‘Peter Sellers, born into a touring theatrical family, became a “drummer, pianist and general funnyman” for RAF Gang Shows during the war. After demobilisation, he worked on radio as an impressionist, exhibiting the extraordinary vocal inventiveness that became one of his trademarks and was a cornerstone of radio’s highly popular The Goon Show (1952-60). Sellers made two Goon Show spin-off films, Down Among the Z Men (1952) and The Case of the Mukkinese Battlehorn (1956).

‘His other 1950s film parts were bewilderingly varied: timorous Teddy Boy in The Ladykillers (1955), fly Petty Officer in Up the Creek (1958), aged, obfuscating Scottish accountant in The Battle of the Sexes (1959), or Brummie villain in Never Let Go (1960), complemented by multiple roles in The Naked Truth (1957) and The Mouse that Roared (1960).

‘The role that confirmed his acting ability was Fred Kite, the Communist shop steward in I’m All Right Jack (1959), where his brilliant performance captured both the vanity and poignancy of this ideologue and intellectual manqué. It was this mixture of sharp observation and pathos that characterised Sellers’ ordinary men with aspirations: the provincial librarian in Only Two Can Play (1961), the idealistic vicar in Heavens Above! (1963).

‘These qualities infused his most popular achievement, Inspector Clouseau, in five films beginning with The Pink Panther (1963) through to Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). In Clouseau, Sellers combined his vocal ingenuity and skill as a slapstick comedian, yet always retained an essential humanity through the inspector’s indefatigable dignity in the face of a hostile universe.

‘His other performance which endures in the memory was the triple role in Dr Strangelove (1963), as the well-meaning US President, unflappable RAF group-captain and the nightmarish Dr Strangelove himself, the government’s adviser on nuclear warfare, who is unable to control his own body, the black gloved hand always trying to make a Nazi salute, expressing an ineradicable desire to dominate and destroy.

‘Always restless, insecure and self-critical, Sellers sought to play romantic roles as in The Bobo (1967) or Hoffman (1970), but was always more successful in parts that sent up his own vanities and pretensions, as with the TV presenter and narcissistic lothario in There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970). Sellers’ career meandered in the 1970s; only his role as the humble gardener turned guru in Being There (1979) showed the range of his talent.

‘Sellers died in 1980 at age 54 of a massive heart attack, a victim of the heart disease that first struck him in 1964 and continued to haunt him during his most productive years as an international star. Mr. Sellers was in London at the time to work on the screenplay of Romance of the Pink Panther, which was to have been his sixth film in the role of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, his most famous comic creation. He was still basking in the acclaim for his starring role in the previous year’s Being There, which won him an Academy Award nomination.

‘Filmmaker Blake Edwards, who directed the Clouseau movies, said, “One lived with the realization that Peter could go at any time. But he was a very courageous man who refused to let his heart problems interfere with his personal life.” Mr. Sellers gave evidence of that during the 1978 Pink Panther press conference. A reporter asked if he would mind answering a personal question. “Of course not,” Mr. Sellers said. “I understand you’ve had some heart attacks . . .” the reporter began, before Mr. Sellers interrupted him with gallows humor: “Yes, but I plan to give them up. I’m down to two a day.”‘ — collaged

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Peter Sellers Official Website
Peter Sellers Fan Site
Peter Sellers Appreciation Society
Peter Sellers @ IMDb
‘The Paranormal Peter Sellers’
‘Forgotten film of Goons restored by BFI’
‘For Pete’s sake, spare us another account of Sellers’ life and death’
‘Biopic’s many strange faces of Peter Sellers incense the actor’s son’
‘Here, there and everywhere’
Peter Sellers discography @ Discogs
‘Peter Sellers Dies at 54’
‘THE PARTY THAT IS PETER SELLERS’
‘The Lost Roles of Peter Sellers’
‘A Cocktail Recipe For Disaster: Peter Sellers And Orson Welles On The Making Of Casino Royale’
’10 Things You Might Not Know About Peter Sellers’

 

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Extras

Peter Sellers – RARE interview – ’74

Peter Sellers on the Muppet Show

Peter Sellers performs ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

PETER SELLERS – ‘Balham – Gateway To The South’ – 1958

PETER SELLERS & SOPHIA LOREN – ‘Bangers And Mash’ – 45rpm 1961

Peter Sellers: Complete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

Peter Sellers – Barclays Commercials 1980

 

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Interview

 

Within a short period of time you have progressed from being an English radio comedian to international star status. Do you regard yourself as a star?

Sellers: No, I’m not a star. I’m a character actor. The character actor must tailor his talent to the parts that are offered. If I were a leading man, a tall, good-looking sort of chap, you know, a chap who has a way with him, who gets parts tailored for his personality, like Cary Grant, then I could regard myself as a star. I’m not a star, because I have no personality of my own.

Hasn’t success enabled you to find your personality?

Sellers: Success hasn’t enabled me to find out anything about myself. I just know I can do certain things. If you go too deep into yourself, if you analyze yourself too closely, it’s no good for the job. You can either act or you can’t. If you analyze your own emotions all the time, and every doorknob you handle, you know, you’re up the spout.

But supposing you were asked to play a character called Peter Sellers, how would you play him?

Sellers: What I would do, I’d go to see all my friends, I’d go to see my acquaintances, and ask them how they see me, ask for their impressions of Peter Sellers. And then I would sift these characterizations. That’s all I can do, because I am quite unaware of what I am. A politician can see himself, can see what sort of an impact he is making. I can’t. I know I’m a bad conversationalist. Often I’m at parties, and people think Peter Sellers is going to do an act, and they wait, and when nothing is forthcoming, they’re disappointed.

Don’t you see a concrete personality when you look in the mirror?

Sellers: It’s difficult but — er — I suppose what I’d see is someone who has never grown up, a wild sentimentalist, capable of great heights and black, black depths — a person who has no real voice of his own. I’m like a mike. I have no set sound of my own. I pick it up from my surroundings. At the moment I’ve got a South African architect working on my new flat in Hampstead, and so I tend to speak in a South African accent all the time. As for the face in the mirror, well — my appearance is fattish, a more refined-looking Pierre Laval, sometimes happy, but always trying to achieve a peace of mind that doesn’t seem possible in this business. This business breeds a tension that is difficult to live with.

Does this make you sad?

