Imprint Editor-in-Chief: Dennis Cooper
Publisher: Akashic Books
Covers designer: Joel Westendorf
Introducing ‘Little House On The Bowery’
by Dennis Cooper
When I first began to read and write fiction, contemporary literature seemed a venue of originality, boldness, and adventure. It was the late ’60s, a very different time in culture and publishing. One could walk into any suburban chain bookstore and find hordes of novels and short story collections offering the prospect of entertainment, emotional and/or intellectual enlightenment, and an anarchic literary spirit. Prominent publishers like New Directions and Grove Press were reliable sources of fresh and fascinating fiction. I knew I could buy any book from these presses and have at the very least an unusual and very engrossing reading experience. In those days, the feeling that innovation and personal vision were the goals of contemporary literature was a pervasive one, and this impression shaped the expectations of my generation of writers and book lovers.
It’s no news that things have changed drastically since that time. Major presses have become extremely timid when it comes to taking chances on writers whose work doesn’t fit within their predetermined marketing strategies. What was once known optimistically as “avant-garde fiction” has been marginalized into the more demeaning category of “experimental fiction,” and a gulf has grown between “commercial fiction” and fiction with challenges to the reader, which is now deemed a chancy investment. There are small publishing houses that champion difficult work, and large houses that occasionally release books with unusual content and style so long as their form and structure pose no real threat to the predilections of conventional book buyers. But the general literary climate in the United States today is not a friendly one to readers and writers who seek in fiction an experience of a unique and startling nature. It’s no surprise that young adventurers have all but abandoned literature in favor of more accessible and apparently vital art forms like movies and popular music.
Because my own novels are both radical and somewhat prominent, I’m often given work by young writers who see my achievement as a sign that their unusual, autonomous fiction could be published and respected, and might find some kind of audience. Once in a while, these writers are truly extraordinary, and I do my best to encourage their efforts and help them succeed. What they don’t realize is that my work is something of an anomaly in mainstream publishing, and that the opportunities for writers like myself come only very occasionally. After years of trying to use my limited powers to help these writers into print with rare success, I decided to initiate a line of books to showcase the best of these authors. Thanks to the generosity and enthusiasm of Akashic Books, readers will now have every opportunity to discover some of these amazing new talents.
LITTLE HOUSE ON THE BOWERY will be a line of fiction books in the tradition of the young New Directions and Grove Press. Its concentration will be on younger North American writers who believe that fiction can be as entertaining, challenging, revelatory, and, in a word, important as any other medium. I hope Little House on the Bowery will be a reliable source for readers who want literature to be an adventure on the levels of content and style. I also want it to be an oasis for people who have come to see contemporary literature as a spotty, conservative medium. I want to create a forum for a wide variety of younger writers whose tremendous gifts and personal vision warrant a broad readership, and whose work holds the possibility of impacting the future of American fiction. I believe these authors are important new voices whose novels and story collections offer what should be the prerequisite of literature: a meaningful, pleasurable, and very impressive surprise. Beginning in the spring of 2003, Little House on the Bowery will begin publishing two titles per year. I hope that critics and readers will give these books careful attention. As their editor, I promise in turn to select works with enough wisdom and daring to deserve the attention and support. — 2003
The Books
Travis Jeppesen Victims (2003)
“This book marks the debut of an author who will surely become a major voice in alternative literary fiction . . . rich, lyrical language reminiscent of a modern-day Faulkner informed by the postmodern narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper.” — Library Journal (starred review)
Victims is a novel about the final days of a religious cult called The Overcomers. Like the infamous Heaven’s Gate cult, whose mass suicide gained world media attention in the 1990s, they are a small group of lost souls guided by the teachings of a charismatic leader, Martin Jones. The Overcomers go about their lives preparing for the cosmic event that will signal the end of their time on earth. Their struggles to reconcile their faith in Jones’s teachings with the emotional ups and downs of their relationships, jobs, and interactions with the natural world form the subject of this exquisitely written and highly original novel.
Based on extensive research into the rhetoric of religious cults, Victims is a novel of ideas in the tradition of modernist works like Magic Mountain and The Plague. Author Travis Jeppesen uses an episodic narrative, an elegantly direct style, and a quirky, sympathetic group of characters to ponder a question raised by Jones’s teachings: If friendship and love are just systems to instill comfort in our lives, are all human interactions acts of manipulation?
