Please welcome to the world … Alex Kazemi New Millennium Boyz (Permuted Press), hosted by James Nulick

Well, does he like butter tarts? New Millennium Boyz by Alex Kazemi
by James Nulick

Oh god, not another critic

Let’s get this out of the way—I am not a professional book critic, I’m a writer. Despite my somewhat questionable talent for stringing beautiful words into pretty baubles, I’m all left thumbs when it comes to literary analysis. Whenever a friend asks what a book or a film is about, I always freeze, eventually saying airheaded things like uh just read it, it’s really good, or nah man it’s bad, but when I saw the excitement swirling around the imminent release of Alex Kazemi’s debut novel New Millennium Boyz, I decided to read it and write a review of it—as a critical reader, not as a critic—exclusively for Dennis Cooper’s venerable and well-loved blog DC’s.

I fake it so real, I am beyond fake

New Millennium Boyz is, quite simply, a search for authenticity in a world so obviously fake. Brad Sela is seventeen on the cusp of the millennium, that huge nonevent that was supposed to change everything. I remember the excitement of 1999 on the social odometer building to the release that became George W. Bush a year later. Sitting at a bar in New Orleans with my father on October 3, 2000—the same day Radiohead’s Kid A was released—my father, a lifelong Democrat from Arkansas, glared intently at the first presidential debate on the flatscreen hovering above our heads and said there’s no way this sonofabitch will win, son. Meaning Bush. Alas, father… Brad, always afraid that he’s a fake, a poser, bristles whenever his friend Lusif, also known as Lu, makes the charge. Your manufactured, corporate-calculated good-boy image is never going to be real. When we become what we fear we will become, the fear is intensified when someone else notices. Lu, always badgering Brad’s itinerant homosexuality, never fails to remind him he’s a phony—the word fake, in its various iterations, appears 48 times in New Millennium Boyz. The tone of the novel begins to shift around page 117, becoming more serious, less teenage? Or are adults just as obsessed with image as teenagers are? Image is more important than how you feel, page 200. Wait a minute, adults don’t judge others solely on image, do they? Need I remind you Gore lost because people thought he was a cardboard cutout. I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.

Brad, Just Admit It…

He only loves those things
Because he loves to see them break
—Hole, Doll Parts

The word dick, hilarious when you’re twelve, silly when you’re not, appears in New Millennium Boyz 129 times. That’s a lot of dick. There are more ass grabs and towel smacks per square inch than you can shake a dick at… where were all these lust-filled straight boys when I was a teenager? Seventeen is a weird age—or do you not remember? On the edge of voting age, at least in the United States, where New Millennium Boyz takes place—the Pacific Northwest is the feeling I get, though Kazemi is Canadian—teenagers are almost completely invisible except to every marketing agency selling sex to underage teens. Does trailer park flesh-smeared Calvin Klein ads or penis-faced Joe Camel ring a silver bell? Youth, a hot commodity that burns very quickly, is constantly told buy this, buy that, look like this, become more popular with the perfect deodorant! But how can you become more popular, more real, in a society where everyone is fake? This is the sad truth Brad Sela is battling for three hundred pages and let me tell you—the struggle is real. Do you not remember, when you were a teenager, how you thought everyone was stringing you along? Do you remember, when you became an adult, how you still felt that way? Sitting in his underwear, talking into a video camera, likely the ever-present Handycam of the late Nineties, Brad asks an unseen audience a la Elliot Rodger What if corporations are watching me aspire to be what they created of me? Everyone at school makes fun of the posers and try-hards, but what if everyone is a poser and a try-hard? Unfortunately, my brain is a platen, and all the bad things in my teenage years have been stored on a hard drive that continues to age yet refuses to forget, and this line rings totally true to me. So many times during my reading of New Millennium Boyz, like screaming at the dumb teenage girl on the screen who goes down the stairs into the dark basement without a flashlight or protection in a thousand cheesy horror movies, I just wanted to shout at these two clueless boys, Brad and Lu, YOU’RE GAY! echoing Elaine Benes’ hilarious YOU’RE BALD! scene from Seinfeld. If Lusif wasn’t so obsessed with being a fake hard-ass school shooter and an overly dramatic Satanist (is there any other kind?) perhaps he’d recognize the love that dare not speak its name, a true love he is willing to toss away for a phosphor dot idealization that means absolutely nothing. Read Nietzsche and Susan Sontag and shut the fuck up, poser. Brad’s epistolary girlfriend, Aurora, the solitary light in all this darkness, advises him to search for love in the room everywhere you go, self-actualizing Brad’s I’m obsessed with you, dude fluorescing into a sex scene between Brad and Lusif that unfortunately never happens. Over several friendly email exchanges between Alex and myself—the young man who shies away from social media and the old man resigned to it—I asked him WHY DID BRAD AND LU NOT HAVE SEX?! I WANT BRAD AND LU TO HAVE SEX!! This book is so Fifty Shades of Gay, Alex! Writing back, Alex advised me that was the whole point, to replicate the mass market romances that get Amazon kindle moms moist, minus the hothouse sex scenes. Yabut some of us old creeps like those over-the-top bodice-ripping sex scenes, Alex. **SIGH**