Sellers: They say all comedians are sad. I wonder if that’s true? Still, I’m not really a comedian. I don’t know what I am.

You’re certainly a star.

Sellers: To be a star means coming out from under the cover of the character, the work, the celebrated anonymity of the featured player. I’ve stepped into the spotlight, looked behind myself and see I cast no shadow. Stanley Kubrick famously said of me, “There is no such person as Peter Sellers.” Spike Milligan, my fellow Goon, said of me, “Peter’s not a genius. He’s something more. He’s a freak.” Blake Edwards said of me, “I think he lives a great part of his life in hell.” These people who know me, you understand. I writhe when I see myself on the screen. I’m such a dreadfully clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, “Why doesn’t he get off? Why doesn’t he get off?” I mean I look like such an idiot. Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan’t be able to go on working.

And so you work.

Sellers: Here’s my credo — “What is to be will be even if it never happens.”

 

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20 of Peter Sellers’s 60 films

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Alan Cullimore Let’s Go Crazy (1951)
‘Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan shine in a series of sketches and multiple roles, in this madcap mixture of music-hall and anarchic comedy. Filmed in just a single week at the same time as Adelphi Films’ feature-length Penny Points to Paradise, Let’s Go Crazy was clearly intended as the subordinate picture of the two films. But Sellers and Milligan’s anarchic goofing here is more characteristic of the Goons style than in the more conventional Penny Points. Both performers take on a number of different roles, with Sellers’ characters including an exasperated Italian head waiter Giuseppe, frustrated Crystal Jollibottom, and a convincing impression of Groucho Marx that was later edited into re-release prints of Penny Points at the height of Sellers’ popularity.’ — bfi

Trailer

 

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Alexander Mackendrick The Ladykillers (1955)
‘The fable of The Ladykillers is a comic and ironic joke about the condition of postwar England. After the war, the country was going through a kind of quiet, typically British but nevertheless historically fundamental revolution. Though few people were prepared to face up to it, the great days of the Empire were gone forever. British society was shattered with the same kind of conflicts appearing in many other countries: an impoverished and disillusioned upper class, a brutalised working class, juvenile delinquency among the Mods and Rockers, an influx of foreign and potentially criminal elements, and a collapse of ‘intellectual’ leadership. All of these threatened the stability of the national character. Though at no time did Bill Rose or I ever spell this out, look at the characters in the film. The Major (played by Cecil Parker), a conman, is a caricature of the decadent military ruling class. One Round (Danny Green) is the oafish representative of the British masses. Harry (Peter Sellers) is the spiv, the worthless younger generation. Louis (Herbert Lorn) is the dangerously unassimilated foreigner. They are a composite cartoon of Britain’s corruption.’ — Alexander Mackendrick

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Mario Zampi The Naked Truth (1957)
‘A different twist on the Peter-Sellers-plays-a-bunch of roles, whereas he only plays someone who plays a bunch of roles. Of course we all know it is Peter Sellers no matter which twist is being used, this one clearly makes it’s game part of the story. I don’t think there is even a sense that he’s supposed to be a master of disguise, as few of his fellow characters seem to fall for it – only the most important one – or incidental bumpings into. The Naked Truth is a scandal rag that never seems to get published, as the publisher uses its contents for blackmail, which is supposedly just as lucrative as publishing it. Save the trees! A couple of other familiar faces contribute to the cast, Terry Thomas and Dennis Price.’ — The Pirate Bay

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Excerpt

 

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Jack Arnold The Mouse that Roared (1959)
‘The economy of the teeny-tiny European duchy of Grand Fenwick is threatened when an American manufacturer comes up with an imitation of Fenwick’s sole export, its fabled wine. Crafty prime minister Count Mountjoy (Peter Sellers) comes up with a plan: Grand Fenwick will declare war on the United States. Grand Duchess Gloriana (Peter Sellers again) is hesitant: how can meek little Grand Fenwick win such a conflict? Mountjoy explains that the plan is to lose the war, then rely upon American foreign aid to replenish Grand Fenwick’s treasury. Bumbling military officer Tully Bascombe (Peter Sellers yet again) leads his country’s ragtag army into battle. They cross the Atlantic in an ancient wooden vessel, then set foot on Manhattan Island, fully prepared to down weapons and surrender. But New York City is deserted, due to an air raid drill. While wandering around, Sellers comes upon atomic scientist David Kossoff and the scientist’s pretty daughter Jean Seberg.’ — Sony Pictures

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Richard Lester The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film (1960)
‘Director Richard Lester first worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan on three television series, The Idiot Weekly Price 2d, A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred (all ITV, 1956), each of them an early attempt to transfer the surreal humour of radio’s The Goon Show to a visual medium. The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, itself entirely shot in a field, can be viewed as an extension of these inserts. Lester later acknowledged that even some of the sketches were variations on those filmed for the television series. Following some earlier shooting by Sellers and Milligan, the majority of the film was shot over one or two Sundays (accounts vary) using Sellers’ own 16mm camera, and edited by Lester and Sellers in the latter’s bedroom. The sound effects and music score were added by Lester shortly afterwards. The film’s lasting legacy was its influence on British comedy in general, and on Monty Python’s Flying Circus in particular. This is evident not only in its surreal humour, but in the way that elements of one routine are threaded through subsequent scenes, transcending the stand-alone sketch form – a tactic subsequently favoured by the Python team.’ — BFI

the entire film

 

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John Guillermin Waltz of the Toreadors (1962)
‘Sellers was just on the cusp of emerging as an international box office phenomenon, but his comic skills had already been well noted in a number of productions, and he had recently won the Best Actor Award from the British Academy for I’m All Right Jack (1959). While filming Waltz of the Toreadors, a comedy of romantic and marital upset, the actor was undergoing his own marriage woes. He and first wife Anne Howe were bitterly nearing the end of their relationship, a crisis fueled largely by his philandering, and Sellers sought relief from this distress with near-constant work. Even that, however, wasn’t always enough. During production on Waltz of the Toreadors, he held up production for many costly hours while he called his friend David Lodge to the Thames valley location shoot, begging him to talk to Anne and apologize for him, in the hopes he could patch things up one last time. The gesture ultimately proved to be in vain. Unfortunately, the completed film version of Waltz of the Toreadors did little to raise Sellers’s spirits. It was not a box office success, and he thought “the whole thing looks terrible.”‘ — TCM

