‘The thing with Nathaniel Mackey’s “new thing” is that it isn’t, and doesn’t, I don’t think, want to be. Late Arcade (New Directions, February 2017) is the fifth volume in an ongoing, open-ended epistolary fiction collectively called From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Like the previous installments, it is a series of letters written by a visionary horn player, N., who lives in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, addressed to an Angel of Dust, who answers N. but whose responses we never see. While Mackey’s fiction has always had an eye on the past, the first installment appeared in 1986, five years after the story it depicts took place. We’re now thirty years on and the story has only progressed by four. As a result, the quotidian elements of N.’s letters have only become more radiant, as if Mackey’s interests in music, mysticism, and the recent past have been distilled to their most potent forms.

‘N.’s letters tend to describe his dreams or performances with his jazz sextet, Molimo M’Atet, and they shift between rhapsodic descriptions and theoretical interpretations—the implication, it seems, is that playing music feels like a kind of dreaming, and that dreams adhere to the logic of songs. Sometimes, N.’s letters are preempted by his “cowrie shell attacks,” visionary sequences prompted by shards of glass embedded in N.’s forehead, and sometimes the sextet’s performances are punctuated by the appearance of mysterious “balloons” that reveal the musicians’ subconscious lives and loves. But tonally, these interruptions are more like brushes on the cymbal than sticks. Never jarring, they are only deeper strangenesses in a world already strange.

‘Okay, but, what happens? Well, not much. More than the previous installments, Late Arcade is ambitiously intimate, the cast of characters is stable and streamlined and its narrative is consistently filled with the familiar invaded by other familiars. N. writes when something is worth puzzling over and stops when there is nothing left to say, instead of with a knock on the door. Mackey could not be less interested in the moral crises and cliffhangers that shaped the first epistolary novels. Instead, he has said he was attracted to the form because of its compulsory repetition of salutation and conclusion, which offered an opportunity to translate some of the features of serial poetry. But it would be a mistake to think that the absence of trauma or the predictable topics of discussion mean that the book lacks emotional heft.

‘In Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, he writes about how the death of his mother helped him to understand contemporary art: “Struck by the abstract nature of absence; yet it’s so painful, lacerating. Which allows me to understand abstraction somewhat better: it is absence and pain, the pain of absence—perhaps therefore love?” Because Mackey’s fiction mistrusts these moments of succinct clarification, I’m almost embarrassed to put them alongside each other. But Barthes’s words help recast the power of the absence at the center of these books. No matter how precise or sumptuous the prose, Mackey has now written close to one thousand pages of fiction about music that does not exist. This will turn off some readers. What is so revolutionary about it, still, is the way Mackey makes the pain of this absence into the occasion for renewing a love of language, of redirecting our ears toward the page: “I’ve long been intrigued by and attracted to the idea of getting musical information from a picture…”

‘Mackey’s handling of history is subtle and immaculate. Details are never used as gimmick or commentary but as bass notes in a mood of simultaneous deterioration and recombination. N.’s letters prefer specificity to systemic analysis, avoiding Reagan and rising income inequality but excited about new albums and despairing the increasing frequency of oil spills: “It’s as though it were the dinosaurs and mastodons’ revenge, prehistory’s grudge against what came after… against preservation or containment, fossil solidity, an entropic brief against past and present keeping their places.” These details seem to trust that we have always the bigger historical picture in mind. They also offer opportunities for aesthetic response that were missed at the time, a sort of untimely dissent. N.’s description of the “mastodons’ revenge,” of course, becomes the inspiration for a new piece of music performed by the group, “Fossil Flow.” We can’t help but wish that these responses had happened at the time.

‘In part, this is because we receive Mackey’s N. as already doubly belated. He is fascinated by the artists who made Los Angeles an avant-garde hotbed in the early ’60s, but he lives a generation later. His is no longer the city of Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and the Ferus Gallery. And this distance is compounded by the restaurants and clubs visited by Molimo M’Atet being both real and deceased—the Comeback Inn, Club Lingerie, and Gorky’s form their own geographic “Fossil Flow” to us today. Although the era of “the first truly autobiographical intelligentsia in Los Angeles history,” as Mike Davis referred to Coleman et al in City of Quartz, has passed, Mackey’s attention to a particular subcultural experience is so thoroughly fused with the markers of its description that we might call N.’s letters symbiographical.

‘Late Arcade is a work of gradual understanding, one that is interested in how ideas and experiences can continue to work on us even as we revise our understanding of them—a sort of dolly zoom, but for the everyday life of an artist.’ — David Hobbs, BOMB

 

____
Further

Nathaniel Mackey @ New Directions
Nathaniel Mackey’s magazine ‘Hambone’
Nathaniel Mackey’s Long Song
Nathaniel Mackey @ Electronic Poetry Center
Nathaniel Mackey @ PennSound
POEMTALK Requiem so sweet we forgot what it lamented
Notes toward understanding Nathaniel Mackey’s ‘Outer Pradesh’
The Song Sung in a Strange Land
Nathaniel Mackey unites modernism, jazz and poets near and far
Nathaniel Mackey: Black breath matters
Song of the Andoumboulou: 142
Comeback City
A Conversation with Nathaniel Mackey
Root Work
A Philosophical Posse Hunts For The Self In Nathaniel Mackey’s Poems
Phrenological Whitman
Buy ‘From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate’

 

____
Extras

A Conversation with Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey Reading

Nathaniel Mackey: On writing workshops

Nathaniel Mackey: Finding a different tempo

 

_____
Interview
from Callaloo

 

Christopher Funkhouser: In your work you take improvisation, jazz, and other styles of music and use them as a well-spring. Could you describe how you came to this and manage to keep it such a prominent part of what you do?

Nathaniel Mackey: Probably the earliest aesthetic experiences for me were experiences with music, going back to when I was a kid. Certainly that’s what that comes from and it has continued to be a very important part of my experience. Not that I started off listening to a lot of the music I listen to now. But music has always been a very important part of my life even when I was seven, eight, nine years old. Why I didn’t take up an instrument and become a musician remains a mystery to me but I didn’t and that has to do with circumstantial things which are just circumstantial things. Late in high school I got into reading poetry and fiction on a more serious level, as something other than what you did because it was assigned. I was actually beginning to do it because I was interested in it, because it was speaking to me in a meaningful way. Some of the literature I got into had analogies with music, though I wasn’t always aware of it. Some of the writers who had an early impact on me were also engaged with music. William Carlos Williams was a writer whose work I got interested in when I was in high school. I didn’t know about his interest in music, which wasn’t that strong or that extensive, but later I found out about it, though it wasn’t necessarily that I was hearing music coming through in Williams’s work. Among those writers I was reading early on was Amiri Baraka, whose engagement with music is enormous, tremendous. It was one of the things that galvanized the relationship between writing, reading, and music which began to develop for me.

Funkhouser: Was there anything equally as important as music as an influence?