Victims is set in a rural America of the imagination informed by classic American values—and cleansed of the mundane distractions that characterize American culture. Travis Jeppesen has written a novel with a philosophical bravura rarely seen in the work of contemporary American writers.
Benjamin Weissman Headless (2004)
“Brilliant. Wildly inventive, profane, and hilarious. Benjamin Weissman is a master stylist who in story after story keeps scoring effortlessly. Beneath the deadpan absurdity these virtuoso comic monologues describe—with more intense accuracy than just about anyone else around—what it means to be male.” — Bret Easton Ellis
The author of the acclaimed transgressive cult classic Dear Dead Person returns with this long awaited second collection of brilliantly written, outrageously imaginative and comedic short stories. Benjamin Weissman is one of the true originals in contemporary American fiction. In Headless, he turns his daredevil wit and fearless storytelling gifts on subjects ranging from Hitler’s secret life as a skier to the philosophical musings of identical twin porn stars to the travails of the world’s most sitcom-defying family. Weissman’s dysfunctional, hilarious, and strangely moving tales of life in contemporary America are a real and unique treasure.
Derek McCormack Grab Bag (2004)
“Grab Bag culls the best of the perverse and innocent world of Derek McCormack. The mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past—these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe.” — Edmund White
“Boy, can Dennis Cooper find ’em! Grab Bag will grab you, all right; plain, simple, and hard.” — John Waters
Grab Bag is comprised of two interrelated novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book, from one of Canada’s most important young writers. Both books are set in the same small rural city, in different eras (1950s, 1930s), each characterized by McCormack’s spare and elliptical prose.
Martha Kinney The Fall of Heartless Horse (2004)
“Tumultuous and beautiful, an emotional inquiry into writing and the nature of illusion, so highly pleasurable, a surprise and triumph for the American novel.” — Claude Simon
“I love this book. How Martha Kinney created this utterly unique and powerful piece of writing—a family saga about sex, love, money, power, and inheritance (among other themes) that blends the best agendas of prose and poetry in its operatic narrative arc, beautifully fuses the diction of historical epic and postmodern friskiness, and is bursting with drama, satire, comedy, absurdity, wit, intrigue, and intense emotion—is beyond me. As a grateful and admiring reader I can only thank her for this work and eagerly await more.” — Amy Gerstler
The Fall of Heartless Horse is a postmodern multigenerational family drama that is dark, hilarious, moving, and wildly original. By turns lyric, comic, and tragic, it deals with greed, inheritance, heroism, capitalism, sex, and the intertwining of public and private histories. Kinney has brought to life an amazing cast of characters with a “novella in verse” combining elements from ancient Scottish sagas, songs, legal documents, new age literature, and interviews. This startling, inventive debut, which draws on traditions of both poetry and prose, has been compared with the works of Lewis Carroll and Anne Carson, and evokes qualities of opera, epic, and melodrama as well. A soaring energetic, one-of-a-kind text, The Fall of Heartless Horse explodes different forms, gutting and reanimating them. Here is a deeply affecting tale of ruthlessness, loss, rivalry, and the difficulty of finding one’s place in the world.
Richard Hell Godlike (2005)
“Vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience.” — William Gibson
“From the beginning, Richard Hell has burned with the same blue flame of misfit insight and desperate beauty.” — Jerry Stahl
Godlike, Hell’s second novel, is a stunning achievement, and quite likely his most important work in any medium to date. Combining the grit, wit, and invention of Go Now with the charged lyricism and emotional implosiveness of his groundbreaking music, Godlike is brilliant in form as well as dazzling in its heartwrenching tale of one whose values in life are the values of poetry. Set largely in the early ’70s, but structured as a middle-aged poet’s 1997 notebooks and drafts for a memoir-novel, the book recounts the story of a young man’s affair with a remarkable teenage poet. Godlike is a novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty.
Trinie Dalton Wide Eyed (2005)
“These charming stories vibrate with innocence and awe. Trinie Dalton is an effortless purveyor of wonder, strangeness, and love. She is a writer of high spirits and unguarded vision, and this debut collection is an absolute pleasure to read.” — Ben Marcus
In Trinie Dalton’s tweaked vision of reality, psychic communications between herself and Mick Jagger, The Flaming Lips, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, and Pavement are daily occurrences. Animals also populate this book: beavers, hamsters, salamanders, black widows, owls, llamas, bats, and many more are characters who befriend the narrator. This collection of stories is told by a woman compelled to divulge her secrets, fantasies, and obsessions with native Californian animals, glam rock icons, and horror movies, among other things. With a setting rooted in urban Los Angeles but colored by mythic tales of beauty borrowed from medieval times, Shakespeare, and Grimm’s fairy tales, Wide Eyed makes the difficulties of surviving in a contemporary American city more palatable by showing the reader that magic and escape is always possible.