Virginal Mushrooms

Full disclosure: I read Alex Kazemi’s debut novel New Millennium Boyz from cover to cover, all 326 pages. I am not a toe-dipper, I’m a careful, conscientious reader, as I would hope most serious readers of literature are. A few weeks before New Millenium Boyz dropped, I noticed some prerelease hate springing up almost overnight, like virginal mushrooms gathering in mommy’s basement, on that most Walmart of book review sites, Goodreads. Despite a few marketing flubs, why all the Kazemi hate, which appeared to be directed at the author, rather than the work? I would posit it’s because Kazemi is famous—internet famous—and the haters are not. We hate what we can’t become, yeah? New Millennium Boyz isn’t perfect, obviously, as all human endeavors are imperfect, especially creative ones, and when was the last time you read a perfect novel? Heads up, class—perfection is boring, perfection doesn’t exist, perfection kills joy. I can forgive New Millennium Boyz its faults because our protagonist Brad, afraid he is a poser, intuitively knowing he’s a poser, is at least trying. When Brad is sitting in the back seat of Lu’s car blowing fog on the window, he thinks I wish I could be in this car forever and never have to know what happens after. Teenage angst pays off well if you manage to live long enough, realizing that, with the wisdom that hopefully comes with old age, we are always going to be an unfinished version of ourselves.

Strange synchronicities, Interesting bachronisms

As I was reading New Millennium Boyz, I began noticing interesting synchronicities between Alex’s work and my own. We both discuss Marilyn Manson (NMB, Distemper). We both fantabulate over Canadian killer Luka Magnotta (NMB, Haunted Girlfriend). We both ponder Adolf Hitler (NMB, Distemper). We both obsess over Richard D. James, the genius known as Aphex Twin (NMB, Distemper, The Moon Down to Earth). Oh, and let’s not forget Adidas slides and Adidas tracksuits (NMB, Distemper, The Moon Down to Earth, Lazy Eyes). I thought I was the only writer in the world who had mentioned “Steal My Sunshine” in a novel, a one hit blunder by Canadian band Len, a song I secretly love but told everyone I hated back in 1999… I didn’t want to look supremely uncool as I was toe-dipping into thirty—I had to keep my Joy Division and The Cure black-cloaked goth shellac unmarred by sugary pop nonsense. My jaw about hit the floor when I read the reference to “Steal my Sunshine” in New Millennium Boyz, page 24—the song makes an appearance in my 2020 novel The Moon Down to Earth, page 384—the character Jace Jason fondly recalls hearing the song playing on the radio (or was it on a CD?) in his mixed-race parents’ car. Like two Tamagotchis fumbling towards each other in the dark, I felt Alex and I were somehow simpatico, our brains connective tissue stretching like Laffy Taffy Sparkle Cherry across the multiverse. Laughing to myself, I began thinking, to quote Keanu in Richard Linklater’s brilliant film A Scanner Darkly, bruh, it’s like you know me… lolz. How are me and this young Canadian author so Fruity Pebbles friendship bracelet? I found the bachronisms (my word for stuff that didn’t really happen during the period piece imagined, this period being late 1999) in New Millennium Boyz quite entertaining, sometimes hilariously so. Dick prints weren’t a thing in 1999, only creepy old men wore grey joggers—at least in the United States. Brad and his friend Shane occasionally wear Levi’s 501s. Teenagers in the United States didn’t wear Levi’s 501s in 1999, to my knowledge—you would’ve been laughed out of the classroom. Those old-fashioned nut huggers had long been abandoned for JNCO, Interstate, and SilverTabs, the Levi’s 501s of yesteryore relegated to nursing homes and 55+ inactive adult communities. Perhaps most interesting, a sly reference to Luka Magnotta, Canadian sex killer and drama queen magnifique, who had written the lines If you don’t like the reflection, don’t look in the mirror. I don’t care in red marker in his closet after murdering Lin Jun (NMB, page 288). Lin Jun was murdered in 2012, a universe away from the loose and freewheeling late 1990s. When I asked Alex about the Luka Magnotta reference via email, his response FUCK YEAH!! YOU’RE THE FIRST PERSON TO SEE IT! DUDE! made me feel vindicated for all the nights I’d spent with Alex’s filigreed and much maligned novel, attentive as a jeweler, searching for Pikachu Easter eggs I felt were written solely for me. But then this is what a novel is supposed to be, right? A meeting of our conscious and the author’s melded together seamlessly via strange black hieroglyphics lasered on paper, sexualized violence blooming in the private theater of conjoined minds.

