‘Peter Campus, a pioneer in the development of video, has said that his ‘Eureka’ moment came while watching the first Apollo moon landing in 1969. From a beach cottage in New England the artist experienced the dislocation generated by simultaneously witnessing the familiar sun-dappled ocean scene before him and the other-worldly event unfolding in black and white on his TV. Both were undeniably real, both were occurring at the same moment, yet each appeared to negate the primacy or plausibility of the other.

‘In an age when most people who live in big cities can expect to be photographed, monitored or videotaped hundreds of times a day, it is hard to imagine a time when video was new. Because it is not just a medium of recording, but can also feed a stream of live images of anything to anywhere, video not only radically changed the average person’s self image, but also altered forever our collective perception of time, duration and the idea of a fixed perspective.

‘Inspired by Bruce Nauman and others, Campus experimented with video in the early 1970s, initially with camera obscura-like installations that demanded the perambulating presence of the viewer. At the same time he made projections addressing video as a kind of displaced mirror, and using himself as test subject. This show provided a mini-overview of these early works, as well as examples of his later Polaroids – a static medium as close to the ‘live’ reflectivity of video as still photography can get – and recent video works made with the latest digital tools.

‘Three Transitions (1973) demonstrated Campus’ talents as a sort of video Houdini who, while executing various subdued performative tasks and supervising his actions via an off-camera monitor, is intent on exposing the perceptual assumptions that allow the spectator to be fooled. In short episodic clips he made ample use of the blue screen process, a technological breakthrough allowing one live image to be inserted into the background or foreground of another. The technique became ubiquitous to the point of invisibility in television production, but in the early 1970s it was still new, and Campus exploited it to examine the mechanisms by which points of view are constructed.

‘His first ‘transition’ showed the artist approach a large paper screen, his back to the camera, and carefully make an incision in its surface. The gash immediately appears to rip open the rear of his corduroy sports jacket, from which protrude Campus’ tearing fingers. In a flash the viewer realizes that the artist is actually standing on the far side of the partition, the near side acting as blue screen, and that two cameras on either side are recording and combining both images in real time. In another projection, Four Sided Tape (1976), a man’s torso is methodically deconstructed by hands emerging from behind the screen on to which the image is projected. Even simpler is Third Tape (1976), in which a jumble of mirrored tiles is slowly placed on a table-top, the random heap reflecting a fragmentary portrait of the face of the person performing the act, one that is continually in flux.

‘This fragile construction and annihilation of images as a metaphor for the tenuous construction of self are a constant in Campus’ work – hence all the destroyed paper screens (he burns one of them in another video), layered images, mirror shards and ephemeral reflections. Campus intentionally never used video cameras with viewfinders, but relied instead on the monitor as a surrogate eye, disrupting the notion that the lens represents the privileged vantage point of the self. Despite Rosalind Krauss’ claims concerning the intrinsic ‘narcissism of video’, this scattering of perspective implies a lack of centrality for both artist and observer.

‘The strain of melancholic self-reflection in Campus’ projections also permeates his high contrast, black-and-white Polaroid portraits from the late 1970s and 1980s, made during a 17-year hiatus from video. Again he used the idea of instantaneous photographic feedback as a reflective surface, and the portraits evolved through a process of collaboration with each sitter. Typically, he would take an initial photograph and show it to his subject, whose emotional response to the image would register and gradually alter the appearance of each successive shot.

‘On viewing the new DVDs made since his return to video in the late 1990s, one’s first inclination is to think that Campus has gone all soft and sweet. Presented on small flat screens, his digitally edited loops are beautiful in a way that his early work never was. Assembled using crisply phrased and montaged clips – a muddy path in the woods, a gardener pulling weeds, an index finger tracing the path of an electrical cord – they exude enough lyricism to make one downright suspicious. But repeated viewings of the lushly hypnotic works begin to erode such wariness, and what remains is a more finely gradated and personal elaboration on Campus’ doubt about the stability of images and identities.

‘In Divide (2001), a humming-bird fluttering in slow motion over a blood-red feeder is spliced together with an image of the empty corner of a room. The marriage of the two apparently unrelated realities eventually proves too fragile to be sustained, and the bird’s image is wiped away like chalk from a blackboard, leaving only a dead, sun-bleached interior. To some degree there has always been both a terror and acceptance of the transitory nature of vision in Campus’ work, which may simply be growing more richly dream-like as his images come closer to home.’ — James Trainor, Frieze

 

____
Stills

 

_____
Further

Peter Campus Website
Peter Campus @ Cristin Tierney Gallery
peter campus video ergo sum
Peter Campus on his most famous work and why he hates it
PETER CAMPUS: IMAGE AND SELF, by Bill Viola
Book: ‘Peter Campus’ (les presses du réel)
Les vidéos désarmantes de Peter Campus
PETER CAMPUS, TROUBLE FACE
Video: Peter Campus Presents His Version of the Star-Spangled Banner
Peter Campus : Quand l’Amérique ne reconnaît pas un de ses génies
PETER CAMPUS: EXISTENTIALISM AND A HALF-LIFE IN VIDEO
Peter Campus: When America fails to recognise one of its own geniuses

 

_______
Extras

Peter Campus, The Artist Studio

Peter Campus at Jeu de Paume, Concorde – Paris / Portrait filmé

Excerpt: Peter Campus exhibition “Before this Moment”, and documentary

peter campus: notes on landscape

 

________
Interview
from BOMB

 

John Hanhardt Do you feel there was a movement from the exploration of the inner self in the Three Transitions videotapes, for example, to an exploration of the self as a reflection, to a cognitive exploration of the self as in the series of installations: mem and Shadow Projection? It would be interesting to know how you locate that shift from video to still photography.

Peter Campus For me what was important was not the switch from video to photography, but from the interior to the exterior. The interior examinations became overwhelming. Particularly the photographic series I did of faces that showed in Cologne and Berlin—which were very stark and severe. They came after Head of a Man with Death on His Mind, this projected, silent, barely moving, black and white image of a man’s face staring at the camera. I went from that video projection piece to photo-projection pieces called Man’s Head, and Woman’s Head [1979], high contrast black and white Polaroid photographs produced in the studio. They continued that idea of confrontational imagery and it just became too much for me. I had to stop. So I started looking at an industrial, burned-out landscape. I found the exploration not so different in a way: those first landscape pictures were harsh. Then I turned to bridges, Bear Mountain Bridge, the Roebling Bridge on the upper Delaware River. Finally, from there, I went into nature. But I was still looking for what I called “resonance” in what I was feeling. I wouldn’t go out to photograph a tree or a stone or a rock; I never felt that the subject of my work was trees, rocks, or stones—I felt that they were in many ways a continuation of my internal examination, that they were reflecting my mood in nature. The difficulty is that often that’s not what’s communicated. It is subtle and not direct. Often people misunderstand work, or, let’s say it’s expected that people have different interpretations than I do of my work. The nature pieces with the 4×5 camera were received very differently from the way I saw them.