Stories include “Hummingbird Moonshine,” in which the narrator’s frustrated hunt for authentic religion in botanicas and science books culminates in a spiritual connection made with a hummingbird. In “Oceanic,” she resolves to marry a manatee after a drunken pre-party for her best friend’s wedding. In “Tiles,” four vignettes about bloody accidents in tiled bathrooms intermingle with scenes from Dalton’s favorite scary movies.
Featuring oddball prose in the traditions of Dalton’s literary heroes—Denton Welch, Robert Walser, and Jane Bowles—these stories have a dreamy, imaginative quality that reveal a peculiar state of mental ecstasy. To be inside the mind of Trinie Dalton is to be escorted into bliss.
James Greer Artificial Light (2006)
“Artificial Light skates on the purity of confession. It’s a brutal reveal; an Abyss Narrative with hooks. Read it in a rush of abomination and rise above, rise above.” — Stephen Malkmus
In 1994, a young woman named Fiat Lux donates twenty-one notebooks full of her writings to a university library and then disappears. It’s only later that her close relationship with a well known rock musician who had recently committed suicide is discovered, and the notebook’s contents become the subject of growing fascination, conjecture, and gossip. Intending to satisfy the public’s insatiable curiosity about the rock star and throw light on the author’s rumored involvement in his now infamous death, and, more importantly, hoping to make a case for her remarkable writings as a work of literature, the university’s press has decided to publish her notebooks in a single volume under the title she had given them, Artificial Light.
Set in the mythological land of Dayton, Ohio, Artificial Light is part historical novel, part science fiction, part sociological study, part murder mystery. Stunningly written in prose that is poetic, gripping, and highly adventurous, Artificial Light may be the first American novel to successfully treat the alternative rock scene of the 1990s as a subject for serious literature. James Greer has written a novel at once completely original in its form, composition, and outlook and yet as classically pleasurable and informative as any work of contemporary fiction in memory.
Userlands: New Fiction from the Blogging Underground (2007)
Editor: Dennis Cooper
Contributors: Mark Doten * Garrison Taylor * Zac German * Bett Williams * Joshua Dalton * Jeff Jackson * Marc Andreottola * Nick Hudson * Sean Pajot * Angela Tavares * Jose Alvarado Lopez * David Estornell * Mike Kitchell * Nick Cacioppo * James Champagne * Mark Gluth * Eddie Beverage * M.A.D. * Jack Dickson * Joseph Marcure * Cody Carvel * Melissa Musser * Callum James * Charles Quiroz * Josh Feola * Robert Siek * Steven T. Hanley * Chris von Steiner * Jack Shamama * Nicholas Messing * Nicholas Rhoades * T.P. Kendall * Patrick deWitt * Mike Kascel * Justin Taylor * Stanya Kahn * Jago Pallabazzer * Aaron Nielsen * Frankie P. * Will Fabro * Matthew Williams
“In the early ’90s, I edited an anthology called Discontents (Amethyst Press, 1994) that documented the amazing creativity of the young writers and artists involved in the then-exploding queer zine phenomenon. The book, now considered a classic, is currently being taught in numerous universities and features a number of new writers who have since gone on to be well-known and important figures: David Sedaris, Dale Peck, Dorothy Allison, Scott Heim, Eileen Myles, and others. With the advent of the Internet, the energy and talent that produced the zine movement gradually moved online, and that same vitality now fuels the similarly grassroots—if higher-tech—phenomenon of blogging, with individual blogs forming the early-21st-century equivalent of the zine. The blog has provided a new kind of forum for new writers to disseminate their work and form mutually interested and supportive communities outside the major publishing industry, whose conservatism and biases toward university-trained fiction writers is well-known.
