Blake Butler
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
Freaks Meeks 700 Sads
1. Excellent profile by Michael H. Miller on the excellent Meeks, by Julia Holmes, at the Observer.
2. This dude owns 700 copies of a book called Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. What book do you own the most copies of? [via Electric Lit via Ron Silliman]
3. Brief but pleasant list of quality of Gary Lutz’s writing, blogged by Ryan Kamstra. “For all the self-referential wizardry and playfulness with the expectation of the sentence overpowering his work, his fiction is tempered by deep human concern. It is also very sad.”
Grace Jones on Writing
“God I’m scary. I’m scaring myself.”
“Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.”
“When I started modelling, I’d raise my arms and it was all muscle and all the other models had nothing. Really, everybody thought I was a man. I don’t have to do much to have muscles. It’s just genetic.”
“I also think that men need to be penetrated.”
“Now when I enter a carriage, it almost empties. But there’s always one brave enough to stay.”
“I’VE LOOKED THE DEVIL IN THE FACE, AND GOD, AND SOMEHOW I’VE FOUND A BALANCE. BUT BEING EXTREME IS AT THE SAME TIME A BALANCE – ONE EXTREME BALANCES THE OTHER”
“As a model one is forced to spend a lot of time in front of the mirror and I just started to freak out, like I was going on the other side of the mirror. So I moved every mirror out of my house when I stopped modeling.”
“A legend is someone who has died.”
On Lady Gaga being a copycat: “I really don’t think of her at all. I go about my business.”
“I get bored. I provoke things to happen without even realizing it. I just follow my instincts. I don’t think about it, really.”
“Without daaaancing, it’s a business meeting.”
“Use, don’t abuse.”
On gibberish: “It’s not a made-up language. It relates to everyone… Only the people who are in it.”
“If you take it just for partying, that’s when it goes pear-shaped.”
DeWitt Dark Side Shoplifter eFuck eYourMachine Black Breath
1. Fantastic essay from Helen DeWitt on habit and death @ The Incongruous Quarterly [via Bookslut, who just posted their 99th issue, and includes my interview with Adam Robinson].
2. This dude remade Dark Side of the Moon as if it had been written 8-bit for the Nintendo.
3. A list of the most stolen books at McNally Jackson at the Awl.
4. I kind of love that certain coffee shops are banning eReaders from their premises.
5. Just in case you happen to be looking for some solid new satanic thrash, Black Breath’s Heavy Breathing is helping me get busy this week.
Richard Yates Contest
Tao Lin’s Richard Yates contest, encouraging entries of video or chats about his forthcoming novel, ends tomorrow. Alongside this, Tao has offered to give away copies of Richard Yates to the first 5 people who comment here with 200+ words about one of the people appearing in one of the video entries so far (below). Comment with your email included so prizes can be received. Also, entries to Tao’s contest, with cash prizes and such, remains open until 10 PM Eastern Tuesday.
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Trash Humpers: “Make it make it don’t fake it”
Watched Trash Humpers last night. Had little to no expectations of how it’d feel. The previews online make it look like it could be a big mess in the badmess way rather than the glorious mess of Harmony Korine’s first two films, Gummo and Julien Donkey Boy, both of which I hugely love. If Mister Lonely felt less prismatic in that way for me in full, it remains unquestionably still engorged with images I will never forget (the black kid riding the pig around? the Uncle Sam spinning basketballs and cackling!), which seems to be Korine’s greatest talent, and one too many forget: putting shit on screen no one else ever would in ways no one else ever would.
Trash Humpers seems to take Korine’s ghetto by way of backyard by way of incidental by way of watch-it-rattle aesthetic to the furthest extent thus far. Made in the light of wanting not to have to play the “make a budget for this movie” game by milking and meeting others’ eyes, Korine turned instead to ghetto-film roots of weird bedrooms, alleyways, parking lots, apartments, the rooms of some invention.
First off, the going rumor that Korine claimed to have edited the film by dubbing between two VCRs is apparently true. Literally scenes transition by showing the crackle and verbiage a VCR displays when switching from Play to Rewind and even some tracking adjustment. The scenes between play mostly like the cream takes of a bunch of huffers wandering around looking for new ways to get off. The central crew here is three people, friends of Korine’s, including his wife, done up in bad old-person make up masks and weird clothes. Korine films and appears various times himself from behind the camera looking like Jim Jones made of plastic. True to the name of the film, they spend a lot of time humping trash. They put their groin on the bin and bang at it in weird silence, as the film has no score, or sometimes while the man behind the camera squawks weird sounds of hack-giggling or sings small lines or screeching Get it Get it, which at first might seem annoying, eekish, but as the film goes on becomes a hobbling refrain.
Kenneth Anger Ad for Missoni
[Thanks K.]
What’s Missoni? I have no idea, even after watching this. Which is the best. Why don’t more big $$ machines give more $$ to arts, even if you have to put their name on it.
Dear Missoni, BP, Brad Pitt, whoever: if you pay me $$ to live for a while, I’ll write a book that has your entity’s object or glyphmark or whateverword in it. That’s not a sales pitch. I’m for $$ sponsorship, when it does not demand control, as this clearly did not. Props to places with taste. I like Missoni now, whatever it is.
[via Cage on Judgment
“Judge in a state of disinterest as to the effects of the judging.” John Cage, Lecture on Something
Blake Butler—
Further from Jessamyn West on David Foster Wallace as a teacher: her remembrance of him @ librarian.net, including his quote, “Just because it really happened, doesn’t make it good fiction.” Thanks again to her.
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