Mackey: The music was pretty close to and bound up with the religious for me. Some of the earliest music I was exposed to was the music in the Baptist Church, so the relationship between music and the spiritual was very strongly imprinted very early through the church experience. Seeing people respond to music in ways that were quite different from music being listened to in a concert situation, I mean people actually going into states of trance and possession in church, had a tremendous and continuing impact on me. It’s no doubt one of the reasons I so often refer to and incorporate aspects of, say, Haitian vodoun, Cuban santeria and other trance rituals that involve music-dance as a form of worship. That was part of the music experience, the wider context into which the music experience extends. I don’t know what else. Obviously one of the things is that I was interested in a variety of things, even as a kid, so there are a variety of things that were pertinent to my early development. I was a precocious reader, read a lot of different kinds of things and had an interest in mathematics and science early on. I don’t know to what extent that comes in but it does. There was a time when I was reading philosophy, although it’s been a while. I think all of those things play a part. It’s easier to see the role that music plays because it’s so pronounced and it has become a central preoccupation or the trope for a variety of preoccupations that such a work as From A Broken Bottle Traces Of Perfume Still Emanate builds upon. The poems participate in that in their own way, in both the musicality of the writing and the overt referentiality to music in the writing. For me music is so much more than music that when you ask “What else besides music?” it’s hard for me to answer because music includes so much: it’s social, it’s religious, it’s metaphysical, it’s aesthetic, it’s expressive, it’s creative, it’s destructive. It just covers so much. It’s the biggest, most inclusive thing that I could put forth if I were to choose one single thing.

Funkhouser: In the work — the prose and the poetry — there is an extreme lyricism that’s transmitted from somewhere. What lineage do you see your work aligned with?

Mackey: Well, I’ve already named Williams and Baraka. The larger tendencies in American poetry that they are a part of I relate to and relate myself to. Oppen, for example, whose line “bright light of shipwreck” I use as a subtitle to one of the poems in Eroding Witness. Some of the so-called “New American Poetry,” the poets in Donald Allen’s anthology, which I read and was very much impacted upon by in the mid-sixties. The Black Mountain “Projectivist” poets were very important: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan. Denise Levertov early on was an important poet for me. I began reading poetry seriously in high school. I graduated from high school in 1965. It was when I went to college that I began to read more, began to read more contemporary, more recent stuff, more post-war poetry. Those were the people I was reading at that time. And, you know, one goes on reading and building on what one has read, and I’ve gone on to other people since then. A couple of Caribbean writers have been very important to me, Wilson Harris and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Other Caribbean writers as well, like Aimee Cesaire, and other writers, a range of writers.If I start naming them I’ll name all day. There was a period when, for example, the new novelists of France, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and others — I read their work quite attentively. I was a big fan of a Polish writer named Witold Gombrowicz. I remember reading and re-reading his novels. You know how it is: you read and you read and you read and some stuff you re-read.

Funkhouser: Did you write at Princeton?

Mackey: Yes. I had written a little bit, had gotten the impulse to write in high school, but hadn’t written a whole lot. It was when I was in college that I started writing more and started thinking about that as something I wanted to do if I could. It was in college that I really began to invest in and investigate the sense of myself as a writer.

Funkhouser: There were teachers there that helped you?

Mackey: Not particularly. It wasn’t so much that setting or any particular teachers there. There were teachers there that I talked to and liked and whose classes were an influence, but not in a direct sense of there being writers there who were teachers of mine. It was more the exposure to literature that I got in literature classes, the exposure to readings that took place on campus, and Princeton being only an hour-and-a-half drive from New York. I would go in and hear readings there, although there wasn’t really a heavy reading scene at that time. Mainly what I did when I went into New York was hear music. That was one of the big stimuli that that allowed. I wasn’t a creative writing major or anything like that — I think I took one creative writing course the whole time I was in college and that was enough. But I wrote and I published in some of the campus literary magazines.

Funkhouser: You manage to place, by virtue of being a publisher and via radio broadcasting, some of your creative output within the context of Western culture, not limiting it to African or Asian or some of the other reference points. Are you striving at all to facilitate any type of social change or awareness, or is it just art?

Mackey: Well, if it can facilitate social change and awareness in a positive and progressive direction, then, certainly, more power to it. I don’t want to overestimate or inflate what work of that sort — doing a radio program, or editing a magazine, or writing poetry and prose — can do. But certainly to the extent that categories and the way things are defined — the boundaries between things, people, areas of experience, areas of endeavor — to the extent that those categories and definitions are rooted in social and political realities, anything one does that challenges them, that transgresses those boundaries and offers new definitions, is to some extent contributing to social change. The kind of cross-cultural mix that a radio program like “Tanganyika Strut” offers diverges from a pre-packaged sense of what appropriate content for a radio program is, where one is usually offered a homogeneous program. There’s a challenge in heterogeneity, whether it’s radio programming, editing a magazine, one’s own work, putting together a syllabus for a class or whatever. These are questions that resonate with all of the political and social urgencies that have to do with how do you get different people to live together in society in some kind of positive and
productive way.

Funkhouser: So where do you find your audience? Are you directing what you are transmitting as poet, as radio programmer, as teacher, to any specific audience or are you just throwing it out there?

Mackey: I’m not just throwing it out there, I’m putting it out there, but I can’t say that I am putting it out there with a particular audience in mind because the way in which audiences are defined is often dependent upon those categories that I mentioned earlier that are fixed and static and I think misrepresent reality in most instances. Therefore I can’t let those senses of possible audiences be what dictates what I do. So I don’t think about the given categories of audience. I think about doing what makes sense to me, what is meaningful to me, with the conviction that there are other people that it will make sense to, be meaningful to, and with the hope that what I’m doing will find its way to them and they’ll find their way to it.That’s the sense of audience I work with. To me it’s more the work finding or defining, proposing an audience, than the work being shaped out of some idea of an audience, consideration of an audience, “this is what such and such a group of people wants to hear…”

Funkhouser: There are writers, especially at this time, who are thinking that way because there’s money in it. That’s not why I was asking you though. Mostly I ask because a lot of the references in your writing are almost completely obscure to someone who is not really on-top-of-it as far as world music goes, as far as “outside” musics go. Someone naively picking up your books might think they were Pound’s Cantos, with so many obscure reference points. For instance, most people would have no idea who Albert Ayler was, and so on. Automatically you might, in a way, sever some understanding.

Mackey: Well, obviously you can say certain things about the audience for a work by looking at the character of the work. In many ways the work itself answers the question “What is the audience for this work?” If you look at a work that is making mention of Albert Ayler, then obviously that work is aimed at people who know who Albert Ayler is or are interested in finding out, would want to find out. You have to talk and write from what you know, about what you know, with what you know. You have to take the risk of speaking to people about things they may be unfamiliar with, just as there are things other people know that you are not familiar with. I have read people whose work spoke of things and made reference to things that I didn’t know about, and reading that work has been an impetus for me to find out about those things. Since that has been my experience as a reader why wouldn’t it be the experience of others? One doesn’t have to be constantly looking over one’s own shoulder asking, “Can I say this? Is the reader still with me?” I think you have to go with the faith that there are readers who are with you. You may not know who or where they are but you have to take that risk.