“This anthology intends to bring to light some of the new fiction writers who are using the Internet’s labyrinthine array of blogs and personal web pages to expose, test, and develop their work. The contributors range in age from sixteen to early forties. They are gay, straight, and in some cases still searching for their identities. They live in North America’s cities and small towns as well as in countries as physically far afield as Norway, Italy, Spain, Denmark, France, and the UK. Their fiction ranges in character from adventurous literary works to pieces that are astonishingly emotional, sexual, and/or personally revealing. What unifies them is their extraordinary talent, their daring and highly individualistic approaches to composing fiction, and the breathtaking freshness, charge, and skill of their prose. Somewhere in this anthology’s collection of mostly unknown, exciting voices are the next important writers of English language fiction.” — Dennis Cooper
Matthew Stokoe High Life (2008)
“Matthew Stokoe’s brutal novel High Life explores the lengths oneman will go to for a shot at stardom, and to say those lengths are extremewould be an understatement. From Raymond Chandler to Nathanael West to JamesEllroy, the “dark underbelly of L.A.”novel has always been an exercise in one-upmanship, to see who can create thestarkest contrast between the surface of Hollywoodglitz and the sheer depravity that lies beneath it. Stokoe’s protagonist isJack, a fully confirmed acolyte of the Hollywood Dream whose holy writ are theprint and video tabloids . . . [T]he novel never strays far from its centralpurpose, to force the reader to consider the price he or she might pay for theultimate prize. As we watch the various threads of Jack’s life come together ina truly devastating series of events that raise the stakes ever higher, thequestion of how much hell any of us would endure for the promise of heaven isas poignant here as it is in anything by Dante.” — PopMatters
Hollywood. The City of Dreams at the end of the nineties. Jack has one ambition – to get famous. He doesn’t care how. He just wants to be like the people he sees in tabloid magazines and on TV: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Tom and Nicole, Arnie, Bruce, Sly…. But the desire for fame has a dark side and he finds himself in a world of drugs and crime, whores, snuff shows, incest, deceit and despair. When his wife is found dead – murdered and disemboweled – and the search for her killer leads him to the femme fatale of all femmes fatales, he sees a chance to make his dreams of money and fame come true. But the City of Dreams can also be the City of Nightmares and it’s going to be a long, dark ride before Jack wakes up.
Buy it
Reading Matthew Stokoe’s High Life
Derek McCormack The Show That Smells (2009)
“Derek McCormack has written a mini-masterpiece that keeps swelling with invention long after you’ve put it down.” — Guy Maddin
McCormack begins his quirky Tod Browning–inspired tale with a disclaimer: “This book is a work of fiction. It is a parody. It is a phantasmagoria . . . Elsa Schiaparelli was never a vampire. Shocking! by Schiaparelli never contained blood.” The work of Schiaparelli, a 1930s Italian fashion designer, was influenced by Surrealist Salvador Dalí, and the same spirit permeates The Show that Smells, which is set in a maze of mirrors. Schiaparelli dresses introduced playfulness and a sense of “anything goes” to the fashion industry. She branched into perfume and became designer to a number of film stars. In addition to Schiaparelli, this tale is about Jimmie Rodgers, a country music–singer dying of tuberculosis, and his wife, Carrie, who tries to save him by selling her soul to a devil who designs haute couture clothing.
Starring a host of Hollywood’s brightest stars, including Schiaparelli’s real-life rival Coco Chanel, character actor Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, and the Carter Family (as red state vampire hunters, no less), The Show that Smells is a thrilling tale of hillbillies, high fashion, and horror. An invitation to adults to make-believe, it is sure to please fashion connoisseurs, fans of classic and cult cinema, and freaks everywhere. In McCormack’s world, the power of death can be bottled and sold, and it certainly smells.
Mark Gluth The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis (2010)
“In short, impressionistic sentences that soon become hypnotic, Gluth captures [an] atmosphere brilliantly and leaves the reader in awe of his ability. Readers looking for something different will appreciate this work—and, given his writing style, might wish that he also applied his talents to poetry in the future.” — Library Journal
The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis begins during the later days of Margaret Kroftis’s life. She is a writer, living alone. As she experiences a personal tragedy the narrative moves forward in an emotionally coherent manner that exists separately from linear time. Themes of loss and grief cycle and repeat and build upon each other. They affect the text and create a complex structure of crosshatched narratives within narratives. These mirror each other while also telling unique stories of loss that are both separate from Margaret’s as well as deeply intertwined.