JH I remember the response was that they recalled 19th century photography and its rhetorical form of image making, black and white photography of the natural landscape shot with a large-format camera. This idea of interior looking that you just referred to brings me back to something fundamentally important about your work: how you think about looking is translated and motivated by the different media you’ve worked with. The relationship between the single-channel videotapes from the early ’70s, the exploration of time as a means to compose and construct the image, and the viewer’s participation within interactive man-made environments that shatter projection have lead toward a refined understanding of the medium, both in its placement in an art historical discourse and in the viewer’s reception of it. I’m trying to construct that movement through traditional photography into digital image making and recomposing the still image by using new media, creating a new kind of representation, and your eventual return to video and the moving image, this time using digital techniques. This is one of the most extraordinary sequences embodied in an individual artist’s work in the late 20th century. It’s all so encompassing, profoundly investigatory and powerful. Can you discuss shifts that you made between these two different media—video and photography—and how you felt you were changing the media, or what issues you were responding to?

PC I probably wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying this five years ago, or maybe even now, but often emotional necessity overrides intellectual necessity. In the ’80s, it was necessary for me to be in the woods, at least part of the time. I needed to look backward from the present instead of forward. I needed to work in classical photography. I tried to keep the investigation, at least the emotional aspect of the investigation, somewhat consistent. It obviously couldn’t be, but I was trying to carry that along into nature. By working in digital photography, I found I was able to more directly explain what I wanted to say. It wasn’t through the subtleties of the photographic medium, but by direct intervention, placing images in direct correspondence one to another. Because of digital imaging, I was able to reconstruct and change images more convincingly than I was able to do in straight photography. I would never give up the eight years that I spent in large-format photography—it was great, and crucial, in fact, for setting up the digital phase.

JH Peter, I’m looking at this as a historian, and as somebody examining the different stages of a career. One can impose a conceptual grid on that by saying you were moving from one type of formal invention, one set of strategies, to another as you have moved through these different media. But that is not to say that there isn’t a profound engagement with yourself.

PC The most important thing for me is to find myself in my work, in the context of the present.

JH So, this conceptual way I’ve been talking about your work shouldn’t overshadow the power of that work, which is how it reveals the self. Whether it’s layers of the body being exposed in Three Transitions; the reflection of the viewer through projected closed-circuit video in the installation works of that period, such as Kiva [1971] and Stasis [1973]; or the turn to nature and the subsequent presentation of the projected video still-image, Head of a Man with Death on His Mind that shows the surface as somehow speaking to the interior, to the profoundly emotional and the cognitive. In the nature photos I see this as a powerful compositional moment. It is a turn outward, an interpretation of the natural landscape that gives the work significance and power. The digital imagery raised another set of issues in terms of composition—your use of color and the development of aesthetics, the images of pure beauty you were using in the ’90s, such as Stuff [1994], and in other digital collages of found images and of objects drawn from nature. That has continued in Mont Désert, the sets of videotapes that marked your return to the moving image and has continued into your most recent work. I’d like to focus on that transition to the idea of the beautiful image, which is partially located in nature but also, fundamentally, in the reflection of yourself in nature. So many of the images you were composing digitally and that you brought to video recently, include yourself; your partner Kathleen; your loved ones; people who are important to you. That feels like a very conscious change. Is it?

PC I’m not sure that there is a direct way to answer—I wouldn’t even call that statement a question. (laughter) It’s almost to the point of why I’m an artist. I had a very dramatic childhood—with the death of my mother and living in seclusion. Art—painting—was a way to get out of it and to communicate some of what I was feeling. As I went through college and studied psychology and then went on to work in the film business, art became an exalted dreamlike place. I’ve almost managed to keep it that way for the 30 years I’ve been doing it. I would say my reasons for making art haven’t changed that much—the most basic reason was to communicate what I couldn’t communicate any other way. That doesn’t deny that when I first entered video, I was really excited by what video specifically was—not necessarily broadcast video—but how this invention that pretty much coincided with my life could be used to make art. The first use of television was 1936 or 1937.

JH And the PortaPack was introduced in 1965 . . .

PC I didn’t use the PortaPack at first: it seemed to me not video. It seemed related to the film camera. To me, pure video was made with cameras you couldn’t see through; they were surveillance cameras. I constructed open camera pieces that were interactive.

JH With the projection?

PC People would actually enter into the projection and interact. I see a lot of work now that’s called interactive—the interactivity is to press a button or set off a series of sequences by moving this way instead of that way. But the projection really engaged the viewer to become, literally, a part of the piece.

JH But didn’t it also reflect and represent the viewers, causing them to see themselves in other, new ways?

PC Each piece proposed that you see yourself in a slightly different way from this perspective and to coordinate that with another view of yourself.

JH So does this fusion of the cognitive and the psychological come out of your own interest and studies? Your own kind of recovery of yourself through art?

PC Right.

JH That was what you were communicating in those first pieces. With what communities were you exchanging these ideas?

PC As an artist, I was very aware of what was going on with me; but as a person, I’ve always been reclusive. I was influenced by Bruce Nauman’s work, shown at the Castelli gallery in 1969. That set my work on track. They were single images in an installation situation that were hour videotapes of repetitive movement. They were extraordinary. I still think they’re extraordinary. They talked about the very potential of the medium. There was the other direction I did not go in, which was similar to, let’s say, Nam June Paik—where there would be a montage of images. A barrage of images. Where the idea was—I think the idea was—that the image wasn’t as important as the situation.

JH It was a total experience. When we look at the early ’70s and late ’60s, there was an enormous range of activity in video. There was work within performance, body art, conceptual art, there was Paik, image processing, there were community-based video collectives . . . and it was all happening at the same time. Were you aware of all that? Were you also aware of Michael Snow’s films and film installations? Were you aware of Paul Sharits’s films?

PC Definitely. He used to be at Millennium Film Archives. There used to be showings most evenings: Stan Brakhage, Ed Emschwiller, Bruce Conner . . .

JH The Bykert Gallery showed installations later.

PC And I first showed at Bykert.

JH So you were aware of the culture of the moving image and installations; these were all things that you were conversing with.