 

___
Book

Nathaniel Mackey From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate
New Directions

‘From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate Volumes 1-3 collects the first three installments—Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus’s Run and _ATET A.D._—of Nathaniel Mackey’s genre-defying work of fiction. A project that began over thirty years ago, From a Broken Bottle is a lifelong epistolary novel that unfolds through N.’s intimate letters to the mysterious Angel of Dust. Unexpected, profound happenings occur as N. delves into music and art and the goings-on of his transmorphic Los Angeles-based jazz ensemble, in which he is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. The story opens in July 1978 with a dream of haunting Archie Shepp solo, and closes in September 1982 on a glass-bottomed boat borne aloft by the music. This edition also includes a discography, plus an author’s note that offers some reflections on the writings of this extraordinary novel—a realist-mythic layering of lyrical prose unlike anything being written today.’ — New Directions

____
Excerpt

___________________ 6.X1.83

Dear Angel of Dust,

Once again it will have come to nothing. Again we will have sat exchanging thoughts on what was to be. Again we will have heard music, albeit not music so much as music’s trace, music’s rumor, pianistic breakdown as an archetypal he and she gazed out drapeless windows. What stayed with us will have been a wincing, distraught right hand backed by a grumbling left on an abject keyboard, a right undone or done in as much as backed by a disconsolate left. We will have stood and stretched as gray, wintry, late afternoon light filled each window, a wounded look on what lay outside and on our faces as we looked out upon it. An archetypal he and she alone but for the music, aloof to each other even but each the music’s intended, we will have so seen ourselves but no sooner done so than drawn back. Something found in a wrinkle, something found in a fold, it will have been this that set our course and put us on it, collapse and come to nothing though it would.

So I thought, at least, earlier today at Djamilaa’s. What will evanescent splendor have come to I wondered as she stood at a window and at one point leaned against the window frame, her left arm raised, her left hand touching the curtain rod. She stood that way only a moment but the way she stood highlighted her long beauty, lank beauty, her long arms and legs a miracle of limbs. For an instant something jumped out at me and at the same time jumped inside me, a mood or a mix of elation compounded with dread. I saw what so much rays out from and relies upon, however much it shook me with apprehension: lank intangible grace, nonchalant allure, love’s modest body. It was the news of the moment but yesterday’s news as well, something aspect and prepossession seemed intent on saying. What that something was, as Penguin would say, more than met the eye, but it did nonetheless meet the eye. My heart leapt and my stomach dropped.

“Leave it alone,” Djamilaa said, demure as to what was at issue but sensing my mood.

“I wish I could,” I said.

The right hand on the keyboard prompted me perhaps, apprehension of any kind its mandate, apprehension of any kind’s fraught base. Thought’s ricochet played a role as well. Momentary angst was its immediate heir, an ungainliness of thought in whose wincing retreat one felt elation well up and right away subside. Fear of being caught out, knowing no way not to be caught out, factored in as well.

“Things are that way sometimes,” Djamilaa said, laconic, blasé, unperturbed.

“I know,” I said. “Things are always that way.”

It had to do with angles. The piano’s legs buckled for an instant and rebounded, then they buckled and rebounded again. The right side of the keyboard crumpled. The hand that played it crumpled as well. Had they been glass they’d have shattered, besetting one’s ears, by turns bodily and cerebral, with sharp, intersecting planes rolling Duchamps’ descending nude and Picasso’s weeper into one. But they were not glass, however much the keyboard’s keening ping made it seem so.

Dressed in a light cotton shift whose hem touched her ankles, Djamilaa stood caught between bouts and volleys of agitation and arrest, her lank beauty all the more lank finding itself so caught but unavailable all the same, it struck me, not to be lastingly caught. A lack of lasting hold or lasting capture pertained to the music plaguing our heads, mine maybe more than hers but hers as well, a music it seemed we each heard with a distinct incorporeal ear or perhaps together with a shared incorporeal ear.

Djamilaa again offered generic solace, oblique as to what was at issue still, so compellingly we both felt it. “Not always,” she said. “But their effect when they are is to make it seem that way.”

“Yes, I guess so,” I said.

The music itself seemed an oblique telepathic dispatch, however much it appeared woven into textile and skin tone, the music of Djamilaa’s bare arms and bare neck emerging from her cotton shift. It obtained in her skin’s lack of lasting hold and in the wrinkles and folds of her shift. Had she said, “Fret not thyself,” I’d have said, “Amen,” but we were beyond that now, the music insinuating itself, issueless issue, the nothing it let it be known it will have come to, the nothing that had never been. It wanted to keep convergence at bay.

It plied an odd, contrarian wish but it was moving and emotive all the same, anti-intimate while inviting intimacy, anti-contact while acknowledging touch. It plied an aloof tactility, love’s lank tangency, verging on emotional breakdown but brusque, pullaway catch or caress.

It was an actual music we heard and let have its way with us, Paul Bley’s “Touching” on the Mr. Joy album. No way could we say title told all.

As ever,

N.

___________________ 14.X1.83

Dear Angel of Dust,

Yes, that one has “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway” on it, as do several others. It does appear, as you say, we let “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway” infiltrate “Touching,” title not telling all notwithstanding, title not telling all all the more. But there’s an asceticism to Bley’s playing that comes across no matter what the title. Djamilaa’s been thinking about that, wondering about that, drawn to it a lot of late. It’s not that less is more, she likes to say, nor that nothing is all, nor that nothing, as Ra says, is. All those ways of putting it only let sensation in thru the backdoor, she likes to say. No, it’s not about that. It’s not as recuperative as that, not as categorical. It’s an angled attrition, banked extenuation, she likes to say.

It’s as if, when she speaks this way, she’d come to me in a dream and vice versa, each of us the other’s wished-for rescue, each the other’s wariness as well. It’s not unlike what sometimes happens when we play. One becomes the extenuation of oneself and the emanation of something else, someone else, ghost and guest arrivant rolled into one. What is it or who is it steps in at such moments? It could be anything, anyone, one senses, but the hollow one’s evacuation puts in one’s place appears to afford strangeness a friendly disguise. One’s fellow band members pass thru that hollow, step into it, relieving the brunt of an attenuation one might otherwise be unable to bear. It’s something like what Roy Haynes must have meant by saying that playing with Trane was “like a beautiful nightmare.”

Come to as in a dream, yes, a dream dreamt on a rickety bed, springs creaking, home like as not an illusion of home. To speak was to bank one’s breath within angular precincts, wall intersecting wall’s proprioceptive recess one’s being there had become. Stereotactic as well, one touched upon aspect, facet, crater, protuberance, grade finessing grade, tangency’s wont.

