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p.s. Hey. ** Poecilia, Hi, P. Thanks, it was only one insomniac night, thankfully. Those drawings are beautiful! Wow, thank you. Everyone, seriously, escape today’s post and comments long enough to look at two beautiful new drawings by the masterful Poecilia that coincidentally happen to be inspired by Zac Farley’s and my film ‘Permanent Green Light’. Here’s ‘Roman with the Giant Grasshopper’ and this one is called ‘Friend of a Friend’ and it’s supposed to be of Guillaume and Ollie (if you’ve seen the film). Amazing, what a treat. xoxo. ** Adem Berbic, Thanks, my sleep is usually okay, and it was just one stressed out night. My normal wake up time is between 6 am and 6:30 am, so when it’s slightly more lit. ** jay, Your being easily swayed thereby hardly seems unfortunate, at least from over here in the peanut gallery. When I’m writing I always have a thesaurus at the ready, but usually online one these days. Night’s a beauty. Kind of a shame that I”m a morning person, but there’s no arguing with one’s body clock, I guess. May your day be cooler than cool in both senses. ** Sarah Palmer, Hi. Yeah, I used to love curating and probably still would if I had the opportunities here that I had in the States. I daydream about ideal shows I’d curate a lot of the time. There’s a show I’ve been wanting to curate for a long time that I almost got to do here. Gisele Vienne and I co-curated a section of one of the ‘Nouveau Festival’ editions that the Pompidou used to do annually. The aforementioned show was part of it, but, at the last minute, the Pompidou cancelled my show because they said the shipping costs were too high, the bastards. It’s a show of Los Angeles sculptors, concentrating on a group of artists who are in their late 30s and early 40s now, and whose work I’ve known and loved since they were students. Very few of them have ever shown their work in France, and I think people would be blown away by their work if they could see it. But, yes, the shipping costs would be daunting, unfortunately. I’m still thinking about it and hoping an opportunity might someday arise. So true about the major institutions, and the smaller and more adventurous venues have little money to work with. It sucks. Thank you for the link to your dissertation! Sadly my French is very poor, but maybe my pal Zac can read it and give me an overview at least. You work at a contemporary art centre, that’s very exciting. Wow, that’s dreamy to imagine and contemplate. Eva Bester interviewed me on her show about my most recent novel, and she’s wonderful. Oh, I’m just a person who’s voracious in my interest/hunger for exciting things and art, always have been, and the blog gives me a reason to do something practical with my investigations, I guess. Thank you! A punk day sounds like just what the doctor ordered as we say or used to say in the US. You too! ** _Black_Acrylic, I know that scene, and I agree. ** Carsten, Thanks for your understanding, pal. I’m almost always asleep for the vast majority of each night, but I do agree. My ideal writing time is early morning to early afternoon. After that it’s hit and miss. I really can’t imagine the museum caring or even knowing that the book exists, but good to be careful, understood. We’re supposed to finish the deck and send it to the producer today. Hope so. I’m not sure if the investors are into experimental film. Our producer has produced a number of successful, daring indie films, so I think trying to convince them to take a little more of a chance might be the situation with us. ** Alex Osman, Hi, Alex! Come to think of it, all of my dreams, which are always also nightmares, that I ever manage to remember are set during the day. How strange. Big up! ** Alice, Hi, Alice, good to see you. I go to sleep really early, so the night is rather foreign to me, which, of course, makes it interesting to think about. Hugo mentioned about your job loss. I’m so sorry, and what a despicable reason for you to have been let go. Why do scared, stupid people always seem to end up in positions of power. That’s a rhetorical question obviously. Early happy birthday. Yes, ‘RT’ is screening in London on Halloween! It would lovely if you can come. Love from me. ** Laura, Hi! Night’s great, but I almost always sleep through it. That’s a conundrum. Night seems like a 360 degree surround sound movie or something consequently. ‘At Night The States’ is very fantastic, agreed. It’s not really corporate writing, it’s writing for rich people who are hopefully cool. Commitment and writing do need to work in tandem. Find that. Thanks re: my writing in that case. Feel and be upmost, I must insist. ** HaRpEr //, The Gallaghers’ only value to me is that they’re