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Stanley Kubrick Lolita (1962)
‘From the beginning, British-comedy fans loved the work of Peter Sellers for its wit and sure attack and for its fillip of emotion. But it took a brilliant young American director with a hip, cosmopolitan temperament to exploit Sellers’ talent fully. As Quilty, Sellers is quicksilver-changeable — a portrait of the artist as a phony. He’s ostentatiously high style. At a summer dance in a high school gym, he manages to look good even though he bops only from the chest up. As he haunts Humbert, he takes on diverse flaky disguises; at one point he impersonates a suspiciously ingratiating state cop — the kind of weirdo turn Norman Mailer once reveled in. When Quilty poses as a German psychologist, the dagger-glint in his eyes lets Humbert know that the pseudo shrink has his number. Sellers’ Quilty sees through the weakness and hypocrisy in Humbert. In the film’s daring narrative frame, you feel that the ultra-civilized Humbert is able to kill Quilty because the victim starts his death scene under a sheet and finishes it hiding behind a painting. In the end, Humbert doesn’t have to look at him.’ — Baltimore Sun

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Blake Edwards The Pink Panther (1964)
‘The Pink Panther of the title is a diamond supposedly containing a flaw which forms the image of a “leaping panther”, which can be seen if held up to light in a certain way. This is explained in the beginning of the first film, and the camera zooms in on the diamond to reveal the blurry flaw, which focuses into the Panther (albeit not actually leaping) to start the opening credits sequence (this is also done in Return). The plot of the first film is based on the theft of this diamond. The diamond reappears in several later films in the series. In the original Pink Panther movie, the main focus was on David Niven’s role as Sir Charles Litton, the infamous jewel thief nicknamed “the Phantom”, and his plan to steal the Pink Panther. The Inspector Clouseau character plays only a supporting role as Litton’s incompetent antagonist, and provided slapstick comic relief to a movie that was otherwise a subtle, lighthearted crime drama, a somewhat jarring contrast of styles which is typical of Edwards’ films. The popularity of Clouseau caused him to become the main character in subsequent Pink Panther films, which were more straightforward slapstick comedies.’ — collaged

Excerpt

Excerpts

Outtakes

 

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Stanley Kubrick Dr. Strangelove (1964)
‘Peter Sellers is quite literally all over the picture–he plays three parts: an RAF group captain attached to the air base, the President of the United States and Dr. Strangelove himself. In the first of these roles, Sellers establishes a tone of British disdain that by itself could alienate a good part of the American audience. We have become a big country since Mrs. Trollope put us across her knee, but the curled British lip is still intolerable anywhere in the United States outside the Anglophile lecture circuit. Sellers’s President, on the other hand, is a work of such persuasive art that, although he in no way resembles any of our Chief Executives, you can scarcely believe that he is not an inspired piece of mimicry. President Muffley is the embodiment of the American executive ideal–a man whose sole quality is a talent for deciding what other men should do–and the fiendish notion here is to project such a man into a moment of ultimate crisis where any decision is irrelevant.’ — The Nation

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Clive Donner What’s New Pussycat? (1965)
‘The swinging ’60s got a new catchphrase and Woody Allen got a box-office hit that put him on the road to directing his own films when What’s New, Pussycat? hit the screen in 1965. With an all-star international cast including Allen, Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, Romy Schneider, Paula Prentiss and Ursula Andress – highlighted with the tag line “Together Again (For the First Time),” and a hit title song recorded by Tom Jones – it seemed like a surefire hit. But if a film’s success was measured by what went on behind the scenes during production, this frenetic sex farce would have been one of the biggest flops of all time. Peter Sellers, who was recovering from a heart attack, agreed to play the psychiatrist, a small role that would help him get back into the swing of filmmaking. But once he got on the set, he started improvising his own lines and suggesting added scenes. Even more damaging, he and Allen developed a rivalry that wasn’t helped by their resemblance to each other. Sellers resented people’s mistaking him for the neophyte actor-writer. And it got worse when an executive producer on the film, thinking he was Allen, reassured him that he wouldn’t let Sellers damage his picture. Sellers began improvising more and even got the producer to give him lines and scenes Allen had written for himself. Suddenly Sellers was the film’s star, and Allen was reduced to a supporting role.’ — TCM

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Vittorio De Sica After the Fox (1966)
‘This represents an insane collection of talent, Vittorio De Sica directing a Neil Simon screenplay with a Burt Bacharach score, a Maurice Binder title sequence, a Peter Sellers in his prime lead performance, Martin Balsam, Britt Eckland, Akim Tamiroff, Victor Mature – not knowing anything at all about this going in, the excitement of seeing all these names in that title sequence alone was worth the price of a ticket. The fact that it actually is quite funny and charming almost seems wrong, somehow.’ — Joe

Intro

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Val Guest, Ken Hughes, John Huston Casino Royale (1967)
‘At one time or another, “Casino Royale” undoubtedly had a shooting schedule, a script and a plot. If any one of the three ever turns up, it might be the making of a good movie. In the meantime, the present version is a definitive example of what can happen when everybody working on a film goes simultaneously berserk. Lines and scenes are improvised before our very eyes. Skillful cutting builds up the suspense between two parallel plots — but, alas, the parallel plots never converge. No matter; they are forgotten, Visitors from Peter O’Toole to Jean-Paul Belmondo are pressed into service. Peter Sellers, free at last from every vestige of’ discipline goes absolutely gaga. This is possibly the most indulgent film ever made. Anything goes. Consistency and planning must have seemed the merest whimsy. One imagines the directors (there were five, all working independently) waking in the morning and wondering what they’d shoot today. How could they lose? They had bundles of money, because this film was blessed with the magic name of James Bond.’ — Roger Ebert

Excerpt

 

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Blake Edwards The Party (1968)
‘Blake Edwards’s The Party is the most maddeningly inconsistent of Hollywood comedies. Its hero is one Hrundi V. Bakshi, an incompetent Indian actor played with exquisite politeness and a touch of preening self-satisfaction—and in brownface—by Peter Sellers. Almost the entire movie takes place at a party of Hollywood swells to which Bakshi mistakenly gets invited; needless to say, the actor, hoping only to fit in, winds up destroying the house, which is an amazing piece of sixties fantasy, with its pools, sliding panels, and acres of Formica. Some of Edwards’s work with Sellers, including long, virtually silent passages of physical comedy (set to Henry Mancini’s music), comes within hailing distance of Chaplin—for instance, a scene of exquisite anguish in which Bakshi has to pee and can’t move because a French starlet (Claudine Longet) is singing an interminable chanson. Other jokes, however, are just routine, and the movie collapses into chaos.’ — The New Yorker