As ever,

N.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. I really liked ‘The Holy Mountain’ until they started going up the mountain. I felt like Jodorowsky might’ve run out of money at that point or something. I think I saw an S/M porn that loosely had that reverse ‘120 Days’ scenario, but I don’t remember its name. It wasn’t very good. There are those moment when the non-artistically super complex fills the bill, so I’ll wait for one of those to seek ‘Peep Show’, Intrigued, obviously. Thank you so much for the good, kind words. It’s hard to express gratitude for gratitude, but I’m really feeling it. I hope your today works really well. ** Jack Skelley, Gracias! Oh, the typo’s fun, I don’t mind. Even if it’s wild and wooly, I’m utterly positive that your crazy launch shebang is going to be a total thing. Just pretend it’s a rose parade float and wave from amidst it like a beauty queen. Curious to hear a report, though, you bet. The inevitable if currently mysterious resolution with Fuckhead is what I’m living for. Thanks, bud. Enjoy the countdown to your night of nights as best you can. ** David Ehrenstein, How interesting about Bill and ‘Skidoo’. And the about the Conner cameo. Did you ever end up being an extra in any crazy movies? ** Gabriel Hart, Hi, Gabriel! Welcome! I’m very happy you came inside. I did a fair amount of Laguna acid tripping back in my teens. There was a kind of ‘seen it all’ vibe there that made hallucinating therein very comfortable. Wow, I remember hearing about Brotherhood of Eternal Love. I haven’t heard that moniker in forever. Sure, I would love to have your novel and mag, if you don’t mind. I guess write to me at my email — [email protected] — and I can give you my coordinates. Thanks a lot! Vag was such a genius. Probably still is. You live in Morongo Valley! I think we shot a couple of scenes there. Crazy. If I had known you back then I would have invited you to the set or hit you up to be an extra in the haunted house scene, alas. Take it easy! ** Uday, Sounds good, the b’day marathon. I really don’t like being the center of attention, so b’days are not exactly my cup of tea. Plus, the older you get, the more they seem like annual bad news. Mm, I would say none of those films have accurate LSD trip portrayals. They’re far too conventional, for one thing. Plus, the whole thing about acid trips is their great length, so a mere scene in a trendy movie isn’t going to nail it. Maybe ‘El Topo’ has the closest incarnation maybe. ** Sypha, I remember preferring Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’ to ‘Helter Skelter’, but I think it might be very hippie/dated now. Yes, based on your references, I would say it seems like you’ve done an almost total switch to the pop side of things. Which is understandable, mind you. Someone the other day was telling me how great ‘Retro Gamer’ magazine is. And I love old games, so … There’s one store here that might just stock it, but it’s closed for the Olympics. Big day, pal. ** Måns BT, Thank you, Måns! ‘War and War’ is next up. I have to find a way to grab it, or I mean see if I can physically grab it from some venue here in Paris before I go the postal route. I have not seen the entire ‘Sátántango’, just sections. It’s a real hole in my film experience. But rectifiable. Well, you should do Paris first, of course. I love it tremendously. Marseille is interesting. It’s kind of rough, it’s kind of the only dangerous (but actually not) feeling city in France. I think it’s more like interesting areas in France than cities themselves. The Normandy coast is nice. The Pyrenees are interesting and scenic. The old volcanic area is cool. I’ll assemble a list for whenever you make a trip. My weekend wasn’t bad. It did cool down. It felt like being rewarded by the sky. It’s heating back up starting today though. How much longer are you in Spain? ** Steve, With the massive rise of amateur porn, the lines have gotten very blurry. There are iPhone vids of very heavy S/M, gangrapes of drugged people, and so on all over the place. ‘Sleeper porn’ of people having sex with people who have been drugged unconscious is a whole popular genre now. Somehow that stuff just slips through without seeming problems. Cool, Peter De Rome was an interesting porn maker. No, ‘Room Temperature’ is still stuck in its morass. Zac and I are going to figure what we need to do to forge ahead and do it in the next couple of weeks. ** Dev, Hi. LSD has always been my favorite drug, although I had to swear it off ages ago. I get the impression that current day LSD is not remotely as intense as it was back when. Pdfs, okay, of course, I guess. Save the trees and the bank accounts and all of that. A lot of people would say, and do say, that Paris gets off very easy in the summer. We haven’t gotten any hotter than 35 degrees Celsius this year, but the humidity, yeah, would suggest a much higher temperature. But, really, we’re lucky, we are. I cannot wait for the film get finished and out. We’re going to get it born this fall, whatever it takes. I’m very, very happy with it. Thanks! ** nat, Hello with multiple w’s back to you! I know the Final Fantasy games, but have I actually played any of them? Hm, maybe not. Being a Nintendo guy does have its limits. Having my name grounded up by a French accent or even a fake accent is a key to my heart, so, yes, more than okay. Uh oh, ‘The Sluts’ could be a turning point. Watch your … back. ** Lucas, Hey, hey, Lucas! I’m going to read your story really soon, like, really, and I’m sorry for my slowness so far. I’m trying to imagine your face as a weird contraption of pain and tension, and I can’t quite picture it, but what I can picture looks like it would be no fun to be inside for you. May Thursday rush rapidly into the present tense. Except with out the ‘tense’ part. Glad you got to spend quality time with the Horn show. My envy continues. That’s a real fucking deer! And pretty. And one can’t help but wonder what it’s looking at and why. Thank you! No, I haven’t seen ‘Story of Marie and Julien’, actually. Ooh, something to seek out. I will. I’ll figure what the path is between me and it. Thank you for that, pal. How’s your week looking? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. A public thank you for the great post! I’m excited! ** ted rees, Hi, Ted! LSD literally made me whoever I am today. It even made Rimbaud seem like cat food. ‘Blue Sunshine’. no. Hm. Luckily, LSD movies seem to have no problem showing up on youtube without their rights holders batting an eye, so I’ll go find it. Great to see you, maestro. I hope you’re far more than surviving the summer and the, you know, politics. xo. ** Bill, I still use the word groovy sometimes, totally by accident. Luckily, I don’t accidentally use the word bitchin’ anymore. Bonello is very hit or miss for me. I really like ‘Nocturama’. I pretty much like ‘Zombi Child’. A few of his early films are quite good. I really didn’t like ‘Saint Laurent’. Another writer I don’t think I know: Nicholas Rombes. I’ll seek and see. Thanks, B. ** Harper, Yep, you said it. Impossible task. Sometimes amusingly badly attempted. I watched a film recently that made me feel like I was on LSD, but it wasn’t portraying drug use, and I can’t remember its title. Yes, when I was, I think, 16, I took LSD continually for a month, and I went basically insane and had a massive breakdown where I could barely talk or think clearly for weeks afterwards. It was amazing, haha. Yeah, the prog stuff that continues to seem exciting was either kind of prog-approximate like Soft Machine or Family or Incredible String Band, or that mixed avant-garde serious music into the prog thing like Henry Cow or others. But the prog-prog stuff mostly just sounds like showoffy tempo and skill set wanking now. ** Darby😸, Hi! Drowsy’s okay. Drowsy can be inventive. Um, I don’t think I have a post on spaghetti westerns, strangely. Coincidentally to this past weekend, I did do an Acid Westerns post, but that’s a whole other thing. Hm, it wasn’t huge, but I saw a fairly big caterpillar once whose rear end looked amazingly like a little human face, and that freaked me the fuck out. Good about your return to your book, and your thoughts thereby get a cheer from me. You told me a little about the book, but what you’re saying now is more detailed and even more exciting to anticipate. Go, Darby! The weather cooled down and was actually really nice, but the heat is rising again today, so I’m trepidatious. ** Justin D, Hi Thanks, J. Yeah, you have to be really prepared before you take LSD. If you’re too afraid of it or are going through something in your life that’s scary or anything, LSD can turn those things into gigantic problems. My weekend was alight, thank you, It was temperate outside, and I saw a couple of friends and bought some books and drank coffee in cafes, kind of standard fare, but it felt good. I’ll hit that Gem Club track in a second because you’re the last visitor today, and I’m almost post-post. Thanks. Good week ahead in theory, I hope? ** Okay. The book that’s spotlit up there is super interesting, and I recommend it, clearly enough. See you tomorrow.

 

‘The story of acid in the America of the 1960s is a story of a nation in conflict between a renewed lust for life and an enhanced drive towards death, between the rebels and the republic, the old guard Don Draper types clinging by their fingernails to the 1950s American dream as it dissolved around them, and the crazy peaceniks mocking and deriding everything that dream stood for. While dad swills a beer and cheers the bombers on the news, his kids are out in Central Park, dropping tabs and flashing peace signs. Seldom before or since in American history has the line between old and young, life and death, love and hate, conformity and free-thinking, been so sharply and clear drawn. And in the field of combat the same line existed between delusional top brass notions of “heart and minds” and the real blood-and-ambiguity-drenched quagmire of the killing field.