amusing in interviews. I’m hardly alone in that. ‘Art can’t exist in an androgynous space anymore’: that makes absolutely no sense, and anyone who thinks that isn’t worth your anger. Ideally. Blathering halfwit know-it-all know-nothings. Cull your feed? ** laura w, Yes, it’s getting dark at about 5 pm now over here. Not even three weeks ago it wasn’t fully dark at 10 pm. It’s magic. Obviously agree about ‘Four Nights of Dreamer’. Just for that scene with the tour boat alone. Like I think I said, I’ve never listened to an audiobook in my life, and I plan to keep it that way. Like I said above, I don’t think the investors are experimental film people. I think they’re low budget indie film people. So it’s a little scary for us. It’s been different with each film. ‘LCTG’ only cost 40k, and that was easy. ‘PGL’ was funded by a French government grant. With ‘RT’ we had a nightmarish, useless, evil producer so Zac and I had to raise most of the money ourselves by approaching people and asking for donations. It took over four years and was exhausting and embarrassing, but it worked. Never again though. Jacob Elordi’s name is like a mosquito you can’t smash or bat away. ** Uday, Oh, gosh, thanks. I bow to you. ** Bill, ‘Unbreakable’ wasn’t so bad if memory serves, which it may not. Oh, wow, fantastic about your gig! So wish I was there. Break everyone’s legs. Everyone, If by chance you’re in San Francisco or nearby or can afford a last minute flight, it is highly recommenced that you so see the great Bill Hsu perform along with Kevin Corcoran, James Fei, and Jacob Felix Heule at Center for New Music on this coming Saturday aka tomorrow at 7:30 pm. Info and tickets here. My insomnia was a situation-specific thing that happily got tired of fucking with me after a single night. Best of luck with any remaining prep you need to do. ** Thom, You sound exactly like me, or rather like an ideal version of me. We really need to have an in-person coffee and tete-a-tete one of these days. xo. ** Okay. Here’s a rather curious post from a long, long time ago. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
Dennis!!!! I don’t know if you remember, but I told you previously over coffee that this was one of my favourite ever blog posts. Always used to love these photo and text pieces. I enjoyed the pieces that made it into Ugly Man. I remember you saying that this one maybe didn’t work so much as just text.
But yeah, excited ramble aside, so glad to have this piece back! Beautiful, strange, moving, numb, flat, weird, brilliant stuff.
Love
Thomas xoxo
Hmm, I don’t think I have an ideal writing time. It happens at all hours. But I also don’t have a fixed writing routine, surely for that reason. I just go by the chokehold of inspiration—when it grabs me I drop everything & just work on the poem. I know of course that I’m lucky with the freelance work affording me such flexibility.
Oh my night owl days are over too, much as I still love the night. Surviving a savage bout of depression-related insomnia that lasted for months in my late 20s will do that to you.
I know I sound overly paranoid about the museum & my book cover but I got my reasons. I don’t really have any fears in life, but legal trouble is pretty much at the top of my list of disgusting, undesirable things. I mean a mugger or a killer you can always talk to, that’s just a person, but a lawyer has the vast & obscure legal apparatus behind them, with rules that make no sense but cannot be challenged because “that’s the law.” That kind of rigid, stubborn framework makes my blood boil. And I’ve experienced enough Kafkaesque frustration with the law, both firsthand & through friends & family, to feel justified in my paranoia. Besides, the museum’s right next to cipM (Centre international de poésie Marseille) & what if I ever do an event there etc etc… Welcome to my brain, haha.
I sent a couple of images possibilities to my editor & he loves them. Three snaps from the museum plus Eagle Rock. I’ll let him do his magic & see what he comes up with.
Also set up an interview with my poet-friend Carmen Vega, which will come in handy for the online book launch. There will also be a related photo gallery, as an appetizer/extra for the book.
Hope the deck is all done & you can sail right into the weekend. Have a good one.
Today’s post is really evocative and it contains an awful lot of feeling inside it.
The Shards ended last night and it did go out with a bit of a whimper. Never really recovered after that ill-fated dance-off episode. And it was tremendous for the first couple of outings, which is more than one can say about most TV shows. Kaia Jordan Gerber as Susan Reynolds defo brought some star quality.
Ah, I remember this curious post. Great to see it again.