PC Right, very much so. Very interested. Aldo Tambellini’s Black Gate Theater in New York.

JH I’m trying to recover that whole history in terms of exhibitions and writing. It’s become very restricted—there are just one or two slices that people are aware of. It is an effort to put it all back together again and see the cross-movements between the work that was being done then—documentary, image processing, conceptual, performance, installation work for television—and the work being created now. When I lecture today, I show your videotape Three Transitions. Viewers seeing that work for the first time are shocked by its transformation of the body and face in the pieces employing chroma-key, two-camera setups. It provokes people to think about portraiture in new ways. When one sees your installations in museums and galleries, displayed alongside new work by younger artists, one really sees them as a powerful resource: the precedent to this whole new generation starting to work with video.

PC Many of them have never seen the work of their predecessors.

JH Yes, but you are one of the teachers.

PC NYU, where I teach, is just beginning to introduce the idea of history in video.

JH Don’t you think that comes through in your teaching: the fact that your work informs the work your students are making now?

PC No. My strength as a teacher is being able to see what the student is trying to do and help him or her to move on with it. I know a lot of people present their ideas to the students; I’ve just never been that kind of teacher. Most places where I’ve taught have had almost no sense of history. In the lecture that you gave at the Guggenheim downtown where you linked film history with video history—that seemed so key. After seeing your lecture, I started showing films in my classes thinking, Yes, of course, this is obviously right. Why do we think of video as being separate from the rest? It’s helped tremendously, allowing us to talk about montage editing, and sequencing, and also, to a lesser extent, what’s going on in movie theaters. Talking about what’s going on in the movie theaters leads us to talk about what is going on in the galleries. What is installation art? For example, in a class last night, a student tried to describe a video piece that she saw at DIA, and she was only talking about the images. I said, “Wait a minute, tell me what you saw in that room. Was the room dark, was the room light? What was this image projected on? A wall? A screen? Where was this image coming from, was it from a projector? Where was the projector? If you walked into a room and saw a piece of sculpture, you would be able to describe every bit of it. But you walk into a video installation as though the equipment isn’t there.” Strong exceptions are works that began to show up five years ago; Gary Hill is really using the equipment as part of the installation—and Tony Oursler.

JH What I think has been central to the art of the 20th century has been the movement of the moving image from film through video, electronic media and television, to the Internet, digital imaging, Web sites, CD-ROM, and DVD. The expanding place . . .

PC Well, we don’t know about that last part.

JH But the web is a place where you can capture the moving image.

PC We don’t know yet. I work really hard to get good quality; the quality of the web is awful. Maybe that will change.

JH Technically, it’s a quality that can still be exploited. Remember, back in the early ’70s, black and white video was reel-to-reel. It was seen as poor quality in comparison to film. Yet it was a different medium, and artists exploited and explored that difference to create an art form out of video. Following that line of argument, I would say that there is a quality of difference that can inform it, but still have this continuing basis of the moving image—which I think is a powerful trajectory.

PC That is how we should think of it. To some extent, I was surprised with the way that Bill Viola was talking about the death of video—that it will only be part of some small period of time. But yes, it is time to think in terms of just the moving image. The trouble with that is the dominance of movies in our culture.

JH Right. There is a profound difference between independent media artists working with film and video, from television production and the mainstream film industry. Those are the issues that you’re talking about with your students: How do you describe what you see? There are also the narrow art-historical paradigms: art historians who don’t deal with the moving image and film historians who don’t deal with art installation. We need to give the study of the media arts a theoretical basis of understanding and interpretation. That is what is so exemplary about your career, Peter—this movement, the basis and understanding of film and the movement through video. Three Transitions, in which you employed chroma-key in the television studio, was done at the WGBH-TV lab in 1973.

PC With the technicians screaming out of earshot, “What is this? Why are we doing this?” (laughter) And the producer, Fred Barzyk, saying, “What is this crazy person doing?”

JH Where do you place your moving image work from the early ’70s within this historical trajectory through different media? Was it somehow linked to your work in the early ’90s, when you began to move back to video and the moving image?

PC ’94, ’95.

JH The 20 year interim from 1973 to 1994 preceding your return to video was filled with photographs and digital images. What brought you back to the medium? What was the quality of that experience, and what was the difference over time? It felt like there was a rediscovery.

PC It’s hard to answer those questions because they are so deep in my psyche. They’re buried down in there. Now that I’m back working in video, I know that’s my real love, that’s what I feel comfortable in. In a sense, it’s what I was trained in. I went to film school. I don’t entirely know what my reasons were for stopping the video work, I’ve given lots of glib answers and some not so glib . . . the easiest answer is that I wanted to stop working in the moving image. There were other things going on. It was nine years of a lot of frustration; I felt that I was successful at it, and yet there wasn’t any way to support myself. Subsequently, I went into teaching. At this point, I probably regret giving it up, but there was this monetary drawback, and I was feeling that drawback all the time.

 

___________
12 of Peter Campus’ 83 works

_________
Kiva (1971)
‘Kiva–the title refers to a kind of ceremonial room used by Native Americans of the Southwest for ritual and spiritual ceremonies–comprises a monitor with a closed circuit camera mounted on top; the lens is pointed directly at the viewer of the monitor, but the camera’s view is restricted and manipulated by the placement of suspended mirrors. The camera shoots through a hole in one mirror to the surface of the other, both constantly shifting in relation to each other as they turn like a mobile. The mirrors fragment and multiply the image, allowing the camera to take in aspects of the room, the viewer, and the eye of the camera itself.’ — University of Michigan

My Experience of “Kiva”

 

______________
Interface (1972)
‘A sheet of transparent glass is set up in a darkened room. On the wall behind this sheet of glass there is a closed-circuit video camera, directed towards it. Four metres in front of the camera there is a video projector which projects the live video signal from the camera onto the sheet of glass. When the visitor moves into the recording area in front of the transparent glass surface, his/her reflection – the wrong way around – and his/her video image – the right way around – appear on it simultaneously and life-sized. Depending on where the visitor is standing, the two images are visible either next to each other or partially overlapping.’ — Slavko Kacunko

Experience

Experience

 

_____________
Three Transitions (1973)
‘Three Transitions is one of the seminal works in video art. It was conceived in the decade of Peter Campus’ greatest creative intensity and thanks to its pioneering nature it has become one of his most widely known works. The video consists of three short exercises or “transitions” in which Campus employs different visual and spatial effects. Throughout the video, the artist displaces and superimposes takes of his own body, which he makes interact with each other using chromo-key techniques. Three Transitions set up many of the paradigms used recurringly by Campus from that point forward, particularly his self-absorbed position as subject and object of the image, and also the use of video resources to contemplate perception and self. The making of the video coincided with Campus’ visit to Boston as an artist in residence of the experimental program New Television Workshop, sponsored by the public broadcasting network WGBH. The innovative philosophy of WGBH led it to develop a policy of active support for visual experimentation by artists of the first generation of video art.’ — Museo Reina Sofía

