Civilization.

PS: Right. Most of my movies do well later—they don’t do well at the time. Well, except for Wayne’s World and Black Sheep. And I guess The Little Rascals did good.

AVC: We were talking earlier about places where you felt like you didn’t really belong. Was there a time where you felt like, “This is the place for me?”

PS: That’s a really good question. I’ve thought about that a lot. And honestly, in mainstream studio production, I never really felt like I belonged there. I almost regret not soaking up the glory at the time, but I just never felt like it was the right place for me. I was doing it because, like I said, I took every job I could get. But those aren’t my people. My people are these people here tonight [seeing Decline]. Just down to earth, normal people.

AVC: What about the second Decline movie? That’s a whole different thing, with Ozzy Osbourne and KISS and that whole rock star culture.

PS: Well, the second one—that’s a long story. I don’t mean to put it down, a lot of people like it, but it’s a different thing. You know who produced that movie? Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who directed Little Miss Sunshine. And they had a whole comic vision for the movie. I would have made every band in the movie be more like the hardcore bands [in the original Decline Of Western Civilization], but I didn’t really get to pick and choose.

AVC: There are some pretty heavy moments in it regardless, like Chris Holmes [of W.A.S.P.] pouring a bottle of vodka in his mouth while his mom watches silently.

PS: Yeah, in the pool. Chris Holmes and Megadeath. That’s me making a movie. The rest of it is, “Let’s exploit this, you know, scene that’s going on right now.”

AVC: The Decline Of Western Civilization Part III is close to your heart, for a number of reasons.

PS: Not least because that’s where I met my boyfriend of 21 years. [Gestures to Sin, dozing on the couch next to her.] He’s going to sleep right now. [Laughs.]

AVC: How do you feel when people say punk is dead?

PS: I feel like they are so behind the times, because back when punk was thriving, that phrase was being used. Punk rock is by nature so against being exploitative and commercial that it doesn’t promote itself. And so people don’t hear a lot about it. But punk, I think, still is alive and well.

And I’m not talking about Green Day—I mean, fine. Okay. Green Day’s okay. Whatever. But for me, it, punk is not only music. It’s a philosophy and a way of life and a set of morals and ethics.

AVC: So someone could be a punk painter or chef or something.

PS: Yeah! Definitely! Usually, it doesn’t involve self-promotion or exploitation.

AVC: There are lot of people talking now about how can we get more women into directing. If a young woman today wants to start making movies, do you think there’s any value for her in going through the system, or do you think that’s just totally fucked?

PS: There is, actually. I’m very glad that today there are more opportunities for young women. I don’t think it’s a useless endeavor at this point, by any means. I almost feel jealous that I was not able to take advantage of this movement. Because it’s one thing to be a woman in this business, but let me tell you something, it’s another thing to be an older woman in this business. Because then you’ve got two strikes against you from the start.

 

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12 of Penelope Spheeris’s 38 films

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Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales: The Movie for Homosexuals (1968)
‘In 1968, Richard Pryor and director Penelope Spheeris worked together on a subversive satire called Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales: The Movie for Homosexuals. While it’s unclear what the film was about, it is believed that it followed a group of Black Panthers who kidnap a wealthy white man and put him on trial for all the racial crimes in American history. Spheeris had assembled a rough cut to screen for Pryor at his home, but Pryor’s then-wife Shelley Bonis got into an argument with him about spending all of his time and money on the film. In a fit of rage, Pryor destroyed the negative.

‘According to the Richard Pryor biography Furious Cool, “Penelope spent days splicing the pieces of the film back together like a jigsaw puzzle. She reconstructed the forty-some minutes of film by arduously piecing together the mangled pieces, some only a few frames long. The result was so crumpled and patched together that the film danced all around as it ran through the projector gate.”

‘Uncle Tom’s Fairy Tales was thought to be lost until Spheeris found a brief clip in her archive and donated it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2005. It was screened during a tribute to the comedian, when it sparked Pryor’s widow Jennifer Lee to sue Penelope Spheeris and Pryor’s daughter Rain for allegedly stealing the original negative during the 1980s. The lawsuit is still pending.’ — Mental Floss

 

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The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
‘Penelope Spheeris’ THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION was perceived as shocking and outrageous at the time of its original release in 1981 and its two follow-up films were no less extraordinary and revealing. Today, museums and educational institutions around the world present them as a historically significant works of art. Featuring some of the most influential and innovative musicians and groups of all time – Germs, Black Flag, X, Fear, Circle Jerks, Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne, these riveting, unflinching and hard-core films adeptly captured the spirit of a major cultural phenomenon.’ — Decline Movies