Thanks for plugging my little gig. I think I’m done with most prep that I can realistically do, though I’m usually concerned that I’m repeating myself. But the other three are so excellent, it probably doesn’t matter what I do, haha.
Saw Tsai Ming Liang’s The Hole again a few nights ago, new 35mm print. That last “ascension” scene, before the final musical number! I’ve forgotten how sublime it is.
Bill
I have long wanted to be the kind of person to wake up at 6am, but my body clock just isn’t having it. I like early mornings a lot, I’m just incapable of them.
This post felt a little Simpsons-like to me. I remember you saying you’re not a Simpsons fan, so don’t take that the wrong way, and the more I think about the association, the less sense it makes, but ho-hum. Simpsons-like is very good in my mind, to be clear.
I had five minutes of thinking that the piece I was talking about was provisionally done, and now I’m not sure, even though it’s received one or two people’s seal of approval. There’s a nagging sense of it still not having found its necessary form. Or of not having a lucid-enough grasp of what it is, as the above does. Or not expressing the full import of what I want it to. But part of that import resists expression in itself, so I sorta dug my own grave maybe.
This might be an overly intimate question, but if it’s any more consistent than a purely case-by-case basis, what’s the starting point of a given piece for you? For me it’s just this tiny, vague momentum, but I don’t even know towards what yet, let alone via what. Or, a momentum and an affect.
yes the boat scene! it’s especially effective because of how sparingly bresson uses music in his films. i love lancelot du lac because there’s no score and the only music is that droning bagpipe/fife during the jousting scene. so many films these days are terrified of silence, and it’s especially daring during a medieval movie where conventions dictate an overbearing classical or gregorian score, ie lord of the rings.
oh interesting about your film budgets. maybe low budget indie film folks are open-minded? unless they want the next micro budget horror hit, i guess. one last film question (fingers crossed behind my back): pgl is in french. was it originally written in french? or written in english and translated? i’m just curious. good post today, very provocative. i forgot about jonathan brandis. i don’t think any of those 90s pretty boys had happy endings except keanu reeves who seems to be doing fine. maybe leo di caprio too but who knows. i just remembered that next week i have to go on vacation and am not looking forward to it.
Chiming in with laura w up there because I’m powerfully curious about the translation process in PGL too. (I’m not nearly fluent enough to really pick up on the nuances or what might’ve gotten lost or spun in translation, and maybe the process was too intuitive to want to explain to any viewer line by line anyway, but I thought hearing Roman sort of deflectively OK-ing Guillaume’s Shakespeare-level pickup line on their walk made Leon’s d’accord later on sound positively oracular.)
I’ve been struggling with insomnia this week. By now, I’m completely exhausted. I tried tapering down on one of my meds a few weeks ago, but I think it backfired.
Will the new film be a French or American production? Or both? Do you and Zac have a good sense of what “low budget indie people” are looking for?
Oh Dennis, this is so beautiful and funny. I could read a whole tome of photo stories like these. Did you ever see that godawful remake of ‘Rear Window’ with Christopher Reeves after the accident? That’s a good watch-while-stoned sort of flick.
Yeah, I’ll cull my feed. It just pisses me off to no avail, especially when people whose work I like spout this stuff. It happened to Bob Dylan when he went electric and wasn’t doing protest songs anymore, and countless other times too, and people won’t learn at all. And all these people like David Lynch and stuff too, it drives me crazy.
I watched ‘Numero Deux’ which I loved. I love when Godard takes apart images and shows how they can work in tandem with one another. Words too. I’m sure his puns and stuff would affect me more if I spoke French, but such is life.
I’ll also add since it’s come up that the boat scene in ‘Four Nights…’ turned me into a mess the first time I saw it, and I usually only cry from Bresson films when they’re over.
Hey Dennis! todays post is equal parts hilarious and haunting i think, no?
haha “an ideal version of you”… i’ll take it, whatever that means… if only i could shake off the damn shackles of wage labour now, huh. of course i’d love to meet up, if we ever happen to be in each others neck of the woods??
glad the insomnia was seemingly a one-off? for me i smoke pot most nights to keep insomnia at bay, which is for one questionable, and also embarassing! pushing 30 i gotta figure it out… well, short n sweet today, bye!!