 

______________
Shadow Projection (1974)
‘Encountering one of these pieces in person is a haunting, unforgettable experience. The room is dark and its dimensions unclear. A glowing pale blue rectangle of light illuminates one wall. As you approach, the rectangle suddenly comes alive with a disorienting burst of light, movement and shadow. Quickly you realize that you are seeing your own image projected live on the wall in black and white. You look at yourself as if seeing a ghost. The pale, fragile quality of the light and tenuous consistency of the image speak of impermanence. Then, as in most unexpected encounters with your own likeness, you discover that you are not what you seem to be.’ — Bill Viola

Peter Campus discusses his work Shadow Projection

 

__________
R-G-B(1974)
‘Writes Campus, “My most dryly stated tape, free of insinuation, [R-G-B] is simply the exploration by a performer of the color system in which he is trapped, much like a prisoner pacing off his cell.” Campus the performer creates a self-portrait within the technical system, transforming video space as he manipulates color physically, mechanically and electronically. Staring directly into the camera, he first places multicolored gels on the lens, then projects slides of pure color. Exploring video’s electronic color system, he points the camera at a monitor and adjusts the color switches, creating a chain reaction, a video “hall of mirrors.” Finally, he totally immerses his figure in saturated fields of electronic video color, his body ultimately submerged in the technology.’ — letterboxd

Excerpt

 

_____________
Head of a Man with Death on His Mind (1978)
‘In Head of a Man with Death on His Mind [1978] the artist video-recorded the still face of actor John Erdman. Through framing and lighting, the face is subtly transformed to become a stark dramatic presence. The vaguely threatening quality is enhanced by the barely visible movement of the recorded image. Thus the portrait has a heightened psychological power, breathing life of its own.’ — John Hanhardt

Excerpt

 

__________
circa (1987)
‘Around 1987 Campus began a series of large-scale projections of shells and stones that recalled his series of faces and his photographic work. This new series united and clarifed the underlying logic behind what had previously seemed disparate activities. They provide barely enough light for visitors to manoeuvre, transforming the space into a sort of maze in which each rock, its outlines hazy, floats on a black field that seems to extend ad infinitum. It is impossible to intuit their scale. Surface details dissolve into abstract patterns of ridges and divots, speckles and bands. Blacks read as negatives, greys as positives, indicating that some materials reflect more than others and underscoring that what we are seeing is ultimately not an object but light. What is important, then, is not the rocks or the images thereof, but the spaces around them: the field of the projection that isolates them, the room in which the works are presented and the darkness with which they visually merge. Viewing becomes a spatial, physical experience that compresses the geologic time implied by the surface details of the stones, a hint of some past process of erosion or eruption, the photographic moment at which each object was recorded and the transitory duration in which the images are presented and seen.’ — ArtReview

Excerpt

 

______________
barn at north fork (2010)
‘barn at north fork  involves the frontal image of a barn that gradually mutates in color. This work not only modulates the flow of time but break up the image’s visual continuity with large rectangles of subtly changing colors that recall the early seascapes of Mondrian, or those of Nicolas de Staël.’ — The Brooklyn Rail

Excerpt

 

_____________
catamaran (2011)
‘In his recent video work, he makes use of digital techniques to work on the image, pixel by pixel, rather like a painter. Using an extremely high-definition digital camera, Peter Campus pursues his current work.’ — Paris Photo

 

______________
red fence (2013)
‘As expanded possibilities of digital editing lured Campus back to video, he reconciled the pictorial and durational components of his art in “videographs”—hybrids of photography and video featuring extended, technologically enhanced still shots. They cultivate heightened attention but offer no particular focus.’ — The Brooklyn Rail

Excerpt

 

______________
nap flower lamp (2015)
‘As the preternatural clarity of the new work updates the uncanny, technological magic of his earliest videos, Campus continues to render the world through the filter of video. Linking past and present, his projections of stones in particular, and their fusion of personal and geological time, assume new poignancy in light of the earth’s uncertain future.’ — The Brooklyn Rail

Excerpt

 

_____________
Convergence d’images vers le port (2016)
‘Convergence d’images vers le port, a work commissioned for Campus’s current Paris retrospective, features extended shots of coastal scenes, simultaneously projected on all four gallery walls. Campus describes it as “anti-cinematic,” since it obliges us to shift attention across the walls. Animated by subtle movements of water and the labors of fishermen, the clips fade into black and white as they end—an allusion to the origins of video and photography in black and white, but also an intimation of mortality.’ — The Brooklyn Rail

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David! ** Misanthrope, Hi, George. I think basically your interpretation of the girlfriend vs. boyfriend thing is entirely correct. Hm, interesting about those reactions. I only get that when it’s people I know for some strange reason having nothing to do with us being natural friends like, say, with members of my family. That’s life, yes. I don’t think of you and me as guys who don’t agree on things, how weird. However, if there’s anyone with whom I don’t think I agree about anything, it’s probably Joe Mills. ** S., Hi. Not a big London fan myself, but it’s a major joint. Even in my pre-16 years old non-vegetarian phase I hated fish and seafood and refused to eat it, strange. ** _Black_Acrylic, You are back, it’s true, hi! That Eleanor Elks Herrmannsen sculpture is nice, I dig it too. Is ‘Dream Deceivers’ the doc about the boy who blew his face off and the trial and stuff? If so, yeah, I remember that being strong. I don’t know if I ever read that Levene/Bladh interview. Cool, thanks! Everyone, Don’t let the week begin without reading this interview with weekend co-star Martin Bladh conducted by Infinity Press author and former DC’s d.l. Shane Levene, which comes courtesy of Mr. _Black_Acrylic. ** Nemo, Hi, Joey. I’m good, thanks. And thanks a lot for the hook up with Sue’s new videos. Just the other day I was thinking/saying how painfully long it has been since I’ve seen new work by her. And she uses a poem of mine in the new work?! That’s news to me. Cool. It wouldn’t be hard to rival my collages, and they certainly did and beyond. You need to tell Jarrod hi right back from me too, please. Love, Dennis. ** That’s it?! Wow, where is everybody? Huh. Well, Peter Campus has a retrospective up here in Paris right now, and it was the most interesting/inspiring show/work I’ve seen in a long time, so, naturally, I made a post to try to share my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, much of his work doesn’t transfer very well at all to this kind of representation, but you can get hints and start your hopeful investigation into his work today at least, if you like. See you tomorrow.