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Hy Averback I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968)
‘One of the few 1960s satires of the hippie culture that doesn’t appear to be concocted by grumpy old men, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas stars Peter Sellers as Harold Fine, a staid Jewish attorney. Engaged to the equally straitlaced Joyce (Joyce Van Patten), Harold wistfully dreams of having a more exciting lifestyle. Through a fluke, Harold is obliged to drive a station wagon emblazoned with “psychedelic” imagery; it is with this vehicle that he picks up his flower-child brother Herbie (David Arkin), and Herbie’s groovy chick Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young). Rather enjoying the company of people outside of his establishment orbit, Harold lets Nancy stay over at her place, and she plies him with marijuana-spiked brownies. His inhibitions released by the spiked pastries, Harold kicks over the traces, grows his hair to shoulder length, and embarks upon an affair with Nancy. But when the effects of the brownies wear off, Harold suddenly feels like the rather foolish middle-aged man that he is. The beauty of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas is that it patronizes neither the hippies nor the Establishment characters; both groups are shown as human beings rather than agit-prop stereotypes.’ — Rovi

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Joseph McGrath The Magic Christian (1969)
‘The Magic Christian, Terry Southern’s best book, is not so much a novel as collection of episodes in the life of the eccentric, incalculably wealthy Guy Grand, who constructs elaborate and immensely practical jokes designed to upset his fellow men and sometimes himself as well. His usual targets are greed and conventional values, but he also attacks good sportsmanship, good living and rudimentary business ethics. The Magic Christian is funny, uncomfortable and without an ounce of benevolence. The meeting of McGrath with his material produces not so much a tension as a revaluation—and the results turn out to be a mixed bag. The episodes have been shuffled around, so that Terry Southern’s bitter beginning (a put-on of a poor hot dog vender) and enigmatic ending (a disappearing chain of super-bargain grocery stores) have been lost in the middle of the film to no good effect. Guy Grand, a middle-aged American tycoon in the book, becomes a British business baronet (Peter Sellers) in the film. And he adopts a son (Ringo Starr), whom he names Youngman Grand, and who serves no reasonable purpose except to give Peter Sellers somebody to talk and relate to. Ringo is fine, and Sellers is finer—in a performance, that vastly enriches and normalizes the archly enthusiastic Porky Pig of Terry Southern’s imagination.’ — NYT

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Alvin Rakoff Hoffman (1970)
‘Hoffman is the satirical tale of an older man, played by Peter Sellers, who invites a female employee to his flat in London. As the film progresses, it is revealed that Sellers’ character has caught one of his workers dealing in a scam against his company, and has decided to blackmail the man’s lovely fiancée away for a full week to convince her to fall in love with him instead. A witty drama rather than a comedy, the film has an almost terrifying performance by Sellers, involved in intricate mind games with the other protagonists. Reportedly, Sellers despised Hoffman because the lead character too closely reflected his own personality. According to Bryan Forbes, who was head of the studio that financed the film, Sellers went through a depressive phase after filming completed and he asked to buy back the negative and remake the movie. He also gave an interview where he said the film was a disaster. It was not a success at the box office.’ — collaged

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William Sterling Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972)
‘A star-studded cast highlights this musical adaptation of the classic fantasy tales of Lewis Carroll. One day young Alice (Fiona Fullerton) takes a nasty spill down the rabbit-hole and finds herself in the bizarre kingdom of Wonderland, where she encounters a number of strange and enchanted characters, including the playful White Rabbit (Michael Crawford), the manic March Hare (Peter Sellers), the mysterious Caterpillar (Ralph Richardson), the Doormouse (Dudley Moore), the imperious Queen of Hearts (Flora Robson), and the quizzical Mad Hatter (Robert Helpmann). The cast also includes Spike Milligan, Peter Bull, Roy Kinnear, and Michael Jayston as Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland won two prizes at the 1973 British Academy of Film and Theatre Awards — for Georfrey Unsworth’s photography and Anthony Mendelson’s costume design.’ — Rovi

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Joseph McGrath The Great McGonagall (1974)
‘That matchless British farceur Spike Milligan stars in The Great McGonagall. The story concerns indigent Scotsman William McGonagall, who aspires to become Poet Laureate of Great Britain. McGonagall might have a better chance of accomplishing this if he had any talent, but he is hilariously inept. The plot is abandoned somewhere in the middle of the film in favor of a series of virtually unrelated comic episodes. Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan’s onetime Goon Show cohort, steals the show in drag as a sexually voracious Queen Victoria!’ — Rovi

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Robert Moore Murder by Death (1976)
‘It was one of the top 10 grossing films of 1976, but Murder By Death has the feel of something Neil Simon and his brother Danny might have cooked up for Sid Caesar during their days writing for Your Show of Shows in the ’50s: Assemble a group of well-known literary sleuths (winking versions of everyone from Sam Spade to Hercule Poirot to Nick and Nora Charles), throw them in a rambling gothic mansion for the weekend and let the whodunit spoofing commence. The cast is an embarrassment of riches that includes Maggie Smith and David Niven. Alec Guinness. Nancy Walker (Mrs. Morgenstern!). Peter Falk. Truman Capote, of all people. James Coco (a Simon regular). Brennan, who died last month. James Cromwell, in his first movie role. And Peter Sellers as a pseudo-Charlie Chan in one of the weirder examples of cinematic yellow face since Mickey Rooney went faux Asian in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’ — Chicago Tribune

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Hal Ashby Being There (1979)
‘In 1971, Jerzy Kosinski published the novel Being There. Soon afterwards he received a telegram from its lead character, Chance the Gardener: “Available in my garden or outside of it.” A telephone number followed and when Kosinski dialed it Peter Sellers answered. For years afterwards, Sellers would try to get this film made. “That’s me!” he would tell people of the Chance character. He hawked the idea of a film to whomever he could find. Finally, in 1979, with the clout he had gained from the Pink Panther series, he was able to fulfill his dream. What followed was the culmination of Peter Sellers’ career: a masterpiece of double-edged satire on politics and television. But Kosinki’s screenplay goes deeper than that. What he and director Hal Ashby expose is a self-serving and self-deceived society. Through the innocence of the Chance character, all the schemes and manipulations of the world are laid bare for what they are: pure folly. For those who hunger for the truths in life, this is a film that will satisfy your appetite.’ — sarcasmalley