‘LSD erased all those lines…as well as all other artificial social constructs. It could make you very peaceful with yourself as you committed horrific violence against yourself or others, merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream of disconnect… On acid you realize even killing can be an expression of love, just ask the Manson family, or the babysitter nuking the kid in the microwave and putting the TV dinner to bed, or Native Americans apologizing to the buffalo as they kill it, understanding that they’re killing themselves for all is connected. All murder is just projected suicide. The Native American’s knew we always only ever eat ourselves. On acid, we knew it too.

‘Taking acid certainly could prove a boost to your perception, heightening and sharpening your senses enabling the user to transcend their usual social more strait-jacket. Whether over in the war or at home, what seemed like unshakable bedrocks only hours before–marriage, church, state, government, patriarchy, tradition–became suddenly clownish, yesterday’s papers, tools of hypnosis to keep the cattle placid. Acid made killing ‘real’ to non-combatants because it shuckered them loose from the grip of the patriarchy, helped them think like the enemy, or how they imagined the enemy thought, slinking through the jungle, hard-wired and alive to every flapping beetle wing and blowing leaf, and best of all, free of all the moral inhibitions about killing. Smashing open an innocent Vietnamese farmer’s face with the butt of your rifle would be intolerable sober, but is just another freaky thing to trip out once you surrender to the fact that you’re living in a world… of… shit, as Private Pyle puts it in FULL METAL JACKET (1987).

‘An integral — though demonized by the press– part of boot camp is hazing, the beating of lagging cadets with soaps wrapped in towels, to toughen them up, give them a face-to-face taste with unendurable pain, the kind that transforms and darkens you, makes you less afraid since you know it can’t get any worse. Anything less than that level of prolonged and traumatic beating up is just business as usual from then on; the volume is turned way down. This tradition is nothing new, and corresponds to Native American rituals that involve hanging by pierced shoulder muscles until you see your white buffalo vision and know you are a man. Women have the agony of childbirth; men have to find agonies for themselves to equal it.

‘Or, you could just try taking too much acid, a sort of self-induced hazing. Either way, you have to do something to free yourself from living life in a state of fear-based wussiness… it takes a jolt to your whole body-mind-spirit in order to shake the civilized cowardice out of a man, to sever all apron string breadcrumb trails back to mommy. You can’t wait to turn savage after you’re savagely killed, by then it’s too late. You have to be already on fire to fight fire with fire.

‘This “death-embracing” aspect of LSD is something America never has been able to reconcile with its more peaceful half, just throwing baby and bathwater alike into prison and barring the door on any further conversation, at least in the US. In England the late-inning demonizing was taken with a grain of salt, and the Nietzschean rebirth from civilized wanker into super-warrior thing appears in British films to this day. Leo DiCaprio taps into it for his psychedelic interlude during a stretch of THE BEACH (2000) and Cillian Murphy finds his inner psycho for the climax of 28 DAYS LATER (2002). Shauna Macdonald (above) experiences a similar death/rebirth when falling into a pit of menstrual blood signifier slime in THE DESCENT (2005). It’s the last straw of horror that snaps her free into CARRIE-style warrior woman.

‘The Japanese have always been fans of this conversion and the slew of samurai films such as SWORD OF DOOM (1966) illustrate a cosmic understanding of the difference between sympathy and true compassion. The antihero main character played by Tatsuya Nakadai, for example, kills a weary old man he meets on a hill, just because he seems to be a burden to his granddaughter. In sword battle contests he only cares about perfection of technique, barely noticing the corpses he leaves in his wake. Perhaps the Japanese, British, and Germans for that matter, are just a little better at “going there.” May I venture to guess it comes from being bombed?

‘But Americans can’t abide freedom from resolve-weakening head games without a little help from their lysergic friends. We need far more of a push to shed our civilized moral paralysis, as we see in our terror of issues like euthanasia, castration and abortion. Comatose, paralyzed, dying patients are kept alive for years, and convicted sex offenders begging to be castrated are turned down flat. Every hospital should have a man like Willard/Kurz in APOCALYPSE NOW or SWORD OF DOOM’s Tatsuya Nakadai (above) to walk through the wards and dispassionately off the incurably sick or comatose, castrating and severing and doing whatever needs to be done. But it’s shocking just to think of it. We are too scared to face death square in the eye! Won’t someone think of the children!!?!?!’ — Acidemic

 

___
Stills

 

___
Screening

________
Ralph Nelson Charly (1968)
‘The psychedelic sequence, where a wounded Charly deals with Alice’s rejection of him by taking drugs, having orgies, and growing his hair long, is a goofy time capsule of 1968’s values, obsessions, and grandiosity. The Ravi Shankar soundtrack, that makes use of flutes, harpsichords, and sitar, is obtrusive in its shouting, “1968!”‘ — Danish Goska

Excerpt

 

_______________
Bill Brame Free Grass (a.k.a. Scream Free) (1969)
‘The film opens with swirly colored peace signs and psychedelic effects while the rock group “California Spectrum”‘ plays the title song. Then we see bad guys Phil and Barney (Casey Kasem and Warren Finnerty) driving a small camper and chasing a running longhaired hippie into a dead-end alley…where they crush him to death! Next we see Link (Russ Tamblyn) shooting up. Tamblyn must have been filming Satan’s Sadists at the same time because it looks like he walked right off that film set and onto the Free Grass set without changing his clothes or taking off his hat! Next psychedelic swirling lights, a dancing girl holding a snake and a room full of stoners smoking grass and playing guitar. Link tells stoner Dean (Richard Beymer) how to make some fast bread by smuggling grass out of Mexico. Hot chick Karen (Lana Wood, Natalie’s sister) asks Dean if he wants to take an acid trip. Next, lots of kaleidoscope trip effects.’ — The Video Beat

Excerpt

 

______________
Alejandro Jodorowsky El Topo (1970)
‘El Topo, a figure dressed in black and carrying his nude son on horseback behind him, uses his supernatural shooting ability to free a town from the rule of a sadistic Colonel. He then abandons his son for the Colonel’s Woman, who convinces him to ride deep into the desert to face off against four mystical gunfighters. All of the gunfighters die, but El Topo is betrayed, shot, and dragged into a cave by a society of deformed people, who ask the outlaw turned pacifist to help them build a tunnel so they can escape to a dusty western town run by degenerate religious fascists.’ — collaged

the entire film

 

__________
Harvey R. Langee Trip to Where (1968)
‘US Navy film warning sailors against the use of LSD.’

the entire film

 

________________
Étienne O’Leary Psychedelic Diaries (1966 – 1968)
‘Psychedelic Diaries is the title of the complete film works of Étienne O’Leary. Pillar of the underground and initiator of a new film language, Étienne O’ Leary shot his films in the effervescence of a Paris reaching May 68. The evanescent and incandescent images of O’ Leary films shows us many compatriots such as Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou and Pierre Molinier appearing under dazzling lights.’ –– icpce

Excerpt

 

________
Otto Preminger Skidoo (1969)
‘Tony is a retired mobster living in the suburbs with wife Flo and daughter Darlene, who has an unwelcome (to Tony) interest in dating hippies. A crime kingpin known as “God” pressures the ex-hit man into doing one last job—going undercover in Alcatraz to assassinate a stool pigeon. When Tony accidentally ingests LSD in the pen, his entire worldview is flipped and he decides to ditch the hit and break out of the clink; meanwhile, Flo and Darlene have taken it upon themselves to track down God with the help of a band of flower children.’ — 366 Weird Movies