 

Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome
by Jeremy Reed & Martin Bladh
Foreword by Stephen Barber

Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome is a unique collaboration between Jeremy Reed and Martin Bladh that revisits the Jack the Ripper case from a brave new angle. Reed and Bladh are preoccupied less with who Jack the Ripper was than with who he became, his compulsions genetically scrambled into amalgams of hardwired obsession that re-manifest themselves in the figures of Ballard, Burroughs, Bacon, Peter Christopherson and Valerie Solanas, as though history were being driven on by the haywire velocity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, backfiring for a few instants into the poetry of Baudelaire but always centrifuged into the contemporary moment. The figure of Jack the Ripper disintegrates into multiple entities of obsessional creativity and murderous fixations, across London’s wastelanded, scorchearthed streets, only navigable via the blood-spurted vectors emitted from that multiplied figure’s victims.

144 pages, 20x20cm, softbound
First edition limited to 100 copies.

STANDARD EDITION http://infinitylandpress.com/3809199-darkleaks-the-ripper-genome
LIMITED EDITION BOX SET http://infinity-land-press.format.com/3809241-darkleaks-limited-edition-box-set

 

 

_____________________

EXTRACTS

J.G. Ballard and
Robert Vaughan

Robert Vaughan as the alienated anti-hero of Ballard’s Crash; a petrol-head psycho addicted to metallized sexuality, and orgasmic bongo achieved through the erotic geometry of impacting bodies and dashboard  ergonomics, was simply Ballard 2. It was Ballard’s own sexual history sighted the analogy between his partner Claire’s nylon crotch and the triangular groove in the shatterproof smoked-out windscreen glass of a hammered BMW; the woman driver’s legs kicked backwards over her head from an explosive head-on collision. Pre-date Crash by a century, and the novel’s obsessive preoccupation with symphorophilia assumes an unnerving likeness to the injuries inflicted on Whitechapel whores whose submerged sexualities were mapped into ventricular alleys and industrial yards as a diagram of available pubis. Vaughan, or Ballard 2, is the voyeuristic stalker who vicariously shoots extreme genital injuries and facial lesions of crash victims by way of cataloguing their violated bodies. When the Ripper cut he zoomed in like the fictitious Vaughan with his nose mashed on the camera’s display, his orgasm synchronous with the diagrammatic wound inflicted.

Was it ever really 1888 except in sepia photos? Does the nineteenth-century exist outside of reinvented fiction, any more than the emergence of Robert Vaughan in 1973, as the delusional protagonist of Crash, driving a reconstructed Lincoln Continental as weaponised assassin along the network of Western Avenue interchanges and flyovers? Is there a link between the Ballard gene and Jack’s chromosome, as quantum psychopathologies?

Imagine it: a man always in a black fog-dampened greatcoat steps into the Whitechapel ziggurat. The fog’s so light-polluted he can’t even see his leather-gloved hand. When he makes contact with a tangible surface it’s a black warped aviator’s jacket worn by Vaughan as the serial choreographer of kamikaze crashes. Jack pre-emptively fingers 1973 in this way and the contact’s so alien it’s like touching gel coating the future.

Imagine it: the brief exchange of bodies like gay sex conducted through time-travel, or the first act of homosexuality committed in the cabin of a NASA rocket’s interplanetary mission.

Imagine it: Jack re-confronts an empty space like tomorrow and he’s thrown. Vaughan can’t go backwards in time, but the transitory contact alerts him like the metabolised milligrams of a drug to some molecular alteration, some blank that was a yesterday decommissioned by his memory, like you forget the taste of ice cream until reacquainted with green pistachio.

Imagine it: was it sex between two pockets of fog: no Jack, no Vaughan, just two foggy intelligences combining to create an orgasmic opal? Each heard the other walk away separated by a century in a nanosecond, like pulling a sticking plaster off time to find history never existed. Imagine it.

 

______________________

 

Have wanted to be your friend with mi letter
I feel certain amount of sympathy for you

the police about here are fine looking fellows
I had the pleasure of drinking with one this morning and asked him what he thought about my glorious work
I was Injoying my Little Self good

I must say you are clever in finding out things you are quite perfect
keep your spirits up dear Bos and be on your guard
all though this has been written with a beating heart and a shakey hand

Near the spot
I mean to leave it a little longer before I tell you where
I am waiting

Yours till death

 

 

been sharpen-ing my knife
you aint sharp enough for me here

I have done eleven murders so you aint found them out after al

Two gone down suers
the Dear old knife who committed these murders is down the thames

I will do the next one worse than the last
I do it when I get a chance not when I see police coming
I will do it one of those times when a copper looking and then I’ll do
the same to him

 

_________________________

Jewels
– after Baudelaire

Sinuously nude and knowing my fetish
she wears only paste jewellery in bed
her ruby anklets climbing up my back
or pendant spilling as she gives me head.

It’s all that dazzle delivers tempo,
cold lapidary sparkle prompting heat
excites by contrast – what I discover
are Egyptian tattoos under her feet.

She’s abandoned on a crumpled divan
fucked-out but seriously wanting more.
You know the rhythm – it’s like surf breaking
in continuity over the shore.

Her dark eyes go places in their corners,
fixated, drifty, they come back at me:
she shifts position, works up her black hair:
my condoms fuel the latex industry.

Her moka body oiled for me to fuck
I use it as a diagram, a curve
on which to project fantasies – I’m mean –
I screw so many others in her groove

her legs hitching around me like a vine.
If she’s aggressive, then I don’t let go
but maintain apparent serenity –
when she accelerates I do it slow.

Sometimes I see her as a boy-gamine,
narrow torso and round expansive hips,
the highly-sexed always contain this split –
angular cheeks and berry-popping lips.

The floor lamp throws a red cone on the wall
reflective light picks up on her pigment
like sorting garnets – it’s a fact in sex –
you always come outside of the event.

 

A Dead Body
– after Baudelaire

Remember, how on a blue summer’s day –
the shock kicked in like a sizzling taser
we chanced on something rotting in the street
there in a yard junction by the corner

this object with its legs up in the air
like a nyloned whore, corrupt end of time
apocalyptic thing – it wouldn’t rot
and seemed the victim of a psychopathic crime.

The sun demanded Ray-Bans; mine were green,
but this object resisted all meltdown
like nuclear waste: no one else around,
bad things happen on the bad side of town.