Trailer

Excerpt

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Suburbia (1983)
‘The dramatis personae of Suburbia have made it to the threshold of adulthood, but as walking wounded. Through the characters of teen runaways Sheila and Evan (Jennifer Clay and Bill Coyne), Spheeris introduces the viewer to a group of squatters who call themselves T.R.—The Rejected. Having left home, they’ve created their own makeshift family, like the one jerry-rigged together by James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), though with none of the Gothic romanticism of their abandoned mansion retreat. The backdrop here is the decidedly non-picturesque cities of Downey and Norwalk, the T.R. manse a run-down tract house located near the Alondra Boulevard off-ramp on I-605.

‘As to lend the proceedings a level of verisimilitude, the young cast was made up mostly of street kids and punk scenesters—among them Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea and more than a few clunky line-readers—and Spheeris gets to make use of her concert film–shooting bona fides, interpolating semi-documentary scenes of bands in action. T.S.O.L. perform “Wash Away” and “Darker My Love,” the Vandals contribute “The Legend of Pat Brown,” and early on in the film D.I. offer “Richard Hung Himself,” with frontman Casey Royer fashioning a noose from his microphone cord while a kewpie-ish New Waver–type girl in the audience is first accosted and then stripped nude, mocked and jeered. As teen punks my friends and I scoffed at this moment, which smacked of scare tactic “Do you know where your children are?” propaganda, but I’m less inclined to do so nowadays, for in its over-the-top way it expresses something true about the free-floating misogyny in the scene being covered—the stories about T.S.O.L.’s malevolent jock frontman, Jack Grisham, as circulated through various proliferating oral histories, are enough to curl your hair.’ — Criterion Collection

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the entirety

 

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The Boys Next Door (1985)
‘When Bo and Roy, 18-year-olds fresh from school and seemingly normal, decide to hit LA for one last fling before settling into factory jobs, neither they nor the audience are prepared for their sudden descent into committing a series of brutal, apparently motiveless murders. Whereas Spheeris’ The Wild Side was weakened by sentimentalising its disaffected punk heroes, her second feature presents a tougher and more balanced view of teen violence; while we’re allowed a glimmer of understanding into the murderers’ feelings, we never indulge them with misplaced sympathies: these boys are monsters.’ — Time Out

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Dudes (1987)
‘Two punks from the big city, traveling across the country in a Volkswagen bug, embrace the western ethos when they must take revenge against a group of rednecks for killing their friend in this lighthearted road movie. Along the way, they enlist the help of a young woman who runs a wrecking service.’ — letterboxd

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The Decline Of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988)
‘The second in Penelope Spheeris’ trilogy, The Metal Years takes a fast-paced look at the outrageous Heavy Metal scene of the late ’80s. Set in Los Angeles, the film explores fascinating portraits of struggling musicians, fans and star-struck groupies. Featuring Alice Cooper, Ozzy Osbourne, Poison and members of Aerosmith, Kiss, and Motorhead as well as performances by Megadeath, Faster Pussycat, Lizzy Borden, London, Odin and Seduce, this raucous and entertaining chapter also chronicles the lonely naiveté of the striving bands, the endless flow of alcohol and drugs and the relentless sexism. Poignant, wistful, sad and insightful, it’s a brilliant look at a unique and timeless genre of music. It’s a historically significant time capsule and it has come to define a generation of music lovers. It is both an exposé and a fun, irreverent, indulgent, indescribably exciting ride.’ — Shout Factory

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The Making of “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years”

 

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Thunder and Mud (1990)
‘Completely bonkers, not sure if this was a Pay Per View event when it first came out because it sure feels like one. Thunder & Mud is essentially a rock concert/battle of the bands/mud wrestling tournament all rolled into one. Two shitty hair metal bands will perform and then two women who represent each band will mud wrestle to determine which band is the best, there’s also some comedy bits in between each act and of course everything is obviously 100% scripted. To top things off the event is hosted by Jessica Hahn, a.k.a. the woman at the centre of the Jim Bakker scandal.’ — Keenan Tamblyn

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Wayne’s World (1992)
‘Because Spheeris had issues with Meyers during Wayne’s World—he wanted to recut it; she didn’t—she was not asked to direct the second installment, which hit theaters in 1993. “I did feel bad that I couldn’t direct Wayne’s World 2,” she says. “It was one of those Hollywood tests. It’s what Carrie Fisher called a ‘nervous breakthrough.’ That was one of the really tough ones for me.” If it’s any consolation, the movie bombed. Spheeris, meanwhile, continued as a successful working Hollywood director but got pigeonholed into directing mainstream comedies—from big-screen adaptations of The Little Rascals and The Beverly Hillbillies to S.N.L. alumni Chris Farley and David Spade in Black Sheep.