The truth is out there, and it’s a lie

New Millennium Boyz will have its detractors, of course. Half-pint critics spelunking for bejeweled Nabokovian sentences will be disappointed, and anhedonian haters may claim the dialogue tastes slightly metallic to the tongue. May I remind you the narrator is seventeen years young—how did you sound when you were seventeen? Blessed be those who didn’t have a Sony Handycam recording every idiot utterance, every poor choice in clothing. Allowing that teenage boys were likely not reading Prozac Nation in 1999 and anticipating readers would likely think teenage boys don’t really talk like this, Kazemi says in a recent Vanity Fair article teenage boys don’t talk like this, it’s cinematic, it’s a fantasy. Fantasy allows for a warped or distorted image if the reader is willing to accept it. Both of Brad’s Boomer parents talk like image-obsessed cardboard cutouts. Perhaps some adults really do talk like this. Charlie Brown’s teacher, Al Gore dancing on the ceiling in New Orleans? And how many readers would acknowledge poor clothing choices when they were a teenager, or perhaps even older? I’m no fashion expert, but I do recall 1999 being a big baggy ass shotgun year that was a lot more fun—and freer—than anything happening in fashion or politics now. Already an old man in 1999—29 years old, Kazemi’s age now—I readily admit to owning a pair of JNCOs way back when, and, perhaps even more horrifying, wearing them in public. I am only thankful there is no Handycam evidence. Again, recalling that easy night sitting at the bar in New Orleans with my father, Brad’s line—or is it Shane’s? Dialogue is unattributed, fusing the characters even more—How much we are always in the same places, doing the same things, and nothing ever interrupts this boring pace of our lives rings as true now as it did then, even as every butterfly ballot and every pregnant chad magically escorted Bush towards an eventuality that installed him at the threshold of the White House doors. When the world is manufactured, as ours most certainly is, when there is no choice because all your choices are predetermined, what’s the point? Towards the end of the novel, Brad and his friend Shane share an exchange, a discussion most teenagers have likely had amongst themselves, in the privacy of their own bedrooms, since forever—No one is looking out for us. No one cares. I don’t exist to the world. I’m fine with that. I remember saying almost the exact same thing to a friend nearly forty years ago. Nothing changes, the toys just get shoddier. The world totally feels like fake plastic garbage now, doesn’t it? Everything is disposable, and people are more disconnected than ever. Where is the information superhighway I was promised so long ago, the information autobahn that was going to bring everyone together, if I only had your vote?

We’ll make great pets

New Millennium Boyz will have its detractors, of course, but if a novel’s protagonist, even if he is unlikable, is searching for some kind of truth, as Brad Sela of New Millennium Boyz certainly is, aren’t the flaws forgivable? What was the name of that perfect novel, again? We’re all searching for our own truth, and when we were younger, before jobs, children, pets, a rent payment, even more so. And what is truth, after all? The world doesn’t change, even when you think you’ve finally found it. The more you expose, the more invisible you become.