Beauty in ugliness: look down; look up
brutal blue sky spatialized on the black:
you couldn’t look at it – I mean the eyes
still registering a red filmed-over shock.

A black busy halo of spotting flies
formed a shape-shifting diagram over
noodles of larvae, composite decay,
and was their industry worth the bother?

The whole thing undulated like a wave,
as though in sexual rhythm, but was dead
and maybe hallucinating sunlight
I saw it change blue, yellow, green and red.

This microcosm, was it alien,
emitted radio waves, a frequency
we’d never heard on the spook side of weird,
the last transmissions of its legacy?

Its form kept changing without frontiers
like slow exposure or some fisted pink
explosion of manipulated paint
projected by Francis Bacon on a drink.

Psycho eyes glaring, jaw propped on a wall,
we saw a guard dog raving to attack
the mess it sighted: constrained by a chain
black muscle rippled across its broad back.

And you, honey, you’ll end up just the same
inside a mortuary – it hit me then
the vision of you decomposed – the thought
flooded my brain cells driving me insane.

I won’t forget it, dread your final end
a poem can’t transcend – it’s cleaner ash
a furnace temperature – not like this rot –
just go in one incinerated flash.

 

__________________________

 

I will cut
out There
Abdomen
I dare say you
Know what
That means

it is not for money but
blood blood blood
I crave for

Bloodworm

 

 

She I ll cut up well
I was going to dror mi nife along of er bloomin throte
I am going to her head off an her legs off
the ears & noses shall be cut off
I shall take her heart left kidney cassues and brains
I take good care of the uterus

I carry a black bag with somethink in that females don’t like
I carried away a part of her
(Conundrum Try & find what part)

I will send you the heart by parcels post
you can show the cold meat

 

______________________

The Old Main Drag

W.S.B. 1970s resident at 8 Dalmeny Court, Duke Street, St James’ Piccadilly, back of Fortnum & Mason. William Burroughs the silver suited, habituated junk spook faded out by daylight and accidentally eyeballing boys on the radial Circus. As a distractive inner discipline he colour-codes blues and greens eliminating all other frequencies. To him it’s like doing urban Mayan without psychedelics.

Was he or wasn’t he as an earlier invention Jack the R without guns? The sartorially precise, hat tilted down man in black, who infiltrated Whitechapel with a mission, and seemingly no traceable ID. Jack was to all accounts a black on black physically invisible assemblage who transmitted sexual impulses in the chilly foggy dark. It wasn’t a curvy gin-dazed hooker he wanted to fuck; it was the brown fog, the softest -mouthed fellatio imaginable in his crypto-erotic vocabulary.

Burroughs mostly understood the parallel processing of living in two different centuries. 1887-88 smelled ruinous, and go to the river you wouldn’t return for marauding gangs hanging out in windowless warehouses like a subspecies consigned to docklands turf wars. W.S.B. sniffs his way forward between centuries, exchanging his identity as Jack. There’s Chinese opium dens up Limehouse way, and rooms where you can smoke on floor mats and mattresses with stoned sailors.

Burroughs is so thin he’s known as invisible – he can beam himself through a wall and come out with his joint still burning. What if he met the real Miss Pamela Dakota down on the docks – subject of Lou Reed’s ‘Downtown Dirt’ (1975) come alive, red hair in a tousled bob to hunt him off the pier deeper into the Ripper precinct. Running from one century to another is like crunching 100 years into a helium-burn 10 minutes. There’s a dash of quantum in it like lime in gin or quantumnised photons called cobits than can only be O, I or an exact superposition of both.

W.S.B. knows intuitively he did something bad in the century he left behind, but he can’t identify it in his genes. If it was pathological homicide then the motive’s come out in different permutations in his writing, like his obsession with guns, and the wife he killed Joan, as a subliminal reality that carried through somehow. Can you be convicted of a crime committed in another century if you confess to it, like a junked plane back from a World War 2 mission suddenly coming out of pink cloud decks to land at Heathrow between two Boeings in from Rome and Berlin with a smell of damp plane fuel circulating in the air?

What do you do if Jack’s genetically coded into your memory and you can’t eliminate the belief you were him. You turn to fiction, maybe, cut-up, non-linear documentation on a narrative chopping board. Burroughs’ Word Hoard – Naked Lunch excerpted from a car park-sized stash of urban metaphors. At St James’ Bill dipped his cigarettes into the pint of cannabis tincture prescribed for him each week. They turned lime green. When he does succeed in picking up a boy, he says ‘call me Jack the Main Drag Ripper, I was around in 1888, and walked here to the action in ten minutes.’

 

_______________________

 

I am so pleased
I have got my knife Replenished so it will answer both for Ladies and Gents
If I cant get enough women to do I shall cut up men boys & girls Just to keep my hand in practise

I am going to take my Knife with me it is nice & sharp & it will kill 10 more mid-ages women & 8 children the oldest shall be 18
again I am going to commit 3 more 2 girls and a boy about 7 years old this time

I like ripping very much especialy women because they don’t make a lot of noise

I riped up a little boy
lots of red raddle spilt
pig sticking I call it

 

 

Just a few lines to tell you I shall begin my knife operation again
i goin to hoperate agin close to you ospitle

I have been having a nice rest but now my rest is over I am going to make a fresh start again

the last job was nice & clean
I have had no hand in it but I think it must be one of my apprentices who has been practising while I have been away

the time is nearly up for another job so look out
the knife is in good condishion and so am I
I am getting tired of my rest and I want to get to work again

I START ONE NIGHT NEXT WEEK
YOU WILL KNOW WHEN I DO

 

________________________

Jack on Jack

It’s me stalking me
a symbiotic wraparound
at zero visibility
magenta fog layering yellow
an iridescent iris
ambient temperature 2°C.
I’m on my back like man on man
apprehended by myself
like a capsule blister pack
compacted into squeeze
same front and back
two-tone green and white
the barcode my personality.
I’m running scared he’s running scared
each heartbeat inseparable
you couldn’t get a nano
in between me and my clone
in this Whitechapel killing lab
I’m programmed into
as serial intelligence
kill the other kill myself optimal
sexual ecstasy, a kick
unrepeatedly terminal,
so follow through this foggy atrium
searching for a delayed dawn

 

A London Fog

Brown off-white menthol green squashed yellow
a black
cadmium-orange smoky violet royal blue smudged red
a no-person
self-identified peripheral fog intelligence
spook country
alien hologram imposter a London
particular
a soluble frontier like an idea
looped by time
into variants where does a thought go
exciting impulse
if it’s not detained an ambient brain
whiter than grey
at the core of it some sort of mania
like you can’t reason
with water when you drown or correct a plane
in its nose-coned drop
a necrotic psychopathy revving
like a smoked-out truck
you can’t see except it senses you
with a single red headlight
a violent unstoppable scarlet LED
a laser that slices a neck
no registration, cloned, unidentifiably
collapsed back into fog
after its sensors kill, the engine dead
as something reverse engineered
day of forever in a rocket shed.