‘“I didn’t really want to be doing comedy,” she says. “I was good at it, I think. But basically, I’m an extremely serious person—borderline depressed. I don’t run around trying to be funny all the time. I don’t think of the world as funny, but that’s maybe what makes the comedy in the films work. But I wish I would’ve been able to do other kinds of films after Wayne’s World.” She recalls pitching a story on toxic waste to a producer, who laughed at her. “Everything serious got dismissed after Wayne’s World,” she says.

‘With the success of Wayne’s World, Spheeris became one of only a handful of women who have directed a movie grossing over $100 million. Spheeris and her fellow female (and male) directors got paid “big time” in the 90s—“you don’t get $2 million to direct a movie anymore,” she says—but thinking back, she also realizes how much discrimination she experienced as a female director.

‘“I never went along the way saying, ‘Oh, I’m being beat up because I’m a woman. I’m being treated badly because I was a woman.’ But when I look back, I definitely was. And we all were during that time. The fact that there hasn’t been much of a statistical change 25 years later is kind of disheartening.”’ — Vanity Fair

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The Beverly Hillbillies (1993)
‘Penelope Spheeris’s home, near Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, doesn’t look like it belongs to a punk icon. It’s airy and minimalist, with grey tiled floor and white carpet. We’re sitting on white sofas in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, and three small dogs are running around. Spheeris bought the place in 1974, then completely rebuilt it in the 90s with the money she made from directing a string of box-office-friendly comedies. But she’s in no mood to reminisce about the likes of Wayne’s World, The Beverly Hillbillies or Little Rascals. “The only movies I could get released were movies that I basically just sold out on and took the money,” she sighs. “And the only reason they released them was because they had thrown money at it and they had to get their money back.” Then she apologises for being so “Hollywood-jaded”.’ — The Guardian

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The Little Rascals (1994)
‘Spanky, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, and the other characters made famous in the Our Gang shorts of the 1920s and 1930s are brought back to life in this nostalgic children’s comedy. When Alfalfa starts to question his devotion to the club’s principles after falling for the beautiful nine-year old Darla, the rest of the gang sets out to keep them apart.’ — letterboxd

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The Decline of Western Civilization III (1998)
‘Penelope Spheeris: ‘I feel that Part III makes the strongest social statement of the three films, and that it serves a greater purpose than the other movies. We have a very, very concerning homeless situation here. In the 20 years since I made that film about homeless gutter punks, the homeless population has exploded here. The reason Decline III is my favourite film is because I think I was able to capture some sympathy and understanding for people in these unfortunate situations. It was the best two years of my life, honestly. In the beginning of punk rock, in the late ‘70s, there were certain traditional concepts that were targeted and being broken down — social issues, political issues, clothing trends, musical trends – it was across the board. The insane genius that Johnny Rotten is, he was just like, “Let’s just tear down everything.” Okay, well, he’s lost his mind today, but back then it was genius. Because we had to get rid of disco on the radio, we had to get rid of hippies, we had to get rid of a lot of things. We needed to change, y’know? And with Decline III, I feel that the kids really embraced that original ethic and continued to live it. My movie Suburbia also has those kinds of themes in it: “Fuck the world, I can live on my own, leave me alone, I don’t care what you think about me.”’ — Dazed Digital

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Hollywierd (1999
‘An in depth documentary shot by music video director Penelope Spheeris  during the production of the Full Moon Features classic BLOOD DOLLS. The documentary features Phil Fondacaro (Troll, Ghoulies II, Bordello of Blood, Return of The Jedi), Venesa Talor (Femalien) and the beautiful ladies of the Blood Dolls band.’ — Full Moon Features