Excerpt

No One Sees Us

We sit on a bench as I look at engravings on the pebble stone beneath us: hearts, stars, devil heads. I pick up an empty beer bottle and whistle into it.
—-Lu screams, “Fuck off! That sound is so annoying!”
—-“Yo, Lu, check it. This is your brain!”
—-“Oh my fucking God.”
—-“This is what happens to your brain when you snort heroin!” I smash the bottle on the pavement. “And your friends! And your family! Any questions?”
—-Lu claps his hands. “I have tears.”
—-“I haven’t laughed this hard in so long.”
—-“Who is in that commercial again?”
—-“The firecrotch skank from She’s All That.”
—-“All that commercial made me want to do is run to the nearest crack house and shoot the fuck up!”
—-“‘It takes one day! One day to get addicted for the rest of your life!’”
—-“One day! One day! One day!”
—-“D.A.R.E. school assemblies just make me want to do drugs even more.” Lu puts his bag on the bench and takes out a bottle of Cinnamon Sticks Glade, a Ziploc bag with glitter heart stickers, a BIC, a flask with a D.A.R.E. sticker, and his Polaroid. “Can you snap a pic of me licking the Glade bottle? That would look so chopped. It’s so my aesthetic right now.” I grab the Polaroid. Lu licks the bottle. “Make your eyes look more fucked.”
—-“Yeah.” He sticks his middle finger up and I hit the shutter. The flash bursts and the picture spits out. Lu grabs it and puts it into his bag. He takes off the lid of my Big Gulp and pours the flask into it.
—-I hold the cup steady. “Is that moonshine?”
—-“No, it’s Smirnoff.”
—-“Oh, dope.”
—-Lu takes off the lid of his Big Gulp, crushes it, pours the vodka in, and chugs it.
—-“You look so dope when you drink your Big Gulp. I wish you could see what I see.” I take off my lid, throw it to the ground, and start chugging. I put my Big Gulp under his lips, and he bites on the cup as I pour it down his throat.
—-Lu slaps his forehead. “Owie! Brainfreeze!”
—-“Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth. It helps.”
—-“Where did you hear that one?”
—-“It’s a suburban myth.”
—-Lu laughs. “Take a look around, bitch. You’re living in a suburban myth.”
—-I swish the Slurpee in my mouth, then spit it onto the pavement.
“Look how chopped that looks.” Pink Slurpee glows in the streetlight. Lu nods. “You know, this looks like demon blood.”
—-“That’s my vibe.”
—-I lie on the basketball court, look up to the full moon, pull my shirt, and rub my fingers on my stomach. Lu stands over me and rubs his shoes up and down my legs. Our eyes lock. I flip myself over and lie on my stomach, looking over at the empty water park. Lu sprays the Cinnamon Sticks Glade into the Ziploc bag. He pushes his hand through the air.
—-“You just go zzzzzzzip… Zzzzzip when you do this shit. You go… gone.” Lu puts his head into the Ziploc and starts inhaling. “Did you…” He huffs. “Know…this…can enter your bloodstream?” He huffs. “Immediately? And reach the…” He huffs. “Brain… sometimes, causing…irreversible… physical…” He huffs one more time. “Damage!
Come, get some…”
—-I grab the Glade bottle. “Newsweek, we have your new story right here, baby. It only takes one huff to kill!” I open the Ziploc, hit the lever, and spray it in. “Like this, right? Am I being fucking retarded? Wait. We have finals next week.”
—-Lu’s slobbering over his mouth, touching his forehead, his eyes rolling back into his head. “Never mind. Brad, you know that huffing can kill you. Something in all of our houses has the power to kill us!”
—-I grab the Ziploc, put my face inside, and inhale. “Ah, fuck. Fuck yeah.”
—-I put my hands over my eyes and lick my palm. The images around me are replicating, glitching: A version of myself in anime. A hotel room in Japan. Looking through a View-Master at a schoolgirl in a black plaid skirt. She lifts it, moans, and puts an octopus on her pussy. I flip the ViewMaster and see myself in front of a well. I look at my reflection in the water and letters appear in blue glitter: “jump in.” I jump. I look up at the sunlight reflecting on the surface and swim upwards. I look toward an island and see a mermaid sitting on a rock. “You’ve always wanted to ascend, to go further, to experience total perfection, unlimited bliss. You’ll never want to retrieve or return to the feeling.” The mermaid opens her hands to a sugar cube gummy shell. “Swallow for total psychick warfare.”
—-Lu slaps me in the face. I open my eyes and look up. I’m on the ground, fingers in the dirt over tree roots. I grab the chain link fence and look through the empty water park. “Huh? How the fuck did I get over here?”
—-Lu shakes the bottle. “Brad! You can’t do the whole bottle, you fucking dick shit.”
—-“I…feel…so lightheaded.”