 

_________________________

 

I hope you can read what I have written,
If you can not see the letters let me know and and I will write them biger

THOSE OTHER LETTERS WERE NOT WRITTEN BY ME AT ALL

this is the first note you have from the real man
I can write two or three hands of writing
this is one far from detections
if anybody recognises the writing I shall kill the first female I see in this house or if there is no females I shall be down on the boss
Am trying my hand at disjointing and if can manage it will send you a finger
Excuse red ink The reason of my writing this in ink instead of human
blood is that I was not fool enough to keep any from last jobs in Whitechapel

I will write you again soon

 

 

___________________________

Francis Bacon’s Red Light

Soho’s like scrambled floating Lego when you’re drunk. Its compacted yards, alleys and courts do asymmetrical fits coming off Archer Street into Rupert and scoping north for sexual adventure. Before leaving the jade-painted Colony Rooms he’d kept seeing a distorted face in the bottom of his glass, and it wasn’t George Dyer’s morphed from suited bovver boy into hallucinated bits, but an image he thought somehow he could identify and brutalise in paint. The accusatory features shimmying in a residual film of champagne had started to recur with unnerving regularity, in the way George Dyer had shown in intuitive sightings months before they met, as rude boy masculine ideal he’d always pursued as rough trade in the Soho radius he exploited. Whoever he had sex with generally, was usually the fantasy built up of the one person who constantly eluded him. Tonight when he’d dipped his finger into the glass it had come out trailing a red fretline of blood: vermilion, scarlet, Persian red, he’d tried to label the exactone as specific to his colour obsession. His finger was still bleeding when he hung out briefly in D’Arblay Mews, waiting for his type to come out of the dark.

Out of curiosity he’d pocketed the glass to take back to his radically distressed studio at Reece Mews, and awkwardly fitted it into his grey flannel greatcoat pocket to repeat the experiment back home. He hung out in the drizzled yard for another twenty-minutes, luckless in his quest for opportune sex, before pulling a taxi back to his disordered Kensington Mews bunker.

When he got inside all the neural power juicing his dosed up artistic vision was familiarly there like jet exhaust burning out carbon. He could smell paint as raw energy, and it did something to him like chocolate as a feel-good endorphin hit. He was working ruthlessly on his George Dyer triptych, reinventing facial planes like the body panels of a car folded into disruptive angles on its back, after mounting the central reservation. What he really wanted was to invade George’s afterlife, if there was one, and establish a dialogue at any cost, a sort of telepathic exchange, and one that would bring George Dyer figuratively alive again in thickly layered Dulux pigment. Painting, for him was a means of fucking canvas to reinvent access to resistant ports – Dyer’s body when alive could only be reconfigured sexually, by stepping into it backwards. Now it could be dramatically reassembled to excite in the way mortuary photos had always brought him off by their compatibility with how he imagined altering the body’s sexual frontiers.

He gunned open a bottle of Perrier-Jouët and took the glass out of his pocket. It already had the resinous tang of a hangover filming a furred tongue. And he remembered acutely the lipstick-red carpet at the Hotel des Saint-Peres, close to the boulevard Saint-Germain, where Dyer had ended it all, pills all over the bed, that saturated carnation red that was somehow written into George’s suicide. He’d painted George with his eyes closed, initially in preparatory panels, in which George was seen opening the door of the hotel room where he was going to die, only the background was house paint lilac, unlike the triptych, as a rectangular black slab, in which the collapsed lovers sit either side of a distorted sexual geometry that is explicitly cannabilistic in its self-consuming intensity.

So many of his friends living precariously on the frontiers of alcohol, drugs and criminalised sexuality were dead, demanding he do self-portraiture for lack of conducive subject matter. Consistently making up had taught him an intuitive mapping of his own face, but he could never get it and be it, he could never imagine its reality without altering it through imagination.

He poured out a brimming glass of fizz, the bubbles spitting like a fry-up, and kicked his way into the trashed, chaotic studio. His work always put him on nervous alert, as though it was someone else’s that he’d like to reassemble, but that it was too exhaustively taboo to do so, and he was just left with it as a depressive postscript to what he did with such ferocious eloquence. His dialect was always photos that he could exploit to reconstruct faces at the terminal point of identity, before their features exploded out of recognition. How we imagined ultimate physical mutilation was always his starting point. He was so locked into a singular vision that the loop appeared without exit.

He drank the champagne off, and waited for the face to reappear at the bottom of the glass.

At first, nothing happened, and he started to think he’d imagined it all, and was going through another period of visually disturbing phenomena happening autonomously, the way he painted it. Then the face reappeared, slowly, formatively, a grey molecular oblong with stitched eyes that he didn’t want to open and identify. He closed his own eyes and blanked on the arrival’s features. He was sure it was George spooking him from a 4-D paranormal zone they couldn’t share, like fine grain on medium format film. He’d always feared that George’s suicide wasn’t the end of it, and this residual showing of blood and plasma was in some way connected to his death. He repeated the experiment and his finger bled again, only the random incision was deeper this time and would require a plaster. Like George, his obsession with personal appearance was pathologically obsessive, and he didn’t want blood spotting his cyan shirt or silver YSL jacket.

He was at his most lucid when drunk and dissolving barriers into a meta-reality, like a plane slicing through a cloud platform into bright blue air. For some reason he remembered George telling him in a drunken state in The Golden Lion, that he carried Jack’s gene, and that his family were related to the suspected Ripper. Of course he hadn’t believed it, but with George you were never quite sure, because he looked one way and thought the other, sort of bilaterally.

He stood there under a raw lemon light bulb in the sort of dead space his figures occupied in paintings, an industrial blank.

He couldn’t take the notion of George coming back at him on top of the guilt solidified into him like jam in a sealed jar. On impulse he threw the glass violently against the studio wall, like he’d done so often in viciously aggressive rows, and watched it explode on impact and bleed down the white wall like someone was seriously cut, and he’d never know who or what he’d bled so forcibly in a moment’s drunken rage at 2am in a studio mashed to detritus by the daily manual assault of his art.