This groundbreaking debut demonstrates an affinity with the work of such contemporary European writers as Agota Kristof and Marie Redonnet, while existing in a place and time that is uniquely American. Composed in brief paragraphs and structured as a series of vignettes, pieces of fiction, and autobiography, The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis creates a world in which a woman’s life is refracted through dreamlike logic. Coupled with the spare language in which it is written, this logic distorts and heightens the emotional truths the characters come to terms with, while elevating them beyond the simply literal.
Matthew Stokoe Cows (2011)
“The word is out that Cows is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Banks’ classic The Wasp Factory. It’s not: it’s even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written.” — Kerrang!
In a decaying apartment: a mother, a son and a paralysed dog. Monstrously fat and murderously driven, referred to only as The Hagbeast, the mother employs her own unique version of dinnertime cuisine as she attempts to bring about the demise of her only child.
Steven sickens slowly, holed up in his room, watching perfect lives on TV, dreaming of what it would be like to be safe, to be happy, to be loved…. Dreaming of Brady Bunch perfection. His only companion Dog, the loyal canine his mother crippled with a brick.
In the apartment upstairs Lucy spends her nights searching for the toxins she knows are collecting inside her body, desperate to rid herself of them. When she enlists Steven’s help to manipulate a piece of invasive medical apparatus, he begins to see that a better life might indeed be possible. Lucy could be his partner, they could make a home together, they could have a baby. They could be just like the folks on TV.
But that would mean surviving his nightly poisonings. That would mean killing his mother – no mean feat after a lifetime of smack-downs. Fortunately, a new job at the local slaughterhouse introduces him to Cripps, an insane foreman who preaches the gospel of self-empowerment through killing. Steven figures the way ahead is clear, figures it’s goodbye Mommy. But there are cows living under the city, and when they come for Steven, he sets his sights a whole lot higher.
Buy it
Is COWS the Most Disgusting Horror Novel Ever Written?
Lonely Christopher The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse (2011)
“Praise seems superfluous for a book as accomplished, cohesive, and devastating as Lonely Christopher’s debut collection, so consider these words admiration instead, and admonishment: if you still think fiction counts for anything, then you should buy this book right now.” — Dale Peck
“Lonely Christopher, as his name suggests, knows despair as only a hobo or a clown can. This knowledge animates his fiction and provides each story with a humor that belies the terrible things that happen to his men, women, children, and animals. His formal experimentation will reward readers who have been craving a Huysmans sort of Nick Drake sort of Andy Kaufman killer writer. These readers will, like all good boys and girls, go to bed happy at last.” — Kevin Killian
Two boys lie on a bed, one of them is already dead; they listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach and talk about suicide and love. A lonely narrator mourns the end of a relationship and the disappearance of a mysterious object as a frustrated artist jumps out of a moving car on his birthday and runs for the last streetlamp in the universe. Awkward parents and angsty teens negotiate a dark suburban landscape, searching for something they can’t name, spelling out balletic sentences of failure and shame. Helicopters menace the night sky, a horse is murdered in a kitchen, victims go missing in swamps of ambiguity, and everybody waits for what the construction of a new road into town will bring: the end of the world or something worse.
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar with an unyielding imagination in the lovely-ugly architecture of his stories.
3 books that got away
Lawrence Braithwaite More at 7:30
This really brilliant novel was intended to be the first book in the Little House on the Bowery series. The author Lawrence was a very difficult person both personally and professionally. I knew Lawrence and was used to dealing with that, but his interactions with Johnny Temple, head of LHotB’s publishing home Akashic Books, were so combustible that Johnny made me cancel the book. Several years later, after Lawrence committed suicide, I asked Johnny again if I could publish the book, but his feelings about Lawrence were still so sore that he said no. The novel remains unpublished, and it really needs to be.
Michael Gira The Consumer
Johnny Temple and I tried to get the rights to reprint Michael Gira’s (of Swans) terrific book of short fiction, which was (and remains) out of print. I can’t remember whether Michael was uninterested or if the price he asked was too large for my series, but it never happened.
Zac German Eat When You Feel Sad
This would have been the final novel in the LHotB series. I really love Eat When You Feel Sad and Zac’s writing in general, and I really wanted to publish it. I lobbied hard, but the powerhouse indie publisher Melville House wanted it too, and they rightfully won out.