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Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, buddy! Great to see you, man! She’s fantastic. There was a big retrospective of her work at Red Bull in NYC recently that really should travel, and, if it does, London, at least, seems like a natural stop. Yes, I saw a selfie coupling of you and Bernard side by side on Facebook the other week. He’s a gem, I agree. Thanks a bunch, man, about the anthology excerpt. I’m headlong into the novel that it belongs in, and, so far so good, and I even hope to finish it ere too long whenever that may be. I’m excited to hear you’re working on your novel. I think us digging in simultaneously must be good luck. Know exactly what you mean about that backwards domino effect, or I feel like I do. I’ll at least be here for a bit of your visit and maybe the entirety. Zac and I are waiting to hear when the Berlin screening of PGL will be, and we only know it’s during the first week of October so far. So I’ll get to see you! Fantastic! Take good care and enjoy the novel work-filled break. xoxo, me. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. The Taylor doc is not that kind of overview thing. It’s a fly on the wall-style thing that shows him living, working, making music, eating, talking on the phone, etc. with no narration or authorial input. Jeez, Facebook is getting really antsy and weird. That’s nuts. I can’t get in to the Washington Post at the moment as I’ve used up my handful of free visiting opportunities for the month, but I’ll read that piece once September dawns, thank you. ** Bernard, Hi, B! How did I not know (or maybe remember) that you knew Gretchen Bender, wow. I didn’t, but I saw her at openings in the ’80s. She was so mis-appreciated and overshadowed back then by her relationship with Longo, which is strange, in retrospect, since she’s a 1000 times better artist than him. But that happens. Yes, yes, about Kevin. His memorial at SFMoMa is soon. So wishing I could be there. Asheville the Paris of the South, really? Or ha ha? I need to visit it in any case. Trump does seem to be his most unglued ever, or … what comes after unglued? And yet the powers that be among you guys just let it happen. Psychotic. If I’ve ever read Quentin Meillassoux the memory escapes me. I’ll check him out and find out and rectify if not. Thanks, pal. Enjoy Asheparisville! ** Steve Erickson, There was just a big retrospective of her work at Red Bull. I wish I’d thought to alert you. Ouch: tooth. Well, I had as tooth pulled a couple of months ago, and it was super easy peasy and the pain killers both worked and were hardly noticeable and it didn’t effect my thinking or doing at all, so may yours work similarly. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Yeah, she’s fantastic. I can only think that, what with the little renaissance around her work going on, some will get to SF. Like I told David, the Taylor doc is an observing Taylor day-to-day thing without any external input. It’s very good. ** Misanthrope, I am usually grinning when I say things that aren’t just simple as pie. Right, right, I remember now that you edit along the way. I do too, but it never ends up being enough in my case. Notes, yeah, interesting. I don’t do that, but my stuff, and especially the new one, doesn’t have the kinds of characters and stories and things that need tracking. Or else I’m just lazy. ** Okay. The other day I thought, Peter Sellers sure was exciting. Then I started looking at clips and found out that he indeed could be really exciting and then much less exciting depending on the vehicle, and, at some point, I decided to make a post out of my journey so you could do the same kind of hunt and assess thing or however you want to use this post. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Gretchen Bender moved to New York in 1978 and had her first solo show there in 1983, when she was thirty-two. She fast became a fixture of an East Village art scene centered on the Nature Morte gallery and the tireless publishing and curating efforts of Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, a milieu that featured artists such as Sarah Charlesworth, Jessica Diamond, Kevin Larmon, Peter Nagy, Steven Parrino, David Robbins, and Julia Wachtel. Perhaps not all of those names ring a bell, and it’s likely Bender’s wouldn’t have, either, only a few years ago. Which raises the question, Why was she almost lost? And why has she now been suddenly rediscovered?

‘As her posthumous retrospective at Red Bull Arts New York testifies, Bender pioneered new ways of using information management as an artistic medium. Starting out in Washington, DC, as a member of a Marxist-feminist printmaking collective, she quickly expanded her arsenal to include electronic as well as other types of screens. She worked hard to locate her art on the cutting edge of video technology, hanging around the labs at the New York Institute of Technology and researching the latest in vector graphics and computer animation. In her electronic works, she graduated quickly from single-channel, single-monitor video, as in Reality Fever, 1983, to pieces that deploy several channels across any number of screens. Bender’s most elaborate version of what she dubbed “electronic theater,” the eighteen-minute long Total Recall, 1987, not only spreads eight channels across twenty-four monitors but also includes projections onto three large screens.

‘The Red Bull show is split roughly between static wall works and Bender’s progressively more expansive video pieces. Half the galleries are filled with laminated color photographs mounted on Masonite or tin and arranged in different groupings. Bender’s stark juxtapositions pit sci-fi movie stills against grisly war-correspondent photos and shots of advertising spokespeople next to notable artworks of the time (by the likes of Jonathan Borofsky, A. R. Penck, or David Salle). Most of the other rooms resemble televisual Laundromats, each lined with a phalanx of TV monitors on which tumble talking heads, narrative fragments, sales pitches, live news segments, athletic matches, ecstatic game-show revelations, and twirling computer graphics.

‘A riddle characterizes all of Bender’s output. If TV’s deluge of information flattens distinctions and evacuates meaning, folding everything from the most banal to the most urgent into its undifferentiated flow, how is it that this only strengthens, rather than diminishes, its relation to power? Bender was careful to temper desensitizing excess with regular injections of artificial exhilaration. Stupor is countered by hyperbole, courtesy of regularly unleashed attention-grabbing techniques: swooping and exploding visuals, music that alternates between the solemn and the frenetic. We see journalists comb battle sites and families celebrate their new breakfast cereal while animated corporate logos repeatedly perform flyovers. Everything is clichéd, yet—like the vitrine-style refrigerators, replete with Red Bull energy drinks, that dot the exhibition space—also seems geared to accelerate breathing and pulse rates.