Excerpt

the entire film

 

_______
Bob Rafelson Head (1968)
‘Richard McGinnis 4 months ago: this is best watched on a 12 inch black and white television while tripping on 1.5 hits of blotter acid. don’t question just try it and within the first 5 minutes you will understand * Bryce Thibodeaux 6 days ago: +Richard Mcginnis That is idiotic. You need to watch this on a 40 inch flat screen and take 5 hits of acid. You want to immerse yourself in the experience and feel and breathe the colours and sounds. How can you do that on a black and white 12inch tv? * Richard McGinnis 5 days ago: the monochrome picture tube does wonders when you’re tripping, and at the beginning when he is swimming with the mermaids? hdtv got nothing on this’

the entire film

 

___________
Terry Merrill & William Grefé The Psychedelic Priest (1971)
‘A group of teenage stoners spike Father John’s soda with LSD! Holy freak out! Father John trips his brains out amid images of religious motifs and becomes the Psychedelic Priest. Setting off across America on a journey of self-discovery, he finds love amidst hippies and heroin until hitting rock bottom on skid row. This dose of acid-drenched cinema is almost worth missing Sunday church for.’ — The Video Beat

the entire film

 

____________
Lockheed Corporation The Hotdog (1969)
‘LSD Propaganda film. It documents a young woman’s first acid trip where a hot dog comes to life and claims he has a wife and kids to support.’

the entire film

 

_____________
Joe Massot Wonderwall (1968)
‘The movie is so freakish, it’s almost impossible to absorb. It’s hardly a “movie,” at least by the normal definition. Worth noting is that the director is the same guy who later did the fantasy sequences in the Led Zep concert movie The Song Remains the Same. If you liked that movie’s werewolves with tommy guns spurting psychedelic blood, you’d dig Wonderwall. The first thing that comes to mind, a few minutes after finishing the film, is “This must be what it’s like to do peyote, throw up, and then spend two hours staring at your vomit and marveling at how wondrous and beautiful your former lunch now looks….”‘ — San Diego Reader

Excerpt

 

___________
Byron Mabe The Acid Eaters (1968)
‘The bikers meet up by a lake, at a dock sporting a sign that reads, “Taking a trip? Go LSD… the only way to fly!” When they arrive, one of their members is already making it with his old lady underwater, emerging from the deep to gasp, “Welcome to the Submarine Club! You passed the test with flying colors!” There follows a long sequence of topless dancing and body-painting, then some lascivious rolling around in the grass, and then, inevitably, the slaughter of a passing motorist for pot money. (The gang’s resident artist hangs a sign around the victim’s neck, reading: “Here lies a man who lost his [drawing of donkey] so we could buy some grass.”)’ — The AV Club

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

_____________
John Schlesinger Midnight Cowboy (1969)
‘There are a handful of scenes which feel like they don’t even belong in this film, particularly a bizarre psychedelic, acid-fuelled Andy Warhol party sequence, which adds absolutely nothing to the film’s narrative at all. The Warhol party scene in the 1960s was the hottest spot in town, filled with New York celebrities and wealthy partygoers. It defies all convention to believe a low-rate gigolo from Texas and a filthy street hustler would manage an invite to this world.’

Excerpt

 

_____________
Tito Davison The Big Cube (1969)
‘This amazing chunk of Mexican-lensed trippiness is a lost classic in Acid Claptrap Cinema! Kicking off with groovy credits, it’s another blast from the past, chock full of the hideous threads, hip slang, and idiocy which quickly made the late-’60s a joke. But it’s also graced with several familiar faces and a rabidly anti-LSD vibe. So prepare to turn on, tune out and laugh your ass off! An aging Lana Turner (in one of her last starring roles) plays Adriana, a famous stage actress who retires in order to marry wealthy financier Daniel O’Herlihy (currently starring in commercials for Magnavox, accompanied by a beachful of baby turtles). His teen daughter, Lisa (Karin Mossberg), is pissed off by the event, so she joins the local longhairs for an expedition to a trendy nightclub called The Trip, featuring “a new show from San Francisco” that has them dropping laced sugar cubes into their beer and blasting off. They also enjoy dosing other’s drinks (“I’m gonna cube that mother, but good.”).’ — Shock Cinema

Excerpt

the entire film

 

______________
Edgar Beatty The Hippie Revolt (1967)
‘A trail-filled trip through the world of hippie freaks in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Love-ins, communes, psychedelic ’60s acid-drenched fuzz guitar. The camera focuses on enclaves in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a rural commune dubbed “Strawberry Fields.” Lots of stoner action in Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle and Hippie Hill. Psychedelic dance rituals, drug use, body painting and incoherent babbling. Terrific tripping scenes. The Hippie Revolt! Features music by The Warlocks aka the pre-Grateful Dead‘. — The Video Beat

Excerpt

the entire film

 

____________
John Boorman Zardoz (1974)
‘Hoity-toity and self-important to the point of supreme silliness, Zardoz is an odd artifact of a time in Hollywood when moviemaking and drug-taking often intertwined, to the benefit of no one but bad movie fans like us … a lushly photographed piece of psychedelic twaddle … a glittering cultural trash pile, and probably the most gloriously fatuous movie since The Oscar — although the passages between the laughs droop.’ — collaged

Trailer

 

______________
Peter Perry Jr. Mondo Mod (1967)
‘U.S. documentary. If you’re cool and outasite and like to be where the action is, then make the trip to this groovy movie where it’s all happening now! Flip out into oblivion with a mod look at the psychedelic sixties (1966 in particular) that includes stops at… The Sunset Strip, where the “Now Generation” buys their groovy & mod fashions and dances wildly in clubs like The Trip, Whisky-A-Go Go and Pandora’s Box; the beaches of Hawaii and Southern California, where beach boys surf; the road, where motorcyclists race their bikes; and the mind, where drugs like LSD enable you to turn on, tune in and discover how beautiful everything is!’ — The Video Beat

Excerpt

the entire film

 

_____________
The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour (1967)
‘Released on December 26, 1967 in the UK, the Beatles gave a nod to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters with sort of random magicians on the countryside film. The Beatles were at moving into the zenith of their songwriting powers, and they made a film that was heavily influenced by psychedelics. It’s a total mess.’