 

____________________________

 

_____________________________

LIMITED EDITION BOX SET

 

ALBUM PREVIEW
https://vimeo.com/210051898

Autopsy (Karolina Urbania music / Martin Bladh voice)
https://soundcloud.com/karolina-urbaniak-2/autopsy

What Shall We Do For The Rent? Walter Sickert (Karolina Urbania music /Jeremy Reed voice)
https://soundcloud.com/karolina-urbaniak-2/what-shall-we-do-for-the-rent-walter-sickert

 

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** This weekend the blog has the great pleasure of doing its bit part to focus attention on the birth of this new book co-created by the legendary British scribe Jeremy Reed and the similarly myth-accruing writer/ artist/ sound maker/ performer/ publisher Martin Bladh, just now published through the latter’s superb Infinity Land Press, already home to similarly luxurious-appearing tomes by Philip Best, Michael Salerno, me, and many others. Please enjoy your time in the book’s and post’s company, and thank you for the opportunity, Martin. ** Amphibiouspeter, Hi, welcome, really good to meet you! Thanks a bunch for your kind words about the GIF piece. Sure, I know that feeling you describe extremely well. Yeah, for one thing, the more you write/finish, the more you get used to the pace, and, more importantly, the pace changes and usually gets swifter the more you do because probably a significant part of that time was spent figuring out things that you have now partly figured out and which won’t be as confusing and time-taking now. But, yeah, the writing pace is a slow one. If it helps, making a movie is a hell of a long, too long, process as well. Anyway, big congrats on the getting the draft together. I hope I’ll get to read something by you at some point. Take care, and, obviously, please come back anytime. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, they’re migrating, okay. That’s better news, although it’s a drag because that means all existing links to writings on Keyframe will be dead and useless now. Still, that’s better than death, for sure. ** Steevee, Hi. I kind of expected as much re: the regularity of the Burden doc. Still, excited to see it for the info and footage and background and so on anyway. Initially I chose yellow for a totally practical reason. I wanted to do a color-based, color-driven one, and yellow was the only color where there wasn’t a jarring difference in the look of that color in the GIFs that employed it. With almost every other color, blue, green, orange, and so on, there was way too much variation from GIF to GIF so the wouldn’t have worked the way I needed them to. When I chose yellow, that was when all the associations started becoming very interesting to work with. Thank you very much for asking. ** Damien Ark, Wow, that GIF work must looks nuts in red. I’m tempted to say, Lucky you. Thanks, Damien, and I hope you’re real good. ** Tosh Berman, Thanks very much, Tosh. That’s very heartening, thank you. Well, the first and last chapters of ‘Zac’s Freight Elevator’ are focused on white and black respectively, if they count as colors. There’s a pretty solid Emitt Rhodes ‘Best of’ collection: ‘Listen, Listen: The Best of Emitt Rhodes’ that covers both his solo stuff and the Merry Go Round stuff. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! How very, very nice to see you! Thank you kindly. That’s extremely interesting: what you say about children’s books and how the colors’ trajectory is the propulsion. That’s really fascinating. Yes, applying that idea/premise deliberately in cinema is such an inspired idea. Huh, I will definitely think a lot about that. Thank you very much again, Nick. I hope everything is extremely well with you and yours. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, my allergy makes buying clothes no more interesting or fun than buying toothpaste or toilet paper. I think this weekend, apart from trying to get some work done that I won’t have much time for after Monday, I’ll take it easy-ish. Tonight is ‘Night of the Museums’ — which I think is a cross-Europe thing so maybe you have it there? — where a lot of museums stay open all night and do special events and stuff, so I’ll probably go around and see what’s going on. My day was pretty uneventful, just work and walking around and stuff. No highlights, I don’t think. I know of Kasabian, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard their music. Okay, I’ll rectify my ignorance. Cool, thank you for the tip! And your weekend? Anything planned that seems like it might be golden? ** S., Hey. Yellow’s pretty strong, right? Making that GIF work gave me a new appreciation for its sluttiness. There’s a walking haunted Paris tour that I keep meaning to take. Hysteria is as common as breathing these days, it’s fucking weird. ** Jeff Coleman, Hi, Jeff. Whoa, that’s total news that Wakefield is putting out those Duvert books. I had no idea. That’s utterly fantastic. I’ll pre-score them. Thanks a lot, man. I hope everything has a high degree of greatness in your world. ** Rewritedept, Hi, Chris. Thanks a lot, bud. Tricks are decent, can’t complain. You? Man, sorry about your grandfather. Close or not, that kind of thing is always a blow. Zac and I are locked into spending the entire summer working on the film, yeah, because it needs to be perfectly finished in September. It’s a ton of work, but I’m joyous about it in theory. Glad you popped in. I hope everything with the funeral is tolerable at the very least. ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! That’s a favorite Pollard song of mine. I swiped the title initially because I just love that title, but I ended up using the song as a kind of structuring, underlying guide for the piece in a certain way. Man, I’m so chuffed by and grateful for your amazing attention to the GIF work. That’s just incredibly rewarding to me. Thank you so, so much! And it’s awesome that you did that investigating to understand how the ending flip works. Man, you’re such a dream reader. The flip is partly coming from my use of the Pollard song as a groundwork. Maybe my very favorite thing about that song is that kind of senseless-seeming but so right flip at its end in the lyrics. What is it again … ‘How do the cows keep coming / just to run through the grinder / Please excuse me I’ve lost my girl / and I need to go find her.’ That lyric drives me crazy. Anyway, thank you once again, Chris! Have an extremely swell weekend! And, yes I just got the new Alex G album yesterday, It’s so, so good! I just love that guy’s stuff. ** H, Hi. Thank you very much. I often wonder how I would dress if I didn’t have the allergy. But then I remember how I used to dress before the allergy appeared in 1991, and isn’t so different, mostly just much, much less colorful. Here’s heavily hoping that heat diminishes as soon as now. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Thanks! Nice about all of those happy associations with yellow. I guess it’s a pretty upbeat color, at least if you don’t think about jaundice and things like that. I applaud your mysterious boldness, no surprise, and I hope it ends up paying off. Please say whatever else you can when you can. Great weekend to you! ** Bill, Hi, Bill. That’s interesting about the slower pace. I had that feeling and intention, but I wasn’t sure if would pan out. Thank you! Do catch the Lynn Hershmann show if you can and tell me about it if you do, please. I hope San Francisco proves to be a great envelope for your weekend! ** Right. With that, please turn your attention to the new and exciting book that you either see above these words right now or will if you scroll up just a little bit. See you on Monday.