‘Does Bender’s work overwhelm and incapacitate or does it spark critical consciousness? In an unsatisfying way, both. Viewers are definitely made hyperaware of just how underequipped they are in the face of torrential corporate-sponsored information. In Aggressive Witness—Active Participant, 1990, eight TV sets are lined up on the wall, each tuned to a different live broadcast. On the glass of each set, a phrase appears in vinyl lettering: DEATH SQUAD BUDGET, PEOPLE WITH AIDS, NO CRITICISM. The unmoving, all-caps seriousness of the phrases literally defies the nonstop parade of pedestrian programming underneath. But that’s the problem: While there are chance moments when the two seem to syntactically relate, mostly what the viewer confronts is a yawning disconnect between issues of monumental importance and the distraction induced by information’s tireless temporal undertow.

‘Which makes Bender’s oeuvre less about television per se than about being constantly targeted by multiple information sources at once. Sound familiar? Right now on my computer screen, there are several windows stacked one atop the other—Word documents, a couple of open folders, available tabs arrayed on my internet browser, some PDFs, my email. I pride myself on being a manager of information, and at the same time feel trapped in a permanent management crisis. In our attention economy of endless scanning and scrolling, information suspends subjects between vigilant attentiveness and numbing exhaustion, evoking the experience not so much of television as of a later invention: entertainment systems that combine game controllers with interactive video or computer displays.

‘In the end, this helps explain why Bender could have fallen off the art-world radar in the middle of the 1990s, only to resurface today. As her aesthetic became more high-tech, the art world moved instead toward the lower depths of abjection, scatter art, and slackerdom. Moreover, Bender’s view of corporate culture as a homogenizing onslaught was at odds with the premillennial interest in the cultural politics of difference as well as with the consensus view that VCRs, cable TV, and the internet equaled a dawning era of consumer empowerment. Today, of course, information culture is no longer greeted with such across-the-board optimism. Hence the renewed interest in Bender’s more blatantly corporate, dystopian vision.

‘Interesting, then, that it’s a corporate sponsor, Red Bull, that has enthusiastically stepped up to not only assemble Bender’s body of work but also make the substantial dollar investment in digitally restoring such a complex, multivideo Gesamtkunstwerk as Total Recall. (Credit for originally unearthing Bender goes not to Red Bull but to the artist Philip Vanderhyden, who in 2012 curated a survey of Bender’s all-but-lost video pieces that traveled from the Poor Farm in Little Wolf, Wisconsin, to the Kitchen in New York the following year.) Bender herself was not against working with corporate clients—quite the opposite: She directed music videos for bands like Babes in Toyland and also came up with the original opening credits for the Fox TV show America’s Most Wanted. “I’m glad if I get corporate support,” she told her friend Cindy Sherman in a 1987 Bomb magazine interview. “I’m trying to infiltrate and mimic the mainstream media.” That Red Bull in turn has been so welcoming of Bender’s infiltration perhaps reflects poorly on her work’s critical aspirations. More likely, though, it’s a testament to the corporate strategy of embracing critique as a way to accrue cultural capital and “edge.”

‘Sadly, Bender fell victim to cancer the same year that Google made its initial public offering and a year before TheFacebook became facebook.com. What’s most prescient about her art is the way it intuited how representation was coming under siege; how the time needed to reflect on the spatial and metaphoric relationship between the manifest signifier and its latent, hermeneutically obtained signified was being paved over by communication’s more lateral and metonymic temporality: the fast-paced attention and reaction to its unspooling ticker tape of information. Since then, pragmatics has seemingly overtaken semantics. Beyond readers and viewers, the subjects of culture today are media users. Media now constitutes a logistical system as well as a meaning system, allowing for not just the circulation of content but the organization and management of everyday activities: desktops, contacts, calendars, carts, bookmarks, playlists, wish lists, folders, filters, friends. Not just representing our world back to us, corporate media now seemingly license our actions within it. What one would give to see Bender parse such a state of affairs.’ — Lane Relyea, Artforum

 

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Further

Gretchen Bender @ Wikipedia
The New Gretchen Bender Survey Is a Triumph, Revealing a Visionary Artist
Who was Gretchen Bender?
Pioneering Video Artist Gretchen Bender Predicted Our Obsession with Screens
Gretchen Bender, by Dan Cameron
Gretchen Bender’s Video Art Predicted the Bleak Future of Mass Media
A Nod to Pioneering Artist Gretchen Bender in New York
Gretchen Bender’s ‘Visual Worlds at the Century’s End’
Disinformation and the Death Star: The Legacy of Gretchen Bender
GRETCHEN BENDER: STEPPING INTO THE PARTICLE UNIVERSE
Moving Target
GRETCHEN BENDER, by Sarah Nicole Prickett
A Finding Aid to the Gretchen Bender papers, 1980-2004

 

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Extras

Salon | Artist Talk | On Gretchen Bender

Philip Vanderhyden on curating Gretchen Bender

Panel Discussion of “Gretchen Bender: Tracking the Thrill”

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA RECALLS GRETCHEN BENDER’S ICONIC ‘TOTAL RECALL’

 

_____
Interview
from BOMB

 

Cindy Sherman It seems as if your critical target is Corporate America because your work isolates and diffuses corporate logos and television advertising. How do you feel about a corporation buying one of your works?

Gretchen Bender I’d feel fine about it. I think it’s to their great credit that one corporation has bought my work. Didn’t Reagan say the corporate sector ought to support the arts? I’m trying to infiltrate and mimic the mainstream media. I’m glad if I get corporate support.

CS Do you think the work will enlighten them?

GB I think that maybe some of the people who work in the corporation might actually be surprised. But I am not that optimistic. I think, basically that by the time a corporation has decided to buy my work, that it is a carcass. The effectiveness of the work has already left it and only the structure remains. It’s already been neutralized. In general, I assume corporations buy work once it is politically neutralized.

CS How does it become neutralized? Time?

GB Time—like after ten minutes! I think that the time limit to media-oriented artwork is an element that many media involved artists are unwilling to confront: art as I practice it or develop my ideas or aesthetics, has to do with a temporal limit to its meaningfulness in the culture—and that’s real tough. It’s hard to make art through the use of guerrilla tactics, where the only constant to the style you develop is the necessity to change it. Style gets absorbed really fast by the culture, basically by absorbing the formal elements or the structure and then subverting the content. You have to make some kind of break or glitch in the media somewhere else with a different style and shove your content into it there. It’s constantly having to accept the fact that your work will lose its strength. You just go on, learning to vary strategies; to recognize when to go underground and when to emerge.