Trailer

the entire film

 

______________
Richard Rush Psych-Out (1968)
‘For those interested in 1960s culture, Psych-Out acts as a rare time capsule of the 1967’s San Francisco and allows a precious glimpse into the world of the hippies at the time: from Free Shops to Guerilla Theater scenes; while trying to deal, at least superficially, with some of the issues of the era like the ideas of ego dissolution, mind expansion and bad trips. Even the talks about the STP-Fright seem highly characteristic of the time and place (STP was a major drug problem in the Haight-Ashbury around the end of 1967).’ — The Daily Psychedelic Video

Excerpt

the entire film

 

_____________
Ken Brown Light Show (1967 – 1969)
‘Between 1967 and 1969, Ken Brown shot super 8 films to projected with the light show at Boston’s premiere rock club The Boston Tea Party. The resulting films were later edited together to make a longer untitled film, often referred to by the name Psychedelic Cinema.’ — Ken Winokur

Excerpt

 

___________
David Greene Sebastian (1968)
‘Early in the production of Sebastian, somebody should have called a meeting to figure out what the movie was about. I guess nobody did. Strange interlude at a party, at which someone gives Dirk Bogarde LSD because the cameraman was complaining the movie was almost over and he hadn’t had a chance to try out his psychedelic special effects.’ — Roger Ebert

Excerpt

 

_____________
Dave Dixon Curious Alice (1968)
‘This drug abuse educational film portrays an animated fantasy based upon the characters in “Alice in Wonderland.” The film shows Alice as she toured a strange land where everyone had chosen to use drugs, forcing Alice to ponder whether drugs were the right choice for her. The “Mad Hatter” character represents Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD), the “Dormouse” represents sleeping pills, and the “King of Hearts” represents heroin. Ultimately, Alice concluded that drug abuse is senseless.’ — Change Before Going

the entire film

 

_____________
Kenneth Anger Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969)
‘Anger is the godfather of homoerotic cinema, having made his pioneering Fireworks in 1947. He has been famously obscene (and charged as such for Fireworks in California), happily hallucinogenic (his Invocation of My Demon Brother from 1969 was famously evocative of an acid trip), and quite consciously provocative (see all). Inside the industry, he’s never found a place to rest—he has Lucifer tatted on his chest. And he’s seen UFOs three times.’

the entire film

 

_____________
Albert Zugsmith LSD, I Hate You (1966)
‘Producer/director Albert Zugsmith’s acid-therapy “comedy,” complete with a tinted trip sequence “in hilarious LSD color.” A suicidal film star named Honey Bunny is sent by her producer to a rest home run by an unhinged Dr. Horatio, who gives his patients LSD as a cure. The wacky patients include female impersonator Skippy Roper as an effeminate dress designer, a midget, a fat lady, and lots of actors, directors, and producers, including Zugsmith himself.’ — letterboxd.com

Trailer

 

_____________
Barry Shear Wild in the Streets (1968)
‘Max Frost and the Troopers are an extremely popular rock and roll group with all the teenagers. A series of events results in Max Frost becoming President of the United States. Everyone over 30 years old is sent to LSD camps. Psychedelic images and sounds.’ — collaged

Trailer

Excerpt

 

______________
Leonard Horn The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970)
‘The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart is a 1970 American film made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) about a confused college student’s experiences with sex, relationships, and drugs in late 1960s New York City. Although Richard Thomas was originally intended to play the lead role of “Stanley Sweetheart”, Don Johnson was cast after having been seen in the lead role (“Smitty”) of Sal Mineo’s Los Angeles stage production of the prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes. Robert Westbrook has stated that he did not like Johnson, considering him a “hustler of the worst kind” and “utterly miscast”, but was overruled by producer Martin Poll. Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro was originally cast as “Danny,” Stanley’s older, more experienced counterculture friend, but clashed with the assistant director and was fired from the film after only one day. As reported by The New York Times and other newspapers in October 1969, MGM announced that Andy Warhol would make his commercial film debut in the movie, in his first-ever speaking role as a “freaked-out psychiatrist” in a hallucination orgy scene. It was further reported that Warhol superstars Ultra Violet, Candy Darling, and Gerard Malanga (as well as Joe Dallesandro) had also been cast in the film, with Ultra Violet playing a nurse during the hallucinated orgy scene. Candy Darling has an uncredited brief, wordless cameo reclining on a mattress in a room during the scene where Danny takes Stanley to an underground psychedelic performance. Neither Ultra Violet, Malanga nor Warhol appeared in the released film.’ — collaged

Excerpt

 

____________
Kō Nakahira Go Forward! (1968)
‘First there’s hidden diamonds and a mysterious girl with a big nose. Then, a sinister looking man in dark sunglasses sips milk from a straw—we see him regularly. He likes milk. There’s an airport briefcase mix-up. Lots of cool 60s mod op-art rooms and sitar music. Magical Mystery Tour-type “love child” fashions! The Spiders watch TV and see a cool garage beat group. During rehearsals for their big TV appearance, a dead guy falls out a speaker cabinet!’ — The Video Beat

Excerpt

 

_______________
John Korty Go Ask Alice (1973)
‘This is the true story of a shy, overweight teenage girl who, in an attempt to be popular, hangs out with the wrong crowd and takes drugs. In no time at all Alice goes from being a “nice girl” to comfortably fitting in with drug pushers, pimps and prostitutes. As Alice takes LSD we hear the Traffic song, “Dear Mister Fantasy.” The movie ends with a freeze frame of Alice poised to start a new school year as her mother’s voice-over informs us that Alice died of “an overdose of drugs” shortly after her 16th birthday.’ — collaged

the entire film

 

_______________
Arthur Dreifuss Riot On the Sunset Strip (1967)
‘A police captain (Aldo Ray) is caught between businesses operating on the Los Angeles Sunset Strip who don’t like the punks hanging out, and his belief in allowing the kids their rights. But when his daughter (Mimsy Farmer) gets involved with an unruly bunch and gets hooked on LSD, his attitude starts to change.’ — IMDb

Excerpt

the entire film

 

____________
Nicholas Roeg Performance (1970)
‘Even in an era of cinematic experimentation, Performance stands out as a visually daring major-studio film that deals with questions of sanity and identity rarely touched on in mainstream filmmaking. The elements of Performance certainly looked attractive to studio executives at Warner Bros. — a gangster on the lam hides out in the home of a reclusive rock star — especially since that musician was being played by Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.’ — RT

Excerpt

 

__________
Eric Le Hung Delphine (1969)
‘Delphine (Dany Carrel) is a country girl who travels to the big city in search of feminine emancipation and freedom. Attending wild parties and nightclubs, she meet a young rock star. She becomes pregnant by him and after she has an abortion, the singer could care less about her. Delphine is always followed by a little boy throughout the feature who constantly asks “what is your name?” She also confides in a boozing, middle-aged cynic who has given up on life but helps the young girl.’ — Unifrance

Excerpt

 

______________
René Laloux Fantastic Planet (1973)
‘FP is an animated sci-psych-fi film directed by René Laloux in 1973. The story is based on the novel Oms en série, by the French writer Stefan Wul. The film depicts a future in which human beings, known as “Oms” (a word play on the French-language word hommes, meaning men), are creatures on the Draags’ home planet, where they are seen as pests and sometimes kept as pets (with collars). The landscape of the Draag planet is full of strange creatures, including a cackling predator which traps small fluttering animals in its cage-like nose, shakes them to death and hurls them to the ground. The Draag practice of meditation, whereby they commune psychically with each other and with different species, is shown in transformations of their shape and color.’ — PsyAmb

Trailer

 

____________
Jack H. Harris Mother Goose a Go-Go (1966)
‘After a disastrous wedding night (i.e. no sex!), Tommy Kirk seeks help from a bikini-clad sex therapist who diagnoses LSD which causes soft-core hallucinations of scantily-clad incarnations of Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White! Tommy Kirk croons several numbers including “Mother Goose A-Go-Go.” Barbara McNair sings, “Queen of Soul.” Set in Shoreham Towers (a deluxe Sunset Strip apartment house popular with the ’60s swingin’ singles set). In real life, Art Linkletter’s 20 year-old daughter Diane, plunged to her death from one of the towers’ upper windows while (rumor has it) tripping on acid.’ — The Video Beat

the entire film

 