—-“Huh?”
—-“Did you see that? Did you see those pink orbs?”
—-“The orbs disappear quickly to trick you into thinking they’re an illusion.”
—-I hug the bottle. “When do I stop? What if I go through the whole bottle?”
—-“A little abuse could do you some use, baby.”
—-Lu puts out his hand and pulls me up. “Everyone is so dumb. We should be the only people on this planet.”
—-“I don’t want anyone to protect me from the world. I want to hurt myself and get something out of it.”
—-“Remember when Shane left us with his house keys and we slept all day in his room? The rain was so loud, and we just kept sleeping?”
—-“Do you know how fucked up my life would be if you moved away, how fucked up it would be for me to lose meeting up with you on the path every day? Or you parking your car up the street because I don’t want my parents to see you picking me up?”
—-“We should fucking overdose together.”
—-“I’m obsessed with you, dude.”
—-“I’m serious. I want to die in the same hotel room as you.”
—-“I love when you do that.”
—-“What?”
—-“I don’t know. I love when you try to impress yourself.”
—-“You know what my biggest fear is? If you and I ever stop being friends, I’ll never have a way to see what’s happening in your life, the life without me. I never want to know what it’s like to have to go looking for you in other people.”
—-“You are my blood brother for eternity.”
—-I rub his palm. “Shane asked me the other night: ‘Do you want to be him? Do you want to look like him? Or do you want to fuck him?’”
—-Lu laughs. “I know what you answered.”
—-“It’s not about answering those questions. It’s just about being so fucking happy that I get to experience such an intense bond with someone when I need it the most.”
—-He grabs my shirt, twirls his fingers in it, puts his hands up my body, makes a fist, and knocks on my collarbones. “It’s the sound of the gods.”
—-“Fuck yeah! Fuck, that feels so fucking good.”
—-I rub my fingers up and down my neck and lick my lips, running my fingers through my hair. Lu pushes me down onto the pavement. “Rub your fingers on my teeth.” Lu lifts my lips and rubs his fingertips on my teeth. “Fuck. Fuck, that feels so fucking good.”
—-Lu puts his legs over my legs. “When else does my body…ever…get to feel…all heavy?”
—-I look up to the full moon. I’m so high now, I don’t know who is saying what. It’s as if we have become one sound.
—-“I forget how life was before this. I don’t want to remember who I was before.”
—-“I want to disappear to certain people and only exist to a select few.”
—-“Do you ever get afraid that you have felt all of the feelings that exist? That you are so numb now that there is nothing left to feel?”
—-“All…the…fucking…time.”
—-“You’re doing it again.”
—-“Huh?”
—-“Angel cloning.”
—-“Can…I…clone angels?”
—-“Those chain link fences are the gates.”
—-“How can I touch endless light?”
—-“Our real selves exist nowhere. Give up.”
—-“Maybe angels are the only ones who will ever know the truth about us.”
—-“I’m happy that you didn’t bring your video camera to the park tonight.”
—-“Nothing about tonight is happening to be remembered.”
—-“Once footage of you is made, it’s like anyone can watch it and make up a million impressions of you in that moment. You are forever frozen, gone in an illusion, no control.”
—-“I want to feel the moonlight in my veins. Inject me.”
—-“The truth is, there…is…no…truth…”
—-He tickles under my chin. “Zim…zum…zim…zum…”
—-I tickle back. “You only hallucinate yourself when you’re with me.”
—-I rub my fingers on his jawline. I lick his cheeks. He licks my eyelids. I lick his forehead. He puts out his palm; I spit into it. He rubs the spit across his elbows. I hug him, his hair in my mouth. He rubs his thumbs across my lips and pushes them into my mouth. I bite them. He pulls my bottom lip down. He twirls his fingers in my hair. I tickle his armpit. He puts my thumb up to his face, bites on it, sucks on it, and looks into my eyes. I rub the back of his ears and turn my hand over. He leans his head on my shoulder.
—-“No more reason. No more logic. A restricted zone.”
—-“I’m inside of it with you. No one can get to us. I’m right here. I can’t even remember who I was before we became…brothers.”
—-Lu pulls me in and presses his forehead against my forehead. “You are my other head, Hydra boy.”
—-I grab his hands and rub his fingertips. “Your skin feels like velvet.”
—-“Your hands…feel…like…suede…”
—-“I like this…I like it best when you’re nice to me.”
—-“In between highs and lows, where is there for us to go? What is there for us to do? This is the empty space.”
—-“My eyes are so heavy.”
—-“We are on the ground, so high that we can’t walk, and no one cares. No one sees us.”