CS Second guessing.

GB Accepting the fact that your work is going to become neutralized—faster than you ever dreamed. It’s a really weird feeling but it’s a given, for me, at this point, so I’m just going with the given in that situation and trying to think on my feet.

CS I remember seeing the piece you did with all the movie titles on it.

GB None of the films had been released.

CS At the time, none of the titles made any sense to me. Later I saw the piece and it was, “Oh, yeah, I know every one of those movies!” At first viewing the titles sounded unbelievable, ridiculous.

GB There was a built in obsolescence to that work, a definite time limit. When I showed it afterthe films came out the reaction was already, “Did I see that movie? What is that title? Do I remember that?” Another level that sculpture was working on was the anticipatory quality—you’re going to learn something, or this movie is going to mean something … you want to know you have a desire—and the piece promotes these anticipations.

CS Just through the titles?

GB Yes, and I put special effect sparkles on it to heighten the anticipatory quality. The film industry has ad campaigns and gossip column items, to give you that anticipatory quality which I made more visually concise with the sparkles.

CS Did you randomly choose titles?

GB No, I got a list from Hollywood Reporter or Variety—the release dates for the next six months of all the films from the major film companies. We recognize the film industry as a very important part of our culture economically and aesthetically and I think it’s a whole area that should be provoked more. Film and its invocations are much more powerful instruments economically and politically in our lives than we seem aware of. We say we’re aware of it, but in a glib way.

CS Especially since most of the corporations who own movie companies also own TV stations and radio stations … and oil.

GB Own the world—the mechanisms that make the world run.

CS Do you choose the visual images for your work, for instance the strips from the TV printer that you used. Is that also arbitrary?

GB It’s not quite as arbitrary as is looks. I tend to want to depict all the computer graphics that are on the television because I think the next area of visual expansion and psychological repression is there. Also, Return of the Living Dead was a piece I did that included a video printout of the evening news the day Reagan visited Bitburg in 1985. The TV graphics on the newscast depicted stun gun torture by the police; child abuse by daycare center workers; Vietnam Memorial services and of course Reagan laying a wreath on the gravesite of German SS dead.

CS A storyboard.

GB Yes, it gave me pause.

CS When the space ship blew up about a year ago you were taping everything on television. Did you ever use that?

GB That happened when I had a TV piece up at Metro Pictures. There were 12 monitors on the wall, each tuned to a different channel and each stenciled with the name of an artist in the show. When the space shuttle blew up, the piece became a macabre choreography of each network’s depiction of the space shuttle disaster.

CS What timing.

GB Brought to you by all of the artists in the show.

CS In that piece you were running regular television. I thought you were taping …

GB I started taping when the bombing of Libya happened. It was after the show and I had all the TV’s in my studio and a couple of VCR’s. I was working in the studio one afternoon and all of a sudden Libya was happening on all the different networks. I started taping that—NBC came on first with the scoop—it was a weird sense of …

CS Being right there.

GB Weird.

CS Did you first start working with video out of dissatisfaction with the static works? Did they evolve together?

GB It was a natural evolution going from the magazines and photos of the news. It seemed obvious to me that the next area was television which is an incredible goldmine for the flow of the pulse, the permutations that happen daily, in the culture.

CS You were using it anyway, taking photographs off the screen.

GB Yes, I started taking stills, incorporating film positives of popular art over images from broadcasting. I thought in the early ’80s you guys [Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Charlesworth, Richard Prince etc.] had done such important work on the print media—the photograph. And it seemed like the next area to similarly deconstruct was television. I quickly got caught up in the way in which TV moves, the current. The movement, not even the sequence, but the movement that flattened content. From that equivalent flow I tried to force some kind of consciousness of underlying patterns of social control.

CS It’s so strange being on this side of the interview.

GB I know, I feel I should start asking what you think.

CS Maybe you’ve already answered this but would you want to see the media affected by your work?

GB I don’t think the media is something that listens in the way that we’re talking about. I think of the media as a cannibalistic river. A flow or current that absorbs everything. It’s not “about.” There is no consciousness or mind. It’s about absorbing and converting.

CS What if your video tapes were on TV, say PBS, would that be defeating your purpose?

GB There are some very fine video artists who work effectively on public television. I’m taking a different tact. I’m trying to create an overview of an environment and at this point I’m not able to do it on one channel so I create a theatrical exposition of it with multiple channels. In the past three years, I’ve surrounded myself and the audience with an environment and then turned up the voltage—to create a criticality. I’ll mimic the media—but I’ll turn up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.

 

___
Show

Total Recall (1987)
Evocative of the effects of a highly coordinated, techno-military image industry, Total Recall takes the form of a kind of electronic theater, one using familiar icons and effects culled from mass culture. Bender borrowed the title for the work after reading in Variety magazine that a film was being made based on the Philip K. Dick short story. Viewers see appropriated clips from Oliver Stone’s film Salvador (1986), Olympic athletes, military fighter jets, and corporate logos from American companies like GE and CBS, among other things. The onslaught of images enacted through Bender’s pioneering use of quick editing—carried along by a soundscape composed by Stuart Argabright—gestures to deep structural patterns and belief systems that govern the image stream. Bender coined the term sense-around to describe the heightened responsiveness that she aimed to engender through her media installations. Like many of her peers in the 1980s, Bender was concerned with the media landscape, but rather than extract and distill, she chose to multiply and amplify.

 

People in Pain (1988)
For the original work (which was unfortunately destroyed after Bender’s death), the artist began with a list of every Hollywood movie that was in production for a six-month period between 1987 and 1988. Bender then printed the titles in a uniform font onto hardened black vinyl that resembled the crumpled, glistening appearance of a trash bag. Some of the movies—Dirty Dancing, Fatal Attraction, Full Metal Jacket, and Predator, for instance—are remembered today. Most are forgotten. Others, such as Word of Honor and Cry Moon, were never released at all. The work comments on the non-stop flow of often mindless entertainment media that inundates American culture every year. The titles are flattened out in presentation so that no single film is privileged over another: they’re all just part of a metaphorical trash flow.