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p.s. Hey. I did a checklist post for my old literary venture Little Caesar Press a while back, and, for whatever reason, I thought I would do the same for my more recent publishing imprint Little House on the Bowery. If it’s of interest and you have any questions or anything, please feel free. Also, novelist and d.l. Jeff Jackson has written a piece for The Poetry Foundation site that’s ostensibly about Diarmuid Hester’s WRONG but is mostly about my poetry, which is pretty rare occurrence these days. It’s very thoughtful and rich, and I’m honored by it. If you’d like to read it, it’s here. ** JM, Hi, J. Yeah, crazy no? I was super thrilled and hopeful, as you can well imagine. It would have been part-animation (the game) and part-live action. It didn’t happen because they never quite figured out how to do that combo satisfactorily. Ever since the disastrous (in my opinion) ‘Frisk’ film back in the early 90s, I’ve been very cautious about selling the film rights to my novels. I’ve only said yes once to a director who wanted to make a film of ‘Closer’ and whose ideas about how to do that interested me, but it never came about. I basically think that my novels are novels, and that they’re about how language and reading work, and they’re aren’t adaptable to a visual presentation. If some interesting director had an exciting idea about how to reinvent a novel in a cinematic space, I would be into considering it. I have let a number of young filmmakers and film students make short films based on my short fiction and poetry. I almost always say yes to that and let them do it carte blanche. I used to have a fantasy that Terrence Malick would adapt ‘My Loose Thread’ because his films were a big influence on that novel. Zac and I would never adapt my novels. The only current ‘filmmaker’ I can think of off the top of my head who I would say yes to in almost any circumstance is Ryan Trecartin, but that’s mostly because it’s such an impossible combination and he would never even think to do it, I think. Thanks for asking and all of that, pal. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha. Thank you for your analysis of me. Very interesting. Just so you know, every French person I know here thinks that I personally and my work are extremely American and extremely not French, which they seem to like about me. Anyway, you are very kind, thank you. ** Sypha, ‘Eaux d’Artifice’. Ah, gotcha. About your squeamishness being animal abuse oriented. Very understandable. And the realness of the cat sacrifice in ‘Period’, like almost everything else in ‘Period’, is highly questionable. ** Brendan, Hi, Brendan! Ha ha, so true. Yes, your email is in my box, and I’ve been waiting for a bit of distracting craziness to end so I can open it in the clear, which should be today since it’s Bastille Day and everyone should be all but asleep here. Wow, it will be so nice if baseball restarts. I assume the re-lockdown order yesterday won’t prevent that since it’s outdoors? That sounds heavenly. Anyway, thank you in advance for sending me your new work, and I will write to you very soon. Oh, did you see that I re-upped your old Oxbow post the other week? Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, I am in agreement with you there. ** Misanthrope, Oh, yeah, tax time, err … I’ll see if I can not miss yet another year. Between you and me, obvs. Yeek, to work in a situation where Mnuchin is somehow that work’s recipient is trippy and, well, yeek. Yeah, I’ve joined the bean paste cult. Well, chocolate is still doable. And cake too, sure, but not compressed sugar disguised as cake. ** Bill, Thank you. I thought that post might be a palate cleanser of sorts. I think the dancing Cleveland boy won the fountain contest. Yes, I’ve heard from h (now j). Looks like there’s some hope that ugly bullshit might be nipped in the bud. Ah, a suggestion by you that I actually know for once! Yeah, ‘The Northerners’, very charming. Fun director (mostly), that guy. ** Corey Heiferman, Good, gallons was what I was going for. Thanks. I used to have a friend who collected those little plug-in fountains you can buy at nurseries and hippie home furnishing places and such. The walls of his bedroom were filled, practically floor to ceiling, with gurgling, flowing little fountains. It was very impressive. I hope to recreate that in a film sometime when the budget allows for such a thing. That Dizengoff fountain maybe looks better at night? I’ve seen Fountain of Time. Yeah, it’s a cooly. What an odd and deceptively unassuming fountain, that Rome one of your choice. Never done a Bokanowski Day, no. I’ll look into it. Light Cone is great. Its oeuvre and so reasonable prices allow for the existence of a few of the best cinemas in Paris. I was still in LA when the Balls were happening, and I don’t think LA had Balls, or not within my radar. ** h (now j), HI. Well, I’m severely crossing my fingers that all the states and institutions suing the government will stop that destructive, evil, stupid Trump order from ever beginning to begin. It feels hopeful. Very scared by the COVID situation in the US. And feeling lucky beyond belief about the situation here so far. Take very good care. ** Okay. Post introduced. Happy Bastille Day! See you tomorrow.