___________
Roger Corman The Trip (1967)
‘The Trip has been called one of the worst ever made, but I’d like to take a minute and discuss that. Here’s a movie that had a pretty good idea. It came out around the time that “underground” cinema was running amok, and director Roger Corman had already been making films for 12 years. He decided to radically stretch the cinematic boundaries he had been exercising. He wanted to film an LSD trip. Although this style of filmmaking has been aped millions of times over on MTV and television commercials, it’s still a pretty radical idea. (Oh, and by the way, Jack Nicholson wrote the screenplay.)’ — Jeffrey M. Anderson

the entire film

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Oh, yeah, it’s very nice, right? I’m pretty sure those Sade mistakes are just because he lost it before he could finish and edit it. It’s interesting because that last section of notes to himself of what he intended to write is probably the most influential thing about the book. Post-modern literature kind of accidentally started there. Museum sounds very cool. I’ve always dreamed of going to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which I think is in that same realm. Never heard of ‘Peep Show’, no, but I’ll hunt its traces at least. And, you know, fantastic about the related conversation’s … revelation, if that’s not going too far. You sound good. ** Uday, I always found Anais Nin’s writing mushy and overheated and lax. (Which are probably the qualities that make people like it). Seriously enjoy the cavorting and presumably being the center of attention. Things I can’t ‘get’ immediately are the things I most gravitate to. ** Steve, I know, right? They were a real find. I’m glad you liked a slew of the assembled. I’ll check into the things on your playlist that I don’t know. My sister was the caretaker of my mom when she was dying, and my sister seemed to manage going sort of insane with sufficiently dutifulness. It’s cooling down here, at least temporarily. I think I’ve given up on Shymalan, but let me know if you think I should change course. ** _Black_Acrylic, I had thought that all the success around her ‘Zone of Interest’ score might normalise her work, but seemingly not. I, of course, would be happy and hungry for that blog post if you feel doing it. Thanks! Eek, well, I hope there’s the pay off you suggest. People here are still pretty bent out of shape by Mbappé’s departure for more moneyed climes. ** Huckleberry Shelf, Hi! No prob, late is a relative term around here. Ah, enjoy the honeymoon. I think being bfs with another writer is probably a really wise combo. Someone who understands and shares the need for paramount dedication to the written word. Sounds ideal. Nice 80s playlist. I miss The Pale Fountains. I’m going to go indulge. Have a really fine, romantic, but not entirely writing-free weekend! ** David Ehrenstein, Rude is as rude does? ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Jackerooni. It’s out! It’s up! Cool. Let me … Everyone, Maestro Jack Skelley and I had a tete-a-tete in ‘print’ about our respective new books — the great ‘ Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love’ in his case — at Write or Die, and if you’d like to see us shoot the shit in our respective styles, you are most invited to click this.. I like that I’m Dennis Copper. Do you think it’s too late to change my name to Dennis Copperfield? Chris is very cool, you’ll have fun. Only a week until the big ‘you’ shebang, and me stuck over here dodging crowds of people with French flags painted on their faces. What a world. ** Lucas, Hi. Happy to throw the unknown at you. I’m starting my cigarette stocking up today. I hope my daily ATM withdrawal limit can handle it. So sorry about the migraine. I don’t know that suffering myself, but I’ve seen many friends’ suffering faces. Well, there’s a bunch of seriously non-taxing and potentially amusing movies up above if you need to play it safe. For sure max out your last two free weeks, but don’t pressure yourself. Just chilling can construe maxing out, or people say (I wouldn’t know). Great weekend to you whatever it entails, pal. ** Misanthrope, Whew, I can still induce a gasp. ‘Flunker’ should be some kind of test of your relationship. Think it through. ** Sypha, Hi, James. You know how it is, if you’re really into something, you just concentrate on exploring it. I quite often am initially introduced to music I like by The Wire, which is the only magazine I read religiously. Interesting stuff you’re revisiting. Well, except for maybe Garbage, haha. Maybe that can transition you into liking harsher electronic groups from nowadays? ** Måns BT, Hey! We’ve cooled down today here, but I think it’s only supposed to be okay outside until Monday. Too bad humans aren’t like chipmunks so we could store up the cool weather in our pouches to get us through the upcoming blasts. ‘War and War’ has been the one I most wanted to read next. Thanks for the reinforcement. Probably to preserve my love of those Tarr films, I’ve been careful not to read the related Krasznahorkai books just in case. Sounds like maybe that was a good instinct? I don’t know of Ronda, but I’ll take a google peek. Have you been to France? We have some fairly obscure but pretty interesting little towns here and there. And, obviously, Paris is no slouch. Have a weekend totally protected by AC at every necessary moment! ** Joseph, I’m happy to foist a bunch of newness on you. Thanks for watching the Chris/me talk. I have seen American porns with fake blood and stuff, but they had a ‘vampire’ narrative, so I guess there are loopholes. Not very big ones. There was a scene in my never realised porn film that took place in a small town, and there was a twinky sort of guy there who was very visibly in his mid-20s, but the conceit of the scene was that everyone in town thought he was 13 years old for inexplicable reasons and wanted to have sex with him because they wanted to have sex with a 13 year old. That’s the scene that most freaked the living hell out of the porn producers. I thought it was funny and surreal. But porn producers don’t seem to have very sophisticated senses of humor. I quit university after one year, and I’m fine just like you are. High five and all of that. I hope the loveliness of your weekend is groundbreaking. ** Harper, Good, the feeling better. There are definitely people who are the opposite of us. One of my best friends rushes to see a doctor when his finger feels kind of achy. Glad you like the Hyper Gal. They’re fun. The first King Crimson album kind of has a lot more going on in it than just prog machinations. It’s kind of photo metal at times, and post-psychedelic too. I love Queneau, and I do wonder what happened between the French originals and the English transferences. There’s gotta be a lot of liberties there. Yeah, we need funding to finish the last little work on the film, but the big problem is we’re in serious debt for the earlier post-production work because our monstrous producer lied that he would raise the funds to pay for it and never did and still won’t. It’s a big mess and hole, but we’ll get out of it somehow. Thank you for the much needed crossed fingers. And yeah, the film is really fucking good, if I don’t say so myself. ** Justin D, My total pleasure. Criterion is wising up these days. Enjoy ‘Pecker’, it’s so lovely, I think. And it was kind of Eddie Furlong’s last hurrah. ** Thomas H, Maybe not so unwise, all things considered? I can’t wait for you to see the new film too. Okay, that audiobook sounds actually pretty exciting. My friend and collaborator Zac is a queer dinosaur nerd too. You guys should have a coffee someday. ** Corey Heiferman, Hey! Heat was up, and life was rather down, and the heat is down for now, and life has an upward motion potential. The Hyper Gal record is really good, yeah. I hope they tour. Good, good, about the good dynamic with the love dude. Oh, I made a John Duncan post, thanks to your bringing him up. Upcoming. My first dance collaborations were in the early 80s when I was living in NYC. The dancer/choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones came up to me and said, I like your writing, do you want to make something together? I said Sure, not having any idea what we would do. But it worked, and we made pieces together for 10 years. With Gisele Vienne, she wrote to me when I was still living in LA and said basically the same thing, and I said the same thing. And we got together, and it clicked, and we’ve been collaborating ever since. But I’ve always been the passive one. I’ve never reached out to a choreographer and sought to collaborate. I think you should do it, obviously. It’s a great thing to do. ** Okay. I give you a weekend of acid-infused or fake-acid-infused films to trip out to or to fake trip out to. I hope you enjoy the ride. See you in the clear light of day on Monday.