 

Untitled (the pleasure is back I) (1982)

 

Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version) (1984)
An early stab at two-channel video shown in the exhibition, Wild Dead I, II, III (Danceteria Version), was produced in 1984, the same year AT&T was forced to start divesting its holdings after an antitrust lawsuit begun in the 1970s, and includes splices from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) with images of AT&T’s new Earth-shaped logo. In Cronenberg’s dystopian horror, TV viewers are unwittingly brainwashed by their sets, consuming seemingly banal broadcasts that later induce violent hallucinations and desires. Bender’s mashup presents Cronenberg’s fiction as reality, as scenes from the film are punctuated by menacing flashes of the AT&T globe—an indication of the company’s vast ambition and a symbol Bender derided as the “Death Star.” The ensemble, set to a frenetic, pulsating score by postpunk musicians Michael Diekmann and Stuart Argabright, comments on the outsize power of telecommunications companies over the American public—a power that is arguably greater today, in light of antitrust’s unraveling in the ’90s and new forms of Web monopoly.

 

TV, Text, and Image (Metro Pictures Version) (1990)
Live television broadcast on nine monitors, vinyl lettering, and shelves.

 

Megadeth Peace Sells But Who’s Buying? (1986)
In Megadeth’s ‘Peace Sells But Who’s Buying?’ (1986), Bender’s breakneck, potentially epilepsy-inducing editing technique complements Dave Mustaine’s high-strung thrashing. Images of the band on stage playing to a mass of head-banging burnouts are incessantly intercut and overlaid with close-ups of Mustaine’s sneering mouth, licking flames, rapidly pulsating images and logos (a dollar sign, a peace sign, Jesus, and so on) and news images recognizable to anyone who lived through the 1980s: bombed-out refugee camps, Ronald Reagan good-naturedly disregarding reporters’ questions at a press conference, hungry-eyed children in Africa. These only let up midway through, when we suddenly zoom out to an irate father, grabbing the remote control and haranguing his long-haired teenage son, who’s watching the video on TV, ‘What is this garbage? I want to watch the news!’ at which point the boy flips back the channel to Megadeth, scoffing: ‘This is the news!’

 

New Order Bizarre Love Triangle (1986)
This overloaded nowness was present in another video on display, New Order’s rather more cool-to-the-touch but, in its way, no less unrelenting ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ (1986), which, like ‘Peace Sells’, was edited by Bender and directed by Longo. Alternating rapidly between images of the band and stock-media footage – flowers undergoing an accelerated blooming, commuters marching to work, exploding fireworks and babies’ faces, alongside Longo’s signature freefalling businessmen and some abstracted, pixilated frames – Bender’s editing can be described as almost sculptural, certainly textural. Even though these images create a single cosmology – simultaneously Utopian and apocalyptic – they still palpably chafe against each other as they are reshuffled in line with the music’s inexorable beat.

 

America’s Most Wanted (Opening Credits) (1988)
Bender designed the credits for the TV show America’s Most Wanted, which Roberta Smith of the New York Times suggested “may have originated the rapid-fire hyperediting now pervasive in film, television and video art.”

 

Untitled (“Nostalgia”) (1989)
Bender’s art was infused with Marxist-Feminist theory (Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Vilém Flusser) and she didn’t care if her barbed politics in her works kept the viewer at arm’s length. Indeed, she seemed to want the takeaway to be a heightened awareness of the conflicts and mediations they embodied.

 

Gremlins (1984)
Four parts; laminated colour photographs, support: 660 x 838 mm, each panel displayed: 1321 x 1676 mm.

 

Untitled (“Daydream Nation”) (1989)
Photographs on Masonite mounted on wooden armature.

 

Dumping Core (1984)
Gretchen Bender’s Dumping Core (1984) is a rapid-fire, multi-channel video installation that plays out over 13 monitors arrayed throughout a black box gallery. The improbability of the existence of one of Bender’s major works was already next-level. MoMA apparently helped restore or recover the work, which had only been exhibited as an abbreviated documentation video as recently as 2013.

 

Overviews

So Much Deathless – Exhibition Trailer

“So Much Deathless” via theObjectified

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Well, first, they’d probably burn your house down for calling them Goths, haha, and being scary or attempting scariness as Death Metal-ers usually do requires a fair amount of make up and additives, just ask Boris Karloff. Ah, yes, Bertrand Cantat, speaking of scary. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein says, ‘Available On Request: A Complete list of the CDs I’m selling for 7 bucks a pop.’ ** Bill, Hi. That’s kind of been my impression re: the Vuong novel. But he’s quite a good poet. Which doesn’t always transition into good prose, especially if poets see prose as being something else entirely. Okay, let’s do a dinner there whatever season it is when I next end up in your realm. Ah, shame that the Blue Note documentary took that tack, but I guess it was inevitable. I was hanging out this summer with a young Australian filmmaker, Amiel Courtin-Wilson, who’s made a documentary about Cecil Taylor. I don’t believe it’s been officially released yet. He basically moved in with Cecil Taylor about a year before his death and lived with him for several weeks, filming that time. It’s an amazing film. I’ll let you know when it’s out. ** Steve Erickson, I have not seen ‘End of the Century’ but I have heard about it and great things about it. I’ll look to see what its status is re: Paris. Thank you. Nor have I seen ‘Crime Thief’. That sounds very curious. Huh. I’ll hunt it. Les Légions Noires are very legendary here and a source of much pride amongst French music followers and musicologists given the rest of the world’s impression that France isn’t exactly a guitar music producing Zeus of a place. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha, did my sentences seem over the top? Unintended. I like non-paragraphing. Bernhard, Guyotat, that dude the other day, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do it in my work unless I’m spacing, but I have angled towards that form in hopes sometimes. I do like all the internal concentrated rhythm possible in that style, but I also like combining that with the big rhythms you can create with in-your-face line and paragraph breaks. My impression of Self in my limited encounters — watching him read three times, conversing with him once — is that he is very, very self-centered. How much post-first draft editing and refining do you think you’ll be doing? Can you tell yet? Jesus, LPS has an angel on his shoulder, maybe even on both of them. ** Right. Gretchen Bender is an artist I love. She was really ahead of her time, and her death at a young age really deprived the world of no doubt more and even more amazing work. I present a selection of her works to you today, and I hope you’ll find out what you think. See you tomorrow.