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p.s. Hey. We’re back. Long story short, the blog has these plug-ins, and occasionally I’m notified that I need to update one of them, which involves just clicking a button. On Friday, I was notified that a plug-in called Ninja Form needed updating. I did, and the blog was immediately shut down. Apparently the plug-in was corrupted and shot a bug into my blog. It was finally repaired yesterday. In the course of fixing things, the WordPress repair crew raised issues about some of the content I post here that they say exceeds WP’s guidelines. I can’t go into details right now, but I may be forced to either delete a number of certain posts or have my blog completely shut down. We’re in negotiations at the moment. But, as far as you’re concerned, everything should work okay while that’s ongoing. ** G, Hi, G! Great to see you! I was really into the WWE in the 80s and 90s, wrote a big essay about it for an art magazine that seems to have gone missing. As David said just below your comment, the Barthes essay is from his book ‘Mythologies’. Anyway, so glad you liked the post. You good? I hope your time during the blog black out was beautifully spent. ** David Ehrenstein, I was on a plane with Haystack Calhoun once when I was a young teen on vacation with my folks on Maui. He needed three seats to sit comfortably, and was he was kind of crammed in even then. My favorite back then, or relatively soon after then, I guess, was George ‘The Animal’ Steel. I think he still might be my all-time fave. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein is still selling great things out of his house and still needs lucky buyers. Hit him up at [email protected]. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. As I told G., I was kind of obsessed with the WWE thing decades ago. I think it even influenced my fiction in some weird, forgotten way. The TV series project was a colossal waste of time and energy, but if we can salvage a feature film out of all that useless work, that would make it somewhat worth it, I suppose. We’ll see. It’s a rough time to try to make a strange feature film. Did you get to start visiting with your folks? I hope your dad is still doing well and improving. I like Robbie Basho. I did a post about him way back when that I should try to restore. Thank you for the shares. ** politekid, Hi, Oscar, just barging in on your and Corey’s back and forth to say hi! How’s it? ** Misanthrope, I assume Kayla is in pristine shape by now. How’s the guitar treating you? Like a good slave, I hope. How was that little singing gig dealy? ** _Black_Acrylic, HI, Ben. Cool, thanks. I guess Johnson laid down some seemingly half-assed new measures on you guys yesterday? What do I know, but I thought it was semi-insanity that the UK reopened pubs at the point they did. How’s everything? ** Nik, Hey, Nik! Wow, seriously? You’re reading ‘The Golden Fruits’? That’s nuts. I do still have my original copy, but it’s way, way far away in inaccessible LA like the giant majority of my books. Thanks about my toe. It’s still painful, and there’s still nothing I can do but wait and not jump around too much apparently. Halloween in Paris is basically a nothing. Although the kind of great Paris haunted house attraction Le Manoir de Paris has just reopened after the lockdown to do a Halloween haunt, and I’m going with friends tomorrow night, and I am ultra-excited about that. Otherwise, I think I’ll be stuck just making Halloween themed blog posts and dreaming. How has stuff transpired since my blog’s accessibility to you was so rudely interrupted? ** Dominik, Big D! Yes, I’m back. It was not the funnest and least stressful series of days, that’s for sure. I hope everything will be fine here now. We’ll see. Still no new restrictions on Paris. Very strange. Hooray about your laptop and the exciting-ness of the course! Even your words had a kind of smile shape. Today … Zac is going to help me do a backup of my blog since things are still a bit scary/fragile, and then I think we’re going to look at art, and I think we might go see the new Gaspar Noe film. I think that’s my day’s best possible outcome. What did your day provide? I had to look up who Cody Fern is. I agree that short shorts is the way to go for him. Scotty Clarke drunk as a skunk strip tease love, Dennis. ** h (now j), h (now j)!!!! Hi!!! ** Steve Erickson, Yeppers, good to back. Everyone, Mr. Erickson has written about the New York Film Festival, and, since it’s somewhat unlikely that you’ll be attending said fest, Steve’s overview is probably your best way in. Here. I’ll likely never see that NXVIM cult doc series, but who really knows. Wow, about Errol Morris’s Timothy Leary doc. I didn’t know about that. That could really work, Thanks for the tip. ** Bill, Hi! I did know about that basketball player only because of the shared name and a revealing google search. Listen, SFMOMA and Amoeba reopening are huge deals. I totally get it. Congrats! You good? Things good? ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! Thanks a bunch for coming in here. I’m so happy that the blog facilitated you discovering artists you dig. Especially Torbjorn Vejvi, one of my greatest favorites. And Ryan Trecartin, ditto. I would be very happy and honored to do the podcast. Thanks you so much for asking. I’m around, so basically at your convenience. Do you have my email? It’s: [email protected]. It will be a great pleasure to talk with you! Take care. ** Okay. The blog restarts with this post about the curious, all over the place oeuvre of filmmaker Penelope Spheeris. I hope you’ll give it your all. See you tomorrow.