Extras

afx I (the boys)

afx 2 (turntable)

hot topic

cat telepathy (Go, 1999)

Author

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p.s. Hey. ** This weekend the notable fiction wielder James Nulick hosts a welcome to the world post timed with the long awaited lift-off of Alex Kazemi’s ultra-buzzy novel ‘New Millennium Boyz’ for your collective delectation. Please spend a solid portion of your Saturday and Sunday perusing the results and consider adding Mr. Kazemi’s tome to your personal library. Thank you, and thanks a whole lot, James. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks, we’re waiting to hear back from the sound guy, a bit nerve wracking. It is beyond massively frustrating to have an AWOL, bullshit producer, yes. The event seemed good. It was hot in there, but not quite the sauna I’d feared. It was the Paris launch for Jack Skelley’s ‘Complete Fear of Kathy Acker’. I was one of the hosts, and Jack read and entertained the gaggle from LA via Zoom. Love following you around at a safe distance all weekend with a notepad sketching you for his future graphic novel entitled ‘Dominick Unleashed!’, G. ** oliver jude, Good morning to you! Yes, a little New Orleans in person yesterday. I really need to get back to NO and actually dawdle there when it’s not summer. Sound editing is serious hard. We can do it, but it would take us until way post-deadline. What’s the short film? Are you working on others? Cool, we’ll keep New Orleans Film Festival in mind. When it is? Wait, I can find out. Our first two films were shot in France, one of them in French, but this one was shot in English in the Southern California desert. One of the actors is French and has a strong French accent, but I don’t think that’s French enough to qualify. Thanks, I’ll keep you up on the film. We’re trying to nail down a cut we can lock in for the first festival submission this weekend. Hopefully the brutal heatwave won’t derail us. How was your weekend? ** Steve Erickson, I agree Nyege Nyege/Hakuna Kulala is on fire. It’s one of those labels where you can trust that anything they put out is going to be interesting enough. Your laptop is a bratty bottom. I really don’t think The Wire expects their writers to be experts on the universe of non-mainstream music. I could be romantic, but I vibe that they’re more open than that. I do love Jim Steinman, but, yes, I remain wary. Thanks, but the weekend is going to be film film film as we have a tight deadline. How was yours? ** Sypha, Aphex Twin plays a fairly big part in this weekend’s post, coincidentally. See, I never got into Goth really. I always thought it was cool and pretty looking and sounding, but I couldn’t enter it with any really interest. Are you planning a Middle Ages-y novel? Safe trip home unless you’re already there. ** Mark, Hi. I wish I could’ve seen you at the gig, but I guess it was one way. Or two way: Jack vs. store. Wow, cool about Atomic Books. Thank you. I think Antonia will probably take the zine. She likes me. After8 is the best thing/place in Paris. I just need to get to the p.o. to pick up that petit package that I hope is the zine. The editing schedule fucks things up, but I think I might finish early enough today to get there pre-closing. We’ll sort it. HBD to Mr. Alfred Jarry. Thanks, Mark! ** Charalampos, You could start your Duvert experience with that book. My fave is ‘Strange Landscape’, but it’s pretty impossible to get without spending a fortune. I bought the Clementi book After8, so it’ll probably come back in stock. Hey back from hell on earth (weather-wise) aka Paris. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you dug them, B. ** 2Moody, Cool. Yeah, Big Freedia’s a joy. It’s true I think I could have been a good referee for your angsty gang. I’ve always had a weird logical side. I think Kanye West flew over an audience, but I can’t stand him, so he doesn’t count. As brutally hot as it is, or at least as it feels, here right now, I think I’ll keep on the no AC if your bugs are the alternative. My parents were Texans. I spent a fair amount of time there growing up, and I remember those bugs, and … long story short, no thank you. My apartment in LA is at the foot of a hill where there’s a big park (Griffith Park), and there have been occasions when mountain lions wandered in the yard of my building. I don’t whisper to them, no. I just whisper to whoever’s with me, ‘Is it still there?’ And coyotes for sure. Pretty nature-y. That is a potential long sit. I just read that the craziest of the most fanatical Taylor Swift fans wear diapers to her concert so they won’t have to go to the restroom and miss a second of her performance. You could try that, ha ha. The event last night I just co-hosted. It was hot but not as death-oriented as I’d feared. But it was too hot to spend an extra minute looking at books, so my tote bag came back empty. What happened to you between now and Monday, eh? ** Montse, Hi, Montse!!! Cool, yeah, The Chap are fun. I’m glad you liked that. The heatwave is supposed to start to end on Monday. It’s bad. Be glad your visit wasn’t timed for it. I hope you’re not frying. Love, me. ** Ollie🦉, Great things! Wait, let me go smoke a cigarette at my window so I can be relaxed for the news. One sec. Back. Okay. Show me the finch. Hm, no I’ve never had a pet bird. The pigeons by my windows are such regulars that they almost are, but they’re also free. I think the editing is going very well, I think. I’ll know better today. Hopefully there’ll be a way for you to see the film. We’ll figure it out. I will do a related post too. It’ll be a while, though. I’m excited you got the Halloween job! Any job with the Halloween attached its exciting to me. Nice that the therapist took you seriously. Well, I mean, why wouldn’t he, but yeah. I hope you can continue with him, if he’s that promising. Okay, no brainbomb answer. I’m boring because my favorite Neutral Milk Hotel album is the obvious one: ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’. What’s yours? Good … morning? ** Corey Heiferman, So Frankfurt lives up or down to my memory of it. I’m glad you found good in the festival, because, yeah, they’re always wobbly. Enjoy if you’re still there, enjoy more if you’re back home. ** Matt N., Good day to you, sir. DJ Arana …. no. I’ll go find out. It’s true that my approach to the performers/ performances in our films is ultra-influenced by Bresson’s. His book ‘Notes on Cinematography’ is kind of a Bible. No, I’m hardly reading. The film is eating everything. I have book pile ready to be devoured though. It sounds like your situation is similar to France in terms of film funding. We couldn’t do that with our new one because it wasn’t French enough, so we ended up just asking lots of people for smallish amounts until we had enough. My weekend is film editing and trying to stay out of the broiling sun as much I can. Enjoy the holiday. What’re your favorite John Ford films? ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. It was at After8. Was it extant when you were here last? It’s the best bookstore in Paris by a million kilometres. Oh, wow, ‘Flaming Ears’. I’d like to see that again. Welcome home! Enjoy the lack of heat. I’m just going to try to survive until the supposed temperature drop come Monday. ** Nasir, Hi! Yeah, busy’s good. I do really like it. Obviously, I encourage you to do what’s necessary to get back to your writing. Thank you about the film. We’re just trying to lock down a solid cut/edit right now. Not very exciting to report on. But exciting to do. Have a splendid weekend however and whatever. ** Right. Welcome Mr. Kazemi’s novel until further notice please. Thanks. See you on Monday.